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Lando liked to think he could have helped - on the days he wanted to hurt himself a little more.
It was a quiet kind of punishment, replaying every moment he might’ve done differently. He traced them like beads on a rosary, each regret worn smooth from overuse.
What if he’d stayed longer that night? What if he hadn’t said it’s fine when it wasn’t?
The questions never answered back, but he kept asking anyway.
Morning light crawled under a ceiling of colourless cloud. He sat on a bench that smelled of rain and old wood. The air was sharp with cold, the kind that bit at your lungs until you felt something. He liked it that way. The world seemed quieter when it hurt to breathe.
Across the path, a patch of grass shivered in the wind, every blade bending the same way. He stared until the movement blurred, until he almost saw it - Oscar, arms spread wide, laughing at the gusts. His hair sticking up, cheeks pink, shoes muddy from running where he shouldn’t have.
“Come on,” Oscar had said once, breathless with joy. “You never just feel things, Lando.”
And Lando had grinned, chasing after him even though the rain stung his face and soaked his hoodie. They’d come home drenched and shivering, laughing, Oscar’s cold nose pressed to his neck, everything warm and loud and alive.
The bench creaked beneath him. The memory stayed. It always did.
He remembered the other mornings too - when Oscar moved slower, quieter, as if he’d woken up under deep water. Sometimes he’d sit at the edge of the bed, fingers buried in his hair, whispering that he was fine.
A gentle lie. The kind that asked not to be questioned.
Lando learned the rhythm of it: the kettle boiling but the mug left empty, music stopping halfway through a song, the bathroom door clicking shut and staying closed too long. “Talk to me,” he used to say from the hallway.
“I am,” Oscar would answer, voice muffled through the door.
But when he came out, he always looked like someone who’d been fighting invisible waves all night.
Still, there were days when light broke through - sudden, startling. Days when Oscar’s smile looked real again, tugging Lando back into something that felt almost normal. Movie nights under a blanket that smelled of popcorn. Fights over burnt pasta. Their whole world shrunk to a small apartment, and somehow that was enough.
Lando used to think those moments cancelled out the bad ones. He knows now that depression doesn’t make deals.
It lingers. It waits.
Sometimes, when the wind caught the trees just right, he could almost hear Oscar humming under his breath. The tune was always the same - soft, circular, half-remembered - looping until it faded.
He blinked, and the world slipped back into focus: the empty bench, the dull light, traffic far away. He rubbed his palms together for warmth. His fingers still shook. Somewhere nearby, a bird sang once and stopped, as if it had forgotten the rest of the melody. His phone sat face-down beside him. He hadn’t checked it in months, but he still carried it everywhere, as if it kept a line open to somewhere that didn’t exist anymore.
The last message glowed in his memory: I’m tired. Don’t worry.
He’d read it a hundred times, maybe more, convincing himself it didn’t mean what it sounded like. He wished he’d worried harder. He wished he’d called again, knocked on the door, refused to accept I’m fine.
Everyone had said the same things afterward: that Oscar was loved, that none of it was his fault, that sometimes people drift beyond reach. He’d nodded because that’s what you did when people offered comfort - they meant it, and that mattered. But at night, when the dark pressed in close, their words collapsed like paper walls.
He still talked to Oscar sometimes. Not aloud - just in the quiet moments: pouring coffee, brushing his teeth, walking home when the streetlights flickered on. Sometimes he caught himself waiting for an answer.
A gust of wind scraped dust along the path. It reminded him of the balcony in their old apartment - narrow, rusted, barely big enough for two. Oscar had sat out there once, knees to his chest, staring at the city like it was some faraway place.
“Do you ever feel like you’re watching your life from outside it?” he’d asked.
Lando had been leaning on the doorframe, phone in hand, not really listening - until he saw the look on Oscar’s face. “Sometimes,” he’d said.
Oscar nodded, mouth twitching into a half-smile. “I feel like that all the time.”
Lando had wanted to fix it, pull him back into the room, into the world. But words felt too small. So he’d sat beside him instead, shoulder to shoulder, the city humming beneath them.
“I’m here,” he’d whispered.
“I know,” Oscar had said - and for a heartbeat, it had sounded like a promise.
Now the wind threaded through the trees, lifting the smell of wet leaves and soil. He stood, joints stiff, and followed the narrow path through the grass. The ground was uneven, soft from rain. Halfway down, a flash of colour caught his eye - wildflowers growing against a fence, small and defiant. Oscar would’ve liked that. He used to stop to take pictures of things everyone else stepped over: cracked pavement, stray cats, light landing just right on broken glass. Proof, he said, that beauty didn’t care where it landed.
The thought tightened Lando’s throat. He reached the end of the path, crouched, and brushed dirt from the small plaque.
Oscar Jack Piastri.
Nothing else. Just a name and two dates far too close together. He traced the letters with his thumb, cold against cold.
“Hey,” he murmured, voice cracking on the single syllable. The sound travelled only a few feet before the air swallowed it.
He stayed a while, breathing, letting the wind sting his face until his eyes watered. He thought of another night - rain on the windows, Oscar curled on the couch, head in his lap. They’d been watching some old movie neither cared about.
“I don’t know why you stay,” Oscar had said suddenly.
“Because I want to,” Lando had answered.
Oscar had smiled without looking up. “That’s what scares me.”
The memory rolled through him like a slow wave. He let it pass. When he finally turned to leave, the clouds had begun to break apart. Thin sunlight spilled through - pale, uncertain, but still there. He shoved his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, and looked back one last time.
He liked to think he could have helped. He still does, sometimes.
But mostly, he just misses him.