Against You

Lando

Lando POV

The night was freezing and damp. The wind chill cut through my thin coat and sent chills across the skin on my back. My chest hurt from hunching into myself. Where was he?

I'd checked my phone a thousand times and the battery was about to die. Twenty minutes turned into thirty, turned into fifty, and still no one came.

I watched the water droplets dancing in the floodlights. Half rain, half mist. My phone buzzed that it was on fifteen percent, and fading fast.

"You okay, son?" a track official asked me. I nodded and said my dad would be here soon. Imagine being a racing champion but still having to wait for your father to pick you up from a birthday party at the karting track. I was seventeen, for goodness sake. I cursed myself for not working on my road license.

The official nodded, steadying his much thicker coat against the wind, and walked to his car.

Buzz. Five percent.

The track stood empty and dark after the last employee left. The last guard switched off all the lights but he brought me out a coffee, at least to warm my fingers even if I hated the taste. He would be here soon.

Twelve missed calls said otherwise.

What if something happened? The worries in my head pulled anxiety to my chest which made me shudder just as much as the biting cold. He said he would be here. He'll be here.

I ended up drinking the coffee. It was bitter and unsweetened but it warmed my chest and gave my tired muscles some respite from shivering.

Buzz. Zero percent.

Now I was getting scared. I could find my way back home on foot in theory, but that would mean fifteen miles of walking in the pitch black and awful weather. My mind flashed back to survival documentaries on the TV and I moved to huddle down in a bus shelter. Shelter. That's what I needed.

I sat there for two more hours.

My dad was never a racer. He never sped on the motorway, never revved the engine at the lights. He tried to talk me out of karting too, saying it was way too dangerous for his little boy. He didn't want me getting hurt.

But he was the one who died in a car crash.

People always told me not to blame myself, but I never understood why I would. Why blame myself for something out of my control? I threw myself into racing instead, where I had the power to do and change anything I wanted. My mother hardly agreed to let me continue, but she saw that it helped me.

My dad died on Oscar Piastri's birthday, and he never once said anything to me. He never checked in, he never said sorry. After that day, the next words he spoke to me were on his first day at the MTC.