shooting stars, racing cars

You were, on the other hand, extremely good at honesty, which was how you'd ended up with three nicknames by the time you turned eighteen. The Paddock Princess. The Ice Queen of Formula 1. And, your personal favorite, coined by a tabloid that had clearly run out of better ideas: The Most Hated Woman in Motorsport.

It wasn't entirely fair. You didn't hate anyone, not really. You simply had no patience for people who wasted your time — reporters who asked the same five questions in different orders, influencers who treated team garages like content farms, drivers who thought a podium finish entitled them to be rude to catering staff. When those people did those things, you told them so. Usually in fewer words than they deserved.

Somewhere along the way, fewer words than they deserved had calcified into a personality. Into a headline. Into a face people recognized in airports and immediately associated with a Twitter thread titled 10 TIMES Y/N WAS UNHINGED.

You'd read that thread once, at two in the morning, during a particularly boring layover in Singapore. You'd laughed so hard a flight attendant asked if you were alright.

You told yourself you didn't care what the internet thought of you.

Mostly, that was true.

Melbourne in March smelled like eucalyptus and sunscreen and, underneath all of it, the faint metallic tang of brake dust that clung to Albert Park no matter how many times the support trucks hosed down the access roads. The season opener always felt like the first day of school — everyone freshly tanned from their off-season holidays, every team kit still stiff and unworn, every conversation beginning with how was your break and ending, inevitably, with someone glancing nervously toward whichever driver had switched teams over the winter.

This year, that driver was Kimi Antonelli.

You'd heard the name for months before you ever saw the face. Eighteen years old, fast-tracked out of junior categories with the kind of statistics that made veteran engineers go quiet and recalculate things. Italian, from somewhere outside Bologna, supposedly so shy in interviews that his management team had reportedly considered hiring an acting coach just to teach him how to make eye contact with a camera.

You hadn't met him yet. You also hadn't gone out of your way to.

What you had done, courtesy of three different group chats and at least one unsolicited voice memo from Priya, was hear approximately every rumor currently circulating about you that he'd apparently absorbed during his rookie orientation.

She made a journalist cry in 2022.

She told a sponsor's son his watch was fake. (It was fake. That part never made it into the story.)

She once made a grown man leave his own team's hospitality suite because he was "being insufferable near the espresso machine."

(That last one was true. You stood by it.)

"Y/n!"

You looked up from your phone to find one of the junior team assistants — Ben, you thought, though half the assistants this season were interchangeable twenty-two-year-olds in identical polos — bearing down on you with the focused urgency of someone who had just been handed an impossible task and intended to immediately hand it to someone else.

"Can you grab these for me?" he said, already pushing a cardboard tray into your arms before you'd agreed to anything.

You looked down. Six coffees. Six. Lids slightly too loose, the way they always were when the hospitality baristas were rushed.

"Where am I taking them?"

"Media center. They're setting up for the afternoon pressers and everyone's about to murder each other over caffeine."

You sighed, with great theatrical weight, the kind of sigh that had been honed over two decades of paddock life. "One day, Ben, people are going to write songs about my sacrifices."

"Nobody asked you to monologue, Y/n."

"Rude."

He was already walking away, weaving back toward the garage with the particular gait of someone whose day had not improved since 6 a.m. Typical.

You adjusted your grip on the tray and started toward the media center, which from where you stood looked deceptively close — maybe eighty meters, in a straight line, if straight lines existed anywhere in this paddock, which they did not.

The walkway between the garages and the media center was, on a good day, merely crowded. Today was not a good day. It was media day, which meant every team had simultaneously decided to funnel sponsors, broadcast crews, photographers, and at least four influencers who absolutely should not have had paddock passes through the exact same forty-meter stretch of tarmac.

You moved carefully. You'd done this a hundred times. You knew how to angle your shoulders, how to read the flow of a crowd, how to time your steps between the gaps left by camera operators swinging their rigs around.

What you did not know — what nobody could have known — was that eighteen years old and freshly arrived from his rookie media briefing, Kimi Antonelli was, at that exact moment, walking the opposite direction with his head down, reading something on his phone, having been told approximately forty times that morning to just keep your head down and you'll be fine.

Nobody had told him to also watch where he was walking.

You felt the collision before you understood it. A shoulder. A solid, unmoving wall of a person who had clearly not expected anyone to be standing where you were standing. The tray tipped. You grabbed for it — too late, too slow, your fingers closing around empty air where a coffee cup had been a half-second earlier.

Six coffees does not sound like a lot of liquid until all six are airborne at once.

"Jesus—"

The curse came from in front of you, low and startled and unmistakably masculine, followed immediately by the unmistakable sound of hot liquid making violent contact with cotton race-suit fabric.

For a moment, the entire walkway seemed to hold its breath.

You looked up.

Oh, no.

Oh, absolutely not.

Standing in front of you — close enough that you could see individual drops of coffee sliding down the fabric of his suit, close enough to see the exact moment his expression shifted from confusion to dawning horror — was Kimi Antonelli.

He was, you noted with a kind of detached, horrified clarity, taller than he looked in photos. Brown curls, damp slightly at the temples from the Melbourne heat. eyes, wide with the specific shock of a person who had just been ambushed by scalding liquid in front of several dozen photographers.

And he was  this felt like an enormous inconvenience at the time — extremely, almost unfairly attractive.

You had approximately one second to process all of this before he spoke.

"What the hell?"

His voice cracked slightly on the last word. He was eighteen. Of course it cracked.

You opened your mouth. What you meant to say — what you had fully intended to say, the words already forming, already halfway up your throat — was oh my god, I am so sorry, are you okay, let me get someone—

What came out instead, in a flat, clipped tone that didn't sound like an apology at all, was:

"Maybe look where you're walking."

The second the words left your mouth, you wanted to disappear. Not metaphorically. Actually, physically disappear, sink into the tarmac, cease to exist as a biological entity.

Because that wasn't what you'd meant. At all. It had come out wrong too sharp, too fast, the verbal equivalent of flinching and now it was just out there, hanging in the air between you, while Kimi Antonelli stared at you with an expression that suggested you had personally and deliberately ruined his entire life.

Somewhere to your left, a camera shutter clicked. Once. Then again, rapid-fire, the unmistakable sound of a photographer who had just realized they were sitting on something.

You didn't notice.

Kimi did.

You watched something close behind his eyes not anger, exactly, more like a door swinging shut. He looked down at his suit, now decorated with six separate coffee stains in various shades of brown, then back up at you.

"Right," he said.

Just that. One syllable, flat and final, in an accent that turned the word into something almost gentle even as the meaning behind it was anything but.

"Wait—" you started.

He was already walking away. Long strides, shoulders set, not looking back.

You stood there, in the middle of the walkway, holding an empty cardboard tray, while the last of the coffee dripped steadily off your knuckles onto the tarmac. Somewhere behind you, a sponsor's assistant was very obviously filming on her phone.

Fantastic.

Absolutely fantastic.

The first sign that something had gone catastrophically wrong arrived almost exactly three hours later, while you were sitting in the team hospitality suite trying to forget the entire incident had happened.

You were halfway through a plate of fruit you had no intention of eating when your phone, sitting face-down on the table, began to vibrate. And kept vibrating. In the specific, relentless way that meant something had happened, not to you, necessarily, but about you.

You flipped it over.

Forty-one notifications. Then forty-seven. Then, as you watched, the number simply stopped being readable, replaced by the small red dot that Twitter reserved for genuine emergencies.

"What happened now," you muttered, to nobody, and opened the app.

The video was eleven seconds long.

It started — you noticed this immediately, with the particular nausea of someone watching their own life get edited without their consent — after the collision. There was no Ben, no cardboard tray, no six coffees, no context whatsoever. Just you, standing very close to Kimi Antonelli, both of you frozen, coffee visibly soaking into his pristine mercedes race suit.

And then your voice. Cold. Flat. Crystal clear, because whoever had filmed this had apparently been standing close enough to capture perfect audio.

"Maybe look where you're walking."

The clip ended there. On his face. On the exact moment something in his expression closed off.

Eleven seconds. That was all it had taken.

You scrolled down, and your stomach dropped somewhere around your ankles.

#PaddockPrincess.

#JusticeForKimi

#FreeKimi.

All three, worldwide trends. Within three hours. On media day, the single most heavily covered, heavily quoted, heavily screenshotted day of the entire Grand Prix weekend.

The comments were not kind.

she's so rude omg

poor baby didn't even do anything

this is literally his FIRST media day and she's already terrorizing him

i've heard stories about her for years. guess they were all true

someone protect this man

You put your phone face-down on the table again, very gently, and pressed both hands over your eyes.

"Kill me," you said, to the fruit plate.

"Oh, we're not doing that," said a familiar voice, entirely too cheerful. "But we are going to enjoy this immensely."

You looked up. Three drivers — two from midfield teams, one from a team near the back of the grid who had clearly decided his Friday was free enough to dedicate entirely to your humiliation — had gathered around a phone two tables away, and at least one of them was now grinning directly at you with the unrestrained delight of a man who had found the best possible use of his afternoon.

"Oh, look," he said, to his companions, loudly enough for the whole suite to hear. "Public Enemy Number One has arrived."

"You people are insufferable," you said.

"Twitter hates you," said the second driver, not unkindly, scrolling his phone with one hand while eating a croissant with the other.

"Twitter hates everyone."

"Fair point," he conceded, through a mouthful of pastry.

You picked up the nearest object — a half-full water bottle — and threw it with the precision of someone who had spent twenty-three years perfecting exactly this gesture. It missed, sailing well wide and bouncing harmlessly off a sofa cushion, which only made the entire group dissolve into the kind of laughter that drew looks from across the room.

You put your head back down on the table and stayed there.

Across the paddock, in a media room that smelled faintly of new carpet and old coffee—ironic, you would think later, when you found out about this part, Kimi Antonelli sat very still in a folding chair while his manager, Marco Esposito, paced in front of him with the energy of a man trying not to say something he'd regret.

"Stop reading the comments," Marco said, for the third time.

"I'm not."

"You are. I can see your eyes moving."

Kimi didn't look up. On the screen, the eleven-second clip played again. And again. He'd lost count of how many times.

He had heard about you before he'd even signed his contract. Everyone had told him, in the careful, slightly amused tone people used when they were enjoying themselves at someone else's expense: Watch out for the team principal's daughter. She'll eat you alive if you give her the chance. He'd assumed it was paddock folklore — the kind of story that got more dramatic with every retelling, the way stories about brake failures and team radio meltdowns always did.

Then he'd walked face-first into six coffees, and the most famous woman in the paddock had looked him directly in the eyes and told him to watch where he was going, in a tone that suggested she'd been personally inconvenienced by his existence.

So. Maybe the rumors were accurate after all.

"She's exactly as bad as everyone said," he said quietly, mostly to himself.

Marco, for once, didn't argue.

What neither of them knew — what nobody in that media room could possibly have known — was that at that exact moment, in a different building entirely, you were scrolling through a separate, much smaller corner of the internet. Not the trending tags. Not the hashtags with your name in them.

You were looking at his pre-season interview. The one where he'd been so nervous his hands wouldn't stay still, where he'd laughed at his own mistake halfway through a sentence and then looked almost betrayed by his own laughter, like he hadn't expected to be capable of it on camera.

And you were thinking — with the specific, horrified clarity of someone realizing something deeply unhelpful at the worst possible time — that Kimi Antonelli had, without question, the prettiest smile you had ever seen on a person who currently, very justifiably, hated you.

The season had not even properly started yet.

This, you thought, putting your phone face-down for the second time that day, was going to be a problem.

The internet, you had learned over the years, did not have a memory problem. If anything, it remembered things with a kind of vindictive precision that made elephants look forgetful.

Two weeks after what certain journalists had, with admirable restraint, begun calling Coffee-Gate, the clip was still everywhere. It had been remixed with dramatic orchestral music. It had been slowed down so that the coffee appeared to fly through the air in elegant, glittering arcs while Kimi's face contorted in horror frame by frame. Someone had set it to a sad piano cover of a pop song, and that version alone had four million views.

You hated that the piano one made you laugh. You hated it every single time, and you watched it every single time anyway.

"You know," your father said, from the doorway of his office, in the particular tone he used when he was about to say something he already knew you wouldn't like, "if you apologized publicly, this would probably go away."

You didn't look up from your phone. "For something that was an accident?"

"You did tell him to watch where he was walking."

"Because he walked into me."

"You don't exactly sound innocent when you say it like that."

"I am innocent."

"You sound guilty."

"You sound annoying."

Toto Wolff — team principal, thirteen years in the paddock, a man who had survived eight championship battles, two engine supplier disputes, and one memorably disastrous sponsor dinner involving a llama — grinned at you with the specific delight of a father who knew exactly how to needle his only child.

You picked up the nearest pen and threw it at him.

He caught it without even looking, the same way he'd been catching things you threw at him since you were seven years old.

"You're lucky you're my favorite child," he said.

"I'm your only child."

"Exactly."

You rolled your eyes so hard it was practically audible. Before you could fire back, there was a knock on the doorframe — one of the PR team, tablet in hand, wearing the slightly harried expression that was standard issue for anyone in PR during a race weekend.

"Everyone's gathering for the welcome announcement," she said. "Five minutes."

Your father sighed, the long, theatrical sigh of a man about to spend forty-five minutes pretending he enjoyed small talk with sponsors. "Time to go pretend I like people."

You stood immediately. "Perfect. I'll stay here."

"No. You're coming."

"Why?"

"Because if I have to suffer, you have to suffer."

You hated it when he made valid points. You hated it more that it kept happening.

The paddock had a particular energy when something was about to happen — a kind of low electric hum, conversations trailing off mid-sentence, people glancing toward the media center every few seconds like they were waiting for a storm to arrive. You felt it the moment you stepped outside, and it took you about thirty seconds to figure out why.

A new presenter was joining the broadcast team. Rumors had been circulating for weeks — someone big, people kept saying, someone Netflix is apparently obsessed with — but nobody had a name, and nobody had a face, which in a paddock this size was practically unheard of. Information didn't survive that long without leaking. Whoever this was, someone had clearly worked very hard to keep her arrival a secret.

You found out why the moment she walked into the media center.

She was, in the most literal and clinical sense, breathtaking. Long dark hair that moved like it had been individually choreographed. A smile that looked effortless in the way that only came from years of very expensive practice. The kind of posture that made you instinctively check your own.

Within ninety seconds, every single person in the room had reorganized themselves around her like iron filings around a magnet. Drivers who normally treated press obligations like dental appointments were suddenly enthusiastically introducing themselves. Team principals — your father included, you noted with deep betrayal — were laughing at things she said before she'd finished saying them.

"That's a red flag," said a voice beside you.

You turned. One of the senior journalists — a woman who'd covered the sport longer than you'd been alive, and who you genuinely liked, mostly because she found almost everything exhausting in the exact same way you did — was watching the new presenter with the flat, assessing stare of someone pricing a used car.

"What is?" you asked.

"Anyone that immediately likeable."

"That's ridiculous."

"Name one person that charming who wasn't secretly a nightmare."

You opened your mouth. Then you thought about it for slightly longer than you'd intended to, and closed it again.

The journalist nodded, satisfied, and went back to her notes.

You were halfway through formulating an exit strategy — out the side door, past catering, gone before anyone noticed — when the new presenter appeared directly in front of you, as though she'd been waiting for exactly this moment.

"You're Y/n," she said. Not a question. A statement, delivered with the easy confidence of someone reading a name tag that wasn't there.

"The infamous one," you said, offering the kind of polite smile you reserved for people you hadn't yet decided whether to dislike.

Her eyes — dark, warm, entirely too sharp for the soft smile that accompanied them — lit up. "Oh, I know."

That was an interesting response. Most people, when meeting you for the first time, did one of two things: pretended they hadn't heard the rumors, or apologized for them on your behalf, as though you needed defending from your own reputation. Nobody usually just... agreed.

"Should I be worried?" you asked, folding your arms.

"Only if you're planning to spill coffee on me." Her smile widened, just slightly, just enough to show she'd done her research. "Sofia, by the way. Sofia Moretti."

"Good luck out there," you said, meaning please leave.

"Thanks." Sofia leaned in, just a fraction, lowering her voice to something that sounded almost confiding. "I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot of each other."

And then she was gone — already turning, already smiling at someone else, leaving you standing there with the distinct, prickling sensation of having just been sized up by something that smiled while it did it.

You weren't sure why that sentence felt like a threat.

You just knew that it did.

Within a month, Sofia Moretti was everywhere.

Not in the way most new hires were everywhere — gradually, awkwardly, learning the rhythms of the paddock one stumble at a time. She arrived fully formed, like she'd been broadcasting Formula 1 for a decade already. She knew which drivers liked being teased and which ones needed careful handling. She knew exactly which angle made every garage look most cinematic. She knew, somehow, within days, things about people that took most journalists years to learn.

The fans adored her instantly. The broadcasters adored her. The drivers — most of them, anyway — adored her, because she made interviews feel like conversations instead of interrogations.

And Kimi Antonelli, for reasons that became increasingly, infuriatingly clear over the following weeks, adored her most of all.

Or — that wasn't quite right. Adored wasn't the word. What was actually happening, as far as you could tell from a careful, definitely-not-obsessive distance, was that Sofia had simply decided Kimi was interesting content, and Kimi — eighteen, painfully shy, allergic to cameras — had apparently found in Sofia the one person in the entire paddock who didn't make him visibly nervous.

Which meant Sofia was around him. Constantly. Every interview, every garage walk-through, every casual hospitality shot that ended up on a broadcast highlight reel somehow featured both of them.

You noticed this.

Not because you cared. Obviously. You had several hundred other things to think about, none of which were the scheduling overlap between a television presenter and a teenager who currently believed you were the worst person in the sport.

"You're staring," said Priya, sliding into the seat across from you with the smug, unhurried confidence of someone who had been planning this sentence for several minutes.

You nearly choked on your coffee — a different coffee, a much more carefully guarded coffee, one you were holding with both hands like it might escape. "I am not."

"You are."

"I was reading something."

"You were staring directly over your phone at Sofia and Kimi."

"They're standing right there. It's not staring if they're right there."

"Mm." Priya leaned back, folding her arms with the air of someone settling in for a show. "Convenient that they're always right there, isn't it."

You glared at her. She looked, if anything, more delighted.

Across the hospitality area, Sofia was mid-interview, leaning toward Kimi with the easy, practiced intimacy of someone who'd known him for years instead of weeks. Kimi who in his own driver-only interviews still occasionally forgot to look at the camera seemed, against all expectation, relaxed. He laughed at something she said. An actual laugh, not the nervous, too-quick laugh he gave journalists when he didn't understand the question.

It annoyed you. You weren't sure why. You filed the feeling away somewhere you wouldn't have to look at it again.

The internet, predictably, had Opinions.

It started small, a comment here, a slow-motion gif there. Then it became fan edits, stitched together with sweeping music, of every time Sofia and Kimi had stood within five feet of each other. Then it became theories. Then someone, you genuinely could not believe this had taken actual effort, produced a twelve-slide presentation titled WHY SOFIA & Kimi ARE ENDGAME (a thread), the evidence for which included: they stood near each other, they smiled at the same time, and, devastatingly, they were photographed in the same building on three separate occasions.

You watched the entire presentation. Twice. You told yourself it was for research purposes.

That night, lying in bed scrolling through your phone with the specific, self-destructive energy of someone who knew they should put the phone down and was choosing not to, a new video appeared in your feed. Sofia and Kimi, leaving the paddock together at the end of the day, walking side by side toward the parking area.

The comments were already in the thousands.

formula 1's new power couple !!

i'm sobbing they're so cute

sofia is literally perfect for him

You watched the video once. and you genuinely could not explain this part, even to yourself you watched it a second time. Then a third.

Then you put the phone face-down on the mattress and stared at the ceiling, which, as ceilings tended to do, offered absolutely no useful information.

What are you doing, you thought. Why do you care? Why are you even thinking about him.

The ceiling had no answers. Your brain, unfortunately, did  and the answer it kept circling back to, against every instinct you had, was his laugh. The real one. The one he'd given Sofia that afternoon, easy and unguarded, the kind of laugh you'd never once heard directed at you.

Which was, you reflected, an extraordinarily inconvenient thing to be thinking about, given that as far as Kimi Antonelli was concerned, you were still  and would likely remain, Public Enemy Number One.

And as far as you were concerned, lying awake at midnight for reasons you refused to examine too closely, Sofia Moretti was rapidly becoming a problem.

You just couldn't, yet, have explained why.

There were exactly three things Kimi Antonelli was afraid of.

Media interviews. Public speaking. And, somewhere just below those two, the specific and very modern horror of accidentally becoming a meme.

Formula 1, it seemed, had taken one look at this list and decided to expose him to all three on a rotating weekly basis.

This particular disaster began, with the kind of precision that would later feel almost cosmically unfair, at exactly 3:17 a.m.

He couldn't sleep. This wasn't unusual — the nights before a race weekend rarely were restful, his mind running through corner sequences and braking points on a loop that refused to switch off — but tonight felt different. Heavier. His brain kept circling back not to apexes or gear ratios, but to the Sofia situation, which had, somewhere in the last few weeks, stopped being merely strange and become genuinely exhausting.

Every interview with her generated headlines. Every photo generated theories. He didn't understand it — didn't understand where people found the energy — and the not-understanding kept him staring at the ceiling of his hotel room long after he should have been asleep.

Eventually, in the specific kind of boredom that only exists at three in the morning, he reached for his phone.

This was, in retrospect, a mistake.

Boredom led to scrolling. Scrolling led to Instagram. Instagram led, somehow — and he genuinely could not have explained the chain of logic that got him there — to your profile.

He told himself, as he scrolled, that he wasn't looking for anything in particular. He was simply curious. Because nothing about you added up. Everyone — everyone — had told him you were cold. Difficult. The kind of person who'd make a journalist cry for sport.

But every time he actually saw you in the paddock — not the version of you that ended up in clips, but the real, unscripted version — you were doing things that didn't fit the story at all. Helping mechanics carry equipment across the garage when your hands were clearly not needed for it. Sitting with exhausted junior engineers during a late debrief, handing out the last of the snacks from catering before anyone else could claim them. Once, memorably, you'd spent ten minutes crouched next to a sponsor's child who'd gotten separated from her parents, talking to her about her favorite cartoon in a voice so gentle he almost hadn't recognized it as yours.

None of it matched. And Kimi — who liked things to match — found that bothered him more than it probably should have.

So he scrolled.

One photo became two. Two became ten. Ten became twenty, and somewhere around photo number thirty-one — a photo from, he would later discover with a sinking feeling, exactly four years ago — his thumb slipped.

The screen flashed red.

For one full second, his brain simply refused to process what had happened.

Then it caught up.

"No," he whispered, to an empty hotel room, and unliked the photo so fast his thumb nearly went through the screen.

The damage, of course, was already done.

The first person to notice was a fan account with maybe four hundred followers.

The second person to notice was a fan account with four hundred thousand followers, who reposted the screenshot with the caption HE LIKED A PHOTO FROM FOUR YEARS AGO?? AT 3 AM??

By 3:26, there were screenshots. By 3:30, Formula 1 Twitter — which apparently never slept, a fact you found genuinely concerning — was on fire. By 4:00 a.m., there were no fewer than three competing conspiracy theories, one of which involved a timeline. By breakfast, the entire sport had collectively lost what remained of its mind.

You discovered all of this at 8:14 a.m., when your phone began vibrating against the bedside table with such aggression that it nearly walked itself off the edge.

You groaned, reached for it without opening your eyes, and immediately regretted every choice that had led to this moment.

Ninety-three notifications. Forty-seven messages. Two missed calls from Priya, which was never a good sign, because Priya did not call people — Priya sent voice memos that were somehow louder and more aggressive than an actual phone call.

"What happened now," you mumbled, and opened the group chat.

The first message read: OH MY GOD.

The second: WAKE UP RIGHT NOW.

The third was simply seventeen crying-laughing emojis in a row, followed by a screenshot.

You opened it.

And nearly dropped the phone directly onto your own face.

There it was. Clear as day, timestamped, unmistakable. A photo from your account — four years old, you in sunglasses at some long-forgotten test day, nothing remarkable about it at all — and beneath it, in the little row of recent likes:

liked by kimi.antonelli and others

3:17 AM

You stared at it. Blinked. Stared again. Then sat bolt upright in bed so fast the duvet went flying.

"No way."

You opened Instagram directly. The like was gone — unliked, presumably the moment he'd realized — but the internet did not believe in second chances, and screenshots, as you well knew, lived forever.

The comments beneath the repost were already feral.

HE WAS STALKING HER ACCOUNT???

FOUR YEARS AGO?? BRO WAS DEEP DIVING

someone check on this man immediately

THIS IS SO EMBARRASSING I CAN'T

You laughed.

A small laugh, at first — almost reflexive. Then another. Then, helplessly, you were laughing so hard you had to set the phone down on the duvet and press both hands over your face, because the image in your head — Kimi Antonelli, eighteen years old, alone in a hotel room at three in the morning, scrolling through four-year-old photos of you — was simply too much. The poor guy. The absolute, certified, undeniable poor guy.

You laughed until your eyes watered. You hadn't laughed like that in months.

The paddock that morning had the specific, electric energy of a place where everyone had heard the same piece of gossip and nobody could stop talking about it.

Drivers. Journalists. Team principals. Mechanics. Even the catering staff  you discovered, with no small amount of horrorf, one of whom gave you a knowing little smile as she handed you your usual breakfast that made it abundantly clear she, too, had seen the screenshot.

You walked into hospitality and were greeted, almost immediately, by a chorus of cheering from a table of drivers that included — inevitably — Oliver Bearman, who you'd long ago categorized as Kimi's friend, troublemaker division.

"Oh, she's here," Ollie announced, to the table, with the delight of a man who had clearly been waiting all morning for this exact moment.

"Don't," you said, already backing away.

"Oh, we're absolutely doing this."

"I hate every single one of you."

"We know," he said cheerfully, and held up his phone, displaying the screenshot, as the rest of the table dissolved into laughter. "Imagine accidentally liking a photo from four years ago."

"Couldn't be me," said the driver beside him, shaking his head with mock solemnity.

"Couldn't be anyone with dignity," Ollie agreed.

"Couldn't be anyone with survival instincts," added a third, and that was the one that finally broke the table entirely — even you, despite yourself, felt your mouth twitch.

You grabbed the nearest napkin dispenser and threw it, mostly out of principle. It missed by a wide margin and skittered harmlessly under a sofa, which only made things worse.

If your morning was bad, Kimi's was significantly worse.

He had never, in his entire eighteen years of existence, experienced true humiliation until that day. Everywhere he went, people smiled at him — not normal smiles, but the specific, knowing kind of smile people gave you when they were sitting on something embarrassing and waiting for the right moment to bring it up.

He walked into the morning drivers' briefing. Someone, somewhere near the back, coughed once, and said, with theatrical clarity:

"Three seventeen."

The entire room laughed. Even the stewards.

By the time he reached his media obligations that afternoon, he had developed the slightly hunted look of a man who had accepted his fate but was not yet ready to discuss it.

A journalist raised a hand. "Kimi — any comment on the recent social media activity?"

The room went very quiet. Marco, standing just off-camera, looked like a man calculating exactly how many years he had left before retirement.

"No," Kimi said.

Immediate. Flat. Final.

The journalist, delighted, opened her mouth to follow up. Kimi had already turned to the next question, jaw set, ears slowly turning the color of a brake disc at full temperature.

Fate, it seemed, had decided that wasn't quite enough.

Because that afternoon, walking between the garage and the paddock club — not paying attention, again, some things never changed — you rounded a corner and nearly collided with him.

Not as dramatically as the first time. No coffee, no cardboard tray, no eleven-second clip in the making. Just both of you, stopping short, a foot apart, in a quiet stretch of corridor where — for once — nobody else happened to be looking.

For a moment, neither of you said anything.

Then you noticed how tired he looked. The internet had spent twelve hours bullying him, after all — there were faint shadows under his eyes, and his shoulders had the particular set of someone who'd been holding himself very carefully all day, waiting for the next joke.

You bit down on your lip. Hard. Trying — and failing — not to smile.

His eyes narrowed the instant he saw it. "No."

That, somehow, made it worse. A laugh escaped before you could stop it. Then another.

"Oh my god."

"No."

"I actually feel bad for you."

"You don't."

"I really don't," you admitted, and laughed again, and his expression shifted from wounded to something that looked, almost, like it was fighting not to be amused.

"You liked a photo from four years ago," you said, delightedly.

"It was an accident."

"Sure."

"It was."

"Mm-hm."

"It was, Y/n."

You nodded, slow and exaggerated, the way you'd nod at a toddler insisting they hadn't drawn on the wall. "I totally believe you."

He groaned — an actual groan, dragging a hand down his face — and you laughed again, harder this time, and something about the sound of it seemed to catch him off guard. He looked at you properly then, like he was seeing something he hadn't expected to find.

Because you looked different when you laughed. Softer. Warmer. Nothing at all like the clipped, cold voice from that eleven-second clip that the entire internet had decided defined you.

The realization caught him off guard. He didn't say anything about it. But for the first time since the coffee disaster, the interaction ended with both of you — however reluctantly — smiling.

Neither of you noticed the photographer at the end of the corridor until it was too late.

By the time you reached your office, the photo was already online: the two of you, mid-laugh, close together, lit by the warm gold of the afternoon. The captions were instantaneous.

wait they're actually... friends??

the chemistry??

i need answers

Someone, inevitably, uploaded a thirty-two-minute video essay titled "The Hidden Truth Behind Kimi Antonelli's 3 AM Like." You watched ten minutes of it before you were laughing too hard to continue.

Somewhere else in the paddock, Kimi buried his face in a pillow and seriously considered a career change.

And somewhere else again — on a balcony overlooking the paddock, drink in hand, watching the whole thing unfold on her phone with the patient attention of someone reading a very interesting book — Sofia Moretti smiled.

A slow smile. Thoughtful.

Because she'd just noticed something. The internet, it turned out, wasn't actually all that interested in her and Kimi. Not really. The fan edits, the theories, the twelve-slide presentations — none of it had generated even a fraction of the reaction that eleven seconds of you laughing in a corridor had just produced.

The story the internet wanted wasn't Sofia and Kimi.

It was you. And him.

And Sofia Moretti had never, in her entire career, been the type of person to ignore a good story.

—--------------

Monaco was always chaos. Beautiful, expensive, completely unmanageable chaos — the kind of chaos that arrived every May with the reliability of a tide and left the entire paddock slightly dazed in its wake.

The streets were impossibly narrow and impossibly packed, lined with superyachts so enormous they made the harbor itself look like a bathtub. Celebrities appeared out of nowhere, trailing entourages the size of small security details. Influencers multiplied like an invasive species, all of them apparently under the impression that the paddock club was a backdrop rather than a workplace. The air smelled like sunscreen and champagne and, faintly, diesel from the support boats idling in the harbor.

You hated Monaco. Which was, you reflected every single year, exactly why you found yourself there, without fail, every May.

The paddock was already buzzing when you arrived Friday morning — not with the usual pre-session energy, but with something else. Something quieter, more conspiratorial. People were checking their phones with a frequency that suggested everyone already knew something you didn't.

You'd made it about ten steps inside the gate when Priya appeared at your elbow, practically vibrating.

"Have you seen it?"

You sighed. "No."

"You should."

That sentence, in your experience, had never once led anywhere good. You took the phone anyway.

The photo loaded slowly — blurry, grainy, clearly taken from a significant distance with a long lens. A yacht, anchored in the harbor among a hundred identical yachts. Two figures on the deck, standing close together. Very close together. Close enough, from this angle, in this light, that it looked — unmistakably — like they were kissing.

The caption left nothing to the imagination.

Kimi Antonelli and Sofia Moretti. Confirmed?

Something in your chest did something small and unpleasant and entirely uninvited.

"Oh," you said.

Priya, predictably, caught it instantly. "Oh?"

"Shut up."

"That sounded jealous."

"It wasn't."

"It absolutely was."

You handed the phone back — slightly too quickly, you realized a half-second too late — and Priya's expression went from delighted to radiant, which meant this conversation, unfortunately, was far from over.

The photo was everywhere within hours. Fan accounts celebrated. TikTok edits multiplied — slow zooms, dramatic music, the works. By that evening, two separate tabloids had run relationship timelines, complete with helpfully annotated screenshots dating back months. Somebody had even produced a graphic ranking the "evidence" on a scale from suspicious to confirmed, and the yacht photo sat firmly at the top, glowing red.

Nobody seemed remotely concerned about whether it was true. The story was simply too good. Reality, you'd learned long ago, was always optional when a better narrative was available.

You told yourself you didn't care.

You told yourself this, in fact, with increasing frequency and decreasing conviction, for most of the afternoon.

"You're staring again," Priya said, several hours later, sliding into the seat across from you on the terrace with the particular smugness of someone who had been counting.

You nearly dropped your phone. "I wasn't."

"You've looked at that photo six times in the last ten minutes."

"I was reading the comments."

"Liar."

You glared. Priya, entirely unbothered, leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, settling in with the relaxed confidence of someone who already knew exactly how this conversation was going to go.

"Do you like him?"

"No."

"That was fast."

"Because the answer is no."

"Interesting," Priya said, in the mild, conversational tone of someone discussing the weather.

"What's interesting?"

"People usually need at least a second to think about it."

You wanted, very badly, to throw your drink at her. Unfortunately, she'd made an irritatingly valid point — and the fact that it was valid made it so much worse.

The truth, if you were being honest with yourself — which you were determined not to be, for as long as humanly possible — was that something about the photo bothered you. Not because Kimi couldn't date whoever he wanted. Obviously he could. You had no claim on him. No reason to care. None at all.

And yet every time you looked at that blurry, distant image, something in your chest twisted, uncomfortably, in a way you didn't enjoy and didn't have a name for.

Except you did have a name for it. You just weren't ready to say it out loud.

Jealousy. Plain, embarrassing jealousy — and especially embarrassing given that the person in question barely tolerated being in the same room as you.

Kimi's day had not been any better.

He'd walked into the paddock that morning to a chorus of congratulations — from drivers, engineers, even a few sponsors he barely knew — and had absolutely no idea why, until someone finally showed him the photo. He'd nearly walked into a support pillar.

"What?" he said.

The driver beside him — grinning, delighted — pointed at the screen. "You and Sofia."

"What about us?"

"The yacht."

"What yacht?"

"The kiss, Kimi."

Kimi took the phone. Stared at it. Then stared harder, because the man in the photo — close up, in better lighting, on a different screen — very clearly was not him. The hair was wrong. The build was wrong. The entire person was wrong.

"This isn't me."

The driver was laughing too hard to respond.

Kimi felt the beginnings of a headache forming directly behind his eyes.

To make matters worse, Sofia — when a journalist had asked her about the photo during an interview that afternoon — had simply smiled, the same perfectly practiced smile she gave everything, and said: "People can believe whatever they want."

She hadn't denied it.

That, apparently, was all the internet needed.

By the time evening fell, you'd retreated to one of the team's private balconies — a small, quiet stretch of stone overlooking the harbor, mostly used by exhausted engineers who needed five minutes away from the noise. The city glittered below, a thousand lights reflected and doubled in the black water, and somewhere down there, on one of those impossibly bright yachts, was the photograph that had ruined your evening.

You weren't thinking about it. You were definitely not thinking about it.

"You're hiding."

You very nearly fell off the railing.

You turned, and there he was — Kimi, hands in his pockets, looking, infuriatingly, even better than usual in the warm evening light. You were beginning to suspect he did that on purpose.

"I'm not hiding."

"You are."

"I'm sitting."

"Alone. On a balcony. Where nobody can see you."

"You found me."

"Unfortunately," he said, and the corner of his mouth twitched — and then, before he seemed to fully decide to let it, he was actually smiling. A real one. The kind that transformed his whole face, the kind you'd only seen directed at Sofia, until now.

For a moment, neither of you said anything. The city hummed below — music drifting up from somewhere, the low rumble of boat engines, distant laughter from a party on one of the yachts. It should have been awkward. It wasn't.

Then, against your better judgment, your eyes drifted toward the harbor. Toward the yachts. Toward the source of the entire disaster.

Kimi noticed immediately. Of course he did.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"You looked at the yachts."

"So?"

His eyes narrowed — and then widened, slightly, and then — to your absolute horror — he started to smile again. A different smile this time. Slower. More dangerous.

"No," you said, before he could say anything.

"Are you jealous?"

"What?"

"You're jealous."

"I am not."

"You are."

"I'm literally not—"

His grin widened. The absolute, unbearable idiot.

"There's nothing to be jealous about," you said, and the words came out sharper than you meant them to, faster than you meant them to — and the second they left your mouth, his grin vanished. Completely. Like a light switching off.

"...What?" he said, quieter.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Now it was his turn to look confused — and in the silence that followed, something clicked into place in your head, slowly, horribly, with the particular dawning dread of realizing you'd missed something obvious.

"Wait."

Kimi groaned, and put his face in his hands. "Oh, no."

"The guy in the photo — that's not even you."

Silence.

More silence.

And then you started laughing — properly laughing, the kind that bent you forward — because of course it wasn't him, of course the entire internet had spent an entire day insisting Kimi Antonelli was secretly dating Sofia Moretti based on a blurry photo of a man who wasn't even Kimi Antonelli, and somehow, in the chaos of it all, neither of you had bothered to check that detail until right now.

"You figured it out," he said, muffled, from behind his hands.

"It took me about two seconds."

"I hate this sport."

You laughed harder. The sound carried out over the water, and for the first time all weekend, Kimi found himself laughing too — quietly at first, then properly, shoulders shaking, leaning against the railing beside you like the tension of the entire day had simply drained out of him.

Because somehow — somehow — the fact that you'd noticed, that you'd cared enough to figure it out, made something in his chest go warm in a way he didn't have a word for either.

Across the harbor, on another balcony, Sofia Moretti stood with a glass of champagne she hadn't touched in twenty minutes, watching.

Not the conversation itself. She couldn't hear it from here. But she could see the shape of it — the way Kimi had turned toward you, the way you'd both doubled over laughing, the easy, unguarded warmth of two people who had, somewhere in the last few months, stopped performing for each other.

She'd seen a lot of things in her career. She recognized this one immediately.

For a long moment, she simply watched. Then, slowly, she smiled — a thoughtful smile, the kind that usually meant trouble for somebody.

Because if there was one thing Sofia Moretti understood better than almost anyone in this paddock, it was attention. And right now, watching the two of you across the water, she understood something else, too.

The story the internet thought it wanted — her and Kimi — had never really been the story at all.

The real story was standing right there, laughing on a balcony, with absolutely no idea it had just been discovered.

And Sofia was already wondering exactly how far that story could go.

If there was one thing Formula 1 loved more than racing, it was drama. And if there was one thing the streaming documentary crews following the season loved more than Formula 1, it was turning that drama into content.

Which was how, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday morning three weeks after Monaco, you found yourself staring at an email that would ruin your entire month.

You knew it was bad before you'd even opened it. You knew it was bad because your father was laughing. Actually laughing — not the polite, diplomatic chuckle he used in sponsor meetings, but a real, helpless laugh, the kind that meant something had gone catastrophically, hilariously wrong for someone who was not him.

"What," you said, flatly, before you'd even sat down.

He slid his tablet across the desk without a word, still grinning.

You read the email. Then you read it again, slower, in case the first reading had been some kind of fever dream brought on by jet lag. It hadn't been.

Subject: Exciting New Feature — Rising Stars of the Grid

The streaming team — the same one whose cameras had been quietly embedded throughout the paddock all season, capturing footage for the kind of glossy, slow-motion-heavy documentary series that turned mid-pack rivalries into Shakespearean tragedies — wanted to produce a special feature. A behind-the-scenes look at the personalities shaping the sport's future. Three days of filming. Exclusive access.

Co-starring, the email specified, with the kind of breezy confidence that suggested someone had already decided this was happening regardless of what either of you thought about it:

Kimi Antonelli and Y/n.

You contemplated, briefly and seriously, setting yourself on fire.

"No," you said.

Your father grinned wider. "Oh, yes."

"No."

"You don't have a choice."

"Watch me."

"You signed the media participation agreement at the start of the season, sweetheart. Page eleven. I believe you initialed it twice."

You hated contracts. Specifically, you hated the ones you'd signed without reading, three years running, because you'd been distracted by a sponsor argument happening in the next room at the time.

"This is a violation of my human rights," you said.

"It's a documentary."

"It's psychological warfare."

—---------------------------

Kimi's reaction, when Marco delivered the news, was — by all accounts, and you heard about this secondhand from at least four separate sources within the hour — even less measured than yours.

"Absolutely not," he said.

"You have to," Marco said, with the patient weariness of a man who had said this sentence approximately four hundred times this season alone.

"I don't."

"You literally do, Kimi. It's contractual."

"I can disappear."

"You're a Formula 1 driver. People will notice."

"I'll become a farmer."

"You grew up in Bologna."

"I'll learn," Kimi said, with the grim determination of a man already mentally relocating to a remote olive grove.

Marco closed his eyes and breathed in slowly through his nose, the way he did before every single conversation that involved your name and his driver's reaction to it in the same sentence.

Filming began in Barcelona, three days later, in a section of the paddock that had been transformed — almost unrecognizably — into a small production studio. Lighting rigs. Microphone stands. A small army of crew members in matching black t-shirts, all of them moving with the brisk, over-caffeinated energy of people who had been awake since 4 a.m. and intended to stay that way.

At the center of it all stood a man who introduced himself, with the enthusiasm of someone announcing the discovery of a new planet, as Jonas Berg — senior producer, executive in charge of, as far as you could tell, everything, and possessor of the single most relentlessly positive personality you had ever encountered in your life.

"Perfect," he said, the moment you and Kimi were both standing in front of him.

Neither of you had said a word.

"Oh, this is going to be fantastic," Jonas said, beaming, clapping his hands together once, and the sentence settled over both of you with the weight of a verdict.

The first interview was, by any reasonable definition, a disaster.

"Describe each other," Jonas said, leaning forward in his director's chair with the eagerness of a man who had clearly been waiting all morning for exactly this question, "in one word."

You groaned. Kimi closed his eyes.

"Come on," Jonas said. "Just one word each."

"No," you said.

"Please."

"No."

"Just one word!"

You folded your arms. Kimi looked very deliberately at a point on the wall slightly to the left of the camera, the way he did during press conferences when he was trying to disappear without technically leaving the room.

Jonas, to his credit, did not surrender. Jonas, you would learn over the following three days, never surrendered.

Finally — mostly because the silence had gone on so long it had become its own kind of torture — you sighed.

"Awkward," you said.

The crew burst out laughing. Somewhere behind a camera, someone actually applauded, quietly.

Kimi's eyes snapped open. "You can't say that."

"It's true."

"You spilled coffee on me."

"That was months ago."

"Trauma lasts forever," he said, with the kind of deadpan delivery that took you completely off guard — and the crew loved it, loved it so visibly that you could practically see dollar signs reflected in Jonas's eyes.

You glanced sideways at Kimi. He glanced back. For a half-second, something flickered between you — something that felt, almost, like the beginning of a private joke.

Then the camera operator said, "Got it, got it, that's great," and the moment dissolved into the general chaos of the set resetting for the next shot.

The three days that followed forced you together in a way nothing else ever had.

Garage walkthroughs, where you were instructed to "just talk naturally" while a camera crew trailed three feet behind you, capturing your every word. Joint interviews, in which Jonas asked increasingly absurd questions — if you were stranded on a desert island together, who would build the shelter — apparently in the hope that one of you would say something quotable. Promotional shoots for a sponsor neither of you had ever heard of, which involved both of you standing slightly too close together in front of a branded backdrop while a photographer shouted things like "more chemistry, please!" with absolutely no sense of irony.

At first, it was unbearable.

By the second day, it was merely annoying.

By the third day — and this was the part that genuinely alarmed you — it had become, somehow, almost comfortable.

It happened on the afternoon of the second day, during one of the long gaps between filming setups. The crew had vanished — gone to reset lights, or argue about angles, or whatever it was documentary crews did when they disappeared for forty-five minutes at a time — and for the first time in two days, nobody was watching either of you.

The silence wasn't awkward. It was just quiet. Comfortable, even, in the way silences sometimes were when neither person felt obligated to fill them.

You glanced over. Kimi was staring at his phone, frowning, with the specific intensity of a man fighting a losing battle against modern technology.

"What?" you asked.

He looked up. "What?"

"You're making that face."

"What face?"

"The one where you're losing an argument with your phone."

"I'm not."

"You absolutely are."

His expression — which had not changed at all — confirmed it. You leaned over, glanced at his screen, and immediately spotted the problem.

You burst out laughing.

"Oh my god."

"What?"

"Your brightness has been on zero for the last ten minutes."

The realization landed slowly. Then all at once. Kimi looked down at his screen — at the faint, barely visible outline of an app he'd apparently been trying to open in the dark for ten full minutes — and put his face in his hands.

"Don't tell anyone."

"I'm telling everyone."

"Please."

"No."

And then, somehow — you weren't entirely sure how, except that his muffled groan from behind his hands was so genuinely, helplessly embarrassed that it was simply funny — both of you were laughing. Properly laughing, the kind that made your stomach hurt, the kind that drew a few curious glances from crew members resetting equipment nearby.

It felt natural. Effortless. Not performed for a camera, not engineered by a producer hoping for a moment — just two people, laughing at something stupid, because it was stupid, and because somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, you'd stopped bracing yourself every time he was near.

That realization — quiet, sudden, and entirely unwelcome — was somehow more frightening than anything the internet had thrown at either of you so far.

Unfortunately, Netflix noticed everything.

Of course they did. That was, after all, the entire point of having forty cameras embedded in a paddock at all times. Every glance became a moment. Every silence became tension. One afternoon, you walked past Kimi without speaking — you were carrying coffee, he was on the phone with Marco, neither of you so much as made eye contact — and a producer standing nearby actually whispered, to a colleague, with genuine reverence:

"Did you see that? The tension."

There had been no tension. You had literally just walked past each other. The producers, it turned out, did not particularly care.

The trailer dropped two weeks later, and it was, in a word, horrifying.

Sweeping orchestral music. Slow-motion footage of you both — walking, laughing, glancing at each other across a garage. A shot of you looking at Kimi from across the paddock, captured with the kind of lingering, meaningful close-up usually reserved for romantic leads in films. You remembered that exact moment. You'd been trying to figure out whether he had ketchup on his face.

The internet did not see it that way.

THE CHEMISTRY IS INSANE.

THERE'S NO WAY THEY'RE NOT TOGETHER.

ENEMIES TO LOVERS, REAL LIFE EDITION??

YOU CANNOT FAKE THIS.

You wanted, very sincerely, to sue everyone involved in the production. You did not, mostly because your father pointed out — unhelpfully, but accurately — that you'd signed the contract twice.

Sofia watched the trailer's reception with quiet, careful interest.

Because she understood something neither you nor Kimi had quite registered yet: the conversation had moved on. The blurry yacht photo had stopped trending weeks ago. The rumors connecting her and Kimi had quietly faded into the background, replaced — entirely, completely — by a single, all-consuming story.

You. And him.

Every article. Every fan edit. Every theory thread.

Sofia watched it happen, in real time, from the comfort of her hotel room, scrolling through an endless feed of speculation about a relationship that — as far as either of its supposed participants knew — didn't exist.

And Sofia Moretti was bored.

Bored people, especially bored people who understood exactly how the media worked, were dangerous.

The final day of filming ran long. By the time the last shot wrapped, most of the paddock had already emptied for the evening — garages quiet, lights dimmed to half-power, the production crew packing equipment into cases with the brisk efficiency of people who'd been awake since dawn and had a flight to catch.

For once, there were no cameras pointed at either of you. No producers hovering nearby with clipboards. Just you and Kimi, sitting side by side on a stack of equipment cases, both of you too exhausted to move.

Neither of you spoke for a while. The silence stretched, easy, the way it had on the balcony in Monaco.

Then Kimi said, quietly: "You know."

You looked over. "What?"

He was staring at the empty garage floor, choosing his words with the careful deliberation he brought to everything — interviews, qualifying laps, apparently this too.

"I thought you hated me," he said.

The confession caught you off guard. For a moment, you just looked at him. Then you laughed — softly, this time.

"I thought you hated me."

"I did."

Your jaw dropped. "Wow."

"After the coffee thing," he said, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

"That's fair," you admitted.

"And then I realized..." He paused, and the twitch became something closer to an actual smile. "You're just weird."

"Weird?"

"Very weird."

"You're the one who accidentally stalked my Instagram," you pointed out.

His ears turned red instantly — so fast, so completely, that you started laughing all over again, and somehow, despite the three exhausting days, despite the trailer, despite everything, you couldn't quite stop.

It had become a habit, you realized. Laughing around him. Somewhere in the last few weeks, without either of you really noticing, it had become the most natural thing in the world.

Neither of you noticed the figure standing at the far end of the empty paddock — phone in hand, watching, perfectly still.

Sofia had seen enough.

If the world wanted a story, she'd decided, she was going to give them one.

And this time, the consequences wouldn't be quite so easy to laugh off.

It started, as these things so often did, with a single sentence. Seven words, delivered with a soft, knowing smile, under bright studio lights, during what should have been a perfectly ordinary live interview.

Those seven words very nearly burned the entire paddock to the ground.

Sofia sat beneath the lights with the easy poise of someone who had done this a thousand times — which, of course, she had. The audience adored her, as always. The questions were the usual mix of season recaps and lighthearted banter, nothing that should have caused even a ripple.

Then a reporter asked the question. The question. The one that had been hovering, unasked, for months.

"Kimi Antonelli," the reporter said, grinning. "Friends, or more?"

The audience laughed. Sofia laughed too — soft, practiced, exactly the kind of laugh that told you absolutely nothing while appearing to tell you everything.

"Oh, Kimi's sweet," she said.

"So nothing going on?" the reporter pressed, still smiling.

Sofia paused.

It was a small pause. Barely a breath. The kind of pause that, on camera, looked entirely natural — thoughtful, even a little wistful.

Then she smiled — a little sadly, a little knowingly — and said:

"Sometimes things get complicated when other people get involved."

Silence.

The reporter blinked. The audience blinked. And somewhere, in living rooms and phones and laptops scattered across the world, the internet drew in a single, collective breath — and then exploded.

You found out the next morning, the way you found out about most disasters: your phone, vibrating itself nearly off the nightstand, dragging you out of sleep into a wall of notifications you weren't remotely prepared for.

Your name was trending. Again. You stared at the screen, blinking, still half-asleep, and the longer you looked, the worse it got.

HOMEWRECKER.

SHE STOLE HIM.

WE ALWAYS KNEW SHE WAS FAKE.

SOFIA DESERVES BETTER THAN THIS.

You sat up so fast the room spun. "What?"

Your group chat was already a warzone. Messages arrived faster than you could read them — overlapping, urgent, half-finished.

this is insane

she KNEW exactly what she was doing when she said that

don't respond

for the love of god do NOT respond

And then, from one of the drivers, a single line that landed with the weight of a verdict:

Paddock Civil War has officially begun.

He wasn't wrong.

Within forty-eight hours, the entire online Formula 1 community had fractured into factions with the speed and intensity of a championship title fight.

Team You. Team Sofia. Team Kimi. And — by a significant margin — Team Chaos, which consisted almost entirely of people who found the entire situation, regardless of who was right, simply too entertaining to take a side.

The drivers' group chats became actual war zones. Memes leaked. Inside jokes that were never meant to leave a private chat ended up, somehow, on Twitter within hours — including one screenshot, mortifyingly, of an entire fake "championship standings" table ranking which driver supported which side, in which one of the rookies had somehow ended up in first place for reasons nobody could explain and everybody found hilarious.

The drivers, for the most part, treated it as entertainment.

The sponsors did not.

Your father stepped into your office holding a tablet, and you knew — the way you'd learned to know, over years of exactly this — that whatever was on it was bad.

"What now," you said, not even bothering to make it a question.

He set the tablet down on your desk without a word. An article filled the screen — a major sponsor, quoted, expressing concern about "ongoing online speculation" and its potential impact on brand partnerships.

Your stomach dropped.

"Oh," you said.

"Yeah," your father said, and for once, there was nothing playful in his voice at all.

The room went quiet. For the first time since this entire ridiculous saga had started — coffee, hashtags, fake yacht photos, brightness settings — the consequences felt real. This wasn't fan accounts anymore. This was contracts. Reputations. Careers that belonged to people who'd worked their entire lives to get here.

And somehow, once again, you were the villain.

The worst part — the part that kept you awake that night, staring at the ceiling of your hotel room, the same useless ceiling that had offered no answers months ago and offered none now — was that you hadn't done anything.

You hadn't posted. Hadn't commented. Hadn't said a single public word about Sofia, about Kimi, about any of it.

It hadn't mattered.

People had already decided the story. They always did. And once a story had a villain, changing the casting was nearly impossible — no matter how little evidence there had ever been to support it.

By Saturday, you'd stopped opening social media entirely. Stopped reading the articles. Stopped checking the notifications that kept arriving anyway, relentless, regardless of whether you looked at them.

You told yourself it didn't matter. That you'd survived worse. That people would move on, the way they always eventually did.

But lying there, alone, in the dark, you found yourself wondering — not for the first time, and you suspected not for the last — why it was always you. Why people found it so easy to believe the worst. Why, in three years of being the most talked-about woman in the paddock, not one single person had ever thought to ask for your side of anything.

Across the paddock, in a hotel room two floors up, Kimi was furious.

This was, by any measure, unusual. Kimi didn't get angry. He got nervous. Embarrassed, constantly. Awkward, on a near-daily basis. But angry — actually, visibly angry — was something almost nobody in the paddock had ever seen.

Every time he opened his phone, there you were. Being blamed. Mocked. Attacked — for something that, as far as he could tell, you had never done, had never even implied, and had spent the entire weekend trying very hard not to think about.

The breaking point arrived during a press conference the next afternoon.

A journalist raised his hand. "Kimi — do you think the recent tension between Sofia and Y/n has affected the atmosphere in the—"

"No."

The interruption was immediate. Sharp. The room went quiet.

The journalist blinked, recalibrated, and tried again. "But Sofia implied that—"

"Then she shouldn't have."

Marco, standing just off-camera, looked like a man who had just watched a controlled detonation go slightly, terrifyingly, off-script.

Another reporter leaned forward. "So you're saying the rumors aren't true?"

Kimi looked at him. Directly. For a long moment — long enough that the silence itself became uncomfortable.

"I'm saying," he said, slowly, evenly, every word deliberate, "that people should stop blaming Y/n for things she hasn't done."

Silence. Complete silence. Even the photographers seemed to have forgotten how their cameras worked.

Because Kimi Antonelli — the shy rookie who flinched at direct questions, who'd once spent an entire press conference staring at a fixed point on the wall — had just, calmly, publicly, on camera, taken your side.

The clip went viral within the hour. Naturally.

Fan accounts reposted it within minutes. News outlets picked it up by the afternoon. TikTok edits multiplied — thousands of them, by evening, set to everything from somber piano to triumphant orchestral swells. Some people switched sides instantly. Others dug in harder. Nobody agreed on anything.

Except one thing, which everyone — everyone — seemed to notice at exactly the same time.

Kimi clearly cared.

A lot.

Possibly — and this was the part the internet seized on with the particular ferocity reserved for its favorite new theory — more than a lot.

You found out about the clip while sitting in hospitality, and your first thought was that it had to be fake. Edited. Some kind of deepfake, surely, because there was simply no version of reality in which Kimi Antonelli stood in front of a room full of cameras and said that. About you. On purpose.

Then you watched it.

Then you watched it again.

Then a third time, your chest tightening in a way that had nothing to do with the trending hashtags or the sponsor emails or any of the noise that had filled the last forty-eight hours.

Because nobody had ever done that for you before. Not publicly. Not when it actually mattered — not when staying quiet would have been so much easier, so much safer. And yet he had. Without hesitation. Without asking for anything in return.

You found him that evening, near the garages, in one of the quiet stretches of paddock that emptied out once the crowds thinned for the day. The light had gone soft and gold, the way it always did in the last hour before sunset, and the noise of the day had faded into something gentler — distant generators, the occasional clatter of equipment being packed away, somebody's radio playing low from inside a garage.

He looked up when he heard you approach. Immediately nervous — as always — shoulders tensing slightly, like he was bracing for something.

For a moment, neither of you said anything.

Then: "I saw the interview."

His ears went red instantly. Cute. Annoyingly, predictably cute.

"Oh," he said.

"Thank you," you said, and the words came out quieter than you'd intended — quieter than you'd meant them to, softer, more honest than you usually allowed yourself to be with anyone.

Something in his expression shifted. Softened.

"You shouldn't have to thank me," he said.

You swallowed. Because somehow, that single sentence — gentle, simple, entirely sincere — made everything feel more complicated and more clear at the same time. The line between better and worse had become, you realized, alarmingly difficult to find.

Neither of you noticed the photographer at the far end of the corridor. The shutter clicking, quiet and unhurried, capturing the way you looked at each other. The way Kimi smiled when you smiled back.

The image would be online before morning. The internet would spend weeks dissecting it.

And within days, none of it would matter at all.

Because somewhere else entirely — far from the paddock, far from the cameras and the hashtags and the endless, exhausting noise — a journalist named Tomas Reyes had just opened an email with an attachment he had not been expecting.

A folder. Screenshots. Voice notes. Messages.

Enough evidence to unravel an entire story.

And once it went public, nothing about this season would ever look quite the same again.

—--------------------

The truth arrived on a Wednesday, at 9:12 in the morning. By 9:13, the internet was on fire again — though this time, for once, not because of you.

You were halfway through your first coffee — a careful, paranoid sip, the kind you'd developed an instinct for since Coffee-Gate — when your phone lit up with the now-familiar wall of notifications. Calls. Messages. Tags. All at once, the way they always seemed to arrive.

You opened the group chat, bracing yourself.

The first message read: OH MY GOD.

The second: SHE'S FINISHED.

The third, in caps, with three exclamation points: TURN ON TWITTER RIGHT NOW.

You frowned. This felt different. Usually, by this point, you'd have already seen your own name somewhere in the first ten messages. This time, you hadn't.

You opened the app — and nearly choked on your coffee.

Every trending topic carried the same name.

Sofia Moretti.

—----------------------------------------

The article had gone live less than twenty minutes earlier, written by Tomas Reyes — a journalist whose name you recognized, mostly for his reputation as someone who didn't publish anything until he could prove every word of it three times over.

He'd been investigating something else entirely, the article explained. A completely unrelated story about sponsorship negotiations. And somewhere in the process, he'd stumbled onto something he hadn't expected.

Screenshots. Voice notes. Messages. Emails, going back months.

Not fabricated. Not edited. Real — painfully, undeniably real.

The picture they painted was meticulous, and worse than anything the rumor mill had ever produced about you, because it was true. For months, Sofia had been quietly feeding information to gossip accounts. Not lies, exactly — that was the unsettling part. Carefully selected truths. Small details, taken out of context. Convenient omissions. Just enough to nudge a narrative in a particular direction. Just enough to keep a story alive. Just enough, always, to keep Sofia Moretti at the center of the conversation.

And every single thread, it turned out, led back to you.

The internet turned on her instantly. Brutally. Without hesitation — the same people who had spent weeks calling you a homewrecker were now posting, with breathtaking confidence, that they'd never believed it for a second.

You sat with your coffee going cold, scrolling, reading the same paragraphs over and over, and felt something you hadn't expected to feel.

Not triumph. Not relief, exactly — though there was some of that, somewhere underneath everything else.

Mostly, you just felt empty.

Because the truth had arrived. Finally, after months. But it had arrived after. After the headlines. After the sponsor emails. After the nights you'd lain awake wondering why it was always you. The damage didn't undo itself just because the story had changed.

And then — somehow, impossibly — things got worse.

Or better. It depended entirely on who you asked.

It began with a single leaked screenshot. Then another. Then ten more. Within the hour, it had become abundantly, gloriously clear that the entire paddock had collectively decided Kimi Antonelli deserved absolutely no privacy whatsoever, ever again, for the rest of his career.

The culprit, as it turned out, was Ollie.

Accidentally, Ollie insisted, to anyone who would listen, which — given the timing, the volume, and the suspiciously specific selection of messages — absolutely nobody believed. Least of all Kimi.

The first screenshot appeared on Twitter without context — a cropped image from a group chat, easy to scroll past. Then someone zoomed in.

And suddenly, everyone was paying attention.

Because the message was from Kimi. And it read:

what time is Y/n's interview tomorrow?

The timestamp was six months old.

The internet paused — collectively, audibly, you imagined — and then, immediately, became feral.

More screenshots followed. Then more. Each one somehow worse — or funnier, depending on your perspective, and usually both — than the last.

One read: do you think she actually hates me?

Another: stop sending me edits i'm begging you

Another, mortifyingly: i accidentally liked her photo

And the reply, from Ollie, immortalized forever: I KNOW. STOP REMINDING ME.

The paddock — and you, eventually, despite every effort not to — was crying with laughter.

Then came the saved photos.

That one, by all accounts, nearly killed him. One of his friends — Ollie, again, you assumed, because at this point the pattern was undeniable — had revealed, with the casual cruelty only a close friend could manage, that Kimi had a small folder of saved screenshots from your Instagram on his phone.

Not many. Just enough.

Enough, as it turned out, to end his dignity permanently and irreversibly.

By lunchtime, there were compilations. By dinner, timelines. By midnight, someone had uploaded what could only be described as a documentary — twenty-two minutes, fully edited, complete with a dramatic title card — laying out, in exhaustive detail, the case that Kimi Antonelli had been hopelessly, helplessly in love with you for months.

The evidence, you had to admit, was embarrassingly convincing.

The funniest part, though — and you noticed this somewhere around your fourth replay of the Ollie screenshot — was that nobody was talking about Sofia anymore. Not even a little. The internet had simply, seamlessly, moved on to a new and far more entertaining target.

And his name was Kimi Antonelli.

You were still laughing when you found him that evening, tucked behind one of the garages in the narrow gap between two equipment trucks — clearly hoping, with the misplaced optimism of someone who had not yet fully grasped how the internet worked, that this might be a place where nobody could find him.

It wasn't working. Two mechanics had already taken photos with him on the way over. A pair of journalists had tried, unsuccessfully, to get a comment. And — you'd heard this part secondhand, but you believed it completely — a group of drivers had apparently followed him partway across the paddock, singing.

The moment he saw you, he groaned. An actual, full-bodied groan, head dropping back against the side of the truck.

"Oh, no."

You lost it immediately. A laugh, then another, then you were laughing so hard you had to lean against the truck beside him just to stay upright.

"This isn't funny," he said, with the deep, tragic conviction of a man whose entire life had ended.

"It absolutely is."

"My career is over."

"You won a race three weeks ago."

"I'll never recover from this."

You laughed harder. His expression grew, somehow, even more devastated — which, naturally, only made it worse.

Eventually, though, the laughter softened. Faded into something quieter. The silence that followed felt different from the others — not awkward, not the easy comfortable quiet of the documentary days, either. Something else. Something that made the air between you feel suddenly very small.

You looked at him. Properly looked — at the flushed ears, the embarrassed, helpless almost-smile, the way he couldn't quite meet your eyes anymore, not because he was avoiding you, but because he seemed to be working very hard not to give something away.

And something in you shifted.

Because for months, the internet had been insisting — loudly, constantly, with twelve-slide presentations and twenty-two-minute documentaries — that Kimi liked you. For months, you'd dismissed it. Laughed it off. Filed it away with all the other theories the internet had ever had about you, most of which had been wrong.

But standing here now, in the narrow gap between two equipment trucks, watching him try and fail to look anywhere but at you—

Maybe, you thought, they hadn't been wrong after all.

He must have seen it on your face. The realization. Because he froze — completely, suddenly, the way he did right before a red light at the start of a session, every muscle tensed, waiting.

For one long, terrifying second, neither of you said anything at all.

Then a voice rang out from somewhere across the paddock, loud enough to carry over the generators and the distant music and everything else.

"HE'S BLUSHING AGAIN!"

You both jumped. Within seconds, a small crowd of drivers materialized at the end of the row — like vultures, you thought, extremely loud vultures — already laughing before they'd even arrived.

Kimi closed his eyes. Slowly. With the air of a man accepting his fate.

"I hate every single one of them," he said.

You laughed — and this time, instead of looking away, instead of denying it, instead of doing any of the things he'd spent months doing every time the subject came anywhere near the truth—

Kimi smiled too.

Because the secret was out. Properly out. The whole world knew. The paddock knew. His friends — especially his friends — knew. And judging by the way he was looking at you now, openly, without flinching, there didn't seem to be much point in pretending otherwise anymore.

That night, the internet celebrated.

Not because of a scandal. Not because of a fight, or a rumor, or a carefully engineered piece of drama.

For once — for the first time in longer than you could remember — people were celebrating something real.

And for the first time in months, you weren't the villain.

You were simply the girl Kimi Antonelli couldn't stop looking at.

Which, you discovered, lying awake that night with your stomach in knots and a smile you couldn't quite get rid of, was somehow far more terrifying than anything the internet had thrown at you all season.

Because the final race weekend was only days away.

And after everything — the coffee, the hashtags, the yacht photo, the documentary, the civil war, the exposure, all of it — there was only one thing left that hadn't been said out loud.

For the first time all season, the paddock was quiet.

No scandals. No leaked screenshots. No relationship rumors trending before breakfast. No journalists hovering by the garage doors with the specific, hungry look of people hoping for a story. Just racing — actual racing, a concept the sport seemed to have collectively forgotten somewhere around Monaco.

You weren't complaining.

Sofia's departure from the broadcast team had been announced quietly, a brief statement buried in an afternoon press release that most people scrolled past without comment. Nobody asked you about it. Nobody asked Kimi, either. The story, it turned out, simply ended — not with a bang, but with the particular, anticlimactic silence reserved for people who had spent too long mistaking attention for power.

You found, to your mild surprise, that you didn't feel much of anything about it at all. Just a quiet, settled kind of relief — the feeling of a held breath finally released.

The final race weekend arrived faster than you'd expected. One week it had been summer — the air thick and humid, the kind of heat that made the tarmac shimmer — and the next, you were standing in the paddock looking at banners that read SEASON FINALE in enormous, triumphant letters, while everyone around you walked like they'd aged ten years in ten months.

It had been a long season. A dramatic one. A genuinely, almost impressively ridiculous one. You suspected — with the strange, fond exhaustion of someone looking back on a disaster they'd somehow survived — that you would be telling stories about this year for the rest of your life.

The funniest part was the comments.

Nobody called you the Ice Queen anymore. Nobody called you the villain, or the Paddock Princess, or anything else that had defined the last several years of your online existence. The internet — somehow, against all odds — had collectively decided to redirect its considerable energy toward a brand-new cause.

JUST DATE ALREADY.

WE ARE SO TIRED.

STOP BEING WEIRD ABOUT IT.

HOLD HANDS. THAT'S ALL WE ASK.

The entire world, apparently, had developed a deeply personal investment in your love life. It felt invasive. It also — and this was the part you found most difficult to argue with — felt completely, maddeningly understandable.

Because the truth was, you and Kimi had spent the last few weeks in a strange kind of limbo. Everyone knew. The paddock knew. The internet had known for so long it had practically filed paperwork. And yet, somehow, neither of you had said anything — not because you didn't know how you felt, but because neither of you seemed to know how to be the one to say it first.

Your friends were no help.

"You know he likes you," Priya said, for what had to be the fourth time that week, with the patience of someone explaining gravity to a toddler.

"Thank you, Sherlock."

"So?"

"So what?"

"So do something."

You groaned and put your head down on the table. Priya groaned louder, on principle, and the conversation — as it had every previous time — accomplished absolutely nothing.

Kimi's friends were, somehow, even less helpful.

The morning of the final race, Ollie appeared beside him in the garage, entirely uninvited, with the particular swagger of a man who knew exactly how unwelcome he was and had decided not to care.

"As your friend," Ollie said, leaning against the car like he owned it, "I think you should tell her."

Kimi didn't look up from his gloves. "No."

"As your friend, I think you're being an idiot."

"No."

"As your friend—"

"Go away, Ollie."

Ollie grinned, and held up both hands in mock surrender, already backing away. "That's not a no," he called over his shoulder, and then turned and bolted before Kimi could throw anything at him — which, given the way Kimi's hand had already closed around a spare wheel nut, had been a wise decision.

The race itself passed in something of a blur. Engines, screaming through the final laps of the season. The crowd, louder than you'd ever heard it. Champagne, eventually, sprayed across the podium in great golden arcs that caught the last of the afternoon light. Interviews. Photos. The slow, almost ceremonial handshakes between people who'd spent the entire year trying to beat each other and would now, for a few months at least, simply be people again.

The checkered flag waved.

And just like that — after everything — it was over.

The paddock emptied slowly, the way it always did at the end of a season — not all at once, but in stages, like a tide going out. Trucks were loaded. Equipment cases stacked and sealed. Garages, one by one, fell quiet, their lights switching off in sequence until the whole place felt strange and hollow, the kind of quiet that only existed in places built for noise.

You should have gone back to the hotel. Everyone else had.

Instead, you found yourself wandering — past empty garages, past darkened hospitality units, past corridors that had been filled with people only hours earlier and now held nothing but the faint, lingering smell of rubber and fuel and spilled coffee that never quite seemed to wash out of anything in this place.

There was something about the stillness that caught at you. Comforting and sad in the same breath. Beautiful, in a way you didn't quite have words for — like standing at the end of a long book, the kind you weren't ready to close.

You walked without really deciding to walk anywhere. And somehow — though you would later tell yourself it was a coincidence, and would later not quite believe yourself — you ended up at one of the garages near the end of the row.

The lights were dim. Most of the equipment had already been packed away, leaving the space feeling larger than it should, the concrete floor swept clean except for a few stray cable ties and a single forgotten glove.

And sitting alone on a stack of tires, elbows on his knees, staring at nothing in particular, was Kimi.

Of course it was.

For a moment, neither of you said anything. You simply walked over and sat down beside him — close enough that your shoulder nearly brushed his, close enough that neither of you moved away.

The silence stretched. It didn't feel like the silences from before — not the awkward early ones, not even the comfortable ones from Barcelona. This one felt different. Fuller. Like it was holding something.

No cameras. No reporters. No producers hiding behind equipment cases with their hearts set on a moment. No fans pressed against fences, phones raised. No internet, for once, watching either of you.

Just the two of you, in an empty garage, at the end of a very long year — exactly the way it probably should have been from the beginning, if either of you had had the slightest idea what you were doing back then.

"You know," Kimi said, eventually.

His voice was quieter than usual. You looked over.

"What?"

He didn't answer right away. He was staring out at the empty garage floor, turning something over in his head — choosing his words, the way he always did, careful and deliberate, like every sentence was a corner he didn't want to take too fast.

Then he laughed. Softly. A little nervously — the kind of laugh you'd learned, over the course of this absurd, exhausting season, to recognize as the sound he made right before saying something that actually mattered.

"When I joined Formula 1," he said, "everyone told me you'd be impossible."

Your smile appeared before you could stop it. "Did they?"

"Yeah."

"I hope you defended my honor."

"I absolutely did not."

You gasped — properly gasped, hand pressed to your chest in mock betrayal — and he laughed again, a real laugh this time, the sound of it echoing softly off the concrete and the empty steel shelving and the dim, half-powered lights overhead. For a moment, he looked younger. Lighter. Like something he'd been carrying all season had finally, quietly, set itself down.

"And?" you asked.

His smile faded — not completely. Just enough. Just enough that you felt the shift in the air between you, the sudden weight of and? settling over both of you like the silence had been waiting for exactly this question the whole time.

Kimi turned toward you. Properly turned, so that his knee brushed yours, so that there was nowhere left for either of you to look except at each other. His eyes — green, soft in the low light, achingly familiar after months of glancing at them sideways, in corridors, across garages, on balconies in Monaco — found yours, and for the first time all year, he didn't look away.

"Turns out," he said, quietly, "everyone was wrong."

Your breath caught. Just slightly. Just enough that you noticed it yourself.

Because there was something in his voice — something you'd been hearing, in pieces, for months. In the way he'd taken your side in front of a room full of cameras. In the way he'd laughed at himself, beside you, in a way he never laughed for anyone else. In the way he'd looked at you on a balcony in Monaco like the rest of the world had simply stopped existing.

Something you'd been pretending, very deliberately, not to understand.

The silence that followed felt enormous. And yet — somehow, impossibly — it didn't feel uncomfortable. It felt full. Heavy with everything neither of you had said all season. Every glance across a garage. Every argument that hadn't really been an argument. Every laugh that had snuck up on both of you when you weren't paying attention. Every single thing that had, somehow, brought you here — to this exact spot, on this exact night, at the end of this exact, ridiculous season.

Kimi took a breath. The kind people took before doing something they couldn't undo. Before jumping off something. Before saying something true out loud for the first time.

Which, you supposed, were more or less the same thing.

"I like you," he said.

No speech. No grand gesture. No cameras, no crowd, no carefully constructed moment. Just the truth — quiet, simple, spoken in an empty garage that smelled like rubber and old coffee, at the end of a season that had tried, in every possible way, to make this moment about anything except the two of you.

You looked at him. Not with surprise — not really. You'd known, hadn't you. For a while now. The paddock had known. The internet had known, loudly, for months, with twelve-slide presentations and twenty-two-minute documentaries and an entire group chat's worth of incriminating evidence.

But hearing it — hearing it from him, in his own quiet voice, with his ears already turning that familiar shade of red — felt different.

It felt real.

Kimi, predictably, looked immediately nervous — which, you thought, was deeply unfair, because it was adorable, and now you were smiling, and you couldn't seem to stop.

"You know," you said softly.

His expression turned cautious. "What?"

"I think the entire world figured that out months ago."

His face went red. Instantly, completely, the way it always did — and you laughed, and somehow that broke whatever tension had been left, all of it, at once. The nervousness. The fear. The months of pretending. All of it just — dissolved, into the quiet of the empty garage, into the sound of your laughter and, slowly, his.

A smile crept onto his face too. Small, at first. Then bigger. Warmer. The kind of smile you'd seen directed at Sofia, once, what felt like a lifetime ago, and had hated — and now, finally, it was pointed at you, and it felt like nothing you'd ever hated at all.

"You didn't answer," he said.

Your heart skipped. Once.

So you reached over, and took his hand, and laced your fingers through his.

Simple. Easy. Certain — in a way that surprised you, a little, with how little thought it took, after months of overthinking absolutely everything else.

Kimi looked down at your hands. Then up at you. And the smile that spread across his face then was unlike anything you'd seen from him all season — bright, and unguarded, and so openly happy that it made your chest ache in the best possible way. The kind of smile people earned. The kind that made every disaster — the coffee, the hashtags, the documentary, the civil war, all of it — feel, retroactively, completely worth it.

"I like you too," you said.

The words had barely left your mouth before he laughed — a relieved, helpless laugh, the sound of someone setting down something heavy they'd been carrying for far too long.

Outside, one by one, the last of the paddock lights clicked off. The season ending around you, quietly, the way seasons did.

Neither of you moved. Not yet.

There was nowhere else, in that moment, either of you would rather have been.

Months later, the new season began.

The paddock came back to life the way it always did — loud, crowded, chaotic, full of fresh kit and fresh gossip and the particular electric energy of a season that hadn't gone wrong yet. Exactly as it should be.

You walked through it hand in hand with Kimi.

No hiding. No careful angles, no quick release of hands the moment a camera came into view, no awkward, deliberate distance in interviews. Just the two of you, together, the way you'd been for months now — long enough that it had stopped feeling like a secret and started feeling like, simply, how things were.

People stared, of course. This was Formula 1. People always stared.

But this time felt different. No whispers behind hands. No accusations. No scandal, no trending hashtags with your name attached to something ugly. Just smiles — and, from somewhere behind you, the unmistakable sound of a driver making exaggerated kissing noises, which Kimi hated with his whole heart and everyone else found absolutely delightful.

As you passed a cluster of journalists, one of them — the same senior reporter who'd warned you, what felt like a lifetime ago, that anyone that charming was probably a nightmare — called out, grinning:

"So the conspiracy theories were true after all?"

You looked at Kimi. He looked at you. Then, with the long-suffering patience of a man who had given up fighting the inevitable months ago, he rolled his eyes — and you laughed, and squeezed his hand, and kept walking.

Past the garages. Past the cameras. Past all of it — the noise, the chaos, the entire ridiculous machine that had spent a year trying to turn the two of you into a headline, and had, in the end, simply turned out to be right.

Toward another season.

His gap-toothed smile was visible even from the other end of the hallway, making the nurse raise an eyebrow before they finally went their separate ways. What a weirdo, she thought. Ella was always so serious, although Lando swore he had once seen her eyes well up when she had to give an injection to a three-year-old.

Lando opened the door to his office, set his folders down on the desk, and took the white lab coat embroidered with his name from the hook on the wall, slipping it on. His work uniform.

But there was still one thing he needed to do, and it couldn't wait. Coffee!

The best thing about Lauda Hospital was that the staff break room, where everyone could squeeze in a few precious minutes to drink their coffee, happened to be in one of the nicest spots in the entire building.

All things considered, it was a pretty great place to work.

Not only did Lando get to help people, but he also got to drink an excellent cup of coffee. That was saying something, coming from a guy who, before medical school and the long journey to becoming the doctor he was today, had genuinely believed energy drinks and caffeine patches were the best way to stay awake far beyond what the human body was ever meant to endure. At some point in life, you have to grow up, right? Apparently, that included accepting a certain amount of bitterness every day, preferably in the form of a steaming mug.

A silly little irony.

As the dark liquid streamed into the dinosaur mug Lando always kept in his office, he was already reaching for three sugar packets sitting at the corner of the counter.

Yeah, he really wasn't built for bitter things.

"Should we ask someone from General Medicine to check your blood sugar levels? I hope you're not actively trying to die," Max Verstappen said from behind him in the flat tone of someone who was still nowhere near the end of his shift.

He was holding a mug remarkably similar to the one Lando had in his hands now, except his didn't have a little triceratops printed on it with a speech bubble that read, You're awesome, Dr. Lando!

Lando let out a laugh.

"Mate, you look like you've been hit by a truck," he said, stepping aside so his colleague could use the coffee machine and setting his mug down on the counter beside it.

Lando tore open the sugar packets and emptied them into his mug one by one, completely ignoring Max's previous comment.

Max answered with nothing more than a grunt.

Lando smiled.

"You're way too happy," Max said, the complaint clear in his voice.

That only made Lando smile wider.

"Do cheerful people bother you that much?" the British doctor asked, finally bringing the mug to his lips.

The coffee settled warmly inside him, chasing away the last traces of sleep and making him feel ready to function. It was like pouring lubricant into a rusty machine and watching it finally sputter to life, ready to take on another long day at work.

"You specifically bother me," Max replied before taking a long sip of his coffee. Not a single gram of sugar. Lando pulled a face. "I think I have a theory."

Lando didn't answer. He simply raised an eyebrow over the rim of his mug as he took another sip.

"It's Theo's routine check-up today," Max said, wearing the smug tone of someone who knew he'd hit the mark.

Lando remained silent. He narrowed his eyes, finished the last of his coffee, and set the mug beneath the machine again.

"You're playing a dangerous game, Dr. Verstappen," he replied as he selected another cup of coffee.

Max let out an amused huff through his nose and leaned against the counter. The room, empty only moments ago, was slowly beginning to fill with nurses just arriving for their shifts and doctors from other departments. It really was a busy hospital.

"I just think it's funny, the way you get whenever she's about to come in."

"She?"

"The woman who brings Theo."

"She's his mother."

"She's pretty."

Lando met Max's gaze as he picked up his mug again. He had already taken two steps toward the door when Max called after him.

"Aren't you going to add your daily dose of diabetes to that one?"

His feet came to an immediate stop. With an exaggerated sigh, he turned around and walked back to grab his sugar packets.

Mornings and afternoons at the hospital weren't always this peaceful. As much as Lando genuinely loved his job, he knew it wasn't exactly the happiest place in the world. After all, nobody liked going to a hospital, let alone staying in one.

The wail of ambulance sirens always made him glance around the corridor, wondering if there was anything he could do to help, and the sound of stretchers rattling past on their way to the operating theatres or the ICU was never a pleasant reminder of why they were all there. Every member of that staff had to be incredibly strong. Lando himself had witnessed more tragedies than he ever cared to remember, but he also knew he worked in one of the hospital's more fortunate departments, and that thought stayed with him throughout the day.

When he stepped into the hallway with the patient charts in hand and called for Dolores West, he found himself wondering why a five-year-old girl had such an old-fashioned name. Then he spotted a short, chubby elderly woman holding hands with a timid little girl wearing her hair in two braids, a Frozen dress, and a matching pair of Crocs. Suddenly, it all made sense.

"Dolores?" he asked, looking at the little girl, who immediately ducked behind her grandmother's legs.

The elderly woman smiled, and Lando couldn't help laughing.

"We have the same name, you see?" she said, gently brushing a hand over her granddaughter's hair. "But what do you like to be called? Go on, tell the doctor."

The little girl looked down at the floor, blinking once... then twice. Lando crouched until he was at eye level with her.

"You don't have to call me Doctor, you know," he said, his voice warm. "You can just call me Lando."

She slowly lifted her head, eyeing him with quiet suspicion. After a hesitant nod, she carefully stepped out from behind her grandmother.

"I like it when people call me Lola..." she whispered, her tiny voice barely above a murmur.

Something in Lando's expression softened. He held out his hand. Lola looked at it, then at his face, and finally back at her grandmother, who gave her an encouraging nod. The little girl reached up with her tiny hand and wrapped it around his.

"It's nice to meet you, Lola," Lando said. "Shall we go inside? I think we've got a few things to talk about, don't you?"

The rest of the day unfolded much the same way. Children came and went. They laughed, they cried, or stubbornly refused to cooperate in that way only children could. Besides Lola, Lando had two new patients who had recently joined the hospital through their health insurance plan, and they took a little longer than his usual appointments.

One of them was Lucca, a four-year-old with shoulder-length hair. Lando ended up reaching for his emergency toy kit because the boy wouldn't stop crying, convinced the doctor was about to give him one of those enormous injections that hurt more than anything in the world. After a five-minute break during which Lando played Woody and Lucca insisted on being Buzz Lightyear, it was unanimously decided that the doctor was, in fact, trustworthy. After all, both of their names started with the letter L, and only cool people had names that began with L.

Children really were fascinating little creatures.

The rest of the appointment went by without a single problem.

Even so, for all his professionalism, Lando couldn't ignore the thin layer of anticipation that lingered at the back of his mind every time he glanced at the clock and realized it was getting closer to four o'clock in the afternoon.

Alone in his office five minutes after his last patient had left, Lando picked up the stack of patient charts on his desk, only to confirm what he already knew.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

He'd promised himself this time would be different.

Get a grip, Lando Norris. For God's sake.

Right.

It was fine.

He would see Catherine first, the patient who had been transferred to his care after her longtime pediatrician retired. After that...

After that, it would be Theo's turn.

Then he would take a short break before handing the evening shift over to Nico, the night pediatrician.

"Catherine, you can come in," he called toward the half-open door.

The seventeen-year-old stepped inside with her mother. It would be one of her last appointments in pediatrics before turning eighteen in less than three months. Nothing was wrong. She had been born with a respiratory condition and still came in every now and then for routine follow-up appointments, just to make sure everything was progressing exactly as it should.

She was a lovely girl. Every visit inevitably turned into a conversation about tennis, with her mother occasionally chiming in, proudly insisting she was trying to keep up with the tournaments alongside her daughter. They were a wonderful family.

Lando was going to miss them when they finally moved on to the adult side of the hospital.

"Doctor, we have something for you," her mother said, reaching for the gift bag that had been resting beside her chair ever since they'd walked in.

Catherine stepped over to stand beside her, slipping her phone into her pocket before giving him a small smile and a nod.

"We know we still have three appointments left with you," her mother began, "but ever since Dr. Stella had to retire and you took over his patients, you've taken such wonderful care of my Catherine."

Her eyes glistened as she held the bag out toward him.

"We wish we could give you something more, but..."

Lando blinked once. Then again. His eyes moved from the two of them to the gift bag they were holding out, and after a brief hesitation, he slowly reached over to take it. Receiving gifts wasn't exactly uncommon, but he was certain it would never stop catching him off guard.

"Oh my God... you really didn't have to," he said, blinking quickly to keep his own tears at bay. Honestly, Lando was far more emotional than he probably needed to be. He cleared his throat and carefully peeked inside the bag.

A box of Belgian chocolates and a shirt, still neatly folded inside its box, though he could already tell it was a soft shade of light blue.

"If the shirt doesn't fit, you can always exchange it," Catherine's mother said.

A quiet laugh escaped Lando as his shoulders relaxed, almost as though he were surrendering.

"That's... incredibly kind of you." He looked between the two of them, still struggling to find the right words. "Honestly... thank you. Thank you so much."

For a moment, the warm glow of gratitude lingered in the room as the two of them left, so much that Lando completely forgot what was coming next. He carefully tucked the gift bag away inside his cabinet, the happy smile still lingering on his lips before turning around and realizing someone was already standing in the doorway.

His breath almost caught.

"Hi, Uncle Lando!" Theo called, his voice bright with excitement.

Ah. He simply couldn't resist.

A quiet laugh escaped Lando as he crouched down and opened his arms. Theo ran straight into them, giggling all the way before wrapping him in a tight hug.

"There you are, you little menace," Lando said with a grin.

"I told him you'd call us in a minute, but Theo wouldn't listen to me. You know what he's like."

There it was. That melodic voice Lando had been waiting to hear all day. Slowly, he lifted his eyes to find you closing the door behind you as you stepped into the room.

The smile resting on your lips wasn't a broad one, just a small, content curve that somehow made every other feature even more beautiful. Even your perfume filled the office, gently pushing away the sterile scent that seemed to cling to every corner of the hospital as though it were part of the building itself.

Lando was completely, utterly screwed.

"Oh... hi, you," he said, getting to his feet as he affectionately ruffled Theo's hair.

A soft laugh slipped past your lips before you lifted a hand in a small wave.

"Hi, you," you replied.

You walked over at an unhurried pace before gently guiding Theo toward one of the chairs across from Lando's desk.

Lando was already making his way back to his own chair, settling into the professional composure he was trying very, very hard to maintain. Mostly because he was trying very, very hard not to look at your face the way a compass needle always finds north.

"So..." Lando began, lowering his attention to Theo. "How have things been since your last appointment?"

"Hmmm... good," Theo answered with the effortless simplicity only children seemed capable of, somehow leaving out every important detail.

A quiet laugh escaped you.

No.

Lando hated that sound.

He nearly let out a groan.

"Love, Uncle Lando's asking about your health," you said with an amused smile. "Tell him what you told daddy yesterday on the way to school."

Theo nodded before looking back at Lando with complete sincerity.

Lando listened carefully, pretending the word daddy was nothing more than an inconvenient detail he could simply choose to ignore.

"Oh... my tummy really, really hurt..." Theo said, lifting his green T-shirt to point at his stomach. "Right here. I even cried."

The doctor leaned forward across the desk, his full attention now on what Theo was saying. A faint crease of concern appeared between his brows.

"Really?" Lando asked, his gaze lifting to you, hoping you could fill in the rest of the story.

You nodded, resting an arm along the back of Theo's chair.

"He didn't even go to school yesterday. We brought him into the Emergency Department. We asked if we could see you, but the receptionist told us you were out on a home visit and wouldn't be back until later. They gave him some medication, and he stayed home to rest. Thankfully, he seemed much better afterward. But since he already had an appointment today, we thought we'd keep it."

Your eyes drifted back to Theo, a fond little smile appearing on your face.

"He was so brave through all of it, wasn't he?"

Theo nodded enthusiastically several times, making Lando laugh.

"I'm sure you were," he said warmly. "But would it be alright if I had a look, just so we can figure out what's been going on?"

Theo was more than willing.

Before anyone could say another word, the little boy had already jumped down from his chair and was climbing up the small set of steps leading to the examination table.

The examination was quick, as it usually was with Theo, but somehow it always took longer because of the questions. "Uncle Lando, what's this called again?" The stethoscope. He never remembered. "Is it going to eat my heart?" No, Theo. It's just going to listen to your heart. It doesn't like the taste of hearts. "After this we're meeting my dad for ice cream, you know?" Oh, really? Wow, Theo, that's great. That's really great. Sounds like so much fun. Fantastic, even. "Uncle Lando, I wish you'd come have ice cream with us, but you're always so busy." I'd like to have ice cream with you too, Theo... but I can't.

And so it went.

When the two of them made their way back to the desk, you were patiently waiting with your legs crossed, absentmindedly scrolling through your phone. Theo was happily distracted by the strawberry lollipop he'd earned for being so brave, which gave Lando a moment to look at you.

It wasn't one of the most professional moments of his life, he had to admit.

Every little thing about you was so beautiful that he had to remind himself there was still a consultation to finish.

"Theo seems perfectly fine," he said, finally drawing your attention.

The little boy wandered over to you, proudly showing off his lollipop before promptly popping it back into his mouth.

"My guess is that it was something he ate, since I can't see anything concerning during the examination. Just to be on the safe side, though, I'd like him to have some blood work done. Bring the results with you at his next appointment, alright?"

Lando had already sat back down at his desk and started typing up his notes and the lab request when you spoke.

"When's the next appointment?"

The words came out much too quickly, as though your brain had stopped working for a second. The moment you realized what you'd said, your entire face turned bright red.

"No — sorry, that's not what I meant." You let out a small, embarrassed laugh. "I... I meant to ask whether your available appointments are usually very far out, or if, when I book it at reception, we'll be able to come back sooner."

Lando paused for a moment, partly because the printer was busy spitting out the lab request, but he would have stopped either way. Whenever you were around, his brain had an unfortunate habit of wandering off in unpredictable directions, twisting every little thing into exactly what it wanted to hear. It was downright treacherous, which was precisely why he had to stop every now and then, gather himself, and make sure he wasn't reading into things he had absolutely no business reading into. After all, you were a married woman. There was no chance you were flirting with him.

His brain wholeheartedly disagreed.

"Well..." Lando began, "since Theo's appointments are usually fairly straightforward, I can ask reception to schedule you around whatever works best for you. It'll mostly depend on when he's able to have the blood test done."

His attention dropped back to Theo, who was carefully throwing the lollipop stick into the bin.

"Can Daddy come next time?" Theo asked innocently, blinking up at you.

Lando pulled a face. Thankfully, he managed to hide it by turning to collect the paperwork.

"It'd be better if he didn't, Theo," you replied gently. "He'll be at work."

This time, Lando didn't react. He simply handed the papers over, and you accepted them with a grateful smile.

Together, you walked toward the door.

Lando crouched one last time to give Theo a hug before waving goodbye to you.

When you reached the end of the corridor, you turned back one last time and waved again.

"Now that is embarrassing."

Gabriel Bortoleto, the newest pediatric resident, was leaning against the wall two doors down. Like everyone else in the hospital, he had his own coffee mug in one hand and the other tucked into the pocket of his white coat. The grin on his face was the same one everyone seemed to wear whenever they watched Lando finish one of Theo's appointments.

"Oh, shut up," Lando muttered, shaking his head as he disappeared back into his office, leaving Gabriel's laughter echoing through the hallway.

Your brother was waiting for the two of you in the hospital car park by the time you finally came out after scheduling Theo's blood test for two days later. The moment the little boy realized what had actually been arranged, having spent most of his conversation with Dr. Norris happily distracted by his lollipop, the protests were immediate. As soon as he spotted Marcus waiting on the other side of the parking lot, he took off running.

"Daddy!" he cried. "Auntie says they're going to poke me with that horrible needle to take my blood! You promised that would never happen again!"

He threw his arms up, demanding to be picked up. Marcus scooped him into his arms without hesitation, a laugh already escaping him before he looked over at you, only to find you rolling your eyes.

"This little drama king knows perfectly well nobody ever promised him that," you said. "He's making things up now."

Even so, a smile found its way onto your lips as you walked past the two of them and opened the car door to buckle Theo into his car seat.

"But as compensation," you said, stepping aside so your brother could settle Theo into his seat, "I'm buying him ice cream."

As Marcus buckled him in, Theo shot a tiny fist into the air.

"Yeah! That's what I'm talking about!"

The two of you burst into laughter.

"I definitely didn't teach him that," Marcus said as he finally closed the back door.

You shook your head, walking around to the passenger side before climbing into the car.

"Oh, I'm absolutely certain you did," you replied, your voice full of affection. "You're a terrible influence."

Marcus dropped into the driver's seat and started the engine before putting on his seatbelt. Immediately, a chorus of horrified voices erupted from both the front and the back of the car.

"Daddy! Your seatbelt! Oh my gosh!"

"Seriously, Marcus? Seatbelt!"

"Dad, put your seatbelt on!"

"Come on, Marcus! Seatbelt!"

Completely unfazed, Marcus let out a long sigh, silently gathering every ounce of patience he could find while you and Theo dissolved into laughter. You reached your hand over the back of your seat. Theo slapped it with an enthusiastic high-five. Only then did Marcus finally buckle up.

It didn't even take eight minutes after the car pulled away for Theo to fall completely asleep in his car seat, his head lolling forward and his mouth hanging slightly open. Marcus glanced at him through the rearview mirror, a knowing smile tugging at his lips before he turned his attention back to the road.

"Thanks for taking him while I finished up a few things at the office," he said as they stopped at a red light. "I know it was last minute."

You looked at him as though he'd just said something deeply offensive and simply shook your head.

"Oh, stop it. You know I adore the little guy. I always go with him to his appointments. And I'll always help you, too. That's what siblings are for, isn't it?"

"That and annoying each other."

"Annoying each other, definitely."

"Your specialty."

You nodded without a trace of shame, making him laugh.

The car started moving again, and Marcus continued, his voice slipping into that suspiciously casual tone that immediately put you on alert.

"So... how's Dr. Hot Stuff doing?" he asked.

"Oh, don't start." You lifted a hand to cut him off.

His grin only grew wider.

"Wasn't that his name?"

Your eyes drifted toward the ceiling, pretending you couldn't hear him.

"What was his name again?"

Idiot.

Complete idiot.

"You know his name."

"Do I?"

Your fingers came up to your forehead, as though measuring just how much of this you actually wanted to confess. Finally, with your eyes still squeezed shut, you let out a defeated sigh.

"I said, 'When's the next appointment?' Like a complete idiot." You groaned, shrinking a little more with every word as the moment replayed itself in painfully vivid detail. "I mean... everyone knows he's not the one who schedules follow-up appointments, and... oh my God. He's never going to look me in the eye again."

There was simply no way you'd actually done that.

No way.

Marcus pulled into a parking space outside the ice cream shop, wearing the kind of grimace that said he fully understood the magnitude of the situation.

"So... what did he say?" your brother asked.

Slowly, you looked over at him, your shoulders curling in even further.

"I tried to fix it. I told him I knew he wasn't the one who handled the appointments, and that I just wanted to know whether he'd have availability over the next few weeks or if we'd have to wait longer."

You paused.

"For Theo's health, you know?"

Marcus didn't even try to hold it together. His shoulders began shaking uncontrollably as he clapped a hand over his mouth in a hopeless attempt to stop himself from laughing.

"For Theo's health," he echoed solemnly.

"God, this is a disaster," you groaned, burying your face in both hands.

When Marcus finally reached over and gave your shoulder two sympathetic pats, you knew you were in far too deep for there to be any coming back from this.

"Marc?" you called through your fingers.

"Yeah?" he answered sympathetically.

"He's so handsome..."

That was the end of it. With a defeated groan, your brother climbed out of the car to finally wake Theo. He was laughing, though, because you are such an idiot.

The first time Lando saw you wasn't anything extraordinary. In fact, it was a day very much like this one. Ordinary. Just another clinic day at Niki Lauda General Hospital, somewhere in the middle of a partially booked schedule after countless other appointments.

Maybe you were wearing that burgundy sweater that somehow made your hair look even prettier. No. Not maybe. He knew for a fact that was what you were wearing.

The memory had stayed with him because you'd worn it several times since, and every single time he found himself thinking, strangely enough, that you looked even more beautiful than the time before. Not that he'd ever said so. He couldn't. Lando would never cross that line with a woman who, in every practical sense, was part of his day-to-day clinical practice. That would be unethical, wouldn't it?

None of that stopped him from finding you beautiful. Not just for the obvious reasons, either. For all the less obvious ones he could never quite find the words to name.

On one of those afternoons, he couldn't seem to get his signature right on a prescription. And you noticed. Of course you noticed. What didn't you notice, anyway?

"Everything alright over there, Dr. Lando?" you asked.

That was all it took for his brain to stop functioning. Utterly pathetic. It wasn't flirting. It wasn't a pickup line. It was just… A sentence. A sentence directed at him that had nothing to do with work. Nothing to do with Theo.

"Mm-hmm," was all he managed, the smile spreading across his face less as an involuntary reaction than as a shield.

Even now, months and months after the first time you'd walked into his office with the little boy by your side, Lando still didn't have an answer for any of it. What he did know was that most of the hospital seemed to have a fairly good idea of what was going on inside his head. And, as far as everyone was concerned, you were married to Theo's father.

No one had ever actually said it. They didn't have to. It wasn't exactly a difficult conclusion to reach. The tall, broad-shouldered man who was always impeccably dressed in a suit, wearing an easy smile, accompanied the two of you to most of Theo's appointments. Today had been one of the rare occasions you'd come on your own.

Lando had already felt bad before. The moment he realized all of that, he felt even worse. It wasn't fair. He didn't even want to be attracted to you.

During the weeks when Theo didn't have an appointment, surviving was much easier. Work settled back into its usual rhythm. He met plenty of beautiful people throughout the week and, without a doubt, more than a few single mothers who made no real effort to hide that they were flirting with him. Lando certainly wasn't an unattractive man, and some things simply couldn't be helped.

He knew perfectly well how to sidestep those situations.

But then, sooner or later… you would come back. Beautiful. Affectionate with Theo. Always so present, making his job easier as though you instinctively knew exactly what to do.

Maybe there wasn't anything particularly extraordinary about it, if he was being honest, but it felt like there was.

You behaved the way so many other mothers did, and yet... Well. Every time you came... and every time you left, this was where Lando ended up: eyes closed, slumped in one of the chairs in the staff lounge, looking for all the world as though he were meditating.

"Everything alright, mate?" Oscar asked, slipping into the staff lounge as quietly as he always did before heading straight for the fridge to grab one of the cans of zero-sugar soda he kept at work simply because he didn't like coffee or tea.

Lando seriously doubted those fizzy things did anything for him, but perhaps Oscar was just built differently. Made of whatever material was stubborn enough to survive more than fourteen hours of brain surgery without collapsing from exhaustion.

"I'm alright," Lando replied, rubbing a hand over his face as he straightened up in his chair.

He hadn't even taken off his lab coat yet. He'd been wondering whether he should take this one home to wash and wear the spare hanging in the back of his locker instead. The gift bag he'd received earlier was resting on the chair beside him, and he started to move it when Oscar walked over, but the neurosurgeon simply lifted a hand to stop him and took the empty chair next to it instead.

"How'd the surgery go?" Lando asked cautiously. Judging by the way Oscar looked, though, he figured it probably wasn't a bad question to ask.

Oscar nodded, took a sip of his soda, then set the can back down on the table.

"It went well. Delicate, but it's over. Helena's staying with the nurses tonight, and I..." He paused to yawn, covering his mouth with one hand. "...I'm going to sleep."

Lando let out a quiet laugh and folded his arms across his chest.

"That's fair. I'm glad it all went well."

Oscar answered with a quiet hum of agreement, his silent way of saying thanks. He took another sip of his soda, then tilted his head to one side, stretching his neck. It was almost as though Lando could watch his body shutting down in real time.

"Yeah... I'd better get going before something truly tragic happens," Oscar announced as he pushed himself to his feet.

Lando followed him with his eyes before standing as well, already holding out a hand.

"Alright, mate. Sleep well," he said, his voice carrying the kind of humor that was second nature among the hospital staff.

Oscar shook his hand and offered a lopsided smile. Sleep-deprived as he was, there was something about that expression that Lando had been seeing everywhere lately.

"So... I heard Theo came in today..."

Before Oscar could finish the sentence, Lando was already pushing him toward the door.

Oscar laughed.

"Alright, alright! I'm going."

An entire day passed after that, and it was a busy one. Busy enough that Lando didn't have a single moment to let outside thoughts distract him from his work.

He saw thirteen patients in total, and every appointment went smoothly. His fourteenth patient, however… That one came as a genuine surprise. Lando knew something was wrong the moment young Alice walked into his office. She looked pale, exhausted, and distinctly unwell. Her mother explained that she'd been like that for the past two days and that nothing they'd tried at home had made any difference.

Lando examined her, then arranged for further imaging. When the results came back later that afternoon… Yeah. This wasn't good.

Alice was transferred to the Emergency Department, where the pediatric surgery team was called in to assess her. By the end of the afternoon, she had been taken into surgery.

It was late at night, and Lando was still there, sitting outside the operating theatre with Alice's mother, who refused to leave or get any sleep. Alice's stepfather was there as well, still wearing the clothes he'd rushed over in straight from work.

It wasn't a particularly complex operation. It wouldn't take more than a few hours. The preparation had taken longer than the procedure itself. But every surgery left parents anxious. Lando knew that.

He was anxious too.

It was four o'clock in the morning by the time he finally got home.

Alice was alright.

The surgery had been a success. She would spend just one night under observation before going home to finish her recovery with the proper medication and care. It was remarkable that, despite everything, she already looked so much better than she had before going into surgery.

The magic of medicine.

It was all rather wonderful, but Lando barely had time to think about it. Still wearing the clothes he'd spent the day in, he collapsed onto his bed and fell asleep almost instantly.

This wasn't going to be easy. You knew that much. Still, bringing Mr. Whiskers, the stuffed cat Theo had received from his grandma for his last birthday, had turned out to be a good idea. Now, in the phlebotomy room, he was curled up on the chair, clutching the little plush toy as though it could make everything better and help the whole ordeal end a little faster.

It broke your heart to see him like that, especially with the tiny pout on his face that did nothing to hide just how upset he was. Theo was such a sweet little boy that, for him to dislike something this much, it really had to be awful.

"Hey..." you said softly, gently nudging his arm. Theo looked up at you with those frightened eyes that would one day melt your heart. "It'll be over before you know it, I promise. Then we'll go to the little playground you like here at the hospital, remember?"

He shook his head before stretching forward to bury himself against your chest.

"For as long as I want?"

You nodded, wrapping an arm around him.

"For as long as you want."

From across the room, the nurse called his name. Theo shifted uneasily on the chair, almost as though he were hoping you hadn't heard, but you stood anyway, gently taking his hand until both his little feet were back on the floor.

"I'll hold your hand, and Mr. Whiskers will too, alright?"

With a small, miserable whimper, he nodded.

Alright, Theo might not have been quite as cooperative as everyone had hoped. He hid behind the trolley with the medical supplies, cried quite a bit, and only settled down once you picked him up and sat with him in the chair. Even so, the moment the needle did its dreadful job, his whole little body tensed, and he cried louder than you'd ever heard before.

In the end, though, everything went well enough because Nurse Doriane was truly wonderful at what she did. She gave him a toy from the Courage Box, a bottle of bubbles, and even a certificate saying he'd done a perfect job. Sniffling, his face still bright red from crying, he accepted them, but he didn't linger for long. Before you even had a chance to finish signing the paperwork, he was already tugging you away from the room.

"Can I... sniff... take my bubbles to the playground?" Theo asked as the two of you stepped outside, already catching sight of the brightly coloured play equipment near the patient waiting area.

For a brief moment, you considered it. There were far too many ways that could go wrong, and even though Theo was still a little shaken, you weren't particularly eager to clean soapy water off the rubber flooring. Clearing your throat, you took the bottle from his hands and slipped it into your bag.

"How about this? You take Mr. Whiskers to the playground, and I'll look after your bubbles. Once we get to your house, you can blow as many as you want, alright? I promise they'll be nice and safe in here," you said, tapping the bag hanging from your shoulder.

He was clearly not thrilled with the arrangement, you could tell, but he accepted it anyway. He nodded, took your hand, pressed a little kiss to it, and then ran off towards the playground, where the play specialists were watching over the children.

You watched him go with a small smile on your face.

"Was today blood test day?" a voice asked from somewhere nearby.

You were so focused on whatever Theo was doing that the answer came automatically.

"Oh, yeah. I booked it for today and—"

The moment you turned around and found yourself face to face with Dr. Norris, you nearly jumped out of your skin. It took every bit of self-control not to let out a startled yelp.

"Oh my God."

A quiet laugh escaped him, landing squarely in your chest like a bullet.

"I know I look terrible, but I didn't think it was that bad," he said, slipping one hand into the pocket of his white coat.

Only then did you really take him in. Dark circles sat beneath his eyes, his hair was a little more tousled than usual, and his shoulders were subtly tense, as though he couldn't quite afford to relax. In his other hand, he was holding a mug that looked very, very warm...

"Where did you get that?" you asked, glancing around in search of a coffee machine.

"Oh, this?" Lando asked, glancing down at the mug as though he were seeing it for the first time. "I got it from the staff break room. I can grab you one too, if you'd like. It's much better than the coffee from the vending machines."

For the briefest moment, your mind drifted back to the conversation you'd had with your brother in the car two days ago. Your hands fidgeted together because, apparently, you still had no idea how to behave around this man, but... well. He was offering...

"The vending machines have cappuccino, don't they?" you asked.

Lando gave a small shrug, the kind that seemed to say, they do.

"That, I'm afraid, I can't offer you from the doctors' lounge. We survive on coffee."

"But I kind of want coffee. Not cappuccino."

Another laugh slipped out, quieter this time, barely more than a soft breath through his nose.

"Then I'll grab you a coffee.”

A broad smile spread across his face as he headed off to get the coffee. It softened the exhaustion etched into his features and somehow made him feel a little more willing to keep going. Lando had never walked to the staff break room quite so happily, especially not after a night that had left him running on barely three hours of sleep.

Unhurriedly, he picked up a paper cup and filled it with coffee from the machine. Only then did it occur to him that he'd forgotten to ask whether you took it with sugar or not. To solve that particular problem, he grabbed one of the small paper bags from the counter and tucked in three packets of sugar, three packets of sucralose, and a couple of plastic stirrers.

The walk back was just as cheerful. He found himself quietly humming a tune he couldn't quite place, paying no mind to the curious glances from the staff as he made his way through the corridors.

There you were, waiting for him while taking pictures of Theo playing on the playground. The little boy was pulling funny faces and striking dramatic poses for the camera as you laughed and encouraged him to come up with even more. Before long, he grew tired of the game and happily wandered back to the slide.

Lando took a step forward. Just one...

From the hospital's main entrance, someone else took a step too. Then another. Towards you. You stood the moment you saw him, greeting the man with a soft smile and a warm hug before pointing over to Theo. Oh, no. The smile faded from Lando's face almost as quickly as it had appeared. He looked down at the coffee, then at the little paper bag, swallowing hard.

Oh, no. What was he doing?

For a moment, he considered turning around and walking away without giving you any of it. He had no right. He didn't want to be a part of... this. Especially not after...

But then you spotted him. You waved.

And there was nothing left for him to do except put on the polite smile he always wore and walk over with everything he'd brought.

"Here's your coffee," he said, holding out the paper cup as he reached you. Then he offered you the little bag as well. "I wasn't sure whether you preferred sugar or sweetener, so I packed both. You can... you can have it however you like.”

Your eyes widened, and the look of surprise on your face was so genuine that Lando couldn't quite hold back the small laugh that slipped out, despite everything.

"You really didn't have to do all this. Oh, thank you so much. Today's been a hard day," you said softly as you sat down, reaching into the little bag for a packet of sugar. "I was just telling Marcus... Theo didn't exactly behave himself."

Marcus. Huh.

Lando shifted slightly to get a better look at the man and greeted him with a polite nod, which was returned with a small wave.

"Yeah, he doesn't usually handle this sort of thing very well," Marcus said, rubbing the back of his neck before turning to you with effortless familiarity. "Remember when he had to get his last round of vaccines? He cried all the way home. That's the only time he cries like that."

You let out that same laugh of yours, and Lando quietly exhaled. His gaze drifted from you to Marcus, then over to Theo playing behind the fenced-in playground.

Alright.

"Well, I'd better leave you to it. I've got an emergency to get back to. But I hope I'll see you all again at Theo's follow-up, alright?" he said, his tone polite and composed.

"Thank you. Really, thank you so much. It's delicious," you said, lifting the paper cup with a smile. "See you at the follow-up, Dr. Norris."

Once again, he answered with a nod before turning his back on the three of you, still smiling together. Lando didn't have an emergency waiting for him anywhere.

That afternoon, Lando had no appointments. It was one of his support shifts, meaning he simply had to stay available in case another department needed an extra pair of hands. No one did, so all he had to do was wait until it was time to clock out. On any other day, it would have been boring. Today, it was unbearable. Which was why, four hours after you'd left, Oscar returned to the staff lounge only to find Lando curled up on the sofa, fast asleep like a child.

He understood that better than most people in the world. Professional exhaustion.

Except it wasn't just professional exhaustion: Lando was hiding.

People came and went from the staff lounge, grabbing their things, eating, drinking, chatting for a while, and leaving again. Through it all, Lando remained exactly where he was, in exactly the same position.

He slept for so long that he never even heard his alarm go off. It was Max who finally pushed his chair back from the table where he'd been eating dinner, walked over, silenced the alarm, and gave Lando's shoulder a gentle nudge.

"Mate... your shift's over," he murmured, waking him as gently as he could.

He stirred awake, thanked Max, gathered the things he'd left in his locker, said goodbye to the few colleagues still around, and headed home.

By the time he got there, though, he had enough energy for only two things: a shower and changing into whatever pair of shorts he could find before climbing straight back into bed.

Lando slept until the following morning. It was his day off.

Determined not to spend the day becoming part of the furniture, Lando was now standing outside a small bakery, holding a paper bag filled with mini muffins. Every now and then, customers came and went, passing by him with a friendly wave while Lando simply remained there, standing in the sun.

He was watching the other side of the street, where a group of teenagers laughed together as they made their way to school. A quiet, amused huff escaped him. Teenagers were always funny in groups.

His phone buzzed, pulling him out of his thoughts.

It was a photo from his sister on a trip to Patagonia with her latest boyfriend. He probably won't be around next week. It's temporary, and he knows that! she'd written. Lando didn't even question it anymore. He simply reacted to the photo with a heart before reading the messages their mum had sent, reminding her to be careful on the hiking trails.

Distracted, Lando barely noticed as you made your way towards him.

Deciding to walk over hadn't been nearly as simple as it sounded. You'd seen him the moment he walked in because you were already there, tucked away at one of the tables near the back of the bakery. The instant those familiar curls and easy smile appeared, you had no idea what to do with your own hands.

When he walked out with his order, you thought you'd missed your chance.

Alright. Fair enough. It happens.

You sent Marcus a message telling him Theo's doctor apparently frequented that little bakery, making sure to add that he looked adorable in his white jacket and that he really did suit white. That earned you nothing more than an eye-roll emoji, and your thoughts drifted back to the day before, when he'd brought you coffee and worried about what kind of sweetener you used.

It was difficult dealing with an attentive man, wasn't it?

By the time you stepped outside, though, you hadn't expected to find him still standing there, bathed in sunlight like some sort of revelation. So, taking advantage of the fact that the two of you were no longer at his workplace, you decided that maybe it would be a good idea to... well. You still weren't entirely sure what would be a good idea, but you'd already missed one opportunity to walk over. It almost felt as though life itself was nudging you in his direction.

So you did.

Lando turned towards you slowly, both eyebrows lifting in surprise.

"Oh... hi! Wow," he said, blinking.

A little laugh slipped from your lips, and you almost scolded yourself. Too much? Oh, don't be ridiculous. Your hand adjusted the strap of your bag on your shoulder.

"Hi!" you greeted him back, unable to hide the smile spreading across your face. "I saw you in there. I didn't get a chance to say anything — you were so quick. Do you come here often?"

Easy. One sentence at a time. That was far too much all at once. And... Do you come here often? Oh, no. No, no, no. Of all the things you could have said, that had to be the worst.

Lando looked at you with quiet amusement, turning fully to face you.

"I do, actually. I live over there." he pointed towards a tall, elegant apartment building two blocks away.

Your eyes followed the direction he was pointing.

Lando took advantage of your momentary distraction to steal what he could.

The surprise of finding you there.

The fact that you were talking to him.

The way your hair was tied up, leaving the back of your neck exposed, and your neck...

Dear God.

Lando took a slow breath and quickly looked away, fixing his gaze on his apartment building instead.

"Do you come here often?" he asked.

Your eyes settled on him again, and you nodded.

"I do. Sarah, the owner of the bakery, has been seeing my brother for... about five months?" you said, frowning as you tried to remember. Eventually, you gave a small shrug. "She's really lovely, so I come here quite often. We chat for a bit, eat nice things... you know."

Fascinating. Everything you said was fascinating. A broad smile spread across Lando's face as he nodded.

"That's nice. I'm glad you like her. That'll be good." He slipped his phone out of his pocket again, opened the family chat, and held it out for you to see. "My sister just sent me this. She says they won't be together by next week."

You stepped a little closer to look, tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear.

Lando would never admit it, but his eyes followed the movement from beginning to end before he forced himself to look back at your face, waiting for your reaction.

"Yeah... they make absolutely no sense together," you concluded. "Although... she looks just like you. She's beautiful.”

He blinked once. Then again. You... you hadn't even realized what you'd just said, had you?

Lando swallowed slowly.

Maybe he could… No. Dear God. Lando, please. Don't say anything. Don't do anything else. You need to stop doing things.

"So... how's your family?" he asked, trying to recover at least a little of his dignity. "Theo... his... his dad?"

The last question left his mouth tasting almost like poison, bitter on his tongue. This time, it was your turn to blink, though not out of confusion. It was a perfectly reasonable question.

"Oh, I haven't seen either of them today. Maybe later. But from what Marcus has told me over text, Theo's doing well," you replied with a small shrug. "He didn't cry anymore after the blood test.”

Lando nodded, slipping his phone back into his pocket.

"Yeah... he can be a little dramatic."

"A little," you agreed, scrunching your nose. "But I try not to... not to give him too hard a time about things like that, you know?"

Of course. Lando understood.

Even so, he tilted his head slightly, curiosity getting the better of him.

"Theo's already been through enough.”

Now that was new information.

Lando knew everything there was to know about Theo's medical history, yet so little about his life beyond the day-to-day. A slight frown settled on his face.

Your head tilted ever so slightly, as though asking, “You didn't know?” Your eyes dropped to the ground as you thought for a moment.

Then you bit your lip.

It wasn't exactly your favourite subject in the world. It still hurt to think about.

"Oh..." you began quietly. "Theo... Theo lost his mum when he was three.”

Lando's lips parted slightly in surprise. His fingers tightened around the paper bag of mini muffins, the crinkling paper the only thing keeping his restless hands occupied.

"I... I didn't know," he said, his voice as quiet as yours, as though speaking any louder would somehow be disrespectful.

You nodded, folded your arms, and let out a slow breath.

"No, it's alright. It's not exactly something we go around telling people, especially not when he's nearby," you explained, adjusting the strap of your bag over your shoulder once again.

"Of course..." he murmured, the information still settling somewhere unfamiliar in his mind.

When Lando looked back at you, your attention had drifted across the street, as though you were watching something that wasn't really there.

Suddenly, he felt even worse than he had before.

"They were coming back from a trip. Theo was so little, and they were playing some sort of game... The lorry didn't see them. It was..." You swallowed hard. "It was really bad.”

A long sigh slipped past your lips before you smiled at Lando again.

"Wow... I kind of killed the mood there, didn't I? I... I'm sorry," you said, trying to lighten the atmosphere before clearing your throat. Then, with one hand, you pointed gently at him. "You look much better than you did yesterday, by the way. Did you manage to get some sleep?”

Flustered, uncertain, and thoroughly confused, Lando nodded. The movement was quick and awkward, as though he were trying to return to the present just as you had.

"Yeah... I got plenty of sleep after I got home. And today's my day off, so I'm making the most of it," he said, absently tightening his grip on the paper bag still hanging from his hand.

For what Lando promised himself would be the last time, his eyes drifted back to you.

He remembered every little glance he'd stolen, the trace of your perfume that seemed to linger wherever you went, and the attentive way you listened to every word he said. He remembered the delighted expression on your face when he'd brought you that coffee, as though it had been far more than just something to keep you awake. He remembered the sweet little voices you put on whenever you pretended Theo's stuffed animals were talking to him.

It was as though you were a painting he was destined to admire, but never touch. Separated by a velvet rope.

It was alright. He could be content with that.

When your eyes met his, his shoulders finally relaxed. You kept talking, and he kept listening, grateful for the chance.

The next few days didn't pass. They dragged.

Lando felt like a shell of himself, and everyone noticed. No one ever brought it up, but someone was always finding a reason to do something that, eventually, even Lando began to pick up on.

He put on his pediatrician's smile, his mask of a man perfectly content with his life, and did the best job he could, just as he always had. But in between appointments, during breaks and the quiet moments, there was always someone talking to him about something completely ordinary or absentmindedly placing something into his hands.

Max talked to him about the match. Oscar brought lunch for the two of them, claiming he simply didn't feel like eating alone. Russell pulled him over to help with the newborns and their families, and somehow... it wasn't enough.

Gabriel didn't make his usual jokes. Instead, he asked thoughtful questions, taking advantage of Lando's experience and quietly treating him like a mentor. Lando didn't mind, nor did he complain when Oliver and Kimi wandered into Pediatrics for no apparent reason other than to distract Gabriel from his work.

Lando went home exhausted every evening and collapsed onto the sofa.

No one could figure out why Dr. Norris looked so utterly worn down. Had someone in his family died? They would have known. Was one of his patients seriously ill? He would have told them. Was he running out of clean lab coats? That had never upset anyone...

Nobody knew. Nobody knew. Not even Lando, really. All Lando wanted to do was work and sleep. Work and sleep. But… Niki Lauda General Hospital missed the soul of Lando. Where had it gone?

It was on the other side of the city, wandering through the streets while taking photographs of all the places she thought were the most beautiful.

He spent his life inside a hospital, and yet there was no cure for a man who truly believed, in the deepest part of his heart, that he was the most wretched of all — so cruel for longing for someone who was not only committed to another man, but who also kept alive the flame of a family that had lost its most important person.

Lando would never forgive himself. He was trying to forget. He had to. How was he supposed to do that?

Drinking wasn't enough. Working wasn't enough. Mindlessly swiping through dating apps and even agreeing to the blind date Franco had arranged wasn't enough either. Sleeping had already proven completely ineffective.

Nothing worked.

There was no cure for what ailed him.

It was on an otherwise ordinary morning that something rather weird happened.

Lando was in his office, finishing the last of the case notes that needed to be signed off that day, when one of the receptionists, Kelly, knocked on his door.

"Come in," Lando called without looking up, stamping a prescription before finally lifting his head. "Everything alright, Kelly?"

She nodded and handed him a sheet of paper.

"It's about Theo. His aunt stopped by to let us know that he and his dad had to leave on a last-minute trip. She asked if we could reschedule his appointment," she explained, simply doing her job. "Since she's usually the one who comes in with him, would you like to speak to her personally?"

Lando's hand froze halfway through the movement.

What did Kelly mean by "aunt"? And what was that about her always being the one who came in with Theo? She was probably mistaken. These things happened. The hospital was always busy, with patients and families passing through reception every single day. Lando nodded. Yes, it would be best to speak to the woman. Especially since there might simply have been this misunderstanding between Kelly and whoever had come in that morning. If she'd confused Theo's family with another patient's, someone would need to let her know, and perhaps he was the right person to make that judgement.

When the receptionist, came back to tell you that Dr. Norris was waiting to see you in his office, that wasn't exactly what you'd been expecting.

You'd only stopped by the hospital that morning to let the staff know that Marcus was about to leave on a trip with Sarah and Theo. When Kelly stepped away to let Dr. Norris know, you'd simply assumed she would come back with a new appointment date, not an invitation to his office.

The truth was, ever since the last time you'd run into him outside the bakery, you'd convinced yourself that nothing more would ever come of it. Despite your own small, almost insignificant attempts to get closer to him, and despite little moments like the coffee, Lando didn't seem particularly interested.

And perhaps he shouldn't be. He was your nephew's doctor, after all. You were fairly certain that was a line no doctor should ever cross, and Lando had always struck you as deeply ethical. It was, admittedly, a little humiliating to keep sending signals that would probably never be noticed. Worse still, you hated the thought of making him uncomfortable. The last thing you ever wanted was to become an inconvenience.

You went anyway.

Your shoulders were slightly hunched as you walked, offering a small wave to a friendly doctor passing by. His ID badge read Dr. Piastri, Neurosurgeon. He waved back, then raised an eyebrow when he noticed where you were headed. You had no way of knowing it, but his gaze met Dr. Verstappen's across the corridor, and the two of them exchanged a very clear, silent message. Here we go again...

Only then did you finally raise your hand and knock twice on the white door at the end of the Pediatrics corridor with your knuckles.

The handle turned. There he was, opening the door for you with a slight furrow in his brow.

"Oh... it's you!" Lando said, almost as though the sight of you had genuinely caught him by surprise. "Kelly said it was Theo's aunt. I think she got confused."

Hang on… What?

You rubbed the back of your neck before stepping into the office through the space he'd made for you.

"So... Theo's gone away?"

As you wandered around the office, your attention drifted from one thing to another.

"Oh, well... yeah. Marcus managed to plan a trip with Sarah so Theo could get to know her better, you know?"

Lando nodded. Right. A family trip.

"And... are you going too?" The question slipped out before he could stop it. Entirely unprofessional.

"Go with... them?" you repeated, a note of confusion creeping into your voice, as though the idea itself didn't make much sense.

Lando caught it. He looked you straight in the eye. His brows drew together even more, and Lando… Lando had never felt so strange in his life. So utterly confused. He rubbed at his forehead and let out a long breath.

"I'm sorry. I really am. I shouldn't be asking you this. It's your personal life, and what you do is entirely your business, but..." He lifted a hand, trying to piece together everything he thought he knew. His gaze drifted away from yours, falling to the floor. "Why would you let your husband and your son go on a trip with another woman?”

You actually took a step back, as though the question had physically thrown you off balance.

"...I'm sorry?"

Lando wanted to take it back. He wanted to erase the sentence from existence altogether. He had wandered into territory that had absolutely nothing to do with him.

Nothing at all.

He covered his face with one hand and shook his head. He didn't want to deal with any of this anymore, yet somehow, every time he opened his mouth, he only seemed to make everything worse. And he kept going.

"No, I... Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interfere in—"

He barely got the words out before you stopped him. Completely. Both hands came up between the two of you, cutting him off before he could say another word.

"Lando. Dr. Norris." You called his name, your voice gentle, touched with a kind of bewilderment that was entirely new. "I don't know what impression we've given you, or what the paperwork says, but... Marcus is my brother."

…

…

…

…

Lando's arms fell limply to his sides. His entire body seemed to lose all structure. He looked... oddly boneless.

…

…

"...Brother?" he echoed quietly, the word sounding completely unfamiliar on his tongue.

Your eyes blinked once. First because… Oh my God. He thought you and Marcus were... a couple? Then they widened. A little grimace crossed your face, one that made you look so, so much like Theo that Lando...

Laughed.

A loud, wholehearted laugh burst out of him as he leaned back, completely overcome by it.

You had never seen this version of him. Never heard that laugh before. It was loud, warm, completely unrestrained… Completely Lando.

For a moment, all you could do was stare.

"Oh... Mint," he muttered. “Mint, mint. Mint.”

Still smiling, he made his way back around to his desk, pulled a sheet of paper from one of the drawers, and clicked his pen open.

"We can reschedule Theo for next week, if that works for you," he said, the smile still seemingly etched across his face.

You blinked again.

"...You thought Marcus and I were a couple?”

Lando closed his eyes, embarrassment creeping up the back of his neck. After a moment, he cautiously opened just one of them.

"...Yes." A beat. "Could we... maybe never speak of that again?”

A smile slowly found its way onto your lips.

"Lando?" you called. He looked up at you. "Is it alright if I call you that?"

Somewhere between one flustered blink and the next, he nodded. Of course it was alright. Everything was alright. Everything was wonderful.

"Yes," he said. "You can call me that."

He set his pen down on the desk. You took a step closer. Then another.

Lando's eyes flicked briefly toward the security camera mounted in the corner of the office, and that alone made you stop, laughing like a child caught in the middle of a harmless prank.

But he wasn't about to scold you. No.

He lifted his chin ever so slightly, wearing that quietly proud expression and the small smile that offered you the briefest glimpse of something… Something for another time.

His hands searched across the desk until they found a business card. His business card. Your breath caught in your throat. You thought he was simply going to hand it to you. Instead, he turned it over and wrote something on the back.

Another number.

And beside it, in unmistakably Lando handwriting, enclosed in parentheses, were the words: (call this one instead).

"So... I wasn't crazy after all?" you asked, taking the card from his hand.

"You drove me crazy, actually," Lando replied, tilting his head to one side.

And with the slightly breathless laugh that escaped you, you knew something very good was about to happen.

"Mint?" you asked, raising an eyebrow.

He laughed.

"Mint."

A moment later, there was a knock at the door, and Kelly poked her head inside.

"Dr. Lando? Your afternoon patients are starting to arrive."

"Alright, Kelly. Thanks," he replied, never taking his eyes off you.

"I... I should probably go," you said.

Lando nodded.

"Yeah. I think so."

Your smile widened. Lowering your gaze, you slowly turned toward the door.

"Bye, Dr. Lando."

His smile only grew.

"Bye, Theo's aunt.”

PART 2

You're in the middle of an important conversation between Friedrich and Brigitte. He's in the garage after a disastrous race that ended in the very first corner. He's just climbed out of the car, pulling off his balaclava along with his helmet. Good. Brigitte walks in the exact moment he looks up, his face damp with sweat from the heat trapped beneath all the layers he'd been wearing, and his eyes are burning with all the anger and resentment he's about to unleash on the team.

The point of the scene is for Friedrich and Brigitte to argue.

He's frustrated, on edge. They aren't exactly friends, and she walks in looking as though she's about to say something meaningful, something he isn't going to hear. His temper is explosive. He hates everything and everyone, and he can't stand it when things slip out of his control.

And yet, the moment she steps through the doorway and he looks at her...

Oh, God.

You hate this.

Friedrich's expression softens. A faint smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, and he greets her with a small nod.

Like a proper gentleman.

You let your pen fall onto the desk with a loud clatter and stare at the manuscript, wondering how on earth things had gotten to this point. Maybe you needed to try a different approach...

Your hand reaches for the folder reserved for inspiration. A coworker had drawn the characters a couple of weeks ago based on the descriptions you'd given her, and, damn, she'd absolutely nailed it. You open it straight to Friedrich's page.

Yep.

That was him.

A strong nose. Light brown hair with a loose strand falling across his forehead. An imposing posture. Ice-blue eyes.

You leave the folder open on the desk where you can see it while you write and pick your pen back up.

Friedrich's face doesn't soften this time.

It hardens.

A stab of guilt washes over you for changing your original plan, but you keep writing...

He's going to walk toward Brigitte. You can feel him settling into the decision. His eyes are fixed on her, focused, intense...

Gentle.

Gentle?!

No!

And where had Friedrich's stubble gone?

He was literally right there in front of you, and with every sentence you wrote, it was as if another hair disappeared from his face...

You squeeze your eyes shut.

Apparently, Friedrich now has a kind face, brown eyes, no stubble, and absolutely no interest in picking a fight.

Not that he was looking to Brigitte for comfort, it wasn't that. He was simply... mature. You could feel it.

At this moment, Friedrich was just a good man who understood the limits between them and had no intention of dragging the girl he cared about into problems that belonged to him alone... and to the awful car they'd built for him to drive.

Maybe it was finally time to accept that your characters really did have minds of their own.

On the other side of the continent, Oscar adjusted the backpack slung over his shoulder as he stepped out of the car that had brought him home from the airport. He gave the driver a simple wave before closing the door, watching the black car disappear down the street toward a destination he had no way of guessing.

Home.

His shoulders relaxed at the sight of the elegant building standing before him, easily one of the best things he'd ever bought since first setting foot on this side of the world.

He crossed the stone pathway leading to the front door and reached for the key he'd deliberately kept in his pocket, eager to avoid wasting even a second longer before finally doing what he'd been looking forward to for quite some time.

He should've come back last night, like Lando had. It didn't matter. He was here now.

The key turned in the lock. The door opened. Oscar let out a slow breath through his nose.

The moment he stepped inside and shut the door behind him, his first instinct was to let his fangs slip free. After all these years, keeping them hidden no longer took any effort, but it was always more comfortable when they were there, just barely peeking past his lips, effortless. Natural. Oh! He slipped off his shoes too, and traded them for the thongs waiting beneath the cabinet in the entryway, exactly where he'd left them.

Still wearing his backpack, he wandered into the kitchen and set it down on the table before unzipping it. The small cooler was still inside, packed with the supplies he'd brought for the trip.

Four blood bags left.

Honestly, that was an impressive amount to have brought back. He was getting good at this.

He transferred the remaining bags into the refrigerator, keeping one in hand for a little snack as he pulled his phone from his pocket.

So many notifications.

"Has Oscar Piastri finally regained his form?

His blistering pace at COTA marked an impressive return to form for the Australian driver… etcetera, etcetera.”

It was a dull, predictable article. Oscar had read pieces just like it about himself, and about the other drivers on the grid, more times than he cared to count. Even so, it earned a small smile. Well then. Where were all the headlines saying he'd forgotten how to drive?

He dropped onto the sofa, took another sip of blood, and reached for the TV remote.

"The greatest minds of Generation Z aren't just scholars and academics. Take a look at some of the names redefining an entire generation..."

Oscar was already reaching to change the channel, his thumb hovering over the button, when a familiar name caught his attention.

"...The young author has become a phenomenon across today's biggest platforms, amassing an extraordinary following on social media and placing two consecutive novels at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List for multiple weeks."

Your face appeared on the screen. Oscar leaned forward, watching with quiet interest.

"...Sources claim that the young author isn't just interested in becoming the next breakout name in Formula One fiction, but in living out a romance of her own."

Oscar took another sip through the straw, drawing the familiar slurp that meant the bag was empty. Even so, his attention didn't waver. One eyebrow arched.

What nonsense were they talking about now?

"...The next name on our list has everything to do with that. Oscar Piastri, fresh off his victory at this weekend's United States Grand Prix in Austin, was spotted on what appeared to be a romantic outing with the bestselling author at a charming local ice cream shop... A sweet way to celebrate? The first steps toward a new romance? Or simply proof that two millionaire celebrities can be astonishingly cheap?"

...What?

Footage of the two of you at the ice cream shop filled the screen.

There he was, smiling. There you were, stuffing your mouth with that ridiculously colorful ice cream. And then there was that look he inevitably wore whenever he was paying close attention to something he found particularly interesting, the one that always made people assume he was in love.

He'd tried to change it before. He knew he was personally responsible for at least half the romantic rumors people had invented about him and Lando.

But Oscar didn't know how to look any other way.

He looked at the screen again. His small smile. You lowering your gaze to your notes… Yeah. It really did look pretty bad.

The program moved on to other names. Other celebrities. Some people Oscar didn't recognize, a few close friends, and others he'd only ever heard of in passing.

Oscar switched off the television and tossed the remote onto the sofa.

With his now-free hand, he ran his fingers through his hair, mussing it up a little, before hopping off the couch to throw the empty blood bag away properly.

"So... you want to change your character's defining traits?" Aalyiah, your literary agent, asked over the phone.

You were halfway through Tiffany's walk when you'd decided to call her. It was an urgent matter, obviously. You needed a second opinion.

"Well... it's complicated. I know the publishing house has already received the initial concept for the character, but..." you began, only for her to cut you off.

"Do you have any idea what you're asking me?" she said. "Seriously, the entire team is already working around the character profiles you submitted. I don't know if a change like this is even possible."

Your footsteps came to an abrupt stop. Tiffany noticed the leash had gone taut and glanced back at you as though wondering what on earth you were doing. She wasn't the only one.

"Aalyiah, we're talking about a publishing house. Everybody knows stories aren't set in stone," you protested, the frustration obvious in your voice. "You're trying to limit my creative freedom. I can't force a character to be someone he isn't!"

Silence settled over the call for a brief moment. Meanwhile, Tiffany wandered from one patch of grass to another, happily sniffing everything in sight.

"I think you can," Aalyiah replied at last, completely unfazed. "He's your character."

She paused before continuing.

"I know you didn't get the interview with the driver you originally wanted, but use whatever you can from the one you did get. That's your job, turn it into something magical. There's already so much work built around this idea, and it's a really good one."

Another brief pause.

"We like our hot-headed driver ...Can we count on him?”

No… Yes… No idea. There were too many answers. You knew which one Aalyiah wanted to hear. You knew which one you wanted to give. And you knew which one was actually possible.

It felt like betraying your creativity. Betraying your art. You hated that.

"I think..." you began, your voice hesitant. You took a step forward, then another, forcing yourself back into the rhythm of the walk as though the simple act of moving might somehow convince your own mind that the decision was genuine. "I think so."

Your voice had fallen so quiet you barely recognized it as your own.

"Wonderful! We'll be expecting the first chapters by Friday, all right? Kisses, sweetheart."

Just like that, she hung up before you had the chance to add anything else.

After your conversation with Aalyiah, it took you two whole days to write another word. Which was deeply concerning.

The publishing house was expecting an update by the following day, exactly as she had warned you, and all you could remember was that you'd spent the entire previous day doing just about everything except writing. Somehow, your office, your books, even your own ideas had become difficult to face. Something you needed time for.

You'd even tried walking toward your office door. It hadn't worked. The room had become practically repellent. You were convinced you were developing an allergy to it.

Still, you couldn't keep running forever.

The next morning, you got out of bed, made yourself an iced coffee, prepared waffles so elaborately decorated they looked like little works of art trying to inspire one another, and locked yourself inside your office. Your writer's block was not going to beat you.

Friedrich's character illustration had practically become a patron saint you worshipped. Even so… It wasn't until late that afternoon that the first word finally appeared.

Brigitte loved chaotic race weekends. They meant she'd have to prove herself in all sorts of different ways to earn her place on the team, but they also meant she'd have plenty of opportunities to do exactly that.

Friedrich hated chaotic race weekends. They were too difficult. Too unpredictable. He liked winning. He liked knowing he was going to.

That weekend, it was raining.

Great! You'd already written scenes that took place much later, but you'd never actually written the beginning. So this was how they were going to meet. During a rainy race weekend.

Huh.

That was interesting. No doubt about it. Thank you, Friedrich and Brigitte, for letting me know.

Your pen found its way back into your hand, though your other one drifted to the back of your neck. It was nice to know that something was finally taking shape.

It wasn't hard to tell that Brigitte was new to the environment. The team was teaching her the basics, everything that came with her position as assistant to the number-one driver, Friedrich. She hadn't actually met him yet. All she knew was that he was the greatest driver in the sport.

Was she intimidated?

Absolutely.

Your eyebrows shot up. Oh my God. This was brilliant! Brigitte was real. You leaned over your desk, suddenly energized, your pen racing across the page.

Brigitte didn't get the chance to meet Friedrich for most of the weekend. Everything was happening too quickly, and with the terrible weather conditions, the people responsible for managing what was happening on track were constantly stuck behind closed doors in endless meetings.

Then came qualifying.

Friedrich was on intermediate tires. The rain intensified. Yellow flag. Four cars were recovered from the track.

Friedrich was worried, of course. The conditions were terrible. Really, really terrible. But he thought there was still something he could do about it.

Back in the garage, Brigitte wore her headset like everyone else on the team. And that was when she heard him for the very first time.

"I'm going all in."

His race engineer, Clark, answered:

"All right. Be careful."

It was such a simple exchange. There was nothing remarkable about the words themselves. Brigitte was fascinated anyway.

Friedrich had the cleanest driving style she'd ever seen. Controlled. Precise. Fast in a way that seemed almost impossible.

He didn't take pole position that afternoon, but he came close. P2, separated by mere thousandths of a second.

"Good work, everyone. A few things to learn from today, but I think we can improve on them."

"Copy that, Friedrich. Congratulations.”

So you could still write. Wow. And the best part? You remembered every piece of criticism you'd received after your previous books, and you were fixing all of it. The garage descriptions? Your time in the paddock had genuinely helped.

You smiled. Apparently, Friedrich was salvageable after all.

You looked over at his character illustration and held your hand up in the air, offering him an imaginary high five.

"Friedrich, this is your new personal assistant. She'll be helping you around the paddock, just like we discussed in the last few meetings," Brock, the head of the support staff, said, introducing the two of you.

The driver had just finished qualifying. After a strong result, team meetings usually wrapped up a little earlier before race day, giving him a bit of time to rest.

Or, in this case... to meet his new assistant.

"Hi! I'm Brigitte!" she said brightly, holding out her hand.

Friedrich shut one eye as he pulled off his balaclava, shaking his hair free from his face.

Then... he looked up at Brigitte.

There it was. Right there. This was it. Now you were finally going to give the editor exactly what she wanted.

The moment their eyes met, Friedrich noticed the excitement in Brigitte's movements and...

Wait.

He smiled, taking her hand in his.

"Hello, Brigitte. How are you?"

Son. Of. A. Bitch. Absolute traitor.

You stared at the manuscript in complete disbelief, blinking once as your shoulders slowly slumped.

Gradually, your gaze drifted toward the little notebook you'd carried with you to Austin, the one filled with interviews, observations... and your conversations with Oscar.

The wind rushed against the little bat's face as he soared across the open countryside at full speed, flying straight toward the moon.

Oscar loved doing this, pretending he was actually going to catch the enormous natural satellite, only to realize halfway there that it was impossible, then dramatically transforming back into a person. He'd pretend he was falling... falling... falling... and, just before hitting the ground, he'd become a bat again.

That was why he loved coming home so much.

That night, he wasn't alone. Lando had come with him and was down below, attempting to build a campfire, something Oscar definitely shouldn't have encouraged. Then again, he'd already pitched both tents, so Lando had to keep himself busy somehow.

"Having fun, kid?" Norris called when he heard the sound of Oscar transforming behind him.

"Very," Oscar replied, throwing himself onto the grass with his arms spread wide. "Finished over there?"

Lando didn't answer right away. Instead, the flames leapt higher, as if answering for him. A grin spread across the Brit’s face automatically, practically saying, You underestimate me.

"And let there be fire," he declared, settling onto the rock strategically positioned to serve as a bench.

Oscar let out a laugh at his friend's expense and leaned back, folding his arms behind his head and resting one ankle over his opposite knee. Lando fished a hot dog on a skewer out of the cooler and pointed it towards the fire.

"You said you saw some report you were in today, but I didn't quite catch what it was about," Lando said, picking up the conversation they'd started in the car on the way over.

"Yeah. It was one of those lists of the most influential Gen Z people," Oscar replied.

Before he could go on, Lando cut in.

"Was I on the list?"

Without missing a beat, Oscar answered,

"If you were, I didn't stick around long enough to find out. But I was."

Lando scoffed.

"Please. That's ridiculous. You're not even Gen Z."

Oscar shrugged.

"Anyway, let me finish," he said, absent-mindedly pulling at the grass beside him. "It was on one of those gossip channels, I think. You know that writer who interviewed me?"

Lando blew on his hot dog before taking a bite.

"Your crush," he said through a mouthful of food.

Honestly, talking to Lando was like talking to a toddler.

Oscar dragged both hands down his face and let out a long sigh. That was how Lando knew he'd accomplished his mission, and the grin he'd been holding back finally appeared.

"Anyway..." Oscar said, deciding to ignore him altogether. "The photos. Someone took pictures of the two of us at the ice cream shop and sent them to one of those gossip outlets. They ended up showing them on TV."

Lando nodded, taking another bite of his hot dog.

"That happens, mate."

Oscar clicked his tongue. He knew that.

"That's all it was. End of story.”

For a moment, Lando considered what Oscar had said.

"So... how did the interview go, anyway? I don't think we've actually talked about it."

"It was interesting."

"Interesting? Seriously? Cheers, Oscar. That's incredibly helpful. I know everything there is to know about the interview now."

Oscar laughed.

"What do you want me to say? It was an interview."

"It was three interviews."

Lando didn't even realize what he'd just said. He was far too busy trying to pull the last stubborn piece of hot dog off the skewer.

Yeah.

Three interviews.

"It was... they were... interesting," Oscar admitted, looking up at the star-filled sky. "She let me read a passage from the book she's writing."

"She's a good writer. She took something that happened between us and put it on the page."

Never in his life had Oscar seen Lando frown quite so hard.

"What did she write about?"

"Something that happened in the Champions' Corridor, near the drivers' rooms. We were talking while she was looking at the portraits."

"And what did you say?"

"I told her she'd forgotten to include the hand kiss."

Lando turned to face him completely, the look of utter disbelief on his face.

"The what?"

Oscar blinked, confused.

"When I left, I kissed her hand. Just to be polite. She didn't put that in the story."

"Oscar... that's flirting."

"No, it isn't."

"It absolutely is."

Oscar gave Lando the flattest look imaginable. The very next second, he turned into a bat.

Lando nearly fell backwards.

"Fuck! Don't do that! You know I jump every time.”

The bat paid Lando no attention whatsoever, taking off once again toward his moon.

...

Alright.

Oscar knew it had been flirting.

By the time the next race weekend arrived, Oscar was just moments away from the first free practice session of the week. His race suit was tied around his waist, the fireproof layers underneath still visible, as he walked down the corridor toward his side of the garage.

He greeted one mechanic with a fist bump, then another, while the media team followed close behind with a phone, recording everything for the team's social media.

"How are we looking?" he asked Tom, leaning over the engineering desk.

The engineer let out a frustrated sigh. Hm. That couldn't be a good sign.

"Problems with the track. Free Practice is probably going to be delayed by an hour or two."

Oscar already knew something was wrong. All the drivers had been warned that the sessions might be postponed. He just hadn't expected it to actually happen.

"All right," he replied with a nod.

What else could he do? This wasn't particularly good news for him.

All right.

Oscar turned away from the garage and headed back outside. He'd already studied everything he could, taken a close look at all the updates, and there wasn't much left to do besides wait. So he wandered over to the common area. Lando was already there. Cassandra, Sophie. The whole group had gathered in one corner with the rest of the team, sharing coffee and laughs. Oscar wasn't particularly interested in staying.

He walked down the steps and lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. He wasn't looking for anyone in particular, and he didn't have anything special planned. He just wanted something to pass the time.

Gasly happened to be walking by. Spotting Oscar, he smiled and came over for a quick handshake. Oscar smiled too, always happy to see a good friend.

"Unfortunate delay," the Frenchman said, making Oscar arch an eyebrow before shaking his head in equal frustration.

"Tell me about it."

They slipped into an easy conversation, the kind that naturally happened outside the motorhomes whenever you ran into someone who understood the same world you did. Oscar was completely engaged, of course. He always was. Every now and then, he'd throw his head back with a laugh.

That was when his eyes caught something curious.

A few meters away, outside the neighboring motorhome, Max Verstappen was smiling too. He was laughing at something. He wasn't alone, it would've been absurd if he had been laughing at absolutely nothing, but that wasn't what caught Oscar's attention.

You were there. Talking to him.

Since when had you decided to come to this race? And why didn't he know?

Someone called Max from inside the motorhome. Your conversation came to an abrupt pause as both of you instinctively turned your heads toward the voice at the exact same moment.

Oscar's attention was still on Pierre. He was still reacting to the conversation. But only half of it.

Side by side, you and Max walked up the steps toward the motorhome, your conversation seemingly endless. What on earth did the two of you have so much to talk about?

Oscar looked back at Pierre and smiled at whatever story he was telling about a mix-up at the restaurant he'd gone to with Kika the night before. Interesting, Pierre.