bittersweet bygones; loscar
vague loscar angst by yours truly! six hundred something words of something i wipped up on my laptops notepad!!
There are the familiar scents that used to follow Logan when he was a kid: burnt rubber, gasoline and asphalt. Logan had grown up on many race tracks deep in Europe and beachside fronts in the States. It's where he made short-term friendships that never fully developed with the constant moving around. In the middle of all of it, he had gotten lucky.
Oscar was fast, stoic in a way that almost made him unapproachable at the young age of thirteen. Logan, in all his quietness and maybe his need to be wanted, had approached Oscar. The conversation slips from him, a question of a deep turn at the fourth corner, the inside line he was considering. Oscar had watched Logan, head tilted and cap pulled low over his head, his eyes dark enough that they seemed like an endless pit of black and not the warm hazel he would get to know.
They stayed close from there, two boys from different sides of the world held together by their mutual love of motorsports. Something else bloomed, warm and grounding. Logan had always followed after Oscar, feeling more like a sunflower greedily taking in the sun before winter sets in. Across the feeder series, Logan followed, never far behind until one day he didn't.
Logan had known the beginning of his end had started in Australia, then Miami happened, then Zandvoort nailed his coffin shut. Oscar had refused to believe it, even when Logan was on the first flight back to the UK to back his things. Oscar had felt Logan had given up, Logan felt that he had given everything he had.
Once sweet words turned bitter, emotions override rational until Logan snapped, "Call me when you can think clearly."
The call doesn't come.
Logan hides his hurt from his family, smiles with the relief of being on home ground. The pit in his stomach grows until it threatens to consume him whole. He does some testing, gets caught in a contract he had no wish of signing and somehow came out of it alive. He catches glimpses of Oscar, his rise and his fall, not yet Icarus but something akin to it; wax melted on pale skin, not enough to burn but enough to remind him of his place among a prison of orange.
He moves on, he races again and falls in love with it all over again. The cars are different, dependable. His teammates adore him and the media seeks him out again. Logan finds his calling in LMP2 cars, in between the other classes. He makes friends that don't ask him about a dream that burned in front of his eyes.
Logan exists in a different world, where his name doesn't come last on a timesheet, where his qualifying times get harder and harder to beat. This is Logan's calling, he feels it in the way his blood sings and the rush of overtaking and battling on track, when the sun goes down and he only has his headlights to lead him.
But sometimes he wonders, on those late nights where the roar of engines and sleep deprived commentators keep him up, of what it could've been had he stayed. He gave them everything he had to offer, his body and being, his mental state. He didn't give up, his will to continue had been dried out, his name dragged across every social media app. He left to protect himself, his sanity.
But what if he had stayed?
The months pass by, chat logs empty and abandoned. He sometimes wonders if he made it all up, the friendship that could've been more with Oscar had they had more time. Would it have mattered, even then, when Logan stood on Dutch grass, his dream in literal flames just a few feet from him. He couldn't have stayed even if he wanted to, but maybe he could've fought harder.
He shakes his head, propping his chin on his knees as the morning sun greets the ocean.
Somewhere in his bag, his phone rings.
