Chapter Text
“Hello?”
Oscar opens the door onto an eerily empty medical office. The layout of the room is the same as always — plain white cabinets and counters lined with easily sanitised linoleum; the messy doctor’s desk at the forefront of the room. The only difference today is that, unlike Oscar’s previous visits, the room is eerily empty.
“Hello-o-o?” Oscar calls out again, wondering if the track doctor is on a late lunch break, or has simply gone home for the day without telling anyone else. “Anyone here?”
“ HEY! ” All of a sudden, a familiar figure pops up from beneath the doctor’s desk like a jack-in-the-box let loose, giving Oscar a fright. “Osc! What brings you here to my humble office?”
Oscar’s brows knit together as he looks at the “doctor” — at his tousled curly hair, his pointed ears, the oversized white coat loosely draped over orange-and-black fireproofs, and perhaps most worryingly of all, the mischievous grin that Oscar knows all too well.
“Lando,” he says. “This is not your office. What are you doing here?”
Lando just scoffs, pulling up the rickety metal chair behind the doctor’s desk with an ear-piercing squeal. “This absolutely is my office. The med bay’s been understaffed recently, you know. They could do with all the help they can get. And you know I love helping people.” He gestures to the chair on the other side of the doctor’s desk as Oscar looks on in sheer confusion. “Come on, then, Oscy. Have a seat.”
Oscar just eyes the chair warily, as if it is a wild animal. “So, uh… the doctor on duty asked you … specifically… to help him run the med bay?”
“He just said that more hands were needed in the med office,” Lando replies nonchalantly. “Who was I to refuse?”
“I think maybe he was saying that they needed some extra staff in general. Y’know… preferably ones with medical licenses?”
Lando raises an eyebrow at Oscar. “Who are you? The medical license police?”
When Oscar is too stumped to reply for a split second, Lando just rolls his eyes. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. Now you can either take a seat and tell me what’s up, or you can go home. Cause there’s no other doctor here right now, and you should be grateful that I’ve stepped in to make sure that the good people of Formula 1 are safe and sound in the midst of a medical understaffing crisis.”
Oscar is so stunned by Lando’s vehemence that he finds himself sitting in the proffered chair without much complaint. Before he can fully process his own actions, Lando beams warmly at him, and steeples his fingers together in a decent approximation of a real doctor’s professional mannerisms.
“Alright, Oscy,” he says. “What can I do for my beloved teammate today?”
“Well…” Oscar grimaces. “I’ve been feeling some discomfort in my ribs lately. It’s there all the time, and it especially hurts when I’m driving. It’s not that bad — in terms of pain, I’d say it’s a three out of ten? My rib is just never not hurting, though. So I thought I’d get it checked out.”
Lando snaps his fingers. “And you have come to the right person, Oscar. I’ll get you ship-shape in no time — we need you out there fighting fit if we’re going to have any chance of clinching the Constructors’ Championship this year.”
Oscar pauses for a moment, remembering who he is talking to. “I appreciate the sentiment, Lando, but… what the hell are you gonna do about it? Like… do you know how bones even work?”
“Uh, yeah? They’re part of your skeleton. Obviously. ” Without elaborating on that, Lando gets up and whirls imperiously towards the door as his ill-fitting white doctor’s coat billows out behind him. “Come on. Let’s get you an X-ray.”
Oscar follows Lando down the corridor towards a smaller room with a radioactive warning sticker on the door, momentarily reassured by the fact that Lando seems to know what an X-ray even is. However, the discomfort in his ribs is soon coupled with a growing pit in his stomach as Lando steps into the X-ray room, puts his hands on his hips, and lets out a contemplative “Ah… hmm.”
“Alright. What now?” Oscar looks to Lando, hoping he really isn’t as clueless as he suspects.
“Uhh…” Lando’s eyes very obviously scan the room, and he turns to Oscar after a brief moment. “You go stand over there, and put your feet over where the painted shoes are. They’re painted like that cause… that’s where your feet go.”
“Oh, really,” Oscar responds dryly.
“Really,” replies Lando, as his teammate’s sarcasm completely escapes him. “In the meantime, I will get things… set up.”
Oscar, now doubting the wisdom of his decision to stay, wants nothing more than to walk out the door instead. But a timely twinge from his ribcage keeps him in the room — better to at least have some idea of what’s wrong with him sooner rather than later, he supposes, even if it is Lando of all people handing out the diagnosis.
A minute passes, and then another, and another. Oscar shifts his feet in the little white outlines painted on the floor, then cranes his neck to look over at Lando, who is fidgeting away in the computer booth.
“Do you know how to operate any of this stuff?” asks Oscar, taking in the awfully large and complicated bulk of the X-ray machine. Even as the question leaves his mouth, he regrets asking — he isn’t quite sure that either answer from his teammate will reassure him.
“Oh, absolutely,” comes the distracted reply.
“Are you just Googling how to use the X-ray machine?”
“Nuh-uh,” replies Lando, in a tone that implies that he is, indeed, Googling how to use the X-ray machine.
“Should I strip down, or something, while I wait?”
Lando looks up at him, brows furrowed. “Why would you do that? X-ray machines can see through things, like skin, and clothes. Crazy that you didn’t know that. I guess that’s why I’m here, filling in for the doctor, and you’re over there, getting your ribs checked on.”
“Alright, Lando.” Oscar rolls his eyes. “Let me know if that’s what Google says, too.”
“I’m not checking Google!” Lando retorts, even as he frantically types out what Oscar presumes to be another mildly misspelled search term into his browser’s top bar.
Another minute of frenzied typing passes, before Lando’s plaintive voice reaches Oscar from the computer booth. “So, uh… yeah. You do need to take off your overalls and fireproofs from the waist up. But that’s not what Google said. I totally did not Google ‘do you need to take off clothes during x-ray’ or anything like that. I just remembered this now. Because I’m the doctor. And doctors know these things.”
“Okay, Lando. Do you also know how to take an X-ray scan?”
“Of course I do! I’ll just need about five minutes to remember how to.”
Oscar just sighs.
He suspects they are going to be here for a while.
///
“It’s broken!”
Oscar is briefly transported back in time, to the moment when he’d heard those fateful words yelled out over team radio one cloudy race day. He blinks, shaking the memory off. “What?”
“It’s broken!” repeats Lando in the present moment, still dressed in that goofily oversized white coat, and now sporting a pair of blue surgical gloves on his hands to boot. “Your rib, that is.”
“Why are you wearing gloves?!” Oscar asks, so distracted by the sight of them that the news about his rib doesn’t even register as his top priority.
Lando just pulls a face. “Uh, because doctors wear gloves? Obviously?”
The corners of Oscar’s mouth pull down in a visibly disapproving frown. “No, they don’t? What are you even touching right now that requires gloves to handle, Lando?”
“Well, Oscar, ” retorts Lando, “you wear gloves when you are handling something with care. And I make it a point to handle all my patients with care. I’m handling the bad news that your rib is broken, with care. Cause that’s how Dr. Norris does things around here, okay?”
Oscar doesn’t even want to begin to unravel the multiple implications behind the ‘Dr. Norris’ epithet — all of which range from bad to disastrous. “Okay. Fine. Anyway, how many weeks off from driving do I have to take?”
“Weeks off?” Lando looks at him questioningly.
Oscar’s jaw almost drops. “Yeah? Cause my rib is broken?”
Lando shakes his head, infuriatingly calm. “You don’t get any weeks off. Driving will help heal the fracture, actually. The G-force from being in the car will fuse your bones back together.”
“Did Google also tell you this?”
“No, Oscy, logic and common sense told me this. When you push two things together hard enough, they join together. Same with the two sides of your broken rib, in the car. I’m not sure what you’re not getting here.”
“I’m not entirely sure that’s how bones work, Lando—”
“Well, I’m sure that’s how bones work, Oscar, ” Lando shoots back. “I saw it in a movie once.”
Oscar gulps nervously. If he cannot appeal to Lando’s reason, maybe inflating his sense of authority will help. “You know what, you’re probably right. You are the doctor here, after all.”
“That’s right,” says Lando, obviously preening a little.
“So maybe you could give me a little break? Not because of the rib, or anything. Just because… you know. Racing is hard. I need some personal time. Maybe you could take up that pad over there and write me a doctor’s note for a week or two. Please?”
“Absolutely not!” Lando shakes his head ardently. “I need you out there on the track, Oscy! Who else is going to defend me from the terrible Ferrari twosome next week? Besides, like I said, continuing to drive will help that rib heal. Trust me! Now get out there and get back on the sim! We have races to win!”
Trusting Lando is the last thing that Oscar can find it in himself to do right now, but there is clearly nothing else he can say that will change his teammate’s mind. Sighing in defeat, he gets up out of the chair, waving briefly at Lando as he leaves the medical office.
Besides, maybe Lando doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Maybe he can’t read X-rays properly, and there really is nothing wrong with Oscar’s rib after all.
It can’t be that bad… right?