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Oscar wakes with an odd feeling in his chest — not light or heavy, but like something is ever so slightly out of place. His alarm goes off a half-moment later, and he silences it on the first ring. He doesn’t name the feeling until he’s halfway through brushing his teeth, mint stinging cold on his gums. Deja vu.
Yesterday's loss feels less imminent than it had last night, ducking out of the club early and drinking alone in his hotel room. It feels far away already, like it’s weeks away and not mere hours.
Oscar shakes off the last dregs of it as his car pulls up to the track, mind already locking onto their run plans for today’s testing. Lando’s probably not going to show up until mid-afternoon, so Oscar’s got the morning shift in the car, and he allows himself a sleepy sigh about it as he beelines for the coffee cart in McLaren’s hospitality.
He gets half a sip of the beautiful, warm liquid before a blurry, teammate-shaped mass nearly bowls him over. He stares sadly as the coffee splashes out of his hand, mercifully missing his shirt. “Mate,” Oscar says flatly.
“Oscar,” Lando gasps, and when Oscar finally looks at him, he freezes. Lando, to put it lightly, looks like shit. He looks hungover, of course, but he looks almost panicked too, and he’s definitely not supposed to be here.
“Are you— did you take something?” Oscar stutters out, grabbing Lando by the shoulders to stabilize him. The coffee, quickly cooling on the floor, is already forgotten. Lando looks taken aback.
“What— what did you say, what? No, or,” he stops, thinks for a moment, "I don't remember. Maybe. Not relevant. I need your help,” he finishes urgently, reaching up to grab Oscar’s wrists and tugging him towards a side hallway.
“What the—"
“Hell,” Lando finishes for him, at the same time. “I know. Sorry about the coffee. I’m in a time loop.”
Oscar freezes as soon as they’re out of sight. “What?”
Bafflingly, Lando echoes him, at the same time, in the same tone. “I know,” he adds. “Just— trust me. It’s like the movie, Groundhog Day. You haven’t seen it but your sisters have.”
Oscar flounders a bit. He hasn’t seen Groundhog Day, but he’s fairly certain he didn’t tell Lando that at any point recently. “Isn’t that—"
“The one with the news guy and he drives off a cliff, yeah. I haven’t tried driving off a cliff yet and it didn’t work for him and I don’t think it’ll work for me.”
Oscar’s morning deja vu is back in full force. “Papaya,” he tests suddenly, but Lando says that at the same time, too. And then, “Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Lando intones tiredly.
“How—"
“Three weeks,” Lando sighs.
—Long. How long, is what Oscar had meant to ask. But Lando knew that already. Lando knew everything, already, if he’d lived the day before.
“I think we made progress yesterday,” Lando says, before Oscar can ask what he’s tried. “We already ruled out all of my exes—" Oscar opens his mouth, “— yes, even that one,” Oscar snaps his mouth shut, “and I’m not having that conversation again, so we’re stuck again.”
Oscar frowns. Tries to ignore the implications that Lando’s been coming to him for help, apparently repeatedly, and he doesn’t even remember it. It makes a new feeling bloom in his chest next to the sense of repetition that’s becoming more clearly defined. The new feeling is undefinable, but he has a few ideas of what it might be. “Why—"
“Was I calling my exes? Because it’s a love curse and to break the loop I have to confess to someone.” Lando’s getting more irritated, like they’re wasting time repeating things. Which, Oscar supposes, they kind of are. “Dunno what caused it, but we narrowed it down to that. Probably.”
It doesn’t sound all that probable to Oscar, but Lando shoots him a look and he figures he’s probably already voiced that concern in a previous loop. He stays quiet, and decides not to examine the fact that he already believes Lando, even if it does sound insane and impossible.
Lando’s chewing on his lip the way he does when there’s something he wants to say, but doesn’t know how to say it. Oscar sighs, and turns to start walking towards their drivers rooms. Even if Lando’s lived today a million times, Oscar hasn’t, and he still has responsibilities he’s theoretically supposed to fulfill. Lando follows him wordlessly, but when they reach Oscar’s room, he lingers at the door.
“I have a new idea,” Lando says quickly into the silence, like if he doesn’t get the words out right now he’ll swallow them forever; “you said something yesterday. You, um. Are you in love with me?”
Everything in Oscar’s brain screeches to a halt.
Passively, he realizes he’s still aching for the loss. He’s never been good, exactly, at not getting what he wanted. And yesterday, Oscar had wanted to win. He’d resolved to put all of the possibly-in-love-with-Lando-Norris feelings off until he was at least back in Monaco, shelved in the face of all of the devastated-about-losing-the-championship-to-Lando-Norris feelings he’d been having recently, but something must have dredged them up yesterday — Lando’s yesterday, that is, the previous loop — for him to have mentioned anything to Lando himself.
“I said that?” he asks after a long moment, unbalanced, and by the way Lando seems shifty, it’s clear this is a conversation he hasn’t run through before. Something new.
“You, um. Sorta?” he clears his throat, finally stepping into the room. After a moment of deliberation, he closes the door. The click of the lock makes Oscar’s ears ring.
Oscar distantly feels a wave of panic as Lando stumbles through his explanation. Last loop, the two of them had, allegedly, gotten stupid drunk on the mixers in Lando’s hotel room, and Lando doesn’t remember exactly what happened after that, but apparently they both shed a few layers of clothing — Lando seemed to be deliberately vague about this bit — and also, Oscar had said that he could love Lando.
“…and I know it’s not exactly the same as me saying it, but I felt like it like, shifted something. You know?”
“What,” Oscar says slowly, “did we do.”
“I don’t remember,” Lando groans, which isn’t really fair because Oscar wasn’t even there, technically, but also he may have — what — made out with? had sex with Lando Norris, and he doesn’t even remember. Or it wasn’t even really him, since they day looped over again, and who he is right now feels distant from the Oscar Lando's telling him about. He might be getting a headache.
Suddenly aware that he does still have a job to do, Oscar grabs his fireproofs where they’re laying folded on the massage table. He thinks Lando squeaks when he turns away and shucks off his t-shirt, but mercifully he decides not to follow up on that. When he turns around again, Lando’s shifted to stare at the wall.
“Okay,” Oscar says once he’s in his suit and he’s gotten his thoughts in order. Lando straightens, turning back to look at him. Oscar hasn’t technically answered the question — are you in love with me — but he’s hoping Lando will let them move past it. “We determined you’re stuck in the loop because you need to confess to someone.” Lando nods. “And… this has to do with me, how?”
Lando deflates, giving him a borderline pathetic look as Oscar goes to move past him towards the door. “Well— he starts, and puffs himself up full of fake confidence as he recounts his logic, “you said you could love me, so I thought that might be… a lead. Like, I could con— er, reciprocate? To you, and that might count enough to break the loop.”
Oscar stops with his hand on the door handle, ignoring Lando’s use of reciprocate. “Do you?” he says, aiming for casual and missing by a mile.
“What?” Lando asks, and Oscar’s suddenly aware that they’re in a building full of staff members with very thin walls.
He lowers his voice. “Do you,” he repeats, watching as Lando’s eyes flick over his face, “love me?”
Lando looks at his hand on the door, and Oscar drops it. They’re standing too close in the small room; if Oscar focuses, he can feel Lando’s body heat. Lando’s breath, fanning over his neck.
“Yeah,” he say quietly, seriously. With the same weight in his voice as when he’d reached for the trophy, either yesterday or three weeks ago. “Yeah, I do.”
“Okay,” Oscar says, something in him settling. “I— do too.”
Lando shoots him a funny look. “You don’t have to… say it back, I think. For it to— you know.”
Break the loop, Oscar fills in, right. that’s what this is all about. “…Yeah,” he says, after an awkward pause. His hand twitches towards the door again. “Well, I should—“ he gestures vaguely. Get the fuck out of here, he thinks tamely.
“Yes! Of course. Testing. Right.” Lando sort of half-leaps out of his way, intent on giving him plenty of space all of a sudden. Oscar pulls the door open quickly, stepping out into the hall.
“Bye,” he throws over his shoulder, leaving Lando behind. In his room. After having just sort-of confessed. But the day waits for no man.
Well. Except for Lando Norris, apparently.
When Oscar slips the helmet on, everything else falls away, like always. Hands on the wheel, feet on the pedals, eyes on the road. It works so well that he half-forgets about brushing his fingers against a dream yesterday before having it ripped away from him. He almost fully forgets about the possible time-discrepancies surrounding the person that ripped it away from him.
Oscar’s just decided that the whole morning was a stress-induced hallucination, laying in his hotel bed that night, when Lando calls him.
He picks up on the second ring.
“What if I’m wrong?”
Lando’s voice sounds small over the phone. Oscar hears fabric rustling and can picture in vivid detail Lando, just across the hallway, shifting under the sheets of his own bed.
“About…?”
“The loop.”
Right. Lando saying I do echoes between Oscar’s ears, paired with the serious green-blue of his eyes, colored like steel with the overhead lights of his driver’s room. I do. Like a vow.
“Then you— come find me. Tomorrow. Explain again, do it all again,” Oscar says simply. Isn’t that how these things work? You do it again and again, until you get it right?
“I don’t want to do it all again,” Lando whispers. Oscar presses his phone closer to his ear to hear it. “I, I’m scared.” And then, even more quietly: “I want to go home.”
Devastatingly, Lando sounds like he might cry. “Come over,” Oscar says quickly, brain and mouth overridden by the sudden tightness in his chest return. Don’t fuck it up again, the tightness is telling him. You’ve been here before. Don’t make the same mistake, over and over and over again.
Lando stays silent, so Oscar keeps talking. “Or — I can go over there, if you want. I’m just across the hall. You don’t have to be — I can. If you want.” He’s not even sure what, exactly, he’s offering. He just knows he has to do something to get that awful shake out of Lando’s voice.
“No,” Lando says, strained, “No. When I woke up this morning and you weren’t there, that was… worse.”
Oscar doesn’t know what to do with that.
“Just— stay on the line,” Lando asks.
“Okay,” Oscar replies, “I can do that.”
There’s nothing but the sound of them breathing for a moment, loud in silent rooms. After a minute or two, Lando speaks again.
“What if I messed it up? I didn’t say the— the full thing.” I didn’t say I love you.
“You can say it again,” Oscar whispers, trying not to sound greedy.
“I love you,” Lando says, voice crackling slightly.
“I love you too,” Oscar breathes, and as he says it he knows it’s true. It was true last loop, when he said he could love Lando, too.
“You don’t have to—“ Lando starts, but Oscar cuts him off.
“I know,” he says, “I just. I want you to know.”
“…Okay.”
Oscar stays on the line until Lando’s breathing evens out, and then stays on a little longer than that.
When Oscar wakes, his phone’s dead, and someone’s pounding on his door.
“It’s tomorrow,” Lando nearly shouts, launching himself at Oscar with a grin that rivals the one he had when he was handed his trophy two days ago. The way he says it, it sounds an awful lot like I love you.
“It’s tomorrow,” Oscar repeats, as Lando hooks his arms around his neck and pulls him closer. I love you too.