Chapter Text
The track ran out ahead of him like a black river, with the car was steaming down it, engine screaming somewhere behind his shoulders, the kerbs hammering up through the floor and into the base of his spine. He weaved through the pack with his hands locked on the wheel, forearms burning, every muscle drawn tight as wire under his suit. A gap opened on the inside, narrow and closing, and he threw the nose into it before his brain had finished deciding. Another car loomed in front of him, red and slow, and he carried the speed past it with inches to spare, close enough to read the scuffs on its sidewall.
"Easy does it," he whispered into the dark of his helmet, his own breath loud and damp against the padding, and he swept out of the final corner and took the lead.
He could feel the wind battering the shell around his head, a flat roar that pressed in from every side, the visor trembling faintly in its frame. The world had shrunk to the strip of grey unspooling in front of him and the small dirty glow of the dash. He flicked his eyes to the mirrors. The car behind was peeling away, lap by lap, until it was nothing but a smudge wavering in the heat that rose off the tarmac. Light work.
"Great job, mate. That's P1." A crackle of static rode under the voice, thin and far away.
He didn't answer. His jaw was clamped, his tongue dry against the roof of his mouth. Just concentrate. You're not finished yet. Three laps. Three laps and the youngest Formula 3 champion in the history of the sport would be him, sixteen years old, his father's name on the back of his suit. He could already feel the cold weight of the trophy, hear the noise of the crowd as a single rising wall of sound.
He turned in for the next corner the way he had a thousand times, brushing the apex, easing the throttle back open.
The rear let go.
It went without warning, the back of the car swinging wide on a slick of cold tyres, and he caught it on instinct, then lost it, then caught it again before the whole thing snapped round under him and there was nothing left to hold. The world tipped. A wheel bit into the grass at the edge and the car launched, nose pitching to the sky, and then the sky and the ground began to trade places, over and over, the belts cutting hard into his shoulders, his head thrown against the seat, against the cage, against the seat again. He heard the carbon tearing itself apart in long shrieks. He smelled fuel and scorched rubber and the hot copper of his own blood. Grass, sky, gravel, sky. The barrier came up out of the blur, grey and flat and waiting, and the car hurtled into it side on with a sound like the world breaking in half.
Then it stopped. All of it. The noise, the motion, the light.
Just blackness, closing over him like water.
----
Oscar Piastri shot up out of bed with his heart slamming against his ribs, the sheets twisted around his legs.
Fuck.
For a second he didn't know where he was. Then the room came back to him, grey light at the edges of the blind, the low hum of the city outside, the familiar shapes of his own life, and his breathing began to slow. He dragged a hand down his face. The other went to the small of his back out of habit, fingers finding the long ridge of scar tissue that ran up his spine, raised and smooth and slightly numb under his touch, the way it always was. The skin there belonged to him but didn't quite report back.
He looked at the alarm clock. Four hours. He'd managed four hours before the dream tipped him over the edge and threw him out of sleep. That was better than three. He'd take it.
He sat for a moment longer on the edge of the mattress, planting both feet, waiting until he was sure of the floor before he stood. He always waited. He didn't think about why anymore. It was just one of the small careful habits that had grown into him over the years.
He pulled the yoga mat from beside the bed and unrolled it across the boards, grabbed the loop of resistance bands off the hook on the wall, and got down onto it. Same routine. Every single morning, without fail, whether he'd slept or not.
He started slow. Pelvic tilts first, easing his back awake, gentle and controlled. Then onto his back for dead bugs, opposite arm and leg lowering and lifting, his core braced tight, his lower spine pinned flat to the mat so the work stayed in his stomach and nowhere near the scar.
He looped a band above his knees and rolled onto his side for clamshells, then bridges, driving up through his heels, squeezing until the muscles burned. He counted under his breath and didn't let himself round the numbers down.
Then the part he hated. Nerve glides. He straightened his leg and flexed his foot and felt the long electric pull run down the back of his thigh, the nerve flossing through the scar tissue that wanted to choke it, sharp and bright and necessary. He breathed through it.
Last came balance. He stood on one leg in the middle of the mat with his eyes shut and tried to hold it, and the room swam instantly, his body reaching for the ground feedback that wasn't there anymore, the soles of his feet sending back static instead of signal. He swayed, caught himself, set his jaw, and went again. And again. Because that was the deal. That was the whole deal. He kept the body sharp, kept it strong, kept it balanced and braced and ready, because the doctors had been very clear with him in that quiet careful voice they used for the things they didn't want to repeat.
One more impact like the last one and he wouldn't be getting up off the mat. He wouldn't be getting up at all.
When he was done he rolled the bands back into their loop, folded the mat, and went to get changed for his run. It was the same routine every day. Woken by a nightmare, stretch, run, shower, eat. Same order, same times, the whole morning laid out in front of him. It was easy. He liked easy.
Easy was a flat grey morning and an empty pavement and the cold air scraping the last of the dream out of his lungs. Easy was knowing exactly what came next, and then the thing after that, and the thing after that. He set off at a steady pace, the city still half asleep around him, shutters down, pigeons picking at something in the gutter, his breath clouding out in front of him and getting torn away by the wind.
He kept his eyes on the ground a few feet ahead, the way he always did, reading the surface, clocking the kerbs and the wet leaves and the loose paving slab outside the newsagent before he reached them. Other people ran with their heads up and their music loud. Oscar ran watching the floor.
After he finished his run, he stood in the kitchen with a glass of water and eyed the calendar stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a tiny Melbourne tram. Today's box had two words biroed onto it. Charlton Athletic. Below that, smaller, Wrexham.
The Valley was close enough to cycle to. He'd done it before, on the good days. But his back was tight this morning, the deep ache sitting low and familiar, and he could feel it pulling every time he turned.
"Better safe than sorry," he muttered to the empty flat, already mapping the bus route in his head.
Oscar had been a sports journalist for three years, at one of the biggest papers in the country, which sounded a great deal more impressive than it was. The names above his on the masthead had covered Olympic finals and World Cup nights and the kind of moments that ended up framed on people's walls. Oscar covered the Championship. Second tier. Wet Tuesdays in front of four thousand people in towns he'd never have visited otherwise. It wasn't the same thing and everyone knew it wasn't the same thing, but the pay was good, good enough for a studio flat of his own in London and he wasn't about to complain about that.
He'd always found Charlton's ground a sad place. They'd been a Premier League club once, years back, good enough and rich enough to build a press box the size of a small lecture theatre, rows and rows of fold-down seats and little desks with power points and a view straight down the halfway line. Built for a future that never turned up. These days it was him and maybe four others rattling around up there, laptops open, flasks of coffee going cold, the empty seats stretching out on either side like a mouth with most of its teeth gone. He only bothered with this one because of Wrexham. People wanted to read about Wrexham. People didn’t want to read about Charlton.
The game was as bad as he'd feared. A flat, scrappy nothing of a match, two tired teams cancelling each other out in the cold, the ball spending most of its life bouncing off shins in midfield. A scuffed goal just before the half from a corner nobody really claimed. Not much else.
He filed his six hundred words from the press box before the crowd had finished clearing the car park. Solid build, deserved win, manager pleased, a quote about character, a quote about taking each game as it comes. Blah Blah Blah. He could write these in his sleep, and some weeks he half suspected he did. He read it through once, fixed a comma, sent it, and shut the laptop.
The Australian was halfway down the stairs of the bus when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn't look at it until he was off and walking, hood up against the drizzle, and even then he only glanced down out of reflex.
A Slack message. From Mark, the head of sports news.
Can you come into the office tomorrow?
Oscar stopped on the pavement and read it twice, the rain ticking against the back of his hood. He almost never went in. He filed remotely, took his calls remotely, did the whole job from the small desk by his window with a view of someone else's brick wall, and that was exactly how he liked it. Working from home meant no commute eating into his back on the bad days. It meant no open-plan floor full of people who'd clock the careful way he lowered himself into a chair, or the slight hitch in his walk by the end of a long one, and ask the question he hated being asked.
He typed back, deleted it, typed it again.
Sure. What time?
The reply came almost at once.
10.
Thanks.
He stood there a moment longer, thumb hovering, waiting for more that didn't come, and then he pocketed the phone and kept walking, the easy flat shape of his evening suddenly carrying a small hard edge it hadn't had a minute ago. He told himself it was probably nothing. He almost believed it.
—
The office sat on the fourth floor of a glass building near the Thames, full of lanyards, breakout pods and a fridge full of oat milk no one ever replaced.
Oscar was 20 minutes early. He stood outside for a second in the cold, looking up at the lit windows, the same low pull of dread he'd been carrying since last night sitting just under his ribs. Then he scanned his pass, took the lift instead of the stairs, and stepped out onto a floor that was far busier than he'd expected.
"Oscar. Come into my office a sec."
Mark was already holding the glass door open, that easy newsroom smile on his face. Oscar crossed the floor toward him and caught the looks on the way past, the quick glances up from monitors, a couple of his colleagues watching him go with something careful pinned to their faces. He was friendly with most of them. They'd been out for enough leaving drinks and birthday pints over the years that he knew their orders, knew whose round it was. Friendly, not friends. He kept it that way on purpose.
Mark shut the door behind him. The noise of the floor dropped away.
"Sit down. How are you doing today?"
"Fine."
"Good, good." Mark lowered himself into his chair with a grunt and laced his fingers over his stomach. "That Wrexham piece yesterday was great, by the way. Really tidy. You always find the human bit in it, that's the thing about you. You know, I used to do match reports back when I started, and let me tell you-"
"I don't want to be rude," Oscar said, "but why am I here?"
Mark blinked, then huffed out a laugh. "Never one for small talk, were you." He tipped his head, studying him for a beat. "Alright. Straight to it. I'm retiring in January."
"Right." Oscar shifted in the chair, easing the weight off his lower back without making a thing of it. "Congratulations. Or commiserations. Not sure which one you're after."
Mark snorted properly at that. "We'll see. Ask me in February.” He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. "Stephen's stepping up to take my chair. Which leaves his."
Oscar already knew where this was going. He felt it land somewhere low in his stomach before Mark even said it, a cold slow drop, like a lift letting go.
"F1," Mark said. "We want you for it."
For a moment Oscar didn't say anything at all.
"I don't watch the races," he said finally. Flat. A reflex. A door pulled shut.
"Oscar." Mark gave him a look that was almost kind, almost careful, a man stepping around something he could see the shape of but not the size. "Come on. Nobody on this floor needs to watch the races less than you. You already know how the cars work, how the teams work, how those kids think, because you were one of them. There isn't a person in this building, probably this whole city, better set up to do this job, and you know it as well as I do.”
There it was. Said plainly, kindly, with no idea in the world of what he was actually asking.
A memory surfaced before Oscar could stop it. Last year's Christmas drinks, four pints too deep, somebody, probably Stephen getting him going about ground effect and dirty air and him not being able to shut up about it, talking with his hands, lit up, alive in a way he never let himself be sober. The way it had felt afterwards, hollow and raw, like he'd opened a door he kept nailed shut and stood too long in the draught. He'd gone home and not slept.
"Mark, I-"
"I know." Mark held up a hand, gentle. "I know it might be strange, going back to all that after so long. I'm not pretending it's nothing. But that's exactly why you'd be brilliant at it." He sat back. "And it's a serious step up. Eleven grand more a year. All your travel covered, flights, hotels, the lot. You'd be one of the youngest names in that paddock." He smiled, like that was the sweetest part. "Just think about it. That's all I'm asking."
You'd be one of the youngest names in that paddock. He'd been the youngest name in that paddock once. Oscar said something, but he couldn't have repeated it after, and got himself up out of the chair and through the glass door without his body giving him away.
He made it ten feet before a hand caught his elbow.
Raia and Jack, two football journalists around Oscar’s age, stood in his path with their coffees.
"Well?" Raia searched his face. "You look like you're going to be sick."
"He offered me Stephen's job."
"F1?" Jack's eyebrows went up, and then, because he was Jack, he grinned and squeezed Oscar's shoulder. "Mate, don't look like that. Most people would die for a shot at working in F1.”
"Yeah." Oscar made himself nod, the smell of hot tarmac rising at the back of his throat out of nowhere, nine years and a whole life away. "Yeah, Jack. I'm very much aware of that.”
He got out of there somehow. Said the right things, made the right shapes with his face, told Raia he just needed air and Jack he'd buy the first round when he'd thought about it, and then he was in the lift going down with his reflection hanging in the brushed steel, grey and far away.
Outside the cold hit him and he was grateful for it. He didn't get the bus. He walked instead, the long way, down toward the river and along it, hands jammed in his pockets, head down, watching the pavement slide by the way he always did. The water moved brown and slow beside him, the tide out, the mud flats catching the grey light. A tour boat went past half empty. He walked until his back told him to stop and then he kept walking anyway, because the ache was at least a thing he understood.
He should say no. That was the simple part. That was the only part that should have been simple. No, thank you, not for me, find someone else. He didn't need a reason. People turned down promotions all the time. Too much travel, prefer the desk, happy where I am. He could give Mark any of a dozen tidy lies and Mark would nod and look faintly disappointed and that would be the end of it, and his life would close back over the gap like water, easy and grey and exactly the right size.
So why hadn't he just said it in the room.
He knew why. That was the worst of it. He knew exactly why, and he hated himself a little for it, walking along the river with the wind off the water making his eyes sting.
Because some buried, stupid, traitorous part of him had heard the word and lit up.
F1. He'd spent nine years building a life with a wall around it precisely so that word couldn't get in, and Mark had just walked up and knocked it down like it was nothing. And somewhere behind the dread, behind the cold drop in his stomach and the tarmac smell at the back of his throat, some small animal thing in him had lifted its head at the sound. The paddock. The garages. The noise of it. The smell of fuel and hot brakes and rubber laid down thick on a Sunday. The life he'd loved more than anything as a teenager.
He'd told himself for years that he didn't miss it. He'd told himself that so often and so well that he'd almost believed it. And then one sentence in a glass office had pulled the floor out from under the lie.
By the time he let himself into the flat it was dark and he hadn't eaten. He didn't put the big light on. He just stood in the middle of the room in his coat, the city orange in the window, and tried to think his way out of it the way he thought his way out of everything, methodically, one careful step at a time, building the case for no.
The travel would wreck his back. True. But the travel was covered, comfortable, business class on the long ones probably, better than the buses and the trains he ground through now.
He'd have to be around the cars. True. But journalists stood in the paddock, not on the grid. Nobody was asking him to drive.
People might recognise him. He turned that one over for a long time. It had been nine years. He'd been a kid then, skinny and unfinished, a name in the junior results that only the real obsessives would remember. He wasn't that anymore. He'd changed. He'd made very sure of that. A dedicated fitness routine, a haircut. His own mother didn’t recognise him sometimes. And no one from his years racing had ever made it into F1. Most were off doing Indycar or Formula E or working for their dad’s company.
Every reason he reached for came apart in his hands. Every wall he'd built turned out to have a door in it he'd forgotten he'd left.
He sat down on the edge of the bed in the dark, his lower back aching, the offer sitting in the room with him like a third person, and for the first time in nine years Oscar let himself wonder, just for a second, just to see how it felt, what it would be like to go back.
It felt like standing at the top of a very long drop.
Oscar didn't sleep, and in the morning he said yes.
Not because he'd talked himself into it. He hadn't. He'd lain awake half the night turning it over and the dread was still there, sitting on his chest the way it had since Mark first said the word. He said yes because when he laid every reason for no out in front of him in the cold light of four a.m., not one of them survived contact with the question Mark would ask next. Why not? That was all it would take. Every honest no led straight back to the crash, to the scar, to the body he managed in private. He could turn down the job, or he could keep his secret. He couldn't do both.
So he kept the secret. He typed the message standing in his kitchen with the kettle going cold, three words, no exclamation mark.
I'll do it.
Mark replied within the minute. A thumbs up.
Good lad. Welcome aboard.
That was it. Done. He'd just signed himself back into the one place on earth he'd spent a decade running from.
He sat down at the small desk by the window and opened the laptop, because if he was going to do this then he was going to do it properly, the way he did everything, methodically, building himself back up to competence one careful step at a time. He'd start with the basics. Who was winning. He could at least walk in knowing who was leading the championship.
He typed it into the search bar. Current F1 championship leader.
Lando Norris.
His thumb went to the trackpad to close it. Get out, don't look. But he made himself stop. He made himself sit there and read it, because he was going to have to know this man's name and face and history by heart in a few weeks, and there was no use pretending otherwise.
So he read.
Formula 3 champion at eighteen. Formula 2 champion at nineteen. Into Formula 1 at twenty. World Champion at twenty-two. And again at twenty-three. And twenty-four. And twenty-five. Reigning champion at twenty-six, leading again, chasing a sixth.
Oscar sat very still and read it twice.
He was supposed to have that F3 title at sixteen. Two years younger than the boy on the screen. He could still feel the wheel in his hands, still hear the radio, still taste the three laps he'd never finished. He'd been ahead of all of this once. He'd been faster, sooner, further along the exact road this stranger had gone on to walk all the way to the end.
That was supposed to be his life. The titles, the ages, the long unbroken line of them stacking up year after year. That was the life he'd been driving toward at sixteen years old with three laps to go, before the rear stepped out and the world turned over and took it from him in the space of a single corner.
He looked at the photo now, properly, for the first time. A man about his own age, holding a trophy, grinning into a wall of cameras, living the future that had been promised to someone else.
Oscar closed the tab.