#fic excerpt

"Don't call him that," echoed Airi from the ground, "in front of him," she added.

Ichigo, who had been perfectly calm throughout his confrontation with the spider hollow, felt sweat break out on the back of his neck.

Matsu frowned. She noticed her kerchief was askew and pulled it off her riotous curls to reapply it. "Well, what's your name then? What else am I supposed to call you, if you're so rude you don't even give us your name?"

"Not that," hissed Ichigo. "It's Kurosaki Ichigo!" He thumped his chest. "I-chi-go!"

"Hey. Ichigo-san." Airi had made no move to get up, and she looked exhausted on the ground there. "How… did you save me?"

"He killed it! He punched it right in its ugly mask. I thought we were all done for," Matsu rambled. "Unfairly Attractive Ichigo-san is even more useful than I previously suspected."

He twitched. "I just told you not to call me that!"

She turned and pointed at him. Her expression was surprisingly fierce, and he reeled back. Her pointy finger jabbed his chest.

"No. You can't expect to swoop in and rescue a lady from certain death like this and have no effect! You think you can still say, 'Oh, look at me, I'm Ugly Ichigo-san?' No! You take responsibility for your actions!"

"What? I don't want to be Ugly Ichigo-san either!"

"Make up your mind!"

Oscar kept himself from ruminating too much by paying close attention to Lando’s race. It was a rare opportunity to be able to compare his own judgements against Lando’s in race time instead of while watching onboards after the fact with the benefit of retrospect. Technically, he’d gotten to do this after his engine failed at the beginning of the season, but because it was also his very first race, he lacked a lot of the context to get the most out of it. He wasn’t able to appreciate back then the way that Lando could read the car by the most minute sensations. But now, listening in on the radio chatter and peering at telemetry, he allowed himself to be amazed by the way Lando would pick up on things that were barely a blip on a sensor graph or how he’d make these automatic, minute adjustments to conserve brake temperatures or preserve his tires before anyone else seemed to think about needing to recommend it. These were things that Oscar would never notice without having all of this in front of him in real time. It was beautiful. And it was also kind of a shame that it didn’t earn him better than P7. 

After he finished with post-race media, Lando found Oscar in hospitality. 

“Hey Osc. You ok?” Lando’s tone in the context easily conveyed that he meant both physically from the crash and emotionally from the result of it.

“I’ll be fine,” Oscar replied.

Lando processed this for a moment. “Which implies that you aren’t right now.”

“No, not really. Bit sore. Bit pissed.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“Not really. I’ll get over it.”

Lando raised an eyebrow. 

“Really, I’ll be fine,” Oscar insisted.

After debrief, and after Lando and Oscar had returned to the hotel and found themselves in one of their typical post-race postures of Oscar settled in one corner of the sofa in his suite with Lando draped upside down on the other side with his feet dangling lazily over the back, Oscar nonetheless found himself ranting to Lando. 

“...and like, I don’t know. I know he used to be your teammate, and I know you’re still close, but God he drives like a reckless maniac. And he gets away with it! And then he acts like it could never be his fault and he’s just this tragic victim of circumstance, and the press just…augh…everyone just fucking eats it up. And I’m over here like, I had the gap, I went for it, he had to know I’d go inside because he’d have done the same thing, and he puts me into the wall instead of letting me take the position that was rightfully mine, and all I hear the media saying is how I made a mistake!”

Lando understood Oscar’s frustration, but he also felt like he needed to defend Carlos. “I’d have done the same as you,” he said, “but you can’t think Carlos did that on purpose.”

“No, I don’t, but the way he came out of the car after he retired and talked to the press like it was somehow my fault, and then suddenly it’s all ‘stupid rookie ruins perfect Carlos’s race’...”

“You know none of us can control how the media spins stuff like this. Carlos would never…”

“Would you just stop!” Oscar stood up from the sofa and started pacing. Lando tracked him with his eyes, “I don’t need you to defend Carlos to me! I’m not asking you to be mad at him, just...I don’t know…a little sympathy? Or hell, silence might be preferable!”

Lando sat up partway, at least enough that he was looking at Oscar mostly upright. “Do you want me to leave?”

“Leave? What? No…” Oscar said, stopping his pacing.

“Then sit back down and listen to me. I’m even going to look at you upside right when I talk to you so you know I’m taking it serious.” Lando twisted his body around in a fluid motion until he was sitting upright on the couch with his legs crossed under him on the cushion. Oscar flopped back down onto the other cushion somewhat petulantly.

“Like I said, I’d have made the same call as you in that position. It was a clean gap. But Carlos locked up. I don’t know if he misjudged the space and thought he was trying to avoid or what, but if he did, he’d never admit it. He’s old-school like that. We might be friends, but that’s something we’ll always disagree on. I say, if you make a mistake, own it. And yeah, I think he made a mistake, and it cost you both. And you didn’t deserve it. I get why you’re mad. But you’re both my friends, and it’s kind of fucking me up that it sounds like you kinda hate him right now. And like, I’m not asking you to not be mad at him. Hell, I’m actually a little mad at him for not owning up because I’m always mad when he does that. But if you let the media even start to influence how you feel about anyone else on the grid…if you even give them the tiniest crack to get into…they’ll use it against you. Maybe not right away, but they’ll know it’s there, and they’ll know how to burrow in and make you doubt everything you ever thought you knew about yourself, your team, your friends…whatever. Are you understanding me?”

Oscar nodded. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Lando so adamantly serious, like he was speaking from personal experience, like he’d seen it happen before, and he was afraid that it would happen to Oscar.

“Ok. Good. I didn’t come in here expecting to have to be the serious senior teammate tonight, so if it’s all the same to you, can we lighten up a little now? You can still be mad or frustrated or whatever if you need to be, but maybe we could take it out on some ones and zeroes for a bit?”

Oscar let out a breath that tried to be a chuckle but carried a bit too much tension with it. “Yeah, sure,” he said, a slight smile ticking up on his face, “CoD still good?”

“Perfect.”

“And just so you know,” Oscar said as he loaded up the game, “I don’t hate Carlos. I just get really mad sometimes. And then I get over it. Always do.”

“Remind me never to make you mad,” Lando said with a small laugh, “You get this whole serial killer vibe. You’re fuckin’ scary, mate.”

Oscar let out an amused puff from his nose, “Yeah, sorry. ‘S why I usually keep it to myself ‘til I’m over it. Thanks for letting me vent, though. I actually feel a lot better.”

“Good,” Lando said, “Now I won’t feel so bad handing you your second ‘L’ of the day.”

Oscar made an offended noise and jabbed an elbow into Lando’s side. Lando yelped.