Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Oscar’s least favorite part of his job isn’t dealing with the souls, it's breaking the news to dead people that, no, Death is not liable for wrongful termination.

It’s an annoying task he’s grown to resent. He has been working for so long now that the exact time is more of a guess than anything else.

However long it’s been, it hasn’t felt like much, though by the Earth Clock's measure, he has been dead for exactly sixty-five years, six months, and twelve days—assuming, of course, that the clock is to be trusted.

A temperamental thing, that clock. It ticks in fits and starts, measuring time on Earth while the afterlife drifts untethered. One minute here might stretch into a month there, or collapse into a heartbeat. It’s not linear, because time itself isn’t real—just a desperate framework mortals cling to, a collective illusion. Space-time is relative, physics says. Perception defines reality, philosophy counters.

The Earth Clock on Oscar's desk agrees with both.

And in that time—sixty-five years, six months, twelve days, whatever—Oscar has processed more souls than he cares to count. Celebrities, athletes, a man who insisted he was immortal right up until his file said otherwise. Oscar has learned, with experience, that the only thing more insufferable than an angry ghost is one who still thinks they have a flight to catch.

“I don’t have time for this,” the man snaps. “I have to be in Miami in two hours. I haven’t even left for the airport. My kids—God, my kids—I need to drop them at the sitter—”

Oscar leans back in his chair, adjusts his thick-rimmed square glasses on his nose, and skims the paperwork again. He types the man's name on the clunky writing machine before him.

“Sir, I understand your concerns,” he says, with the measured patience of someone who does not, in fact, understand nor particularly care. “But unfortunately, there is nothing I can do.”

“No, no, no, no, don't give me that crap.” He wavers between anger and disbelief. “There has to be something—some kind of train to catch, some, some... time stuff? A candle to blow. A loophole! This can’t be right. I was fine! There must be a mistake.”

He collapses into the chair across from Oscar, hands gripping his temples.

"I was heading out. I had my keys. I kissed my wife goodbye. I did everything like every other day. So why…” His voice cracks. “Why am I here?”

Now come the tears. Oscar watches as the man folds in on himself, pressing his face into his hands, shoulders trembling.

Oscar has seen enough grief to be unmoved by it. He cried, too, when he first sat in that chair—when he answered the routine questions, and when they told him he had died at twenty-three, on the night of his own birthday, in 1959.

“Are you requesting the cause of death?” he asks, because he is eager to get this over with and because there are something like thirty other people waiting outside his door.

The man lifts his head slightly, eyes red-rimmed and unfocused. “My cause of death?” His voice is hoarse. “Yes. Yes, sure, I’d like to know.”

Oscar nods, already flipping through the stack of papers on his desk.

“Cause of death requests must be processed under Regulation 42A, subsection 3, which requires verbal confirmation from the deceased before details can be disclosed.” He says. “I will need you to state your full legal name and date of birth for verification.”

The man swallows hard. “Uh, Mark Evans. January 13th, 1995.”

Oscar types something into the ancient, clunky machine in front of him. The typewriter-like contraption coughs, gears shifting as if deciding whether to cooperate.

“Mark Alan Evans,” he corrects, glancing at the document that materializes. “You had a middle name. Please verify for record accuracy.”

Mark stares at him. “I—yeah. Sure. Alan. That’s me.”

Oscar nods in satisfaction, peeling the fresh parchment from the tray. He scans it, expression unreadable. “Time of death: 6:42 AM, Eastern Standard Time. Location: your residence. Cause: cardiac arrest.”

Mark blinks. “What?”

Pushing his black glasses up the bridge of his nose, Oscar says, “Sudden cardiac arrest. It is a condition where the heart ceases to function due to electrical malfunction, often with little to no warning.”

“No, no, I know what it is.” Mark shakes his head. “But, that’s—that’s not possible. I’m twenty-nine. I run every morning. I eat healthy.”

“A common misconception. Lifestyle choices do not grant immunity from biological failure. Would you like me to print an informational pamphlet? We have one on unexpected fatal cardiac events—Form 73Q.”

Mark stares at him like he’s grown a second head. “You’re joking.”

“I am not authorized to joke during soul processing,” Oscar says matter-of-factly. “If you suspect an error, I can submit a Request for Reassessment, but I must warn you, the likelihood of a misclassification is statistically insignificant.”

Mark lets out a shaky breath. “So that’s it? Just… game over?”

Oscar clasps his hands over the report. He wouldn’t call it game over, exactly—more like loading a new save. Death wasn’t the end of the story, just the start of a different level.

“If you would like to discuss afterlife placement, we can proceed with Section B of the intake process," he says. "Otherwise, if you require a moment to process, I can offer a temporary waiting room—though I must note that time is an inconsistent construct in this dimension, so there is no guarantee of its efficacy.”

Mark just stares at him.

Oscar sighs, rolling his shoulders. “If it’s any consolation, you were pronounced dead before your body hit the ground. I imagine it was painless.” He glances back at the paperwork. “Though that is subjective.”

Mark lets out a short, breathless laugh—one of those laughs people make when their brain has completely short-circuited. He runs a hand through his hair, eyes darting across the dull, gray office.

“So that’s it?” he repeats. “I just fill out some forms, and then I’m shuffled off to…what? Heaven? Hell? Some eternal DMV line?”

Oscar reaches into a drawer behind him and pulls out a neatly stacked set of papers.

“That would be Form 12A for standard afterlife placement. You may also request a full breakdown of your karmic record—Form 13J—or, if you believe you were assigned the incorrect metaphysical destination, an appeal may be filed using Form 44Z.” He slides the stack across the desk. “I should inform you that appeals take an average of six to nine eternities to process.”

Mark stares at the stack like it might bite him. “You’re kidding.”

Oscar frowns. “I have already stated that I am not authorized to joke during soul processing.”

Mark picks up one of the papers at random, scanning the tiny, cramped text.

“What if I refuse to fill these out?”

Oscar leans back in his chair, fingers steepling. “Noncompliance defaults to Standard Processing. You will be placed in the appropriate afterlife based on our existing records, and any further complaints must be lodged post-placement using—”

“Let me guess.” Mark drops the paper onto the desk. “A form?”

“Form 66B,” Oscar confirms. “However, I must warn you, the Department of Eternal Affairs has no jurisdiction over post-placement grievances. Once assigned, your fate is determined by the governing entity of your designated afterlife. If you wish to submit a complaint against the system as a whole, we do have Form F1A, but it has never resulted in a successful resolution.”

Mark presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”

“That would be Form 10D if you wish to request a meeting,” Oscar supplies.

Mark lets out another hysterical laugh. “Of course it is.” He exhales, long and slow, hands dropping limply to his lap. “Fine. Fine. What do I do?”

Oscar nods, pleased to finally move things along. “Start with Form 12A. Sign at the bottom. And please use black ink, blue is not accepted for official documentation.” He pushes a pen toward Mark and waits as he hesitantly takes it.

For a long moment, the dead man just stares at the paper. Then, finally, he exhales, "And this… this just decides where I go?"

In reality, the process is far more complex than that. Fortunately for the newly departed, their role is limited to selecting an option and signing on the dotted line—filing, sorting, and the actual bureaucratic legwork fall under Oscar’s jurisdiction.

Technically, souls may petition for non-standard placements, such as direct entry into the Void or a specific reincarnation request, but the sheer volume of paperwork involved makes it an inconvenient option. As a result, Oscar only discloses these alternatives when he feels like it.

Whether withholding such information is an overreach of his authority is a gray area—while the Department of Eternal Affairs has exhaustive regulations for the dead, its guidelines for employees are considerably more flexible.

Oscar nods, leans in his chair, and runs a hand through his slicked-back hair.

"Form 12A determines your standard placement. Your options include corporeal ghosthood, temporary purgatorial processing, or reincarnation under Clause 7B of the Soul Continuity Act."

"Those are my choices?"

"Unless you would prefer to file for a metaphysical reassessment, which, as I mentioned, takes six to nine eternities to process."

Mark groans. "Ghosthood? Like, the wooo spooky kind?"

"That would be the informal term, yes," Oscar says, unamused. "You would remain in the mortal plane with limited physical interaction, bound by unresolved circumstances or strong emotional ties." He taps a line on the form. "Purgatory is exactly what it sounds like, interim placement for cases requiring further review. Reincarnation is self-explanatory, though I must warn you that it carries a 47.8% chance of returning as a lower life form due to karmic debt."

Mark pales. "Lower life form, like…?"

"The last soul in your position returned as a garden snail," Oscar says blandly.

Mark squeezes his eyes shut. "Oh my God."

"Again, that would be Form 10D."

Mark groans again.

"You know what? Fine. Whatever. I'll—I don't know, purgatory. That seems safe."

Oscar nods, flipping the file to the appropriate section and tapping the signature line. "Sign here."

He doesn't mention that the probability of ending up in hell vastly outweighs that of reaching heaven. Given the subjectivity of moral judgment, Oscar is neither permitted nor equipped to tally up sins and virtues. That responsibility belongs to higher-level adjudicators. This means Mark’s stay in purgatory could last anywhere from a brief interlude to an indeterminate stretch of metaphysical limbo, depending on how long it takes to reach a verdict.

Not that it’s Oscar’s concern. All of this is detailed in the fine print of the placement contract, which Mark, like most souls, should take the time to read before signing.

With a long, suffering sigh, Mark scribbles his name.

Oscar takes the form back, giving it a quick glance before stamping it with a heavy, resounding thunk.

"Congratulations, Mr. Evans," he says. "Your eternity awaits."

The air around them wraps around itself, the fluorescents flickering as reality bends. Mark can barely react before he vanishes with a whoosh.

It doesn't take much time for a new file to materialize on Oscar’s desk in a soft white cloud.

He adjusts his suit coat, taps the cover, and sighs.

"Next," he says, without looking up.

A woman sits down in the office chair. She’s young—twenty, maybe twenty-one—hair pulled into a messy bun, eyes darting around the room like she’s searching for a hidden camera.

Unlike most people, she’s not panicking.

She leans forward, resting her elbows on the desk. "So, this is the afterlife?"

Oscar flips her file open. "The administrative processing center for souls, yes. Your afterlife is determined by Form 12A, which you will be required to sign before departure."

She exhales, dragging a hand down her face. "God, I thought I was dreaming."

"Form 10D," Oscar murmurs.

"What?"

"Nothing." He scans the page. "Lillian Carter. Age twenty-one. Cause of death pending confirmation. No active metaphysical complaints. No unresolved oaths or lingering contracts. Congratulations, Miss Carter, your paperwork is refreshingly straightforward."

She frowns. "Pending confirmation? What does that mean?"

Oscar slides a second sheet in front of her, tapping a neat row of text. "It means our system has not yet finalized your official cause of death. If you’d like to expedite the process, you may file a form for immediate review."

Lillian scans the page. "And if I don't?"

"It will be processed in the standard queue."

"How long does that take?"

Oscar adjusts his glasses. "Between five minutes and five centuries, depending on backlog and quantum fluctuation."

She stares. "Are you serious?"

"I am legally required to be," he says.

Lillian slumps back in her chair. "This is insane."

"Insanity determinations fall under psychiatric evaluations in the Living Realm, which is no longer within your jurisdiction. Now, your standard options." He smooths the paper flat. "Corporeal ghosthood, purgatorial processing, or reincarnation under Clause 7B."

She raises an eyebrow. "Ghosthood sounds miserable. What's purgatory like?"

"Waiting," Oscar says.

"For what?"

He shrugs. "Further instructions. Divine intervention. Bureaucratic clarity. Occasionally nothing."

She taps her fingers against the desk. "And reincarnation means starting over?"

"Yes. Though specifics are determined by karmic weight and existential resonance. The system is allegedly fair."

"‘Allegedly’ isn’t reassuring."

"It wasn't meant to be."

Lillian exhales sharply. "Screw it. Reincarnation."

Oscar slides the form forward. "Sign here."

She hesitates for half a second before scribbling her name. Oscar stamps the page. The room comes alive, ironically, the air shuddering as the universe claims her soul. She only has time to say, "Well, this has been—" before she vanishes in a blink.

Oscar checks the clock on his desk (which, by Earth standards, is displaying something between Tuesday and the 21st century) and pinches the bridge of his nose.

Technically, days do not exist in the afterlife, but Oscar is certain this one is about to stretch on endlessly.

He needs a drink.

Oscar doesn't believe in many things anymore, not in free will, not in eternal peace, and certainly not in decaf.

But habits are hard to break, even when your heart stopped beating ages ago. And so every cycle or so, he shuffles over to the coffee machine, with a mug that reads: "Death is a full-time job." (It had been funny for the first two decades.)

Oscar presses the black button for Extract—Caffeine Variant, and the coffee machine wheezes.

It always wheezes.

He stands in front of it and waits, adjusts his tie—navy blue, for once—and watches as the machine produces a cup of what is, by generous description, coffee, and by accurate description, a dark fluid that only resembles caffeine through mimicry.

He doesn’t even flinch when the machine coughs up a moth.

Still better than the stuff they had at IBM in ’57, he thinks, catching the moth in one hand and flicking it into a nearby bin marked “Please do not feed the Bureaucratic Entities.”

Just as he is about to take the first sip, a voice behind him drawls, "You're looking spry for a corpse, darling. You switch brands or finally die inside for real?"

Oscar doesn’t turn. “Good to see you too, James.”

James Hunt, Director of Post-Mortal Affairs, walks through the Department with a perpetual obnoxious smirk and a shirt forever unbuttoned to the midpoint of his chest.

By all bureaucratic definitions, he is Oscar’s superior. That said, Oscar had the distinct misfortune of both being born before James and dying before him—an unfortunate chronological double-whammy that, in the eyes of the system, renders him forever subordinate.

“Got something for you,” James says, slapping a folder down on the counter next to the coffee machine. It shudders, as if afraid. “New soul, time of death’s a bit… wobbly. You’re good with the weird ones.”

“I process souls,” Oscar says. “That’s the job.”

“You process souls the way I smoke in the stairwell, joylessly, and maybe out of spite.”

Oscar takes another sip of the coffee. It ripples like oil and tastes faintly like lemon juice.

“What’s the case?”

James leans against the counter. “Well. He’s a philosopher. One of the ones that believe reality is a simulation. Took thirty minutes just to explain to him that he’s not in an elaborate art installation."

Oscar closes his eyes. “That’s going to be an 88Q form.”

“And three addendums,” James says cheerfully. “Plus a metaphysical debate waiver. Also, gossip.”

Oscar glances up.

James is smiling from ear to ear. “You know that new Reassignment Officer from the Empath Division?”

“Charlotte?”

“She cried so hard in Processing Room B yesterday that the walls started to weep blood. Which is impressive, considering we had those sterilized after the Faust Incident.”

Oscar blinks. “Why?”

“She accidentally told a fourteenth-century saint he’s been misallocated to the Lust Realm. He didn't take it well, and kept asking to speak to Dante.”

Before Oscar can formulate his reply, the hallway lights suddenly flicker.

And the door slams open.

“Hey!” Ollie, the new kid, skids in, wearing a hoodie that says “I bear-ly made it on time” in glow-in-the-dark letters. He has a cup of something smoking sideways and a look of deeply misplaced joy.

James lights a cigarette and nods toward him. “Nice jumper, Oliver.”

“Thank you, boss!" He waves, then, with a displeased frown, adds, "Did you know the elevator screamed at me again? I don't think it likes me very much."

“That’s because you said the C-word,” Oscar mutters.

Ollie blinks. “What, crash?”

The floor gives a low, seismic shudder. Overhead, the lights sputter like they're choking on their own glow. The coffee machine lets out a hiss, then starts dribbling what appears to be Latin scripture—something about eternal damnation, Oscar’s Latin is rusty.

Somewhere down the hallway, a voice yells, muffled but exasperated: “Third time today!”

James raises one hand and the tremor dies.

“Okay. Nobody panic!" He turns to Oliver. "Just don’t repeat that word, kid.”

“...Crash?” Ollie repeats, helpfully.

Reality hiccups once more. A tile on the ceiling lets out a soft cry and turns inside out. Somewhere down the hallway, a door bursts open and a pigeon with twelve eyes flaps angrily toward the Legal Department.

Oscar turns, calm as ever. “Ollie,” he says, “we do not say that word in this Department. It triggers the Residual Trauma Alarm.”

“The residual—what now?”

A klaxon begins wailing mournfully in the distance, followed by a warped, off-key rendition of 'Stayin’ Alive' by the Bee Gees reverberating through the endless halls.

Ollie winces. “Oh.”

James rolls his eyes. “We’ve told you so many times. Stop saying it. Just say incident. Or unscheduled conclusion. Or literally anything else.”

“But Logan said it was a cra—”

"Alright, break's over." Oscar grabs his coffee, and the boy's arm in the same fluid motion and begins dragging him out of the room. “You are going back to work. And James, I need a 34-P.”

Their boss winks. “Already forged one. Have fun.”

Fun isn’t really the word to use here—mandatory metaphysical babysitting feels more accurate, but the Department doesn’t exactly encourage creative phrasing.

Oscar pushes back his chair, the wheels creaking faintly against the floor, and rolls across the office. He counts to ten—bottom to top—before sliding open the drawer.

Inside, a collection of neatly categorized folders stares back at him. He counts fifteen down, then plucks the sixteenth and flips it open.

Full Name: Charles Marc Hervé Perceval Leclerc.
Status: Deceased.
Cause: Blunt force trauma, high-velocity impact.
Circumstances: Vehicular incident.
Date of Death: Sun. Sep 11, 2022, 3:23PM

Standard case. No irregularities, no discrepancies, no errors in the system. Oscar shifts his gaze from the file to the man standing before him.

Charles Leclerc is very much exactly what the file describes—messy-haired, wide-eyed, and still dressed in a fireproof racing suit, faintly scorched at the edges. He is not bleeding, but he appears shaken.

Oscar has seen that look enough times to recognize when reality is starting to set in.

“Welcome to the Department of Eternal Affairs,” he says, monotone. “We handle soul processing, afterlife allocations, and interdimensional inquiries. If you have questions about your final destination, please refer to Form 14B. If you wish to lodge a complaint about the circumstances of your death, that would be Form 27C, though I must warn you, we have a substantial backlog."

The man just stares.

Oscar waits.

It is what he does best, after all.

“I—” The man swallows at last. His accent is clipped, French-tinged. “I had a race.”

Oscar confirms, “Yes.”

A shaky breath. He presses a hand to his chest like he’s making sure he’s still there. “I was in Monza. The car—there was an impact. I remember the impact.”

Oscar skims the file again.

“Yes.”

The man, Charles Marc Hervé Perceval Leclerc, a breath away from 25 years old, exhales sharply again, fingers twitching.

Oscar keeps his voice even. “Would you like to request confirmation of your cause of death?”

Charles barely hears him. His eyes dart around the vast, nondescript processing office, landing back on Oscar with sudden urgency. “Where’s Max?”

Oscar doesn’t blink. “Max?”

Charles steps forward.

“My Max," he says like that explains everything. "We crashed. He was right next to me. Is he—” His breath stutters. “Did he—”

Oscar flips through the file. “Your mortal companion, Max Emilian Verstappen, born 30 September 1997, currently still alive.”

Charles lets out a breath so sharp it could cut through titanium. His hands find his face, fingers threading through his dark, wet hair.

“Putain,” he mutters. “Merde, merde, merde—”

“I take it you were hoping for a different outcome?”

“No!” His head snaps up, eyes wide. “No, I—I just—” He exhales, shoulders slumping.

Oscar has processed thousands of souls in his time, from every walk of life, every time period, every death imaginable. He’s dealt with kings and beggars, pop stars and prophets, mothers and murderers. He’s watched a caveman try to bite through a filing cabinet in primal panic. He’s had a CEO try to bribe him with money. He once had to listen to a seventeenth-century French aristocrat cry for three days straight.

None of that, however, has quite prepared him for the particular brand of existential distress unique to a man whose last memory is going two hundred miles per hour on an Italian race track.

Charles Leclerc stares at him with the wild, darting eyes of someone who still thinks, somehow, he can bargain his way out of this. The recently deceased always go through the same pattern—denial, anger, bargaining, all the usual mess—but it manifests differently in everyone. Some plead, some break down, and some get aggressive.

The ones in suits usually threaten to sue.

The ones in uniforms demand their medals.

Charles… Charles looks like he’s about five seconds away from sprinting out of the office at full speed. Which would be impressive, considering the Department of Eternal Affairs does not have exits.

“So,” Charles says after a long silence, “Max... Max is alive?”

“Yes.”

Charles sways slightly like he might be sick. He grips the edges of the desk, knuckles white.

“But I—” He swallows. “I remember him hitting me.”

Oscar glances back at the report. “Indeed. Collision with secondary vehicle, frontal impact, lap thirty-seven.” He flips a page. “Other driver sustained minimal damage.”

Charles exhales, something broken in it. “Of course he did.”

Oscar tilts his head. It’s not the reaction he expected. It’s not relief, not really. He’s seen relief before—it usually looks like someone collapsing in on themselves, like a man being freed from a noose. Charles looks the opposite of that. Tense, trapped, like something inside him is folding in the wrong direction.

“You don’t seem pleased,” Oscar notes.

Charles gives a hollow, humorless chuckle. It sounds like a pained wheeze. “I love him.”

The correct tense would be loved.

Oscar says nothing. He waits.

Charles runs a hand through his hair, staring at nothing. “We were supposed to grow old together.” The words come out unsteady. He blinks rapidly, lets out a raw sob, shoves it all down again before it can slip through the cracks. “He’s going to blame himself.”

Oscar knows better than to offer comfort. He’s not built for it, not after sixty-five years, six months, and—what was it now? Thirteen days? Time was a mess here. It bent and stretched and collapsed in on itself like a poorly built bridge. He once had a woman from 1892 show up before her husband from 1885. Time was not a straight line, no matter how many clocks mortals built to tell themselves otherwise.

But he does know inevitability when he sees it.

“Survivor’s guilt is common,” Oscar says, flat. “Statistically, however, most living individuals do not waste away from grief. They continue their lives, as people do.”

Charles flinches. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“No.”

The man looks like he's bracing himself for impact all over again. He shifts his weight, shoulders tensed. “I need to see him.”

Oscar blinks.

“That is not a standard request.”

“I don’t care.”

Oscar straightens his back against the chair, and recites, “If you mean through a visitation permit, that requires at least three documented cases of unfinished business. If you mean haunting privileges, you would need to be tied to a specific location or object—”

“I mean actually see him.” Charles leans forward, desperate now. “I can’t just—leave him. Not like this.”

Oscar clicks his pen against the desk, considering.

He’s seen this before. Love, obsession, devotion—the things that tether souls to the world long after their bodies have gone. He’s watched mothers refuse the afterlife until their children joined them. He’s seen lovers claw their way through dimensions to find each other.

Time bends for love, sometimes.

Sometimes.

It is, unfortunately, a paperwork nightmare.

And although Oscar is not required to disclose every possible option—making omission a perfectly acceptable practice—he is legally obligated to respond to direct requests made by the deceased.

He lets out a tired sigh.

“You have two options,” he says. “One: you proceed with standard afterlife allocation. Reincarnation, ghosthood, purgatory, etcetera. Or two: you file a Deferred Afterlife Request.”

Charles frowns. “What is that?”

Oscar pulls out the relevant form—A12-D. He sets it down between them with a loud thud. “This allows you to delay your final allocation until a chosen individual has also passed. You will remain in limbo—no aging, no sensation, no concept of time—until their file is processed.”

Charles’ breath catches. “And then?”

“Then, you move on together. To whatever comes next.”

Oscar flips to the last page.

Charles stares at the paper like it might vanish if he looks away. His fingers tremble when he reaches for the pen. “And he—” His voice wavers. “He won’t be alone?”

Oscar doesn’t bother with reassurances, but he does say, “Statistically speaking? No.”

Charles exhales sharply. “Okay.”

It’s a double-edged choice, this waiting. Oscar knows it never ends the way the Dead think it will.

On one hand, it keeps them from loneliness, suspended, untouched by time, waiting for the one person who made life worth living. But on the other hand…

People move on.

That’s what they’re meant to do. No one stays in grief forever, no matter how much they swear they will.

Max Verstappen will not mourn forever. He will drive again, win again. He will laugh again, hold someone else’s hand again. He will fall in love again. Maybe he will marry. Maybe he will have children. Maybe he will die an old man, at peace, surrounded by a family that will cry for him like Charles is crying now.

And when Max arrives at Oscar’s desk, when his name materializes on a fresh file, he will not know the promise Charles made here today. He will be someone else by then, someone shaped by years Charles will never get to see. He will have a wife, a husband, a partner, children, someone else waiting for him, and Max will choose.

And Charles—

Charles will wake up from limbo, bright-eyed and eager, ready to be with him again. And it will be Oscar who tells him the truth.

Oscar always has to be the one to tell them.

It’s happened before.

There was a girl once, back in the 70s, barely twenty when she died. Her boyfriend, an artist, had painted her a hundred times. She had been his muse, his great love, and when she died, he had sworn he’d never love again.

She had chosen to wait.

Fifty years later, he died. Oscar processed his file. The man had lived a long, full life. He had married another woman, had four children, eleven grandchildren. And when it came time to choose his path, he did not ask for the girl from the 70s. He asked for his wife. The one he had built a life with.

Oscar still remembers the way the girl’s face fell when he told her.

Love is a sharp thing, but time—time is sharper. It dulls grief's edges, wears it down, turns it into something softer, something bearable. And Oscar has watched too many people wait for someone who never came.

Charles might be one of them. He signs the document.

Oscar stamps the paper with a heavy thunk, watching as Charles flickers at the edges, reality peeling away from him.

“Charles Marc Hervé Perceval Leclerc, you are now in a state of deferred existence,” he says. “You will remain suspended until Max Emilian Verstappen is deceased and processed. Do not attempt to communicate with the living. Do not attempt to bypass limbo, and—"

Oscar is about to add—Do not attempt to resist transition, as it may result in temporal displacement or existential fragmentation. Which, in less bureaucratic terms, means: "Don't fight it, or you might get stuck in between realities and turn into something that shouldn’t exist."

But Charles is already gone.

Oscar rarely eats.

It’s not that he can’t—he technically has a mouth, teeth, a stomach that functions in whatever loose definition of "function" applies to the dead—but there’s no real need for it. Nothing in the afterlife is needed. The body is a concept more than anything else, a familiar form to latch onto so that souls don’t completely detach from the weight of existence unshackled from time.

That being said, he does still take his lunch break from time to time.

It isn't much. Some borrowed absent time, spent in a break room that always smells vaguely of burnt coffee and olive oil. But in a job where time isn't real, bureaucracy is infinite, and nobody ever retires, it is the closest thing Oscar has to sanity.

Logan and Alex are already seated when he gets to the break room.

The room itself is much like the rest of the Department of Eternal Affairs—beige walls, yellowish lights, a vending machine that hasn’t been restocked since before Oscar even took the job. The clock on the wall is frozen at 16:33. It has been for the past forty years, or so. Logan once tried to fix it and almost caused a time fracture, so now they just leave it be.

Oscar sits at his usual spot—a chair that has once been black but has long since faded to an indeterminate gray—and pulls out his sandwich.

The food isn't real, exactly. Nothing is, here. But it still appears, still tastes like something, even if the specifics are difficult to pin down. His sandwich is neither warm nor cold, neither fresh nor stale, and when he bites into it, he gets the distinct sense it should have a texture, but it doesn't.

Across from him, Logan is halfway through a bowl of something orange. He has his chair tilted back, precarious in that way that makes Oscar uneasy because he still believes the whole thing might collapse and send him sprawling. Of course, nothing ever falls here. If Logan overbalances, he would probably just… stay there, frozen at an impossible angle, until he corrects himself.

Next to him, Alex has his feet propped up on another chair, reading through something that looks suspiciously like a kid's fairytale book.

Oscar takes another bite of his sandwich.

“So,” Alex says, not looking up, “any good cases today?”

Logan snorts. “Define good.”

“Interesting, then.”

Oscar considers. He thinks of Charles Leclerc, whose hands were shaking as he signed his name earlier. He thinks of love strong enough to delay eternity.

“I had a guy request to wait for his boyfriend,” he says around a mouthful.

Logan raises an eyebrow. “For how long?”

“However long it takes.”

He lets out a low whistle. “That’s commitment.”

"Mine was dumber," Alex says, still reading through something. “He asked if he could get a PowerPoint of his best moments before moving on.”

Logan cackles. “Shut up. No, he didn’t.”

“Oh, he did. I referred him to Archival Review just to be rid of him.”

“And?”

Alex sighs, closing his book. “They dumped it on the new kid—Ollie, I think? Poor guy actually made it.”

“No way. Swear to God, right now!"

“I swear to God, man! Just when I think the bar can’t get any lower, someone comes through with a shovel. This guy got a highlight reel of his life, narrated, with dramatic music.”

Oscar frowns. The concept is still a little foreign to him, but he tries. “Who narrated it?”

“Some dead sports announcer, I don’t know.” Alex waves a hand. “But it was cinematic as fuck. They had slow-mo, instant replays, even commentary on his best decisions.”

Logan huffs. “That’s—” He shakes his head. “God, I wish I had your cases. All I get are the ancient ones. It's all so boring.”

Oscar takes a sip of his drink. It tastes like something in between water and coffee. "You are lucky. Old people are wiser,” he says.

Alex glances at him. “Still dealing with the young adults?”

Oscar nods.

He has the eighteen-to-thirty range now. He gets the young, the reckless, the ones who think they’re invincible right up until the moment they aren’t. He gets students, soldiers, drunks, idiots. He gets the ones who stare at him with wide eyes and say, But I had my whole life ahead of me.

It is its own kind of tragedy, watching them come to terms with the fact that the future they were promised is never going to arrive.

Alex, at least, has the middle-aged ones. The ones who have lived long enough to expect the end, even if they aren't ready. Logan handles the elderly, which is arguably the easiest by far.

And, of course—

“At least none of us get the kids,” Logan says, stretching.

There is a brief silence as they all exchange a glance.

“Rosberg’s job." Alex grimaces, shaking his head like the simple thought can send shivers down his spine.

Oscar has no particular opinion on Nico Rosberg, but he does have an opinion on processing children. It is something he has never had to do and never wanted to do. Children don't understand bureaucracy. They don't care about forms, policies, or procedures. They want their parents. They want to go home. They want to know why.

Oscar has never envied Nico’s job.

“Remember that time he went on strike?” Logan heaves, reminiscent of a time that could’ve been last week, or a century ago. “Refused to process anyone under ten?”

Alex lets out a distressed cry. “They still haven’t cleared that backlog.”

Oscar checks the silver watch on his arm. It blinks, unreadable for a moment, before settling on a time that probably isn't accurate.

He figures their break is nearly over, by pure assumption.

He is about to stand, when Logan taps his spoon against the table and points it at him. “Hey, Oscar," he begins with a frown. "Did you know what a PowerPoint was before you died?”

“Of course not,” Oscar says.

“Did you even have color TV?”

Oscar shoots Alex a flat look. “Yes.”

“Did you own one?”

“… No.”

The grin that spreads across Logan’s face is far too self-satisfied.

“God, I can't believe you died before actual fun existed,” he says, shoveling another spoonful of neon-orange whatever into his mouth before adding, "Did you ever watch porn?"

Alex laughs.

Oscar pointedly ignores them.

He’s long since accepted that he is—by Logan’s standards—an outdated relic of the past, someone who still calls movies films and believes a good suit is the mark of a respectable man.

But that does not mean he has to indulge their nonsense.

“Well,” he says, standing up, “back to work.”

Logan groans. “Ugh. Can’t we unionize or something?”

“What would we demand? Shorter eternities?” Alex asks.

Oscar does not dignify that with a response, either.

Oscar is halfway through stamping a Posthumous Name Correction document, because apparently people care about their legacy after they’re dead, when the door to his office creaks open.

He doesn’t look up immediately. The newly deceased are rarely in a rush. Some hover awkwardly in the doorway, adjusting to the reality of their situation. Others pace, hoping movement might somehow reverse the inevitable. A select few charge straight in, demanding answers, justice, or, in one particularly memorable case, a refund.

Oscar flips to the next page.

“Welcome to the Department of Eternal Affairs,” he says, tone as flat as the stack of unfinished forms on his desk. “We handle soul processing, afterlife allocations, and interdimensional inquiries. If you have questions about your final destination, please refer to Form 14B. If you wish to lodge a complaint about the circumstances of your death, that would be Form 27C, though I must warn you, we have a substantial backlog.”

Nothing.

That’s unusual.

Most people react in some way, an exclamation, a sigh, maybe even a horrified what the hell do you mean, afterlife? But this new arrival is suspiciously silent.

Oscar finally glances up.

The guy standing in the doorway is young—as are most of those that show up at his door—he’s got messy brown curls, freckles dusted across tanned skin, and an expression caught someplace between amusement and confusion. It somehow reminds Oscar of how Death is rarely kind.

The guy is also soaking wet.

Oscar stares at the puddle forming beneath him. “Please don’t drip on the paperwork.”

“Oh. Uh, yeah. Sorry, mate.” The guy steps forward, feet squelching against the floor. He stops in front of the desk, shakes out his hands, and flicks water onto neatly stacked files.

Oscar exhales through his nose.

“Take a seat,” Oscar says, nudging aside papers with the back of his knuckle. “Name?”

The guy flops into the chair like he’s settling in for a chat at a bar rather than a formal evaluation of his soul’s eternal fate.

“Lando.” He pauses, blinking. “Norris?”

Oscar underlines the question mark he hears in the tone, and dutifully writes it down in tidy block letters.

“Date of birth?”

Lando rattles it off, then leans back, stretching his arms behind his head. He idly scans the room as Oscar slides open the middle drawer with a dry clack, looking for the missing file. 

It happens sometimes. Files that should appear neatly on his desk at the precise moment of death occasionally take the scenic route. Oscar suspects a malfunction in the Records Transmission Pipeline, though of course any attempt to submit a formal complaint results in a long correspondence with the Infrastructure and the maintenance board.

Oscar has been dead since 1959. He no longer complains; he simply adapts.

“So, this is the afterlife, huh?" the guy marvels. "Bit… beige.”

Oscar doesn’t answer right away. He pushes himself away from the desk, chair wheels creaking slightly as he glides toward the far cabinet—Cabinet H-Theta, which unfortunately has a stiff drawer and a tendency to bite.

“I apologize if the aesthetic disappoints,” he says dryly, at last. “Would you prefer a more traditional setting? Fire and brimstone, perhaps?”

Lando snorts. “Nah, I’m good. Just thought it’d be more dramatic. I dunno. Flashier.” 

“Were you expecting a red carpet?”

“Well, no,” he scoffs. “But like, maybe thunder? A choir? I could’ve come in swinging.”

Oscar frowns. “Swinging?”

“Yeah, you know, like, uh, you know!” Lando snaps his fingers, visibly annoyed that Oscar most certainly does not know. He frowns, wheels turning, then suddenly lights up. “Like—uh—all fists blazing!” he declares triumphantly.

Oscar freezes halfway through rummaging in the drawers and turns to stare back at him.

“Guns,” he corrects. “The phrase is all guns blazing.”

Lando brightens. “Yeah! That one.” He nods sagely. “That’s what I meant. You’re smart."

Oscar does not reply. He simply files that comment in his mental cabinet titled: Unnecessary observations from the recently deceased. It is getting quite full.

But, well, yes. He is quite smart.

Smart enough to keep his mouth shut and not engage with this man, who, he is certain, will keep talking if given even the slightest encouragement. Instead, Oscar applies his intelligence in the most productive way possible: focusing on the task at hand, flipping through records.

It takes longer than it should. The file isn’t where it’s supposed to be. It’s been misfiled—lodged in some strange place, tucked between the Scheduled to Die records. Which is not where the dead belong. It’s where the living go.

That’s unusual.

Oscar grabs the edge of his desk and pulls himself forward, rolling his chair back into place, and flips the file open, expression blank. “Lando Norris. Born 13th November, 1999. Cause of death—” He stops. 

The line is empty, white, blank. There isn't even the expected: "pending confirmation."

Which is fine, mostly? It happens sometimes, he has been told. It just makes the job a little more annoying than it already is.

“Tell me about your death,” Oscar says.

Lando shrugs. “Well, see, that’s the weird thing. I don’t remember dying, mate.”

Oscar frowns.

“You were unaware of your own death?”

“Yeah. One minute I was swimming, the next, poof—here I am.” Lando gestures vaguely around them. “Feels like a bit of a rip-off, to be honest. I didn't even see my life flash before my eyes."

Oscar presses his lips into a thin line.

“You should have been processed at intake, and made aware of your death by a reaper and then logged by the Front Office.” He taps the stack of documents. “Neither of those things have happened.”

"Maybe I got the VIP treatment? Like next-day delivery with Amazon Prime or something." Lando leans back in his chair, swinging his legs slightly. "Wait, does that mean I’m important in the afterlife?"

Oscar does not dignify that with a response.

Instead, he flips through the file again, scanning for anything out of place. Drowned, maybe? No, that should have triggered an automatic cause-of-death note. Sudden heart failure? Also should have been logged.

There’s nothing.

“I don’t like inconsistencies,” Oscar mutters, more to himself than anyone in particular.

Lando smiles. “Why not? I love them. Keeps life interesting.”

Oscar levels him with a stare. “You are not alive.”

"Well, yeah." He gestures at the desk, the papers, the overwhelming sense of bureaucratic hell. "Would be a bit weird if I was, wouldn’t it?"

Oscar hums noncommittally.

“You have three primary options,” he says, slipping back into the standard script because he has to get this going, somehow. “One: reincarnation. Your soul is wiped and repurposed into a new form, memory-free. Two: ghosthood. You remain tethered to the living world in a non-corporeal state, typically for unfinished business.” He pauses. “Though, given your circumstances, I don’t imagine you have any.”

"That's a tad shady," Lando says, scrunching up his face. "But yeah, you're not wrong. Unless the universe is absolutely desperate for me to finish my last game of Mario Kart, I've got nothing better to do."

Oscar has no idea what Mario Kart is.

“Three: standard afterlife processing.” He flicks a paper forward. “Purgatory, paradise, oblivion, all depends on your final allocation.”

Lando eyes the document. “And what if I just… wait? Y’know, loiter about for a bit.”

Oscar sighs. “That is not an option.”

"Not with that attitude.”

Oscar pinches the bridge of his nose again. He is developing a headache, which is absurd, because he does not have a functioning nervous system.

“This is not a negotiation,” he says, voice flat. “You are here, you are dead, and you have to be processed accordingly.”

Lando huffs, dramatic. “Well, fine. I guess if I have to—”

Oscar tunes him out as he flips open the form for the final signature, scanning down the information one last time. Date of birth, yes. Circumstances of arrival, unknown. Cause of death, he notes down, pending review.

And then—

Oscar stills.

The line at the bottom of the page, where 'Date of Death' should be, where every name he’s ever processed has a final timestamp, reads something else entirely.

Status: Alive.

Oscar stares.

Lando, oblivious, keeps talking. “—do I get, like, a cool ghost power? Because if I can’t, like, float through walls or mess with lights, I’m gonna be really disappointed.”

Oscar slowly, carefully, closes the file.

Well.

This is new.

Oscar knew that working in the Department of Eternal Affairs would not be smooth all the time. He knew that, inevitably, someone would fuck up.

He has made his peace with that.

The processing system is a nightmare, yes, and time itself is a suggestion in this place, but it is fine. He came to accept that the reapers are overworked and under-supervised, and the higher-ups—the ones who actually run this entire thing—only get involved when things go so catastrophically wrong that they can no longer be ignored.

Which means, ultimately, Oscar’s entire job is making sure those mistakes never reach the higher-ups.

He likes his desk. He likes his routine. He likes not being called into The Council of Soul Transferal because a reaper threw the afterlife into disarray.

He has always said it too, the problem with hiring last-minute reapers is that sometimes they do the job as a hobby, and get bored. And when they get bored, they get lazy. And when they get lazy, they start making mistakes.

Which is, in Oscar’s professional opinion, how he has ended up in this situation.

Kimi—the Finnish Reaper assigned to high-profile mortality cases—stands in front of his desk, arms crossed, looking exactly as apologetic as a man who does not care about anything can look. Which is to say: not at all.

“So,” Oscar starts with deep, bone-weary exhaustion, “you accidentally took the wrong person?”

Kimi nods. “Yes.”

Oscar stares at him.

Kimi stares back.

Lando, sitting to the side, kicks his legs idly. “In my defense, I was just minding my own business.”

Oscar rubs his temples. “Let me get this straight. You were supposed to retrieve Landon Norris—who, for the record, was actually scheduled to die today—and instead, you took Lando Norris, who was very much not scheduled to die?”

“Yes," Kimi says.

Oscar breathes in. Then out. Then in again, slowly, because he is actively fighting the urge to flip his entire desk over.

“And why,” he asks, very patiently, “did this happen?”

Kimi scratches his head. “I was having a shit.”

Oscar blinks. “I’m sorry—”

“I rushed the paperwork,” Kimi continues, entirely too casual. “I didn’t check properly. Saw the name, took the guy.” He gestures vaguely at the concerned person. “My bad.”

Lando gives him a thumbs up.

Oscar presses his hands against his face and screams internally. Because of course, of course, this is why. Not because of some grand celestial disturbance, or because of a glitch in the system. No, Lando Norris is here because a bored apathetic reaper had a bathroom emergency.

Lando, for his part, looks wildly amused.

“So let me get this straight... I am supposed to be alive?”

“Yes,” Oscar says.

“So you’re telling me I died because this guy had to take a dump?"

“I am afraid so.”

There is a long silence.

Lando, looking between them, snorts. “Man, that’s hilarious.”

Oscar does not think it’s hilarious.

Oscar thinks it’s a nightmare.

Because this is exactly the kind of mistake that should have been caught before it even reached his desk.

There are procedures in place. Checks and balances. The reapers do not operate alone—there is the Front Office, where every death is logged before it happens, the Processing Halls where new souls are assigned destinations, and the Council, the faceless, all-powerful who oversee everything but intervene in nothing.

Unless, of course, someone forces their hand.

Oscar shudders. He has been working here for sixty-five years, six months, and something-something, and he has never seen anyone walk away from a Council review unscathed.

And his reaper, clearly, does not care.

“Just send him back,” Kimi says. “Problem solved.”

Oscar stares at him like he wants to set him on fire. “It is not that simple.”

Kimi shrugs. “Worked before.”

“That was one time, ” Oscar snaps. “And it was a goldfish!”

Lando, still swinging his legs, perks up. “Wait—goldfish go to the afterlife?”

“Not the point,” Oscar mutters.

The point is that once a soul crosses the threshold, the afterlife does not like being undone. The process of undoing it requires layers of approval, an appeal to the Council, and meticulously documented proof that the individual in question was not supposed to die in the first place.

And right now, all Oscar has is a reaper with a bad filing system and a man who really shouldn’t be here.

Suddenly, Kimi pulls out a flask from somewhere and takes a sip of a beverage that Oscar really hopes is not alcohol, seeing as reapers are strictly forbidden from drinking.

“Just fix it," Kimi says, wiping his mouth. "Or maybe don’t fix it. But it is not my problem anymore."

“It is your problem!" Oscar snaps. “Because if you think I’m handling the paperwork for this, you are sorely mistaken."

Kimi frowns. “Paperwork?”

“Yes, paperwork,” Oscar says. “Because, unlike some people, I actually have to document things when they go catastrophically wrong.” He pulls a sheet from his desk and slides it toward him. “This is a B71-Undue Mortality Report. You’re going to fill it out.”

Kimi glances at it. “I don’t have a pen.”

Oscar smiles, though it is anything but nice. He slaps a pen onto the desk.

“Now you do.”

Kimi sighs but takes it, at the same time as Lando leans forward, and asks, “So, uh… I can go back, right?”

Oscar hopes so. But he’s not about to admit his doubts out loud.

“Technically, yes,” he says. “But it’s not just a matter of snapping our fingers and sending you on your way. There’s procedure. A body cannot be re-inhabited if it has already begun to shut down.”

Lando pauses. “Meaning?”

There is a small pause in which Oscar grimaces and takes a deep breath.

“Meaning I really hope they haven’t pronounced you dead yet.”

Lando’s face falls. “Oh.”

Kimi, unhelpful as ever, takes another sip from his flask. “Might be fine.”

Oscar instantly glares at him. “Do you even know where you left his body?”

Kimi considers.

“Somewhere wet.”

Oscar closes his eyes.

He is going to lose his mind.

The Council Chamber is a place Oscar never wants to see again.

He’s seated in the center of a vast obsidian room that doesn’t quite obey physics. The walls bend at angles that shouldn’t exist. The ceiling is a thousand feet above him, or possibly only five. Echoes travel in both directions. The Council presides from five chairs, each taller than the last, shadowed figures that rarely come into focus.

They are called many things, The Eternal Judiciary, The Lords of Transition, The Legends of the Beyond, but Logan and Alex prefer to call them by what, they insist, is their true nature.

An absolute pain in their afterlife.

Oscar clears his throat in a poor attempt to shake off the unwelcome thought. “Oscar Jack Piastri, Department of Eternal Affairs," he presents himself with a relatively steady voice. "I work in the Soul Processing Division.”

“You were the one to discover the discrepancy,” one of the Council members booms. It’s not a voice so much as a presence—it reverberates in Oscar’s sternum and makes his knees want to fold politely inward.

“Yes,” Oscar says. “The deceased in question is currently not deceased.”

“And why was that not flagged by the Front Office?”

“Because the Reaper in charge was… otherwise engaged.”

There is a silence so oppressive it could flatten cities. From somewhere to Oscar’s left, someone makes a soft sound that might be a snort.

Ayrton Senna, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, flicks his brown eyes toward Oscar. His voice is dry. “Otherwise engaged?”

Oscar is starting to regret everything. “He said he needed to take a—uh—short break, and in his haste confused ‘Lando Norris’ with ‘Landon Norris’.”

The Council stirs. One of them leans forward, shifting just enough that Oscar gets a sense of presence behind the veil. Not a face, not a form—just a weight, like time or gravity.

“So the living walks our halls.”

His name is Richard Petty. Or something like that. Oscar isn’t so sure anymore—not with his stomach twisting itself into an intricate sailor’s knot.

“I’m right here, you know,” Lando calls out. He’s sitting beside him on the bench, legs dangling.

Oscar doesn’t look at him. He refuses.

“Well,” says the one they call The Doctor. “This is certainly a new mess.”

“The case,” a feminine voice adds, “is very simple. The soul was taken prematurely. The Reaper made a mistake. The error must be corrected.”

“Yes, but the question is how,” another interjects. “Sending a soul back is not a simple matter.”

“It has been done before.”

“Rarely. And with severe consequences.”

Oscar wants to grit his teeth. He has been warned before, that this Council loves to argue, loves to pontificate on the philosophical implications of every decision while avoiding the very simple reality.

They messed up.

Or rather, Kimi messed up, and now Oscar has to clean up the mess.

Lando, who has not yet learned the fine art of shutting up in front of people who can erase your existence with a thought, tilts his head and says, “Can’t you just, y’know, put me back? Like rewinding a tape?”

Oscar turns to him. “Just, please, keep quiet.”

“There is an alternative,” The councilwoman named Michèle muses. “If the soul has entered the afterlife improperly… we could simply correct the mistake by—”

“—killing him,” Richard finishes, matter-of-fact.

Silence.

Lando blinks. Then his mouth drops open. “Wait, what?”

“You were not meant to die,” the first figure says, “but you did. Sending you back is a complicated, dangerous process. Eliminating you entirely would be cleaner.”

Oscar watches as realization slowly dawns on Lando’s face—the exact moment where his easygoing demeanor shatters and sheer panic sets in.

“Okay, um, so,” Lando says, voice suddenly high-pitched, “listen, I get the whole... death and balance and scary shadow people thing, but now that I realized I wasn’t meant to die, I kinda—what’s the phrase—uh, I want to have my cake and eat it twice.”

Oscar frowns and recoils back in confusion. “I am not sure that's the correct—”

“I don’t wanna die!” Lando all but yells.

A murmur ripples through the Council. Some are amused, some are irritated, and some are entirely indifferent.

“This is all unnecessary,” Ayrton says and everyone falls silent. "I do not believe we should be killing mortals to fix divine mistakes.”

Lando snaps his head toward his voice. He looks like a man seeing water in the desert.

“Thank you!” he exclaims, throwing his hands up. “Finally, someone with some sense! I mean, really—killing me to fix your paperwork error? That’s like—like…” He squints. “Like burning down the whole orchard just ‘cause you had one bad apple.”

Oscar squints at him. “Cutting down the whole tree for a bad apple.”

“Same thing.”

“It really isn’t.”

Lando ignores him.

He gestures wildly, “I mean, I was swimming! Enjoying my life! I was vibing, guys. Then next thing I know, I’m in some hellscape being told, ‘Oops, mistake, might as well just finish you off.’” He crosses his arms, looking personally offended. “Where’s the customer service in that?”

One of the Council members shifts in their towering seat.

“You are not a customer.”

Lando waves a hand. “Oh, clearly. If I was, I’d be leaving a terrible Yelp review.”

The chamber falls silent.

Oscar exhales slowly, resisting the urge—not for the first time—to find out exactly how much trouble he’d be in for slapping a soul in the afterlife.

Instead, he turns to the council and says, “With all due respect, what course of action do you suggest to resolve this situation?” before I lose my mind, goes unsaid.

The chamber comes alive again.

“There is a precedent," Richard answers.

"Yes. The soul can be returned with guidance. So send someone with him,” Ayrton adds. “A liaison. Someone who can return him to his body, erase the memory, and ensure no anomalies remain.”

There follows a long, very, very long pause.

Then all five heads turn to Oscar, and he knows what that means before the words are even spoken. It's always the same face they make. The face of, you’re reliable and expendable in equal measure.

“The agent responsible for his processing,” The Doctor continues, “must personally escort him back to the mortal plane. The passage must be guided. A soul cannot return alone.”

Oscar stares. “You’re joking.”

It's out of his mouth before he can stop it.

No one ever jokes here.

The Council pointedly ignores him.

“In accordance with Article 9A of the Interdimensional Return Protocol,” Michèle says, “we hereby assign Oscar Jack Piastri to Repatriation Detail #04. He will escort the mistakenly retrieved mortal soul, Lando Norris, back to his body, ensure the transition is clean, and report anomalies upon return.”

Oscar closes his eyes.

He wishes he could die again.

Oscar tightens his grip on the Artifact of Passage.

It is, for all intents and purposes, a suitcase—brown leather, scuffed at the corners, the handle smooth from decades of anxious palms. Inside is nothing, and everything. It has no zippers, no clasps, only an agreement between the object and its bearer that when it is time, it knows where to go. It doesn’t ask, just delivers.

Oscar hates it.

“This place is like—like—a crematorium made by Willy Wonka,” Lando mutters, jogging a few steps to catch up as Oscar strides through the Hallway of Passing.

Oscar does not respond.

“I mean, look at this. It’s literally just elevators. And weird lighting. And that one guy who came out screaming in Spanish—wait, did you see that? You saw that, right?”

Oscar walks faster.

The Hallway of Passing is not a hallway in the conventional sense. It's a long, twisting tunnel carved through time itself. The walls are slick with something that buzzes softly, like breathing glass. The floor is lined with train tracks, and on either side, countless elevators rise and fall, vanishing into thin air, and reappearing moments later with a soft ding.

Some open to reveal fields of wheat. Others, industrial cities shrouded in fog. One lets out a single confused cow. Another reveals a man in a powdered wig and robes screaming.

“I think that one was from 1776,” Lando says, pointing. “He looked very mad. You think they have Uber there? No, probably not. Horses? Horse Uber? That’s just a horse, isn’t it—hey, why are we not talking?”

Oscar stops in front of a lift. The brass plate above it flickers between the numbers 2024 and 2025, then settles.

“This is the one,” Oscar says flatly.

Lando peers around him. “Wait, so, what happens when we step inside? Is it like a movie montage? Are we gonna swirl through a tunnel? Will I see my nan? Actually, wait—does this thing kill me again or are we good on that?”

Oscar presses the elevator button. It makes a soft, mechanical clunk.

“You will experience temporary disorientation, potential nausea, and a mild-to-severe existential awakening,” Oscar says. “Once you are in your body again, I will make sure your memories of the afterlife are expunged. You will be placed precisely thirty-eight seconds before the original extraction point.”

Lando’s mouth opens. “Thirty-eight seconds? That’s weirdly specific.”

“It's the margin required to recalibrate the soul to the body. Your heartbeat was irregular. That margin accounts for—” Oscar sighs. “It doesn’t matter.”

Lando frowns. “Dude, you sound like the inside of a tax form. Like if my accountant was also my grim reaper.”

“I’m not a reaper,” Oscar mutters.

The elevator dings. The door opens.

Inside: nothing. Just a square room with a single flickering lightbulb overhead, and an ashtray bolted to the corner, despite the strict celestial ban on smoking. (Oscar suspects it’s been there since the ‘70s. No one has the clearance to remove it.)

Lando leans in. “Alright. Okay. Let’s do it. Are we doing this? This is so cool. Is this like … space travel? Afterlife teleportation? Quantum jump? Like—Doctor Who? Or do you, like, hit me over the head with the suitcase and bam—back to the land of the living?”

Oscar closes his eyes for a long, slow inhale. “No.”

“Do you open it and it sucks me in?”

“No.”

“Do you throw it really hard and we both get sucked in?”

“… No.”

Lando nods, thoughtful. “What if I just licked it?”

“Why,” Oscar says flatly, “would you lick a transdimensional artifact?”

“I dunno. See what happens.”

Oscar gives him a long, flat look—up, then down, clearly trying to figure out if Lando is a trick question. He blinks once, unimpressed, then steps into the elevator without a word.

He moves to the panel on the left, where the buttons aren’t really buttons at all—just a cluster of strange, organic shapes. Cherries and apples, some withered and rotting at the edges, others budding into bloom.

The suitcase in Oscar's hand lets out a tiny click, like it knows they’re ready.

Lando hesitates. “So if I puke in there, does it travel with me, or does it stay in this timeline?”

Oscar doesn't answer.

He reaches into the pocket of his coat and pulls out a small, folded piece of parchment. It's blank, but it pulses faintly with golden light.

“Wait,” Lando says as the doors begin to close, “do I get a helmet, or—”

The elevator shudders. Time bends.

And then, everything turns sideways.

Lando Norris has, technically, been dead for three minutes only, but he will not stop screaming about it.

In fact, Lando is still screaming when they hit the water.

Oscar does not scream. Oscar has seen many things in his death—impossible, unspeakable things. He has watched souls come apart like paper in the wind. He has seen time fold in on itself and has glimpsed the terrible machinery that keeps the afterlife running. He has signed paperwork that has condemned people to eternal hell.

So, no, he does not scream.

But he does, regrettably, go under.

The water is colder than anything he remembers. It slaps him in the face, rushes up his nose, and fills his mouth with the unmistakable taste of chlorine. He kicks up, sputtering, limbs sluggish and uncoordinated—his body suddenly, shockingly real again.

For a long time now, Oscar has known the weight of existence only in the abstract. The afterlife is a place of muted sensation, where everything is dulled—sound, smell, touch. He has existed as a presence more than a person, paperwork, and routine defining his days rather than hunger, exhaustion, or breath.

Now, he feels everything.

The weight of his clothes, his suit soaked and dragging him down. The sting of the chlorine in his eyes. The sharp bite of cool air as he finally breaks the surface, gasping. The distant sounds of music and laughter, the rumble of car engines on hot pavement. The feeling of being again, his own heart—beating, beating, beating.

He’s alive.

He doesn’t move for a long moment, just treads water, mouth slightly open, disoriented by the sheer presence of the world around him.

And then:

“Holy shit,” Lando wheezes, flailing beside him. “Oh my god, oh my god, I’m alive, I think I pissed myself—wait, can you piss yourself if your soul is not in your body yet? Doesn't matter, I just did! Holy shit, that was mad!”

Oscar shuts his eyes. He tips his head back, floats for a moment, and tries to ignore the high-pitched rambling beside him.

“—and I swear, I saw a literal elevator made of bone and it opened into a forest, and there was this cow—and, and... oh my God, I am alive, I am alive! Am I alive?"

“Yes,” Oscar mutters, slicking wet hair back from his face. His glasses are gone.

He blinks against the sun.

God, the sun.

It’s blinding. Warm. Aggressively there. And the sky—too blue. It shouldn’t be this blue. He feels it press against him like he’s been dropped into a painting someone forgot to blur.

Lando is thrashing. Splashing. Celebrating. “I can feel my legs! And my arms! And—Oscah, I have feelings in my nipples again!”

Oscar swims to the edge of the pool without replying.

He is heavy. Water clings to him. Gravity digs its nails into his shoulders. Every cell in his body is screaming at him that this—this—is life. He hasn't felt this weight in sixty-five years, six months, and, what was it now, thirteen days? Maybe fourteen.

He grips the edge. His fingers press against the concrete lip and hurt.

He feels pain.

Oscar wants to cry.

He exhales. The air burns going in. The oxygen is real, wet, messy, humid, so unlike the still, dull nothingness of the Department’s halls.

The world is so loud.

Lando grabs his arm, shaking him. “Hey, man, you okay? You’re just sitting there all broody, and I get it, you’ve got like big ‘I’ve seen too much’ energy, but like—we’re back, right? This is the right place? Earth? Planet? Pool?”

Oscar blinks, slowly. Focuses. He counts three heartbeats. His.

"You are back," Oscar corrects because ultimately, this is Lando’s destination, not his. No matter how much—how deeply, how desperately—he wants to feel like this always, he cannot.

This world is not his anymore.

And just like that, the moment fractures. Reality seeps in through the cracks, pulling him back down like an anchor.

Oscar reaches for the suitcase, prepared to end this now.

He pulls it up from the water.

It drips.

And it sags.

And there is a very, very wet sound as part of the leather slides off in his hands.

Oscar stares as the suitcase, the single most important object in the entire operation—the celestial artifact designed to guide souls safely through time and space, crafted by the finest hands in the afterlife—squelches pitifully.

His stomach drops.

No, no, no no.

Not here. Not now.

Lando is still bobbing in the water like an excited dog. “You look like you just saw a ghost." He snorts. "No pun intended.”

Oscar lifts the case and turns it. Water spills out.

It glugs.

“Gods above,” Oscar whispers. “It’s broken.”

“What’s broken?”

Oscar turns slowly. His expression hasn’t changed. It’s blank, and monotone, but under the surface, panic prickles like static.

“The Celestial Artifact.”

Lando blinks. “The… memory and travel thingy?”

Oscar nods once.

The Department is going to kill him.

It’ll take them a while to notice. Oscar isn’t sure what a while means in this case—two minutes, two hours, a week, a decade—but once they do, they’ll kill him. Again. And this time, they won’t bother with paperwork. No destination forms, no appeals, no purgatorial waiting lists, just a one-way trip to Hell, stamped non-negotiable.

And Oscar will be left praying he’d signed the 12A standard form back in the ’50s, back when he first died, and he still had a choice.

Meanwhile, Lando smiles, like the biggest fool on earth. “So I get to remember all of it?! Like the elevators and the bone one and the hallway with the ghost that looked like King Henry the—”

“No.”

His excitement crumbles.

“Oh. Okay," he says, then, "Wait. Why not?”

“I have to fix it somehow,” Oscar mutters, setting the broken case on the warm porcelain tiles. “I’ll need a reset rune, or a salt circle, or—” He looks around.

It’s someone’s terrace. A pool. There’s a plastic flamingo float and a crumpled towel nearby. A folding chair.

“We’ll have to improvise,” he says.

Lando blinks. “Should I start chanting something? I can chant. Thunder! Ka-chigga! Ka-chigga!”

Oscar rubs his temples.

Somewhere deep inside, a headache begins to form.

This was not in the manual.

There are no instructions for what happens when the suitcase of eternal transition gets water damage in a bachelor pad.

Oscar is sitting on a beanbag.

He doesn’t know it’s called a beanbag. He only knows it is a shapeless, yielding blob of a chair that swallowed him whole the moment he sat down and now refuses to let go. He’s been trying to sit upright for five minutes, elbows braced against the floorboards like a man crawling out of quicksand, to no avail.

This thing is not a chair. It’s a trap.

The room smells like… lime. Not the fruit. The artificial, chemical promise of lime. Laundry detergent maybe, or deodorant, or the seven half-empty suspicious drinks Oscar clocked on the coffee table when he walked in.

There’s a TV the size of a motel wall. Flickering. Lando turned it on “for ambiance,” which, Oscar suspects, is code for “I can’t sit in silence for more than two minutes without twitching.”

The walls are covered in posters. Some racing team names he doesn’t recognize, some half-naked people he very much does. One appears to be both.

Oscar isn’t sure how to feel about that. 

“Well,” Lando says, sitting on the couch cross-legged, “I think the suitcase is officially dead. Like, not the fun dead. The boring kind. The not-working kind.”

“I gathered,” Oscar replies flatly. He’s been drying the thing with a hairdryer for twenty minutes.

It smells like burnt copper and swamp water. A rune slips off and lands in his lap with the sad flutter of a wet receipt.

Lando leans forward, elbows on knees. “So what happens now? Do I get haunted? Is the Council gonna send, like, a backup guy with wings and glowing eyes? Is there a paperwork drone? I bet there’s a paperwork drone. It probably flies.”

Oscar stares at the suitcase, which now makes a soft whomp sound every time he taps it. “There are no backups. No drones. The suitcase is uniquely tethered to me. Without it, the return process is compromised. It was never meant to leave the Department. Let alone be… submerged.”

Lando gasps. “Are you telling me that was a limited edition suitcase from the land of the dead and I ruined it?”

“You killed it,” Oscar corrects, expression stony. “Which is ironic, given the circumstances.”

Lando throws a pillow at him. It bounces off Oscar’s shoulder and flops to the floor like a wounded duck. “You’re such a downer, man. Have you always been like this? Were you even fun in your time?”

Oscar doesn’t answer. He is trying to figure out if the sigil seals inside the lining have truly dissolved or just temporarily lost conductivity. It’s a fool’s hope. The spells were never meant to function outside controlled temporal corridors. Let alone in a man-child’s bachelor den, surrounded by socks and something that looks like a dog toy but might be sentient.

“Hey... Technically speaking, if the suitcase’s broken, you can’t erase my memory. And if you can’t erase my memory, then I technically remember everything I wasn’t supposed to. And if that’s true, then doesn’t that make me, like, an unauthorized knowledge carrier?”

Oscar sighs. “A breach.”

“Sounds cold. Do I get a cool title? Lando the Breach Walker?”

“Lando the Mistake.”

“Ouch.”

Oscar leans back—or tries to. The beanbag chair shifts with him and immediately eats half his body again.

“You weren’t supposed to die,” he says. “You weren’t scheduled. There are rules. The soul is not designed to return with memory intact. You’re supposed to let go.”

“Well, maybe your system needed a little shake-up. I kept things spicy.”

Oscar gives him a long, tired look. “You drowned in a pool.”

“C'mon, mate, what’s spicier than a fucking revival in your own backyard? I feel like Jesus. If Jesus wore swim trunks and didn’t have a beard.” He pauses. “Did Jesus have a beard?”

Oscar pinches the bridge of his nose.

Lando flops onto his back. “Okay, real question though: am I gonna melt? Like in a week? Will I start leaking ectoplasm and turning into a ghost with no ankles?”

“You’ll be fine. For now.”

“That's ominous as hell," he says, falls quiet for about half a second, before he adds, "So what do we do now? You and me? You and this breachy little disaster?”

Oscar glances at the ruined case. Something in the faint buzzing behind his teeth makes him believe the Council is probably already aware.

He says nothing.

“Well,” Lando says cheerfully, “if you’re gonna be stranded in the land of the living, we’re gonna need to get you better clothes. And a phone. And probably a Letterboxd account. Wait, do you even know what a movie is?"

Oscar glares. “I died in 1959, not during the Stone Age."

Lando gives him a nasty look, “Okay, no need to be shady. I didn't know."

Oscar mutters something very unholy under his breath and reaches again for the suitcase, praying that maybe, by some miracle, he can fix this before the Council—

Bzzzt.

Something electric pulses against his fingertips. He jerks back. The suitcase glows for a second—blue. There are few sounds in existence more profoundly disrespectful than a wet thwip.

Oscar watches in disbelief as the suitcase, which had gone deathly still for the better part of an hour, shudders once, huffs like a disappointed bureaucrat, and spits something out of its underside.

A single piece of paper, slightly steaming, flutters down and lands on the floor between his feet. The edges are gold-trimmed. The ink is shimmering black. The seal at the top: unmistakably the sigil of the Grand Department of Eternal Affairs, Council of Unreturnable Souls and Management Division.

Oscar’s stomach sinks.

Lando, of course, is immediately crouching beside him like someone who just saw a magic trick.

“Mate,” he says, eyes wide. “Your spooky hell-briefcase just gave birth.”

Oscar carefully picks up the parchment.

He already knows what it is. 

Oscar lowers the page. 

His left eye twitches.

He is, apparently, a mortal now. Stranded, grounded, reassigned against his will.

The briefcase gurgles once and dies. 

Lando is watching him with intense fascination, "what did it say? Is it, like, fixable? Are we going back to the Backrooms? Do I get to go in those elevator again?”

Oscar stands up, brushing off his wet slacks. The beanbag tries to hold him.

“I am mortal,” he says flatly.

Lando’s jaw drops. “Wait, like—mortal mortal? You mean you can die again? Eat? Get the flu?” He pauses. “Shag?”

Oscar remains silent. He stares at the ceiling. Then the floor. Then the cursed, wet, silent suitcase. He folds the notice precisely, tucks it in his pocket, and breathes in.

He smells synthetic lime and chlorine and something that might be leather.

“Does this mean we’re roommates now?” Lando asks.

Oscar considers all twelve conduct mandates. The seventh rule states: “Do not engage in physical violence, unless under mortal threat or offered a beverage called ‘Bang Energy.’”

“Do you have a guest room?” he says eventually.

Lando beams.

Oscar’s stomach growls.

He hasn’t been hungry in sixty-five years.

God help him.

Oscar has had a very long day.

Longer than most mortal days, by his count—though he’s still adjusting to the way time moves here. He isn’t sure whether it’s the hours or the weight of them. Being alive is dense. Too many sensations, too many expectations, too much static running under his skin like an overcharged circuit.

And, of course, there’s the fact that he has just been rebranded as a twenty-three-year-old man born in 2001.

2001.

A full forty-two years after he died.

Oscar shifts under the covers. The fabric of his new clothes is wrong.

The pants are soft, and thick, and the T-shirt is too thin. Everything is loose, elastic, and synthetic. It stretches when he moves. It has give.

Even the socks feel strange. It all makes his skin crawl.

He had protested, of course. But Lando had taken one look at his damp suit and, with the kind of pitying expression Oscar has only ever seen in people about to suggest that someone “live a little,” shoved a pile of clothes into his hands and pointed to the bathroom.

“This is what people wear now, mate. You wanna blend in, you can’t be walking around like a librarian who died of tuberculosis.”

Oscar, who had, in fact, died in a way far more ridiculous than tuberculosis, bit his tongue and complied.  

Now, lying in bed, he stares at the ceiling, silently reciting the Twelve Mandates for Earthbound Clerical Cases. Just for something to do.

MANDATE #1: Do not attempt contact with any known deceased individuals.

Well. No problem there. Everyone he knew has been dead for decades, and even if they were still around in spectral form, the last thing he’d want is to see them. That chapter of his existence is well and truly closed.

MANDATE #2: Avoid disclosing past employment, cause of death, or any details regarding the Bureau, the afterlife, or the Interdimensional Transit System.

Also fine. He has no desire to talk about any of that with strangers. Or anyone.

MANDATE #3: Ensure physical sustenance at appropriate mortal intervals (2-3 meals per day, with adequate hydration).

Oscar grimaces.

His body has been hounding him for food since he got here. He isn’t sure what’s worse—the return of hunger itself or the unsettling feeling of actually digesting things again.

The pizza Lando had insisted on ordering was… fine, but everything about eating was just too much. The smell. The texture. The heat of it in his mouth. The way he could taste each ingredient separately if he thought about it too hard.

He is not looking forward to doing it again.

MANDATE #4: If necessary, acquire and maintain mortal employment within three weeks of terrestrial reintegration.

Oscar closes his eyes. He breathes in through his nose. Out through his mouth.

Absolutely not.

MANDATE #5: Blend into Earth’s social structures by adopting standard human interactions and modern conversational customs.

Which, judging by Lando, includes an unbearable amount of talking, physical contact, and nonsensical slang.

Oscar has already failed at this.

MANDATE #6: Secure suitable living arrangements and remain within designated territory unless otherwise instructed.

Well, unless the Council intends to mail him a flat of his own, he doesn’t exactly have options. The Lando Norris Problem is an ongoing issue.

MANDATE #7: “Do not engage in physical violence, unless under mortal threat or offered a beverage called ‘Bang Energy.’” (See subclause 12.3).

Oscar frowns and flips through the additional documents until he finds Subclause 12.3, buried under a list of similar nonsense.

SUBCLAUSE 12.3: "Due to prior incidents in which Earthbound Clerical Cases have experienced severe physiological and metaphysical distress after the ingestion of ‘Bang Energy,’ all associated conflicts—verbal, physical, or existential—shall be considered exempt from standard non-violence mandates. Should an affected individual exhibit symptoms of extreme agitation, time dilation, or temporary omniscience, authorized restraint measures may be applied."

Oscar stares at the paper.

He reads it again.

He decides he never wants to know what happened to warrant the creation of Subclause 12.3.

He turns the page and moves on.

MANDATE #8: Refrain from using Bureau-assigned clerical abilities unless under the direct supervision of an Authorized Guide.

No issue there—he doesn’t even have them anymore. It’s not as if he can access the archives or sort souls from here.

(Still, it stings. Like losing an arm he didn’t realize he relied on.)

MANDATE #9: If signs of memory bleed, existential distress, or metaphysical anomalies occur, report immediately to the nearest Supervisory Entity.

Considering the only person remotely aware of his situation is Lando, Oscar does not have high hopes for this one.

MANDATE #10: Maintain legal identification and comply with all necessary civic obligations.

He glances at the ID again.

And grimaces.

The card is impeccably forged. A government-stamped lie, complete with a fabricated address and a neutral, unsmiling photo—his own face staring back at him.

Twenty-three years old.

He has been for decades. But now, Oscar is twenty-three again.

Officially, legally, and living.

Or at least, pretending to.

MANDATE #11: Await further instruction regarding reintegration procedures. No independent action should be taken in the meantime.

And finally—

MANDATE #12: Under no circumstances should unauthorized travel between realms be attempted. All non-standard movement will be considered a breach of protocol and subject to disciplinary action.

In short: Stay put. Follow the rules. Wait.

Oscar pinches the bridge of his nose.

Waiting is easy. He’s done nothing but wait for decades. But this—being alive, again, being stuck with a mortal body, mortal needs—is going to be harder than any eternity he’s ever known.

There’s a knock at the door.

“Oscar,” Lando’s voice calls, far too awake. “Are you asleep?”

Oscar does not answer.

The door opens anyway.

Lando sticks his head in. “Okay, so,” he says, not even checking before launching into conversation. “Big problem. Major issue. We need to talk about it right now.”

Oscar sighs. “What.”

“I forgot to get you a toothbrush.”

His expression is deadly serious.

Oscar blinks.

Lando tilts his head. “Like, you do have teeth, right? That’s a thing you still have?”

Oscar shuts his eyes. “Good night, Lando.”

Lando does not leave.

He ignores him.

Lando sighs, then finally retreats with a dramatic, put-upon groan. "I’m getting you a toothbrush tomorrow," he mutters. "And clothes. You can’t just wear those forever."

Oscar exhales slowly. He rolls onto his side, facing the wall.

The night is warm. The sheets are soft. The air smells like fresh laundry.

He closes his eyes.

For the first time in decades, Oscar sleeps.

Chapter Text

The dream starts with the smell of wet pennies.

Copper, river water, and that strange damp warmth that never quite leaves your clothes, no matter how many times you tumble them through a dryer. Oscar knows it’s a dream because the river in it is too still. Too theatrical. Like a film reel looping the same slow splash over and over.

He’s not even sure if it was a river anymore. Maybe it was a canal. Maybe it was the fountain outside the bar. He was very drunk.

It had been his birthday.

His twenty-third.

He had a fiancée.

He remembers that too.

The wind outside has a texture to it.

It doesn’t howl so much as whisper—a sound like shuffling cards and a thousand clocks ticking all out of sync.

It stirs the fog in curls and ribbons that never seem to settle. It bends the signs on the street and rattles the windows of the narrow little shop tucked between The Department of Eternal Affairs and a now-defunct gallery labeled “Dreams You Forgot Before Waking.”

Above the door hangs a crooked sign written in purple and orange letters:

RICCIARDO’S TIMEKEEPING & TEMPORAL REPAIRS
(No refunds. No forwards.)

Inside, the shop is dim and full of sound. Not noise, no—sound.

There’s a difference.

It's a forest of ticking, chirping, chiming, soft winding. Clocks of every kind: cuckoo clocks, sundials on rotating pedestals, glass spheres with galaxies inside beating one year per blink. A grandfather clock in the back whispers the names of the hours instead of numbers. ("Dawn. Morning. Almost-Lunch. Hush. Look out.")

And behind the counter, perched on a ladder five rungs up, stands a man.

He is whistling a lively tune, squinting at a pocket watch he holds up to a beam of diffused golden light leaking in from… well, from somewhere.

He wears a vest that shimmers like beetle wings, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, and his smile is lopsided and too wide, maddeningly cheerful for a man presumed dead. Which he is.

Mostly.

The bell above the door tinkles.

The man doesn’t look up. “You’re late,” he says brightly, spinning the minute hand with a twist of his finger.

Ollie hesitates in the doorway. The wind nips at his back like it wants to follow him in. “What?” he says, pushing the door shut behind him. “I think, well—am I?”

“Course you are,” says the man. “Everyone’s late in here. That’s why they come.”

Ollie looks around. He doesn’t know where to focus. A clock just mouthed something at him. He thinks it might have been an insult.

“Are you… Mr. Daniel Ricciardo?”

“Depends,” Daniel says, slipping the watch into his vest pocket and sliding down the ladder. “If you’re the guy who owes me a century of free labor, then no. If you’re the guy looking for the guy who knows a guy who knows Time like an old friend, then yes, that’s me.”

He sticks out a hand. “Danny.”

Ollie shakes it, trying not to flinch when the man’s palm feels like velvet and static electricity at once.

“I’m Ollie, uh, Oliver Bearman,” he says. “I work over near Soul Intake. Temporary Assignment."

“Ah. Temporary. Dangerous word. Suggests permanence in disguise.”

“I’m here because of Oscar,” Ollie blurts.

That lands.

Daniel blinks once. His smile doesn't fall, exactly, it just turns sideways, like a clock being re-hung.

“Oscar,” he echoes. “Tall guy, tired eyes, still shaves with cut-throats?”

“That’s him.”

“Did he finally snap?” Daniel asks, offhandedly. “I always said that coffee machine would break him.”

He moves behind the counter, pulls out a drawer full of gears and dimes and a single snail, which he gently plucks out and places on a windowsill.

Ollie shifts awkwardly. The shop smells like burnt thyme and old citrus peel.

“No,” he says. “He… disappeared.”

Daniel looks up, fingers stilled on a pendulum, expression tilting.

“Disappeared?”

“After handling a case,” Ollie explains. “Earth Realm. He went to escort a human and then he vanished.”

“…Vanished."

Ollie nods. “No record of reentry. Nothing flagged in the Echo Logs. I tried scrying through the Surface Archives and even pinged his tetherstone. It didn’t blink. Like he just—”

“Slipped,” Daniel says.

“Fell,” Ollie offers, quieter.

Daniel hums, moving back toward a cabinet full of papers that all look like they were written in different centuries, and possibly languages. He pulls open a drawer; looks inside it with mild disappointment before closing it again. Opens the one below, and pulls out a jar of buttons, which he turns in his hands.

“You ever misplace a sock?” he asks suddenly.

Ollie blinks.

“What?”

“A sock,” Daniel repeats. “Goes into the wash. Never comes out. Vanishes. Poof. Gone. But not really, right? It didn’t cease to exist. It just… slipped into the spaces between where we expect things to be.” He gestures loosely with the jar. “It’s not where it was. It’s not where it’s going. So where is it?”

“I don’t think that’s the same thing as—”

“Exactly!” He sets down the jar—on top of a teacup already holding a compass and a dead beetle—and finally meets Ollie’s eyes. “You know what happens to things that fall between time?” he asks, more gently now.

“No,” Ollie admits.

“Neither does Time!" Daniel replies and laughs. "And you, you want me to go gallivanting back to chase after your lost ghost shepherd?”

Ollie hesitates. He wasn’t supposed to ask this fast. He was meant to build into it. But it feels like the shop won’t let him pace things properly.

“I... well, I wouldn’t put it like that, exactly," he says. “I mean—I don’t know who else would even consider it. Logan says you’re the only one who ever bent the rules without... snapping the spine of the universe in half.”

Daniel gives a short, surprised laugh, a sound like a marble skipping across glass.

“That’s sweet. Incorrect, but sweet. I’ve broken the universe twice, actually. First in ’74, because I said yes to a girl in a red coat. Second during a leap year. Should’ve known better than to trust February.”

He turns away, now fiddling with a celestial armillary that glows softly with a bluish light. A dull chime sounds in the distance. From outside the shop.

“Well, I’d help you,” he continues, conversational. “But I’m retired.”

"Uh," Ollie blinks. “You’re... what?”

“Retired." Daniel spreads his hands. “Hung up my chronometer. Turned in my hourglasses. Got the badge, the pension.” He gestures vaguely at the shop. “I tinker. I brew tea. I make clocks that go backward. Sometimes forward. Sometimes nowhere at all. And occasionally mechanical spiders.”

“But…” Ollie steps forward. “But... this is important. It’s Oscar.”

Daniel pauses, just for a beat. The grin falters but doesn’t quite fall. Instead, it twists and turns into something else. Not quite sadness. Not nostalgia either.

“Do you know how I got this shop, Ollie?”

The boy blinks. “No?”

Daniel leans on the counter.

“By dying on my birthday, naturally! Birthday deaths come with perks, don’t they? You know the drill. You do work here, after all. It's a chance to stay in the system. Work the inner machinery. Fix what you couldn't fix alive.”

“And... you choose clocks?”

Daniel gestures around. “Time fascinates me. Always has. How we try to own it. Name it. Box it up in seconds and hours like it isn’t just us, walking forward while everything else stands still.”

Ollie looks around the shop. His eyes drift to a machine ticking backward.

“Still. Fixing clocks seems a bit…”

“Boring?” Daniel finishes, raising an eyebrow. He plucks a sand grain off a sundial and flicks it at a grandfather clock, which gurgles and corrects itself by two hours.

Ollie shrugs sheepishly. “A little, yeah.”

Danny chuckles—not offended. Just amused. “Sure. So is being a mortal. So is immortality, after a while. People think retirement means peace, but peace is a house with no doors. It's fun up until you start clawing at the walls.”

He’s still toying with that glowing armillary, shifting stars with the tip of his finger.

“The truth is,” he continues, “you need something to fix. That’s the trick. Otherwise the machinery in your head starts ticking louder than the ones around you.”

There’s a pause.

Then Ollie says it, not quite rehearsed: “What if I offered you a case, then? Something to fix. Just one.”

Daniel gives him a long, unreadable look.

“No such thing as just one,” he says, softly. “Time’s funny like that. You tug one thread and six thousand monks in Burma get nosebleeds."

Ollie hasn't expected this to be easy—not by a long shot. But he has let himself believe it might be possible. Just a little. So it's only natural that his shoulders sag with disappointment, his expression falters, and hope slips from his face before he can catch it.

“Right," he breathes out. "Of course. I just thought—”

“Ah-ah.” Daniel lifts a finger, cutting him off. He is grinning again. “I didn’t say no. I said I don’t take cases. But... I could put my apprentice on it.”

Ollie looks up, and the colors return to his face, sort of.

“You have an apprentice?”

“Of course! You think I clean the teeth of Hour Serpents myself?" Daniel scoffs. "He's clever. But he's got hands like starlight and absolutely no sense of authority. You’ll like him.”

Ollie opens his mouth to ask what an Hour Serpent is but decides against it.

“Okay, and—what’s his name?”

Daniel taps the side of his nose. “Names are slippery things. He answers to Andrea. Or sometimes just Kimi.”

“Can he really help?”

“If Oscar’s suitcase is anywhere on Earth, he'll find it. But I’ll need his file. All of it. Unabridged. Including the part the system thinks is classified.”

“I can try to get it.”

“You’ll have to do more than try,” Daniel says, bright again. “You’ll need to bribe the Recordkeeper and promise to pretend you’ve never heard of the 22nd hour.”

“The what?”

“Exactly.”

A clock strikes thirteen again.

A cuckoo bird pops out, coughs once, and whispers, “You're being watched.” before exploding into salt.

Daniel waves it off.

“Oh, and—don’t touch anything set to Locrian mode,” he advises. “Or Kimi will have to reattach your soul manually.”

When Ollie gives him a confused look, Daniel leans in, voice conspiratorial.

“Which is quite tricky, Ollie. Dead people aren’t exactly known for their souls. It’s like trying to sew mist back into a coat."

The sun comes in without knocking.

It stretches its long fingers across the windowsill, slow and golden and inconsiderate, draping itself over the floorboards like a cat that owns the place. Oscar feels the first brush of warmth against his cheek, eyes still closed, unsure for a moment of where—or when —he is.

There’s a birdsong outside, far too cheerful.

He doesn't open his eyes right away. He lies there, very still, and lets the world's strangeness wash over him in pieces. The soft cotton of the sheets. The smell of... what is it—hazelnut? Brown sugar? Toast?

His body aches in peculiar ways. Not the bone-deep ache of a soul grown tired, but the physical kind: neck sore from an unfamiliar pillow, stomach making quiet threats about food, skin itching faintly under a borrowed cotton shirt that smells like a stranger’s detergent.

Oscar stirs, not because he wants to, but because he can’t not.

There is a weight to waking now.

For sixty-five years, six months, and sixteen days, Oscar had no heartbeat to jolt him from rest. No lungs to sting at the thought of morning air. No soft cotton pillow beneath his head. But here, now, in this borrowed bed, in a borrowed life, with a borrowed fake ID sitting smugly on the nightstand… he wakes.

And opens his eyes.

His chest rises and falls with the effort. There’s a warm body beneath his shirt, now. His body, apparently.

Oscar blinks a few times, wary when he sits up, afraid his spine might not be where he left it. His joints protest. His hair is a mess. There’s a small line pressed into his cheek from the pillow.

Dignified as ever, he thinks dryly and looks around.

The ceiling above him has a weird popcorn texture. There’s a ceiling fan he doesn’t remember turning on and it has a lightbulb shaped like a teardrop. The walls are an off-brand shade of white, beige, or both? The curtains are geometric, loud in color, and clashing with the duvet. Oscar doesn’t like it. It is very different from how his childhood home used to look.

There are no crucifixes on the walls. No rosary. No sign of anything sacred at all.

Just an oddly large print of a racing driver with a lion on his helmet.

On the bedside, there’s an orange sticky note, next to a glass of water someone must have left sometime after Oscar fell asleep. It reads, “Don’t die again, pls. :) – L”

He stares at it for a long time.

Eventually, he picks it up and folds it neatly in half. Then in half again. He tucks it into the small drawer under the table, next to what looks like to be various medications.

Somewhere in the apartment, a kettle clicks on.

The door creaks open.

“Are you decent?” Lando’s voice, filtered through a mouthful of food.

“No,” Oscar replies.

“Cool,” he says, stepping into the room anyway, brightly, as though they’ve lived together for years, “Good morning! You sleep like a vampire, you know that? Didn’t move once. Not even a twitch."

Oscar makes a noncommittal sound and doesn't answer.

It appears, however, that Lando considers silence more of an invitation than a deterrent.

“You want pancakes?” he asks.

Oscar glances at him.

He’s barefoot, naturally. His hair is pointing in at least four different directions. There’s also a bandaid across the bridge of his nose—crooked—and Oscar doesn’t bother asking what happened. Judging by the limp and the faint smear of syrup on his cheek, the morning has already gone poorly.

He’s wearing a hoodie that reads Team Papaya, which Oscar has decided not to ask about either. There are many things in this era he doesn’t understand, and fruit-based team affiliations rank low on the priority list.

“I also made eggs,” Lando continues. “You eat eggs, right? I looked on the internet and people from the fifties ate eggs a lot. Since, you know, they had eggs."

Oscar sighs and swings his legs off the bed. “Yes,” he says, flat. “Eggs have been around for quite some time.”

“Okay, cool. I was a bit scared you were allergic to eggs or something. And there's coffee, too,” Lando supplies, “but if you don’t like caffeine, I can probably dig out some herbal stuff. Or oat milk. We have oat milk. For some reason.”

Oscar blinks, sincerely disturbed.

“What in God’s name is oat milk?”

Lando blinks right back. “Uh. It’s milk," he says, helpfully. "From oats.”

Oscar stares at him. This boy, who looks like he hasn’t known a single hard day in his life, who wears socks with bananas on them and has previously listed cereal as a dinner option—this boy is telling him that oats, the food of livestock, now bleed milk.

“From oats," he repeats slowly.

“Yeah. They make it by, like. Uh, I don't actually know how they make it."

Assumably by blending them with water and straining them, Oscar guesses.

There was a time, a very not-long-ago time (for him, anyway) when the strangest place milk came from was almonds. “I think I will just have the regular coffee,” he says, solemnly, like he’s choosing execution over exile.

Lando smiles brightly. “Cool! Come on, then. Kitchen’s this way.”

And Oscar, still groggy, still a tad furious at the sun for waking him, follows.

Slowly.

Like a man learning how to walk again.

The song drifting through the kitchen is unidentifiable to him.

Something nasal and bright about a piña colada and getting caught in the rain. An odd pairing, he thinks, though meant to be romantic. The lyrics make little sense, but Lando is singing along with them anyway—loud, off-key, and with great conviction.

The space is modest, the kitchen very... Oscar does not have a word for it. Half the counter is taken up by a blender he suspected has not been washed. The fridge has letter magnets spelling words Oscar does not approve of. (“Poopyfast?” Really?) And the sink is burdened by, for whatever godless reason, six forks and four spoons already.

Oscar watches the toaster finish its cycle and pop up two violently burnt slices of bread. He takes a cautious sip from the glass in front of him—the infamous oat milk—and recoils slightly.

“You people..." He gives it a nasty look. "really drink this voluntarily?”

Lando, mid-sway, stops singing to answer, “Oh, yeah, we do a lot of horrible things on purpose. You’ll see.”

Oscar believes him. Wholeheartedly.

He watches, still bleary-eyed from his mandated six hours of mortal sleep, as Lando opens a kitchen drawer, rummages through about seventeen half-dead pens, and finally finds one that works.

“I knew her smile in an instant, I knew the curve of her face,” Lando is singing, entirely too enthusiastic, as he scribbles something onto a square yellow sticky note.

He peels it off, walks over to the fridge (already peppered with a chaotic, colorful constellation of other notes), and slaps the new one in the corner, just under one that says: “The eggs do not taste like eggs today, so that's great."

Oscar squints at the fresh addition.

It reads: “I am alive agian. I like that.” And at the bottom, surrounded by hearts: “The piña colada song!” Lando draws a wobbly smiley face next to that one.

Then, seemingly pleased, he steps back.

“Again is spelled wrong,” Oscar remarks.

Lando, already dancing back toward the toaster, doesn't seem to care much.

“Too late. Put that in your hat and smoke it.”

Oscar stares.

And stares longer.

“I believe the phrase is put that in your pipe and smoke it.’”

Lando shrugs. “I mean, I don’t smoke pipes. Or hats. So.”

The logic is maddening. And flawless.

Oscar looks at the fridge once more: a polaroid of a dog in sunglasses, an expired concert ticket, a magnet shaped like an eggplant for no apparent reason, and dozens of small square notes like the one Lando just added.

All of different colors, thoughts caught before they could dissolve into whatever chaos buzzed behind his green (or are they blue?) eyes.

It is the first time Oscar's eating a piece of toast that smells like someone has cremated it.

The smell reminds him vaguely of the Hall of Ashes—Section C, upper east wing—where improperly processed souls wait for their second audits. He hadn't liked the Hall of Ashes. Who did? Too hot. Too loud. And too many people convinced they were in hell when they were really just in line.

He had never thought, however, that he would one day compare it to a toast.

Across the kitchen, Lando sits on the counter, legs swinging, scrolling endlessly on that cursed glowing rectangle of his that Oscar still isn't entirely sure wasn’t conscious.

They eat in relative silence—or rather, Oscar does, chewing thoughtfully on his slightly charred toast, and Lando clicks and swipes and makes occasional noises at his device, like tsk and ugh and a very breathy noooo that seems to come from somewhere below the lungs and above the soul.

“Do you eat that thing?” Oscar asks, only half-joking.

There are so many deaths a day—thousands upon thousands—that he is fairly certain someone in his Department has processed at least one soul who died after ingesting something like that.

Not that it would've been an accident. Oscar is willing to believe many things but you don’t just accidentally swallow what looks like a neon chemical weapon.

“My phone?” Lando looks up, amused. “Depends on the Wi-Fi.”

Oscar does not know what a Wi-Fi is. He suspects it is either a pagan ritual or a new form of electricity, both of which he distrusts deeply.

Lando checks his telephone—because that’s what it is, a telephone, though, for the record, Oscar still has no idea how the blasted thing works—and sighs dramatically.

“Right, I actually gotta go.”

Oscar is a bit taken aback. “Go?

“Work. Job. Labor.” Lando tosses his burnt toast into the trash without even pretending to try and eat it, then makes a beeline to the hallway. “Y’know, the thing us Earth-folk do to afford overpriced coffee and spiraling rent?”

Oscar frowns slightly, watching as Lando reappears already halfway dressed, a camera strap slung across his shoulder like a bandolier.

“I assumed your schedule was more leisurely," he says, "It's past ten.”

“Yeah, well, that's cause my schedule is leisurely, I work from home most of the time. But today I’ve got a shoot. Magazine gig. Fashion, kind of, but also like… very sad and broody.” He narrows his eyes thoughtfully. “Which honestly is probably how you look all the time, so we could do a whole spread on you alone.”

Oscar doesn’t rise to the bait. “You are a photographer, then.”

“Ding ding ding.” Lando mimics a bell sound with his mouth, stuffing memory cards and batteries into a canvas bag. “Mostly freelance. I do portraits, some commercial stuff, and sometimes editorial. I like faces. Faces don’t lie. Unless they’re actors or politicians, or that one girl from the club who—never mind. I like faces.”

Oscar nods. He doesn't necessarily want to know about the girl at the club.

He’s also not entirely sure why “freelance” is still a thing, nor why anyone would willingly work without the structure of contracts, unions, and the comforting hierarchy of middle management.

But, oh, well.

He watches Lando flit about the flat. Every now and then, explaining something unprompted: where the keys are, how the kettle works, what to do if the fire alarm screams (don’t panic, just wave a towel), how to unlock the bathroom door in case it gets jammed ("it does that sometimes, but only if you're naked and in a hurry").

Oscar sits at the small kitchen table, hands folded.

“And you’re just… leaving me here?”

Lando, balancing on one foot while pulling on a sock, pauses mid-hop.

“Well, I’d take you with me, but unless you wanna hang out with a tripod and three models in linen jumpsuits pretending to laugh at the same cloud, I figured you might prefer some alone time. There’s food in the fridge—some of it’s edible. Just don’t open the bottom drawer. That’s where the vegetables go to die.”

Oscar eyes the refrigerator again, then looks back at Lando. “And you’re genuinely alright leaving a complete stranger—me—alone in your house? Unsupervised?”

Lando throws his arms out with a shrug.

“Stranger's a bit harsh, innit? We’ve traveled through an interdimensional hallway together. That’s, like, serious bonding. I’ve known people for years who haven’t done that with me. Plus, you saved my life, which definitely earns you some points. Honor system and all that.”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” Oscar says, a little flatter.

Lando finally stops moving. Just stares at him for a beat.

Then—“Okay, fine. Look, first of all, I locked my bedroom. That’s where I keep the expensive stuff. Second of all, what are you going to do, rob me? For what? You don’t have anywhere to go, and I kinda trust you not to burn the place down. Not out of morals, necessarily, just out of general confusion about how the stove works.”

Oscar frowns. “I could still steal something.”

“Alright then, Osc. Steal what? My yoga mat? My old PlayStation with the jammed eject button? Please—if you manage to find something of actual value, other than my precious air fryer, I’ll be impressed.” Lando zips up his bag.

Oscar opens his mouth to object, at the same time as Lando says, "And you know I am right." So he promptly shuts it again.

Technically— technically —Lando isn’t wrong.

Well. Would you look at that? Turns out it really can be quite simple.

Lando moves to the door, slinging his bag across his back, sunglasses balanced atop his wild hair. Before leaving, he points two fingers at Oscar and says, "I’ll be gone four hours, tops. Have fun!"

Then he’s gone, the door swinging shut behind him with a soft click.

For a moment, Oscar just sits there, waiting as the apartment drains itself faintly of the leftover noise of Lando's voice, cabinets being slammed, and keys being thrown about.

Now, all he hears is the cursed refrigerator.

He glances toward it. A new note is already stuck on the door. Oscar has no idea when Lando found the time to write it, let alone sneak it there.

"Don't die while I'm out, you can watch TV instead, it's better than during the stone age, promise! - L.”

It’s only then that he remembers the letter from the Council of Soul Transferal, Order of the Obsidian Feather.

You are to carefully monitor the Subject, Lando Norris, for signs of soul splintering, existential confusion, or repeated death.

Shit.

He slumps back into the chair with a sigh so heavy it might qualify as a minor seismic event. Curse you, Kimi, he thinks.

He knows full well that cursing a Reaper—even mentally—technically violates Afterlife Conduct Clause 6.6.6 ("Disrespectful Projections Toward Assigned Collectors"), but Oscar no longer cares.

And besides, he’s mortal now—so technically, the laws don’t even apply to him anymore.

Somewhere, faintly, Oscar hears the next song start.

Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees.

Oscar ends up in the living room, clicking one too many buttons on the remote and jumping at one too many ominous start-up sounds.

He finds himself on a channel called Netflix, which appears to be less of a channel and more of a messy library with a very poor cataloging system.

There are two pictures—one is a yellow dog with a hat labeled “Lando”, and another is a brooding blonde baby in a suit labeled “Not Lando.”

Out of caution, he clicks Not Lando.

Somehow, he lands on a show called Drive to Survive. The irony is not lost on him.

He watches.

And watches.

And somewhere between high speed and the dramatic voice-overs, the man from his office, from a few weeks to an eternity ago, Charles Leclerc is on his screen, far from trembling, heartbroken, wide-eyed, and crying.

Oscar discovers someone else entirely.

Someone alive.

Someone human.

Someone young and hopeful, who has known loss intimately, who has brushed shoulders with the Reaper before he even stamped his name.

Oscar feels something like guilt in his chest, which is strange because he's never been particularly prone to feelings—not since dying, at least.

Three episodes in, his eyes start to close.

The voices fade, replaced by the sound of the river.

Oscar sees the Department again in his dreams, sterile and grey, and somewhere down the hall, a file flutters open.

It’s stamped with his name.

Oscar doesn’t hear the key in the lock—he just hears the door creak open, and the clatter of a plastic bag hitting the counter. The room’s already dark, save for the weird flicker from the broken ceiling light, the one that blinks every ten seconds.

“Didn’t know what you liked,” Lando says over his shoulder, voice a little hoarse. “Hope you’re okay with noodles. Or, like, whatever this technically is. The lady didn’t speak English and I don’t speak Cantonese but we came to an understanding based on hand gestures.”

Oscar’s still on the couch. Same position since his nap, when the city outside turned orange and pink and then grey. He thinks he will never get used to this hunger, or being tired, or aching in the joints. He thinks he will never get used to needing anything at all.

“Here,” Lando says, tossing him a bundle from a paper bag. “Your toothbrush.”

Oscar blinks.

“It was buy-one-get-one," Lando adds. "Mine’s green, yours is blue.”

Oscar stares at it. He reads the back even though the words blur together: Micro-bristles, gentle on enamel, for sensitive gums.

He has normal teeth now.

Right.

He is still a little clouded with sleep.

There’s the sound of plates being dragged from a stack, followed by running water. Then Lando’s voice again, calling through the apartment: “You okay with chopsticks? If not, I am willing to wash a fork.”

Oscar mutters something like “Chopsticks are fine,” but his voice comes out dry, weird in his throat. He hasn’t spoken in hours.

He follows the noise to the kitchen and finds Lando halfway through pouring two bowls. The light in there is yellow and soft like old paper. It smells like soy sauce and garlic and something sugary.

Lando nudges a bowl toward him.

Oscar sits, because it’s easier than not sitting.

He finds that the food tastes great. Salty, savory, coating his tongue in a way that reminds him he has one, that his body works in real-time now, no longer suspended between pulses, between tasks.

There’s no desk to return to. 

Just digestion. And sleep. And pain. And blue toothbrushes, apparently.

“You’re quiet,” Lando says, glancing up. "I mean, you always are but now you're quieter quiet."

Oscar doesn’t look at him. “I am still getting used to all the… input.”

“Yeah, mate. Being a person’s a lot.”

Oscar makes a small sound of agreement. It’s easier than explaining the burn in his mouth; the ache behind his eyes; the absurd pressure of having a spine and knees; the noise of the fan, of Lando’s chewing, of his stomach clenching in a strange, greedy fashion after every bite.

Oscar isn’t sure he’s ever felt like this, even before his death.

“I’ve never been full,” he says without meaning to.

Lando snorts. “Give it five more bites.”

But Oscar means it. There’s a pressure in his chest he doesn’t know how to name. It’s like the inside of him is still catching up, parts are still being built, and they’re not all arriving in order.

He stares at his bowl. "Thank you for the toothbrush."

Lando doesn’t look up. “Sure.”

“Do you do that for all your guests?”

“What?”

“Buy them toothbrushes.”

Now Lando does look up. Squints like the question is either very dumb or very serious, and he’s not sure which.

“No,” he says, after a beat. “Just the random guy who fell through a crack in the sky after bringing me back to life.”

Oscar considers that.

It is the second night of his life.

And he is still here.

It's been three days.

It feels like three years.

Oscar steps out of the bathroom, looking like he has just survived something catastrophic.

He stands in the hallway for a moment, blinking under the glare of the ceiling light. A new horror to adjust to, apparently: the return of bladder maintenance.

Back in the Department of Eternal Affairs, one didn't need to “relieve” anything.

You don't sweat, or itch, or bleed. You certainly don't pee. Your body is ornamental, a sort of placeholder for the concept of self. You wear it like an old uniform, and the closest thing they have to humanity is a state they call “idling,” which Oscar has once described to Ollie as “being very conscious of being unconscious.”

But here, he uses the bathroom, and not in the pretended way souls in transition sometimes mimic bodily processes out of habit. This has been real. Grimly, disturbingly real.

Once again, Oscar can't quite believe that he is, for all intents and purposes, alive.

The tag of his shirt is itching him. And it is awful.

Dragging his feet down the narrow hallway, he lets out a breath and tries to remember the last time he’s felt so tired. Oscar reckons he can sleep for fourteen hours straight and still wake up just as exhausted as he has gone to bed.

This body—this mortal body—aches with need. It makes him feel slow and sticky and weighs him down like wet wool. Every step feels like walking on unfamiliar bones.

The corridor is quiet, save for the faint music leaking through Lando’s door. That, and the soft flutter of paper stirred by the breeze slipping in through the half-open sliding door in the living room—sticky notes, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, lining the hallway walls like falling leaves.

Oscar pauses to read a few.

- I went karting with Max.
- Green apples.
- Mum got me the pink Mclaren cap.
- Today is not yesterday. That’s good.

The handwriting varies slightly from note to note. They look like they have been written by different versions of Lando. Some neat, blocky. Others loose, scribbled. A couple are in bright pink highlighter, barely legible.

A door creaks open behind him. Oscar doesn't turn, just keeps looking at a note that reads, “If your brain says you’re garbage, throw that brain in the bin and use your backup brain.”

“Hey, Oscah,” Lando’s voice floats in, with that stubborn refusal to acknowledge the existence of the letter r. “Anything from the suitcase yet?”

Oscar finally turns.

Lando is leaning on his doorframe, sleepy-eyed, hair flattened on one side. He looks more boy than man, Oscar thinks, and the hallway’s warm light makes him look incredibly soft.

“No,” he says simply. “Not a word. It’s still inert.”

Lando frowns, rubbing his eyes. “Weird. Aren’t those things, like... divine?”

Oscar allows himself a small sigh.

“They’re manufactured, actually. At the Department of Conveyance. A subsection of the Ministry of Soul Logistics, which is itself under the Department of Eternal Affairs.”

“That’s too many departments.”

“That’s exactly the right amount of departments,” Oscar corrects. “For a system of metaphysical governance to work, one needs both specificity and redundancy.”

Lando blinks. “You sound like an instructor.”

Oscar isn't sure how to respond to that, so he doesn't.

They stand in silence for a few seconds. Then, Lando perks up.

“Hey, you wanna play Mario Kart?”

Oscar narrows his eyes. “I don’t know what that is.”

“You don’t know—” Lando gasps dramatically, much more awake—“You don't know what Mario Kart is? The racing game? You mean to tell me, with a straight face, you’ve never hurled a red shell at a friend in a fit of petty vengeance and joy?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever hurled anything in vengeance, petty or otherwise,” Oscar says. “And I don’t know who this Mario is, but if he requires a cart to move about, perhaps he should seek medical assistance instead of racing.”

“Right,” Lando mouths, blinking. “That’s it. Forget the suitcase. Tonight, you have to play Mario Kart.”

Oscar sighs deeply and lets his hand fall to the doorknob of the guest room. “I was hoping to lie down and not wake up until the department called me back.”

Behind him, Lando makes a noise that’s somewhere between a whine and a wounded seagull and slaps his hand against the wall—directly over another note. ("Because Max's cat took a nap with me.” Oscar reads it through the gaps in Lando’s fingers.)

What a weird habit.

Lando seems to write everything down and somehow says nothing at all.

The first thing Lando does is pick Yoshi.

The second is throw himself sideways on the couch, half on top of Oscar’s legs, the controller already in his hands. “He's objectively the best,” he says like there’s a debate to be had.

There isn’t, obviously, because Oscar does not know who Yoshi is.

He doesn’t look up from the character screen, thumb hovering, thoughtful. It takes him a while to decide. He ends up picking Donkey Kong.

Earlier, Lando has walked Oscar through the rules and controls, and to his surprise, he picked it up fast, like unsettlingly fast. Instinctive, almost. Lando has then suggested he selects Luigi, obviously. Great stats, solid handling, and—come on—objectively the better brother. But of course, Oscar went and chose that ridiculous gorilla in a tie.

Lando makes a face about it but doesn’t comment. He’s trying this new thing where he pretends to be chill.

At his side, Oscar barely blinks, spine a straight line, hands tight on the controller like he’s still at a desk somewhere. Lando, on the other hand, is already leaning too far left, kicking his socked feet like it helps.

“Okay, so,” he says and finds that he always sounds like everything he wants to say's been burning a hole in his throat. “Since you’re, like, alive now. Like, mortal-mortal. With me. I figure I should, y’know. Ask stuff.”

It comes out too fast.

It's a recurrent thing, apparently. Everything Lando says around Oscar comes out too fast. He always feels like he’s running to catch up with something, and he doesn’t even know what.

Oscar doesn’t look over.

The countdown begins—three… two… one.

GO.

Lando barrels straight into a Goomba. “Shit.” He recovers—barely—and jumps right back in like the hit never happened. “So were you, like… married? Before?”

Oscar drifts perfectly around a corner.

“No,” he says.

Cool. Chill. No big. Lando chews his cheek and lobs a red shell.

“Girlfriends?”

“Not really.”

“Boyfriends?”

There’s a pause, sadly not long enough for Lando to take back the question.

“No.”

Huh. Lando hears himself make the noise, soft, surprised, not exactly disappointed, but not not either. He throws a shell without looking.

It misses.

“So you were just… what. Celibate and alone in a little afterlife office for, like, fifty years?”

Oscar doesn’t answer right away. He’s too focused, doesn’t even glance over when he says, “I wouldn’t describe it that way.”

Lando wants to laugh. Of course, he wouldn’t. He probably thinks that’s unprofessional or undignified or whatever else Oscar is made of.

Silence and punctuality and perfectly starched shirts.

“How would you describe it, then?”

Oscar taps a banana peel out behind him like it isn’t the meanest possible item to drop when someone’s talking to you.

Lando drives straight into it.

His kart flips. 

There’s a beat of quiet.

Oscar doesn’t gloat, doesn’t even smile, just keeps playing. He says, “I worked, and I liked it. That was enough.”

Lando glances sideways at him—his profile, steady and calm and maybe a little sad, though he could be imagining that. It kind of pisses him off. Not in a real way. Just in the way where someone doesn’t give you what you expect, and it throws you off-balance.

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Oscar shrugs. “It wasn’t.”

Lando wants to press, but Oscar’s face says he won’t say more, and Lando’s never been good at sitting still in silences like that.

So he pivots.

“Okay, then, favorite color?”

Oscar exhales. “Navy.”

“Favorite food?”

“I didn’t eat.”

Lando groans. “You don’t have to have eaten to imagine liking a food, Oscar. Come on. Be fun.”

Oscar mutters, “…Toast.”

Lando stops, just… stops. “Toast?” He barks out a laugh. “I bring you back from the afterlife and you tell me your favorite food is toast?”

Oscar’s mouth twitches.

It’s not a smile, not exactly—but it’s the closest thing he’s ever shown to one. And it’s devastatingly unfair, just how pretty it looks on someone so aloof.

God, Lando hates that.

“You’re such an old man,” he mutters. “No wonder you died.”

They’re on lap three. Lando’s in second. Oscar’s in first. The worst part is he looks like he isn’t even trying, and that’s what makes it so infuriating.

“Okay. One more,” Lando says, biting his lip. “Then I’ll shut up.”

Oscar makes a low sound of assent.

"What do you want? You’re mortal. You can do anything. Be anyone. Eat whatever boring-ass bread product you want.”

Oscar’s kart drifts through a mushroom patch so precisely it makes Lando wonder if he lied and has already played Mario Kart before.

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” Oscar says.

Lando eyes him, head tilted, blinking too much. He doesn’t understand how someone can talk so little. It kind of drives him insane. Maybe that’s why he says, “You should.”

There’s a flicker in Oscar’s brown eyes that doesn’t feel like a yes or a no. 

Lando tries to shake it off.

“Is it lonely?” he wonders. “In your office?”

Oscar’s hands stop moving, he does not answer. His kart gets blue-shelled. Somehow, he still wins.

When the race ends, Lando tosses his controller in the air, catches it on instinct. It feels stupidly theatrical. “You always talk like that?” he asks, breathless in the silence. “I mean, like you’ve got a script."

Oscar just picks up the controller again and hits Rematch.

They play seven more rounds after that. Lando doesn’t stop talking once.

Oscar seems to listen to every word.

During his sixth day, Oscar finds a book by accident—some battered old copy of Leaves of Grass, spine torn and full of underlines that aren’t his.

He sinks into the couch, tucks one knee under himself, and decides he wants to read. The living room is mostly quiet except for the occasional creak of the house settling and something small and alive outside. He doesn’t know why he’s still holding the book after the first poem.

Something about it. Something about how the pages smell like dust and sun, like lavender and the back of someone’s throat.

He’s halfway through rereading the same verse when the door flies open like it’s mad at the hinges.

“I made a list!”

Oscar startles, eyes flying up.

Lando’s standing in the doorway, triumphant, breathless, holding a crumpled notepad. His curls are a mess and his cheeks are pink from excitement or running or both.

Oscar blinks. “A list of…?”

Lando waves the paper in the air like it should be obvious. “Of all the things we should do now that you’re a mortal.” He says it the same way someone might say “Now that the world is ending,” or “Now that I’ve won the lottery," which is to say, dramatically. 

Oscar just blinks again.

“Since, you know, you said you haven't thought about it, and all. It took me a bit of time,” Lando continues, collapsing onto the armrest like his own enthusiasm wore him out. “Like two hours, actually. And I googled some stuff. Some of it might be stupid but like, whatever. I tried. I was being thorough."

Oscar turns the book over in his lap. “You made a list.”

“I made a list,” Lando repeats.

Oscar takes a look at it.

It is a list.

About skydiving and getting a shitty tattoo and going to the kind of midnight diner that serves cold fries and lets you slow dance to the jukebox. About jumping into a lake in the rain, and kissing someone under fireworks, and riding a bike with no hands.

"Oh, and drive a car. A real one. With actual tires. Rubber."

Oscar stares. "I am aware of how a car functions.”

"Good, great! That means we can go through a drive-thru, which I saw was first invented in 1947, isn't that crazy? Then we will watch a horror movie because the old ones are not scary at all. Then—"

Lando talks and talks and talks, like someone winding up a toy and letting it go until the batteries run out. His words come fast, stitched together by giggles and breathless I mean, if you want to’s.

He waves his arms when he gets excited. He reads a few of the list entries out loud, one of which is literally “pet a goat” followed by “partying in Monaco.”

Oscar stares.

In his head, the thoughts are slow and thick, like syrup. Lando seems to be the complete opposite of that. Why does he talk so much? Not in a cruel way, but in a curious one, like watching a fire flicker and trying to understand the shape of the flames.

He doesn’t even realize he’s said it out loud until Lando pauses mid-sentence and looks at him.

“Is it a problem?”

Oscar looks back at the list in his hand. “make Oscar laugh (even a little)” has been written and crossed out twice.

This is just someone… thinking about him, without reason.

It makes his chest feel tight.

He sighs, leans back against the cushions, and says, “I suppose not.”

Lando smiles.

The sign above the shop is still swinging, even without the wind.

RICCIARDO’S TIMEKEEPING & TEMPORAL REPAIRS
(No refunds. No forwards.)

The second time Ollie steps inside, a new chime greets him—dissonant, akin to a music box tuned to a minor seventh, and the clocks on the wall watch.

Something has shifted since his last visit. The timepieces don’t just mark seconds, they seem to observe him now. On the left, a timeweaver makes noise. On the right, a stack of pocket universes sit in jars labeled Wednesday. A blackboard had moved since yesterday. So had the floor tiles.

There’s a sundial on the ceiling, too, and it casts its light directly onto him despite the fact that it’s indoors and raining outside.

Oliver clutches the file tighter.

“Back again?” Daniel’s voice floats in from somewhere behind a velvet curtain. “I told you not to get attached to the furniture.”

“I brought the file,” Ollie calls.

“Of course you did. Apprentice’s workshop is through the archway. He’ll handle it.”

Ollie hesitates. The “archway” is just a bent steel frame with strings of copper thread crisscrossing it like cobwebs. He ducks through and finds himself in what looks like a fusion of a lab, and a garage.

At the center of it all, seated on a wheeled stool, is a boy around his age, maybe younger. He’s at the main table beneath a halo of flickering lightbulbs—half of them floating in slow orbits. His jacket’s slung over the chair, and his shirt sleeves are rolled up. He wears thick goggles on his forehead, pushed up into unruly curly hair, one lens tinted green, the other red. A scattering of tools surround him, none of which look normal.

There’s a compass with thirteen points. A scanner shaped like a fountain pen. A scalpel engraved with runes.

The boy's holding a coil of Chrono-thread and soldering it into a pane of Reality Glass.

The pane pulses.

Ollie clears his throat. “Uh. Hi?”

The boy doesn’t look up. “If you talk now, you will break it. Give me… uh, trenta secondi.”

Ollie nods, then realizes the boy can’t see him.

Albeit reluctantly, he waits. Watches. The boy—Kimi, presumably—threads a thin strand of time into the glass. It glows briefly blue, then folds itself into a shape that looks like a treble clef with teeth.

“Done,” Kimi mutters, then slaps the goggles down over his eyes and taps the glass three times. The object flattens into transparency. “Ah, you must be the boy."

Kimi, Oliver notes, has a charming Italian accent.

“Uh. Yeah. Name's Ollie.” He nods, then stumbles forward a little too fast. “And, you’re… Kimi?”

“Yes. Andrea Kimi Antonelli from the Department of Conveyance. Apprentice-class technician, teleportation specialty.” He wipes his hands on a grease-stained cloth without looking. “I build things your people don’t want to wait for. You brought the file?”

Ollie hesitates, then offers it. “Oscar’s. I wasn’t sure who else—”

“Ah, Mister Sunshine,” Kimi interrupts, grabbing it before Ollie has finished speaking.

“You knew him?”

Kimi doesn't answer at first—already scanning the cover, lips moving silently. Then: “Not really. We met once during the twenty-seventh Collapse. He said I looked too young to be assigned a quadrant.”

“…And?”

“I said he looked too old to still be processing souls.”

Ollie blinks. “How did he react?”

“He sighed. You know, the long one.” Kimi mimics it perfectly. "That one."

Ollie huffs something close to a snort. “Yeah. That’s him.”

On the workbench between them, the file is opening itself. Its pages flicker by like a flipbook catching breath. Paper rustles with a mind of its own. Ollie watches the pages flutter for a moment. It is kind of elegant—like watching a coin spin and not knowing which side it’ll land on.

Next to him, Kimi is hunched over a copper dial, soldering something that gives off a soft green spark when touched.

"Wait," Ollie says suddenly, frowning. “You’re not even reading it—"

"I am reading it,” Kimi interrupts, not looking up. “Just sideways. You do not know how to read sideways?"

"That’s not a thing."

“It is when you work with collapsing timelines.”

The file clicks once, then stills. Pages open to the center. One line glows faintly in silver ink. The apprentice shifts his goggles up to his forehead and leans in, frowning slightly.

“Oscar took a return trip to Earth. Repatriation Detail, case number—” He squints. “—zero four. Lando Norris. Yeah. I know this guy.”

“You know him?”

“Everyone in the apprenticeship program studied the Lando Event. He wasn’t supposed to die. The Death Index had him clear for another twenty-two years.”

Kimi presses a finger over the page. Instantly, the text shimmers and lifts into the air in lines of neat handwriting. Coordinates, timestamps, annotations. Some of them are redacted in thick blackout lines.

Ollie squints at the glowing projection. The text hovers just above the open file, jittering slightly at the edges.

Temporal anchor unstable. Could be pre-Yield.

Kimi whistles low.

Ollie frowns. “What’s that mean?”

Kimi's reading ahead, eyebrows twitching with little half-reactions. The goggle lenses reflect the light above the file like tiny moons. “Anchor’s broken,” he mutters. “His return route wasn’t stable.”

Right. That makes sense. Sort of.

“No, I mean…” Ollie gestures vaguely toward the floating text. “Pre-Yield?”

That gets Kimi’s attention. He turns, blinks once like Ollie just asked what a clock is, then says, “You don’t know the Yield?”

"I mean..." He shifts his weight, awkward. "Not really. We had like one seminar in training. It was mostly diagrams. And the instructor cried.”

Kimi exhales, and Ollie catches the barest echo of Oscar in it. That world-weary, dear-God-I-have-to-explain-this-too? -kind of sigh. Though in Kimi’s case, it’s got more bite, less patience.

“Come,” he says in that strong accent of his, and he’s already halfway to the back of the workshop before Ollie takes a step.

They pass tangled wires hanging like vines, worktables cluttered with half-built devices, and a cat sleeping on a pile of heat coils. The walls are a mismatched patchwork of metal plating and old posters written in languages Ollie doesn’t recognize. 

Kimi stops at a blackboard, one corner chipped like someone punched it, and yanks it aside. Behind it, a wall-sized diagram flares to life, blue and gold light shifting in rings. It looks like a clock but instead of numbers, each point is marked with an event:

The Temporal Delay. The Dream Revolt. The Yield. The Collapse. The Restoration (In Progress?).

Kimi taps one, The Yield, and it pulses beneath his finger.

“Here. This is when Time tried to quit.”

Ollie blinks. “I’m sorry—Time did what?”

“You heard me,” Kimi says, spinning one of the glowing rings so the events rearrange themselves into a new pattern. "Clockkeepers, soul processors, all of us—we were still using human-linear time, yes? Years, days, stupid things. It worked for a while. Then it didn’t.”

The projection shifts faintly. Beneath The Yield, a line fractures into five spirals, each meandering off into fragmented timelines.

“People started slipping,” Kimi continues. “Dreams happened first. Then memories. You’d dream of something, then it would happen. Or worse, you’d remember doing something you hadn’t done yet.”

“Déjà vu?” Ollie offers, trying to keep up.

“No.” Kimi gives him a look like that was a dumb word to use. “Whole cities aged backward. Buildings regrew foundations. History erased itself. It was chaos, like—like a zombie apocalypse!"

Ollie just stares. The words make sense individually, but together, they feel like they’ve been run through a blender and thrown at him.

“So… Oscar went there?”

Kimi makes a noise halfway between a laugh and a groan.

“No, idiota! He went to Earth.”

“Then what’s this got to do with—”

“The instability,” Kimi interrupts, pointing toward the file again. “If the file says pre-Yield, it means the anchor point Oscar locked onto might have slipped… backward, temporally. And when the return route collapses—” He snaps his fingers. “—you’re done. You don’t get to come home.”

Ollie’s throat tightens. “He’s stuck?”

“Worse. He’s alive.”

There’s a long pause.

“…So then why are we talking about all of this?” Ollie finally asks, not quite able to keep the edge out of his voice. “You just info-dumped me about time breaking and dreams and cities aging backward, and I’m still not sure how that helps.”

Kimi shrugs. “Well, you asked.”

“I meant the Pre-Yield part in the file! I didn’t sign up for a whole history lecture—”

“Well, maybe you should’ve! What, you think soul travel’s just walking through a shiny portal? It's science.” Kimi crosses his arms. “Besides, I like explaining things to the tragically uninformed."

Ollie throws up his hands. “I know it’s science. I’ve read the manuals, okay? I passed my soul-transport exam on the first try. ”

Kimi gives him the flattest look known to man. “Happy eighth birthday."

“Oh my god, you are so annoying—”

“You are the one who asked what Pre-Yield means, and then got mad when I answered the question.”

“No, that's not what happened! You just told me Time quit and then expected me to not react!”

“Because you asked!”

“I asked what pre-Yield meant, not for a full breakdown of the zombie apocalypse!”

Kimi’s mouth twitches into a smile but he fights it back like it’s an involuntary muscle spasm. He walks over to the projection and flicks it again, zooming out on the timeline until the diagram shows a massive pulse radiating from The Yield point.

He turns toward Ollie, face deadly serious now.

“Okay, listen. You want to understand what matters? Here’s what matters. Oscar didn’t just fall into some alternate Saturday afternoon. He fell out of the system. He’s not supposed to be there anymore—not like that.”

Ollie frowns. “You said he’s alive. That’s supposed to be worse than being stuck?”

Kimi exhales sharply, grabbing a tiny hexagonal gear from the cluttered table and tossing it between his fingers.

“Imagine a pond.”

“Oh my God.”

“No, shut up. Imagine a pond.”

Ollie makes a mocking face but shuts up.

“You throw a rock into it. The surface breaks. Ripples go out. The pond is never exactly the same, right? You can’t un-throw the rock. Even if you dive in and fish it out, the water moved. The algae, the bugs, everything shifted.”

He tosses the gear at Ollie, who catches it by reflex.

“Oscar’s the rock.”

Ollie stares at it. “…He does act like a rock, sometimes.”

Kimi ignores that. “He was supposed to pass through. But now he’s stuck. Alive. That’s permanent mass in a system that was meant to stay untouched. He’s altering history just by breathing there. The timeline’s not a story anymore—it’s reactive. It's responding to him. That’s what the pre-Yield marker means, that the rules we use now? The safeguards? They don’t apply.”

“…So we’re the pond.”

He groans in frustration.

“Ma dai! No! The universe is the pond. We’re the dumb bugs watching someone cannonball into it and pretending it’s fine.”

Ollie’s mouth opens, then closes. He looks down at the gear in his hand again.

After a moment: “So what—you’re saying he’s... dangerous now? That’s bullshit.”

“That’s physics.”

Ollie sets the gear down carefully, in complete silence.

“…We’re going after him, right?”

Kimi snorts. “Oh, sure. Let’s just hop into the collapsing timeline and rescue the most temporally dangerous soul processor in history. Should take what—twenty minutes?”

“You’re the one who said he’s alive!”

“Yeah, and I said that was the worst part! He’s not dead, but he’s active." He scoffs, then mutters, “Honestly, I’m surprised the Council didn’t just decide to… I don’t know. Terminate him. Would’ve been faster.”

There’s a dry, short laugh in his voice.

Then the laugh fades.

They both go quiet.

Kimi’s arms drop to his sides. Oliver blinks once. Twice.

And in the thick silence that follows, they turn to look at each other at the exact same time.

“…Wait,” Ollie says slowly. “You don’t think they—”

“No,” Kimi says way too quickly. Then again, quieter. “No. They wouldn’t.”

“But if they thought he was too dangerous—”

“They wouldn’t,” Kimi repeats, except now he’s not making eye contact. “They’d warn us. They’d—there would be a recall notice. Something.”

A long beat follows.

Kimi swears under his breath. “Merda.”

Oliver feels the blood drain from his face. He steps back from the bench like it might explode.

They stare at each other for what feels like an eternity, obvious panic rising like floodwater.

And in perfect unison, they both say, “We have to get to him first.”

This time the dream starts with sound.

Not thunder, but something softer and muffled, like the dream is under water. Oscar blinks against the rain, pulling his coat tighter.

The streetlamps flicker in their aureoles of mist, glowing a dull yellow through the fog. He steps out of the bank on Gresham Street, the door slamming shut behind him.

The briefcase in his hand is heavy with ledgers and carbon paper. His shoes are wet already.

“God,” Oscar mutters, adjusting his collar. “Always rainin’.”

It’s 1958. He doesn’t know how he knows that. He just does.

The dream has rules.

And a certain charm to the way the world blurs in it—headlights pass like ghosts, a bicycle bell rings in the distance, hidden under the steady drumming of rain.

And then, he sees the bridge.

Grey iron rails and slick stone, arching over the slow black ribbon of the canal.

Oscar slows.

There’s someone standing on the edge. A man, soaked through, his back is to the street, his hands curled tight around the railing.

Oscar’s heart skips a beat, maybe two. He doesn’t think much before he steps closer.

“Hey,” he says. “You alright?”

The man doesn’t move.

Oscar edges nearer, umbrella tilted against the wind, and without fully realizing it, he holds it out, wide enough to cover the stranger, too.

“You’re soaked,” he adds. “You’ll catch your death.”

A beat of silence passes between them, then—“Already did.”

Oscar blinks. “What?”

The man turns slightly, still not looking at him fully. His face stays hidden in shadow, half turned away, yet his voice is young and familiar.

“I mean. I was going to.” He exhales slowly. “I wasn’t sure if I was going to do it until it started raining.”

Oscar shifts, his umbrella wobbling slightly. “Rain changes your mind?”

The man smiles—just barely. “It always does.”

They stand there a while. Oscar isn’t sure why he stays.

“You from around here?” he ends up asking, for whatever reason. 

“No,” the man says. “But I think I end here.”

Something in the phrasing sends a shiver down Oscar’s spine. The bridge suddenly groans beneath a passing car, and the umbrella jerks in his grip. He glances away for half a second, but when he looks back—

The man is gone.

There was no splash, no scream, just an empty space where he was standing.

Oscar bolts to the railing, heart hammering.

Nothing.

Only the canal, still and slick like oil.

And the umbrella, still open in his hand, turning slowly against the wind.

Oscar wakes with a jolt in tangled sheets. His chest is heaving, his pulse settles, but the dream remains.

He can’t remember the man’s face.

Only that he was wet.

Only that he was young.

Only that Oscar knew —he didn’t jump.

Chapter Text

When it happens again, Oscar thinks he’s dreaming wrong.

Dreams are supposed to be strange and foggy, aren’t they? Supposed to be a patchwork of weird moments, stitched together badly. Not this... this startling clarity, this sun beating down on a golden field, warm against his skin.

He sits up slowly, his palms brushing against soft, dry grass. Somewhere in the distance, there’s the low buzz of bees, the creak of a porch swing, the scent of something sweet baking in the air.

Oscar doesn’t remember how he got here.

Then a voice calls out, familiar enough to punch the air right out of his lungs.

"You absolute featherbrain! Are you napping, of all things?"

Oscar turns around, startled. There’s a house behind him, pastoral and rustic, smoke curling lazily from the chimney. A figure stands on the front porch, arms crossed.

Oscar squints against the sunlight; tries desperately to make out his face, but it blurs and twists, a bit like trying to catch your reflection in running water.

It's the man from the bridge.

Oscar’s heart trips over itself.

He knows that voice. He knows that shape. A knowing deeper than anything he can explain, tucked into the marrow of his bones.

“Oscar,” the figure whines. "we’ll have our nap in the grass once we’ve finished all the work around the farm!"

Oscar opens his mouth to speak but no sound comes out. The stranger smiles at him then, bright and warm, a look so achingly fond it feels like it might tear his heart in two. He tilts his head slightly, and for a moment, Oscar swears he catches a flicker of green in his eyes, but it’s gone before he can be sure.

“What is it?” the figure says, the smile slipping off his face.

Oscar wants to ask, Who are you?

He wants to say, Don’t leave me.

He wants to confess, I’m sorry I forgot.

Instead, he staggers to his feet, takes a few trembling steps forward, and falls hard to his knees.

And there, without shame, without hesitation, Oscar doesn't know why but he cries.

When he wakes up, he tastes salt on his lips, and his hands are tangled in the bedsheets, gripping them so tightly it feels like they might slip away if he lets go.

During the day, Oscar tries to push the dreams from his mind and finds it mercifully easier once Lando starts talking nonstop beside him, filling the air with noise.

It’s been a week. A few days shy of two.

And the fridge is talking again. Or, well—Lando is.

“You will remember to water the ficus next time, right?” His voice comes from somewhere between the crisper drawer and the expired mayonnaise. “Because yesterday, you forgot, and the ficus has still not recovered from the betrayal.”

Oscar leans against the counter, arms crossed. He watches Lando somehow emerge triumphantly with a can of Monster. He's considered asking how he manages that with a fridge so chaotic it could probably open a wormhole, but he’s too afraid the answer will make less sense than the question.

Lando pops the tab and takes a sip.

In the twelve days since Oscar's ended up here, dropped really, he had started compiling a list in his head titled: Things That Should Have Stayed Ideas. This... Monster Energy was high on it, which, to his disappointment, was not banned, nor sued into oblivion.

Also that hideous chocolate Lando insisted he try: something pistachio, imported from Dubai, with gold leaf and a name Oscar can't remember. Whatever it was, he thinks, it’s probably what the Bible meant by gluttony.

“I never agreed to water the ficus,” he says. “That’s why I did not do it.”

Lando raises both brows like Oscar’s the idiot. “You stood in the room when I said it. That counts as consent. Legally binding.”

“You are not making sense.”

“I am large, I contain multitudes,” Lando declares, grabbing his keys from the orange bowl by the stove.

The kitchen light reflects off the now half-empty Monster can, it scatters into fractured glints against the microwave door, breaking into a lazy mosaic of gold and green. The clock on it blinks 04:04 again, dumb and insistent, and Oscar still hasn’t figured out why it does that.

It’s all so vibrant that, sometimes, everything here still hits him like a punch.

“I am not watering your ficus,” Oscar says at last. “It is your ficus—purchased, mind you, five days ago, despite my entirely reasonable objections about how unnecessary an expense it was, so you should care for it. I told you this, Lando.”

“Yes, yes, which is exactly why I know you’re going to forget to water it.” Lando is halfway to the door, slipping on a single glove. “So really, this conversation is just us circling the drain.”

“What drain?”

Lando sighs, then gestures broadly. “The metaphorical one of withering houseplants, and of you pretending you don’t like living here—”

“I don’t.”

“—but you do.”

Oscar opens his mouth to say something but closes it again.

He doesn’t really have a comeback.

Because the truth is, Lando’s apartment is the first place in years that’s felt quite this real. Here, time moves forward in a clear line, and mornings happen, not just as settings, but as events where the world makes normal sounds: clinking dishes, faint music, the shuffle of running shoes by the door.

There’s even dust on the windowsills. Oscar stares at it sometimes, stunned. He hasn’t seen dust in years.

He doesn’t know what it means. To feel this way after so long.

“Come on, Osc, hurry up," Lando urges, and Oscar is pulled out of his thoughts. "Ralph’s gonna think I ghosted him!”

Lando says the word like it's obvious and everyone should know.

Ghosting, he says, means cutting someone off, disappearing, and ignoring them completely. Oscar doesn’t say it out loud, but he finds the term vaguely funny, ironic, too, possibly. He used to be a ghost, by profession, after all.

He doesn’t move. “I thought you said he was your French neighbor’s dog.”

“He is. But he knows where the love is.” Lando turns back to him, zipping his hoodie.“You’re coming, right? I made a list. An actual list of things to make you joyful. Ralph is number one because dogs are joy. Ralph is basically a golden serotonin dispenser.”

Oscar raises an eyebrow. “I did not say I was going.”

“You didn’t say you weren’t,” Lando counters, smiling like that settles the matter. “C’mon. It’s thirty minutes. Forty if Ralph decides to chase a butterfly. Which he will.”

Oscar looks at him—how he moves, how he talks. He’s seen Lando do three things before breakfast today: draw on his ficus pot, rearrange the spice cabinet by color gradient, and clean the entire kitchen.

Apparently, this... aliveness is just how he operates.

Many times over the past week, Oscar has watched him move the living room furniture when he couldn't sleep, repaint a wall in his room, then paint over it again the next day, and shop an exorbitant amount of clothes that Oscar is sure he will not even wear.

Lando has not sat still once, not even at night. He is like a kite in a lightning storm, bright and fast and flying too close to the wires.

Oscar sighs and stands up.

Lando lights up like a sunrise.

“Yes! I knew it. I knew the silence was a yes.” He claps once, then bounces into the kitchen for no real reason. “We can stop by the bakery on the way back. I think they’ve got those croissants with the jam inside today. Do you want one? You want one. I’ll get you one.”

Oscar's eyes follow as Lando peels off a sticky note and scribbles something down with a blue pen. He slaps it on the fridge with the others.

– the way Ralph snorts when he dreams
– jam croissants on Tuesdays
– rain that stops right as you walk outside
– finding an old favorite song by accident
– his face when he hears a bad pun and pretends not to smile

Lando’s back by the door before Oscar can read today’s.

“You're wearing that weird coat again?" he asks with a barely concealed grimace. "You’ll scare the neighborhood.”

He cracks open another can, this one his second, maybe third. Oscar’s lost track, and, via painful trial, figured out that Lando drinks at least two of those before noon and then sometimes goes hours without blinking at his phone.

He shrugs his coat on anyway.

The park smells like cut grass and roasted almonds, which is disorienting for two reasons. One: Oscar doesn’t remember trees having a smell. Two: there’s a dog—a fluffy, golden, possibly-too-happy retriever—charging straight at him.

He’s bracing for impact when Lando whistles sharply. “Oi, Ralph! Easy, mate.”

The dog skids to a halt right in front of him, tail wagging.

It’s the first time Oscar has truly been outside—excluding, of course, the one occasion Lando asked him to take out the trash, which hardly counts, given it had only given him enough of a glimpse to deduce, with some confidence, that they were somewhere in the south of France.

Monaco, precisely.

“He likes you,” Lando says once he’s close enough, a little out of breath from jogging over. His cheeks are flushed, and he’s already starting to sweat.

Oscar has noticed this about Lando, too, his nonexistent tolerance for weather, in either direction. Too hot, he’s melting. Too cold, he’s shivering. He’s always dressing for the wrong season, like when he wore a thick sweater to the corner shop when even Oscar, who once survived a Chicago winter in wool slacks, had to switch to shorts.

“He doesn’t know me,” Oscar says, looking down at the panting dog.

“That’s why he likes you,” Lando shrugs. “Blank slate. No bad blood.”

It’s probably meant as a joke, but Oscar blinks a little too slow at that one. His hand moves before he’s aware of it, reaching out, and brushing lightly against the dog’s warm head. Ralph leans into it immediately, tongue lolling.

“He’s… so soft."

Lando’s smile quirks. “You really are weird about normal stuff, you know that?”

Oscar bristles slightly, not in offense, but in the reflexive way someone adjusts their tie when reminded its knot is crooked.

He doesn’t mean to be strange about these things. It’s just that softness is something he hadn’t encountered much, as of late. Everything in death is cold and neat, even comfort, there, is standardized.

So yes, the softness of a dog surprises him. He thinks, When was the last time I touched something that wasn’t cold, or exact, or dead?

Oscar straightens, hand lingering in the golden fur a second longer than necessary.

“I’m not used to being seen," he says.

“What, like, metaphorically?”

“No,” Oscar counters. “Literally.”

Lando nods but doesn’t push.

That’s another thing about him; he’s surprisingly good at knowing when to stop talking. Not often, mind you. Ninety percent of the time he talks like he’s afraid silence might swallow him whole. But every so often, in moments that catch Oscar off guard, Lando simply chooses not to pry.

It's unnerving, almost.

He pulls a folded list from his pocket, a smudgy piece of paper that’s already starting to fray at the corners.

“Right, first thing on the list—walk in the park.” Lando glances around with an exaggerated nod. “Look at us, absolutely smashing it!”

Oscar watches a kite float past, all red and purple streaks, its string zigzagging in the breeze behind a child in bright red boots who’s laughing so hard he might lift off too. Behind him, a barefoot girl sprints through the grass, dragging a boy by the hand.

"Look at you, dummy! You have ice cream all over your shirt!" she berates him, "Let's go wash it."

Oscar doesn’t remember people being this loud.

Or this alive.

Or this bright.

He lets himself breathe it all in. The sound of distant traffic. The rustle of leaves overhead. The impossible weight of being here, and not elsewhere.

“Are we grading these?” he asks, after a long silence.

Lando laughs. “You want to review the activities?”

Oscar shrugs, hands behind his back.

It would feel more manageable if it were a checklist, he thinks. If life could be reduced to neat bullet points with boxes to tick. Walking in the park—check. Breathing—check. Surviving Lando’s endless commentary—ongoing.

Oscar understands forms and procedures. This, however, is unfiled. And, ironically, has no place to live.

“All right.” Lando squints up at the sky, then around at the park. “We’ve got sunshine, an absurdly cute dog, and you hanging out among the living instead of haunting the plumbing, hum, yeah. Solid eight and a half.”

Oscar raises an eyebrow. “Why not a nine?”

“Because you still talk like a depressed old man.”

Oscar snorts and only belatedly realizes it’s a laugh. Not a dismissive huff, not the dry rasp he sometimes passes off as amusement, but an actual laugh, unplanned and surprisingly light. It catches in his chest like a skipped step. He hadn’t laughed like that since, well. Since black-and-white television and soda fountains. Since hats were compulsory, and men didn’t cry, not even at funerals.

The dog nudges his leg again, and Oscar finds himself kneeling easily, easing his hand back into the soft fur.

Lando looks at him for a moment. There's a crease between his brows, a tug at the corner of his mouth. Like he wants to say something, or maybe do something but chooses not to.

“Okay,” he says at last. “C’mon. We promised Mrs. Martin we’d keep him moving. I think he gets cranky if he doesn’t pee on at least five different trees.”

Oscar stands and brushes some grass off his slacks. Ahead, Lando's already bounding, calling back with an enthusiastic, “C’mon, mate, we have to find Ralph some prime bark real estate!”

He sighs but follows.

They take the long loop around the park, past the row of townhouses with the peeling fences, past the garage with the busted radio playing music too loud. Ralph trots along, tail wagging, ears bouncing with every uneven step.

Lando talks the whole way.

He talks about Piñón, another dog, whose breath smells disgustingly like seaweed, and how he’s spent the last summer hoarding squeaky toys under his couch. He talks about Mrs. Martin's homemade fig pie, which he adores beyond reason, and the kid two streets over who claims he saw a ghost in his greenhouse. Lando even talks about pigeons, specifically, how he was once told they’re unionized government spies who take shifts watching from the lamppost near the laundromat.

Oscar doesn’t say much. He nods, sometimes. Hums a little under his breath. He is not really following the thread but still likes the sound of it.

By the time they hit the halfway mark in the park, Ralph had indeed peed on at least three different trees and looked significantly less jazzed than he was on the way out.

Lando slows his pace.

“You know what’s funny?” he says, cutting himself off mid-story, as he usually does, chasing a new thought like a squirrel. “I never wanted a dog. Like, ever. I was a cat kid. Still am. Cats are honest. If they hate you, they make it known. If they love you, they leave a dead bird in your shoe.”

He pauses to grab a stick from the ground, half-chewed, and damp at one end, then flings it down the path. Ralph tears after it like a rocket.

“But then he showed up, and I dunno.” He shrugs. “I slept better when Mrs. Martin left him with me. That’s dumb, right? I think he’s rewiring my brain or something. Do you think that’s a thing? Getting addicted to dog company?”

Oscar looks over at Ralph, who circles a tree, nose pressed to the grass, tail still wagging. The leash swings a little between them, brushing the side of his leg.

He frankly doesn’t know what to say right away. He used to write reports that detailed the metaphysical drift of souls and understand them. He once denied a duchess access to the Astral Gardens because her paperwork had been smudged by tears. And now here he is, watching a dog sniff a tree while trying to answer a question about the neurological impact of companionship.

“I think,” Oscar says, after a pause, “you enjoy looking after whatever, or whoever, needs you.”

It tracks, anyway. The way Lando always runs in every direction at once, always reaching for something, offering, fixing, giving. Oscar could ask for one pair of socks and Lando would show up with five because he “wasn’t sure what kind Oscar liked,” which is objectively stupid, objectively unnecessary.

And also kind of sweet.

Lando looks at him then, face surprisingly blank, not smiling or joking, just watching him with that unreadable expression he sometimes gets when the day slows down too much and there's nothing left to do but feel things, somewhere between when the city dies down and the stars outside start to reflect in his pool brightly. It’s always around that time. When Lando forgets to be Lando for a second. When he’s just... still.

Then Lando blinks and laughs and punches Oscar’s arm. “That’s disgusting, mate. Don’t get all poetic on me." He nudges him. "Go throw the stick, Mr. Doom and Gloom.”

Oscar doesn’t.

So Lando does it again, harder this time, chucking it like he’s launching it into orbit. Ralph bounds after it with all the joy of a dog who’s never had to worry about anything in his life.

Oscar glances over, unimpressed. “Your throws are crooked.”

“Your face is crooked.”

That night, after Ralph has been given back to Ms. Martin (with the appropriate number of ear scratches and Lando saying, “He understands English now, I’m not kidding”), and after they both mutually agreed that maybe Oscar shouldn’t be trusted to walk Ralph alone just yet (he nearly returned with someone else’s golden retriever), Lando realizes begrudgingly that it’s too late, and he’s not feeling any takeout.

Which is how Oscar comes to understand that Lando Norris is not only messy and impulsive beyond reason, but also a terrible cook. Not just a little bad. Not charmingly clueless or adorably helpless, no.

Catastrophically, alarmingly, apocalyptically unskilled.

It all starts with a very confident Lando throwing open the fridge, which in itself is already a warning sign.

“Okay,” he says, rummaging, “we’ve got… half a zucchini, something I think was chicken once, and a bunch of eggs. Oh, and chili flakes. We’ll be fine.”

Oscar stands in the doorway to the kitchen, arms crossed. The last time he cooked anything himself, Eisenhower was president and all margarine was highly taxed.

“What are you making?” Oscar asks.

“I don't know. Spaghetti?” Lando says, but it sounds more like a question than an answer. “Even though, honestly, I’ve always thought it was a bit weird. Like, who’s the random Italian who woke up one day and decided to make ropes out of bread and call it dinner?”

“Right,” Oscar says, unimpressed. “How about we make something simple.”

Lando frowns, clearly wounded. “Pasta is simple.”

“Something simple,” he repeats, “that doesn’t involve boiling water.”

He’s seen what happens when Lando is trusted with boiling water. Last time, he had set a pot on the stove to make mashed potatoes, then decided it was the perfect time for, and Oscar quotes, a quick shower. By the time he returned, the water had turned into steam, the pot was scorched, and Lando very nearly burned his hand trying to pick it up barehanded.

So, no, Oscar is not keen on repeating that experience. And judging by the look on his face, the distrust must be painfully obvious, because Lando gasps, loudly and theatrically.

“That’s cruel! I only forgot it one time!”

Oscar gives Lando a flat look. "Once," he says dryly, "is all it takes to burn a house down."

“You sound like my mum.”

“If your mother had any sense, she probably installed a fire extinguisher next to your bed.”

Oscar flips open a kitchen drawer, sorting through a jumble of utensils. Plastic spatulas, a whisk tangled with a phone charger, a cracked measuring cup, evidence of a household governed more by disorder than order.

"I have a fire extinguisher!" Lando says, proudly, opening a cabinet to reveal a tiny, travel-sized canister labeled 'For very SMALL fires only.'

Oscar stares at it for a long moment, then closes the drawer with a soft thud.

"We'll save that for when you accidentally ignite the tea towels."

"Fine," Lando huffs at last. "We can cook what you want but I’m supervising. You can be sous-chef or something."

"I will not be your sous-chef," Oscar finds the carton of eggs, the zucchini, and a half-block of cheese in the fridge. He pulls them out. “We’ll make an omelet, alright? You can’t possibly ruin that.”

"Okay, sous-chef Oscar."

Ten minutes later, Oscar understands that yes—yes, Lando can ruin an omelet.

But not entirely on his own. In fairness, the stove is partly to blame (it runs too hot, something Oscar noticed immediately but Lando had stubbornly insisted was “just how it worked now”), though it does take a certain kind of reckless optimism to turn three eggs, a pan, and some butter into something that looks like an edible deflated rubber boot.

He’s not a lost cause, Oscar thinks as he guides Lando’s hand with the knife. “Keep your fingers curled,” he says, nudging them into the correct position. “Claw shape. Like so. You don’t want to slice your fingertips off.”

Lando tries, tongue poking slightly out in focus. His pieces are uneven, too big, too thick, and flying in all directions. Oscar reaches out, gently correcting the way Lando holds the vegetable.

“Thumb behind, Lando. Curl the fingers. Like this.”

For a moment, their hands touch. Oscar pretends not to notice. Lando pretends very badly. He squints down, cheeks a little pink. “This feels weird.”

“It’ll feel worse if you’re bleeding into the zucchini.”

“Gross,” Lando says, but obeys. “You sound like my... I dunno. Maybe a responsible uncle. Or a very tired boss.”

“I assure you, I have neither title.” Oscar resists the urge to sigh, once more, as Lando’s knife wanders perilously close to his thumb. He nudges the hand again.

Gentle parenting, he thinks wryly. That’s what this is. The soul processing agent turned accidental ghost nanny. How noble.

Still, there's something curiously gentle about it, this little act of teaching. It reminds him, distantly, of Sunday mornings in his mother’s kitchen, when he'd help with pancakes and she'd fuss at him for stirring too hard.

“You’re being surprisingly patient with me,” Lando says quietly after a long pause, which is a surprise in itself. Lando has two volumes: chattering and asleep. Quiet isn’t really in his vocabulary.

“I’m being practical,” Oscar replies. “The sooner you learn to cook, the sooner I won’t have to watch you burn this place down.”

“It's still very nice,” Lando smiles, tossing the zucchini into the hot pan. It sizzles.

Oscar says nothing. He simply adjusts the heat slightly and adds a pinch of salt. Lando watches him with interest, leaning a little closer.

There’s music coming from a phone docked on the counter, some mellow song Lando threw on casually. Oscar doesn’t mind it. The lyrics make little sense, but the rhythm is pleasant.

Everything about tonight is strangely pleasant, in fact.

“I think you might actually like it here,” Lando says, suddenly, like he’s been thinking about it for a while.

He sounds very confident about it, which makes Oscar look at him.

“Here?”

“Yeah. Life. People. Dogs. Food that’s edible if I don’t touch it.” Lando glances over at him, amused but a little hopeful, too. “You know. All this.”

Oscar wants to say no, immediately. That he belongs elsewhere. That this isn't his place, not anymore. That he's a man out of time, literally, with no home but dusty offices and decaying ledgers.

For, some reason, he doesn’t.

Instead, he looks down at the omelet slowly forming in the pan, and says, “I suppose it does have its moments.”

Lando beams.

They eat sitting side-by-side at the kitchen island, the remains of their culinary attempt steaming faintly between them. The omelet is palatable, if not exactly impressive. It tastes like something Oscar supposes could be worse.

Throughout dinner, Lando shares stories that go off in tangents, Oscar learns about his father's electric (because, apparently, that's a popular thing now) scooter brand, his complicated relationship with his neighbor’s cat, and a particularly disastrous attempt at skiing that left him in a cast for three months.

Oscar, for his part, shares less, but Lando pulls enough from him.

“So,” he says around a mouthful, “did you have coworkers? In the Afterlife place?”

Oscar sips his water before answering, considering how to frame it.

“Yes. Quite a few, actually. We were assigned departments based on skill set and… disposition.” His mouth quirks, just barely, into something that almost resembles a smile. “You’d have hated it. Very orderly. Very rule-driven.”

Lando rolls his eyes, but he is amused. “Yeah, sounds about right. But like—friends? You had any?”

Oscar pauses, tapping the edge of his fork lightly against his plate.

He thinks of Logan, naturally, who he knew the longest and who always had the weirdest ties. He then thinks of Alex, who once broke the copier and blamed it on poor Ollie. There was also Susie at reception who could recite the complete list of permitted mortal complaints by memory, and usually did if you stood still long enough.

"I suppose I did. They weren’t friends in the way you probably mean it,” Oscar says. “But we often had lunch breaks.”

“That’s sick. You had a whole little... soul squad.”

Oscar is amused despite himself. "We preferred the term processing unit."

“Boring,” Lando says immediately, poking him lightly with the end of his fork. “You should’ve called yourselves the Afterlife Avengers or something.”

Oscar blinks at him, nonplussed. "The what?"

Before Lando can answer, his phone makes a loud sound against the table. He jumps a little, startled, and glances over, mouth twitching into a frown.

It makes the same little noise again.

Lando's fingers drum once on the edge of his glass before he reaches out, flips the phone face-down without even looking at the screen, and lets out a small, silent breath through his nose.

The sound stops.

Oscar frowns. In his day, a ringing phone had meant urgency. News good enough or bad enough to justify interrupting you wherever you were. But now it just seemed like a background noise people learn to ignore.

He smooths his hands over his knees, the way he might've once smoothed the lines of his slacks.

“So,” Lando says, trying for a smile, “you lot have any cool afterparties over there? Like karaoke nights, that sort of thing?”

Oscar lifts an eyebrow. “Afterparties.”

“Yeah, promotions, bonuses, crazy nights out—”

“There was a mandatory fire drill once,” Oscar cuts off, deadpan.

Lando blinks. “...That’s it?”

“We’re in the business of endings,” he says. “We don’t tend to celebrate much.”

Buzz.

Buzz.

Buzz.

The phone is not making loud noises anymore, but it is vibrating nonstop.

Oscar glances at it this time.

“Someone’s trying very hard to reach you,” he points out.

Lando pushes the phone further away with the heel of his hand. “It’s probably nothing.”

Oscar frowns. “You’re quite sure?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lando says quickly. “Not important. Anyway, you were telling me about the fire drill. Please continue, this sounds absolutely riveting.”

Oscar looks at him for a long second, the way someone might study a particularly baffling abstract painting. Then he sighs.

For now, he’ll let it lie.

But he files it away, neatly, into the growing list of things about Lando Norris that don’t quite add up.

They linger over dinner longer than either of them probably meant to. The plates are pushed off to the side now, one empty, the other half-finished, and Lando is sprawled back in his chair.

Outside the windows, the sky has deepened into a velvet blue, stitched with the faintest edge of stars.

Oscar eventually collects the plates and brings them to the sink, where he's stacking them in the casual clutter of Lando’s kitchen.

It’s when he’s wiping the table with a rag (because someone must, and it’s not going to be Lando) that his eyes catch on the abandoned phone, still face-down on the wood.

It's still vibrating.

Oscar frowns, tilting the telephone, enough to glance at the screen without unlocking it. What he recently learned were notifications are currently crowding the display, one stacked over the next in rapid succession:

Max:
Where are you? Your mum says you aren't in Glastonbury anymore.

Max:
Are you at your apartment in Monaco?

Max:
????

Max:
Why aren’t you picking up??

Max:
Did you lose your phone again?

Max:
Please answer me.

Max:
Mate, please. Just tell me where you are.

Oscar sets the cloth down slowly.

The messages keep coming, tumbling over each other like a flood with no one left to build a dam. He counts at least a dozen. Oscar realizes he doesn't know much about Lando's life, but even he knows panic when he sees it.

He glances over his shoulder toward the living room, where Lando is half-curled on the couch, thumbing idly through some streaming service, humming off-key to whatever song plays faintly from the TV.

Oscar wipes his hands on the rag. He doesn’t say anything. Just tucks the moment away in the part of his mind reserved for questions that aren’t his to ask.

“Osc, do you want to keep watching Drive to Survive?” Lando calls from the living room.

“Sure,” he says, though his mind is somewhere else entirely.

The phone, abandoned on the table, buzzes again.

Ollie’s apartment is technically unnecessary.

That’s how the file has phrased it, back when he first crossed over.

"Living quarters optional. No bodily maintenance is required. Emotional regulation varies."

Most people don't bother with sleeping here. Or eating. Or showering—though on bad days, Ollie swears he could feel the weight of muscle memory dragging his eyelids down. But routine has teeth. If you die, and you get recruited, and then process souls by the dozen, well, at the end of the day, you want four walls that belong to you. Even if it’s fake, some souls like the sensation of it, like pretending.

It makes the in-between feel more like the before.

Ollie doesn't pretend much. He just likes having a door to close.

The elevator barely makes a sound as it glides up past the fortieth floor, past the sixtieth, past the smog curtain, and the glow of the median rings.

He leans against the panel.

His apartment is on the 87th floor—prime height, worker-tier residency, glass front with auto-tint. No plumbing (not really needed), no kitchen (optional), and one of those pseudo-beds that only simulate REM cycles if you ask nicely.

The corridor lights flicker when he walks past long rows of identical chrome-gray doors that line the hallway, punctuated only by the occasional sound of neighborly life or someone’s musical projection.

Room 1287 flickers its panel green when he scans his palm.

Ollie steps inside and exhales, unshouldering his workbag. He doesn't bother with his shoes—just toes them off as he steps in, reaching for the little magnetic key hanger by the entrance.

click-ckhh.

The lamp by the couch—a pull-string kind, the kind his grandma used to have—suddenly flicks on.

“Fucking hell!” Ollie yelps, stumbling backward into the doorframe. His keys clatter to the floor.

Kimi is sitting on the couch, legs crossed, book open on his knees, goggles pushed up into his curls, and reading. He’s the one who pulled the lamp string.

“What the—what are you doing in my apartment?!”

Kimi lifts a finger, not even looking up. “You should really put locks on your windows.”

Ollie has never wanted to smack someone in the face so badly before. “I live on the eighty-seventh floor!” he hisses, breath catching up with the rest of him.

“And?" Kimi says, snapping the book shut. "Richard Chase only murdered people in homes that were unlocked. He thought locked doors meant he wasn't welcome."

"Who the hell is Richard Chase?"

"A man who would absolutely climb eighty-seven floors just to slit your throat."

Ollie gapes at him. "You are so fucking weird. Did you seriously just break into my apartment?"

Kimi looks like he’s just heard the dumbest question in the world. "I didn’t break anything, mate," he declares, annoyed. "The window was open. I climbed. È normale."

"It’s not è normale!" Ollie snaps, mocking his accent shamelessly. He snatches his keys off the floor, scowling so hard it hurts. "You can’t just—god, Kimi, it's called personal space. Ever heard of it?"

“I have heard of it.” Kimi swings his legs off the couch, landing lightly on the floor. “I just don’t find it that important in our current predicament."

Ollie groans into his hands.

This is, apparently, his life death now. Getting home from a long shift processing dead souls only to find someone lurking on his couch. He's already bracing for whatever lunacy Kimi's here to announce.

“Alright. Fine!" He throws up his hands in frustration. "You’re here. Clearly about to ruin my night. What do you want?”

Kimi, completely unbothered, tilts his head and says in that maddeningly calm voice he uses just to get under his skin, "Technically, it's not night. The afterlife simulates diurnal cycles based on collective human memory to maintain psychological stability among the newly deceased."

"Oh, shut up!"

Kimi smiles. "Anyway. I am here because I had an idea." And God knows nothing good ever started with those words.

Ollie crosses his arms, trying to project some sense of control over the situation, even though he feels like he’s being dragged toward the edge of a cliff he doesn’t remember climbing.

He narrows his eyes, suspicious. "Okay." He nods, "What idea?"

"A device,” Kimi continues.

“A device," Ollie echoes.

Kimi nods, pleased with himself. “Like the old transport suitcases, but smaller."

“And you’re telling me this why?”

"Because you're going to help me," he replies. Before Ollie can open his mouth to argue, he adds, "Not with the building part, obviously. You're more for... the rest. Since you’re pretty much useless with anything that requires actual skills."

Ollie scoffs. You give him an inch, he takes a mile.

He wants to say no out of pure spite, but it’s not like he has any better ideas about finding Oscar. Not without equipment only The Eternal Judiciary owns, and the Council isn't exactly handing those out like candy.

"So?" Kimi huffs, suddenly impatient. "Look, if you are scared, you can stay here, and hide. I will save Oscar myself.”

Ollie scowls harder. He is not scared, but he doesn't want to take the bait, either.

He glares at Kimi for a long, slow count of five, then groans, and shoves his feet back into his shoes with a grunt. "Fine," he grumbles. "This is absolutely how we die again."

"Technically," Kimi says, "you can't die again."

"Technically," Ollie snaps back in a mocking, nasal voice, "you can’t not die again either."

The Afterlife is weird like that. Death isn't a solid wall, per se, it is more like a paper screen. Technically, you can't “die” again in the traditional sense, but you can be disintegrated, collapsed into nothing if your energy signature got scrambled badly enough.

It isn't common, but it isn't impossible.

And if there’s one person Ollie trusts to find the exact one-in-a-million way to destroy themselves, it’s Kimi.

It is important, Oscar feels, to remember that Lando made a list.

It started innocently enough, a scribbled note on a napkin, then quickly graduated to a notebook, then sticky notes, and then a full-blown spreadsheet on his laptop. A catalog of All The Mortal Shit Oscar Had to Try Now That He Was Stuck Here, emphasis very much Lando’s.

The title in cell A1 read: “Things that melt, bruise, stink, break, and are still worth it.”

Number 14 was ice cream.

And today, Lando’s decided that means they’re going to Santo Gelato, the nice little place squeezed between a laundry shop and a bookstore that only sells French poetry and very peculiar cookbooks.

“You’re so lucky I picked this place,” Lando says, practically bouncing as he yanks the door open. A little bell jingles over their heads. “This is the real stuff, mate. None of that powdered fake garbage. The pistachio here changed my life.”

Oscar steps inside after him, blinking against the sudden chill.

It smells absurdly like sugar and something softer, and the air drones faintly with the sound of a freezer struggling against the Mediterranean heat.

"You say that about every place we go," Oscar says dryly.

"Yeah, because I have a flexible and evolving palate," Lando shoots back, already halfway to the counter. “Morning."

"Good morning, sir," the cashier says, smiling. "What can I get for you?"

Lando taps his chin, thinking. "Two cones, please. One pistachio, and—" He twists around to look at Oscar. "What about you, Osc? What’s your flavor?"

Oscar doesn't know. His eyes drift along the glass counter, rows of delicate pastel scoops blurred slightly by frost. His gaze snags on a deep pink mound.

“That one.”

The girl behind the counter says, “Blackcurrant?”

Oscar nods. “Sure.”

Lando mouths basic at him but turns back to the cashier smiling. "One pistachio, one blackcurrant. Merci!"

They grab their cones and squeeze into a little table by the window, beneath a flickering TV bolted crookedly to the wall. On-screen, sleek cars twisted around impossible corners at impossible speeds through narrow streets.

Oscar points a thumb toward it.

“Is that that one racing show?”

Lando nearly chokes on his ice cream. "Oh my god. No. No, dude." He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Are you blind?"

"It’s cars. And they’re driving. I’m not sure how wrong I could be.”

“That’s a replay of the Monaco Grand Prix," Lando sounds scandalized. "Like, real racing. Proper racing. You've never seen it?"

Oscar watches a car whip past another so closely that it looks like they might have fused together for a second. “Back in my day, the cars did not look like this," he says, "And racing wasn’t very popular. It was something only self-righteous assholes enjoyed.”

"That's not true!" Lando yelps. Then lowers his voice when a nearby couple glances over. “Jesus, mate. Monaco is Formula 1. Look around—there’s probably a driver in this shop right now."

Oscar, despite himself, straightens a little, scanning the crowd.

“Really?"

“Yeah. Lewis Hamilton lives here. George Russell too. One of them is literally living in the penthouse next to ours, mate. There are loads of them. It's for, like... tax reasons. But still.”

Oscar nods sagely. He doesn’t even register the way Lando says ours—like the penthouse he is renting with his money belongs to both of them and isn't just a cluttered chaos zone that Lando only remembers to clean at three in the morning, usually while Oscar is already dead asleep.

“Taxes are a great motivator," he finds himself thinking out loud. "The only thing a racing driver can't outrun. That and Death, I suppose."

Lando levels him with a look.

“Whatever, mate, I can't believe you don't watch. It's so good.”

"Hm." Oscar sounds, considering. "As I said, back in my day, only the most self-righteous assholes liked racing."

Lando rolls his eyes.

“Okay, maybe some of them were. But it’s different now! It’s—" He flails slightly with his hands, lost for a second. "It's different! You wouldn't know, since you're archaic."

Oscar watches him, faintly amused.

“So educate me," he says, because he’s still learning Lando’s moods, and he’s learning that if you hand him a spark, he’ll set himself on fire for the joy of it.

And sure enough—

“Alright, so," Lando leans forward, “you’ve never seen a race? I mean—besides Drive to Survive, which, yeah, okay, technically it shows races but it’s mostly drama for Netflix teenagers, you know?”

"Am I the Netflix teenager in this scenario?"

"No, you're like... the confused time traveler," Lando says, solemn. "Anyway, Formula 1 is not just cars going fast. It’s chess but at 300 km/h, and every decision matters. You blink wrong and you lose everything. You sneeze wrong and you’re in a wall."

Oscar raises a brow. "And you like this?"

Lando shrugs. "Yeah. It’s people pushing themselves until they break. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they become like... gods. I kid you not, I've seen someone compare Max Verstappen's jizz to an offering."

"You’re a fan of that," Oscar says simply.

"I’m a casual, nonchalant enjoyer," he insists, sitting back and finishing his cone. "There’s a difference."

Oscar lifts an eyebrow, and Lando squirms in his seat.

"I just—I might have named my childhood goldfish after a certain Spanish driver. It's not, like... that weird."

"Of course not," Oscar says. "Perfectly normal. Every non-fan child does it. Usually right after they apply for a mortgage."

Lando kicks him under the table, smiling like a schoolboy. "You dog," he says, mock-offended. "Who even taught you to be sarcastic?"

Oscar laughs, startled by the sound of it.

It bubbles out of him before he can think to stop it, bright and strange and almost giddy. He’s still not used to how laughing feels, even less in this bright, ridiculous place where ice cream drips between their fingers and the air smells faintly of sea salt.

Outside, the city glitters like a spilled jewelry box. Inside, they let the ice cream melt without hurry, neither of them quite willing to move. Oscar's cone is almost gone, the last drips pooling in the paper napkin.

It has a small, cartoonish design printed in the corner. A messy little doodle of a boy with wild hair, and a toothy smile, holding a melting ice cream.

It looks, unsettlingly, like Lando.

Without really thinking, he folds the napkin carefully and tucks it into his pocket. He’s not entirely sure why. Oscar tells himself it’s just for safekeeping.

After a minute, Lando bumps his foot lightly under the table.

"Alright. Your turn."

"My turn?" Oscar echoes.

"I just made myself sound like a massive racing nerd, so yes. Your turn."

Oscar knows what Lando means, but it’s more amusing to play dumb. "I’m not particularly passionate about racing, I fear I'd make a very poor conversationalist."

Lando shoots him an unimpressed look. "Osc," he whines, dragging out the single syllable of the nickname. "You know what I mean! You must have something. Some weird little mortal joy."

Oscar hesitates. Lando is earnest in that way very few people are, it's a bit disarming. It makes Oscar want to answer, even though some part of him doesn't know why.

"I liked snow," he says finally.

Then immediately cringes internally, because somehow it sounds stupid out loud, small, and inadequate. Lando doesn’t laugh, though. He just brightens, like it’s the best answer he’s ever heard.

“You’re really gonna hit me with the cinematic melancholy answer, huh.”

"You asked," Oscar says, trying not to sound defensive.

"No, it’s good," Lando says quickly. He’s already digging into his pockets, pulling out a crumpled sticky note and a mostly dead pen. "A+ mortality answer! I’m putting it on the list. Item seven is fresh snow. We’ll find some. Somewhere."

"You’re seriously writing it down?"

"Of course! This list is gonna outlive us both."

Oscar scoffs but feels something weird and soft unspool in his chest anyway.

Across the room, the TV blares another shot of the race—a driver, helmet off, face streaked with sweat, skin flushed red, is crying openly as champagne rains around him.

He watches for a long moment.

His eyes are dashingly blue.

"Do they ever crash?" Oscar asks, already knowing the answer but somehow needing to hear it anyway.

Lando fidgets with his pen, dragging it in aimless zigzags across a napkin when it doesn’t write and just leaves a faint dent in the paper until the ink stutters out in messy, jagged lines. His eyes flicker up toward the screen, then back down to the crumpled paper.

"Yeah," he says, after a long moment. "They do."

"They what?" Oscar asks, voice a little higher than usual.

He stops stirring his coffee.

If he had ever made a list of things he thought might have happened since he died, hearing that humanity casually walked on the moon would not have been anywhere near the top. And yet, here Oscar was: seated on the balcony sofa, staring at Lando in open disbelief.

Lando, who, seemingly oblivious to the emotional earthquake he has just triggered, takes a sip of his tea and shrugs. "Like, ages ago. First landing was in 1969. Guy named Neil. He's pretty famous."

Oscar blinks at him. The world tilts, just slightly. "No," he says, putting down his mug.

"I swear!" Lando insists. "They even filmed it and everything, mate."

"But... the moon is..." he gestures helplessly skyward, where it hangs pale against the morning blue, "very far."

"Yeah, that's kinda the point. It's, like, a big deal."

Oscar leans back sharply against the sofa, the legs giving a protesting creak against the floor. He can't believe what he's just heard.

"You’re telling me," he says slowly, "that since my death, humanity has flown to the moon?"

"And back!" Lando adds brightly, jabbing a finger at him. "Don't forget the back part. Otherwise, that would’ve been seriously depressing."

Oscar turns to look out the balcony, up at the faint shape of the moon barely visible, then drops his gaze to the busy street below, where people drift along in little groups, chatting, laughing, utterly unaware that the entire foundation of his reality has just been cracked wide open.

People went to the moon.

People walked on the moon.

Merciful heavens.

"I—" he starts, then stops. He tries again. "When I was alive, we had only just started putting satellites into orbit."

"Well, now we have a Tesla orbiting around Mars," Lando says helpfully.

"I'm sorry?"

"Yeah, it's a car. In space. Elon's idea."

Oscar must look as bewildered as he feels because Lando bursts out laughing.

"You don't know Elon, either?" he says, half-choking on a laugh. "Man, you’re seriously under-educated for someone who’s technically undead and, like, got a whole second lease on life."

"I am technically classified as mortal again," Oscar corrects. "Which I was, previously, from 1936 to 1959."

"Right, right. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth."

"Hardly," he says dryly. "Dinosaurs went extinct sixty-six million years ago, young man."

Lando shrugs and crams a piece of dry toast into his mouth.

"Okay, Grandpa."

Oscar gives him a flat look. “I hope you know that I am, chronologically speaking, two years younger than you now.”

He doesn't exactly expect Lando to let out a full-body, high-pitched horrified scream, but then again, a small part of him absolutely did.

It's just that there are little habits Lando has that Oscar is starting to pick up and finds oddly amusing. So much so, that by the time he goes to bed most nights, he realizes he has spent the entire day without once thinking about the suitcase.

So Oscar can’t really be blamed for the faint, traitorous smile that pulls at the corner of his mouth.

Oscar thinks he’s already emphasized that Lando has a fair share of peculiar habits.

This one might, however, just be the strangest of them all.

Oscar notices it for the first time when Lando burns his toast.

The toaster spits out two sad, blackened slabs, and without missing a beat, Lando smacks the side of the appliance and says, "You absolute muppet!"

At first, Oscar thinks nothing of it. Modern people have strange ways, and Lando has more of them than most. But it happens again two days later when the washing machine starts beeping mid-cycle and Lando crouches down to look it squarely in its digital face.

"Don’t you dare bail on me now," he warns it. "We’re too far in."

Oscar stands there, towel in hand, feeling vaguely like he’s intruding on a private conversation.

After a week, Oscar has collected an entire mental catalog of examples: Lando sweet-talking the blender when it struggles ("You got this, mate!"), threatening the vacuum cleaner, even once apologizing to a chair he stubbed his toe on.

He talks to everything.

Not absentminded muttering, no, Lando speaks to objects like they're real people. Like the toaster’s feelings might be hurt if he’s too harsh, or the lamp might work harder if properly encouraged.

One afternoon, as Lando tries to fix the TV remote by thumping it gently against his knee and offering it sweet encouragements ("C’mon, little guy, you can do it. I believe in you"), Oscar decides he can’t stay silent any longer.

"You do realize it cannot hear you," he says, from where he’s reading on the couch.

Lando looks up, remote hanging loosely in his hand. "Who?"

"The remote," Oscar says patiently. "Or the washing machine. Or the toaster. Or the kettle."

"Yeah, duh. I know."

Oscar frowns. "Then why do you speak to them?"

Lando shrugs, flopping down into the armchair opposite. "I dunno. I just always did. They do things for us, right? They try. Even if they’re crap sometimes."

"They are machines, Lando. They are not capable of effort."

Lando tilts his head, thinking. "I know. But it's like... just something I always did when I was younger."

Does he mean to say he's been talking to inanimate objects since he was a child? Oscar regards him quietly.

"I see," he says, not entirely convinced.

Lando tosses the remote onto the coffee table and stretches out, lazy and graceless. "Besides, if you’re nice to stuff, sometimes it decides to work better. That’s just physics."

Oscar smiles thinly. "I am fairly certain that is not physics."

"Modern physics," Lando corrects. "You wouldn't understand."

Oscar scoffs under his breath.

He thinks, with a sudden, startling fondness, that maybe it isn’t about the machines at all. Maybe it’s just Lando’s nature, to offer care to things most people wouldn’t bother noticing. To speak kindness into empty spaces. 

And perhaps, Oscar realizes, he rather likes that about him.

One of Lando’s other habits has to do with the rooftop terrace.

Oscar comes to learn, through simple observation (and a few near-sunburns), that there was a very good reason Lando’s first brush with death had involved a pool: the man spends an absurd amount of time either swimming laps or lounging like a cat.

As it turns out, the best thing about the terrace isn't, as Oscar had first been led to believe, the pool, or even the view, but the fact that, under its sun, Lando—whose skin seems to turn golden at the mere suggestion of sunlight—developed the most impressive tan he’s ever seen.

So it’s not much of a surprise that when Oscar slides the screen door open, the frame rattling softly behind him, he finds him sprawled out on a deck chair, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, his phone balanced on his chest, listening to some song Oscar probably wouldn't recognize if he could hear it through the earphones.

The pool glitters under the light, half the water stirred lazily by a soft breeze.

Oscar hesitates at the edge of the terrace, unsure if he should disturb it. It feels almost sacred, this peace. A sort of cathedral made of chlorinated air and fading, orange light.

Lando squints up at him, one hand lifting lazily in a wave.

"Hey, Osc."

Oscar gives a polite nod. He has, admittedly, gotten better at being casual, but it still feels faintly ridiculous.

"Didn’t know you were out here," he says. It's a lie.

"Yeah," Lando says, yawning, "just chillin’. You wanna sit?"

Oscar glances around. There’s another chair, a little battered, a little sun-bleached. He steps closer and sinks into it with a small sigh. His bones creak pleasantly.

They sit like that for a moment.

This isn't exactly the first time.

During the first days, Lando made attempts to maintain a normal routine, going to work, answering what Oscar assumed were professional calls, and pretending to be a, mostly, functioning adult. But as the days went by, those attempts grew fewer, and his time spent orbiting around Oscar grew longer.

Oscar doesn’t exactly mind. He tells himself it’s because it’s easier to keep an eye on him this way. (Right, the Council asked him to keep an eye on Lando, after all.)

"You know," Lando says suddenly, tipping his head sideways to look at him, "this song I'm listening to kinda reminds me of you."

Oscar turns to him. "Does it."

"Yeah." He smiles lazily. "It's... old-sounding. In a good way. Like, nostalgic. But also steady, y'know?"

Oscar processes that. It's not the worst description he's ever gotten.

"I'll choose to take that as a compliment," he says.

"It was a compliment!" Lando protests, sitting up straighter. His hair is sticking up all over the place from where he’d been lying down. "You're like... like one of those vinyl records. Kinda scratchy sometimes, but cool as hell."

Oscar huffs a laugh, low and amused.

"You're terrible at metaphors."

"Probably, but I'm sincere," Lando says, without even a beat of hesitation.

The breeze picks up, ruffling his hair and sending little ripples across the pool. Somewhere beyond the railing, a cicada drones its endless summer song.

Oscar lets his eyes drift shut for a moment. It’s so warm that he can feel the heat soaking into his skin—real skin—and is overcome by how much he enjoys it.

It’s strange because he never thought he cared much about the sun. Back at the Department, when they’d offered to simulate any climate he liked for his office, he’d always declined. They had the technology, sure, but it was unreliable at best—glitches in the simulation sometimes meant a snowstorm during paperwork hour or a heatwave right in the middle of evaluations. For safety reasons, most of the Department stayed tuned to neutral; no weather at all.

Oscar hadn’t minded. He used to think it didn’t matter. Weather was just another background detail he could live without.

But almost four weeks under the real sun, with the real world spinning lazily around him, and he’s starting to think he was wrong. He's starting to wonder if he’ll ever be able to go back to a place where Lando’s rooftop, and the easy warmth of it, isn’t.

“Can I ask you a question?” Lando says suddenly, voice a little tentative.

Oscar blinks one eye open. “You just did."

Lando huffs a little laugh and flops back down onto the lounge chair.

“No, like, a real one.”

Oscar turns his head slightly to look at him. Lando is staring up at the sky, arms crossed behind his head, squinting into the bright blue like he’s trying to find something in it.

“Go ahead,” Oscar says, carefully neutral.

“So…” he starts, then trails off. “Remember when we were playing Mario Kart?"

Oscar nods. "I remember when you drove directly into a wall for three consecutive laps," he quips.

Lando rolls his eyes, scoffing, "That was a tactical move to confuse the enemy!"

Oscar snorts, a sound he doesn't bother hiding.

Lando's smile dies down into a quieter kind of sad line, after a little while.

"No, but really—do you remember when... I asked you if you had a boyfriend?"

Oscar hums, but doesn't say anything.

“It's just... You didn’t even blink, and I thought, huh, that’s weird, ‘cause you’re from like the fifties. And back then it was, you know, a big deal.”

Oscar watches him for a moment. Lando is looking at him, expectant and a little hesitant, too. "I suppose," he says eventually, "it would surprise someone from your time."

"And not from yours?" Lando asks, eyebrows raising.

Oscar hesitates, then sits up properly, brushing imaginary dust off his trousers, gathering the words. “I didn't tell you that I had a fiancée,” he settles for. His voice is quiet, almost hard to hear over the breeze. “Her name was Lily.”

Lando deflates a little, blinking. “Oh.”

“She was lovely. Kind, patient. She liked crossword puzzles and was smarter than anyone I knew.” He pauses, the corners of his mouth tilting up at the memory. “We were engaged for three months before I... well. Before I died.”

Lando’s face softens. “I’m sorry.”

Oscar shakes his head. “No need. It was a long time ago. Another life, in more ways than one." He takes a small pause. "I did love her. Or... I believe I did, in the way I was taught love was supposed to look."

Lando listens quietly, knees pulled to his chest now. The sun keeps beaming down, abrasive and indifferent to their exchange.

“I knew... different people existed. Even then. You had to be careful, of course, but it wasn't impossible to notice if you looked. It wasn't discussed. It wasn’t approved of. But it wasn't wholly unknown, either. You'd hear rumors in schoolyards, in army barracks, always framed as tragedy or disgrace."

Lando’s mouth twists, but he doesn’t interrupt.

Oscar offers him a small smile, rueful. “I suppose if I had allowed myself to entertain the thought... I might have been. But I didn't. Not properly. I was... well, I was very good at doing what was expected of me."

For a long second, there’s just the noise of the city below them, the lazy thrum of a helicopter far off in the sky. Then Lando lets out a breath, a little shaky, and sounding like he’s been holding it in.

“I am, uh, I am one of the... different people you're talking about, I am like them," His voice wobbles slightly on the admission. Like he’s half expecting something bad to happen. "I mean. Not the tragedy part. I hope. But, uh, yeah."

Oscar turns to look at him properly.

He is doing that thing he does when he’s nervous: picking at the hem of his shorts, messing it up, and smoothing it down again. His mouth is pressed into a stubborn line, but there's something raw in his eyes. He looks like he’s bracing for a hit he’s not sure will come.

And then, with the simplest, most natural honesty, Oscar says, "Good."

Lando blinks. "Good?"

"It’s good," Oscar repeats, and to him, it might as well be the most obvious thing in the world. "That you can be who you are. That you’re not required to spend your life pretending to be someone else. It’s..." He pauses, thinking. "It’s rather extraordinary, actually."

Lando laughs then—this surprised, messy thing—and tips his head back against the chair. "You’re really something, y'know that?" he says.

"I've been called worse." Oscar smiles, small and genuine. He feels the need to add, kinder this time around, “Lando, it does not change anything.”

Lando’s face breaks into something soft and tentative.

“You’re seriously cool with it?”

“Of course,” Oscar says, and means it. “It would be a very dull world if everyone loved the same way.”

Lando laughs again, a bit more freely this time. He bumps his shoulder lightly against his. And Oscar lets it happen. Lets himself lean, just a little, into the warmth.

“Man. You’re full of weird wisdom.”

“It comes with age."

“Didn't you say you were two years younger than me?" Lando points out.

“A technicality,” Oscar says.

Lando grins at him, all bright teeth, and for a moment Oscar feels the strange, almost overwhelming sensation of belonging. Of connection, real and alive in a way he hasn't felt in ages.

The wind picks up slightly, rattling a few of the sticky notes still clinging to the hallway inside.

Oscar lets himself close his eyes again.

"Hey, Lando."

"Mh?"

"You said you were listening to music," Oscar says. "Before."

"Yeah," Lando sits up. He fiddles with his phone for a second and taps a few buttons. "Here. Wanna listen with me?"

He passes one earbud to Oscar, the old kind with the cords still dangling, Lando has claimed he preferred them because he kept losing the wireless ones "like a muppet."

Oscar takes it carefully, tucking it into his ear.

The song plays again.

Ollie isn't sure if the shop has clocks anymore or if the clocks are the shop now.

There are so many ticking, whirring things crammed into every surface that breathing feels like it might accidentally set off a Rube Goldberg machine of temporal tragedy.

Kimi is crouched over his workbench, his pair of brass goggles shoved onto his forehead, tinkering with what looked like an old-fashioned pocket watch, if pocket watches usually glowed like miniature dying stars. What was the name again? Kimi had told him before, something with nebulas, or was it supernovas?

Ollie sits nearby, cross-legged on the floor, feeling like he hasn't rested in something like a century, which was technically possible, considering that in here, “pulling an all-nighter” sometimes meant losing entire, though trivial, decades.

He sighs theatrically, just to prove a point.

“You know, if you’re gonna build a universe-bending gadget, maybe don’t make it out of something I could find in my dead grandpa’s sock drawer.”

Kimi doesn't even look up. He seems to have grown rather numb to the prospect of their shared time being filled with more sarcastic remarks than actual silence.

“Form follows function," he tells him.

“I’m just saying, it’s not very inspiring.”

“Good,” Kimi mutters, tightening something with a tiny wrench. “If it looked inspiring, you’d try to touch it.”

Across the room, Daniel, stretched lazily across a high-backed velvet chair, chimes in without opening his eyes: “He’s right, you know. Best inventions look completely unimpressive until they accidentally kill a man.”

Ollie gives him the stink eye.

“That’s very comforting, Daniel.”

He slumps against the nearest wall, trying not to think too hard about the fact that they are building something that could, theoretically, snap the universe in half if they got it wrong.

The blue glow brightens. Kimi sits back, flexing his fingers, and wipes a smear of grease across his pants.

“Done," he says simply.

Ollie stares at it.

And stares some more.

“That’s it?” It feels a bit anticlimactic.

Kimi rolls his eyes at the aggrieved tone. “You are looking at a portable, personal quantum tether. It reads the elasticity of local spacetime and anchors itself to a chosen temporal frequency.”

“English, please.”

“It lets you jump without snapping your own timeline like an old elastic waistband.”

Ollie blinks. “Wait, so it’s like—what, a DIY time portal?”

“No, imbecille," Kimi huffs. “It’s not a portal. It's a tether. Like—” He searches for words, snapping his fingers. “Like a fish hook. You cast forward, you move, but there’s still a line connecting you back to where you started.”

“Right. So if it fails, we drown.”

Kimi gives a cheerful shrug.

“Or evaporate!" Daniel adds.

Ollie lets out another groan and buries his face in his hands. Why was he trusting the world’s most annoying people to hack the fundamental laws of existence?

Because it’s for Oscar, he reminds himself. And because no one else would.

Kimi stands, pocket watch's chain swinging from his fingers, and clicks open the case. Inside, a complex network of gears is shifting in a way that makes Ollie’s head hurt a little to look at it. It doesn't help that the ticking sounds nothing like normal ticking, either. 

“We have to test it,” Kimi says, serious now.

“Test it how?” Ollie asks, already dreading the answer.

Kimi twirls the watch once and catches it easily. “I need to see how far I can push it. See how much I can pull, rewind, or bend before it snaps or becomes unstable. We need to know the limits.”

“Wait, rewind? You mean—actual time travel?”

“Small range,” he explains, adjusting a dial. “Large scale jumps would require a stabilizer, and we don’t have one."

Ollie stares at him. “You’re gonna just… what? Try and rewind a few minutes and see if you don’t die?”

“Pretty much,” Kimi says cheerfully.

"That’s insane."

"No, that’s science."

"Mm. No. Pretty sure it’s just insane."

"Boys, boys," Daniel cuts in, "Insanity is science. All good discoveries start with folly and end with minor to major existential collapse.”

Ollie decides it’s better for his blood pressure to ignore him entirely. He breathes out slowly. "Okay, I get that we have to test it," he says tightly. “But can’t we at least test it in a, I don’t know, controlled environment?"

Kimi clicks the watch shut and tucks it into his belt.

"I wasn’t going to do it here," he snaps, bristling. "I’m not a savage!" Ollie pulls a face, mouthing I’m not a savage in an unflattering, mocking fashion. Kimi pointedly ignores him and says, "We need Earth conditions to see if it actually works, anyway."

That's far from the answer Ollie actually expected.

“Earth cond—How the hell are we supposed to get Earth conditions?"

Kimi lifts his goggles over his head. The lenses click and shift colors, to gold, green, and red. “I know a place,” he says. “There’s a simulation chamber under the Department. It mimics real-world physics for Reapers training.”

Ollie thinks, for a second, that Kimi’s joking—except Kimi looks very serious about it. 

“You’re saying you have access to a classified facility.”

“No,” Kimi says. “I’m saying I might know a guy who knows someone who owes me a favor.”

Ollie raises both eyebrows. “Define favor.”

“Definitely stupid, but I assure you, it is highly effective.” Kimi smiles. "You are in, right?"

Every ounce of survival instinct, and what little common sense he still has, wants to say no. Maybe Kimi forgot, but they’re supposed to stay under the radar, not wave a blazing red flag in front of a very large, very pissed-off bull. Especially when everything they’re doing is, technically speaking, wildly illegal.

But then his eyes catch the glowing pocket watch, and he thinks about Oscar, and how no one else is even trying to bring him back.

Ollie sighs and stands up.

“I really do not want to lose my job, and this is the exact sort of dumb crap that ends with us, jobless, in purgatory.”

“I’ll take full responsibility,” Kimi says.

“No you won’t,” Ollie says automatically.

“Correct."

"I don’t like how quickly you said that."

Kimi taps his forhead. “You came to me because of how fast this little bad boy works, remember?”

And he’s infuriatingly right.

He usually is.

Lando doesn’t hate doing groceries, exactly.

It’s just that it feels unnecessarily complicated for what should be a simple task: get food, survive, repeat. But somehow there are a hundred types of tomatoes and seventeen brands of butter and God, why is everything so complicated?

He maneuvers the cart with one hand, kicking the wheel a little because it’s squeaking like mad, while Oscar trails behind with the most judgmental look anyone has ever worn inside a Carrefour.

"You're not supposed to ride it," Oscar says mildly as Lando hops on the edge of the cart and lets it glide a little.

"You're such a party pooper," he shoots back.

Oscar just shakes his head, exasperated in that very specific Oscar way—like he’s sixty percent annoyed, thirty percent resigned, and maybe a little tiny bit amused if you squinted.

The first thing about Oscar: his tolerance for Lando’s bullshit is both very high and absolutely zero, depending on the hour of the day.

They weave through the aisles. Lando is vaguely trying to remember what they actually need ("food" is as far as his brain got) while Oscar, annoying person that he is, has an actual list he scribbled down before they left.

"So what’s on the agenda?" Lando asks, dragging the cart sideways like an idiot. "Bread? Milk? Uh. Lettuce?"

Oscar gives him a dry look over the top of a can of beans. "Yes. And several other items necessary for basic survival."

"Right. Like... cereal?"

"Cereal is just sugar they sell you as breakfast."

"Still breakfast, though," Lando says brightly and tosses a box of Frosted Flakes into the cart before anyone can stop him.

He can practically hear the internal groan Oscar does when things are slightly off-plan.

They turn the corner into the produce aisle, where Lando immediately loses all focus because there's a massive stack of watermelons piled there, in the form of a giant pyramid.

Like, actually, massive.

"Hey," he says, elbowing Oscar, "You think someone could climb that?"

"I would strongly advise against it," he says without even looking.

Lando blows air through his lips. He grabs a basket of apples instead and drops it theatrically into the cart. "One apple a day keeps the demons away."

Oscar pauses mid-step, then turns slowly to him. "The doctor," he corrects. "It keeps the doctor away."

Lando waves a hand. "Same thing, innit?"

The second thing about Oscar: he never lets Lando get away with butchering sayings, but he’s also never actually mad about it. It's just... something he corrects, automatically. A bit like breathing, actually.

They continue down the aisle, and Oscar picks up the last few things. He actually checks expiration dates (nerd), while Lando is starting to visibly wilt with boredom.

Shopping with Oscar, he decides, is a lot like shopping with a very responsible, joy-sapping parent. If he closed his eyes, he could probably pretend he was back at age six, trailing behind his mum while she compared brands of canned tomatoes.

"What about dinner?" he says, throwing a bag of frozen peas into the cart without checking if they already had peas at home. (They did. Like two unopened bags.)

"I thought you wanted to make spaghetti," Oscar says, eyeing the peas disapprovingly.

"I did, but now I’m thinking—what’s that thing? Y'know. The stuff you eat with like... layers? Cheese? Tomato sauce?"

Oscar looks at him for a second. "Lasagna."

Lando snaps his fingers. "That's the one! Legend."

The third thing about Oscar: he always seems to know which word Lando is thinking of, even when Lando's brain has turned into absolute scrambled eggs. Which, to be fair, is often.

At checkout, he tries to pay with the self-scanner but manages to set off the "Assistance Required" light in under thirty seconds, which he feels is a personal record.

Oscar just steps in and somehow manages to sort it all out.

The fourth thing about Oscar: he makes Lando's chaos less chaotic.

By the time they're back outside, bags in hand, the sky’s starting to blush pink over the rooftops, and the air smells like petrol and summer and that weird corner shop next door that always burns incense.

"So," Lando says, swinging a bag onto his shoulder, "I made us a playlist."

Oscar glances over, one eyebrow lifted. "A playlist?"

"Yeah. You know, a playlist. I explained it to you before! It's a list of songs on the phone for when we hang out, or for the pool, or for those weird late nights when we both end up in the kitchen like ghosts or something. Happens a lot, actually."

Oscar shakes his head, fond and baffled all at once.

"You are utterly incomprehensible sometimes."

"And yet," he says, winking, "you love it."

Oscar doesn't answer right away. He shifts the bag in his hands, looking anywhere but at Lando, before muttering, faintly pink in the ears, "Could you open the car, please?"

And Lando, smiling so hard it actually hurts a little, knows he has four reasons why he wouldn’t trade this for anything.

He writes them all down once they're back home.

The kitchen is a mess.

It’s not Oscar’s fault. He tried. He even drew up a perfectly reasonable preparation chart, sectioned by task and time, before they started. But somehow, when Lando’s involved, this just... happens.

There’s flour dusted across the countertops, a half-shredded bag of mozzarella dangling dangerously off the table’s edge, and tomato sauce in places that sauce simply shouldn’t be. (The fridge door, for one.)

Oscar wipes his hands on a dish towel.

Lando is enthusiastically attempting to layer the lasagna. He squints at the baking dish, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration, and drops another sheet of pasta in, slightly crooked, but he pats it down like it’s a job well done.

Oscar clears his throat. “The meat sauce should go first.”

“Huh?” Lando looks up, a smear of tomato sauce on his chin.

Oscar hands him a spatula wordlessly. “Meat sauce, then pasta, then ricotta, then mozzarella slices, then meat sauce again, then parmesan cheese. Then repeat.”

“Ohhh," Lando says. "I was doing it... freestyle."

“Clearly.”

But Oscar isn’t really annoyed. In fact, he finds himself strangely fond of it all, the mess, the chatter, the way Lando sings tunelessly under his breath while working.

He remembers being in kitchens like these. Lily tying her hair up with a handkerchief, laughing as she spilled flour on the floor. His mother pressing dough with the heels of her hands while the morning radio crackled in the corner. Kitchens were noisy places, full of life.

This feels a little like that. Warm and messy and good.

They finish layering the lasagna without burning or breaking anything—Lando insists on doing a slow-motion cheese sprinkle at some point—and they slide it into the oven.

Oscar sets the timer carefully. "Forty minutes."

"Perfect," Lando says, flopping onto one of the kitchen stools. There’s a fine dusting of flour on his nose.

Oscar reaches over to clean it, mindlessly.

It’s strange, he thinks—not unpleasant, just strange—how easily he’s fallen into this life. How natural it feels to sit here and wait for dinner with someone.

He’d always assumed that after death, any second chance would be lonely by design. That attachment would be something pruned away, like a dead branch.

But now Lando is laughing about something (Oscar isn’t even sure what), tapping his fingers against the table in an endless rhythm, and Oscar thinks that maybe it’s not about pruning anything away. What if it’s about seeing what grows back? That would make sense, he believes.

To him, at this very moment, it makes sense, at least.

The oven beeps, eventually, and Lando leaps up like he’s been shot.

“Time to feast!” he declares, fist-pumping the air.

Oscar shakes his head but stands too, helping him with oven mitts and plates.

Later, they eat perched at the counter, and Lando keeps talking between bites, animated and tireless. Oscar listens, half-smiling. He thinks they did a fine job, and that the lasagnas are not only edible this time, but very good.

He doesn’t notice that Lando never actually finishes his plate.

Or that when Oscar yawns in front of the TV, Lando's eyes are still bright, wide open.

That night, Oscar dreams of a masked ball.

In which he slips away from the chattering crowd in the grand hall, out onto the terrace, where the air is fresh with the smell of late-bloom roses and candle smoke.

Beyond the marble railings, the garden slopes gently down to a fountain, glittering in the moonlight. Someone is there, half-drenched, half-sitting in the shallow water, furiously pawing at the bottom like a man possessed.

Oscar blinks.

The figure wears a silver mask, but it has been knocked slightly askew in the scuffle with the water. Curly hair clings wetly to his forehead, though Oscar can't see his face in the dark.

"Are you well?" he calls down, unable to keep the faint incredulity from his voice.

The man whips around, looking more offended than embarrassed. "Of course I am," he snaps. "Never better."

Oscar steps closer, peering down at the fountain.

"It certainly seems so. Shall I fetch you a lifeboat?"

"You could fetch me my dignity, if you happen to find it floating by," the man mutters, raking a hand through his dripping hair. He wades another step, slipping slightly.

"You’re making a right spectacle of yourself."

"And you," the man says grandly, "are the rudest man I have had the misfortune to meet this evening."

Oscar leans lazily against the balustrade. "Well, the night is young. I am sure you shall mingle and find worse."

"Oh, I intend to," the stranger says, straightening up with all the wounded pride of a soaked cat, "just as soon as I retrieve my ring."

"I doubt you will retrieve anything at all by flailing about like a drunken heron," Oscar says, with the kind of dispassionate helpfulness that is not helpful at all.

The man plants his hands on his hips. "Do you plan to stand there all evening, offering commentary, or will you lend assistance?"

Oscar pushes off the balustrade with a long-suffering sigh.

"Very well. But if I catch some ghastly disease from wading into this glorified birdbath, I shall name you responsible."

"I would be honored," the man says, mock-bowing low enough that his sodden hair drips onto the marble.

Oscar steps forward, careful not to slip, and kneels by the fountain’s edge, peering into the moonlit water.

For one dizzying second, their gazes lock—green eyes meeting brown—and something deep inside Oscar shifts.

He knows this man.

Some part of him aches every time he sees him.

The next morning, Oscar finds Lando on the rooftop terrace, perched on the ledge like some kind of bird, camera slung around his neck, a cigarette dangling between his lips.

He’s squinting through the viewfinder, angling for a shot of something far below, Oscar can’t immediately tell what. It’s too early for anything to make sense.

He steps closer, eyeing the cigarette curiously. "You smoke?" he asks, voice scratchy with sleep.

"Just sometimes," Lando says breezily, exhaling a thin curl of smoke. He doesn’t even glance back, too focused on whatever it is he's trying to capture.

"Listen, right, so I had this idea, absolute genius, like, for real, I was thinking, what if you shoot reflections, but only reflections, like you never take a photo of the thing itself, just how it looks in puddles or mirrors or windows? And you could do like a whole series on it, and it’d be like, about perception and all that, and no one would even realize what they're looking at until they really look, y'know?"

He taps the side of his head with the hand still holding the cigarette, ash drifting into his hair. "Brain’s massive, mate. Unstoppable."

"You didn’t sleep, did you?" Oscar says suddenly.

"I slept," Lando says. He flicks his ash off the ledge and shrugs. "I mean, a bit. But I’m not very tired."

"You don’t look like you slept."

"I did!" he snaps. "I can sleep whenever I want. Don’t worry about it."

Oscar looks unconvinced. He pulls his sweater tighter around himself against the early chill, thinking, not for the first time, that Lando is like a storm trapped in a bottle.

Loud, restless, and maybe a little bit breakable if you shook him too hard.