Chapter Text
Learning anything about Doc takes patience – a patience that, before he’d met the man, Lightning McQueen would’ve thought he did not possess. He’s always been fast, on and off the track, burning through friendships and good will and girlfriends and boyfriends and money, a whirlwind, perpetually in motion. Doc, by contrast, seems as unmovable as the rocks that rise, orange and static, from the sunburnt earth of Ornament Valley. Whenever a bit of that rock chips and crumbles, and some little secret comes to light, it’s as infuriating as it is satisfying. It hurts, how hard he has to pry to learn anything at all, even now, but there’s relief in the learning, too, like picking off a scab, some pleasure in the welling up of blood.
In the months that follow Chick Hicks winning the Piston Cup, Lightning learns a great deal, albeit in nonlinear, jagged, sharp-edged fragments. Some of the lustre rubs off. The vision of Doc as his chief, the refurbished gleam of the Hudson Hornet, all fade a little. Doc’s brilliant, sure, but he’s lonely. It’s an old kind of loneliness that’s turned bitter with time. He can still be short with Lightning and he often is.
That’s the first clue that things are metastasizing into something fucked and broken – the temper, the way it spikes. Doc’s often seen with a drink in his hand, and Lightning wonders, in the space between two a.m. and morning, if he’s gone and fallen for someone a little too like his old man. For better or worse, the truth is more complicated. He learns this slowly. The pieces fall into place: the way Doc limps on the bad days, palms his hip, the way he always has one eye on the clock when his pain is bad. The man is a licensed physician, after all. It makes sense that he’s self-medicating, and after a crash like he’d had, Lightning can’t really blame him.
He’s strict about it – harsher with himself than he ever is with Lightning. Never takes enough to get hooked, not completely. Never takes enough to fully take the edge off. Just enough to get by.
“Put it together all by yourself, did you?” he asks, when Lightning confronts him.
“I’m just – worried – I mean – you know what you’re doing right? You’re... you’re being careful?”
“You think I’m a junkie?” he snorts, mocking, handsome face gone ugly with mistrust as he raises the glass in his hand to his lips, glowing golden in the dim light of the setting sun. Lightning, having asked too much, spars back gently.
“I just don’t think you should drink if you’re... otherwise under the influence.”
“Your objection is noted,” he drawls dryly. But I’ve been doing this long before I met you. It’s implied, but crystal clear. “Now go home. You need to sleep.”
You need to sleep too, Lightning thinks, but doesn’t push it. There’s no point. Men like Doc don’t respond to direct force, they respond to slow erosion. He tells himself that’s why he’s avoiding starting an argument. He tells himself he’s just using his past experience to steer clear of pointless, futile drama. The lie sits painful, like a badly set limb.
That Doc drives after he’s taken something, be it booze or pills, bothers Lightning, though. He realizes in retrospect it’s probably happened before – probably countless times. Times they’ve been together, and he hasn’t noticed. Near misses. That gets under his skin. It’s not just the safety issue – it’s that it’s too close to home. It grazes him like a stray bullet. He feels the same squirming wrongness he feels when “Say It Ain’t So” comes on the radio. It hits him in his guts, in that mess of flesh and nerves where ‘father’, ‘father figure’, ‘Dad’ and ‘Doc’ are all intermingled in the worst way.
It boils over when they’ve been out in the desert. Practice takes its toll on the young man, and while he’s removing a mess of cactus from the right from wheel well, the result of a poorly executed turn, he gouges his palm bad on a spine. He’s so deep in his head, he doesn’t notice, not until he’s back in the car and bleeding all over the seats.
“I’ll fix you up back at the house,” Doc assures him, and suggests they places. He slides into the drivers’ seat like butter melting in the dry heat of the air. Lightning, palm aching, exhausted, doesn’t argue. His brain feels like it’s being fried with a low dose of electricity. He stares at the blood in his cupped hand with passive fascination.
He notices, though, quickly, that Doc isn’t keeping straight on the road. He’s weaving – not terribly, and they’re not going all that fast – but enough that it’s noticeable.
“You tired, Doc?”
“I’m alright.”
“You just seem a little... off.”
“Son –”
Lightning shudders. For a split second, he’s seven, and he’s handing Dad the hip flask of Wild Turkey he keeps in the glove box, while he watches the side mirrors of their station wagon for signs of lawmen. He shakes out of the memory as quickly as he falls into it, but it leaves him feeling clammy and creeped out.
“Pass me my coffee, would you? It’s in the travel mug on the floor there, should be by your left foot. That’ll see me right.”
Lightning picks it up, and on a whim, he sniffs it as he turns the lid to open.
“This isn’t coffee.”
“It’s mostly coffee. Give it here.”
Anger licks at Lightning’s face and neck. He’s unmoored in time, out of control, ricocheting between man and boy. It’s good Doc is driving, he thinks, manically. If it was me, I’d surely kill us.
“Bullshit, it’s mostly coffee! This smells like Jim Beam.”
“Kid –”
“Don’t ‘Kid’ me,” he hisses, scowling, disgusted with Doc, but more than that, disgusted with himself. “Forget it.”
He waits for Doc to get angry. His old man surely would’ve been. Was. But Doc’s not his father – not quite. He just looks defeated, deflated, and old. He doesn’t ask again, and the cup gets stashed back on the floor like an unwanted heirloom.
Doc gets them home in one piece. They don’t talk. He presses some gauze and rubbing alcohol into Lightning’s good hand, then leaves him in the kitchen, going up to bed. Lightning watches his slumped shoulders, and the bald spot at the back of his head, the radial thinning of his silver hair, and he feels something like want fucking the tangle of anger in his stomach.
There’s times he genuinely hates Doc. He can see the old man’s self-destructive streak, see the parallels, see how deeply fucked he’s allowed this whole thing to get. He starts to drink a little more than he normally does, just to allow himself to sleep. Just to take the edge off, his father’s voice says through his lips, and he hates what he’s becoming. Doc’s remaking him in his own image, fatal flaws and all.
oOo
When Lightning breaks down, when it all comes out, he’s with Sally, and maybe it isn’t a good thing to pour these kind of feelings out into the lap of the woman you used to date, but he can’t talk to Mater about it, even if the guy is his best friend. It’s complicated in a way that would distress him. He sees Doc as good, and sees Lightning as good, and in his world, there’d be no obstacle to stop two good people getting together. No way two good people could tear each other apart.
Sally invites him over, because, in her words, ‘it’s unhealthy to spend all your downtime locked in your room listening to Nirvana’ which is a hell of a personal attack. He hadn’t realized she could even hear his music. Apparently the cones have thin walls, if you’re puttering around outside. Apparently half the town’s heard him blasting “Heart-Shaped Box” and “Rape Me” on loop for the better part of three weeks, wearing out his In Utero CD.
So he tells her. Lays it all out on the line. She’s not as observant as she could be, tired, in pyjamas, hair all loose around her shoulders. She doesn’t notice the tells that he’s worked his way through a six-pack of Coors just so he could talk to her about this shit. She just takes one look at his broken, helpless expression, and steps aside to let him in her room.
He expects Sally to be surprised, but she isn’t. She just swears softly, shaking her head, and gets two cold ones from the fridge. Cold ones. She never used to call them that, she’d just call them beers with an ‘s.’ As in ‘let’s get some beers.’ Cold ones was his thing. He’d showed her the sbemail when he was trying and failing to get her to see the humour of Homestar Runner, early in their ill-fated courtship. Of all the Strong Bad clips, the Property of Ones was the one that had struck her as laugh-out-loud funny. Since then, on the hottest of desert days, should they run into each other, she’ll ask him if he wanted to go to Flo’s for a cold one, since ‘the colder it is, the more of a one it is.’
It all comes out, like a hairball snaked out of a backed up drain. He spills his guts over some ones that are very cold, that he’s worried about Doc, and attracted to Doc, and maybe kind of a little in love with Doc, all in one sprawling, hellish mess of a conversation. And he looks at her as she listens, attentive, and kind, and really pretty. Barefoot and braless, she smells good, and she’s still hot, small frame drowning in baggy shorts and his worn out Hootie and the Blowfish t-shirt she borrowed and never gave back, and he wonders what the fuck is wrong with him, to have thrown all that away over some stupid, one-sided crush on a guy old enough and messed up enough to be his dad, who’s been voluntarily single as long as he’s been alive.
“Doc doesn’t like entanglements,” Sally says finally. “Far as I understand, anyway. I mean... I’m not trying to shoot your hopes down, and I’m not just saying this in some shitty attempt to sabotage you... I mean, I’m sad we didn’t work out, but I’m not that kind of person. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“I know.”
“Anyway, it’s probably better we didn’t... commit. I have to admit, you scared me a little.”
This is news.
“I scared you?”
“Yeah. You still do. You live too fast, Lightning. You’re always running around like you’ve got ten minutes to live. It’s not healthy. I knew lawyers in LA who stressed out less than you do. Heck, I stressed out less than you do and I had a freaking nervous breakdown before moving out here. You keep listing off all the things you’re worried about that Doc does, but honestly I’m just worried that the two of you are exactly the same in all the ways that’d screw you both up worse. You’re codependent. After what you’ve told me about your dad –”
“This has nothing to do with my dad –”
“Don’t piss in my face and tell me it’s raining, Lightning. Look – I’m worried about you. You’re getting... weird. Fucked up. If Doc’s the reason that’s happening, maybe you should cool it – get out of each other’s lives for a bit.”
“Wow,” he says after a while. It’s all he can think to say.
“I’m sorry,” she says, though she doesn’t sound like it. “I don’t lie to people I care about. You want my honest opinion? I think Doc’s been the way he is now for so long he wouldn’t know what to do if love came and bit him on the nose. He’s not fixable, he’s not your project, and more than that, I don’t think you’ve got a great chance he’d even be interested. I’m pretty sure he’s straight.”
“I mean, he doesn’t date. How could you know for sure?”
Lightning hates how hopeful he sounds. It’s pathetic.
“He was married...?”
She says it like she’s surprised he didn’t know.
“What!? When? To who?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No!”
Lightning feels like a ball of nerves, mostly angry and pained. He rakes a hand through his shaggy blond hair and shakes his head.
“What the fuck... who was he married to, Sally?”
“I don’t – if you don’t know about it, I don’t want to tell.”
“Sally!”
“It’s not right! Look – you – you dropped me into this and now you want me to – to gossip about people and – just... do yourself a favour, Lightning. If you want some old man to pay attention to you, find one somewhere else!”
There it is – at last, the wounded undercurrent he’d expected has settled into her voice. He’s pushed her too far, finally, another casualty of his impulsive nature. He wants apologize, to undo the hurt, to kiss her, wants to get his hands up under that stretched t-shirt and feel the warmth of her. He knows you can’t fuck away hopelessness, but he wants to try anyway.
He doesn’t touch her. He leaves, a half-drunk cold one in hand, and slinks back to his room at the motel in disgust.
oOo
The knowledge doesn’t leave his brain, though he hopes it will. No, it keeps him awake until 4:30, and is waiting for him when he wakes up. While he’s been tossing and turning, it’s burrowed in deep like a splinter. It throbs in the back of his skull. He wants to stay in bed and wait it out, let it dissolve into nothingness, but he’s got plans with Doc, plans to practice, because of course he does.
He makes no move to get into the driver’s seat when he gets there, so Doc gets in with a groan. He hands Lightning his travel mug and tells him to drink some.
“Just coffee,” he says. “You look like you need it.”
Lightning drinks, closing his eyes against the glare of the morning sun.
“When were you married?” he asks through a mouthful of thumbtacks.
“Married?”
“Yeah. You were married, weren’t you?”
“Sure, I was married.”
He says it lightly, like it means nothing.
“So? What happened? Are you divorced? Did she die?”
“What difference does that make?”
He sounds genuinely surprised, as though it’s never occurred to him that Lightning might be interested in knowing about it.
“Doc, that’s kind of an important part of somebody’s life, don’t you think? Unless it was one of those two week long Vegas weddings or something –”
He laughs dryly like that, his voice a low rumble.
“No. Emmylou wasn’t some Vegas wedding.”
“... Emmylou?”
Doc sighs.
“What are you digging into this for, anyhow?”
“I just – I’m insulted you haven’t told me.”
That’s it – anger is an emotion that makes sense here, Lightning decides. He falls into it like a well-worn groove in old leather and Doc sneers a little, shaking his head.
“Well, I’m sorry to have offended you.”
He’s making fun of him. Prick.
“If I was married, I’d tell you!” Lightning blurts out. Doc raises an eyebrow.
“Last I heard you weren’t doing so well on that front.”
Lightning’s cheeks burns and he looks away.
“What the hell,” he hisses, and suddenly his eyes are burning, and the interior of the car feels acutely claustrophobic. There’s a tense period of nothing but acute discomfort.
“Hey, son, I am... sorry,” Doc backpedals, sheepish, voice laced with embarrassment. He slaps him once on the knee. “You know I... I don’t mean to be an asshole, alright? I’m just an old man talking nonsense. Don’t... don’t take it to heart. You’re a good kid.”
Lightning shakes his head, still unable to meet the old man’s eyes, even as the car pulls off the dirt road and into the desert dust, where it rolls to a stop.
“Kid?”
“Just... shut up,” he wheedles, and he hates how whiny he sounds, how choked up.
“You’ll find someone,” Doc assures him. “Sally... well she’s a lovely girl, but if it wasn’t to be, it wasn’t to be. You’re young yet. Everything’ll be alright for you. I’m sure of that.”
Yeah, Lightning thinks bitterly, but I want everything to be alright for you too.
oOo
To Doc’s credit, he does seem to try to clean up his act after that, at least where the pain pills are concerned. He still takes them, but he makes a point of not mixing them with his drinks anymore which – no shit. Surefire way to fucking kill yourself. Clearly he felt some shame over how he’d acted, immature and defensive as some dumb kid. It should be enough for Lightning, to see that the old man is trying to accommodate him in some way. Trying to make it work. Never mind that ‘it’ is a mentor-mentee relationship, and not what Lightning’s taken to fantasizing about in the sleepless hours he spends pacing his cone.
Mater notices something is off with him. Says as much – asks if he’s okay.
“I’m real sorry you an’ Sally didn’t work out,” he says with so much sincerity it hurts like a physical blow.
“My fault,” Lightning mutters. “I’m an asshole.”
“You ain’t an asshole.”
“Mater, being someone’s friend and being someone’s boyfriend isn’t the same thing. I can be a good friend, I’ll accept that. I’m shit at relationships. I was shit before, and I’m shit now.”
Even Mater, with his perennial optimism, can’t think of anything to say to that.
“Shoot,” he sighs, scratching the back of his head. “You wanna blow off some steam?”
Lightning’s mouth is dry. His throat is parched. His heart is heavy.
“Yeah,” he says. “Sure.”
They don’t mean it as they pour gasoline on the fire – none of them. Enablers rarely realize what they’re doing before it’s too late. He doesn’t blame them – any of them. He knows exactly what he’s doing, even as he avoids Flo’s concerned glances when he stumbles home, Mater propping him up like a crutch. To Mater it’s a fun night out. Flo knows different, because she’s seen Lightning come by in the off hours. It can only go on so long before she puts her foot down, and he doesn’t blame her for that either.
He isn’t surprised when she cuts him off, but he is pissed. In the moment, he mouths off to her, and takes off out of town. Ornament Valley is full of little old half-forgotten towns like Radiator Springs. He drives to the next one and loads up on all the booze he can carry. Coors, his poison of choice, and Wild Turkey, for the ghost riding shotgun. He doesn’t make eye-contact with his reflection in the liquor store’s glass window. He knows who he’d look like. He doesn’t want to acknowledge that fact just yet.
Race cars aren’t like normal cars in many ways, one of which is that, typically, they don’t have a radio – beyond a two-way one for communication. If you get distracted on the track, you can kill yourself, so listening to music is not allowed. That said, Lightning’s car serves as both his livelihood and his only way around the desert, so he’s modded it accordingly. He takes the non-regulation radio out before matches, but leaves it in the rest of the time, and if anyone gives him shit, he says it’s to train him to tolerate a higher degree of background interference, some bullshit about improving his focus. The truth is, he just likes having the freedom to rock out while he’s out of earshot of Sally at the motel. This night, the night he’s off and running, he cranks it up loud, and opens a one that is not nearly cold enough, splattering foam over his fingers.
Motherfucking Weezer again. “Say it Ain’t So,” because of course, of course the universe is laughing at him.
He sees the exit for Radiator Springs and ignores it, taking a side road instead and peeling out into the desert.
He throws the mostly empty Coors on the seat next to him, careless of the upholstery, and opens another. Somewhere along the line, he starts singing along, then yelling, and finally sobbing, great heaving, ugly, childish sobs, sobs so violent he can hardly see the road. Gasping sobs and gulping swallows alternating, hopeless. The Coors runs dry. The Wild Turkey slides down his throat with a hostile, insidious burn.
“Everlong” comes on, then that one Radiohead song he never knows the name of, and then “Californication,” and with the lower tempo, he finds himself drifting, drifting in and out of memory, in and out of time. He can’t remember the last time he’s cried like this. Wait – that’s a lie. It’s in there, buried in the pile of shit he’s trying to forget. The time that he was in North Carolina and Harv called him to tell him his old man had finally died. Christ. He’d buried that for a reason. Mack had been there, gone all quiet, and patted him on the back real gentle.
“You okay, man? You want to talk about it? I can call Harv back – reschedule your interview with –”
“That’s not your job,” he’d said and Mack had laughed like he’d said something absurd.
“It’s what friends do,” he’d said like it was obvious, and he’d felt shaken, like the earth had moved, to realize Mack considered him a friend.
“Talk’s boring,” he’d said with false flippancy. “If you want to be a pal, then buy me something to drink.”
And Mack didn’t know, of course. He’d never told him. So he’d agreed.
It was a pattern. It was the most obvious fucking pattern.
“We all become our fathers, in the end,” Mack had slurred. “When my dad passed, I thought, aw hell, I’m gonna miss the guy forever, but he’s more with me than he isn’t.”
It was meant to be a comfort. It wasn’t. It was a horror. Inescapable. Lightning had nodded. What else could he do?
The crunch of dirt under his tires and the sudden sensation of veering off-road pull Lightning back into himself. He hits the brakes hard, right as his front right tire comes into contact with something – a rock? – and blows. Disoriented, he shudders back into reality with a violent jerk of whiplash. The car is turned diagonal, across the road. Swallowing hard, he pulls it over, wincing as metal scrapes asphalt.
He’s fucked. The certainty of it settles on him, heavy.
There’s nothing to do out here but wait. He doesn’t have a spare with him. He has a cell that gets no service this far out of town. It should scare him – people do die like this, forgotten, stranded on old desert roads – but he just feels numb.
“Losing My Religion” laps quietly at his consciousness. The sky is a huge, star-studded bruise above him. Lightning gets out of the car, leaving the door open a crack so he can listen to the music, Wild Turkey in hand, and lies down with his back against the hood. It’s cold in the weird way deserts are at night, but it’s beautiful, and the chill feels cleansing, purifying in a way.
He’d been doing better. He’d been doing well. And like clockwork, he fucking had to sabotage it. This isn’t about Doc – well, not just about Doc. This isn’t even about his father. It’s about him, whatever’s broken inside him that makes him want to take a good thing and ruin it every goddamn time. On some level, he doesn’t believe he deserves it, to be happy. Maybe that’s the root cause of all his misery, or maybe that’s a symptom of some larger personal defect. He knows the depths of his own selfishness, his own cowardice, his own weakness.
Or maybe you’re just a dumb kid with daddy issues and not a lick of sense.
Time stretches on. R.E.M. blurs into Paul Westerberg, blurs into the next timeslot on the tinny, local station. The show rolls over and plunges into something that sounds like it might be a track off Linda Ronstadt’s Spanish album. The soft guitar and gentle horns are calming, and some of the helpless rage flows out of Lightning as he shivers, hands stuffed in his armpits, watching the silver dollar moon gleaming against the black.
“What the hell am I doing with my life?” he asks the night. The silence is damning.
He’s not stupid. He knows that doing the same wrong thing over and over again won’t suddenly make it right.
“Kid?”
The static crackle of the two-way radio scares the living shit out of him and he half scrambles, half falls off the hood. He turns the music off and talks back frantically, part of him convinced that Doc’s just something his tired, drunk brain has conjured up out of thin air.
“Doc? Is that you?”
“Where are you kid? You on this road?”
“Y-yeah. Are you? What are you doing here?”
“Friend of mine runs the tobacconist that’s next to the liquor store where you, in his words, ‘bought up half the inventory and drove off like a bat out of hell.’ He called me and I’ve been looking for you ever since.”
“Oh.”
Lightning feels embarrassed all of a sudden. Of course Doc has eyes in every fucking corner of the valley. Friends in every town. Fuck it, probably wives in every goddamn town too.
“Are you alright?”
“Car’s fucked,” he slurs, which is hyperbolic but he can’t bring himself to care. Next to him, the car looks like it's in fucking mint condition. “Need a spare or m’gonna havta get towed.”
Doc swears at him, grumbles something, but tells him to stay put anyway.