Chapter Text
Lando didn’t know he was broken when he was young.
__ ___ ____
Lando remembers, deep in his memories, being a little little boy and watching Disney movies with his family. He remembers Snow White above all else and in particular, the prince in Snow White above all else. It was his first fictional crush and also first fictional character he wanted to be.
(He was a little kid, it made sense)
Lando remembers wanting to be the prince’s prince - wanting to hold hands and kiss and marry a prince and then they get to be husbands together! He didn’t know why his parents were for some reason assuming he’d want to kiss and marry Snow White but it didn’t bother him. Sex wasn’t something he even knew existed so he didn’t know it was something he should want.
It was probably the happiest period of his life.
___ ____ __
Lando’s parents are religious, the type of religious where they take their kids to church every Sunday. Lando doesn’t liked church much, but he likes the stuff associated with church: the candles, the songs he can’t sing, the language he can’t understand, the calm. His teenage cousin Lacey, who lived with them for a summer while doing a study aboard program when Lando was six, doesn’t however - always calling it archaic. She apparently gets in the most trouble with what his parents call temptation.
“Resist temptation,” his parents would always scold Lacey when she would come back late or smelling like smoke and Lando would always blink in confusion. Temptation to him was the yucky stuff that adults did - kissing and whatnot - and Lando can’t grasp why Lacey would actually want to indulge in it, to quote his parents.
“I’m not tempted,” he pipes up in childhood innocence after Lacey had huffed and stormed away, and both his parents chuckle, endeared.
“You‘ll understand it when you get older,” Dad says chuckling, pinching Mom’s side. “Lacey is going through her teenage years, it happens to everyone.” Lando’s nose scrunches. Why would he ever want to go through that kind of thing? It sounds messy and gross and nasty.
Three years later though, when even Oliver is being lectured to about temptation, Lando realizes he’s still…unchanged and that’s not good. The comments about not being tempted aren’t funny anymore and instead cause glances to be exchanged between the adults so Lando stops mentioning it.
“It’ll come eventually,” Oliver comforts him one night. “Maybe it just needs a little push.”
____ ___ ___
Three more years later, when Lando is twelve, nothing has changed so he takes his brother’s advice and steals a tape from Oliver's porn stash. Lando hopes that if he watches it, actual sex because he now knows that’s what his parents have meant all those years ago, maybe it'll click - something in his brain will straighten up and fix itself.
He pops the dvd in the player at 4:00am and lets it play in anticipation.
He doesn’t get through the foreplay before he pukes.
___ ____ ____
His first proper relationship is when he’s fourteen and is with someone called Maria who was in his year. She’s pretty, like a painting in Lando’s young opinion which should have been the first sign he wasn’t romantically attracted to women. They kiss right after he wins a karting race then Lando lies and says he needs to pee.
He doesn’t. Instead he drinks straight from the tap and paws at his tongue, desperately trying to get rid of the sliminess, the different tastes in his mouth. It’s nauseating, oddly violating, and Lando regrets the part of him that still wants romance after this. He gags into the toilet, but he’s exhausted and so dehydrated from racing that nothing comes up.
Lando’s never hated anything more, and the little prince inside of him that had hoped maybe kissing would fix him cries.
“It’s alright,” he tells himself aloud to the empty gray stalls and disgusting grimy mirror. “I just don’t like girls. I know this. I’ll kiss a guy later and I’ll like it and everything will be fine.”
____ ____ ____
A year after he breaks up with Maria, Lando kisses another guy on the karting track. His name is Fabio and he’s a Spanish-born Englishman with stubble at sixteen that makes Lando feel younger than his fifteen years. Kissing him is no better, still slimy and weirdly gross and slightly violating, but it’s made worse by Fabio’s requirement that it must be secret.
“You are pretty Lando, but we can not be known,” Fabio says with big pleading eyes like Lando would understand. Lando pretends to and in return, politely declines all of Fabio’s advances for something more explicit with him.
They go out for a month before Fabio breaks up with him because “what use is a boyfriend if I can’t fuck you,” to quote. Lando, dealing with his first major breakup of his life, buries his feeling with ice cream, beating Fabio on the karting track, and Oliver’s support. At some point while Lando was moping to Oliver, he apparently comes out because Oliver stops trying to lend him his playboy and instead gives him the more explicit version of Flo’s magazines.
Lando can appreciate the effort, and the photos too, as long as he puts duct tape over their dicks. He may hate everything to do with sex, but he can still admire the time it took to form those muscles.
Maybe if he looks at enough, God will turn him normal.
__ ___ __
When he’s eighteen, and receives the news he’ll be in Formula One the next year with Alex and George, they all go out to celebrate. At one point, Lando gets himself tangled up with a random stranger and before he knows it, they’re at a hotel.
In the beginning, it’s fine - Lando able to get away with just flopping on the bed and relaxing, just the buzz of the night continue to keep him happy and content. They start with kissing and Lando’s never liked it, but it’s better now then when he was a kid - the gentle kind they start out with is even nice. It’s doesn’t turn his mind off as he wants it too, as all the media he had watched had depicted it, but he doesn’t feel the need to vomit anymore. He’s matured.
Then the man slips a hand down Lando’s shirt and then takes it fully off and it’s slightly uncomfortable but it’s still alright.
Then there’s a hand touching him between his legs and suddenly it doesn’t matter that he’s still got his boxers on, the world is spinning, the touch is burning and Lando’s screaming, scrabbling back, fully off the bed and his heart is racing and the prince has disappeared forever because—
The man immediately pushes back, puts his hands up in innocence, asks if he did something wrong, are you alright mate, but Lando’s too revolted to answer. He locks himself in the bathroom and calls Alex to pick him up, tears stinging his eyes and chest cold from his missing shirt and pants. Lando doesn’t think he can ever wear red shirts or boxers again.
Alex picks him up at the hotel lobby, eyes widening as he takes in Lando’s trembling form and the parts of his outfit that are missing, still up in the hotel room and hopefully never finding their way back to Lando. He tries to press him answers, names, details the whole ride home until Lando makes it clear he doesn’t want to talk. He wakes to see resources for sexual assault survivors shoved under the hotel door as well as one of his favorite brands of chocolates that he knows must have cost Alex too much money.
It makes it all the worse.
____ ____ ___
The next month, over Christmas, Lando watches an episode of House MD. The couple claim they’re asexual and Lando perks up because oh, there’s a name for it! The couple seems happy to and Lando’s heart pounds in his ears - he might not like sex, but these people are happy so maybe he can find someone to make him happy too?
Just romance - holding hands, maybe kissing if it makes the other person happy, cuddling together in bed but never being scared the other person will want something more- and nothing more. Lando didn’t know it was possible to want that, but now he craves it. He keeps watching.
The episode concludes with Dr. House revealing that the husband has erectile disfunction and the wife had just been lying the whole time. Lando cries himself to sleep and makes himself a promise: if he ever finds someone stupid enough to date him, he’s going to tell them he’s asexual right away so they can leave before either of their hearts can be truly broken.
The only happiness he has is that apparently there’s a word for broken people like him: asexuals or ace for short. The irony of the card for one, the sole symbol, the alone symbol being the short form for asexuals doesn’t go over Lando’s head.
Still - it’s nice to know that God didn’t curse him individually.
__ ____ ___
During Lando's first season in Formula 1, McLaren gifts him an Oura ring, a plain black thing that apparently monitors his sleep. He remembers slipping it onto his middle finger and marveling at how natural the black ring looked there, a subtle sign of who he is, a little symbol of asexuality. Lando doesn’t like being ace, but maybe if he finds someone else who is, they can commiserate together over being the universe’s unwanted. He wears it that way for five weeks, but then, late one night, while strolling on reddit, he sees a thread that's caught on.
He chucks the ring out the hotel window.
Lando hasn't worn rings since.
__ ____ ____
Every year, Lando prays it’d go away, that God would finally just let him mature, let him be normal, unbroken, let him experience what he thought he was going to when he was young and what makes someone human, in his opinion.
Every year, his prayer is denied.
Lando stops believing in God around the same time he realizes he has a crush on Carlos Sainz as Carlos walks away to Ferrari.