trick or treat :)
It happened a month after Hungary.
Media day, bottle frozen mid-air, smirk curling on his lips. He didn’t tell Lando. He didn’t tell anyone.
Instead, he tested it. Stopwatch. On. Off. On. Off. 11.762 seconds. 12.114. 13.009. He logged it in Notes, digits blurring the longer he stared.
The silence was wrong. Too heavy. Oscar could hear his pulse in his ears. He’d walk across the room, flick the light switch up and down, watch the bulb stubbornly hold its glow. Wave a hand through the dust motes stuck in air, all suspended like glitter in resin. Sometimes he’d whisper, just to hear the sound drop dead in his throat.
He thought about cheating. Not sabotage—he wasn’t going to touch Lando’s car, wasn’t insane enough for that. But little things. Sneaking a drink of water before parc fermé, just enough to nudge his weight up on the scales. Freezing the grid to buy a few extra breaths before Q3, letting the tyres warm in silence—only to realize, frustrated, that heat didn’t move if time didn’t. Once, he even stood in the Red Bull pit wall, staring at their open strategy notes, wondering if the knowledge would stick when the world started again.
Lando swore he hadn’t used it on track, but how the fuck was Oscar supposed to take his word for it?
He thought about ethics. About timelines. What if every freeze splintered a new universe? What if he was aging twice as fast, burning himself down from the inside out? His head ached after twelve minutes, a throb behind his eyes. He pictured his cells fraying faster, mitochondria choking in the pause.
He told himself he’d stay in his lane. Don’t touch it, don’t use it. Don’t turn into him.
And yet—he kept testing.
Because the worst part wasn’t the silence, or the paranoia, or the headache. It was how easy it was to reach for it. How natural it felt, like flexing a muscle he’d always had.
He still hadn’t told Lando. He hadn’t fucked Lando since Hungary. Things between them were stiff, awkward, edged. But every time Lando looked at him with that too-bright grin, Oscar felt the itch in his chest again, the pull to stop the world and see what he could do with it.
Maybe just once more.
