Chapter Text
The bass crawled through the wall like a persistent thought he couldn’t shut off. Oscar dragged a pillow over his head anyway, because hope was stubborn even when common sense wasn’t. The red digits on the clock glowed back at him: 2:03 AM.
Perfect. Another night after he’d show up to work wired and useless. If he fell asleep right now—he wouldn’t—he could scrape four hours before his eight o’clock meeting. He turned on his side, then his back, then stared at the ceiling like it might finally shut up if he glared hard enough.
He’d lived here two years. Two calm, mostly silent, adult years. The building was old but civilized: neighbors who said hello and closed their doors softly, hallways that smelled like laundry on Sundays and soup on rainy days. Then one month ago he moved in.
Lando Norris. New tenant, DJ, walking smile. The building chat had exploded: He helped me carry groceries! He fixed the lobby light! He’s doing a set Friday, I can get you on the list! Everyone loved him. Oscar had replied Great and muted the thread.
It would be easier if the whole building suffered, but of course they didn’t. Marco on three worked nights. The flight attendants in 1B were gone half the week. Mrs. Ruiz took out her hearing aid at ten. And as it turned out, only the wall between Oscar and Lando had been “missed” during the last round of upgrades. His bad luck. Their shared wall might as well have been made of paper.
The kick drum landed again—thump, thump—so clean it rattled the glass on his nightstand. He could hear a bright line of synth under it, the kind that would’ve been catchy if it wasn’t trying to live inside his skull. He shoved the pillow down harder. His heart tapped back in time, and he hated that.
He reached for his phone where it buzzed against the books he never read this late. Logan would be awake; Logan was always awake.
OSCAR: He’s at it again. Two a.m.
LOGAN: DJ Sunshine?
OSCAR: Do not call him that.
LOGAN: he lives in your head rent-free
OSCAR: no, he owes me rent for the noise.
LOGAN: go knock. u know u want to
OSCAR: I have knocked. Nicely. Not nicely. Note under door.
LOGAN: then knock meaner
OSCAR: I have a meeting at eight
LOGAN: go be scary then come sleep on my couch next time
He stared at the screen until the little typing bubble stopped trying to become words. The bass rolled on, smug. He couldn’t believe one cheerful stranger had turned his apartment into a stage he hadn’t asked to stand on.
Fine.
He threw back the covers, yanked a hoodie over his t-shirt and stepped into the hallway barefoot. The motion light blinked awake, wan and reluctant. He rapped on the door next to his with the kind of patience that was actually fury. The music dipped. Then it cut.
The door opened on a slice of light and Lando leaned against the frame like the apartment belonged to him and the corridor did too. Curls pushed back, headphones around his neck, a glass in one hand. Awake eyes. Wide, unfair mouth. A smear of something dark on his forearm like marker or dust.
“Well, good evening, sunshine,” he said, smiling like they were already in on the same joke. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Norris,” Oscar said, because not using a first name made a useful kind of distance. “It’s two in the morning.”
“Mhm.” Lando glanced at his watch as if to confirm time still existed. “It is, yeah.”
“I have work at eight,” Oscar said. “Like last time. And the time before. I asked you to keep it down after eleven. That wasn’t a suggestion.”
Lando’s smile thinned, then returned. “I remember. I turned it down.”
“You turned it off just now,” Oscar said, and heard his own voice flatten. “There’s a difference.”
“Okay, Pastry,” Lando said mildly, and Oscar’s jaw clicked.
“It’s Piastri.”
“That’s what I said.” A beat. “Pastry.”
“You’re not funny.”
“I’m very funny,” Lando said, and there was an edge under the lightness now. “Just not to you, apparently.”
“The lease says no loud music after eleven,” Oscar went on, because rules were not meant to be flexible if someone had already bent them into a joke. “Forty decibels. Quiet hours. There are people trying to sleep.”
“Forty decibels,” Lando echoed, head tilting slightly. “Who decides what’s ‘loud?’”
“When my bedframe vibrates, that’s loud,” Oscar said. “When I can hear your voice through the wall, that’s loud. When I know your minor chord changes better than my own last name—”
“Which is Pastry,” Lando said.
“Piastri.”
Lando’s mouth quirked. “You have to admit, Pastry is funnier.”
“I don’t,” Oscar said. “Turn it down. Now.”
“Or what?” Lando leaned a shoulder into the frame: too casual, too practiced. “You’ll come bang on my door again in those very cute pajamas?”
Oscar could feel heat lick up his neck, the ugly, obvious kind. “They’re pants.”
“They are,” Lando agreed brightly. “Plaid. Bold choice.”
He wanted to drag the conversation back into sane territory; this was always the problem, Lando would take something simple and tilt it until Oscar lost footing. “You can do your… whatever it is you’re doing in the afternoon. Or at your job. At the club.”
“I sleep in the afternoon,” Lando said. “I work at night. This is me… working.” He lifted his glass, a sip of water, apparently. That offended Oscar on a new level, for reasons he couldn’t name. “I’m not throwing parties. It’s just me and a pair of monitors, not a sub. Your wall’s the issue, not me.”
“My wall exists,” Oscar said carefully, “and yet, somehow, you’re the noise.”
“Are you always like this?” Lando asked. “Or do I get the special version?”
“Do you always act like nobody else lives on the planet?” Oscar shot back. “Or is this your neighbor discount?”
Lando laughed; there was no warmth in it. “See, this is why everyone else loves me. They let me be. You knock like a cop and then read me bedtime rules.”
“Because you don’t follow them.”
“I do,” Lando said. “Mostly.”
“‘Mostly’ isn’t a rule,” Oscar said. “It’s an excuse.”
“Better than a tantrum.” Lando’s eyes flicked, sharp now, catching on Oscar’s clenched fists. “Relax, Pastry. You’ll sprain something.”
“You can’t keep doing this,” Oscar said. It came out thinner, more tired, than he wanted, which made him angrier. “I’m not asking for a lot. I am asking you to be a decent neighbor.”
“I am a decent neighbor.” Lando pushed off the frame, irritation showing clear for the first time. “Ask literally anyone else in this building. I carry groceries. I fix lights. I change the batteries in the laundry room clock because apparently that was no one’s job for six months. You’re the only one at my door every week like I owe you my schedule.”
“You owe everyone some quiet.”
“And you owe everyone not being insufferable.”
They glared at each other like idiots. Oscar thought of the way the bass had carved a trench through his brain. He thought of the way Lando’s smile slid around a sentence and made it useless. He thought of his eight a.m. and the way he could already feel the weight of it between his eyes.
“Forty decibels,” he said again, because he needed something to hold onto. “After eleven. That’s not unreasonable.”
“Fascinating,” Lando murmured. “Do you quote rulebooks on dates too, or am I just lucky?”
“My personal life is not relevant.”
“So… yes,” Lando said. “And now I know why you’re single.”
“I didn’t— I am—” Oscar shut his mouth on the fluster he could hear and hated. “I’m not doing this. Turn it down.”
Lando’s smile came back, slow. “You don’t have to do this, Pastry. Earplugs exist. So do noise-canceling headphones. Meditation apps. A white noise playlist, oh, wait, I can make you one.”
“I have all of those,” Oscar said, and saw the surprise flicker over Lando’s face. “They don’t beat you.”
“A compliment,” Lando said lightly. “Finally.”
“Not remotely,” Oscar said through his teeth. “If this continues, I’ll bring it up with the building manager. Again.”
“Do that.” Lando spread a hand out, inviting, mock-polite. “And tell them to fix your wall while you’re at it. Or move your bed. Or your attitude.”
“You are unbelievable.”
“Right back at you.”
A beat stretched, thin as wire. The hallway bulb hummed. Somewhere on another floor, a door shut softly, proof it was possible to live without making noise.
“Forty decibels,” Oscar said once more, because he was repetitive when he was trying not to yell. “After eleven.”
“You really like saying that number,” Lando said, and something almost like amusement tugged at his mouth again. “Okay. New plan. I’ll keep it lower. Not because you told me to. Because I chose to. Satisfied?”
“Lower than what you think is low and what I can’t hear are not the same thing,” Oscar said.
“Then we’re both about to be disappointed.” Lando’s voice was bright as cut glass. “Goodnight, Pastry.”
He shut the door in Oscar’s face. Not hard, not slamming. Just firm. Final.
Oscar stood there, stupid in plaid, with the handle inches from his knuckles. The silence on the other side made a point for three long seconds. Then the music came back—quieter, yes, but still there, a pulse thinned to thread. Just enough to prove Lando could do it and just enough to make Oscar want to walk into the sea.
He went back to his apartment and shut his own door more gently than he wanted to. He stood in the kitchen because the kitchen felt like a place where grown-ups made decisions. The beat seeped through the wall like a petty promise.
His phone buzzed again.
LOGAN: well?
OSCAR: He’s unbearable.
LOGAN: u love him actually
OSCAR: I love the idea of eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
LOGAN: rude. how’s the noise
OSCAR: lower
LOGAN: progress
OSCAR: Not enough
LOGAN: come sleep here tmrw
OSCAR: I shouldn’t have to evacuate my home because a stranger thinks he’s a nightclub
He put the phone face down and grabbed the drawer where he kept all emergency solutions: foam earplugs, a headset, a cheap white-noise machine he’d bought at one in the morning on a desperate night two weeks ago. He plugged it in. Wind filled the room, fake and useless. He added earplugs. He put the headset over the earplugs and lay down like someone preparing for flight.
He could still hear the beat. The bone carries sound; his jaw remembered it and handed it upstairs to his brain. He glared at the ceiling and made a list to keep himself from marching back next door:
-Email the building manager at 7:59 about the wall.
-Move the bed to the other side of the room this weekend.
-Ask Logan if he still has that spare rug.
-Pretend not to be a monster at the meeting.
-Buy stronger earplugs, or a hammer.
He rolled, and the mattress thumped the frame in time with the music like a mockery. He imagined Lando in the next room, head down, hands moving, mouth tilted, enjoying himself so thoroughly he didn’t notice the thread of other people’s lives he kept tugging.
Everyone else loved him. Of course they did. He was the kind of person who lived easily, who said good morning in an elevator and meant it, who fixed lights without being asked, who handed out smiles like flyers. Oscar did not live easily. He lived on schedules and lists. He lived in the space between other people’s noise. He’d been fine at it until last month.
The music thinned again, a long fade to almost nothing. He kept his eyes closed, suspicious. It stayed soft. He let his shoulders drop a millimeter. If he slept now, he could still—no, don’t count.
He fell asleep angry, which at least felt like control.
The alarm yanked him up feeling like wet cardboard. He turned it off with more force than necessary and sat a moment with his feet on the floor and the taste of no sleep in his mouth. The wall was quiet now. He listened harder, because sometimes silence was a trick. Nothing.
He showered too cold, freezing himself awake, because pain, apparently, was the only thing that worked. He made coffee in the ugly mug that said GOOD ENOUGH IS NOT and almost smiled at the irony. The reflection in the toaster looked like a man who did not, in fact, take jokes well at 2 AM.
He was locking his door when the elevator dinged and spat out two people with yoga mats and optimism. They smiled. He managed half a nod. He glanced, not meaning to, at Lando’s door. The scuffed paint. The handle that had closed in his face. The thin strip of light at the bottom, gone now. Sleeping, probably. He tried to decide if that felt like an injustice.
On the ground floor, he caught Mrs. Ruiz by the mailboxes, cardigan tight, paper bag smelling like bread. “You look tired,” she told him in the voice of someone who had earned the right to comment.
“Long night,” he said, which was true and told her nothing she could fix.
She patted his arm with a small hand that had known a lot of years. “They’re putting fairy lights in the courtyard this weekend. That nice young man said he’d help.”
“Norris,” Oscar said before his brain could stop his mouth.
“Yes,” she beamed. “So polite.”
Oscar made a sound that was not a laugh and not anything else either. “Have a good day, Mrs. Ruiz.”
“You too, dear.” She peered up. “And try to rest your eyes. They look… shouty.”
He didn’t know what that meant, but he believed her.
The eight o’clock meeting dragged and snapped; he was short twice and apologized once. He got through his slides and remembered his points and left with the raw sense he’d been awake a week. He sent an email to the building manager with the subject line Shared Wall Noise and attached a photo of the not-insulated section the electrician had exposed last month. He wrote Please advise because he didn’t trust himself with Please fix it yesterday.
By the time he let himself back into the apartment late afternoon, the place felt like a neutral space again. No sound bled through. He put his bag down and stood still, listening, like the building had rules he hadn’t learned yet. Quiet.
He ate toast standing over the sink. He told himself he wouldn’t check. He checked. He put one palm flat to the wall. Cool, calm.
At ten thirty, he ran over his meeting notes for the next day and gave up pretending they mattered. He brushed his teeth. He turned out the light. He lay down and waited in the dark for the thing his jaw was already bracing for.
Right on schedule, at 11:06, the bass started. Softer than last night. Still there. A polite tap-tap where there had been a punch. It wasn’t enough to wake a person. It was enough to keep one from sleeping if that person was already waiting for it and wanted reasons.
He threw off the blanket, went to the wall, and tapped back twice with his knuckles, not gently.
The bass paused for a single beat, like the music itself considered him. Then it went on, a fraction lower, petty math.
He stared at the dark and felt the shape of his own temper. He could knock again. He didn’t want to stand in that hallway tonight. He didn’t want the smile or the word Pastry curling at the end of the sentence. He also didn’t want to be the person who swallowed this for a month and then exploded in the lobby in front of fairy lights.
He got back into bed. He put the pillow over his ear. He told himself a story where the building manager wrote back We’ll fix it this week and Lando found another wall to love and the club he actually got paid to be loud in.
The beat threaded the edge of sleep and yanked him back three times before it finally blurred into the general hum of the city and he lost track.
In the morning there would be coffee and emails and a decision about whether to move the bed. There would be another night and probably another conversation.
For now, there was the last thing he’d heard before Lando closed the door: Goodnight, Pastry, tossed like a coin into the space between them. It glittered in his head, bright and irritating, and he hated that it landed at all.