Chapter Text
The fireworks were for Lando.
Oscar kept his helmet on. The visor had fogged at the edges, softening the sky into something he could almost look at—gold bleeding into silver bleeding into the colour of a days-old bruise.
P2, the board in front of his car said. Second in the race. Third in the championship.
Third in the story everyone would tell about this year. Not important enough to boo, not tragic enough to mourn—just... there. There’s a specific humiliation to that position, he could almost hear the commentators jest, especially after leading for most of the season.
Across parc fermé, the McLaren crew moved as a single organism, papaya flooding toward the other car—the championship car—the way water finds its level. Lando hadn't climbed out. Through the gap in the bodies Oscar could see him still in the cockpit, shoulders shaking, hands pressed to his visor. Ten seconds. Twenty. Three hundred million people were watching this moment, and the cameras held their positions, patient as predators.
Get up.
Oscar’s fingers twitched against his thighs. Get up so I can look at you. Take your helmet off so I can see your face when you finally have everything you ever wanted.
He knew what Lando was feeling. He remembered Austria, the F3 opener—contact at the first corner, then clawing back through the field, the last few laps stretching into something endless as the gap went from theoretical to real and the world had slammed into focus so hard his vision spotted. He'd sat in that cockpit afterward, terrified to move, certain that standing would shatter something.
He should move.
The media pen was waiting. His engineer had said something in his ear about debrief times, and he needed to take his helmet off before the sweat pooling at his collar made the skin there crack and bleed again. But Oscar’s hands stayed at his sides, and he stood paralyzed, watching smoke clear above the faint circles the other papaya car had carved in the distance like a boy drawing his name in wet cement.
When the new champion finally rose, his movements were wrong—puppet-jerky, like someone working the controls from very far away. He braced one hand on the halo. The other reached behind his visor.
Oscar’s fingers tightened around his helmet, now placed on the plinth. The crowd noise was so loud it had become texture, a pressure against his chest. His teammate was walking. He didn't remember deciding to walk. The cameras would immortalize this exact configuration of his features forever, was all Oscar could think before Lando's visor came up and his face was—
Oscar's throat closed.
—wet and blotched and crumpled in on itself, ugly the way only real joy is ugly, and his curls were plastered dark to his forehead and his eyes couldn't seem to fix on anything, sliding over the crowd like he was searching for something he'd lost.
They found Oscar.
Later, he wouldn't be able to say who closed the distance. Only that suddenly there were arms around him and he was pulling Lando in by the back of the neck, chest to chest, and through two layers of damp Nomex he could feel a heartbeat slamming against his own—
Wheel to wheel, something in him said. One more time.
Lando had gone pliant against him for half a second, eyes bright and wet behind the visor, green as go lights, green as a helmet in the rearview, green as every number that had ever flashed next to his name in the faster sector. This close, Oscar could see the exact pattern of burst capillaries around his eyes, could smell the sharp copper-salt of adrenaline sweat, could count the milliseconds between each wet inhale.
The visor was up. Nothing between them but ten centimeters of humid air.
I could.
Oscar's hand was on the back of Lando's head. His thumb had found the soft place where skull met spine.
I could tilt his chin up right now. I could—
Lando blinked. A tear slid sideways across his temple and caught in the hair above his ear, and Oscar watched its whole journey, watched the light fracture inside it like a small death. A supernova of exhaustion and relief contained in a single skull, and for a fraction of a second, Oscar was orbiting it.
I could kiss every drip of your happiness off those trembling lashes and we'd never have to pretend again that this is just about the driving—
—He removed his hands from the body of Lando Norris, 2025 formula one world champion. Slowly, carefully, the way you peel back a bandage when you're afraid of what's underneath.
The hand on his waist lingered for just a moment. And then gravity rushed back in; or rather, he was violently flung away from its centre. A champion board sliced through his vision. A thousand flashing lights, and none of them for him. Adam Norris’s arms had found his son, and Oscar had been released back into being merely there—a witness, a footnote, someone who had flown too close to the sun.
You don’t spend a lifetime chasing a feeling without becoming addicted to the chase, he thought, the rationalization smooth and cold in his mind. And Lando, in this moment, was the purest embodiment of the summit. To want him was to want the crown itself. To be taunted his body heat, to hunt him down and be his prey, to imagine his own lips wrapped around the thumb he clasped in congratulations. To reach into every photo, every post he’d liked like breathing and left to gather dust in memory, and yank Lando back by the collar of his race suit and scream, Look at me. See only me.
"Good job, mate," was all that his mouth managed. It took a few seconds to sink in. The voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.
There was a photograph from that moment.
Oscar hadn't seen it yet, but he knew it existed—knew it was already propagating across servers and timelines, being cropped and filtered and captioned with words like finally and deserved and history. In it, Lando's face would be turned toward the light, mouth open in that particular shape of disbelief that athletes' faces make when decades of wanting finally crystallize into having. His eyes would be wet. The fireworks would crown him.
Oscar knew the photograph existed because he'd been standing three meters to the left of it, watching it happen in real time, feeling the moment's gravity bend around Lando's body like light around a collapsing star.
The cameras had also captured a woman with golden pigtails throwing her arms around the new champion's teammate. What they hadn't captured was the half-second before—Oscar's flinch, quickly suppressed, as the blur of movement in his periphery registered as someone else's mother reaching for him.
Cisca. Mother of a world champion.
Her perfume was floral and expensive, the kind of scent that came in small bottles and lingered in the fabric of things. It hit Oscar like an accusation. Like the smell of someone else's complete joy, bottled and sprayed directly into his open wound.
"Thank you," she said into his ear, squeezing tight. Her voice was thick. "For being good to him. For being good with him."
Oscar let himself sink into it for a moment, a brief surrender. He thought about his own mother's hands on his face sixty seconds ago, the way she'd looked at him like he'd won something anyway—that quiet maternal lie that children learn to accept as love. He thought about his sisters crowding around him, their voices bright and determined, building a wall of we're proud of you between him and the thing he actually felt.
He thought about being young enough that hurt was clean and losses could be soothed with dinner and sleep.
"He deserved it," Oscar replied. The worst part was that it was true.
Lando had earned this through a season of sublime pace and agonizing near-misses. Through seven years of being McLaren's crown prince. Six years and eleven months of almost. Six years and four months of watching other men stand on the top step and smile, and always letting the cameras catch whatever his face did in those moments. The championship wasn't a gift. It was a debt the universe had finally, begrudgingly, paid.
And Oscar wanted to take it from this woman’s son anyway.
He wanted to peel Lando's fingers off the trophy and close his own around it. He wanted to go back to Zandvoort and watch the smoke rise from the other papaya car and feel nothing—not the sick lift of hope, not the immediate shame that followed, just the sheer, uncomplicated hunger of a man who had his eyes locked onto the prize and didn't care how.
You never want to win like this.
He remembered saying it. Remembered the microphone hot against his lips, the Dutch sun flattening everything into overexposure, the way his voice had come out measured and appropriate and kind. He remembered meaning it, too. That was the part that still frightened him. He'd meant it in the moment—had looked at Lando's crumpled posture on the grass hill, in the garage, and felt genuine anguish on his behalf.
And underneath the anguish, quiet as a heartbeat: thirteen points.
That's what separated them now. Thirteen points and a summer that had curdled somewhere between Austin and Mexico City, when the car that had been his, that had answered to his inputs like an extension of his own nervous system, started speaking a different language. Started finding grip where Lando's hands asked for it. Started rotating on Lando's rhythm.
He'd led the championship for fifteen races. He'd gone to sleep in Monza with a bitter taste in his mouth, a thirty-one-point lead and dreams so vivid they left him gasping—dreams where he stood on a stage in Abu Dhabi and his family was crying in the crowd and the weight of a trophy was real and solid in his hands.
He'd woken up in Baku to a car that didn't want him anymore.
The Ferrari Trento was cold on his hands. Oscar raised the bottle, aimed, and watched the spray catch the Yas Marina light as it arced toward Lando's face—watched Lando sputter and laugh, watched him shake his head like a dog, curls flying, droplets catching the fireworks and fragmenting into something almost too bright to look at.
Thirteen points.
Lando's mouth was open. Sparkling wine dripped from his jaw. His race suit clung dark to his shoulders, and Oscar could see the shape of his collarbones through the wet fabric, could trace the architecture of a body that had just become immortal.
He would go to sleep tonight replaying the way Lando climbed out of his cockpit like a drowning man surfacing from the ocean.
Thirteen points, Oscar thought, and smiled for the cameras, and felt the number settle into his bones like a second skeleton. Something to carry into next season. Something to build a year around. Something to whisper into the dark on all the nights between now and Melbourne, when sleep wouldn't come and his hands yearned for the shape of his biggest rival’s palm against his.
He walked through the media pen on autopilot. Questions arrived and departed like trains he had no intention of boarding.
How does it feel to finish the season third after leading for so long? He said something about learning and coming back stronger. Some are calling this a collapse, do you think that's fair? He said something about the sport being difficult. About margins being small. He did not say: I led for fifteen races. I watched the gap close like a wound healing in reverse, I watched Verstappen catch up while we fumbled like clowns and I couldn't stop it, I couldn't stop any of it, and now you're asking me if collapse is fair—
He did not say: What word would you use?
His mouth shaped the syllables with the mechanical precision of a man who had given this exact answer, in this exact tone, countless times before. The journalists wrote it down. They always wrote it down. They would publish it tomorrow with a photograph of him looking "composed" and "measured," and no one would notice that his eyes had gone somewhere else entirely.
Lando said he’d learned a lot from you. Can you tell us in return what you’ve learned from him?
He said something about the season being enjoyable for both of them, about how nice it was to know that it goes both ways. He did not think about the debrief room.
He did not think about Singapore.
Are you happy for him?
He said yes, of course, absolutely, the most deserving champion. The words came out smooth and warm, the kind of words that made headlines write calm beyond his years and refreshingly mature and a class act in defeat.
He did not tell them that calm was the wrong word for what he was.
Oscar was still. There was a difference. Calm implied an absence of turbulence—a lake on a windless day, surface like glass, nothing moving underneath. Stillness was what happened when two equal and opposite forces met and cancelled each other out. A held breath. A locked jaw. A howling need to put his fist through every camera lens in this room, and a crushing awareness that the fracturing would change nothing.
The gap would still be thirteen points. The trophy would still be carved with someone else's name. And tomorrow the sun would rise on a world where Lando Norris was a Formula 1 World Champion and Oscar Piastri was a cautionary tale about the danger of peaking too early.
He finished his media duties in record time. Then he walked back toward the McLaren hospitality unit, past the celebration already hemorrhaging into the paddock, past the confetti and the screaming and the endless golden arc of champagne catching the floodlights like something from a dream he used to have.
Past Lando, surrounded by his family, unable to stop crying.
Oscar's feet didn't slow. His eyes didn't linger, but his peripheral vision catalogued it anyway: The way Lando's shoulders heaved. The way his father's hand curved around his back, exactly where Oscar's hand had been twenty minutes ago. The way his mother pressed her face into his hair and held him like he was five years old and had just woken from a nightmare, except the nightmare was over now, the nightmare was finally over, and Oscar was the one still trapped inside it.
The papaya-colored 4 trembled against black. Great heaving sobs wracked the frame beneath it.
He cried like that in Zandvoort too. The memory surfaced without permission. Oscar had been in the garage, still half-dressed, watching the timing screens tell the story of Lando's mechanical failure in precise digital increments. And then his teammate had come through the door, loss written across his entire body, eyes looking like someone had scooped something out of them, and Oscar had opened his mouth to say—
What? What had he been going to say?
I'm sorry. Too small. I wanted to beat you properly. Too cruel. Please don't look at me like I stole something that was always mine to take. Too true. The words had frozen somewhere in the space between his chest and his throat, caught in that terrible place where tears form when the hurt grows too big for language to hold. And Lando had already been turning away, shoulders rigid, the door swinging open before Oscar could reach for anything but air.
He hadn't reached. That was the thing. He'd stood there with his hand half-raised and his mouth half-open and he'd let Lando walk out, and afterward he'd told himself it was the right call. Give him space. Let him process. Don't make it weird.
As if anything between them had ever been simple enough to make weird.
No hard feelings, of course. That was what the papaya rules said. That was what their carefully coordinated social media posts implied. No hard feelings, no lingering tension, just two professionals who understood that motorsport was a zero-sum game and sometimes your teammate's engine failed at the worst possible moment and you inherited a victory that tasted like someone else's ashes.
No hard feelings. Except Oscar had been the one to turn away in Singapore.
It played behind his eyes now—a loop he couldn't stop, a splinter he couldn't extract. His car shuddering as Lando's front right made contact, and the immediate white-hot flare of something that wasn't quite anger. "That's not fair. That is not fair." His own voice, thin and sharp through the radio. He remembered the exact pitch of it. Remembered the way his engineer's response had landed like a dismissal. Team's not taking action, Oscar. He was avoiding Max, there was nowhere else to go.
"Well, if he has to avoid another car by crashing into his teammate, then that’s a pretty shit job of avoiding."
Silence. The kind of silence that meant everyone on the pit wall was looking at each other, recalibrating, filing this away under Oscar Piastri: moments of uncharacteristic emotion. He wished he could say he regretted it immediately. Wished he cared that the words hung in the air like smoke, impossible to take back, poisoning something.
But that wasn't the part that played on loop.
They'd been standing side by side in front of the camera—the standard configuration, the one the social media team loved, look how well our drivers get along—and Oscar had been talking. Saying something about the back to back constructor’s championship, about being grateful for the car, about everyone back at the factory, and Oscar had been looking straight ahead at nothing. At the specific patch of nothing that existed in the exact opposite direction of Lando's face.
And in his peripheral vision—that traitor, that archivist, that obsessive chronicler of every detail— he'd seen it anyway. Lando kept glancing at him. Quick, darting looks. The kind of looks a dog gives when it's knocked something off the counter and isn't sure yet if you've noticed. Please look at me. Please tell me we're okay. Please give me something, anything, even anger would be better than this—
Oscar had given him the wall and let him twist.
Are you seriously going to give me those kicked-puppy eyes right now and pretend it's enough? He'd thought it so loudly he was half-surprised Lando couldn't hear it. You're standing there looking at me like I'm the one who did something wrong, and I'm supposed to—what? Pat your head? Tell you it's fine? Absolve you?
I'm not your priest, Lando. I'm not your therapist. I'm your direct fucking competition no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise, and you hit me, you cost me points, and now you want me to make you feel better about it?
He'd thought all of it. He'd felt all of it, hot and righteous and sharp. And underneath it, so quiet he could almost pretend it wasn't there: If you'd just look at me without wanting something. Just once. If you'd just see me as something other than a problem to be managed, an obstacle to be overcome—
The door of the hospitality unit was ten meters away.
Then five. Then his hand was on the handle and the noise of the celebration was fading behind him and he was inside, surrounded by the silence of a space that was waiting to be filled with joy.
Oscar didn't turn around. He didn't look at the crying boy with the number 4 on his back. He didn't let himself wonder if Lando had seen him pass, had watched him walk away, had felt the same cold distance settle over this moment too. Because if he stopped—
If he let the Singaporean floodlights glare through his eyes onto Yas Marina, if he let that memory-face superimpose itself over the real one— If he let slip something truer than congratulations, something that would bridge the chasm between the championship standings and the place where they actually lived, which was in each other’s heads, in the data traces and the late-night sim sessions and the stupid jokes that only made sense to them before the coldness had poured in and the truth had washed away leaving only the shell of a proper smile on his face—
He would have to look directly at the thing clawing inside his chest. And he suspected it had teeth.
They'd made sure Oscar's hotel room was on a high floor, facing away from the circuit. A kindness, probably. Someone on the logistics team understanding that he didn't need to watch the fireworks paint someone else's name across the sky. Didn't need to see them continuing into the night, the way they did in Abu Dhabi when there was something to celebrate.
He stood in the doorway without turning on the lights.
Hilton, for the stay. For those in search of expensive anonymity, for cream walls and geometric carpet and the kind of abstract art that existed purely to fill space. His reflection ghosted across the darkened window: still in the team polo from debrief that had been nothing more than a formality, lanyard still around his neck, looking exactly like a man who had somewhere else to be.
His phone had been vibrating against his thigh for forty-seven minutes. He knew because he'd been counting. Messages, tags, the algorithmic awareness of social media realising he was a person of interest tonight. Well-meaning texts about perspective and next year, the team group chat probably filling with champagne emojis and heart reactions and all the appropriate symbols of collective joy. His sisters sending increasingly unhinged cat memes in what he recognized as their particular dialect of we love you and don't know what else to do.
He remembered the way Hattie’s expression had flickered when he told her he’d rather be alone tonight—something knowing, something worried—but she didn't push. They never pushed. That was the Piastri way.
And somewhere in the algorithmic churn, whatever Lando was posting. Whatever Lando was becoming, right now, in this first hour of his transfiguration.
Oscar didn't check. He walked to the bathroom instead, locked the door behind him, and stood very still in the dark.
Cool, calm, collected. Three words that had followed him since junior karting, attached themselves to his name like a surname, become so embedded in how people perceived him that he'd almost started believing it himself. It was perhaps the most successful deception Oscar had ever managed, and he'd managed it entirely by accident.
The truth was far less entertaining: he had never learned the facial expressions for his emotions. Growing up in a family that showed love through logistics and presence, in a boarding school on the other side of the world where homesickness was something you solved by not thinking about it—he'd absorbed early that feelings were private things. Internal rooms you didn't show to strangers. You lived your life quietly, in the spaces between observable actions, and you trusted that the people who mattered would understand without being told.
The people who mattered usually didn't.
He turned on the tap. Cold water over the wrists—a technique he’d learned from his sports psychologist, after his panic attack in Baku, for moments when the interior rooms threatened to flood. Name five things you can see. Sink. His own hands, trembling almost imperceptibly under the stream. The small complimentary soaps still wrapped in paper. The pattern of tiles that probably cost more than his first remote-control car. Mirror.
Name four things you can hear. Water hitting porcelain. His own breathing, too fast. The muffled bass of celebration somewhere below—a pool deck, maybe, or a penthouse suite, the kind of sound that traveled through concrete. The phantom echo of Lando’s sobs.
You made a little kid’s dream come true.
He looked up. The mirror showed him the same face it always did. Same sweat-matted hair drying stiff at the temples. Same red line across his forehead where the balaclava had pressed for two hours. Same brown eyes that a commentator had once called "unreadable" during a post-race interview, clearly intending it as a compliment.
The second Ice Man, they said. Robotic. As if his nervous system had been replaced with circuit boards somewhere between F2 and F1, upgraded for optimal performance. The paddock loved its archetypes: Max the ruthless, Charles the romantic, Lewis the legend, Lando the accessible one who made self-deprecating jokes and streamed on Twitch and let the world see his therapy homework.
Oscar was the blank space where a character should be. The outline of a persona not quite rendered.
Twenty-four, he thought, leaning closer to the glass. You are twenty four years old, you have just lost something you never actually possessed and you look exactly the same as you did this morning.
He meant the championship. Obviously he meant the championship.
His fingertips found the mirror, touched the reflection of his own cheekbone. Bone dry cheeks. Mathematically alive yet spiritually buried, and his face had produced nothing. Not a single tear, not when turn one passed and he’d known it was over, not while gritting out how do I win this race like nothing could hold him down. Not even the burning behind the eyes that preceded them.
The engineers had noticed. He'd seen it in the way they stopped meeting his gaze during post-race debriefs, the way their voices had softened into something careful. They'd been talking about "when" all season—when you clinch it, when you're champion, when we get the setup right—and somewhere between Austin and Mexico the language had shifted without anyone acknowledging it. Next year. There's always next year. The experience will be valuable.
He hadn't cried then either.
Twenty-five hundred days. He'd done the math once, during a sleepless night in some other identical hotel room. Twenty-five hundred days since he'd signed his first serious contract, since he'd understood that the thing he'd been building toward since age nine might actually be possible. Twenty-five hundred days of single-minded obsession, of sacrifice calcified into habit, of relationships thinned and hobbies abandoned and every waking hour bent toward a single point of light….
…And here he was. Third in the championship. Supporting actor in someone else's origin story. Standing in a bathroom that cost five hundred dollars a night, unable to produce the basic human response to grief, and nobody would even bat an eye because— Why would they? Everyone knew that Oscar Piastri didn’t have feelings.
No wonder they’d rooted for Lando. Oscar would have rooted for Lando, too.
Dialectical thinking, his teammate had told him before they’d dived side by side into this entire shitshow. Or rather, he'd called it diabolical thinking, because Lando had never met a polysyllabic word he couldn't mangle, and Oscar had corrected him, and Lando had pouted into his pasta, and Oscar had felt something shift inside his chest like tectonic plates beginning their slow, inevitable collision.
That had been February. At the cafeteria, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, the smell of industrial cleaning products and lukewarm coffee that meant home in the way Oscar's actual home never quite had. Engineers three floors up running simulations on the MCL39, and down here, two drivers pretending to eat lunch while the weight of the coming season pressed against the windows.
Their year. Everyone knew it would be their year. The car was finally right, two seasons of patient development crystallizing into something that moved like an extension of thought. Zak's barely contained glee in every team meeting. Andrea's careful optimism. The whole factory humming with a frequency Oscar had never felt before, hope so thick it almost could’ve suffocated the elephant in the room.
The unspoken question of which one of you.
"'S what my therapist called it." Lando had continued, gesturing with his fork and nearly knocking over Oscar's orange juice, the way he always did when he was nervous and trying to seem casual. "Holding two opposite things inside you at once. Painful things. Like—" His free hand made a shape in the air that could have meant anything or nothing. "I can want to be champion. And I can want you to do well. Both things can be true at the same time."
He'd looked at Oscar then with those puppy-wide eyes, earnest and anxious, that expression he got when he was trying to build a bridge across something he couldn't quite name. The collar of his training jacket had been unzipped, revealing a V of tan skin dotted with moles—the same moles Oscar had first encountered in junior karting footage, attached to a gap-toothed boy who drove like he was being chased by something only he could see.
"I think you should practice it too." Lando's voice had softened. "With what this season's gonna... y'know."
What this season's gonna.
Oscar had looked at the moles. Counted them, because counting was safe. Three on the left side of his neck, two on the right, one just visible at the hollow of his throat where a pulse beat visible and vulnerable and entirely too present.
His sports psychologist had a term for it—hyperawareness, she'd said, common in high-performance athletes, the brain's pattern-recognition systems running at constant full capacity. She made it sound clinical. Manageable. She didn't know that Oscar had memorized the exact configuration of his teammate's neck from three years of trying not to stare at it.
"Dialectical," Oscar had said, deadpan. "It's called dialectical thinking."
"Oh my god." Lando's offense had been immediate and theatrical, accompanied by a betrayed stab at the tomato on his plate. "Making fun of me before the season's even started. Didn't know what I signed up for. Absolute muppet nerd teammate of mine."
He'd looked delighted. That was the thing about Lando—he wanted to be corrected. Wanted Oscar to see his soft underbelly and find it charming rather than exploitable. Kept offering his throat to the shark like he was certain, somehow, that this particular shark had no teeth.
The way Lando could crack him open without even trying, without even knowing what he was doing. The way Oscar had to look down at his plate, counted to four, and rearrange his face into something neutral before the thing in his chest could reach his expression. I can want to beat you, he'd thought. And I can want you to keep looking at me like I'm the safest person in any room. Both things can be true.
Both things can be true and I can tell you neither of them.
Coldness pressed through his socks. In the silence of his hotel room, the ceiling softened and swam above him.
Oscar realized he'd slid down against the wall at some point, was sitting now with his knees drawn up and his back against the door and no memory of the transition. The tap was still running. Water sounds filling the space where his thoughts should be.
From somewhere outside—below, or north, or in another dimension where people celebrated things—cheering swelled and faded. The party should be in full swing by now. Lando hoisted onto shoulders by now, done punching a fist over and over into the air, done savouring the gasping, the radiance, the roars of all that had gathered to worship at the altar of his becoming, done being photographed for magazine covers he'd spend the next decade seeing in airports— incandescent with the glow of a person finally becoming what they'd always known they could be, his story told by billboards, by websites, by the opening montage of next season's broadcast—
I can be happy for you and hate my place outside your victory. Both things can be true.
Stillness could turn into peace, Oscar thought as he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He could fight to hold two painful truths inside him all at once: The truth that for three years, Lando had been both a blueprint for how to be in this world—funny, bright, effortlessly loved—and a mirror that showed Oscar everything he was not. Every interview where Lando charmed the room while Oscar counted the seconds. Every celebration where Lando cried and the world called him brave while Oscar stood dry-eyed and the world called him cold. Every moment where Lando reached for connection and Oscar flinched from it, certain that whatever he offered would be wrong.
He pressed harder against his eyes until colors bloomed in the darkness. Red and gold. The colors of fireworks. The colors of a season burning down to ash around him while someone else rose from the flames.
Both things can be true, and you can survive them. You have before. And you will again.
He was trying so, so hard.
The thing about obsession is that it rarely announces itself. It doesn't arrive with trumpets or warning labels. It seeps in through hairline cracks—a photograph held too long, a voice replayed until the syllables lose meaning, a name typed into a search bar at 2 a.m. when you should be sleeping.
Oscar was fourteen the first time. In a classroom in Haileybury, seven thousand miles from home. His classmates had scattered for lunch. Oscar stayed behind, hunched over one of the shared computers, refreshing a karting forum he'd bookmarked six months ago.
The article loaded in increments: text first, then the photograph, pixel by pixel, like something developing in a darkroom.
British prodigy Lando Norris continues dominant form in European championship.
The boy in the photo was fifteen, yet he looked like a child. Messy hair escaping a backwards cap. A smile that occupied too much of his face—all teeth and crinkled eyes, the kind of smile that made you wonder what the joke was and whether you'd been invited. He was standing on the top step of a podium, still somehow shorter than the drivers on either side, holding a trophy nearly as big as his torso like he wasn't sure what to do with it.
Oscar read the article three times. Then he read it again.
He told himself it was research. Competitive intelligence. Lando Norris drove for Ricky Flynn Motoracing—the same team Oscar had just signed with, the same team that would ship him to Europe in eight months to chase the same dream through the same junior series. Knowing the field was smart. Knowing your future rivals was survival.
He told himself this while his hand found the printer button. While the inkjet wheezed and spat, producing a copy he had no rational reason to want. While he folded the still-warm paper into thirds and slid it into his blazer pocket, where it would stay for the walk back to the dormitory, where it would migrate to a drawer beneath his spare uniform shirts, where it would remain—checked on, occasionally, in moments he refused to name—for the next four years. Competitive intelligence, he thought again that night, staring at the ceiling while his roommate snored. That's all this is.
The search history he deleted every Sunday told a different story.
The interview was unremarkable in every objective sense. Standard questions, standard answers, the kind of content pumped out by every junior motorsport publication trying to identify the next big thing. But there was a moment, thirty-seven seconds in, when the interviewer asked about pressure.
"I dunno," the boy on screen said, and his eyes dropped to his hands—long fingers, bitten nails, fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. "Sometimes I think everyone else has this, like, instruction manual for how to be a person? And I'm just... making it up. Pretending I know what I'm doing." A self-deprecating laugh. "Probably shouldn't admit that on camera, should I?"
Oscar's thumb hovered over the replay button.
He'd never heard anyone say it out loud before. The feeling of wrongness that followed him through every social interaction, every attempt at connection—the sense that everyone else had received a decoder ring for human behavior and he'd been left reading the cipher blind. He'd assumed it was unique to him. A defect in his programming. Something to hide. And here was Lando Norris, golden boy, future star, saying I'm making it up too into a camera like it was nothing.
Like being yourself could be that easy.
The pattern established itself without permission. Instagram posts appeared in Oscar's feed at random hours—3 a.m. in Melbourne meant afternoon in Monaco, and Lando posted like breathing, like he'd never considered that permanence was a risk. Oscar learned to recognize the different contexts: gym selfies with performative grimaces, paddock shots with genuine smiles, late-night stories that vanished after twenty-four hours but lingered longer in Oscar's memory.
He never liked them in the first hour. That would be too obvious. He waited until the count was high enough that one more notification would disappear into the crowd, and then he let his thumb press the heart, and then he wondered who the fuck he was hiding from.
You don't even know him, some rational part of his brain insisted. You're constructing a person from curated content—a parasocial shadow that bears no relationship to reality.But Oscar had always been good at pattern recognition. At data analysis. At watching and cataloguing and drawing conclusions from insufficient evidence. And the data said:
Lando Norris bit his nails when he was nervous. Oscar could track the state of his cuticles across press conferences like a barometer.
Lando Norris laughed differently when he meant it—a full-body thing, head thrown back, shoulders shaking, lips curving into a perfect heart—versus when he was performing amusement for an audience.
Lando Norris talked about therapy in interviews like it was normal, like mental health wasn't a weakness to be hidden, and Oscar couldn't decide if that made him brave or naive or both.
Lando Norris had a gap between his front teeth that showed when he smiled wide enough. Orthodontics could have fixed it. He'd kept it anyway.
Lando Norris cried in public—after losses, after wins, after any moment sufficiently weighted with meaning. The cameras loved it. So human, the commentators said. So refreshing to see a driver who isn't afraid of his emotions. Oscar, who hadn't cried since age nine, who'd taught himself to redirect the hydraulic pressure of grief into the particular numbness that looked like composure, watched those tears and felt something twist in his chest.
Lando Norris was… right across the table, close enough to touch.
Because Oscar had won Formula Renault. Then Formula 3. Then Formula 2. Then suddenly he was in the paddock, finally out of Alpine’s clutches, and Lando was in a hoodie that made his features look even softer than usual, and Zak Brown had shoved him by the shoulder and said, "Have you met Oscar Piastri? Most talented rookie since Lewis Hamilton, heard he just signed with McLaren—"
And Oscar couldn't speak.
Not literally. His voice worked fine, produced sound at appropriate intervals, shaped words that technically constituted language. But the Oscar who showed up at the MTC was a hollow automaton running pre-programmed responses, because the real Oscar had retreated somewhere deep behind his eyes the moment Lando Norris turned around and saw him.
"Osc! Finally, mate!"
Osc. A nickname Oscar had only heard from his mother, deployed like they were old friends— like he had been waiting, like Oscar was the answer to a question Lando had been asking, like all those one-sided years of watching had somehow been mutual. Lando's hand was warm and slightly damp—nerves, Oscar's pattern-recognition supplied, he's nervous too—and his grip was firmer than expected, and his eyes were greener and prettier up close than any camera had ever captured, and Oscar's entire elaborate fantasy of how this moment would go collapsed into two syllables:
"Yeah, hey."
Great, some part of him screamed. Entire conversations in your head—what you'd say when you finally met, how you'd be funny but not try-hard, impressive but not desperate, and you give him 'yeah, hey.'
But Lando just smiled. The real one, head tilted, gap-toothed. "Weird, innit? Being teammates after all this time watching each other come up through the ranks?"
Watching each other.
He doesn't know, Oscar realized, with a cold that started in his chest and spread outward. He has no idea. To him, I'm just another driver. Another name on a timing sheet. He hasn't memorized the moles on my neck.
The asymmetry of it should have been comforting. Evidence that Oscar's obsession was his own problem to manage, private and contained. Instead, it felt like falling from a height he'd only just realized he'd climbed.
Oscar had nodded. Said something about the car, the factory, the opportunity. Standard boilerplate, autopilot engaged.
As if Lando wasn’t always one step ahead. One series higher. One championship up. A comet streaking through the junior categories while Oscar charted its course from the other side of the world, collecting data like a scientist, dreaming like a fool. He learned the shape of that face before he learned the proper racing line around Spa. He memorized the cadence of that accent before he memorized his first sponsor's talking points.
He doesn't even know my name, Oscar had thought, at fourteen, at sixteen, at eighteen. The ache had been vast enough to echo. It had felt like grief, somehow—mourning a connection that had never existed outside his own hungry imagination.
“…I know Oscuh will be champion, too.”
The words arrived tinny and distorted, playing from the phone screen Oscar had placed face-down on the bathroom floor but could still picture perfectly: Lando in the media pen, golden light, that trembling smile, saying Oscar's name into every microphone like it belonged to someone worth mentioning.
Well, now Lando Norris knew his name.
Now he was throwing it in front of every camera, shoving it into the faces behind every screen chanting at them to dig their claws in each other and draw blood, into the ears of anyone who would listen without being deafened by the bold letters of 2025 WORLD CHAMPION screaming from his papaya cap. Now he was daring the world to try and forget him— Brilliant driver. Most special teammate. A lovely, lovely person. Said it with an abbreviation Oscar had never authorized, stretched the vowel in that particular way that would eventually become synonymous with home: Oscuh, like a breath, like a private language—
And Oscar wasn't sure if that made it better or worse.
Because a lovely person was what you called a neighbor's well-behaved child. A colleague who remembered birthdays. A pleasant acquaintance who didn't overstay their welcome at dinner parties.
It was not what you called the person who'd been living in your head since you were fourteen years old. The pattern you'd spent a decade studying until you knew it better than your own face. The shadow that made your light mean something, that turned solitary ambition into a story worth telling, that had somehow become the coordinate system by which you measured every success and failure—
Lando. Ever so kind, ever so beautiful, ever so generous it felt like violence, sometimes.
At the start of the year, the championship had been his. He could trace it on a graph if he wanted to: the steady climb through the first half of the season, the lead he'd built race by race, the way the commentators had started saying his name with a new kind of weight. Oscar Piastri, championship leader. Oscar Piastri, the new generation. Even Lando had looked at him differently in those months—something flickering behind the usual warmth, a competitive edge that Oscar had craved like oxygen.
Then Austin. Mexico. São Paulo.
The American swing had swallowed him whole, no sugarcoat. Lack of pace he couldn’t solve. Strategy calls that went wrong. A crash in the sprint race that still made his neck ache when he turned too quickly. He'd watched his points lead evaporate like water on hot asphalt, and he'd watched Lando surge past him in the standings with the kind of late-season form that made the prophecy feel inevitable. Of course it would be Lando. It was always going to be Lando.
Mark had called him after Brazil. "You're driving scared," he'd said, and Oscar had wanted to throw the phone across the room because of course Mark fucking Webber of all people would know, wouldn't he? Mark had lived this exact trajectory—leading, then falling to third, then watching his teammate lift the trophy. The curse passed down like an inheritance, from one Australian to another.
"I'm driving fine," Oscar had said. Flat. Controlled.
"You're driving like someone who's afraid to lose," Mark had replied. "Which means you've already lost."
Oh, but that was the thing, wasn’t it? Everyone had wanted them to be afraid. The press, the fans, the algorithms—all season they'd been surrounded by sharks in open waters, salivating for blood. Teammates fighting for a championship was supposed to mean wheel-to-wheel combat, radio outbursts, passive-aggressive post-race interviews. It was supposed to mean choosing sides. Building narratives. Nico and Lewis. Prost and Senna. The kind of rivalry that sold documentaries.
Instead, Oscar and Lando had given them nothing.
"I've learned so much from him," Lando would say in every interview, and mean it. "It’s nice to know that it goes both ways," Oscar would reply, and mean it too. They'd handed over positions when the team asked. They'd debriefed together without shouting. They'd eaten lunch at the same table all year long, trading stupid jokes, existing in a bubble the cameras couldn't penetrate.
The fans called it boring. Called it PR. Called it fake.
They didn't understand that the only other out for blood was in, and restraint was pressing onto the pain so it couldn’t be scented from open waters. That every calm word was a hand clamped over a scream. That Oscar could smile and shake Lando's hand and congratulate him on another pole position while his whole body howled I wanted that, I wanted that, it should have been mine, and still go home and defend him on anonymous forums like his life depended on it.
Later, those forums would say Oscar Piastri hadn’t even been important enough to boo. P1 was the cursed victor. P2, the tragic hero. P3 was… ambience. It was flying so close to the sun you carried its burn forever, only to be left cooling in the long shadow of its celebration. It was being everywhere in the love of your life’s moment of his life, and yet utterly absent.
Stop. Stop talking about me like I’m something that needs to be fixed right now. You just won the world championship. Act like it.
Dialectical thinking. Two opposite truths, held in the same clenched fist.