Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

BREAKING NEWS: QUIDDITCH HEARTTHROB LANDO NORRIS TAKES A TUMBLE MID-AIR!

Disaster strikes at the Quidditch League semi-finals as McLaren Seeker Lando Norris plummets from his broom during a high-speed dive! The 25-year-old prodigy — known for his gravity-defying moves and headline-making charm — crashed in the 73rd minute of Sunday’s match against the Red Bulls.

Spectators report a sudden lurch, followed by a terrifying fall from over 60 feet. Medical wizards rushed to the pitch within seconds. Sources close to the team call it “a freak accident,” but fans are already whispering: was it sabotage?

More details to come.

The headline pulses across the enchanted glass of the Daily Prophet Live broadcast, looping endlessly in its charmed corner slot above the staff sink. Below it, the footage plays again for the seventh time that hour: a maroon blur against grey skies, the glint of enchanted hoops high above a roaring stadium, and then a stutter. A lurch. A streak of movement no one expects — downward.

A body drops.

Maroon and gold robes flailing, broomstick spiraling. The crowd inhales as one, a massive collective breath sucked through teeth, and then the feed slows on the figure mid-air. Suspended. Caught by the camera mid-plummet. Curled like a leaf. Dark curls visible even from this distance, blown back by the fall.

Oscar doesn’t move.

He stands by the tea counter, one hand resting on the edge of a chipped porcelain cup, waiting for it to fill itself from the perpetually bubbling kettle. The staff break room at St. Mungo’s is always too bright. Everything is a shade of pale: pale green walls, pale yellow tiles, pale, twitching fluorescent charms in the ceiling. Even the air feels scrubbed raw, like it’s been filtered too many times through too many spells.

Behind him, the room murmurs with low conversation. Nurses and mediwizards shift in and out, tired voices buzzing like flies. Someone rustles a bag of crisps. Someone else coughs. The broadcast volume is charmed low, but it still bleeds into the atmosphere. There’s no escape from it. The repetition, the looping of the footage, the subtle urgency behind the calmly spoken words.

“He just… dropped,” someone says from the couch near the window. Their voice is hoarse. “Right off the broom.”

“Altitude destabilisation?” another offers. “Or a muscle lock? You hear of that case last season with the Racing Bulls—”

“Or nerves,” someone else mutters. “Pressure finally got to him.”

Oscar glances down at the tea swirling into his mug. Clear amber. Perfectly brewed. He doesn’t want it anymore.

“It was probably his ego,” he says quietly, almost to himself, but not quite. “Got too heavy mid-air.”

There’s a brief silence behind him. Not awkward. Not tense. Just… muted. Like no one really wants to engage. A few feet shuffle. The broadcast flickers again.

—Golden boy Lando Norris is said to be receiving top-level care at St. Mungo's, where Healers are—

The kettle hums into silence. Oscar picks up his mug.

He doesn’t turn to look at the screen again. He already knows the angles. The image is fixed in his memory, burnt into the inside of his skull like an afterimage from staring at a spell too long. The shot of Lando mid-fall — not graceful, not golden, just human. Loose-limbed and falling too fast.

Oscar doesn’t feel anything about it. Not really.

It’s a name he recognises. A face from old corridors, late-night common room chatter, the echo of Quidditch commentary during exams. It lands in his brain the way a dropped file does. Just another note in the backlog. Lando Norris, former schoolmate. Fell during a match. Is probably going to be fine. Probably.

Oscar lifts the mug, takes a sip, finds it too hot. He sets it down again, harder than necessary. The clink echoes too loud in the whitewashed room.

Someone mentions St. Mungo's again. Mentions a full recovery. A spokesperson. A quote about “unforeseen circumstances.”

Oscar doesn’t comment. He doesn’t even roll his eyes.

He just picks up the folder someone left on the counter and flicks it open, scanning the first page with professional ease. A burn case. Third-degree spell damage. Clean margins, manageable scarring. He moves on to the second page.

Behind him, the broadcast loops again. Maroon robes. Grey sky. Dark curls. Falling.

He doesn’t look.

He doesn’t need to.

He already knows how it ends.

St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries

Second Floor — Spell Damage Wing, Room 2C

Oscar Piastri reviews the scan twice before knocking lightly on the doorframe.

“Morning, Mrs O’Dell,” he says, stepping in.

The older witch sits upright on the exam bed, arms folded over her floral shawl, lips pursed as if the idea of being here personally offends her. A thin stream of blue smoke curls lazily from one of her ears.

“I told them it’s residual from the misfire,” she says, before Oscar can open her file. “Happened when I tried to silence the kettle.”

Oscar nods, flipping through the parchment anyway. “Spell caught your eardrum. Still inflamed. Let’s check if it’s receded.”

She frowns, watching his hands move with clinical precision. “Are you the one who was at Hogwarts with that Norris boy?”

Oscar doesn’t look up. “Yes.”

“You must’ve heard, then. The whole thing’s all over the Prophet. Tragic. Such a talented flyer. McLaren’s never had someone like him.”

He nods again, expression flat. “Please tilt your head to the left.”

She does. More smoke escapes, now tinged faintly green.

“Do you know how he’s doing?” she asks, eyes narrowing. “You work in the hospital he's in, yes?”

Oscar lowers his wand. “Tilt to the right.”

She complies, but not before adding, “They say it might’ve been a curse. Or sabotage. Imagine—sabotage, in a game.”

“I haven’t been updated,” Oscar says, voice still even. “Open your mouth, please.”

“But you must’ve seen him around,” she insists. “He’s so recognisable. You two were in the same House, weren’t you? Or was it just classes?”

Oscar doesn’t answer. He taps her temple once, gently, and mutters a charm under his breath. The smoke twists, then vanishes with a soft pop.

“There,” he says, stepping back. “Residual charm’s cleared. You’ll have a mild headache this evening, but nothing lasting. Use a cooling compress and avoid loud spells for forty-eight hours.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” she says, still peering at him. “And you’re sure he’s all right? I mean—your generation produced so many stars, didn’t it? That Norris boy, especially. Always seemed a bit too perfect for his own good.”

Oscar smiles, thin and unreadable. “Your discharge form is at the front desk.”

The next consult goes much the same.

A warlock in his thirties with post-duelling wrist damage. Bone still stiff, even after regrowth. Oscar reviews the original reconstruction spell, tweaks it slightly, conjures a stabilisation brace.

“Have you heard what happened to Lando Norris?” the man asks, rotating his arm with cautious delight. “Poor kid. Never saw it coming. You know him, right?”

“I used to,” Oscar says.

“Bet it’s madness in here with him upstairs. The press must be circling like Hippogriffs.”

Oscar nods. The man doesn’t seem to notice that Oscar hasn’t made eye contact for several minutes.

“Honestly,” the man continues, “he was always pushing the limits. The way he dives—like he thinks he’s immortal.”

Oscar’s grip tightens on the roll of bandage. “Please flex your wrist.”

“Do you know if he’s awake yet?”

“I don’t know,” Oscar says, clipped this time. “Let’s focus on your healing response.”

It doesn’t stop.

Every patient that morning, from a teenage Beater with fractured ribs to an elderly wizard who accidentally hexed himself invisible from the waist down — they all find a way to bring it up. Lando Norris. The Fall. McLaren’s Golden Boy. Half of them assume Oscar’s on the case. The other half ask if they were friends. As if the entire history of his medical training has been reduced to whether or not he knows the fallen Quidditch star personally.

By the time the last patient leaves — a seven-year-old girl who giggles while asking if Oscar can get Lando’s autograph for her mum — Oscar is clenching his jaw so hard it hurts.

He mutters a cleansing charm, letting it settle over his shoulders like cold mist. The room resets. Charts file themselves. Surfaces shine. His breath evens out.

But somewhere under it all: a flicker.

Not anger, exactly. Not sadness either.

Just that familiar, hollow tightness in his chest — the one that started as far back as Hogwarts. A strange pressure that settles like dust. He never asks it to stay. It just does.

The knock comes just as Oscar finishes scribbling a prescription charm across the final page of a follow-up file. His handwriting, as always, is precise, almost mechanical. He doesn’t look up.

“If this is about Lando Norris again,” he says, tone flat, “I swear to Merlin I will request a permanent transfer to Spell Containment.”

“Not quite,” comes the reply — clipped, faintly amused. “Well. Depends how you define ‘about.’”

Oscar finally glances up.

Dr. George Russell leans against the doorframe, sleeves pushed halfway to his elbows, the ever-present patient folder tucked under one arm. His hair is slightly askew, like he’s been running from wing to wing again, and behind him stands Alex Albon, chewing absently on the cap of a quill like it’s the only thing tethering him to reality. Both of them wear their white coats open — unbothered, too casual.

Oscar narrows his eyes. “I’m finishing up rounds. I’ve still got half a file stack to get through.”

George ignores that. “Head office wants you.”

“Head office can wait,” Oscar mutters, reaching for the next folder.

“They can’t. Or rather, they won’t.”

Alex steps forward, quill now held like a pointer. “Before you say no, hear us out.”

“I’m not saying no,” Oscar says coolly. “I’m saying I’m busy.”

“You’ll want to see the file,” George says. “It’s unusual.”

“Everything is unusual around here. That’s the job.”

“This one’s different.”

Oscar sighs audibly — not dramatic, just exhausted. “Is someone going to die if I don’t look at this right now?”

“Possibly,” George says. “Just not in the way you’re thinking.”

That earns a pause.

George takes advantage of it and steps further into the room, holding the file out without fanfare. “Lando Norris. Brought in late last night. Level Seven, private wing. No media or leaks about his condition. Someone called in favours. We don’t know from where.”

Oscar doesn’t move to take the file. “And this involves me because…?”

“You’re the best with magical neural entanglement in the department.”

“I’m not a Mind Healer,” Oscar says automatically. He’s said this enough times it might as well be tattooed on his name badge.

“No, you’re not,” George agrees. “But you’ve seen more spell-induced loop cases in the last two years than anyone else here. And you don’t get squeamish.”

Oscar still doesn’t take the file.

Alex shrugs. “We already tried the obvious. Cleansings. Nulls. Spells. Nothing stuck. He’s not cursed, not hexed, not potion-compromised. His vitals are textbook. The only anomaly is his neural patterning.”

Oscar folds his arms. “Looping?”

George nods. “Exactly. Not just replaying a memory — it’s structured. Layered. Like an engineered trap.”

There’s a long silence.

Eventually, Oscar reaches out and takes the file, flipping it open with the air of someone checking the weather — necessary, not interesting.

The chart is clean. Disturbingly clean. As if Lando’s body has no idea it’s unresponsive. All systems functioning. Heart rate steady. No arcane residue, no spell flare. Just that one line, buried in the diagnostics summary:

Neurological activity: active loop signature.

Type: unidentified.

“Who made the initial call?” Oscar asks, eyes still on the file.

“Manager. Didn’t come through official channels,” George replies. “It got routed up. Admin didn’t even realise who the patient was until he was already in containment.”

Oscar turns a page. A photograph is clipped inside. It’s Lando, just a few hours after the fall — still as marble, mouth slightly parted, hair damp with residual spellwater. Oscar stares at it for a long moment.

He looks awful.

Gaunt. Shadowed. There’s a pallor that magic can’t disguise. And something about the position of his hands — loose and uneven — suggests a body that didn’t choose to rest.

Oscar closes the file.

“I’m not a publicist,” he says, voice low. “If they want someone to parade around and look concerned on telly, get someone else.”

“No one’s asking you to smile for a camera,” George replies calmly. “We’re asking you to look at a patient.”

“Not just any patient,” Oscar says. There’s no heat in it. Just weight.

George meets his eyes. “No. But you’re the only one I trust to handle this without getting distracted by all the headlines.”

Oscar exhales slowly through his nose.

His hand tightens around the file. His shoulders don’t move.

Alex watches him for a beat. “You okay?”

Oscar shoots him a look. “Fine.”

Another beat.

Then: “Do I have a choice?”

George just shakes his head once.

Level Seven – Private Spell Damage Wing

The room is silent in that way only high-security spell wards can be — as if even sound has been filtered out. The walls gleam with recent sanitisation charms. The air smells faintly of antiseptic, old linens, and the static sharpness of layered protective enchantments. Clinical. Intentionally impersonal.

Oscar steps inside without comment.

He doesn’t know what he expected.

Something messier, maybe — chaotic vitals, alarms, residual energy etched into the corners of the ward. The aftermath of a cursed object, maybe, or trauma from a half-botched obliviation. Instead: quiet. Cold. Too clean.

Lando lies in the centre of the room.

Unmoving.

Not in the loose-limbed, uneven way people sleep — but arranged. Arms resting precisely by his sides, head tilted slightly toward the ceiling, expression neutral to the point of unnatural. There’s no tension, no breath catch, no micro-adjustments of a restless body. Just stillness.

Oscar walks forward, boots clicking softly against the tile.

A containment field shimmers faintly around the bed — low-level, stable. Diagnostic sigils float in a patient grid above Lando’s chest, pulsing at uniform intervals. One of the monitors tracks brainwave activity. The output pattern is… strange. Predictable in its unpredictability. Like a circle drawn too many times.

He stops at the foot of the bed. Folds his hands behind his back. Observes.

Lando looks—

Unwell, obviously. But not in a way most people would notice. The difference is subtle. A slight sunkenness to the cheeks, the pale crescent of a healing scar just at his temple, the way his fingers curl inward as if reacting to something unseen. There’s no glamour here, no post-match bravado. Just a body. Suspended.

Oscar keeps his distance.

He catalogues what he sees: elevated aetheric latency. Magical tension in the muscular reflex channels. Signs of long-term looping activity in the synaptic grid. He runs through the diagnostic framework automatically, the way you might recite ingredients for a routine salve.

Eventually, his gaze settles on Lando’s face again.

His hair’s longer than it used to be. Less controlled. It fans out across the pillow, sweat-damp and matted. There’s a faint line at the edge of his brow — stress, maybe. Or impact.

Oscar doesn’t sigh.

But something behind his ribs shifts — quiet and inward, like a drawer closing.

“This is excessive,” he murmurs to no one. His tone is dry. Functional. “You’d think with all the attention they’d have at least found something.”

Still, he steps closer.

His fingers hover over Lando’s wrist, just above the monitoring charm embedded in the skin. He doesn’t touch it. Doesn’t touch him. But for a second, he thinks — maybe. Maybe there’ll be a flicker. Some reflex. A catch in the breath.

There isn’t.

He retracts his hand without reacting.

The numbers on the charm don’t change.

He doesn’t say you look worse than I thought. He doesn’t say I haven’t seen you in years. He doesn’t say I figured if anyone made it out clean, it’d be you.

Instead, he turns back.

George stands just inside the doorway, arms folded, unreadable.

Oscar nods once. His voice is even.

“What do you need me to do?”

The room doesn’t invite conversation.

It’s built to contain. Neutral-toned walls, temperature-held at a clinical constant. Silence layered between faint magical frequencies: diagnostic hums, monitoring glyphs, containment wards. All precise. All necessary.

Oscar stands near the examination table. His coat is still on. His hands are still.

A file lies open under a sterile light. Pages slightly curled at the edges from heat exposure — or magical interference. Hard to say. He reads in silence, eyes flicking from line to line, absorbing patterns, not meaning. Not yet.

The pages are dense. Brainwave tracings. Magical contamination scans. Healer notations. Pattern diagnostics. All recorded meticulously, almost obsessively. But none of them say anything useful.

Across the room, George waits, arms folded. Watching, but not speaking. He knows better than to interrupt.

Oscar turns another page. The brain activity is stable — that’s the first thing. No erratic spikes. No sudden troughs. No neurological collapse. But the rhythm is wrong. It loops. Repeats. Identical frequency, identical waveform. As if frozen in motion.

He tilts his head, expression unreadable. Notes the complete absence of external trauma. No residual curse shock. No unravelled counterspell debris.

But something is there. It’s just… too clean.

“Modified memory-binding,” he says, voice flat. “Possibly something derivative of a Mindlock hex, but deeper. Slower. It’s not meant to immobilize — it’s meant to trap.”

He flips to George's log. The entries are technical, impersonal.

Spell cleansing ineffective. Nullifiers bypassed. Mindvault intrusion attempt triggered harmonic backlash. Healer in charge sustained brief auditory dissociation.

Oscar’s mouth tightens slightly. The terminology doesn’t matter. The outcome is consistent: failure.

He turns the page again. Another scan. Magical residue: trace levels of structured mind enchantment. Refined. Unfamiliar.

“This isn’t standard mind magic,” he says quietly. “Someone built this deliberately. Layered, reinforced. And not to break the subject — to preserve them. Keep them confined in something inert.”

George shifts. “So it’s not an accident. Or fallout.”

“No,” Oscar replies. “It’s active. Intentional. And extremely sophisticated.”

He leans over the chart, fingertip hovering just above a glowing node on the magical scan. The frequency loop isn’t degrading. It’s holding. Sustainment spells must be embedded somewhere deeper in the mind’s architecture — latent enchantments feeding on ambient magic. Possibly drawing energy from the subject directly.

Oscar’s mind clicks through options. Break the loop? Too dangerous without isolating the core enchantment. Sever the sustainment spells? Requires identification first. Enter the mindscape? Risk of recursive entrapment.

“We need to destabilize the loop first,” he says. “Disorient the feedback long enough to access the internal structure.”

He pulls a scroll from his coat pocket, flicks it open. It unfurls over the table with the precision of intent — blueprints of potion matrices, experimental and fringe. Not yet sanctioned. The kind of thing brewed in silence, in labs with no names.

“Valerian compound for cerebral slackening,” he murmurs. “Nightshade to fog the reinforcement layer. Essence of mooncalf — not for sedation, but to induce temporal dissonance. Let the loop lose its grip.”

George steps closer. “You’re going to try that?”

Oscar nods once. “There’s no precedent. But precedent doesn’t help us here.”

His tone is devoid of hope or urgency. This is process. Procedure. Calculation.

He checks the time. Calculates the brewing duration, the necessary cooldown, the method of administration. Oral ingestion would fail — the patient’s passive wards would reject the potion before it reached systemic absorption.

“Intravenous only,” he says. “Direct line past the magical threshold. I’ll prep the dosage. You’ll need to isolate the ward. No visitors. No healers.”

George’s response is clipped. “I’ll lock it down.”

Oscar nods again. Brief. Dismissive. Already elsewhere.

He closes the file. The snap of the cover breaks the silence. Just for a moment.

Then: “Notify the lower lab. I want the distillation tanks warmed and the stabilizers calibrated. No errors.”

George is already moving.

And Oscar — he’s already reaching for the thin gloves in his coat. Not out of concern, but control.

The work ahead is precise. The risk is structural. The subject is not awake, not reachable, not present. But still—something inside is resisting extraction.

Not by accident. Not by nature.

By design.

Level Six — Potion's Lab 

The lab is silent.

Not empty — but stripped of sound. Everything that moves, moves precisely. Every surface gleams. No clutter. No deviation. Only clean lines, cool air, and the low ambient thrum of magically reinforced containment wards that keep the rest of the hospital out.

Oscar doesn’t speak. Doesn’t sit. Doesn’t pause.

He moves through his workspace like a system running on code. Tools align under his hands. Glass clinks. Liquid measures itself into calibrated vials. Incantations murmur low in the background — voice-triggered wards maintaining stability, temperature, balance. They obey. They always do.

The potion is already forming.

A cerebral disruptor, retooled and refined. Originally built for trauma-bound magical fractures. Now repurposed — not to heal, but to intrude. To break something open that refuses to be touched.

He grinds valerian root by hand. Slow, even pressure. The fine powder settles into the air like dust in static. No excess. No wastage.

Nightshade next — not for sedation, but for dissonance. Enough to slip between reinforcement spells without collapsing the entire structure. Too much, and the mind might shut down. He calculates the dose again. Adjusts downward. Then proceeds.

The mooncalf essence hovers in its vial, faintly luminescent. It doesn’t behave like other liquids — light bends around it, refracting in odd, elastic patterns. He doesn’t watch it. He pours with precision.

Timing matters. Lunar interference is peaking — a rare alignment of arcane fields, logged in advance. The infusion synchronizes to that rhythm. No rituals. No fanfare. Just math. Just application.

He doesn’t wear gloves. He doesn’t need to.

His hands are steady.

He binds the mixture with a low chant, the syllables exact, almost inaudible. Stabilizing the reaction. Locking in the potency. No flare of light. No reaction. Only the soft pulse of the potion turning over in the cauldron — slow, deliberate, like a heartbeat filtered through glass.

He checks the temperature again.

Then the infusion path. Intravenous delivery. No other method will work — Lando’s passive wards will reject oral absorption, maybe even spellcasting. But not this. This will slip through. This will enter.

Oscar records nothing. He doesn’t need to.

It’s already memorized.

He draws the final dose with clinical care. The potion has turned — no longer liquid, not quite vapor. Something in between. It glows faintly, like memory trapped in glass. Like moonlight spilled into shadow.

He seals it. Labels it. Sets it aside.

Then stands motionless for exactly three seconds.

Not to reflect. Not to hesitate.

Only to confirm.

The air in the workshop remains unchanged — cool, sterile, humming with the dull energy of anticipation. The moment does not feel significant. Only quiet. Tense. Waiting.

This isn’t healing.

It’s entry.

Not into consciousness. Not into dreaming.

But into containment. Engineered. Inflicted.

Oscar’s expression never shifts.

He turns toward the exit. The vial is steady in his hand. There is no announcement. No final thought.

Just the silent, calculated movement of someone who has built a key and intends to use it.

The air was thick with antiseptic and the faint, unyielding hum of magical wards.

Level Seven was a fortress of silence — walls sealed with layers of enchantments, containment spells pulsing faintly in rhythmic beats like a slow, mechanical heartbeat.

Oscar moved deliberately through the room, eyes sharp and hands steady. He traced the outlines of the protective charms woven into the walls, floor, and ceiling, fingers hovering over sigils glowing faintly blue.

Each ward was a barrier not only against external interference but against uncontrolled magical feedback — a thin line between safety and catastrophe.

He muttered the incantations under his breath, testing the strength of each ward, his voice clinical and steady.

“Containment spells are stable,” George’s voice cut through the quiet, low and sure, standing near the entrance with arms crossed.

Oscar didn’t look up. “Reinforcement matrix on the north wall—sustained at ninety-two percent. That should hold.”

George nodded. “No one gets in. No one gets out without our say.”

Oscar’s gaze flicked to the floor, where an intricate network of runes shimmered faintly beneath the tiles. “Passive wards are calibrated to nullify any mental intrusion below Level Six. It’s the best barrier we have.”

A nurse stepped into the periphery, clipboard in hand. “We’ve cleared the schedule. No visits. Minimal staff rotations. No distractions.”

Oscar gave a curt nod. “Good. This isn’t routine.” His voice dropped to something almost unreadable. “We’re pushing boundaries.”

George’s eyes met his. “I’m ready on my end. Backup protocols in place. If anything goes sideways, I shut this down immediately.”

Oscar finally looked up, expression unreadable. “Let’s keep it that way.”

He moved to a central panel, fingers dancing over controls that monitored every magical layer in the ward. His eyes scanned the readings — wards stable, containment fields active, ambient magic low and steady.

He sighed softly, almost imperceptibly. “We’ve isolated the target. Now we wait.”

George’s silhouette stayed firm in the doorway. “When you’re ready.”

Oscar’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Soon.”

He stepped away from the panel and pulled a thin, silvery cord from his coat pocket.

It was faintly luminous, delicate but unyielding — a tether charm designed to anchor him back to the waking world.

His fingers moved with deliberate precision, weaving the cord through a series of small, precise gestures.

The tether hummed softly as it anchored itself to his palm, then extended to a rune inscribed on the ward’s control console.

He tested the connection with a low incantation — a pulse that traveled along the cord, feeding back in a steady loop.

If I lose myself, he thought clinically, this tether will pull me back.

He turned to George, who watched silently.

“No margin for error,” Oscar said flatly. “This link is the only thing between extraction and… permanent loss.”

George nodded. “I’ll monitor it from here. Signal if anything changes.”

Oscar gave a brief nod, securing the tether coil at his wrist like a surgeon fastening a tourniquet.

The room held its breath — sterile, still, expectant.

Oscar’s breath slowed. Each inhale—controlled, deliberate—not calm, but exact. Like the slow, steady cut before the first incision.

His fingers flexed once, then stilled, steady as stone.

Across the room, George stood silent, eyes fixed on the monitor—pulse, brainwaves, magical flux—traced in faint, trembling lines of blue light.

The ward held its breath. No sound but the mechanical hum, steady and low, the pulse of containment wards holding all at bay.

Oscar lifted the vial, cool glass warming in his palm. He uncapped the syringe—smooth, practiced—drew the liquid with no pause, no tremor.

He moved to the bedside.

Lando’s arm, bare and warded, waited.

Oscar pressed the needle in—no hesitation, no ceremony—just the sharp, clean act of purpose.

The potion slipped into the bloodstream—a quiet ripple in the still air, the hum of magic shifting, realigning around the unseen tide.

George’s voice cut the silence, sharp:

“Fifteen seconds.”

Oscar nodded once. Not acknowledgment. Confirmation.

Time—precious, fleeting. The potion’s veil would thin, fail, and wards would roar back. He must enter before the gates slammed shut.

He looked down at runes glowing softly beneath his hands—ancient glyphs alive with silent magic, pulsing in response.

He placed both hands gently at Lando’s temples.

No words. No flourish.

Only contact.

“Legilimens.”

The word fell like a blade in still water.

The room did not shift—but his sight did—folding inward, edges blurring, sound muffling as if underwater.

Not pain. Not movement. Only displacement.

The threshold trembled beneath him.

And then—

He fell.

Not down, not out—

But deep, inward—

Past wards, past skin—

Into the endless loop.

Oscar’s eyes fluttered open — slow, distant, like surfacing from a deep well.

The distant roar of a train echoed, growing louder, vibrating through the haze.

A sharp metallic screech, the rush of wheels on rails.

Then, darkness pulled him under again

Chapter Text

Oscar blinks.

The world slides into place without warning, seamless and jarringly whole, as though it had been waiting for him behind his eyelids. It clicks together like glass dropped over a diorama—perfect, sterile, and wrong.

He’s sitting.

The bench beneath him is cold through his trousers, its ridged metal unforgiving and immovable. The air is thick in that way air gets before a storm—dense with something unspoken. Everything is still. Not quiet, not really. There’s a buzz overhead, low and constant, the fluorescent kind that burrows into your bones. It’s the only sound.

His hands are resting on his thighs. Palms cold. Fingers slightly curled.

Oscar doesn’t move for a long moment.

The platform stretches out on either side, endless in its symmetry. White tile. Glossy pillars. Yellow lighting. Pristine signage that reads North Greenwich in blue. Everything is polished to the point of falseness. The kind of clean that feels like erasure.

Eventually, he stands.

His shoes echo against the floor as he walks, louder than they should be. There are no paper cups, no discarded tickets. No posters on the walls. No help points. No adverts promising broadband speeds or musical revivals or drinks that make you younger.

Just… structure. Intent without detail.

He finds a staircase. There’s an arrow above it that says Exit, plain and clear.

Oscar climbs it.

Halfway up, he feels something cold crawl down his spine. He doesn’t know why.

At the top: the same bench.

No transition. No in-between. Just the platform again, the space identical to what it was before. Still empty. Still waiting. Still humming faintly with that sterile, electric stillness.

He tries again. A different staircase this time. A different direction. He walks faster. Longer. Circles a pillar. Cuts across the yellow line.

Always, the platform.

Always, the bench.

The third time it happens, he stops walking. Just stands there, breathing in the falseness. The loop sinks in like cold water through a crack in the floor.

This isn’t a dream. This isn’t a misstep in potion-brewing. This is a closed circuit.

A trap.

Then: the soft whine of brakes.

Oscar turns his head.

The train glides into view without urgency, as if it has all the time in the world. Chrome-sided and quiet, it pulls up to the edge of the platform with almost no sound. The doors open with a hiss.

Its destination glows across the top in steady golden letters: Stanmore.

No one’s on it.

He watches it wait.

It doesn’t lurch. Doesn’t beckon. It just remains. Like it knows he’s watching. Like it’s part of the pattern. Eventually, it pulls away again, smooth as breath. The doors close. The tunnel swallows it whole.

Not long after: another train. Same platform, opposite side.

It doesn’t stop.

It screams past in a silver blur, all momentum and no meaning. A flash of movement that feels more like memory than motion. Gone before Oscar can blink.

He frowns at it. But only briefly.

Whatever. Probably noise. Leftover dreamstuff from the subconscious. A background element without function. Not worth attention.

He looks back to the track where the other train was. The one that stopped. The one that waited.

His eyes narrow.

That one, he thinks.

That has to be it.

The only train that opens its doors. The only one that pauses for him. The only part of this place that seems to respond.

The exit must be on it.

He doesn’t say the thought aloud, but it settles anyway. Heavy and inevitable.

Get him on the train. That’s how we leave.

He studies the station map for the fifth time, hoping—irrationally, maybe superstitiously—that something will have shifted.

It hasn’t.

The lines remain sterile and impassive. A perfect tangle of geometry printed on laminated plastic. Jubilee Line. North Greenwich highlighted in bold. Stanmore far to the northwest, Stratford to the southeast. None of it means anything. The names might as well be invented.

He stares anyway. As if understanding the pattern might unlock a door.

A breath escapes him, thin and soundless. Even that feels muffled here.

The air is too still. The kind of stillness that suggests not peace but absence. The world holds its breath and doesn’t let go.

Then—

“Took you long enough to wake up.”

The voice doesn’t echo. It just arrives.

Oscar turns sharply.

He’s not sure what he expected—some half-formed projection, some shadowy residue of Lando—but instead it’s him, or close enough. Nineteen, maybe twenty. Still wiry, not yet filled out. Dressed in a set of McLaren Quidditch robes that look freshly issued—creased, overlarge at the shoulders, stitched through with bright orange threading that catches the station light too vividly. The broom in his hand is familiar. So is the way he holds it—not casually, but like it anchors him to something.

Oscar’s throat tightens, then cools.

Lando tilts his head slightly. He’s watching, but not with surprise. Like he’s been expecting him. Like he’s already seen this.

“You came out of the train, didn’t you? The one from Stratford,” Lando says, with the bluntness of someone too tired to be dramatic. He gestures vaguely toward the platform edge. “Walked right past me.”

Oscar blinks. “I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“No,” Oscar says again, firmer this time. “I woke up on the bench.”

Lando doesn’t argue, but he also doesn’t concede. Just looks at him for a moment longer—measuring something invisible—and then begins to walk forward. Slowly. Deliberately.

His footsteps are soft but distinct. The sound feels wrong in the air, like the space wasn’t designed to hold it.

When he stops, it’s still at a careful distance.

“What are you doing here, Piastri?”

Oscar exhales through his nose. “Helping you.”

A beat.

“Hopefully.”

Another.

“If you cooperate.”

The words hang in the artificial light, too crisp against the fuzzed edges of this place.

Lando’s mouth twitches—not quite a smile. Not quite anything. “You look older,” he says.

“I am.”

“Right.”

Another pause.

Oscar doesn’t move. “Do you remember what happened?”

Lando’s gaze drifts sideways. “I remember… flying,” he says, slow and halting, as if trying to speak in a language he hasn’t used in years. “It was a match day. I think.”

“And?”

“There was… something. I don’t know. Wind, maybe. I slipped?” His brow creases. “No. That’s not right.”

Oscar waits, but nothing else comes.

“That’s it?” he asks, clipped.

Lando shrugs, all loose discomfort. “I don’t know. It’s foggy.”

“You don’t remember falling?”

“No.”

“Medics on the pitch?”

Lando shakes his head. “I told you. I don’t remember.”

Oscar’s jaw clenches. The irritation flares and cools in the space of a breath. He looks at Lando again. Studies him. There’s no evasion in his face—just the distant, vague unease of someone genuinely trying to recall something that’s gone too soft around the edges.

He sighs.

“You’re in a coma.”

Lando doesn’t flinch. “Yeah. Figured.”

“How?”

A gesture, vague and a little tired—sweeping across the platform, the pristine tilework, the frozen signage, the stairs that loop like mirrored corridors in a dream.

“This place. It’s… too clean.”

Oscar nods once.

“I tried to leave,” Lando adds. “Didn’t work.”

“Same.”

Silence again. Not heavy, but not quite empty either. Something holds its breath between them.

Oscar’s eyes flick briefly toward the tunnel. A draft brushes past his sleeve—the familiar prelude to another arrival—but he doesn’t turn to look. Not yet.

Lando’s gaze drops. He scuffs his shoe against the tile, but it leaves no mark.

Oscar crosses his arms. “This version of you,” he says slowly, “thinks I’m still seventeen.”

Lando looks up again. “You’re not?”

“I’m twenty-three.”

“You don’t look it.”

Oscar huffs a dry breath. “You’re nineteen.”

Lando shrugs. “I guess.”

There’s a strange slowness to everything. Not lethargy. Not resistance. Just… delay. As if time exists here, but sideways.

Neither of them speaks for a long moment.

Eventually, Lando turns and looks at the platform again. He doesn’t ask where the train is going. He doesn’t ask how to get out.

He already knows it’s not that simple.

And Oscar doesn’t try to convince him yet.

Because neither of them trusts the other—not really.

Not yet.

Eventually, Lando breaks the stillness.

He turns—not slowly, not dramatically, just a tilt of the head and a glance over his shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “You’ll want to see it.”

Oscar doesn’t speak. He just falls into step behind him.

They walk.

The platform stretches out in long, perfect symmetry. The air is faintly metallic, humming with that fluorescent buzz—constant, toneless, just shy of silence. The tiles gleam too white, too even. Nothing is scuffed. Nothing is worn. The rails look freshly polished, the warning strip unmarred. It’s spotless in a way real stations never are. A kind of cleanliness that feels oppressive, like something trying too hard to appear normal.

Lando walks ahead, movements precise but faintly distant—like he’s used to being watched, or measured. He doesn’t look back to check if Oscar is following. He just assumes he is.

They pass the bench.

Then they pass it again.

“This platform loops,” Lando says, without turning. “Takes about fifty seconds to realise, if you’re walking. A little longer if you sit still.”

Oscar glances around. The same crack in the tile. The same hairline smudge on the signage. The map is identical, the same rippled plastic edge curling minutely in the corner. He files it all away.

“How long did it take you to figure that out?”

Lando shrugs, just one shoulder. “No idea. There’s no time here. Everything just stretches.”

They reach a stairwell. One of several.

“This one,” Lando says, gesturing to the steps, “goes nowhere. So does the one across. I’ve counted. Thirty-six steps up. Turn. Then forty-four. Then nothing. You’re back here.”

Oscar frowns, climbing a few steps, then pausing. “Feels like it should go somewhere.”

“They all do. That’s the point. They lie to you.” Lando says it without emotion. “Same number of stairs. Same tile patterns. I’ve marked them before. The marks vanish.”

“Elevators?”

“No buttons. No sound. Just glass and metal and reflections.”

They keep walking.

Lando leads him to the end of the platform, past the place where the advertisements should be. Instead, there’s only blank white light—backlit panels that glow too evenly, humming like old CRT screens. Empty space pretending to be full.

“There used to be posters,” Lando says, stopping in front of them. “At least—I think so. I remember colour. Letters. But I can’t remember what they said. They fade. Blank out.”

Oscar stares at the panels. The light feels warmer here, too warm. Almost feverish. He raises a hand and hovers it in front of the glow. It casts no shadow.

“Sometimes I think I almost read something,” Lando murmurs. “But the closer I get, the more it slips.”

Oscar makes no comment. Just notes it. Burned edges of forgotten meaning. He moves on.

They cross to the opposite end of the station. Lando gestures at the far tunnel—the one that yawns wide and black in the distance.

“This one,” he says, voice low, “never stops.”

Oscar peers into the dark. The tunnel mouth is too clean, too round, as though carved mathematically, not built. A breeze stirs occasionally from within it—dry, without smell. A ghost of motion.

Lando’s voice is matter-of-fact. “Train comes through. Every cycle. Doesn’t slow. Doesn’t open.”

“How do you know it’s a cycle?”

Lando glances up. “The lights.”

Oscar follows his gaze. The fluorescents overhead hum quietly, like before. Then—faintly—one flickers.

“Seven times,” Lando says. “Always seven. In a row. No other flickers count.”

Oscar watches. One flicker. Then another. His brow twitches slightly.

“The moment the seventh hits,” Lando says, “you feel it. The air changes. Pressure drops. Then that train—” he nods toward the dark tunnel—“blurs by. Always toward Stratford. Never Stanmore.”

Oscar files the name away.

“You’ve tried getting on it?”

“No.” Lando’s reply is immediate. Sharp-edged. “It doesn’t stop.”

“And the other train?”

Lando’s mouth tightens. “That one stops. Every seven flickers, it will appear, but the lights blink sporadically. Stanmore-bound. It comes from the opposite tunnel. It’s… quieter. Too quiet.”

Oscar watches him carefully. “You’ve ridden it?”

Lando’s fingers tighten slightly around the broom in his hand. “Not really. Sort of.”

Oscar tilts his head. “How did you get there?”

Lando exhales slowly. “I woke up on it.”

Oscar blinks.

Lando doesn’t meet his eyes. “I wasn’t on the platform. I was on the train. Sitting. Alone. Nothing out the windows. Not even tunnels. Just white.”

He swallows. “And then it stopped. Here. Doors opened. And I was—this age. Nineteen.”

Oscar says nothing. He feels something shift in his gut, something cold and unreadable.

“You didn’t try staying on?”

“I panicked. Thought maybe I missed my stop. Stepped out. Doors shut. And then—” he gestures vaguely, “this.”

Oscar absorbs the words in silence. Files it away. Waking up on a train. Not stepping onto one. Already nineteen. Already stuck. Nobody else here.

He glances at the platform again, then up at the lights. Four flickers. Five.

“You’ve been alone the whole time?”

“Yeah.”

“Until now?”

“Yeah.”

Oscar nods slowly. Says nothing.

The lights flicker again. Six. Seven.

A low rumble starts in the floor beneath them, the sound so deep it rattles in the bones. Air moves. Something enormous rushes through the tunnel behind them.

Oscar doesn’t turn.

Lando does. His expression stays blank, but his knuckles are white where they grip the broom.

“I keep thinking the timing might change,” Lando says quietly. “That maybe one day, it’ll stop.”

Oscar doesn’t reply.

He just memorises the moment. The way the air feels before the train comes. The way Lando stands, always just a little tense. The way the platform hums like a wound that never closes.

And the way everything resets—exactly—when the lights go still again.

They settle eventually on the bench nearest the tunnel mouth. The hum of the lights above has settled into a low, unbroken murmur—constant, electric, like the sound of the world holding its breath.

Oscar sits stiffly, arms crossed, spine taut. He doesn’t lean back. He barely blinks. Lando, by contrast, slouches like he’s lived a thousand hours on this platform already. His broom lies across his lap, fingers absently tracing the handle, the way someone might pet a sleeping animal without realising it.

Oscar speaks first. “You’re in a coma,” he says, tone blunt.

Lando doesn’t look at him. “Yeah. You mentioned.”

“No—I mean it. You’re really in St Mungo’s. You collapsed mid-air during the McLaren–Red Bull match. Right after that block on Verstappen’s Seeker.”

He pauses. Lando says nothing.

“We’re guessing delayed-impact curse. Something subtle. You dropped like a rock. Forty metres, no control.” Oscar draws in a breath. “Alex and George got you stabilised, but your mind was… gone. No injuries. No response. That’s when they called me.”

That earns him a glance. “So they handed me off to you.”

“I’m the best mindworker they have.”

Lando huffs. “Didn’t think they liked you.”

“The don't,” Oscar says dryly. “They trust me.”

Lando doesn’t argue. Just looks away again, eyes tracking nothing. “So this is what being cursed feels like, huh. A train station.”

Oscar shrugs one shoulder. “It’s your head. I just showed up.”

Lando glances around at the fluorescent haze, the stale stillness. “Figures mine would look like this—Jubilee Line doesn't seem as jubilant anymore.”

“It’s better than the void,” Oscar offers.

Lando lets out a short, dry breath. “Debatable.”

The silence stretches. Far down the tunnel, a gust of air whispers through, slow and rhythmic, like something breathing in the dark.

Oscar stares at the track. “You don’t remember anything?”

Lando tilts his head back against the tiled wall, eyes half-lidded. “I remember the crowd. That weird buzz when they start chanting. And then I was in the air. There was a flicker—someone too close to the broom tail. I blinked and… I was on the train. Already moving. Alone. Wearing this.”

He looks down at his robes, the faded McLaren crest stitched over his heart.

“You look nineteen,” Oscar notes.

“I feel it, too.” Lando nods. “That kind of empty you only feel when you’re nineteen and faking it.”

Oscar watches him. “And you got off at North Greenwich?”

“Yeah.” Lando’s mouth lifts at one side. “Panicked. Thought I’d been kidnapped. Or dead. Only ever woke up off the train. Never chose it.”

Oscar swallows. “And I walked past you?”

Lando’s eyes flick over. “Once. Straight off the train. Didn’t say anything.”

Oscar’s brows draw together. “I don’t remember.”

“You looked different,” Lando says. “Not older. Just… colder. Like someone who’d already decided I wasn’t worth the time.”

Oscar doesn’t respond.

Lando leans back again, letting his eyes close briefly. “Figured you were just part of it. The punishment. Like, here’s Oscar, cold as fuck, walking past. Dream logic.”

Oscar’s throat tightens. “It was the potion. The first time through, there’s always fog. I wouldn’t have—”

Lando shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”

But it does. The words sit between them, sharp and unyielding.

They lapse back into quiet. The buzz of the lights seems louder now, as if the platform’s grown emptier around them.

After a while, Lando shifts, glancing sideways. “They’re talking about it, aren’t they?”

Oscar hesitates. “Yeah. It’s everywhere. Press got wind by the hour mark. ‘Lando Norris collapses mid-match.’ Headlines. Speculation. Even Red Bull issued a statement.”

Lando closes his eyes. “Fuck.”

“You should’ve seen the fans,” Oscar adds. “Your face on every Prophet cover. Someone paid our manager off so your condition wouldn't get leaked. The media thinks you’re awake, no one knows your condition. Course, George still had to send a Patronus just to get the reporters off the window ledge.”

Lando exhales, sharp and humourless. “Classic.”

Oscar studies him. “You’re worried about them?”

“No,” Lando says, but too quickly.

Oscar raises a brow. “Sure.”

They sit there a while, just breathing. Somewhere, distant and warbled, the PA system clicks on and off. No announcement. Just the echo of one that might have existed once.

Then Lando says, quietly, “It’s weird, isn’t it. Us. Sitting here.”

Oscar looks over. “You think?”

“We were friends, once,” Lando says. “Sort of.”

Oscar’s face stiffens.

“We were,” Lando insists, softer. “Same grade. Even though you were younger. Always forget you were younger.”

“I fast-tracked,” Oscar mutters. “Doesn’t count.”

“You made it count.”

Oscar doesn’t answer.

There’s a beat of silence, then Lando chuckles, surprising even himself. “I remember the way you’d sit next to me in Charms and pretend not to copy my notes.”

Oscar scowls. “They were barely legible.”

“And you used to roll your eyes when I talked about flying, but I could tell you liked it. The way you listened.”

Oscar doesn’t respond. Not out loud. But his knee brushes against Lando’s—just barely—and doesn’t move away.

Lando hums, a little amused, a little sad. “Feels like back then.”

Oscar stares at the wall opposite, jaw tight. “It’s not.”

Lando watches him for a long second. “No,” he agrees. “It’s not.”

The warmth fades, replaced by a thin thread of tension that snakes back into the air.

Oscar doesn’t look at him. “We stopped talking for a reason.”

“Yeah,” Lando says, too quickly. “We did.”

He says nothing else.

Oscar doesn’t press. He thinks he knows—but it’s half-memory, half-feeling, buried beneath years of silence and things never said.

Eventually, Lando breathes out, slow and tired. “So. What now?”

Oscar leans back against the wall. “We wait.”

“For what?”

“The next train. We're going to Stanmore.”

Lando glances up. “You think it’ll be different?”

Oscar doesn’t answer.

He watches the lights overhead.

Waiting.

Seven flickers. Then maybe something new.

Or maybe nothing at all.

A low vibration thrums up through the floor.

Oscar lifts his head.

The overhead lights blink—five, six, seven times—then shudder like a skipped heartbeat. The air turns electric. Charged with something quiet and cold.

Lando stills.

Then the tunnel exhales.

A gust of wind barrels through, dry and dusty, carrying with it a sound like static—thin music warped into unrecognisable notes. Faint, broken, almost melodic. Almost real.

And then the train appears.

It doesn’t arrive so much as unfold into view, peeling itself out of shadow. It slides in like water folding over itself. Sleek. Metallic. Windows too glossy to see through. No destination listed. No colour-coded stripe. Just silver.

The doors open with a sigh.

No chime. No announcement. Just silence, stretched and waiting.

Oscar stands.

Lando doesn’t.

The train lingers, patient. Like it knows. Like it’s been here before.

Oscar looks down at him. “You coming?”

Lando stares past him at the open doors. His face is carefully blank. “Where does it go?”

Oscar hesitates. “Stanmore, I think.”

Lando lets out a soft breath—half-laugh, half-exhale. “Of course it does.”

Oscar’s brow furrows. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Silence folds between them. Lando’s hand grips the edge of the bench, knuckles bloodless.

“I don’t want to get on,” he says eventually.

Oscar crouches a little. “Why?”

“Because I know how this goes.” Lando’s voice is calm. But there’s something too even about it, like it’s been practiced. “Things like this always go bad. I try, and then it breaks, and then I end up worse than before.”

Oscar studies him. “You haven’t tried.”

Lando doesn’t look at him. “You don’t know that.”

“I kind of do,” Oscar says. “You were twenty-five when it happened. On the pitch. In a new uniform. You fell midair.”

That lands heavy. Lando doesn’t blink.

Oscar presses on. “You woke up here—nineteen, in those old robes. I think the curse pulled you into this.”

He gestures at the platform. The station. The flickering lights and warped echoes of reality.

“Maybe this is a side effect. Maybe the coma’s just the surface.”

Lando finally glances at him. “So what—you want me to get on and hope it takes me somewhere better?”

“I want to see if it takes you anywhere at all.”

Lando’s mouth presses into a line. “And if it doesn’t?”

Oscar shrugs. “Then we figure it out. But this—” he gestures at the empty platform, the worn tiles and cycling silence “—this isn’t working either.”

Lando doesn’t answer.

His jaw works, like he wants to say something but can’t get it past his teeth.

Then—

“You ever feel like you’re missing something you never had?” he says suddenly.

Oscar blinks. “What?”

“I don’t know,” Lando mutters. “It’s like—I’ve been waiting. But I don’t know what for. And I’m tired of being wrong.”

His hand shifts slightly. Not reaching. Not quite.

Oscar steps forward anyway.

“You’re not wrong,” he says, quiet.

Lando lets out a breath. Doesn’t meet his eyes.

But he stands.

He doesn’t take Oscar’s hand. Just moves toward the edge, shoulders drawn tight like he’s bracing for impact.

The train waits.

They step on together.

The doors seal shut with a hush.

Inside, the lights are low. The seats are empty—but the glass reflects motion where there is none. Flickers of figures that don’t exist. The kind of shapes you might dream about and forget by morning.

Lando grabs the metal pole beside the door.

Oscar stays close.

And then—

The train jolts.

It begins to move.

Oscar’s stomach pitches slightly as the platform slips away, swallowed into the dark.

Outside, the sign glides past in a blur:

NORTH GREENWICH → CANARY WHARF

The train moves towards Stanmore.

Oscar exhales. “Okay. That’s something.”

Lando’s voice is a murmur. “That’s not the way I came.”

Oscar nods. “Let’s see where it goes.”

The train hums louder. Lights streak across the windows. Shadows shift and ripple in the glass.

Lando doesn’t let go of the rail.

And then—

The lights flicker five, six, seven times—

And Oscar vanishes.

It hits him like a crash.

A light. A sound. A pressure that doesn’t belong in bone.

Oscar’s eyes snap open—

—and he’s not on the train anymore.

He’s in the ward. Horizontal. Brightness everywhere. Cold against his skin.

He tries to breathe and his lungs seize up.

“Oscar—” George’s voice, somewhere above him. Alarmed. “He’s back—Alex, he’s back—”

There’s a hand on his chest, another on his wrist, then too many hands, or maybe none at all. The world tilts and lurches sideways. The ceiling blurs.

“Oscar,” someone says again—closer, firmer. “Can you hear me?”

His heart is sprinting.

Too fast.

He tries to answer but nothing works. His throat’s dry. There’s a hum behind his ears, like the train followed him out. Like it’s still moving.

His fingers twitch. He tries to ground himself—linen, pressure, voice—but everything feels just off. His body’s wrong. Too loud. Too slow.

He turns his head and throws up over the side of the cot.

Someone swears softly. A hand steadies his shoulder.

“Easy,” George murmurs, lowering him gently. “You’re alright. You’re alright.”

“I—I didn’t do anything—” Oscar gasps, not sure who he’s talking to. “He got on. He got on and then—”

His voice breaks.

“Pulse is erratic,” Alex says somewhere to the left. He's already casting. “Temp’s climbing—”

Oscar’s limbs jerk once, then go loose.

George catches him.

“Oscar—?”

But it’s too much. The room folds in on itself. The sounds bleed together.

And then, he’s gone.

Chapter Text

There’s a moment—small and treacherous—where Oscar doesn’t know if he’s awake or still in Lando’s mind.

The ceiling above him is too white, too smooth. The air is too still. There’s no vibrating platform beneath his spine, no dull metallic groan of a train lurking in the dark.

Just quiet.

And a couch.

And a blanket.

His pulse lurches.

Oscar bolts upright, breath hitching sharply in his chest. Magic flares at his fingertips before he can stop it, sharp and flickering—nearly shapeless. The sudden movement sends the room teetering sideways. His vision smears, goes pale at the edges.

Something’s wrong. Too warm. Too soft. Too still.

He twists, trying to get his bearings, but it feels like the floor’s missing beneath him—like he’s still suspended in some in-between space, too far from shore to swim.

A shadow moves in the doorway.

“Oscar—easy—”

The voice is low and steady. Familiar.

George.

In two long strides, he crosses the room. Then he’s crouching by the couch, palms out like Oscar is some skittish animal.

“You’re alright,” George says gently. “You’re okay. You’re safe.”

That word—safe—lands wrong.

Nothing about this feels safe.

Oscar’s breath comes fast and shallow. His hands shake under the blanket, curling in against his ribs like he can anchor something there. The blanket’s suddenly too heavy, too much—constricting instead of comforting. His heart hammers like it’s trying to outrun whatever this is.

He blinks hard. The room sharpens, piece by piece.

A living room. Domestic, cluttered in a warm sort of way. Honeyed wood floors, thick wool rug, a few mismatched cushions tossed across the furniture. The air smells faintly of peppermint and tea tree oil—healing salves and homemade cleaner. Photos line the mantle: some still, some enchanted. In one, George and Alex grin in the snow, a snowball frozen mid-air. In another, they’re blurry with motion, dancing. A broom leans casually near the door, and there’s a teacup on the windowsill with something green still unfurling in it.

This isn’t St Mungo’s.

This isn’t the train station.

It’s too warm. Too human.

Too real.

He turns sharply, throat dry. “Where—?”

“Home,” says another voice.

Oscar turns. Alex stands just outside the kitchen archway, still in sweatpants and a hoodie that’s clearly not his. His hair is damp, curling slightly at the edges, and he’s holding a steaming mug in both hands.

“You were out for nearly two hours,” Alex says. His voice is casual, but the tension around his mouth betrays him. “We didn’t want to leave you in Mungo’s—not until we were sure you were stable. So. Welcome to our couch.”

Oscar blinks at him, then George, then the blanket still draped over his legs like it belongs there.

Everything here is soft. The lighting is golden and low. There’s music playing quietly in the background—a Muggle song about something called a Pink Pony Club. A kettle whistles faintly in the kitchen, then clicks off. Somewhere behind it all, the protective hum of household wards pulses like a heartbeat.

Oscar is still cold.

He doesn’t remember getting here.

He doesn’t remember leaving.

He drags in a slow breath. “I didn’t ask for that.”

“No,” George says. “But we didn’t exactly ask if you wanted to stop breathing, either.”

Oscar goes still.

The phrase echoes, sharp and unspoken: stop breathing.

Alex shoots George a look—not angry, just quiet and reproachful.

He steps forward and offers the mug. “Here. Drink.”

Oscar takes it automatically. The heat of the cup seeps into his fingers, grounding but too present. It’s chamomile, layered with something sharper—clove, maybe. Valerian. Calming draught components. A healer’s mix, familiar from long nights in the ward.

He doesn’t drink.

Alex gestures toward the armchair and sinks into it. “Do you remember what happened?”

Oscar stares into the mug. “I got kicked out.”

“Yeah,” George says, softer now. “Pretty violently. You woke up briefly, and then were unresponsive. That’s why we… apparated you here.”

Oscar’s mouth tastes like ash.

There’s a silence that feels like it’s pressing on his skin. He can sense the weight in the room—the things they’re choosing not to say. The way George keeps watching him out of the corner of his eye, as though expecting him to vanish. The low, alert thrum of concern just beneath Alex’s calm voice.

Oscar isn’t stupid.

He remembers the train. Lando stepping on. The platform slipping away.

And then—

The jolt.

The falling.

His hand touches his sternum before he realises it’s moved.

George notices.

So does Alex.

They don’t say anything.

Oscar sets the mug down on the coffee table, careful and precise. “Thanks,” he says stiffly, rising. “But I should go.”

George straightens too. “Oscar—”

“You’ve done enough. Really. I’m fine.” He tugs his sleeves down, scanning for his wand, already halfway to the door.

Alex doesn’t raise his voice. “Sit down.”

Oscar blinks.

Alex doesn’t sound angry. Just steady. Grounded in a way Oscar currently isn’t.

“You’re not fine,” Alex continues, as if it’s a plain fact. “And we’re not about to let you walk out of here after what happened. So sit.”

There’s no pressure. Just… certainty.

Oscar wavers.

Then sits.

Not because he wants to.

Because it’s easier than resisting the weight of their worry.

The couch dips under him again. The blanket—soft and stupidly heavy—slips back into place over his knees.

He stares down at his hands.

They’re still trembling.

Everything in this flat feels like it belongs to someone else’s life. Someone who hangs photos on their wall. Who keeps plants alive and tea warm. Who lives with someone they love and doesn’t drown in it.

Oscar breathes shallowly.

He feels like a stranger in his own body.

And still—somehow—the room stays warm.

The flat slips into a hush again, like it’s holding its breath around him.

Oscar doesn’t move. The mug in his hands has gone lukewarm, but he still hasn’t touched it. Across from him, Alex watches carefully, as if he’s waiting for something to break—but not in a cruel way. More like he’s done this before.

Oscar hates that. That they’ve both seen him like this now. Fractured. Weak.

George returns a few moments later, balancing two bowls in his hands and levitating a third behind him.

“I hope you still eat,” he says lightly, setting one on the coffee table in front of Oscar. “Otherwise this’ll be embarrassing.”

It’s some kind of stew—rich, thick, heavy with root vegetables and seasoned rice. It smells faintly of ginger and peppercorn, a comfort potion disguised as dinner.

Oscar blinks at it.

“We made extra,” Alex says, quieter now. “In case you woke up hungry.”

“I’m not,” Oscar mutters, but his stomach betrays him with a low, traitorous growl.

George smiles. “Sure you’re not.”

They eat in silence for a few minutes, the kind that doesn’t ask for conversation. The kind that only happens between people who’ve sat beside death enough times to know when not to push.

Oscar forces a few mouthfuls down. His body registers the food before his mind does—calming slightly, breath slowing, the taste anchoring him in the present.

He doesn’t thank them. Not out loud. But he eats.

George and Alex don’t comment.

Halfway through the bowl, Oscar sets his spoon down. “I flatlined.”

Alex looks up slowly. George doesn’t move.

Oscar continues, voice flat. “You’re not saying it, but you don’t need to. I felt it. Before I woke the first time. It was like the air tore. Like I’d been ripped back.”

Neither of them speak.

“You brought me here,” he says. “Not because it was easier. But because it was urgent.”

Still, no answer.

Oscar nods once. “Fine.”

George’s knuckles tighten around his bowl. “We weren’t going to let you die,” he says finally, low. “Even if we had to drag you out.”

Alex adds, “You wouldn’t wake up. We had to try something.”

Oscar leans back. The couch creaks under him. “I wasn’t supposed to be there that long.”

“But you were,” Alex says gently. “And you will be again. That’s how this works, right?”

Oscar says nothing.

Alex finishes his food, then glances toward the corridor. “There’s a spare room made up, if you want it. Or the couch again. Doesn’t matter.”

“I’m not staying.”

“You should.”

Oscar shakes his head. “I’m not your responsibility.”

“No,” George says. “You’re not.”

Alex stands, gathering the empty bowls. “But we care anyway.”

He leaves Oscar with that, padding quietly into the kitchen. The wards hum again—softer now, almost like they’re settling in for the night.

George doesn’t press. Just shifts slightly closer, not enough to touch, but enough to be present.

Eventually, Oscar exhales. “I’ll stay.”

George says nothing. Just nods.

Oscar doesn’t move for a long while after that. But eventually, he sinks into the couch, arms crossed, head tilted back.

The flat is warm. The food sits heavy and grounding in his stomach. Somewhere behind him, the Muggle song loops back again—soft beats, synth shimmer.

He closes his eyes.

Oscar dreams in loops.

Footsteps echo on concrete, rhythmic and off-beat. A yellow line blurs beneath him. Doors slide open and shut with a hiss, but the trains never stop moving.

Somewhere above it all: the crackle of a station PA, distorted and indistinct.

This train… terminates at… —more.

Oscar turns sharply.

Lando stands across the platform, older now—twenty-something, worn around the edges. He doesn’t look surprised to see him.

“You came out of the train, didn’t you?” Lando says. Voice low, unreadable. “The one from Stratford.”

Oscar’s breath catches.

But before he can answer, the platform drops out from under them.

He wakes with a violent gasp.

The air clings to his skin, warm and thick. The blanket tangled around his waist feels suffocating, suddenly too much. Sweat slicks the nape of his neck. His hand shoots out before he’s fully conscious, a half-formed protective spell trembling on his tongue. The wards around the flat pulse in response—tense, alert.

He blinks against the dark.

No platform. No tunnels. No flickering overhead lights. Just the soft outlines of George and Alex’s living room—muted lamp glow from the corridor, a quiet hum in the walls, the scent of dried tea leaves and linen detergent.

He isn’t in the mindscape.

But his heart doesn’t know that.

Neither do his lungs, which drag in ragged, too-sharp breaths. His pulse hammers against the inside of his skull. He’s dizzy. Half-collapsed back against the armrest, he stares at nothing and sees too much.

Lando’s voice echoes like a bell tolling from the back of his skull.

You came out of the train, didn’t you? The one from Stratford.

Oscar presses the heel of his palm to his sternum.

It doesn’t help.

He knows better than to try to sleep again. He can already feel the dream circling. The long platform. The sliding doors. Lando stepping forward with that look on his face—like he knew something Oscar didn’t.

Something final.

He needs to think. Needs to be useful. Needs to not fall apart.

He throws the blanket off, swings his legs down. The hardwood floor is cool against his feet. His wand lies on the coffee table nearby, within reach. His fingers curl around it like muscle memory.

And then he breathes.

And then he straightens his spine.

And then he begins.

Occlumency is not peace. It’s not numbness, or comfort, or quiet.

It’s control. Brutal and brilliant.

And Oscar is good at it.

Where in the waking world he drifts—detached, dulled, buried under routine—in this magic he sharpens. Focus narrows. Breath deepens. Power wakes.

He draws inward, one layer at a time, folding himself down to something tight and precise. With each breath, his thoughts fall into formation. With each whispered incantation, he builds. Compartmentalizes. Contains.

The chaos of memory is reduced to motion: his wand tracing crisp, invisible arcs through the air, symbols and locks and tether points. Threads of light begin to shimmer around him—magic made visible, delicate as wire and just as unforgiving.

The couch beneath him creaks as the pressure shifts. The light warps. Dust on the mantle begins to swirl, dancing in the charge.

He boxes his mind.

Lando, laughing on the lawn in sixth year—filed away.

Lando, in seventh grade. avoiding his eyes in the hospital wing—sealed.

Lando, older, haunted, heading toward the train doors—pushed deeper.

The voice—

This train terminates at—

Oscar flinches. Just once. A flicker.

The thread of magic in his wand hand shudders, then thickens. A visible pulse ripples across the air, distorting the space around him like heat on asphalt. One of the picture frames on the shelf tips sideways.

He pulls tighter.

He’s no longer sitting so much as anchored. Knees braced, spine tall, wand steady in his hand. The room hums around him, pressed beneath the weight of his will.

In this—this sharp, bright stillness—he is more alive than anyone’s seen him in months. Gone is the subdued, tired-eyed version of himself that shuffles between patients and paperwork. Here, he burns.

Here, he feels everything—then locks it away.

One thought at a time.

One flame extinguished. One echo silenced.

He loses track of how long it lasts. Ten minutes, thirty, more. Time has no place here.

But his body does.

It’s tired. Slipping.

He doesn’t notice the tremble in his wand hand at first. Doesn’t notice the drag in his breath. He presses on. There’s still more to do. Still more to tame.

Then—

A sound.

Soft, deliberate footsteps crossing the hall. A creak in the doorway.

And a voice. Low, cautious, and unmistakable:

“…Oscar?”

He falters.

His mind stutters, just enough.

One of the memory boxes cracks open.

And out it floods:

The train platform, silent and endless. Lando standing in the glow of flickering lights. The gleam of the departing train’s windows reflected in his eyes.

“You came out of the train, didn’t you? The one from Stratford.”

Oscar’s breath punches out of him. The magic shudders.

His wand hand drops. The golden threads unravel. The room sways.

He barely hears the next footstep. But he feels it—

A grounding presence, drawing nearer.

Magic bleeding at the edges. The couch beneath him vibrating faintly with leftover charge. The wards holding on, barely.

And behind it all, closer now—

"Oscar?”

He flinches. His eyes snap open, breath stuttering.

The world tilts.

Magic bleeds out of him in frayed threads, no longer bound, no longer clean. The couch shudders beneath him; the edges of the room pulse faintly, warped by the spillover. His wand slips in his grip.

Then—gentle pressure.

Not on him. Never that. But near.

Alex crouches a pace away, hands loose at his sides, posture open like he’s dealing with a skittish creature.

Oscar doesn’t speak.

His chest rises and falls, too fast. His eyes are wide. He looks younger, for a moment—sharper, frayed at the edges, stripped of all that tired restraint he usually wears like armour.

“I’m fine,” he says eventually, voice low and flat. He tries to sit straighter. His knees wobble. “Just practicing.”

Alex doesn’t dignify that with a response.

He surveys the room once—pictures askew, lamplight flickering, one of the kitchen cabinet doors cracked open from a burst of pressure—and then exhales through his nose.

“Your practicing almost took down our bloody anti-fire charms.”

Oscar doesn’t answer. He just grips his wand tighter, knuckles whitening.

Alex shifts forward slightly. “You’re not alright.”

“I’m managing.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Alex says. There’s no sarcasm, only quiet concern. “You look like you’re two seconds from collapsing.”

“I wasn’t—” Oscar starts, then cuts himself off. The truth hangs too heavy. He was spiraling. Not out of control, not yet—but too close. And tired. Merlin, he’s so tired.

Alex eases into a seated position beside the couch, not touching, just… there.

“Don’t do that alone,” he says softly. “You don’t have to.”

Oscar’s laugh is barely audible. “I’ve always done it alone.”

“Well,” Alex shrugs, “now you don’t.”

He says it like a fact. Not an invitation. Not a suggestion. Just something true. Something permanent.

Oscar’s eyelids flutter, and for a moment it seems like he might argue. But then the floor seems to pitch beneath him again, and his wand dips—

Alex catches it before it can hit the carpet.

He holds it out. Doesn’t hand it back yet.

“If you’re going to keep going,” he says, voice quiet, steady, “I’m staying.”

Oscar’s eyes narrow. “Why?”

Alex shrugs again. “Two hands are better than one.”

Oscar doesn’t know what to say to that.

He doesn’t want this. Doesn’t need this.

But the thrum of magic still crackles under his skin, half-contained. His limbs are trembling. He could try again alone—but he’s exhausted, and worse, he knows Alex is right.

So he nods. Once.

Alex doesn’t smile. Doesn’t make it a moment.

He simply reaches out, brushes two fingers lightly against Oscar’s knee—an anchor, not an intrusion—and settles back into position.

“Start from the top,” he murmurs. “I’ve got you.”

And Oscar, against his better judgment, begins again.

It takes a while before Oscar speaks. Before he even moves.

His wand is already in his hand. He doesn’t remember picking it up. His legs are folded tight beneath him, shoulders braced against the quiet, breath shallow at first, then deeper. Like he’s rehearsing being calm.

Alex is still beside him. Solid, silent, patient in that maddening way of his.

Oscar exhales. Closes his eyes.

And begins.

Magic flickers at the edges of his skin before it reaches the wand—so much of it, too much of it, pulled raw from somewhere too deep to name. But he’s not afraid of it. This part of him isn’t something he questions. It just is. It knows what to do.

So does he.

He doesn’t visualise boxes, or shelves, or vaults. He doesn’t need to. It’s more intuitive than that. The way you know where your hands are in the dark.

The memories come fast. He lets them.

Lando on a broom, laughing into the wind, not quite seventeen.

Lando, years older, staring right through him on a train platform where time didn’t work.

The words that stuck like ash in his lungs—

You came out of the train, didn’t you? The one from Stratford.

Oscar doesn’t shove anything down. Doesn’t fight.

He just… shifts it. Reaches inward with magic and places each thing where it won’t scream. Not gone. Never gone. Just quiet. Organised. Slotted into corners of his mind that don’t throb when touched. He can feel them, even now. Still humming. Still there. But not loose anymore.

His breathing evens out. His spine stays taut. The wand-tip glows soft and white in the dark like a star barely seen.

Alex doesn’t interfere. Just stays close, one hand braced against the side of Oscar’s shin, weightless but steady. A tether. A reminder.

Oscar’s magic swells again—louder this time, sharper. The edges of a memory flare, fighting to rise:

Lando on the platform, voice so clear it might’ve been real.

Stanmore, he nearly says.

Oscar flinches before the word can land.

He grips the wand tighter. Refocuses. That one won’t go quietly—but he doesn’t let it bloom. He wraps it in silence and lets it drift, places it somewhere deeper, somewhere farther from the surface.

Alex leans in when he falters. Doesn’t say much—just breathes slow, like a metronome, something to mirror. And Oscar, half-lit by magic and fury and grief he hasn’t named, doesn’t thank him. But he doesn’t pull away either.

More memories flicker up. Ones he hadn’t expected.

Letters never sent. Hallways he’s walked too many times. Voices—his mother’s, Lando’s, his own.

He doesn’t fight them. Just moves them. Sorts them. Leaves them filed and labelled in the architecture of his mind that no one else can see.

And when the storm of it passes, when the magic finally dulls to a low, buzzing hum across his skin, Oscar breathes out like it’s the first real breath he’s taken all day.

His wand lowers slowly. His shoulders slump. He’s drained, but clear. Like everything inside him has been set in order—not fixed, not healed, but arranged.

Alex watches him carefully. Doesn’t speak yet. Just keeps his hand where it is, warm through the blanket.

“I’m okay,” Oscar says eventually. His voice is hoarse. “For now.”

He doesn’t open his eyes.

They sit in silence a while longer, the wards pulsing gently around them, the night quiet again at last.

Oscar doesn’t move. He just leans, very slightly, toward where Alex sits. Not enough to ask for anything.

Just enough to know he’s not alone.

Eventually, the hum of magic fades.

Oscar’s hand loosens around his wand, which slips from his fingers and lands softly against the couch cushion. His head tilts slightly to one side, the weight of exhaustion finally catching up. The sharp line of his spine eases, like he’s forgetting to hold himself together.

Alex watches his breathing even out. The tension in his jaw has gone slack; his brow, unknotted.

He reaches for the blanket—still bunched behind Oscar’s back—and pulls it gently around his shoulders. Oscar doesn’t react much, but when the fabric settles, he shifts instinctively toward the warmth.

Alex tucks it around him a little tighter. Carefully brushes back a stray curl that’s stuck to Oscar’s damp temple. The boy’s skin is still faintly flushed from the magic, but cooling.

“You did good,” he murmurs, more to the room than to Oscar. “Get some rest.”

The words barely reach him. Oscar’s already drifting.

The air has stilled again, soft as it was before. No more flickering, no more sharp static hanging in the air. Just the low pulse of the wards in the walls and the faint whisper of the city night outside.

Alex leans back against the armrest and lets his own eyes fall closed for a moment.

Beside him, Oscar breathes slow and steady, blanketed and safe, the night finally quiet around them.

Oscar wakes up to the smell of toasted bread and something sweet frying in butter.

For a moment, his body forgets the tension of the night before. There’s warmth across his back and the soft weight of a blanket still clinging to one shoulder. The flat is quiet, sunlight edging in through the blinds, fractured and gold.

He blinks, memory slow to catch up.

The couch. The magic. Alex’s hand on his shoulder.

The way he nearly—

Oscar sits up. Immediately. Breath sharp.

He’s not alone.

Alex is standing by the stove, barefoot and rumpled, flipping something in a pan. George is at the kitchen table, hair still sleep-mussed, reading a folded copy of the Prophet with one hand and nursing a coffee with the other.

The domesticity of it hits like a punch to the chest.

He stands too fast. The blanket slips off.

George looks up. “Morning.”

Oscar gives a short nod.

Alex glances over his shoulder, smile small but genuine. “You slept through the storm.”

Oscar doesn’t answer. He adjusts his shirt—still wrinkled from the day before—and picks up his wand from where it sits on the coffee table, as if he can fold the previous night away with enough motion.

George sets his mug down. “Alex told me what happened. Or… what he could piece together.”

Oscar stiffens. “There’s nothing to—”

“You nearly burned the wards down,” George says, tone mild. “There’s something.”

Silence stretches between them.

George’s voice is quieter now. “Oscar.”

He doesn’t say anything else. Doesn’t need to.

Oscar looks away. His jaw ticks.

It’s Alex who breaks the quiet, setting a plate of food on the table. “Eat first.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Don’t care. Sit down.”

Something in Alex’s voice brooks no argument. It isn’t forceful, but steady—calm in that maddeningly capable way that Oscar’s come to associate with him. Alex is always like this. Grounded. Gentle. Unshakably decent.

Oscar sits, if only because standing makes him feel even more out of place.

George passes him a glass of water. Their fingers don’t touch.

No one says anything for a minute. The only sound is the scrape of forks and the quiet flutter of a page being turned.

Oscar eats mechanically. Bread. Egg. Something sweet he doesn’t name. It fills the space in his mouth, but not the one in his chest.

George finally speaks again. “Do you want to talk about what you saw?”

“No,” Oscar says flatly.

George exhales through his nose. “Alright.”

“But you need to,” Alex says. Still not unkind. Just matter-of-fact. “We can’t make progress if you’re the only one with information.”

Oscar sets his fork down. “There’s no progress to be made. He’s not responding.”

“Still,” George says. “He’s alive?”

Oscar doesn’t answer for a moment. Then: “Yes.”

That word shifts the room slightly. Alex’s hand pauses, hovering over the rim of his cup. George leans back in his chair, expression unreadable.

Oscar stares at the table.

Alex prompts, “What did you see?”

He hesitates.

How do you explain a train station that loops in on itself? A boy stuck at nineteen, surrounded by the hum of something that doesn’t belong to time or place? The way a voice crackled over the PA system, familiar and fragmented?

“I don’t know,” he says eventually.

“That’s not helpful,” George replies, but not harshly.

“I know.”

There’s another pause.

Oscar scrubs a hand over his face. “It’s a loop. A platform, a train, and him. That’s it.”

“Did he recognise you?” Alex asks.

A beat.

“Yes,” Oscar says. “He remembered me.”

He doesn’t mention the way Lando had looked at him—like he’d been expecting someone else.

George is watching him carefully now. “You’re not telling us something.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Oscar.”

He hates the way his name sounds in George’s voice—gentle, familiar, disappointed.

“I don’t care about him,” Oscar says bluntly. “I just want to get this done.”

Alex doesn’t look surprised. George, though—his jaw tightens slightly. His fingers curl around his mug like they’re remembering something.

“You cared once,” George says.

“Well, I don’t now.”

Silence falls again. Tighter this time.

Alex speaks first. “That potion you made. The one you used to get into his mind.”

“What about it?”

“It nearly overloaded your system.”

Oscar shrugs. “I made it quickly. It worked.”

“Barely,” George cuts in. “You almost flatlined.”

“And I didn’t.”

“You might next time.”

Alex’s voice is low. “It’s unstable. You know it is.”

Oscar doesn’t deny it. “I didn’t have time to stabilise it. He was going under fast. I improvised.”

“Well,” Alex says, standing. “Now you have time.”

He moves to a drawer and pulls out a notebook, flicking it open and grabbing a pen. “I want you to walk me through everything you used. Every ingredient. Every process.”

“Fine.”

“We’ll improve it. Stabilise it properly. I can source better flora—maybe something from the Eastern Marsh range, something with tethering properties. I’ve got contacts at the Emporium who can help.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I want to,” Alex says, sharp this time. “If you go back in, I’m not letting you do it with something half-brewed out of adrenaline and grief.”

Oscar scowls but doesn’t argue. He knows Alex is right.

George stands now too, slower. “Once the potion’s ready, we’ll go into the Pensieve together. You show us what you saw. We work from there.”

Oscar nods.

He still doesn’t know how to explain the trains. The way Lando had said, You came out of the one from Stratford, didn’t you? As if it meant something.

But there’s time to figure that out.

He glances up, just briefly.

George and Alex are standing side by side, speaking in low voices about stabilising agents and dosage timing. Their shoulders brush. George looks at Alex the way people don’t when they think anyone’s watching.

Oscar looks away again. Down at the empty plate.

He doesn’t say it aloud, but the thought lodges sharp behind his ribs:

He doesn’t belong here.

Not in this flat. Not in this quiet intimacy. Not in this borrowed sense of purpose.

He’s just here to do the job.

And then—hopefully—never come back.

Mid-morning. The flat is silent.

Not quiet—silent. The kind of silence that comes not from absence but aftermath. The kind that feels earned. Fabricated. Like the space has been cleared of all movement, all noise, all warmth. Sunlight bleeds through the gauze curtains, overexposed and useless, catching dust in the air but failing to warm the floor. No wind. No birds. No city.

Just the soft, sickly creak of old floorboards under bare feet.

Oscar sits at the far end of the kitchen table. Not quite slouched. Not quite upright. One wrist dangles slightly over the chair’s arm. His fingers twitch, curl, twitch again. On the table before him: a cauldron. Not the one he's used to—that was at St. Mungo’s—but similar. Enough to hold the memory. He’s half-cleaned it out of habit, though the effort is half-hearted at best. The interior is smeared with a thin film of silver-grey residue, clinging like frost to the metal, dull where it should shine. He hasn’t finished the job. He won’t.

The flat is otherwise empty.

George left earlier that morning—early, without fanfare—to take Oscar’s place at the hospital. Quiet trade. No questions. No scolding. Just a glance exchanged in the hallway and a nod that meant: We’re doing this for now.

Across from him, Alex places a mug of black coffee onto a coaster. The ceramic clinks—soft, deliberate. His sleeves are rolled up. His wand rests on the table beside him, parallel to his fingers.

He doesn’t sit.

He just leans, weight on his forearms, eyes tracing the edge of Oscar’s expression like he’s looking for cracks in concrete.

There’s no conversation for a while.

Then, finally—dryly—Alex says, “You want to tell me what you actually put in it?”

Oscar blinks slowly. His voice, when it comes, is flat. Distant.

“Valerian root. Essence of mooncalf. Nightshade.”

The ingredients hang in the air between them, too heavy for how softly they were spoken. They settle like sediment.

Alex’s mouth ticks upward—not a smile. Something thinner.

“No binder?”

Oscar’s tone doesn’t shift. “Didn’t have time.”

“That wasn’t rhetorical.”

“I still didn’t have time.”

Alex exhales, slow and long. He stares past Oscar at the far wall, as if seeing through it.

“You used nightshade without a tether.”

“I diluted it. And I used a physical tether instead.”

“Not enough.”

Oscar says nothing. His hand moves slightly, as if to reach for something, then stops.

“You weren’t even brewing in the right environment,” Alex says. “No arithmantic grid. No temperature stabilisation. You didn’t temper it between stages.”

“I know.”

“Did you even stir it clockwise?”

Oscar’s lips press together. “Only once.”

Alex lets out a quiet, sharp laugh—humourless.

“You’re lucky you didn’t collapse halfway in,” he says.

“I almost did.”

A pause.

Alex’s voice lowers. “Oscar, you nearly didn’t come back.”

Oscar looks away. Not at the cauldron—past it. To the sink. To the window. To anywhere else.

“But I did.”

The words are barely a whisper. Not relief. Not defiance. Just fact.

Alex watches him for a beat. Then, wordlessly, he moves to the drawer near the oven. Pulls out a roll of parchment. A quill. Ink already waiting, uncapped.

He returns to the table, sets them down in front of himself, and begins to write.

Oscar doesn’t ask what he’s doing.

“You used volatile potionwork,” Alex says, still writing. “So we need volatile stabilisers. Leechmoss, probably. Fluxroot if it hasn’t bloomed out of phase. Thestral resin—nonreactive, but will bind it down.”

He pauses, chews briefly on the inside of his cheek.

“Might need bloodflax. Depends on the mooncalf extraction. Was it fresh?”

Oscar nods once.

Alex scribbles that down too. The parchment curls slightly at the edges from the ink.

“I’ll go early tomorrow,” Alex says. “Grimmauld has stores that haven’t been catalogued in decades. If I’m lucky, they won’t be rotten.”

Oscar watches him, silent. There’s no thank you. There never is.

Alex doesn’t look up. “You know this isn’t sustainable.”

“I’m aware.”

“You’re burning through theory like it’s instinct.”

“It is instinct.”

“That’s not a compliment.”

Oscar leans back in the chair. The light through the window has moved—sharper now, angled across the table like a blade. The dust in the air no longer floats. It hangs.

The flat creaks again.

Then Alex looks up. Finally.

“You’re not invincible, Oscar.”

He says it plainly.

“And we don’t need two people in comas.”

Oscar’s gaze sharpens—just for a second. Not defensive. Just… precise.

“I’m not planning on dying.”

“No,” Alex says. “You’re planning on being correct. That’s different.”

Neither of them move.

The cauldron beside them releases a soft, metallic groan as it cools, steam still faint at the rim. Somewhere further in the flat, a clock ticks once, skips, then ticks again like it’s stuttering through time.

Oscar blinks.

The moment passes.

Alex straightens, folding the parchment once and sliding it into his pocket. His wand disappears into the sleeve of his jumper.

“I’ll be back before evening,” he says. “If I’m not, don’t improvise again.”

He leaves.

Oscar remains in the chair.

Outside, the street is still empty. The sky is the colour of a waiting room. The cauldron continues to smoke.

And the silence doesn’t return.

It lingers.

The door clicks open with surgical precision.

Not slammed. Not even pushed. Just… opened. Deliberately. Like everything George does—silent and exact, as if he’s working within the sterile rhythm of a hospital ward and never quite learned to switch it off. Oscar doesn’t look up. He doesn’t have to.

The flat creaks once, then stills.

The sound of shoes coming off—neatly, methodically. A satchel placed down with a faint thump, its weight softened by habit. Another breath. Then the gentle drag of fingers across the wall as George hangs up his coat with a kind of care that feels practiced, not sentimental.

No voices. Not yet.

Then:

“How are you?"

Oscar doesn’t answer right away. He remains seated at the table, his body slack with exhaustion in that way that isn’t sleep-deep, just… systemically empty. His arms cross over his chest as though they got there accidentally. His eyes stay fixed on a chipped ceramic mug—cold tea, untouched since morning, surface lined faintly with a tea scum film that looks almost like skin.

George appears in the kitchen doorway, unbuttoning the cuffs of his sleeves. The light catches on the pale indent along the bridge of his nose, the residual pressure-mark from a healer’s respirator. His wand is still tucked behind his ear. There’s dried antiseptic on his forearm. His voice, when he speaks again, doesn’t cut the air—it measures it.

“Alex said you talked about the potion.”

Oscar shrugs, a gesture so small it could’ve been imagined.

“He’s gone to Grimmauld. Looking for stabilisers.”

George nods, once. “Figured.” He crosses to the sink, rolls his sleeves higher, washes his hands like he hasn’t left the ward. His motions are quick, exact, rinsing with purpose more than need.

“I covered your shift,” he adds. “Told your patients you’re working off-site on an urgent potion audit. Nobody’s pushing—yet.”

Oscar doesn’t say thank you. He doesn’t even blink. He just exhales through his nose, low and flat.

George’s gaze flicks toward the cauldron at the end of the table. Still faintly steaming. The dregs inside have cooled into an oily sheen, like blood under fluorescent light. He doesn’t ask what Oscar was doing with it. He already knows.

“You alright?” he asks, with the faintest emphasis on the you—not Lando, not the potion, not the mission. Just Oscar.

Oscar’s response is almost a reflex. “Define ‘alright.’”

George doesn’t respond to the provocation. He never does. He simply turns and opens the drawer nearest the stove. The contents rattle faintly—glass on wood, metal on metal. He pulls out a vial, thin-necked and stoppered tight. The kind used for memory capture. He sets it on the table beside Oscar with a soft, mechanical clink.

“Let’s get it down before anything degrades.”

Oscar doesn’t move for a second.

Then—without a sigh, without commentary—he draws his wand. Tapers the tip inward, angles it precisely against his own temple. The silver thread of memory comes away smooth, viscous and luminous, suspended like drawn silk in midair.

He lifts it into the vial. It sinks with no sound.

George watches him—not scrutinising, not suspicious. Just… there. Present. Quietly bearing witness.

He corks the vial himself once it’s sealed. Lifts it to the light. The strand inside coils like it’s alive. Almost breathing.

He doesn’t ask what’s in it.

He doesn’t have to.

“You’ll write a report,” George says, and it’s not a request. “Timeline. Environmental variables. Any cognitive interference. Send it to me tonight.”

Oscar shifts slightly in his seat, face blank. “What is this, a practicum?”

George meets his gaze. “It’s protocol.”

Oscar doesn’t reply.

George holds the vial a moment longer, then turns and leaves the room. His footsteps don’t echo. The door down the hall opens and closes with a soft click. Then the sound—familiar, strange—of liquid memory pouring into Pensieve stone.

No reaction. No commentary. No voices raised from the other room.

Just silence, as sterile and humming as an empty surgical theatre.

Oscar doesn’t follow. He just sits.

Eventually, he moves—barely. Reaches toward the drawer to extract parchment. Ink. Quill. The same tools used by every apprentice healer when filing casework, only here, it feels colder. More absurd.

Like he’s writing a post-mortem on a patient who hasn’t died yet.

He unrolls the parchment on the table. The ink bottle wobbles slightly as he sets it down, casting a glint of blue in the pale afternoon light. The sun outside has dimmed further now, filtered grey through the cloud-thick sky, and the flat is drenched in that colourless half-light that makes time feel thin and distant.

Oscar doesn’t light a lamp.

The quill scratches faintly against the parchment.

He begins to write.

Internal Observation Log – Level 7 (Experimental Cognitive Extraction)

Subject: Norris, Lando

Filed by: Piastri, Oscar

Date: [Redacted – timestamp auto-linked to memory capture]

Objective:

To evaluate neurological and metaphysical response of subject following intravenous administration of experimental mindbridge serum. Primary goal: establish cognitive contact. Secondary: assess viability of memory navigation and stimulus response under unstable psychic conditions.

Dosage Parameters:

IV delivery via left antecubital vein.

Components:

1. Valerian root infusion (modulated dose, 8.2ml) – sedative conductor
2. Essence of mooncalf (raw) – lunar-reactive binder
3. Nightshade tincture (trace dilution) – boundary-softening agent

Note: stabilising agent omitted due to time constraints and material unavailability.

Estimated onset: 3.8 seconds

Subject response threshold: 5.1 seconds

Session duration (subjective): Approx. 17 minutes

Observed Environment:

Initial re-entry location: Jubilee Line platform, North Greenwich.

Environmental parameters:

• Structural repetition, no visible egress.
• Trains passing in both directions. Only westbound (to Stanmore) slows to a stop.
• Lighting inconsistent; PA system warped and intermittently intelligible.
• Subject (Norris) located seated near platform edge. Apparent age: 19.

Subject Behaviour:

Subject appeared disoriented but semi-lucid. Recognised presence of external party (myself). Vocalised confusion re: origin of arrival. Quotation (verbatim):

“You came out of the train, didn’t you? The one from Stratford.”

Clarified that I had not. Subject appeared unconvinced. No further emphasis placed on line by either party.

Subject displayed signs of residual distrust, mild hostility. Despite this, agreed to investigate platform and later proceeded to board westbound train voluntarily.

Subject exhibited hesitation at threshold, followed by increased physiological anxiety (visible posture shift, breath rate acceleration). Required external prompting (non-forceful).

Train Departure:

Both myself and subject entered the westbound (Stanmore) train.

Environmental conditions within train:

• Warped lighting
• Diminished horizon
• Auditory interference present

Session ended upon abrupt psychic ejection (myself only). Exit event caused moderate dissociation and minor physiological distress. Pulse irregularity recorded. Memory retained and extracted within safe bounds post-wake.

Evaluation:

Memory coherent. Unstable potion formulation responsible for weakened link integrity and premature ejection. Subject is alive, lucid, and resisting psychological collapse—but internal stasis is dangerously entrenched. Conscious mind appears trapped within a looping construct of symbolic spatial logic.

Interpretation: Subject believes westbound progression (Stanmore) represents solution. We agree.

Recommend secondary insertion with stabilised serum.

Actionables:

• Reformulation of potion with inclusion of tethering stabilisers (see Alex: notes on fluxroot, leechmoss, thestral resin).
• Reassess psychological mapping of platform environment.
• Monitor auditory anomalies (“This train terminates at…” message remains unclear—full phrase was truncated upon ejection).
• Log additional subject references to “Stratford” for pattern review.

Notes:

Emotional distance maintained throughout.

To investigate further

Level Seven – Private Spell Damage Wing

The hallway outside the closed ward is sterile in the way only hospitals can manage — whitewashed walls, no scent except the distilled sharpness of antiseptic, a faint hum of magical containment spells layered over the tile like wax.

Oscar arrives first.

He doesn’t speak to the welcome desk witch. He doesn’t need to — she clocks his identification badge, nods once, and waves him through. She doesn’t ask why he’s alone, or why he walks like he’s already bracing for the next impact. The lift to the restricted floor opens before he reaches it. Oscar steps inside.

Down the corridor, third door on the left: the temporary diagnostic theatre. It isn’t meant for long-term patients, but Lando isn’t standard.

Inside, the air is cold and unnaturally still. He can feel the enchantments binding the space — temperature regulation, magical suppression fields, a low-grade temporal dilation around the IV channels to ensure consistent flow. Lando lies beneath the transfigured stasis dome, surrounded by muted lights and whispering charms.

Oscar doesn’t look at him.

Instead, he moves to the side counter. His hands find gloves, fit them on automatically. The vials Alex retrieved the day before sit already arrayed in labeled order: leechmoss, fluxroot, thestral resin, and a few minor tinctures for elemental balance. The improved formula has been carefully outlined in dense, methodical script — Alex’s handwriting, of course. Measured loops. Narrow, upright lettering. Controlled.

George arrives five minutes later. His robes are already folded up to the elbow. He sanitises his hands, then slips into a thicker layer of spell-resistant gloves.

“We’re starting on time,” he says. Not a suggestion.

Oscar nods.

They do not speak about the memory. The report has already been filed. George reviewed it alone. He hasn’t commented on it since.

Alex enters last, hair still wet, sleeves shoved up, potion satchel already open. He whistles softly — a low note that flattens as he comes to stand beside the bench.

“This place gives me the creeps,” he says mildly.

Oscar doesn’t respond.

Alex doesn’t expect him to.

The prep begins.

Oscar clears the staging bench. The base cauldron — cleaned with medical sterilisation charms, not just Scourgify — is brought forward. George unpacks the tools. Slicing shears. Temperature wands. Agitator probes. A thin-threaded silver stirrer tuned to 23.4 rotations per minute — clockwise, stabilisation set.

Oscar begins with the mooncalf base — poured in first, then calibrated with fluxroot while George monitors the temperature field. Alex folds thestral resin into the side mixture using a specialised press—viscous and reluctant, it resists binding. The smell is faintly like ozone.

Everything is slow. Intentional. Each movement feels weighted. Not dramatic — simply necessary. It’s like watching surgeons lay out tools for a procedure where no one’s sure the patient wants to wake up.

By the time the stabilising agents have bonded, the potion is deep silver-gold. It holds its viscosity when stirred, surface tension undisturbed by the wand.

Alex nods, almost pleased. “That’ll hold.”

Oscar lifts the IV feed tube. The line snakes into the chamber, through a warded gap in the stasis shield.

George glances at the vitals. “Magical conductivity is up 14%. We’ll keep him steady. No feedback loops detected.”

“Is it primed?” Oscar asks.

“Nearly.” George adjusts the rune plate on Lando’s right. “Five seconds.”

Oscar doesn’t hesitate.

He draws his wand — no preamble, no ritual — and uncaps the final dosing vial. It glows faintly under the containment lights. A single drop lands in the cauldron, and the whole solution stabilises with a sigh.

George glances at him.

“Ready?”

Oscar says nothing.

Instead, he steps into position. The spell matrix activates underfoot — tuned to his magical signature, keyed for single-entry traversal.

The wand dips.

Magic floods the platform, slick and immediate, snapping through his veins like the first jolt of anaesthesia.

The world disappears.

Chapter Text

Oscar surfaces the way a coin rises in a glass—slow, reluctant, catching light that isn’t light. Breath first. Then the ache in his knees. Then the cold.

Tile presses its pattern into his palm. Little ridges. Little rivers collecting in the webbing of his fingers. He stays there long enough to name the sensations, the way he would in triage: pressure, damp, chill, steady respiration, no immediate vertigo. There’s a muscle in his back that’s pinched from sleeping wrong on George’s couch. The ghost of adhesive on his wrist where Alex taped the cannula down. Real pains, remembered pains, and this—this other thing that isn’t quite either.

He opens his eyes to a thin green world.

Pale tiling climbs the walls like scales. Fluorescent bars under the ceiling cough a whiteness that leans sickly toward hospital mint. He waits for a sound to attach to it—buzzing, a hum—but the noise is almost theoretical. It is there like pressure is there, like altitude is there. The silence around it is the louder thing.

He tips his head back. A sign overhead trembles into legibility as if embarrassed to be read.

Canary Wharf.

The black letters have a halo of flicker. A corner of the plastic plate blinks as if someone’s breath keeps fogging it from the inside. He watches it too long, already trying to catch the pattern of the tremor, wordless numbers forming in the back of his mind. He stands, eventually, hands against tile, the cold lifting with him like a layer of skin.

He doesn’t remember a door. He doesn’t remember boarding anything. He remembers Alex’s hand on his shoulder, the sterile smell of the seventh floor room, the weight of the IV line tugging when he shifted, the taste of something copper-sour as the potion sealed him under. Then this.

He just—exists, and the station exists around him, and the world feels as if it has been wiped and rewritten with the same sentence.

A breath. It writes itself into the air: white vapor in a place that should not be this cold underground. It drifts, then thins, then is stolen by the sterile draft that slips through the platform like a thought no one will claim.

He feels fine. That is the strange part. Heart steady. The precise calm that comes after panic has been managed. He catalogues the ordinary: fingers, warm enough to flex; mouth, dry; head, clear. He catalogs the extraordinary: the way the tiles are wet, not glossy; the way the fluorescent tubes cast no shadow he can measure; the way the silence seems to be waiting for instruction.

He turns.

The platform spreads out, wide in both directions—longer than North Greenwich, maybe. There are narrow ledges along the wall where benches ought to be. He has a memory of benches. Gum constellations. Grey metal arms with a chip of white paint near the anchor bolts. None of that here. Just a line of ledging at a height that assumes fatigue but not comfort. The opposite wall is the mouth of the tunnel: a blackness with metal veins gleaming where the tracks sit slick as something under skin.

He listens for the rails. The faint ring trains leave in metal even after they’ve gone. There isn’t any.

He rolls his shoulders. The potion sat in his blood differently this time; Alex had changed the ratio, smoothed the drop. There’s less burn in his chest. Less floating. The return path, if it’s there at all, doesn’t announce itself.

He walks to the edge and looks down. A sign painted on the platform lip repeats mindlessly: STAND CLEAR OF THE— STAND CLEAR OF THE— STAND CLEAR OF THE— The remaining words are missing, or the paint refused them. He looks up at the speaker grill embedded in the beam, expecting the voice that never finishes to stutter him a fragment. Nothing comes.

He waits for the absence to be interrupted by presence: a train, a footstep, a cough. His body waits with him in the practiced stillness of hospitals: the measured patience he learned cleaning up after other people’s panic.

He has learned a lot of waiting. He is good at it. It doesn’t make this easier.

“Canary Wharf,” he says aloud, just to see the word exist in the cold. It does. The breath blooms, thins. The letters do not echo. Sound seems to lay down flat here, collapsing into the tile like heat would into snow.

He tests the space like a spell. He taps the toe of his boot against the lip of the platform—counting the hollow beat in his head: one. two. three. four. The beat doesn’t carry. Still, the numbers feel necessary. They give the air something to hold.

He looks for a clock and finds none. He looks for a map and there is one—behind glass with a smear inside the plastic like someone wiped at condensation from within and didn’t clear it away. The dots on the line swim if he stares too long. He steps closer and the glass sweats harder, blurring the names just as he tries to fix them: North Greenwich behind him. Canary Wharf here. Stanmore beyond. The thought of Stanmore hits him in the sternum with a pressure that makes no sense. A word is not a door, is not a decision. He takes one step back and the glass clears with a sound like a swallow.

The tiles underfoot have a grit to them, the faint tack of something damp that has been clean too many times. He drags his palm along the wall and comes away with condensation beaded on the heel of his hand. It breaks when he flexes his fingers, little drops running down to his wrist and disappearing into the cuff.

He turns again and chooses a direction at random. It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. This place has a way of disciplining choice back into inevitability. Still. He wants movement. The body wants to be more than stacked against tile.

He starts walking.

The world keeps pace with him as if on a delay. The fluorescent bars extend in their uniform intervals. The tiling refuses to change. His own footfalls are thin and short-lived. He keeps his hand near the wall to make this realer: texture as proof. Moisture as proof. He thinks about North Greenwich and the bench there. The way the gum speckled the metal into galaxies. The way the faint smell of ozone in the tunnel promised a train that sometimes did not arrive. He thinks about the way the boy on that platform had looked at him—wary and young and older than anyone ought to be at nineteen. He thinks about the line the boy had said—You came out of the train, didn’t you? The one from Stratford.—and how it felt like being accused of something he’d done in a language he didn’t speak.

A speaker cracks. The sound is soft and ugly, a wire bent inside a throat. Stand clear of the— it says, cordial and already erasing itself. Silence swallows the dash. The little pause after it is obscene.

He walks faster, as if he could catch the end of the sentence.

There is a camera suspended from the ceiling near the tunnel mouth. Its black hemisphere reflects him in miniature: a distorted figure walking a white cold place. As he passes under, the camera seems to tilt. He thinks he sees it adjust its gaze. He stops and walks back beneath it. Still. The half-sphere shows his shape moving like a cloud across its own darkness. He raises a hand. The little version of him raises a hand. The lens doesn’t flash. There is no red light. It feels watched anyway.

His second pass by the sign—Canary Wharf—shows a new defect: the lower right screw sits at an angle, as if it has slowly unscrewed itself by a fraction. He had not noticed that before. He cannot prove whether it is new or he has not been paying the right kind of attention. He can feel a study forming in the back of his head: return to the sign at intervals, note the screw’s orientation, measure the site’s slippage. The instinct to catalog is so strong that he almost laughs at himself. Of course he wants to write this down correctly, even in a place that eats writing.

The far end of the platform narrows toward an exit gate that isn’t. There are metal barriers there, the waist-high bars they install to organize bodies into lines. They are sealed to the tile, but beyond them is only wall. He steps close anyway, testing for a seam, for a door disguised as a lack of door. There is a line of caulk at the juncture of tiles that suggests something was once there, or almost was. His fingertips pick up more condensation. When he looks down, it has gathered into a drop at the edge of his nail. He watches it grow and tilt and fall.

He can hear his own heart now. Not loud, not panicked—just declarative. It proves him to himself. If he presses his thumb to the inside of his wrist, his pulse meets it. The skin there is a little raw from tape. Alex’s hands had been gentle and efficient. The memory sits on his skin like a second pulse: the press-and-release of care.

“Lando?” he says, not because he expects an answer but because the name is a key he has used before.

The air does not refuse the name. It does not give it back either. He tries again, quieter. He feels foolish, then angry at himself for feeling anything. There are ways to do this. Ways to proceed. He should map. He should test the edge. He should not allow the ache in the middle of his chest to define the outcome.

He goes to the platform lip again and crouches. The rails gleam like something living. Far down the tunnel, a light ghosts—it might be his eyes catching at nothing. He keeps very still and listens with his whole body.

A wind rises. It moves along the tunnel like a decision being made by someone who will not have to live with it. It brings with it the smell he associates with this place: that thin metallic ozone, the inside of a spell that has been cast too many times and has learned to be efficient. His breath moves in his throat. The wind reaches the platform and lifts the tiny hairs on his wrists. The fluorescent tubes consider their hum.

He knows better than to lean over. He knows better than to put his head near the heat. Still, his body wants to answer any change at all. He stands and lets the air move through him.

Past him. Past this. Down the platform, the wind dies as if it hit a wall, though there is only open space. He tracks its failure with his eyes: something unseen that refuses to cross a threshold. He has a sudden, stupid thought of North Greenwich again, of a train that would not stop, and this—this not-wind that will not go far enough.

He swallows. It is louder than it should be.

He makes himself walk the length of the platform one way and then the other, touching the wall at intervals to mark his progress not with distance but with texture. The tile changes tone near the tunnel mouth: more grit embedded in the glaze, as if more feet have stood there, which is absurd. He drops into a half-squat and touches the edge between two tiles where the grout hairlines and feels like a seam. He presses his nail into it like a kid prying apart pages that have stuck together. It does not give, but the act satisfies something ancient in him: the urge to unglue.

He looks up and the sign, Canary Wharf, blinks seven times, quickly, like a code teaching itself to be read. He counts them without meaning to. On the seventh, the last letter loses one black fragment—nothing you’d see unless you were courting madness by degrees. When the flicker stills, the letter is whole again. He feels embarrassed on the station’s behalf. He knows that’s not a useful emotion. He lets it go.

He thinks of George saying, evenly, You need to write everything down, Oscar, and he thinks of his own hand refusing the quill out of muscle memory. He does write everything down. He just does it inside his skull where no one can peer at the ink and call it a cry for anything.

He talks himself out of the next thought before it finishes arriving: the one where he wonders whether the Stanmore train would be kinder now, whether the decision would be simpler if he simply chose— He pushes it away like a form he refuses to sign. Not yet. Not here.

His hands are stinging faintly. When he looks, the skin has reddened where the cold tile pressed. He rubs his thumb over the little ridges his palm remembers and the feeling is just sensation again, nothing mythic.

There is a poster opposite him for Travelcards that promises Anywhere, anytime in a font that thinks it is friendly. The date at the bottom pretends it is a year that has already ended. He knows the year. He cannot remember if the font is right. The left bottom corner lifts a fraction, as if a draft has gotten under it. He watches the lifted corner the way you watch a breath in a sleeping chest when you aren’t ready to admit you care whether it keeps happening. The corner lowers, adheres. He waits for it to peel up again. It doesn’t. He hates that he finds relief in this.

He chooses the other direction because obedience to any pattern here feels like being tricked into religion. The same bars of light, the same green, the same smear on the map near his shoulder as he passes it again—it cannot be the same map, and still it is. He counts his steps to keep a separate line of numbers under the surface. When he reaches thirty-seven, the speaker pops and coughs that half-sentence again. He stops at thirty-nine and goes back two to stand at thirty-seven in case he has found the place where the world chooses to pretend it is alive. Nothing obliges him. He smiles, a sharp corner of it, at himself.

He breathes. The white bloom becomes a habit. He imagines what he might look like to an observer who has never learned cold: a man making smoke with his body as he walks a room that rejects smoke.

The platform edge looks newly dangerous, the way edges do in rooms where you are the only inhabitant. He pivots away from it. His hip clips the wall very lightly and collects a constellation of damp that blossoms through the fabric a shade darker, slow. It will dry and disappear. He presses his palm there and thinks of the wrist he grabbed at North Greenwich, how it felt—cold, yes, but there. The pulse under his fingers. The way name and person were briefly the same thing.

“Canary Wharf,” he says again, quieter this time, as if the station might accept the familiarity.

There is a hairline crack in the floor tile near his left boot where something heavy once landed. He bends to put his fingertip to it and misjudges the distance—his hand stops exactly where the crack widens by a fraction, as if the tile has taught space to be inconsistent along that line. He straightens and all the tiles are uncracked again. He closes his eyes to spare himself another study.

Behind him, the tunnel breathes. It does not give up a train. It gives up the idea of one and waits to be thanked.

His body answers with readiness anyway: that small lift in the chest, that forward tilt people have in stations the moment before they admit they’re going nowhere yet. He feels ridiculous and human. He thinks of breaking that down into metrics the way he breaks everything down—heart, lungs, breath rates, muscle readiness—and decides to let himself be ridiculous and human in a place built to sand those edges off. He bares his teeth at the tunnel the way you might at a dog that will not either come or run.

The speaker relents. Stand clear of the— It is almost a comfort now, the same way a lie can become a part of the room if you keep it in the same corner and dust it. He wonders how many times the announcement loops before a real one has to begin. He wonders if there are rules here or if the rules are the game.

The ceiling vent breathes a thin draft that smells like something that used to be weather. He thinks of rain hitting stone at Hogwarts, the way the outside insists. He lets the thought be a bridge and not a trapdoor.

His feet take him to the pillar nearest the tunnel mouth. He stands with his shoulder against it as if the architecture could be a person. The pillar’s paint is clean in that over-clean way that hides grime like a sin. He imagines George’s face if he were to describe a column as pious. He imagines Alex’s laugh, quick and folded in half, face buried into his shoulder so the sound doesn’t shake his whole chest. He holds that thought at arm’s length and doesn’t allow it to become a want.

He tries Lando’s name again. Not loud. Not pleading. Just the fact of it, placed in the room.

This time the world answers with movement, but it isn’t a voice and it isn’t a train. The light shifts very slightly, a tone colder, as if the tubes had remembered a different color temperature and decided to try it on. The effect is like someone opening a door in a far corridor. The door does not lead here. The corridor is not on any map he can see. He stands straighter without deciding to.

He walks to the exact center of the platform because it is an easy lie to tell himself that centers are safer. The map sweats at his shoulder again as he passes. He puts his palm to the glass and it fogs from the inside. He takes his hand away and rubs the damp from his skin onto the seam of his trousers. The little smear on the map stays. He looks at the line: the run of stations like a pulse you could ride if you believed hard enough in signage.

North Greenwich —> Canary Wharf

A long pause.

Stanmore.

He doesn’t say the last one aloud. He has not earned it, he tells himself. He has not decided it. He has not been asked to decide it.

He looks over the track again. The rails lift their heads out of darkness like something that sleeps with eyes open. A tiny sound reaches him then—a click far down the line, the small electrical swallow that travels ahead of machines. His chest tells the truth before he lets his mind have it; he steps back from the edge because bodies do that when edges remember their purpose.

The click becomes a run of clicks. The wind returns, not an argument but a posture. He closes his eyes and his ears tell him the shape of a carriage through the tunnel, the way metal sings about weight long before weight arrives. He feels the impulse to move—the way crowds herd themselves toward possibility, the way they gather in small knots at the right place on a platform because the old pattern says the door will stop here.

There is no crowd. He goes to where the door would stop anyway. The world humors him, or maybe he humors the world.

The lights down the line stutter. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six— He waits for seven with an irrational expectation that something will give. On the seventh flicker, the speaker tries: Stand clear of the— and chokes. He smiles without humor. All right. All right, then.

The wind draws back again, embarrassed at its own theatre. The clicks recede like footsteps on tile down a long hall. He keeps his eyes closed for one more breath to practice being the kind of person who does not flinch when nothing happens.

When he opens them, the station looks minutely different. It is a lie small enough to be polite. The screw in the corner of the sign has rotated a degree counterclockwise. The camera’s black hemisphere is tilted just a fraction more toward him. The lifted corner of the poster has thought better of obedience and raised itself the breadth of a fingernail again. He lets the differences be true without demanding proof. He has learned to treat certain truths as pastries he cannot afford: looked at, not eaten.

He sets his palm against the wall where the condensation is thickest. It is the closest thing this place has to warmth. He holds it there until his skin cools to match the tile, and the boundary stops arguing. When he takes his hand away, the print he leaves looks like evidence. It fades as he watches, as if the station is offended by the idea that anything could touch it and remain.

His mouth has gone drier. He has a memory of water in a paper cup beside a hospital bed, the way the rim goes soft if you keep sipping. He swallows nothing and tells his body it is enough.

He wants to sit, and there is nowhere to sit. The ledge is too low for his knees and too high for the kind of slouch that feels like defiance. He leans his hip to it and pretends this is a choice. He looks down the line until the tunnel’s black forgets to be a color and becomes a convincing end.

He decides to be bored on purpose. It has served him before. Boredom unwraps patterns like string. He catalogues the taste at the back of his tongue (metallic, potion ghost), the thickness of the air (thin and wet, paradox), the way his hands have stopped stinging from the cold because they learned the lesson too quickly.

He breathes, and counts, and breathes.

Another thought sneaks in despite all the lists: the sight of a nineteen-year-old boy with the wrong age in his eyes, an awkward smile held like a badge against fear. Oscar drags his attention back to tile and light and the way the station hums without sound. He refuses to write that memory onto this wall. He refuses to make a church out of a platform.

His pulse has steadied into the kind of rhythm you could set a metronome to. If he had a quill, he would note that. If he had anything to write on, he would chart the seven-flicker rule, the screw’s rotation, the map’s stubborn condensation, the vent’s draft at thirty-seven steps, the speaker’s need to confess half a sentence every few minutes as a way to prove it exists.

He does not have a quill. He has a mind that has turned itself into a ledger for as long as he has been large enough to carry more weight than he should. He writes the station down inside himself with the same even hand he uses on patients’ charts when the worst thing in the world is trying to be true in the bed before him.

He keeps his body very still. The station does too. Two stubborn animals pretending to be furniture.

The sign flickers once. Just one. No pattern. A muscle spasm of light. His jaw unlocks. He had not realized he’d been holding it tense. He rolls it slowly, hears the small pop near his ear, and resents the intimacy of his own bones.

The wind tests the tunnel once more, more cautious this time, as if embarrassed to have tried to be story twice.

Oscar stands off the ledge, hands loose at his sides, and considers the edge again—not to approach it, just to give it the respect a boundary demands.

He looks down the left. He looks down the right. He listens. Nothing. A not-train, doing not-arrival, in a station that has perfected the art of behaving like it is about to matter.

He can feel the prickle along his neck that means someone else lives in the same paragraph. It is not sound. It is not sight. It is that animal thing that cities file off you and mindscapes give back. He turns his head slowly so as not to frighten whatever it is, as if the platform is a clearing and he is trying not to spook a dear, skittish presence.

There is no one in sight.

The feeling does not leave.

He draws a breath that tastes of electrics and thinks—without letting the thought solidify into sentence—that the station has finally remembered him.

He straightens his cuffs like a man preparing to step into a room where being ordinary is a disguise, and he starts walking again, toward the centre, toward the tunnel, toward whatever the platform is about to admit.

He does not hurry. The air is too cold to make haste believable. He lets the world come to him as if he has been waiting for it all this time, which he has, which he hasn’t, which both can be true at once.

The speaker gathers itself. The announcement begins, courteous and incomplete, the way ghosts must be when they take on work: Stand clear of the—

He keeps his eyes on the track. He keeps his hands where he can see them. He keeps the cold on his skin like a fact he might need to present later, if anyone asks him to prove he was here.

He stops exactly where the gap between tiles is widest, because some part of him still believes in luck. He smiles at that, lets the smile go, and waits for the next change to choose him.

He’s halfway through deciding whether the screw in the corner of the Canary Wharf sign has truly turned or if his brain is obligingly inventing proof for him when the platform remembers momentum.

It happens in the air first—a slight thickening, a draft that isn’t a draft, like a breath pulled in by someone standing too close. His shoulder follows the feeling a fraction too late, the way bodies do when they’re taught to be polite to physics, and then there’s contact: a clean, ordinary collision made strange by the way nothing else in this place has a pulse.

Not hard. Not painful. Just abrupt.

His left shoulder jolts; the other person’s coat skims his sleeve with that dry whisper wool makes when it has collected too many ghost rains. He half-turns, eyes up—

—and it’s him.

The recognition arrives with the soft thud of a book shut in a quiet room. No cymbals. No revelation shouted by angels. Just the brain placing a face into a box already labeled and slid to the front.

Lando.

Older by a inch you could measure, not the face so much as the posture: shoulders set, a new economy in the way he stands that wasn’t there at nineteen. The mouth is the same, the kind that holds jokes for later. The eyes do the flicker he remembers: there and not-there in the space of a breath, like a train that intends to stop but chooses velocity instead.

“Sorry,” Lando says, the word automatic, as if returned to him by a charm that releases common speech on impact.

Oscar’s hand has already closed around his wrist.

It’s reflex dressed as decision. The skin under his fingers is cold and human and astonishing; he feels the bones like careful architecture, the roll of a tendon as Lando’s hand shifts with surprise. Not a projection. Not the idea of a wrist. A wrist.

“Wait,” Oscar says, and hears how the request misses the upward lilt that would make it gentle. It comes out level, as if he were asking a monitor to display new data.

Lando stops. There’s a half step where his body argues with the instruction before conceding, like the platform conceding a flicker under protest.

Their eyes meet and the cold multiplies—not temperature, something else: the mind finding a new number to attach to stillness.

“Oh,” Lando says, and the oh is neither pleased nor disappointed; it’s the vowel a person makes when a hypothesis confirms itself.

A short beat. Then: “You again.”

“Yeah,” Oscar says. “Me again.” The answer surprises him with its lack of armor.

They don’t let go right away because letting go would be too decisive in a room that punishes decisions. But there isn’t real grip either. His hand is there because it is there. The wrist under it has not decided to be claimed, and he has not decided to claim it. He notices the faint drag of condensation on Lando’s sleeve where the platform has printed its climate into fabric; he notices he is noticing.

Oscar drops his hand first.

Lando’s gaze flicks to the sign as if to anchor the scene in a noun. “You came out of the Stratford train,” he says, voice flat, not quite accusation, not quite fact. It sounds like something he has decided to believe to make the world less arbitrary.

Oscar thinks about the tunnel behind Lando, the wind that pretends to say a name and then forgets it. He thinks about how truth in here is often a kind of politeness. He doesn’t answer. The not-answer settles between them like a cup you put down silently between two obstinate people and call it compromise.

A train no one asked for grinds far down the line and then changes its mind. The speaker clears its throat: Stand clear of the— The dash lands like a closing door.

Lando’s coat is wrong for student robes, wrong for Quidditch leathers—the cut is adult, careless, the collar turned up on one side as if he sat against a wall until the fabric learned the posture. There’s a smear of something darker near the pocket, spell-oil or old soot. Oscar files the scent because smells are the only things that refuse to be bullied by time. Smoke, yes. Oil. The non-smell of breath in cold air. A memory choosing not to mask as a dream.

“Where are we now?” Oscar asks, eventually, because asking is how you test if a structure can hold weight.

Lando tracks the long white of the platform with his eyes like a surveyor: “One stop down.” His mouth moves around a humor that doesn’t survive to be spoken. “But it’s still the same, isn’t it.”

It isn’t a question. That’s a kindness. Oscar nods anyway. “It loops.”

“Yeah.” A breath that almost turns into a laugh and then doesn’t. “Figures.”

They stand in a silence that is not empty. The cold inhabits it the way a cat will always find the one cushion you wanted to keep unpressed. The light flattens the space until even their shadows look embarrassed to exist.

Lando shifts his weight. The minuscule squeak of a sole against damp tile is rude in a place that pretends to be holy.

“I don’t remember falling asleep,” he says, watching the tunnel as if it owes him something.

“You didn’t,” Oscar says. “Not properly.” He hears his own voice and is annoyed at how it knows how to be calm at the wrong times.

Lando’s eyes do the light-switch trick again—on, off, on, but lower voltage. He slips his hands into his pockets with a motion that reads as practiced and reads as young in the same breath.

“Why’d you come back?” Lando asks. Not hostile. Not curious either. The question sounds like someone setting a cup down where a cup goes.

“Needed more data,” Oscar says, and would like, afterward, to take the sentence back and hand it to a different version of himself with warmer hands.

Lando exhales something that lives one neighborhood over from laughter. “Still treating it like homework?”

Oscar doesn’t deny it. It seems cruel to deny a thing that is already unbeautiful.

The platform hums without humming. Trains pass without passing. Oscar’s eyes go to the CCTV orb again and he catches—ridiculous, surely—the impression that it has angled down another hair toward them, as if the station has remembered that scenes are scenes because someone watches.

“You’re not going to ask how I am?” Lando says after a while, as if picking from a list of things people say to keep air moving.

Oscar looks at him. It should be simple to say any of the things doctors say in the first ninety seconds of a consult. He has said them to hundreds of people with sincerity baked in by repetition. He looks and the script peels away from his tongue. “You’re still here,” he says, and wants to apologize to someone for how that sounds.

“So that’s a no, then.” No heat in it. Just the dignity of writing his own minutes.

Another silence, but different now, wider: the kind you can put a bench in and two bodies on the bench and call it company. Lando gestures with his chin toward the far end of the platform. “Come on. Might as well sit while we wait for nothing.”

The phrase is so clean he wants to keep it. He nods and follows.

They choose a ledge section that has the least of nothing on it. They sit side by side with exactly the distance that suggests neither intimacy nor caution: the old schoolboy instinct to leave a buffer for elbows. The ledge is cold through fabric in that way that feels moralistic, like punishment for preferring the body to the idea of the body. Oscar rests his hands on his thighs and considers the act of folding his arms and chooses not to give the cold the satisfaction of seeing him small.

“Has it always been like this?” he asks.

Lando looks forward. “Here? Yeah.” A pause. “Or do you mean—”

Oscar watches the tiny white of their breaths try the air and fail to thrive. “Both.”

“Then no.” Lando’s mouth tilts like it wants to be fair to the past. “It changed, from North Greenwich. The trains barely come anymore. At some point, there was… noise. There used to be noise. People, sometimes. Footsteps that weren’t mine. But they didn’t look like anything when I turned to see.” His shoulder lifts, the barest shrug. “I stopped turning.”

Oscar leans back until the tile prints its damp through his coat. “When did you stop counting?”

Lando blinks at him as if he’s been told a complicated joke. “Counting what?”

“Loops.”

A faint, incredulous sound. “I didn’t start, not in this station.” He shifts, shuts his eyes against the white light for a second. “I know that’s your thing. You count so you don’t…—” He opens his eyes. “But it doesn’t behave like numbers for me. It behaves like… waiting rooms.”

Oscar looks at the sign. The screw is looser. The platform is trying to agree with him. “Waiting rooms are numbers,” he says, softer.

“Not here,” Lando answers, just as soft, as if they’ve agreed to lower the volume together. “Here it’s all the same minute stretched thin.”

The speaker tries again, faithful as a dog that never learns the trick properly. Stand clear of the— Silence like a swallowed stone.

Lando exhales through his nose. “You hear that, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I was worried it was my brain clearing its throat.”

“I think it’s the room.” Oscar watches the light bar above them consider a separate, cooler white and then think better of it. “Or me.”

Lando turns his head just enough to aim the full weight of his attention, which is heavier than a twenty-year-old should be able to make it. “Everything here reacts to you,” he says, with the easy cruelty of stating the precise truth. “You’re the only thing that changes.”

Oscar keeps his face where it is, because moving would turn the sentence into a thrown object. “I’m not changing anything,” he says.

“You are by being here.” Lando tells the ceiling this, so Oscar won’t have to flank the pronoun alone. “It was quieter without you.”

There’s a risk inside that line. Not a threat, precisely. The risk of being unnecessary. Oscar folds it, puts it somewhere he promises not to take out when he’s tired.

He tests the edge of their distance with an unremarkable question. “What do you do, most of the time?”

“Walk,” Lando says. “Wait.” A pause stretched tight. “Forget.”

Oscar wants to say: that’s three verbs and none of them are living. He doesn’t. He wants to say: then remember. He doesn’t say that either.

Instead: “Do you sleep?”

“Not really. Not the useful kind.” Lando tips his head against the wall and looks up the line like a man looking for weather. “Sometimes I close my eyes and the whiteness gets louder. That’s not sleep.”

“You dream?”

“Dreams have—” He searches for the word, palms flat against his thighs, fingers splayed like he’s bracing himself on his own legs. “Edges. This is edge.”

Oscar files that, too. He files everything because filing is the only way he knows how to be kind without getting caught worshipping. “Do you remember the fall?” he asks, careful with the syllables, a gloved hand going in after glass.

Lando keeps his eyes on an emptiness that might become a train if it earned it. “Bits. The noise. The…—” The hand that isn’t touching anything closes, opens. “Not the ground.” His mouth does something. “That’s probably good.”

The bench feels different under Oscar’s palm when he puts it there, a thin filament of warmth under the cold like a secret he has chosen to keep from himself. He lifts his hand and puts it back. Warm. Lando doesn’t react. Oscar looks at the CCTV orb. It has tilted a fraction farther, domesticated voyeurism.

A ghost of crowd sound skims along the tunnel mouth then, so faint that it would be a kindness to pretend it is the fluorescent hum misbehaving. It isn’t the hum. It’s a roar that knows how to be far away and still touch the hairs on the back of your neck. Oscar turns his head before he can tell himself not to. Lando doesn’t move.

“Did you—” Oscar begins.

“Hear what?” Lando asks, on time.

“Nothing,” Oscar says, because admitting noise out loud here feels like smuggling in color.

Lando’s mouth turns at one corner. “You’re bad at lying.”

“I’m not lying,” Oscar says, reflexive as breathing.

“You’re bad at that too.” Lando leans forward, elbows on knees now, a posture he must have learned from benches that were actually built to be sat on. “I know when the air changes. I don’t always know why.”

They breathe in the same number of seconds for a while, the way two people will sync without signing a treaty. Oscar counts without counting; the station counts without acknowledging arithmetic as a faith.

“What happens if you take the train to Stanmore?” Oscar says finally, because there is a question that has been living behind his teeth since the first station and questions rot if you keep them in the dark too long.

Lando looks at the rails. The pause between the look and the answer is not for drama; it is a man letting a sentence check its weight before setting it down. “It goes to the end.”

The way he says it flattens every corridor in the station. It is not threat, not warning, not an invitation delicately dressed. It’s a sign on a door that has decided to be law.

A wind tries the tunnel again. The lights do not fit the room for a brighter bulb this time; they harden. A train rushes somewhere you can’t point to. In the black glass of the CCTV dome, Oscar catches a thin, ridiculous image of himself—a man who has consented to be a witness and refuses to admit it.

He hears his own heart add a beat he doesn’t like to its sentence. He does not examine it. He will be alone with it later; that is punishment enough.

“Is that you,” he says, “or the place?”

Lando’s mouth curves not toward smile, not toward pain, but toward comprehension. He takes a breath that makes the cold look obedient. “Does it matter?”

“Yes,” Oscar says, because medicine is nothing if not the science of saying why until the body either confesses or lives long enough to make confession unnecessary.

“Then it’s me,” Lando says, too easily to be true, true enough to be useful. “I think I decided that once, and the place liked it so much it kept the decision for me.”

Oscar looks at his hands and back at the tunnel and then at Lando again, because the only place to look that won’t turn into superstition is the person you’re trying to save from your own superstition.

“You cold?” he asks, because one mercy at a time.

“Yeah,” Lando says. No heroics. The word lands between them like a small, acceptable dog.

They don’t move closer. They don’t do anything theatrically kind. They sit there, two men with their hands open to the air, and allow the idea of warmth to be a thing the body remembers despite the platform’s argument.

After a while, Lando says, “Do me a favor.”

Oscar tips his head.

“If the train stops for you—” He stops, starts again. “If it stops for you, don’t be noble about it.”

Oscar turns the sentence like a coin. The relief in his shoulders is so tiny it’s almost theoretical. “I have never been noble. Why start now?”

“Good,” Lando says, like he’s writing the word down to check later. “Don’t start.”

The speaker’s voice fails, then returns in the same half-breath: Stand clear of the— The ceiling picks that moment to blink once, no pattern, just nerves.

“You really think it’s reacting to me,” Oscar says, to keep from asking what he wants to ask. “The lights.”

“I think you make it want to impress you,” Lando says. “And it’s terrible at impressing people.”

“It’s very good at repetition,” Oscar says.

“That’s not impressing. That’s…—” Lando frowns at the idea. “That’s weather.”

They sit with that, oddly pleased by the accuracy.

A film of damp has formed on the ledge between them, a neat oval where neither thigh touches. Oscar drags a fingertip through it, leaves a line that beads and then erases. Lando watches the movement without comment, like watching a stranger tidy a table you will never eat at.

“Do you remember the library?” Lando asks then, so suddenly Oscar has to catch the question in both hands so it doesn’t fall and break.

“Which one?” he buys time with, already knowing which.

“North Tower. After lights-out.”

Oscar lets the platform breathe all over him. He looks at the CCTV dome instead of at Lando, because the reflection tells fewer truths. “I remember,” he says.

“Good,” Lando says, and that’s all. The past sits between them like a folded coat neither of them will put on in public.

A tremor shivers along the rails, the kind your bones are designed to feel so you won’t be a tragedy. The wind returns with purpose. This time, carried in it, there’s the faintest smear of roar that doesn’t belong to air at all—crowd noise too far away to attend.

Oscar’s mouth has already opened before he realizes he’s going to speak. “You hear that?”

Lando tilts his head, listens, then shakes it. “No.”

“It’s nothing,” Oscar says, and both of them let the lie be a kindness.

They sit until the wind fails again. The sign pretends to be solid. The screw continues its career toward absence with admirable patience.

Lando stands first. Oscar follows.

“Come on,” Lando says. “Let’s walk.” He says it the way people say let’s keep living when what they mean is let’s keep from stopping. They begin the long, pointless circuit. The bench will be in a different mood next lap. The poster will remember its corner and forget it again. The orb will angle itself a degree more toward confession. Somewhere in the iteration, one of them will say the wrong helpful thing and the station will punish them by imitating mercy.

As they pass the map, it fogs from the inside like a mouth on glass.

“Don’t touch it,” Lando says, for no reason Oscar can name.

“I wasn’t going to,” Oscar says, for no reason he will admit.

“Good,” Lando says, the word soft and adult in his twenty-year-old mouth.

They walk. The loop moves around them like a bored beast changing how it lies so its limbs won’t fall asleep. The air hums with that barely-there electricity of a spell that has been cast over and over until meaning wears thin in it like a brushed-out seam. The rails gleam. The tunnel insists on being a throat that has forgotten words. Oscar counts only when it helps. He lets his hands hang warm at his sides until they remember they are allowed to want contact.

On the fourth circuit, Oscar reaches out to the ledge again and lays his palm flat where the damp gathers. Warm. He leaves it there, lets the heat teach his skin a version of truth he can bring back with him. Lando doesn’t ask. He doesn’t have to. The station knows what hands are for. Even bad rooms do.

They pass the place where the air pressure collapses when a not-train comes near. Lando looks into the tunnel like a man who has made a contract with a silence. Oscar looks into the same black like a man who knows contracts can be renegotiated if someone writes the clause correctly.

The speaker says the only half it knows how to say. The dash is a cliff in the middle of language.

“Yeah,” Lando says to it, kind as a person can be to a machine that cannot stop failing. “We know.”

The next circuit will be the one that breaks, Oscar thinks, because something always breaks when you teach a room to notice that you’ve started to believe it.

He doesn’t say it aloud. He lets the idea join the iron filings of all the other ideas scattered under his ribs, waiting for a magnet to arrive in the shape of a catastrophe.

They walk the white, and the white refuses to remember them, and still it does. A train begins to make a decision somewhere neither direction owns. The lights decide to blink in sevens and then decide not to. The screw loosens with respectable morality. The camera listens. The air tries on being weather. Two breaths fog and vanish and fog again, like rehearsals for lines no one will speak correctly the first time.

At the far end, they turn.

This time Lando’s shoulder brushes his, the smallest, most ordinary miscalculation of space. Oscar doesn’t apologize for being there. Lando doesn’t either.

They keep moving, and for the length of the platform the world behaves, which is its own kind of threat.

They don’t decide to stop; the ledge decides for them. It arrives under their hips the way a slow wave arrives at a sandbar—inevitable and almost apologetic. Cold through fabric. Cold like tile remembers it was once water and would like to be again.

They sit angled toward the tracks as if that grants them agency over a horizon that refuses to perform. The light above them gives up a long, exhausted breath and goes back to pretending it has never known warmth.

Oscar sets his palms on his thighs, thumbs just touching, the way he does when he’s trying not to look like he’s bracing. He stares at his hands until they’re hands again and not instruments. The nails are neat. The knuckles know too much.

Beside him, Lando leans back against the wall until the damp prints its idea of him into the tile. The imprint will vanish. Everything vanishes here. He tips his head to the side like he’s listening for something that used to visit—a timetable, a whistle, a cheer. He finds none of it and looks almost relieved.

“Do you ever get used to the light?” Oscar asks. Quietly, as if the fluorescent bars will feel complimented and misbehave.

“No,” Lando says. The word sits up straight. “It’s polite about it, though. It pretends to be close to daylight so you’ll stop asking where the sun went.”

“Does that work?”

“For a few minutes.” He breathes out, long and level. “Sometimes that’s all anyone needs from a lie.”

A speaker farther down the platform clears its throat like an old man about to say something useful and then thinks better of it: Stand clear of the— The dash lands between them, an em-dash you could balance a life on if you were careless.

Lando lets his eyes close for a heartbeat, then two. “I tried sleeping on it,” he says.

“On what.”

“On the floor. Where else?” He opens his eyes again. “Didn’t take.”

“How do you sleep,” Oscar asks, and hates the way the question fits so easily in his mouth, like a checklist item he’s asked in rooms with better air.

Lando turns his face without turning his head. “Badly. You?”

“Not here.”

“Outside, then.”

“Functionally,” Oscar says. The honesty tastes like metal, a first lick on a frozen railing.

“Functionally,” Lando repeats, tasting it too. “Right.”

They let the word sit. It feels like a plastic chair that has learned the weight of too many people. Oscar watches the tunnel where possibility usually gathers its excuses. It’s empty, then emptier still—a clever trick, the way nothing can teach itself degrees.

“Do you want to tell me why you came back,” Lando asks, almost curious, almost bored, like a man testing the balance of a coin with his thumb.

“Back in school, you told me not to be brave,” Oscar says.

“That wasn’t the question.”

“It was the answer I had.”

“So you came back because you’re not brave?”

“Because I’m not noble,” Oscar says, and the correction is softer than it should be.

Lando lets that hang until it clothes itself. “Good. We can work with not-noble.” He tips his head back against the tile, winces when his hair picks up wetness, doesn’t move. “Are you waiting for it to do something?”

“It’s designed to,” Oscar says.

“The station?”

“The body.”

Lando huffs a breath that almost wants to be a laugh. “Functionally.”

“Functionally.”

“Okay.” He falls quiet long enough that the word wears down to a stone. Then: “Sometimes I think if I could get bored enough, it would let me out.”

“Has that ever worked for anything.”

“It works for press conferences.” His mouth goes slantwise. “Bore them until the question dies of old age.”

“And here?”

“Here the question has a better pension.”

A tiny warmth collects beneath Oscar’s left thigh, capillary heat trapped in steel or conjured by need. He doesn’t move to test it. He does not want to give the room the satisfaction.

“If you don't mind me asking again, do you remember,” he asks, keeping his eyes on the tunnel, “what it felt like—right before.”

“Before?”

“The fall.”

Lando’s jaw goes still in a way that reads as both thinking and decided. “Air,” he says, eventually. “And the part where your stomach is sure you’re lying to it.”

“About what.”

“About ground.”

Oscar nods. He had expected this. He had not expected the precision.

“I remember the quiet more,” Lando adds, after a beat.

“Quiet?”

“You’d think—” He gestures with two fingers, a small, exact motion. “Crowd, wind, announcers, whatever. But when you know it’s already happening, your head turns the noise down like it’s being helpful.” He shrugs, light and loaded. “Everything that isn’t the fact leaves. It’s polite like that.”

Oscar thinks of his patients — the line flattening on their monitors and how even the machine had seemed to hold its breath, as if to avoid interfering. He keeps the thought and does not hand it over.

“Do you want to talk about it,” he asks instead.

“Does anyone.”

“Sometimes.”

“Not here,” Lando says, and it is almost kind.

The sign blinks once—just once—an involuntary flutter of light. It makes them both look up like people in a chapel trained to rise on a bell. Nothing follows. The platform goes back to pretending it never moved.

“I miss the library,” Lando asks, too sudden to be anything but true.

Oscar studies the mouth of the tunnel, which has the decency not to swallow his gaze whole. “Yes.”

“I keep trying not to,” Lando says. “Because then it feels like time has shape.”

“And you don’t want it to.”

“I don’t trust it if it does,” he says. “I’ve met time. It forgets to be kind.”

Oscar’s shoulder catches one degree more of damp. The cold is careful, punctilious, an accountant. He tilts slightly away from the wall and the wall takes back its water as if embarrassed to be caught making a copy of him.

“When did you stop being angry,” Oscar asks before he can teach the sentence better manners.

Lando doesn’t flinch. “At what.”

“Pick something.”

“The nurses,” he says. “The gravity.” A beat. “My own bones.”

“And now?”

“I’m tired.” He glances at Oscar and then away. “It looks like calm if you don’t stare too hard.”

They breathe through that. The station obliges with its version of breathing: a circulation whisper you can only call wind if you’ve never stood outside. Oscar resists the urge to name it something useful. Not everything needs a label to become real; some things prefer to be tolerated.

“Even the anger was useful,” Lando says, after a while, surprising himself with the admission. “It made hours look like they had corners. You can turn corners.”

“And now it’s a circle.”

“Now it’s a minute stretched until you can see through it.”

Oscar rubs his thumb along the seam of his trousers. The fabric catches and releases in a rhythm that feels borrowed from a heart, then not. “If I asked,” he says, because they are already here, “what you want—”

“Don’t,” Lando says, gently. “I like you better when you’re the one who asks the questions you can survive.”

Oscar accepts the rebuke as if it were a blanket. “Fair.”

“Anyway.” Lando lifts one hand, turns it palm up, studies the condensation beading on the lifeline like someone tried to read him with water. “Wanting is a door. The station can’t allow doors.”

Oscar looks at his own palm. The grooves are full of the room. The room very politely refuses to show up under the fingernails where dirt would prove that something grew.

The announcement tries and fails and tries again to exist: Stand clear of the— Stand clear of the— Each dash seemingly stacked atop the last until it feels like a ladder you could climb if you forgot ladders need rungs.

“I keep thinking about the word ‘clear,’” Lando says, not moving his head. “How it means safe and also empty.”

“And which one is this,” Oscar asks.

“Depends on the minute,” Lando says. “Depends on whether you’re alone in it.”

A gust noses the tunnel. Not a train—too indecisive. The lights harden a shade toward surgical. Oscar’s shoulders draw in and then reject the animal urge to make himself a smaller target. He’s spent years filing down those instincts until they passed for professionalism. The filing still fits. He hates that it fits here.

“I know the room is real when you’re in it,” Lando says, simple as naming weather. “When you’re not, it feels like I’m playing patience with a blank deck.”

“Solitaire,” Oscar says.

“We called it patience at school. That’s what it feels like. Practicing a virtue until it stops meaning anything.”

“You make this funny,” Oscar says, realizing he’s grateful for it and resenting the gratitude.

“It’s habit.” Lando lifts his shoulders again, lets them fall. “Habits survive even when people don’t.”

“When did you pick it up.”

“The habit?”

“The joke.”

“Same time I picked up the broom,” he says, voice gone dry in a way that doesn’t need water. “You learn quick that everyone’s watching. If you make them laugh, they look away more gently.”

“You learned it too well.”

“Functionally,” Lando says, and the smile almost makes it to his eyes.

Oscar doesn’t smile back. He lets his mouth keep its line because the alternative feels like theft.

“Tell me something true,” Lando says, suddenly, turning the question like a key in a lock that won’t be opened but enjoys the ritual.

“I don’t know if I came in on Stratford,” Oscar says.

“That’s not true,” Lando says, mild. “That’s a comfort.”

“Then—” Oscar tries again. “I thought I didn’t care. About any of this.”

“And now?”

“I keep count,” he says, and that is the truest thing he has offered all day.

Lando nods as if he’s been given a blood result. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“It’s a start.”

The sign above them flutters its lashes seven times, too neatly to be accidental. On the seventh, the speaker hits its mark—Stand clear of the— —and then shames itself into silence. Neither of them looks up. The ritual is comfortable enough not to require witnesses.

“Tell me something true,” Oscar returns, because symmetry calms the animal part of him that hates this light.

“I’m not scared the way I was,” Lando says. “I’m scared the way you get when you don’t remember how to be anything else.”

Oscar watches the tunnel’s black mouth arrange itself into an expression and then dismantle it. “I know the difference.”

“Of course you do,” Lando says, and it isn’t unkind.

They let their shoulders take their own distances. Their thighs learn how to share metal. Breath fog blooms and folds. The station hums with un-sound, as if the idea of noise is vaping beside them to avoid breaking a law.

“I tried not moving once,” Lando says, almost to the ledge. “Stood in one spot and decided I wasn’t going to do a single loop for as long as it took.”

“How long did it take,” Oscar asks.

“Until my knees started to lock,” he says. “The body ruins good experiments.”

“Functionally.”

“Functionally.”

“Do you want—” Oscar stops, edits, replaces the word. “Would it help to sit differently.” The offer reveals itself mid-sentence as ridiculous and then sweet; he lets it be both.

“It helps that you asked,” Lando says. “That counts?”

“It counts.”

They shift their weight. The ledge doesn’t reward them. The small, unhoused warmth beneath Oscar’s thigh turns uncertain, like a stray animal questioning its own welcome. He ignores the narrative and accepts the physics.

“If you took Stanmore,” Oscar says, and finds he can say the word now without the room closing a hand around his throat, “would you be choosing, or would it be choosing you.”

“Yes,” Lando says, and somehow it’s not evasive; it’s accuracy.

He breathes, and Oscar matches, because it’s easier to be a metronome than a man sometimes, and the platform will allow at least that.

“You told me not to be noble,” Oscar says.

“That was for you.”

“And you.”

Lando looks at him properly then, the tilt of the head that says he is measuring something that might require courage if he keeps measuring. “I can’t promise not to be noble,” he says. “It’s one of my worse habits.”

“Worse?”

“It looks good in pictures,” Lando says. “You can sell it.”

“And here?”

“Here there’s no one to buy,” he says, and the smile is as brief as a medical light.

The announcement tries again, not for them but near them. Stand clear of the— The dash feels less like a cliff and more like a hand on a sternum. Not now. Wait.

“Do you ever feel,” Lando says, “like the words are trying to finish themselves without us.”

“All the time,” Oscar says, and this feels like the only safe kind of confession.

“Maybe that’s mercy,” Lando says. “Let the sentence spare you the trouble.”

“Maybe it’s theft.”

“Maybe those are the same thing,” he says, and leans his head back until the tile scolds him with another shiver of damp.

Oscar watches a drop gather in Lando’s hair, consider gravity, and choose kindness, clinging a while longer before it has to fall. He wants to reach and brush it away. He wants not to want that so he can be pleased with himself for the purity of his intentions. He does nothing. The drop makes its choice. It slides along the curve of Lando’s ear and disappears into a collar that doesn’t deserve it.

“You’re counting again,” Lando says, eyes still on the tunnel.

“How can you tell.”

“You look like you’re listening to a song you won’t let yourself like.”

He considers denying it and finds he doesn’t have the energy for prettiness. “Seven,” he says. “It likes sevens.”

“So do gamblers.”

“So do spells.”

“Which are we,” Lando asks.

“Functionally,” Oscar says, and lets the word stand in for an entire book he has already written on paper that doesn’t hold ink.

A draft rises. Not strong. Not weak. An argument rehearsing its lines. Far down the tunnel, something metallic learns the opening note to a piece it refuses to perform. The sign does not blink. The screw does not rotate. The camera’s black dome considers them with the same degree of attention it has settled on, as if kindness could be measured and dispensed in fractions of a degree.

“Tell me another true thing,” Lando says, perhaps because the air has remembered how to be an audience.

Oscar thinks he has run out. He hasn’t. “When I woke up,” he says, meaning outside, meaning the couch, meaning Alex’s hand on his shoulder and George’s careful voice, “I thought about not coming back.”

Lando’s mouth loses an idea and doesn’t chase it. “And?”

“And here I am,” Oscar says, because the body is a blunt instrument.

“Okay,” Lando says. “Okay.”

They don’t look at each other. It would domesticate the thing. They watch the tunnel as if the dark needs chaperoning.

“Do you want me to tell you not to,” Lando asks, after a time that hides its clocks.

“Not to what.”

“Come back.”

“No,” Oscar says. He tries the word and finds it fits. “No.”

“Good,” Lando says, and the word arrives with a steadiness that makes Oscar’s hands want something to do, so he sets them palm down on the ledge and waits for the cold to teach him patience.

Another small warmth wakes under his thigh, utterly unearned and therefore sacred. He doesn’t move to test it. He’s learned enough for one minute stretched thin.

“Do you remember being happy,” Oscar asks, not as a doctor, not as a man who expects a number scale.

“Yes,” Lando says, with unreasonable speed. “I remember it three times and then in little bits.”

“Three?”

“First broom. First real win. The day I realized someone could say my name and mean me.” He breathes. “Everything else is glitter or plaster.”

Oscar considers his own three and decides they can wait their turn. “I can work with that.”

“You keep saying that,” Lando says, with no heat. “Like a promise to yourself.”

“Functionally.”

He expects the smile. It doesn’t come. Instead Lando nudges the front of his shoe against the grout line, very gently, as if he could tease the seam into telling them where the door is hidden.

“If you do get a train,” Lando says, wearing the sentence carefully, “if the doors open for you and not for me, don’t slow down to look back.”

“I’m not leaving you here,” Oscar says, and the station catches the certainty and folds it into its walls like contraband.

“Don’t promise that,” Lando says, softer, not bargaining, asking. “Don’t make me someone you break your word for.”

Oscar thinks of every oath he has made that had the shape of virtue and turned out to be stubbornness. He thinks of how often mercy and pride dress in each other’s coats. He refuses to be clever about it. “I won’t look back,” he says.

“Okay.” Lando nods the nod of a man filing a necessary cruelty. “Okay.”

The light above them chooses then to pulse once, a heartbeat the room didn’t mean to show them. They look up in the same breath and the pulse is gone, replaced by the relentless flatness that pretends to be care.

“Tell me something untrue,” Lando says, unexpected, like a magician handing you his empty hands.

Oscar takes longer than he should to realize it’s an invitation. “We’re fine,” he says, with professional precision.

“Good,” Lando says, and the word doesn’t laugh at either of them. “We’ll keep that one.”

The platform gathers itself to do nothing with dignity. The rails hold their breath. The speaker practices its dash. Somewhere aboveground, a clock gives the hour to people who don’t need it. Down here, time is a soft white room that collects them like coats. They sit in it until the sitting becomes a skill. They do not move closer. They do not move apart.

The world, satisfied with their performance of patience, begins to remember drama—pressure along the eardrums, a lift of air at the knees, the almost-grit of vibration under the ledge. Lando tilts his head, listening, not to the train, which he doesn’t believe in, but to Oscar, who he does. Oscar feels the heat under his thigh hold steady for a full count of seven before the platform, chastened by its own generosity, cools it back to proper.

“Ready?” Lando says, not for arrival, not for leaving—ready for the part where the room does what rooms do: enforce its story.

“No,” Oscar says. He doesn’t pretend. “But I’m here.”

“Yea, you are,” Lando murmurs, and this time the almost-smile finds his eyes.

They brace without bracing, the way people in moving vehicles do: learned, animal, dignified in its lack of heroics. The PA opens its mouth and trips on the same stone. Stand clear of the— The lights consider the theatre of a strobe and deny themselves the indulgence. The tunnel gathers a sound with teeth in it.

Oscar’s hand lifts of its own accord, then stops just shy of Lando’s sleeve. The almost-touch hangs there like a word you could speak into a different life. He lets it drop to the ledge instead, flat, calm, honest.

Small truths, then. Enough of them, and the minute might remember how to become a door.

It starts with heat where there shouldn’t be any.

Not a trick of nerves. Not the wishful warmth the mind conjures around a memory to keep it. Real heat, tucked into the thin bezel of stainless under his palm—animal, pocketed, defensible. The ledge has learned a pulse.

Oscar flattens his hand without meaning to, as if more surface area could make the proof larger. The metal holds. Warm, then warmer, the way skin gathers sun. It feels like one degree past comfort and tiptoeing toward pain. He lifts his palm, expecting the temperature to snap back like a lie caught mid-sentence. It doesn’t. The air licks the damp print he’s left and the print evaporates as if embarrassed.

“Don’t,” Lando says.

It’s quiet and late and exact. The word lands on the ledge between their hands and waits to be joined by a second. It isn’t. The platform has learned brevity too well.

Oscar’s fingers hover, stubborn, then fold back into his lap. The heat holds without him as if his touch has created a permission the world is too polite to withdraw. Somewhere underfoot a filament of sound plucks itself to life—thin, metallic, barely there—like a rail learning how to hum in the register of bone.

He listens.

There’s a way metal speaks when it remembers weight. This isn’t it. This is the mind of the station imitating heartbeat after stealing one reference sample from his wrist. The hum tracks him—one beat late, the echo of a pulse trying to teach itself to be leading instead of following. It staggers, corrects, staggers again. On the fourth attempt, it matches. Perfectly. He feels the discovery land in the floor. The tiles accept the rhythm the way a patient accepts a diagnosis they don’t understand yet and therefore respect.

“Do you feel that,” he says.

Lando doesn’t flinch. “You do,” he answers, and the flatness is almost kind. “That’s enough to make it true here.”

The light above them takes the cue like a timid accompanist. One bar flickers, a quick trip; then another, farther down. The world arranges brightness and absence into a heartbeat on a long white vein—one, pause, one, longer pause. Oscar’s chest picks up the pattern without asking him. He thinks of monitors and the way alarms learn you before you learn them. He’s spent years teaching his body not to obey other rooms. This room teaches better.

The sign clears its throat. Canary Wharf blinks once, twice, and settles into a seven-beat stutter: 1—2—3—4—5—6—7; and on the seventh the speaker fulfills its religious duty.

Stand clear of the—

The dash is a fall and also a bridge and also a hand across a chest saying not yet. It stretches this time, as if the sentence, embarrassed by its incompleteness, has chosen to apologize by becoming a note instead. The vowel lengthens past words, past the idea of words, into frequency. It isn’t loud. It exists the way altitude does—subtle, total, unavoidable.

Oscar can feel the rails knitting themselves to the sound. The floor tightens under the ledge like a muscle bracing under a needle. He doesn’t move. Lando doesn’t move. Movement would make it small. Staying still lets the thing be exactly as large as it intends to be.

“Don’t,” Lando says again, and Oscar realizes the word is for himself this time. Not a touch—an instinct—the one that has his hand half-raised toward Lando’s sleeve without permission from language, the one that wants a place to land. He sets the hand down obediently. The ledge burns through the heel of his palm with an intimacy he refuses to call comfort.

The air at knee-height thickens, gathers, lifts. The tunnel takes a breath that has teeth. Every shift of pressure arrives a fraction of a second after the one before, teaching him a tempo the way cities teach you how to cross streets without dying. Someone, somewhere beyond the curve, commits to motion. The station flinches like a decent liar being asked for a second story.

“Oscar,” Lando says, and the name cracks like ice. He’s not looking at him. He’s watching the place where a door might one day decide to stop. The black at the tunnel mouth straightens its spine.

“Here,” Oscar answers, and hears how the answer is the only one he has.

The seven-beat flicker accelerates. Not into a panic; into accuracy. 1—2—3—4—5—6—7, and again, tighter, exact, as if the lights are learning him, calibrating bloom and dim to the minute geometry of his breath. He hates that it’s beautiful. He hates that the body is built to love competent systems even when they are cruel.

Heat, then pain. The ledge crosses some threshold and informs his skin. He keeps his hand there. Let the world know what a refusal looks like.

The hum rises. The speaker changes vowel—not a different word, a deeper note. The frequency lands on the bones at the back of his skull and teaches them to vibrate. He pictures the ossicles wearing tiny white laboratory coats and nodding along, professionals appreciating another professional.

The tiles under his boots shift to inattentive. No, not a shift—a slide. The wrong half-centimeter, the one gravity isn’t supposed to allow if the contract is being honored. His ears register the lie before the rest of him. Balance snaps to alert like a dog told to heel. He does not lurch. Lando doesn’t either. They’ve both been trained by rooms with worse manners.

“Don’t hold your breath,” Lando says.

“I’m not.”

“You’re counting. It’s the same thing here.”

He exhales. He refuses to be obedient and then, because what is living if not compromise, he obeys.

The tunnel brightens without revealing light. That’s the trick—that’s always the trick. He has seen it in operating theatres and in bodies: illumination without source. The black takes on a wet sheen, like a pupil swelling. He hears not wheels, not yet, but the small quick grammar of metal thinking—relay, click, relay, the little throat-clears a system performs before it bothers to arrive.

“I need—” The sentence finds him half-built and ashamed. He doesn’t know what it needs.

“Don’t need,” Lando says, and somehow it doesn’t land as scold. “Want.”

He wants to put his hand where he knows a pulse lives. He wants to anchor this to something that isn’t tile and hum and polite cruelty. He wants a stupid, ordinary thing—a wrist, a mouth shaping his name and meaning him, a bench that is warm for the correct reasons.

“Want,” he tries, and the speaker accepts the audition and lengthens the vowel again, the way rooms will bully language into matching their climate.

He turns his hand and finds Lando’s wrist without looking.

Heat shocks him—sharp, immediate, human. It knifes through the cold and refuses to be explained by any of his private theories. The skin is wet from the room. The pulse is immediate, stubborn, younger than he has any right to expect. It hits his fingers like a knock answered, like proof. He thinks of all the monitored beats he has watched, all the righteous lines printed in ink, and realizes this is the first honest rhythm he has held all day.

Lando flinches—but it’s the kind of flinch that belongs to surprise, not refusal. His hand turns infinitesimally under Oscar’s grip, settling into a position that allows fingers to become a cuff.

“Don’t,” Lando says for the third time, and now Oscar hears it—a prayer to no one in particular. Don’t stop, don’t let go, don’t make this something we can’t survive naming.

“I won’t,” Oscar says, and somewhere the room writes that down and prepares a punishment for later.

The hum snaps from frequency to tone. The rails pick up harmonics until they sound like a choir that learned Latin by eavesdropping. Somewhere very near, the pressure changes direction as if the air has decided to go around them rather than through. The ledge sears the heel of his hand into an ache he will keep when he wakes. If he wakes.

Canary Wharf loses the space between letters and becomes a block—CANARYWHARF—sign and wall and command, a terminal. He thinks for one idiotic second about the word terminal and then, like a good doctor, refuses to have a sense of humor.

The seven-flicker collapses into steadiness. This should be relief. It is the opposite. The moment before a seizure looks like this—order so exact it becomes violence.

The speaker tries one last time to finish its sentence. It doesn’t. The dash gives up and lengthens until it isn’t punctuation or breath or warning. It’s field. The platform saturates with it. The humidity spikes as if the room has decided sweat is a doctrine.

He hears it then—wheels, finally, wheels—hugging the secret curve where sound becomes body. The roar is wrong. Not wrong like a hiccup, wrong like a word you recognize spoken by someone who learned it from a different childhood. A pitched thunder raging up through the frame of the world. The tunnel exhales. The light decides to be too white.

He tightens his grip on Lando’s wrist. The tendons answer. The bones hold. The pulse keeps time like a promise.

“If it stops for you—” Lando begins, and the platform steals the rest, replaces it with a non-sound like paper catching fire without flame. Oscar leans toward the voice anyway, ridiculous, hopeful, human.

“Say it,” Oscar says, and the air obliges by becoming storm.

“Don’t—” Lando tries again, and stops. The second half arrives crawling. “—forget the library.”

Of all the phrases the room could choose to let through, it lets that one. It drops into Oscar’s throat like a key a child didn’t know they were carrying. Rain. Candlelight. Stone warmed by breath. Ink. The mind finds the corridor with almost indecent speed. He sees dust halos in lamplight. He hears the clock. He’s here and he isn’t. He is two places that agree the other is true.

The train reaches them the way a wave reaches a wall—committed, unapologetic. Doors are ideas. The carriage windows are black mirrors listing the thing you refuse to be. In the CCTV dome’s warped shine he glimpses himself: a man anchored to another by the simplest human invention.

He doesn’t look up. He looks at Lando, at the cut of cheekbone older by a year than it has any right to be, at the mouth that’s learned economy, at the eyes that flicker and settle and flicker like they’re struggling to pick a present and live there.

“Hold on,” he says, not honest to any plan except the most cowardly and the most brave.

“I am,” Lando says, and the words unfurl heat like a match struck cupped in a palm.

The floor drops.

Not much. Just enough. That terrible half-centimeter again, but longer, sustained, a plane of tile remembering it is a slab and can do slab things. Oscar’s inner ear lifts its hands, helpless. Gravity shifts its stance by a fraction. The human part of him does what bodies do: braces without permission and then tries to pretend it never flinched.

The light stutters toward strobe and thinks better of it; dignity is maintained. The sound pushes past hearing into bone, a bass-line you feel in cartilage and memory. The rails scream—thin, metal, ecstatic. The world telescopes: ledge, wrist, breath, sound. Beyond that, everything smooths to white.

The smell changes. The room can’t help it. The ozone cracks open and leaks rain. Not metaphor. Rain—the low, clean sweetness of water meeting stone, of wet wool, of the ink you only smell before you’ve blotted it. The light takes the hint and warms by a degree that would not be measurable unless you were starving. He is starving. It is sunshine.

The bench vanishes.

Not visually—physically. His hand slaps air where heat used to live. The sudden absence burns in reverse, cold teeth closing on the place the heat left, the way mouths miss teeth they’ve had pulled. He reaches again reflex, finds only edge.

He refuses to let go of the wrist. Lando’s skin is the only continuous line left—the only stillness in a room teaching itself to be river. Fingers lock. He will let the station take his professionalism and leave the stupid, animal grip.

The announcement pours through him one last time, the vowel widened to a bridge the exact length of his spine. He feels it land, feels it ring the bones behind his ear. For a moment he hears a human voice hiding in it, the timbre of a woman trying to be precise, and then she goes to frequency again and frequency evaporates into weather.

“Don’t be noble,” Lando says. It slips in anyway, a refrain that doesn’t want to be a prayer anymore.

“I’m not,” Oscar says, and the honesty makes the platform flicker like a paled-out laugh.

The train is both there and not. Doors are ideas. The idea of a door opens. The idea of stepping through sails across his chest, sails back, sails across again, like a bird hitting invisible glass until the glass remembers to be kind.

“Library,” Lando says, a third time, softer, as if the word can prime the corridor.

“North Tower,” Oscar returns, and the mouth of the tunnel gives up the last of its black and becomes the full throat of a bell.

His grip on Lando does not waver—he couldn’t make it loosen even if he wanted to. The human instinct to hold on has nothing to do with courage here; it’s older than reason, as primitive as breathing against the dark. Beneath his fingers, Lando’s pulse thuds, uneven but resolute, each beat a syllable spelling alive. The tendons shift as Lando turns his wrist slightly, not to pull away, but to fit their hands more cleanly together, as though the world might slide off its axis if skin didn’t recognize skin.

The air folds around them. The tunnel inhales, long and cold and deep enough to pull the light with it. The sound that follows isn’t a roar but a resonance—metal learning the frequency of bone. It fills the space behind Oscar’s ribs, hums through the ache in his knuckles where he’s holding too tight, until he isn’t sure whether he’s feeling Lando’s heartbeat or his own reflected back.

The white glare off the tiles turns liquid, trembling between brightness and motion, as if the whole station is rethinking its existence. The train’s outline shivers at the edge of sight—its carriages a suggestion, its windows mirroring only light. The doors are still just ideas, but the idea grows more persuasive with every breath.

He feels Lando’s breath hitch; a small, involuntary thing. Their shoulders touch, barely, but it’s enough to complete the circuit—the cold stops biting, the hum steadies. It feels, for one impossible second, like the room has decided to believe in them.

“Don’t let go,” Lando says—not loud, not pleading. Simply a rule written into the air.

“I’m not,” Oscar answers, and his voice comes out low and rough, as though the sentence has scraped itself raw on the way up. His thumb moves once, almost unconsciously, across the jut of Lando’s wristbone.

The world trembles on that touch. The rails ring. The air turns to sound. The tunnel’s black collapses inward and becomes a single flash of gold—the same candlelight that used to stain library wood, the same color that rain makes when it slides across windowpane and remembers how to catch fire.

Then: nothing. Not quiet—nothing. The difference is tactical and absolute.

The hum cuts, as if a hand has pulled a plug with satisfying efficiency. The lights hold their breath like a choir before a downbeat. The pressure abandons its experiment with his ears. The floor recalls itself to order. His own heart throws a hard, bruising beat into the absence, sudden as a judge. His grip crushes bone and tendon—he knows this, he catalogues it as he’s committing it.

He blinks and the color changes. Not drama—drift. The white goes honeyed at the edges like a page gone old in a warm room. The damp on the wall recalibrates from sterile condensation to rain’s proper residue. The cold turns from fluorescent to draft. The station still exists, it insists it does, but it has forgotten its own script and borrowed someone else’s lines. He listens for the speaker and hears a clock instead, patient, metronomic, merciful.

“Lando,” he says—or thinks he does. His mouth might be slow to obey. He doesn’t look to check. He keeps his grip. He allows himself one act of faith: if the room can have its rules, so can he. Rule: he does not let go first.

The platform answers by dissolving its edges. Tiles blur to a run of color that isn’t color yet. The rails become a staff without notes. The tunnel forgets to be throat and decides on corridor. His feet are—somewhere. His body performs the gesture of standing. He permits it. The heat from the ledge is gone, but his palm keeps the ache, and the ache will be proof.

In the blur, something like a coat-brushes sleeve again. He has a fierce flash of the collision—how ordinary it was, how clean—and that ordinariness feels like the bravest thing the day did. He holds tight, not noble, not brave, functional, honest.

The sound tears.

Not loud. Not violent. A seam opening along its proper stitch. Out of it spills rain as a sound—thread-thin, membrane-soft, too articulate to be the station’s child. The next layer is the clock: not the clipped, cheerful bureaucracy of hospital hour-chimes, an old clock’s patience—the click that says we have time to do this right. He has heard it, he knows it, from a room where learning was allowed to be slow.

Smell next, inevitable: candle–wax surrendering to heat, ink awake in a bottle’s throat, parchment’s animal memory. The Underground gives up without losing face. It has the dignity to become background rather than defeated.

“Don’t forget—” Lando tries again, because repetition is a way to keep rooms honest.

“I won’t,” Oscar says, and he means the room, the wrist, the three times Lando said Don’t be noble, the smell of broom-sap on a handrail, the way late rain makes stone breathe. He means everything. He lets meaning be a crowded word.

The last thing the station takes is the lens that makes distance look like threat. The CCTV dome stalls in its slow tilt. The screw in the sign rests politely where it is. The poster holds its corner down. The seven flickers gather in the idea of seven and go to sleep.

Oscar closes his eyes on brightness and opens them on wood.

The ledge ceases being ledge somewhere in the closing. His palm skates off lacquered table instead, warm from candleshadow. The ache in the heel of his hand remains because pain is an honest archivist. His fingers still hold a wrist, and the skin is warm but the temperature is correct now, human-warm rather than miracle. He lets his grip loosen by a fraction—just enough to insist this is consent, not drag.

He doesn’t look yet. He lets the new air prove itself: the thin, good damp of rain working at a window, the deep quiet of stacks that know you and have decided to be kind, the thick, thoughtful hush of paper. The fluorescent hum has become the irregular flicker of candlewick, tiny wind-tunnels of gold dashed on the table by flame. The floor is wood that has remembered footfall for centuries and will remember his if he allows it. A clock above the shelves marks time with a calm hand. Not the second-by-second graph of a life in peril. Time as a man who has taken off his coat and sat down.

He opens his hand.

The air cools at once, greedy to fill the space where another pulse used to live. His fingers flex against nothing, the ghost of heat already fading, each heartbeat of his own an echo that finds no rhythm to answer it.

If he has brought anyone with him, the room will say so in a moment. It stays quiet. The silence, when it comes, is clean—not cruel, not kind, just a fact being written down.

He looks at his palm, expecting to find proof—a dent, a mark, some faint residue of skin on skin—but there’s only the ordinary pallor of his own hand, damp with the kind of cold that doesn’t come from weather. The ache remains, which is something, and he decides not to call that grief.

“Library,” he says into the gold, because the word opens the door in his chest before it opens any other.

And the world answers—first with rain, then with the clock, then with the smallest, most mundane sound of all: the slow ruffle of a page being turned by a hand that might be his own.