also uh ↻ FLIP FLOP I would love any oscar POV of in midnight’s jaws!!!!!!
here is nearly 4k of the morning after scene from in midnight's jaws from oscar's pov
Oscar’s phone is ringing.
Oscar’s phone is ringing at seven in the goddamn morning.
Oscar’s phone is ringing at seven in the goddamn morning the day after a race.
Oscar, half asleep and still exhausted, stops the ringing the first way he can think of: by answering the call. “Hello?” he mumbles, his face still turned into the pillows.
“Oscar? Don’t hang up, please.” The voice is panicked, faintly accented, familiar. Oscar’s sleepy brain doesn’t quite recognize who it is until he pulls his phone away from his face to squint at the screen.
“Carlos? What the –” Oscar stretches, putting the phone back to his ear. “Why are you calling me?”
“I… I need your help,” Carlos says. There’s a faint tremble to his voice that Oscar’s never heard before.
Oscar sits up with a groan and asks, “With what?”
There’s silence on the other end of the line. If this is a prank call, Oscar is going to impede Carlos in every qualifying session for the rest of the season, consequences be damned. After a moment, Carlos says, “I need you to pick me up.” His voice has not lost the note of panic.
Oscar pulls the phone away from his ear and checks, again, that he’s speaking with Carlos. His name sits at the top of the screen, a digital proof of identity.
“From where?” Oscar asks. “Why me?” Surely there are at least a dozen other people Carlos could have asked. What on earth made him reach out to Oscar? If Carlos hadn’t outright said Oscar’s name, he couldn’t be sure Carlos had even called him on purpose. “Carlos?” he says. There’s a faint puff of noise over the line. “Are you still there?”
“I don’t know,” Carlos says, his voice small and scared. If this is some kind of prank then Carlos is the best actor Oscar’s ever met, including the handful of movie stars who’ve swanned through the paddock this season. “I woke up, and I do not know where I am.”
A chill runs down Oscar’s spine. What the fuck has Carlos gone and gotten himself into, that he’s woken up someplace strange and needs to be picked up? Surely if he was anywhere in Monaco, Carlos could figure out how to get home on his own. And why is he calling Oscar instead of Lando or Charles or someone on his team, his cousin or whoever. A friend who actually knows Carlos well enough to know if this is normal for him.
“I will send you my location,” Carlos says, an edge of desperation in his voice. “Please, Oscar, I – I don’t…”
Something unpleasant twists in Oscar’s belly. He’s not exactly fond of Carlos, but it’s brutal to hear him like this: clearly distressed, miserable and begging for Oscar’s help. Oscar draws in a breath to say okay just as Carlos pleads again, his voice cracking.
Oscar pushes the blankets back and gets out of his nice, cozy bed, far too early on his day off. “Yeah, alright, I’m on my way,” he says, opening his closet and searching for a clean shirt. “Send me your location, I’ll figure it out. Do you need anything else?” He’s nearly joking, half an idea of picking up coffee along the way to wherever Carlos is.
“Some clothes,” Carlos says. Oscar frowns. It’s much too early for this. He considers, one again, the possibility that this is all a big joke Carlos is setting up. Oscar can’t hear much from Carlos’s end besides heavy breathing and the occasional rustle of his movements. “And shoes,” Carlos adds.
Shoes. Christ. “Is this some kind of prank?” Oscar asks, grabbing the first shirt he sees. Maybe someone’s playing a trick on Carlos – maybe his friends are the kind of people who would kidnap him as a joke, only to jump out after five minutes bursting with laughter at his state of panic. Certainly not the kind of thing Oscar would appreciate, but then, he really doesn’t understand Carlos in the first place. “If I show up and somebody’s filming me for one of your stupid videos –”
“It’s not a prank, I swear,” Carlos interrupts, quick and desperate. That will have to be reassurance enough, Oscar supposes, for him to go running across the country – small as it is – for Carlos.
There’s a sharp intake of breath, and then a few faint, muffled thuds. Oscar’s phone chirps with a new notification. “I sent you my location,” Carlos says in a rush. “Did you get it?”
Oscar pulls his phone away from his ear and stares at the map that’s popped up. The dot of Carlos’s location blinks in the southern hills of France, close to the border with Italy. Oscar doesn’t recognize a name of any of the surrounding towns.
“Where the fuck are you?” Oscar mutters, before realizing Carlos probably can’t hear him. He puts the phone on speaker and rummages through the closet for a pair of shorts. “Yeah I got it,” Oscar says, checking the location again. What the fuck. “I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Os - ar? Are?”
Oscar taps back to the call just as it ends. “Carlos?” he says, now staring at a list of his recent calls. Right at the top: Carlos Sainz, 5 minutes 15 seconds. Oscar frowns, pulls up directions to Carlos’s location, and tosses some extra clothes in a bag.
–
Oscar has not lived in Monaco all that long. He still gets a bit turned around on the winding streets, confused by the one-ways and the pedestrian paths, but eventually he gets out of the city and the country, driving through the rolling hills of southern France. It would almost be pretty, if not for the gnawing anxiety in Oscar’s gut. He tries to convince himself he’s about to be proven a gullible fool when he shows up to some remote villa, Carlos sunning himself on the patio and laughing himself sick when Oscar actually shows up. Oscar doesn’t really want that to happen, but he would rather deal with that than find Carlos injured or drugged or trapped somewhere.
This is very much not how Oscar thought his day would go.
The route takes him through a few small towns and past old houses spaced farther and farther along, up steep hills and back down. “Fucking hell Carlos, how did you get all the way out here?” Oscar mumbles, one eye on the brush and trees growing denser along the side of the road.
For the last few kilometers, Oscar slows to a crawl, scanning the roadside for any sign of Carlos, or any hint of what happened to him last night. He hopes to god Carlos was at some party out here and passed out in a garden, but it’s been a few minutes since Oscar’s passed any houses at all, and quite a bit longer since he’s seen any that looked the type to throw a party with a Formula 1-caliber guest list.
Oscar keeps one eye on the navigation and the other on the road, creeping along as he gets nearer and nearer to the location Carlos sent him. Oscar’s going to have to park the car somewhere along the road and walk the last bit, as Carlos seems to be off in the trees. Oscar rolls to a stop and peers out the window, through the gnarled trees down a steeply-sloping hill.
There are no other cars around, no buildings in sight. Oscar doesn’t understand what anyone would be doing out here in the middle of the night, let alone Carlos, freshly returned from a race weekend, but he’s about to find out. He takes a deep breath, shuts off the engine, and gets out of the car. “Alright Carlos,” he calls, striding through the trees. “If this is some kind of joke, I’m blocking your number. Forever.”
“Oscar?” That’s definitely Carlos’s voice, somewhere off to Oscar’s right, farther downhill than the location marker had seemed. “Oscar?”
“I’m over here,” Oscar calls back, adjusting his course toward the sound of Carlos’s voice. He can hear someone running through the brush, twigs snapping and leaves crinkling. When Carlos finally stumbles through the trees in front of him, Oscar’s jaw drops.
There’s no doubt Carlos spent the night in the woods. He’s half naked, and the only thing he’s wearing is a pair of dirty, badly-torn sweatpants clinging to his hips. Faint red scratches criss-cross his chest, and his hair is an absolute disaster. His face is a mess, too, something dark smudged over his jaw and down his neck. His normally wide eyes are huge and panicked.
“Carlos?” Oscar asks faintly. This person looks like Carlos, sure – but not like the Carlos Oscar knows. Oscar can barely imagine Carlos setting out for a hike through the woods, but if he did, surely he’d be wearing some kind of branded hoodie. And shoes. If Carlos had purposely gone into the woods he certainly would have done so wearing shoes.
“Did you bring clothes?” Carlos asks, as casually presumptuous as Oscar has ever heard him.
“Did I bring clothes?” Oscar repeats, incredulous. Oscar’s driven all the way out here first thing in the morning because of a cryptic distress call, and found Carlos looking like he narrowly escaped some kind of nightmare. And the first thing Carlos asks about is if Oscar brought clothes. “What the hell happened –” Oscar cuts himself off and forces himself to take a breath. Carlos has clearly had a rough night; Oscar should cut him some slack.
“Yeah, mate, I brought some clothes,” Oscar says, picking his way through the brush and over to where Carlos is standing frozen between the trees. Carlos watches him, his lips parted, his jaw shifted over to the side. Oscar can’t quite tell if his gaze is its usual level of vacant or if it’s somehow – worse. “And I drove most of the way over to Italy at seven in the morning the day after a race because you called me in a –”
Oscar freezes. What he’d thought was dirt, smeared all down Carlos’s jaw and neck, is a distinct brownish-red in the morning light. There are a few brighter flecks of it right at the corner of Carlos’s lips. Oscar has to force himself to breathe, to focus on the air flowing in and out of his lungs and not the blood all over Carlos’s face.
“Thank you,” Carlos says with a depth of sincerity wildly at odds with his current appearance. There’s no way he knows what he looks like. Oscar’s taking that as a tentative sign that he isn’t about to get eaten alive.
Oscar nods stiffly. “We should go before someone crashes into the car,” he says. The sooner they get back to Monaco, the sooner Oscar can start pretending this is just a normal day. “These roads are awful, and there wasn’t exactly a good place to park.”
“Yes,” Carlos says. “Right, I… thank you.”
Oscar turns and starts walking back towards car before Carlos can thank him again. After a few steps, the back of his neck prickles with the eerie sensation of being followed. Of course he’s being followed – by Carlos, the man he’s come all the way out here to find. Oscar certainly hadn’t expected to find him looking so feral, covered in blood like he’d narrowly escaped some kind of secret pagan ritual.
Oscar swallows down a laugh, imagining it: Carlos and a bunch of other people standing around a fire in the dead of night, drinking from some rough-hewn chalice. Maybe that’s the secret to Ferrari’s recent success. They can keep it, Oscar thinks, opening the car door and grabbing the bag. Oscar’s not about to make any blood pacts for the good of McLaren, no matter how many races it would win him.
He holds the bag out to Carlos without turning back. He isn’t quite ready to face him again.
“Thank you,” Carlos says, yet again. Oscar hears him unzip the bag, then the rustle of fabric as he looks inside.
“If you really want to thank me you can tell me what happened to you,” Oscar mutters as he crosses back around to the driver’s seat. He starts the car and reverses the directions on his phone, drumming his thumbs against the steering wheel, waiting as Carlos gets into the car, shoves what remains of his sweatpants into the footwell, and puts on the seatbelt. He checks that the road is still clear, then pulls the car back around towards Monaco.
They drive in silence. For a while, Oscar waits for Carlos to say something. Anything. Normally, whenever Oscar sees Carlos, he’s chatting away to whoever he’s with. It’s odd to see Carlos alone, let alone to see him so quiet. Oscar thinks back to the last time he’d driven Carlos someplace, the way Carlos had been curled in on himself in the passenger seat, looking ashen and exhausted.
Oscar glances over at him. The scratches are faint, and Carlos had been able to run to him just fine. “Are you okay?” Oscar asks. He should have checked before, but he’d been so surprised by the whole situation, he’d forgotten his senses. “You’re not hurt or anything?”
Carlos shifts his jaw, then tilts his head to one side, then the other. “I’m okay,” he says. “A shower and some breakfast, and I will be fine.”
Unbelievable. Oscar doesn’t know that he can say the same of himself. The memory of stumbling upon Carlos in the middle of the woods, covered in blood, is going to crop up in his mind over and over again. He drives without conscious thought, fingers nudging the turn signal and hands turning the steering wheel as he drives through an intersection, onto another country road.
“That’s good,” Oscar says blankly. How nice that Carlos can go about his day when he’s completely ruined Oscar’s. “So are you ever going to tell me how you ended up in the middle of nowhere, covered in blood? Or shall I just start guessing?”
“What?” Carlos says sharply. Out of the corner of his eye, Oscar sees him reach for the visor and miss. Carlos’s hands have started shaking quite badly. He keeps his eyes on the road, glancing over as Carlos slowly raises a hand to his face. His jaw is hanging open, his breath getting shorter and quicker.
That’s not good.
Oscar pulls the car over as Carlos pulls his shaking hands away from his face and stares at the blood now staining his fingertips. “Carlos,” he says, but Carlos ignores him.
God, he’s such an asshole. Oscar didn’t think Carlos knew what he looked like; he’d quite literally told Oscar he didn’t know where he was. Carlos had woken up in the middle of nowhere, lost in the trees, and had called Oscar for help. And Oscar had just gone and made him panic some more.
“Carlos,” Oscar says again. Still no response. Oscar puts the car in park and undoes his seatbelt so he can turn to face Carlos. “Hey. Carlos, hey.”
Carlos’s breath is really rapid now, his whole body trembling. He looks lost in a way Oscar’s never seen, worse even than when he found him in amongst the trees a few minutes ago.
Oscar leans over and takes him by the shoulders, and Carlos doesn’t even blink. “Carlos, look at me,” Oscar says with as much authority in his voice as he can muster, giving him a good, hard shake.
Carlos finally looks at him, his eyes unnervingly vacant. He blinks, a furrow appearing between his brows. Recognition. “Yeah, that’s good,” Oscar says. He keeps his own breathing slow and steady, hoping that Carlos will match him. “Just look at me, okay?” he says, squeezing Carlos’s shoulders reassuringly. “I shouldn’t have asked like that.”
“It was a fair question,” Carlos says, his voice rough. His breathing still hasn’t quite gone back to normal, but it’s at least slowed enough for Oscar to stop worrying. Mostly.
“Yeah, well,” Oscar says, flipping the visor back up before Carlos can catch sight of himself and freak out all over again. “You sounded pretty freaked out on the phone, I should’ve realized this isn’t something to joke about.”
“Yet,” Carlos says.
It’s the first time all morning that Carlos has sounded like himself. Almost enough to draw a smile to Oscar’s lips. “Are you gonna be okay if I start driving again?” he asks. He still has one hand on Carlos’s shoulder, a reminder that Oscar is here, that whatever happened last night is over. Oscar watches Carlos’s face for any signs of renewed distress.
“Yes,” Carlos says. “Let’s go.”
“Okay,” Oscar says, matching Carlos’s quiet tone. He withdraws his hand and adjusts his grip on the wheel, pulling onto the road once more.
So Carlos’s day is probably just as ruined as Oscar’s, then. This will take more than a shower and some breakfast to fix. Hell, Oscar doesn’t know if this can be fixed. They drive along in silence; Oscar can see Carlos staring out the window at the houses passing by.
Eventually, Carlos says, “The last thing I remember is taking a shower last night.”
Carlos woke up in the middle of the woods, his face covered in blood, and the last thing he can remember happened at least eight hours ago. Oscar turns to him.
“Hey, watch the road,” Carlos yelps, reaching for the steering wheel.
Oscar turns back to the road, still empty of other traffic. He slows down and eases around the curve up ahead, so much slower than any of the tracks they race on. Still fast enough that Carlos leans against the window with the momentum.
“That’s it?” Oscar asks, unable to contain his curiosity. “Just the shower, and nothing else?” No strangers turning up to drag him into the woods, no demons creeping in through the walls – Jesus, Oscar needs to cool it with those paranormal debunking videos. Clearly they’ve gone to his head.
Beside him, Carlos shakes his head. “I remember yesterday,” he says. “The race, and flying home. I got back to my apartment, ate dinner, took a shower, and then…” He shakes his head again, then groans suddenly, pressing his hands against his face. He jerks back just as suddenly.
They’re nearly back to Monaco, the roads now busy with early-morning traffic. Oscar scans the road ahead, looking for a place he can pull over if he needs to talk Carlos back to reality again.
“Do you think…” Carlos hesitates, wringing his hands. “What if I…”
What if, indeed. Carlos doesn’t seem to know what he’s asking.
“Do you think going back would help you remember?” Oscar suggests. Something to jog Carlos’s memory, like how you can walk into a room and forget what you were looking for, then walk out again and it’ll come back to you. “Not right away. Later in the week, maybe?”
“No,” Carlos says definitively. After a moment, he says, “Maybe it is better, if I cannot remember.”
Privately, Oscar disagrees. Somewhere in those trees, there has to be a reason why Carlos woke up this morning with blood on his face. He has half a mind to turn right back around after he drops Carlos off, to walk up and down that hill until he finds the explanation Carlos won’t – can’t, apparently – give him. If Oscar were in his position, Oscar would rather go back and find whatever body might be left behind, get some answers and hide the evidence before it comes back to bite him.
Instead, Oscar asks Carlos for his address and types it into his phone’s GPS.
“I could give the directions,” Carlos says over Oscar’s phone’s robotic instructions. “I know where I am now.”
Oscar tightens his fingers around the steering wheel and rolls to a stop at an intersection. “Do you want to walk the rest of the way, then?”
Carlos crosses his arms over his chest and quietly sulks in the passenger seat. Oscar doesn’t look at him again until they turns onto Carlos’s street, and silently follows Carlos’s directions around to the private entrance at the back.
Oscar stops at Carlos’s door and glances over at him. “If it was me,” he says, “I’d want to know.” He doesn’t see how Carlos can not.
Carlos sets his jaw, stubborn as ever. “Are you calling me a coward?” he asks.
“No,” Oscar says. Carlos seems to be handling this morning about as well as anyone could be expected to. “I think you’re handling this pretty well, considering all the –” Oscar waves his hands. “I’d just be more curious.” Oscar is more curious, but he didn’t live through it. He’s only a bystander, watching the mystery unfold from the sidelines.
“Of course I’m curious,” Carlos says. “But not knowing feels safer.”
That, Oscar reasons, makes a certain amount of sense. If Carlos isn’t brave enough to go digging just yet, well. Maybe bringing him back to Monaco isn’t the only way Oscar can help him.
“Will you be alright getting upstairs?” Oscar asks. Carlos stares back at him, and Oscar fights the urge to act without waiting for an answer, to press himself close against Carlos’s side and walk him back up to his apartment. There could be clues up there, some hint as to what drew Carlos out of his apartment, why he doesn’t remember last night, or –
“Yes,” Carlos says, reaching for the door handle. “Thank you, again.”
Right. Carlos’s life isn’t some mystery for Oscar to go snooping through. He deserves a nice relaxing morning after whatever he’s gone through, some time to come to terms with what’s happened. All Oscar could do is offer to help, and let Carlos take it if he wants it.
Oscar shrugs, a calculated up-and-down of his shoulders. “No problem,” he says, watching as Carlos gathers his ruined clothes and his cracked phone and get out of the car. He watches Carlos hurry across the sidewalk without looking back, quickly ducking through the door in a too-small t-shirt and bare feet.
Oscar had forgotten to bring him shoes even though Carlos had specifically asked for them. He groans and rests his forehead against the backs of his hands, still holding the steering wheel.
“What the fuck,” Oscar mutters.
