#relationship study

"I told you to rent the SUV."

“And I said, we don’t need one!” Lando protested, his voice cracking slightly as he gestured wildly at the frosted window.

“Clearly, we do because your dysfunctional car drifted into a pine tree that is now blocking the very exit we need. Lando, we are fucking stuck here."

You stood by the window of the cabin, arms crossed, staring out at the disaster in the driveway. The McLaren Artura—a vehicle worth more than most houses and designed exclusively for dry asphalt—was buried up to its wheel arches in a Finnish snowdrift and a huge pine tree just mocking both of you. It looked ridiculous.

You stared at the car, a bitter laugh bubbling in your chest. It was so typical. Lando Norris: the boy who lives life like a game. He never planned for the bad weather. He never planned for the hard days. He just assumed everything would work out if he went fast enough.

That was exactly why you were leaving him. You were tired of being the passenger in a life that was moving too fast to actually be lived.

Inside, the air was already turning stale and cold. The "smart heating system" Lando had insisted on installing two years ago was currently flashing a red error code that probably meant Game Over in Finnish, and the WiFi router was dead.

Lando was pacing the length of the living room rug. He was wearing a bright neon green Quadrant beanie that clashed violently with the rustic timber walls, looking less like a Formula 1 driver and more like a glow stick experiencing an existential crisis.

"My stream," he muttered, tapping his phone screen aggressively. "I was supposed to be live in a few hours. The chat is going to think I died."

"Priorities, Lando," you sighed, turning away from the window to face the room. "We are trapped in a blizzard with no heat, no internet, and..." You gestured to the coffee table.

There, the reason why you both are here in the first place, sitting in the center of the room like a radioactive device, was the thick manila envelope. The divorce papers.

Lando’s eyes flicked to the envelope, then immediately away, bouncing to the ceiling, the floor, the window—anywhere but the evidence of your failing marriage. He pulled his beanie down lower. "I’m going to check the fuse box again."

"You don't know what a fuse box looks like.”

“I can be an engineer if I wanted to!" he yelled over his shoulder, fleeing into the kitchen.

—————————

Two hours later, the engineering attempt had failed, and the silence was louder than the wind howling outside. You were both huddled on opposite ends of the oversized leather sofa, wrapped in whatever blankets you could find.

Since talking about why you were divorcing was too painful, and talking about the weather was too depressing, you had resorted to arguing about the assets, specifically the things in the last house that you were unable to sell. It was petty, it was stupid, and it was the only thing keeping you from crying.

"I don't want the deer," Lando said, pointing a gloved hand at the terrifying taxidermy head mounted above the fireplace. "It looks like it’s judging me… kind of reminds me of you, actually.”

"Well, I don't want it!" you snapped, pulling your blanket tighter. "You bought it! You said it gave the place 'scandi-vibes'!"

"I was drunk! That shouldn't be legally binding!"

You looked at the deer, and a memory hit you so hard it nearly knocked the wind out of you. You remembered that day. It was two years ago, during the winter break. You were stumbling through the Helsinki Christmas market, Lando laughing so hard his nose was bright red, holding that stupid deer head like a trophy. He had kissed you right there in the snow, promising that this cabin would be your escape—a place where cameras couldn't follow.

Now, the cabin was just another asset to liquidate, and the deer was just a dusty witness to the end.

He huffed, sinking lower into his hoodie. He looked ridiculous and looked exhausted. But also, annoyingly, he looked cold. He hadn't brought a proper coat because Lando lived life on the edge, and now he has to suffer through it, and clearly, you don’t give a fuck if he freezes for the next 48 hours. His teeth were chattering, a soft click-click-click sound that was chipping away at your resolve.

Don't do it, you told yourself. Do not offer him your scarf. He is a grown man. He is a millionaire. He can buy a scarf factory. But god, he looks like a shivering puppy.

"What about the Nespresso machine?" you asked, trying to distract yourself from the urge to choke him with your scarf.

"You take it," he said quickly.

"But you love that machine. You named it 'Brew-is Hamilton'."

"Yeah, well," he mumbled, picking at a loose thread on the sofa cushion, refusing to meet your eyes. "I don't know how to use the milk frother properly. You were the one who made the good foam. 

"It’s useless to me. It doesn't taste right if... if you don't make the foam."

The next blow. He was basically saying, It’s useless to me without you. This house is just bringing up past memories that you would like buried with the snow.

You looked away, swallowing the lump in your throat. "Fine. I take the machine.”

—————————

Night fell, and the temperature plummeted. The generator gave a final, dying wheeze and cut out, plunging the cabin into darkness save for the dying embers in the fireplace.

"Dinner," you announced, trying to keep your voice steady. You rummaged through the pantry with your phone flashlight. It was a grim selection of non-perishables left over from your last visit. "Okay. We have pickled beets, a jar of sardines... or plain crackers."

"I am not eating a fish from a jar," Lando said from the floor, where he had moved to be closer to the fire. "That is a crime against humanity. That is worse than Oscar’s dry sense of humor."

"It’s that or starvation, Norris."

“Fine…Crackers, please.”

You joined him on the rug, the only warm spot left in the house. You sat shoulder-to-shoulder, not touching, sharing the box of dry crackers and the bottle of expensive red wine that was supposed to be for the 'Closing Sale' toast.

You took a sip, trying to stop your own shivering. The cold was seeping through your socks, biting at your toes. You shifted your legs, tucking them under you, but it didn't help.

Lando paused mid-chew. He didn't turn his head, but his gaze dropped to your socks, tracking the subtle, involuntary tremor of your knees. He knew that fidget. He knew exactly at what temperature you stopped functioning. Without a word, without even looking up from the cracker he was inspecting, Lando reached out.

His hand clamped around your ankle. He tugged your legs straight, then lifted your feet and tucked them securely under his thighs, sandwiching them between the warmth of his legs and the rug.

You froze.

It was muscle memory. A habit from three years of marriage. Your feet were cold; he warmed them. It was a reflex attested through a shared life you once both knew.

You looked down at his hand resting on your shin. The gold wedding band was gone; he’d taken it off for the legal proceedings, but the skin on his ring finger was still pale, a stark of white against his tan. A ghost of the promise he claimed he couldn't keep.

He chewed his cracker, and he paused. The realization hit him a second later that you.

He went rigid, his hand hovering over your shin. But he didn't let go, and you didn't pull away, either. The heat from his legs was seeping into your frozen toes, a painful, wonderful reminder of the intimacy you were throwing away.

"Jesus," he hissed, his hands tightening around your ankles to generate more friction. "Are you actually part of the undead, now? "

"Rich," you mumbled, eyeing the sad, half-eaten cracker in his other hand. "Coming from the man trying to survive a blizzard on a dry biscuit."

But neither of you moved. The air between you was charged, heavy with the scent of woodsmoke and the vanilla perfume you hadn't changed in years.

The fire popped, a loud crack that broke the trance. You looked at the coffee table. The manila envelope was barely visible in the firelight, but its presence felt heavy, suffocating.

"Just sign it, Lando," you said, your voice trembling. You pulled your feet out from under him. The loss of warmth was immediate and brutal. "The pen is right there. It’s been six months of you dodging the lawyers. Just finish it."

Lando flinched. He pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them. The neon beanie slipped back, revealing messy curls. The mask of the "Cool F1 Driver," the streamer, and the joker dropped completely. He just looked like a boy who was lost.

"I can't," he said quietly.

"Why?" You grabbed the envelope and tossed it toward him. It landed on the rug with a soft slap. "It’s just paper, Norris. You drive at 200 miles per hour, but you can't hold a pen?"

"I opened it, okay! The papers you sent me the first time… I held it over and over again!" he shouted suddenly, his voice cracking, eyes flashing with sudden, wet anger. "I had the pen in my hand! I sat there for hours!"

"Then why didn't you?"

He looked at you, his eyes swimming with tears, his chest heaving.

"Because it felt like signing your name out of my life," he choked out. "Once I put the ink on the paper, I can't undo it. I can fix a bad lap. I can apologize to the team. I can fix a crash… But, I can’t fix this."

He wiped his face aggressively with his sleeve, sniffing loudly.

"I didn't want this," he whispered, the fight draining out of him. "I didn't know how to carry the weight of the title and the weight of your heart at the same time, so I dropped you. I dropped us. I thought if I focused on the car, you’d still be there when I got out, and fuck, Y/N, I was wrong.” He stepped closer, hands twitching as if he wanted to reach for you but was terrified to touch.  “I let you slip through my fingers, lap by lap, race by race. I was so obsessed with the car that I didn't see I was driving our marriage off a cliff. And the worst part? You stayed. You sat in the stands and cheered for me while I was letting you rot in silence. I want to get on my knees and beg you to start over, to tell you I’ll change—but how can I ask you to forgive a man who watched you drown for a year and did nothing but smile for the cameras?" He looked at you dead in the eyes now. “I’m sorry, Y/N, for everything I've done to us. But believe me when I say, Fuck the championship. Fuck the legacy. It’s all just noise. I thought if I won, I’d be enough for you, but all I did was ensure I’ll never be enough again. I let you down in the worst way possible. I left you alone when I was right there beside you. I’d give it back. I swear to God, I’d give every point, every podium, every second of it back if it meant you wouldn't look at me with those dead eyes. Please... just tell me it isn't too late."

The silence that followed his confession was louder than any cheering crowds that had drowned you out during your entire marriage.

Fuck the championship.

Three words. Three words that would have saved you six months ago. If he had said them when you were crying on the bathroom floor in Monaco, or when you were staring at the ceiling in an empty hotel room in Vegas, you would have stayed. You would have fought.

But now? Those words just felt like a eulogy.

You looked at him. The desperation in his eyes was raw and terrifyingly real. This wasn't Lando the Superstar; this was your Lando, stripped down to the bone. He was offering to burn down his empire just to keep you. God, it hurt. It hurt because you believed him. You knew he meant it. He would give every trophy back.

But he couldn't give back the time. He couldn't undo the loneliness.

But the love? The love was always right there between the two of you, terrified and freezing. It hadn't left. That was the cruelest joke of all. You didn't want to leave him because you stopped loving him; you were leaving him because loving him had started to kill you.

But looking at him now, shattered and breathless, the horrific truth finally hit you: He hadn't neglected you because he didn't care. He had neglected you because he thought he had to be a god to be worthy of you.

He was just a boy who had convinced himself that the only way to keep you was to be the best in the world. He had driven himself into the ground, chased every point and every win, not for his ego, but because he was terrified that if he was just Lando, he wouldn't be enough. He had broken your heart trying to protect it with trophies and glory when all you ever wanted was him.

If you walked away now, you weren't just leaving a bad marriage. You were leaving a man who had finally woken up. You were pulling the trigger right when he was ready to lay down his armor.

Is asking for a divorce really the right call?

You made a choice.

You reached over and picked up the thick manila envelope.

Lando flinched, squeezing his eyes shut, turning his head away as if expecting you to force the pen into his hand.

Riiiiiiiiip.

The sound was tearing and loud in the quiet cabin.

Lando’s head snapped up. He stared, mouth slightly open, as you tore the document down the middle, then stacked the halves and tore them again.

"My lawyer is going to kill me," he whispered, staring at the confetti in your hands. "That was the original copy."

"Let him sue us," you said, your voice trembling but firm. You tossed the shredded paper onto the floor. "We’re snowed in. We have at least twenty-four hours before a tow truck can get here. Maybe forty-eight."

You crawled across the small space on the rug and he followed you. You didn't kiss him. It was too soon for that. But he sat next to you, shoulder to shoulder, pressing your side against his.

"We don't sign today," you said softly. "We talk about us, about the schedules, about everything.”

Lando let out a shaky breath, a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob. He leaned his head sideways until it rested heavily on your shoulder. His hand found yours in the dark, his fingers tangling with yours, holding on tight.

"Okay," he murmured, the tension finally leaving his body. "We talk."

He paused, sniffing loudly, rubbing his thumb over your knuckles.

"But can we also talk about getting better snacks for this cabin? Because if we get back together, I am banning the sardines."

You let out a wet laugh, leaning your head on top of his neon beanie. “Deal."

—————————

The next morning, the sun rose over a brilliantly white, frozen landscape. The Finnish tow truck driver arrived at 9 AM, shaking his head as he winched the flashy McLaren out of the snowdrift. He walked up to the cabin to get a signature, knocking loudly on the thick timber door.

Nobody answered.

Inside, the fire had long burned out, but the room was warm. Buried under the single faux-fur throw, two figures slept tangled together, limbs knotted in a desperate seek for warmth, surrounded by the torn remnants of a divorce decree scattered like snow. They didn't hear the knock. They were too busy making up for lost time.

He had panicked. Any semblance of an association with the police would have reflected badly on him, especially since his induction to Crown was still fairly recent at the time.

Allowing the man to blab would've posed a significant threat, not only to Harrison's goals, but his own life included, for who's to say Crown wouldn't have his head as well for harboring ulterior motives in joining the Queen's Cursed forces?

Admittedly, his father's memory being invoked also made something ugly and heated rise in his chest. The people whom he once looked up to as his father's colleagues were little more than treacherous snakes in Harrison's eyes now.

They had shaken his hand and offered only false sympathies to him and his mother on the day of the funeral, all while hiding the fact that Marco Gray's death was a casualty borne from someone else's political machinations.

What right did they have to still speak of him as if they didn’t facilitate the murder of one of their own?

Smoke plumed from his pistol as Harrison held his breath. He didn’t trust any part of his visage to not give away his discomposure. With his gaze fixed on the corpse, he asked, tentatively, if Liam could do him the courtesy of pretending this… first day mishap never happened.

He did not expect Liam, uncharacteristically subdued, to agree so readily to his request. Even more to his surprise, Liam echoed Harrison’s own words of consideration back at him. 

“It’s like you said, right? We’re colleagues. The only things we need to know are things like when to jump into the fray and how our abilities work.”

An earlier kindness reciprocated.

Harrison’s mistrust over Liam’s apparent lack thereof was immediate, much to his chagrin.

Along with his Curse, Harrison was convinced that an oversensitive propensity for deceit had awakened in him as well on that fateful day. Now, his first instinct was to doubt good intentions, even when it came to the most benign matters.

Try as he might not to heed it, that same impulse drove him yet again in that moment.

He forced himself to meet Liam’s gaze. Wide. Open. Nary a trace of suspicion in them.

Was Crown really a suitable place for someone so blithe and unquestioning? It seemed as though Liam’s view of the world was of a similar rose-colored hue to his beautiful eyes.

“I won’t ask you anything you don’t want me to, and I won’t tell anyone anything you don’t want me to, either. Not because we’re colleagues, but because we’re friends!”

Friends…

As Liam made his proclamation, that uncanny, preternatural sensation that something was amiss whenever he encountered falsehoods eluded Harrison.

Curious, he decided to probe further.

“The first time we met, you said that you thought we could get along well. But that was a lie…”

“Oh, that… I think that was because of a bunch of stuff I was worrying about at the time.”

Liam looked abashed as he went on. “I like to jump headfirst into danger a lot and tend to cause a lot of problems when I have one of my fits. So even though I wanted to get along with you, I was worried you wouldn't want to be friends with me.”

Huh. That was all true. Curiouser and curiouser.

A small, traitorous, hopeful part of Harrison felt warmed at the obvious sincerity in Liam's words and wishes.

He had become something of a recluse after the Curse upended his life. Choosing to remain in London. Letting his mother take up residence in the countryside all by her lonesome, all while her son devoted himself to chasing the tail-end of a murder mystery brought to life.

Compiling a paper trail of ill-gotten documents related to Yard activity. Diligently reading the morning paper to amass newspaper clippings of suspected Crown operations. His madness personified in the shape of a painstakingly assembled corkboard littered with names, dates, and events leading up to Marco's death and thereafter.

The evidence board, along with his sanity, was held together by mere string, a carton of fasteners, and his own accursed determination.

The “friends” he had made in recent years were all just people he deceived and used for the sake of furthering progress in his dogged investigation. Exactly as he was doing now with Crown and its (for the most part) unassuming members.

He was convinced the Harrison of today was not capable of something as fluffy as genuine friendship.

What would happen, after all, when he inevitably got caught in the future? His secret for being deceptive from the get-go and an eventual renegade aired out for all the Crown members to cast their judgment on him, Liam included.

Heartbreak, he can imagine. Plain as daylight in those earnest, rosy eyes.

But it was hard to say no to a face that beautiful and guileless. And though he'd lie through his teeth before ever admitting it, Harrison has been subtly drowning in his solitary existence for quite some time now.

He has forgotten what it means to breathe easy in the company of a friend, someone who would gladly stand in his corner when the weight of the world threatened to crush him underfoot.

And here was Liam, extending his hand with a smile like he did during their official introduction back at Crown Castle. Promising to lift him out of the waters and help him finally come ashore.

How could he not accept?

Note/s: I did not intend for this to turn out so longggg. I put off reading all the chapters in the Harry & Liam event becuz I was salty that I didn't get the actual card despite being so close to the final soirée level.

But anyway, I adore their origin story. Liam is soooo trusting & Harrison's moral self-perception is soooo skewed due to his Curse, they drive me insaneeee (ง ͠ಥ_ಥ)ง💚🩷