. Ęâ âč . ĘË . Ę TOAST!
Synopsis: Landoâs least favorite repeat call becomes the one he secretly starts hoping for when the woman living in the âtoaster houseâ makes every emergency a little harder to leave.
Pairing: Firefighter!Lando Norris x Reader
Warnings: Mentions of house fires, grief, and loss of loved ones (reader mentions her grandparents who passed away).
Authorâs note: Hiiiii! This one is a little longer, but I had so much fun writing it that I could not bring myself to cut it down. I hope you enjoy reading their little moments as much as I enjoyed writing them! Also, a hug to anyone dealing with the loss of a loved one (like I am). I hope youâre being gentle with yourself and taking care of yourself. âĄ
. Ęâ âč . ĘË . Ę The problem was exactly where youâd said it was.
A section of old wiring behind the living room wall had overheated, likely from years of handling more than it was ever meant to. Lando had seen it plenty of times before. Old houses had their quirks, and sometimes those quirks turned into something that sent a fire engine racing down the road in the middle of the night.
He crouched near the wall while one of the other firefighters checked the surrounding area, making sure there wasnât any damage spreading somewhere they couldnât see. The house was quiet now, apart from the occasional creak of old wood settling and the rain tapping steadily against the windows.
You stayed nearby, watching them work.
Heâd noticed that about you over the last few calls. You never hovered close enough to get in the way, never asked a hundred questions while they were trying to figure something out, but you were always there. Curious. A little worried. Like you needed to see with your own eyes that everything was actually okay before you could relax.
âYou can sit down, you know,â he said after a while, glancing back at you.
âYouâve been standing in the same spot for ten minutes.â
You looked down at yourself, then back at him. âHave I?â
You huffed out something like a laugh and finally sank onto the arm of the sofa, mug abandoned somewhere on the side table. âForce of habit. I keep thinking if I look worried enough, the house will behave.â
âHas that worked so far?â
âYouâre literally in my living room for the fourth time. What do you think?â
Lando huffed, testing a section of exposed wire with careful fingers before nodding to himself, satisfied. âGood point.â
Oscar called something from the other room about the fuse box, and Lando answered without looking up, easy and automatic, the kind of shorthand that came from working alongside someone long enough to not need full sentences. You watched the exchange with faint curiosity.
âHave you two always worked together?â
âFour years now.â Lando reached for his kit, pulling out a roll of electrical tape. âFeels longer some days.â
âIs that good or bad?â
âDepends on the day. Ask me after this shift.â
That earned a real laugh, quiet but genuine, and something in Landoâs chest eased at the sound of it, like heâd been waiting to hear it since he walked in.
He worked in silence for a few minutes after that, aware in the kind of way he didnât examine too closely of exactly where you were sitting, exactly how the mug had gone cold in your hands, exactly how the rain outside had softened into something gentler than before.
âThere,â he said eventually, taping off the last section. âThat should hold till the electrician can come take a proper look tomorrow. No more buzzing, no more flickering.â
âNo more fire trucks at midnight?â
âCanât promise that. This house seems to have something against me.â
You smiled down at your hands, and when you looked up, something had softened in your expression, more than politeness, less than anything youâd say out loud yet. âThank you. Actually. Not just for tonight, for not making me feel like an idiot every time I call.â
Lando straightened, meeting your eyes properly for the first time all night. âYouâre not an idiot. Old wiringâs old wiring. Not your fault.â
âStill. You didnât have to be so,â you gestured vaguely, searching for the word. âNice about it.â
âWould you have preferred I wasnât?â
âNo,â you admitted, and the honesty of it caught you both off guard. âNo, I really wouldnât have.â
The quiet that followed wasnât uncomfortable. If anything, it stretched a beat too long, charged with something neither of you moved to name.
Then Oscar appeared in the doorway, took one look at the two of you, and grinned like Christmas had come early. âAm I interrupting something?â
âI didnât say anything.â
âI was going to say,â Oscar said, entirely too pleased with himself, âthat for a man who âfinished up two minutes ago,â youâre taking your sweet time saying goodbye.â
Lando didnât answer, mostly because there wasnât a version of the sentence that didnât make it worse. He climbed into the truck instead, staring straight ahead while Oscar settled into the seat beside him, still grinning like this was the best part of his week.
The engine pulled away from the curb, rain streaking sideways across the windscreen. Oscar let the silence sit for exactly as long as it took to be unbearable.
âYou didnât even ask her name tonight,â he said, far too casually for how pointed it was.
Landoâs jaw ticked. âI know her name.â
Lando didnât answer that either, and this time the silence said plenty on its own.
The fifth call came almost two weeks later, and this time there was real smoke (not much, just enough to blacken the wall behind the stove where a spark from the same tired wiring had caught the edge of a dish towel someone had left too close). By the time Engine 81 arrived, youâd already smothered it with a lid, and you met them at the door looking more furious at the house than afraid.
âIt tried to kill my kitchen towel,â you said, before anyone could ask. âIâm considering pressing charges.â
âAgainst the house?â Lando asked.
âAgainst whoever wired it in 1974 and called it a day.â
Captain Zak Brown, hanging back near the truck, caught Landoâs expression before he had a chance to arrange it into something more professional, and filed it away with the quiet satisfaction of a man who didnât miss much.
By the sixth call (a breaker that blew hard enough to spark visibly through the panel) Lando had stopped pretending to himself that this was just part of the job. Heâd catch himself at the station, hosing down the truck or restocking the medical kit, wondering what you were doing. Whether the electrician had ever actually come by. Whether youâd started keeping the fire extinguisher somewhere more accessible like heâd suggested, half-joking, the last time.
He learned your last name almost by accident, glancing at the incident report Oscar filled out at the scene. He learned you were in your final year at university when you mentioned, offhand, that youâd be pulling an all-nighter for a deadline the same night the smoke detector had gone off for the fourth time that month (âbrilliant timing, as alwaysâ). He learned you lived alone when Oscar asked, casually, if there was anyone else in the house they should account for, and you said no, just you, like it was nothing.
He learned about the tea because you always had a mug of it, no matter the hour, no matter how bad the night had been. He learned about the records because he spotted the shelf of them by the window on the seventh call, and made the mistake of asking, and got a twenty-minute answer he hadnât expected and hadnât minded in the slightest.
Back at the station, it became a running joke he could feel building momentum he had no way to stop.
âChertsey Road again?â Zak would say, deadpan, scanning the call sheet, and somehow always find a reason to look directly at Lando when he said it.
âItâs not funny,â Lando said, more than once, to increasingly less effect each time.
âItâs a little funny,â Oscar said, mimicking Landoâs own words back at him with visible glee.
âThe toaster house has a crush on him,â someone from B shift said, one afternoon, and Zak didnât even bother denying it, just grinned into his coffee.
âI think,â Zak said, âthat Lando here has a crush on the toaster house.â
âI have a crush on nothing,â Lando said. âItâs faulty wiring. Itâs a coincidence.â
âSeven coincidences,â Oscar pointed out.
âOld houses have old wiring.â
âYou know her records collection alphabetically.â
Lando did not have a response to that one, mostly because it was true, and everyone at the table knew it, and the collective silence that followed was somehow louder than if theyâd all laughed at once.
He didnât mind it, not really. Not the way he minded most things people teased him about. He just didnât have a good answer for why a house two miles off his usual route had started to feel like a place he looked forward to being called to, or why heâd started noticing things like the exact shade the sky turned right before a call came in, the particular creak of your front step, the way you said his name like youâd been testing it out before you said it, that had nothing to do with wiring at all.
The eighth call, he told you, without quite meaning to, that you were clever for spotting the burning smell before the alarm even went off.
âSmart girl,â he said, easy, the way he mightâve said it to anyone.
You went quiet for a second too long, something flickering across your face that you didnât quite manage to hide, and Lando, filing that reaction away the same way Zak filed away everything, decided, privately, that he liked it far too much.
The ninth call started with a smell. Faint, electrical, the kind that made you second-guess yourself for a full ten minutes before you finally gave in and dialed. By the time Engine 81 arrived, youâd already gone through the house twice, sniffing at outlets like a woman losing her mind, and still couldnât pin down where it was coming from.
âI swear itâs not nothing,â you said, meeting them at the door, arms crossed like you were bracing for someone to tell you it was.
âDidnât say it was,â Lando said, already stepping past you into the entryway.
It took them the better part of twenty minutes to trace it, an outlet behind the bookshelf, warm to the touch, wiring beginning to scorch just under the surface without ever quite catching. Nothing dramatic. But close enough that if you hadnât trusted your own nose, it might have gone very differently by morning.
âGood instincts,â Lando said, once it was capped off and safe. âMost people wouldâve talked themselves out of calling.â
It was quiet after that, the kind of quiet that came from adrenaline draining out of a room once the danger had actually passed, and it left enough breathing room for the question that had apparently been sitting in the back of Landoâs mind for weeks.
He asked it while packing up the kit, careful to keep his tone light, like it was just curiosity and nothing more. âCan I ask you something?â
âDepends what it is.â
âWhy do you still live here? House tries to kill itself every other week. Youâre clever enough to know a lost cause when you see one.â He said it with half a smile, testing the ground before he put his full weight on it.
You didnât answer right away. You looked toward the entryway light instead, now steady, like the house had decided to behave for the moment. âItâs not really about the wiring.â
Lando waited. Heâd learned, over the last few calls, that you talked more freely when he didnât fill the silence for you.
âMy grandparents raised me,â you said eventually. âSince I was seven. This was their house.â A small, humorless breath escaped you. âThey passed last year. Four months apart, almost to the day. My grandad first, then my nan. I think she just didnât know how to be here without him.â
Landoâs hands had gone still on the kit. âIâm sorry.â
âEveryone says that.â You said it without any bite to it, just tired honesty. âItâs fine. Itâs just, they left me the house. And I know itâs falling apart, and I know the wiringâs a nightmare, and I know a sensible person would sell up and let someone else deal with it. But itâs theirs. Itâs the only thing that still feels like them, some days.â You glanced at him, like you were bracing for whatever came next, pity, or the kind of sympathy that made grief feel like something to be fixed.
He didnât offer any of that. âSo you keep calling us instead of moving out.â
Something in your shoulders loosened, grateful for the shift in tone. âEfficient, I know.â
âI mean, at this rate weâre basically on a first-name basis with your fuse box.â
That got the laugh heâd been angling for, small but real, and it settled something in his chest he hadnât realized had gone tight. âYou could just say you donât think I should sell.â
âI didnât say that.â
âYou didnât have to.â
Lando didnât argue the point. He just zipped the kit shut and let the quiet stretch, comfortable this time, while outside Oscar leaned against the truck pretending very hard not to be watching the two of you through the open door.
Oscar didnât let it go. Of course he didnât.
âSo,â he said, the next morning, far too pleased with himself as he leaned against the locker beside Landoâs. âYou gonna ask for her number, or are we doing this the hard way where you just keep finding excuses to drive past Chertsey Road on your days off?â
âI donât drive past on my days off.â
âYou drove past on Tuesday.â
âI was getting coffee.â
âThe coffee place is in the opposite direction.â
Lando didnât have an answer for that, which Oscar seemed to take as its own kind of victory, grinning the rest of the way to the truck bay. It became the theme of the week, Oscar finding new and increasingly unsubtle ways to bring it up, Zak occasionally chiming in with a comment about wedding invitations, someone from B shift leaving a joke Valentineâs card taped to Landoâs locker with your future toaster house wife scrawled inside it in Oscarâs handwriting.
Lando let most of it roll off him. He was used to being teased, it came with the territory of working alongside people who spent entire shifts crammed into a truck together with nothing to do but wind each other up.
But underneath the teasing, quieter, was the part he didnât say out loud to any of them, that he kept thinking about the way youâd talked about your grandparents. The four months between them. The way youâd braced for pity and gotten none, like you werenât used to people just letting you finish a sentence about grief without trying to fix it. He thought about the house differently now, too. Not as a nuisance that kept dragging his engine across town at odd hours, but as something you were holding onto with both hands because it was the last place that still felt like the people who raised you.
He thought, more than once, that he should ask for your number. He thought about it enough that Oscarâs teasing had started to feel less like a joke and more like a countdown.
He was still thinking about it four days later when the call came in.
Structure fire. 4 Chertsey Road.
Not your voice on the line. A neighborâs, panicked, breathless, saying theyâd seen flames in the upstairs window and they didnât know if anyone was inside.
Lando was moving before dispatch finished the sentence.
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