Archive of Our Own

Doc has a copy of it somewhere, a cracked spine hidden on a shelf between decades of periodicals and ledgers. That old story made from dust and metal, more glittering than any trophy or racetrack chrome. It comes to him in flashes when they’re out on the dirt, McQueen hot on his heels. Faster and faster around the butte like a young god on the plains of Troy, the red gleam of the 95 in the sun like armor.

“You got to take it slow, son,” Doc says when the dust clears and McQueen’s golden head materializes ahead. “You’re on the gas too hard. You’ll just keep sliding if you go on like that.”

Doc has him driving in the slick. It’s dry enough for it, the ground packed smooth and merciless, glazed hard by the heat. McQueen’s been spinning out—car loose, shoulders tight, patience thin. Wrath made flesh as he climbs out and stalks over.

“It’s always the same fucking spot,” McQueen says, his eyes flashing, his neck steeped in sweat. It sounds nothing like the bullshit he was spewing just a few months ago. It’s not even drivable, he’d have said, or: what kind of test is this, old man? 

Now he’s listening. Trying to learn. Too bad he’s still a brat. Too bad Doc likes him better this way—incensed, determined, flushed hard. Like he wants Doc to discipline him. Like he’s begging for it. A wild animal of a boy with the glimmering keys to a metal death machine. Untameable the way Doc was before he learned about God and the Greeks and how hard dirt could feel under his knees and against his face. 

Doc hands him some water, watches his throat bob as he swallows. One, two, three, and then the bottle’s empty and back in Doc’s hands, plastic already warm from the heat of McQueen’s grip. 

McQueen sees something on his face. “C’mon, Doc,” he says, probably thinking Doc’s gonna call a break. Grinning now. Crooked, sharp. “I almost got it an hour ago. I’m gonna get it right and leave you in the dust.” 

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Think about it this way, kid: you can’t hit a dust storm at speed without getting into a wreck.” Doc sighs. “You’re gonna have to get used to eating dirt if you keep driving like that. You gotta change with the track. Pay attention to where the worst of the slick is, steer with gas.” And even though he’s said it a thousand times: “Slow down.” 

“Show me,” says McQueen. Gaze bright like the shimmer of the desert horizon up through his lashes. “Show me how.” 

Easy enough, Doc thinks: take the track smooth and steady like always, watch for the slick. Pretend to be twenty years old again, made light by the wind and the earth. Loop once, pull up, get out, body thrumming with speed. Look the boy in the eye. 

Watching always leaves McQueen a little breathless and starry-eyed, no matter how much faster he is, no matter how little more Doc can still teach him. Beating Doc won’t ever be enough. He wants to be Doc, consume him. He’d swallow him whole if he could. 

“Alright,” says Doc, looking away from his terrifying radiance to the safe red—the car, the dirt. He listens to the gleaming anticipation in McQueen’s inhale, feels it echo as he gets in the car and hurtles past the butte, and hears it again. 

And again. And again. Show me how. I’m gonna get it right.

“Hey, Doc,” says the luminous shadow approaching his porch. “Whatcha reading?” 

Doc shuts the book closed with a puff of dust. A strip of airborne motes blaze to life under the outdoor lamp, hovering above the yellow text on the cover. Gold on gold. Gleaming brighter now than those empty cups hiding in the dark of his garage.

The boy’s a molten shape through Doc’s glasses, fuzzy at the edges. Doc takes them off, sets them down. Lifts his glass and drinks. McQueen stands his ground, warmth blooming down his neck like he’s come straight from the track.

“It’s late, kid,” he says. “What’re you doing here?”

McQueen doesn’t answer. His eyes are blown wide and curious, fixed on the book where it sits on the arm of Doc’s chair. He’s wearing the same jeans Doc gave him after Bessie ruined his hotshot city boy look. The denim’s dirt-stained at the knees now, makes him look like he’s lived in Radiator Springs all his life. 

Doc tears away. Hauls himself to the kitchen inside to grab McQueen a beer. When he gets back, McQueen’s got the first page open on his lap.

“It’d take me forever to get through this,” he’s saying, tracing the big S at the beginning of Sing, goddess. “Haven’t read anything since English class when I was fourteen. Never been too good with books.”

There’s a kid sitting at a school desk in some midwest town in Doc’s imagination, but it isn’t Lightning McQueen. A lonely teenager with no history, no destiny. Nameless until he hit the open road.

“It’s better to take it slow anyway,” says Doc. “Had to learn how to pace myself when I went back to school. I was still going too fast. Losing my head.” He reaches for a cigarette. Doesn’t offer one to McQueen, who’s sitting there watching him, intent as a predatory bird. “It was a gift from a friend. He said I’d hate it. And I did, the first time around.” Exhale. “Then I lost him in ’81. So I picked it back up again.” 

“Must’ve been someone special,” says McQueen. “To make you wanna try again.”

There aren’t words to explain those years to a boy like McQueen. What it was like to get so close to the sun, to have one radiant boy after another and to love all of them and none of them at all, because loving wasn’t something he was brave enough to do back then. How it felt to mourn them, six drinks in and glassy-eyed, looking at the worn cover-edges, the creases and dog-ears, and those four lines underlined: Father Zeus, Athene and Apollo, if only not one of all the Trojans could escape destruction, not one of the Argives, but you and I could emerge from the slaughter so that we two alone could break Troy’s hallowed coronal. 

Only Doc emerged from the slaughter. All those boys were left behind in the dirt—on the track, in the war, on the bathroom floor. So much time spent wishing he’d gone with them. Wishing he’d given himself to the dust and the metal too.

“Reading’s just like racing, son. Takes patience to get faster. To really enjoy it.” He looks at the cracked spine against McQueen’s thigh. Thinks that reaching out to thumb the pages would singe his skin now that McQueen’s touched them. “Maybe you need a little practice.”

“Extra credit?” McQueen grins, teeth flashing. Lips bitten red. Glossy like the rim of his bottle. Just looking at him is exhausting.

“Homework,” says Doc, and listens to McQueen groan. Like he wouldn’t do anything Doc asked him to anyway, more hungry for it than he’s ever been for anything else. 

They spend so many days out in the dirt that Doc forgets what it’s like to drive on a real road. The asphalt of the 66 on the way to Flagstaff isn’t quite right, smooth in places and rough in others, that line of lonely black tarmac marring the dry rock and golden fields. McQueen’s riding shotgun, laughing and bright like some sort of mirage, singing along to Springsteen with the windows rolled so far down Doc can’t even hear the words. 

“How come you drive faster on dirt, old man?” shouts McQueen, leaning too close. Doc thanks the wind for the way it makes a mess of proximity, parts and musses McQueen’s hair like a cornfield, snatches the heat off him and pulls it out and away. “Come on, I bet you can get us back up another ten if you gun it down the next curve—”

“Don’t tell me how to drive my car, boy,” says Doc, but he’s got his hand on the gearshift, heart swooping down into his gut when they hit the turn. They fly the next few miles uphill—McQueen’s right, of course he is, beaming at Doc in self-satisfied wonder. Easy as breathing, lighter than air.

“Fuck yeah, Doc, again,” McQueen’s saying, almost gasping, and when they hit the next straightaway Doc glances over, sees the stretch of McQueen’s slender knuckles around the book, cradled in his lap the way the red plains hold the sun. 

Doc’s got the car loaded up by the time the first chill of evening comes in. 

They have a post office in Radiator Springs, but it’s tradition now for Doc to ferry home his spoils from Flagstaff: new gear for Ramone, this time, and a new cell for Sally. A table for Liz’s shop. A few months of Norvasc sitting in the console, courtesy of an old friend in the field who won’t treat Doc like the rest of his patients, who knows Doc only comes to see him to catch up and to reassure Sally that he’s not gonna keel over anytime soon. 

You already know you’re in good shape, Hud, but we don’t want any surprises, he’d said, meaning: you’re a lucky bastard and it’s a miracle you’re not dead yet. Face smooth and neutral with the next question. Any lifestyle changes? 

I’m back in the game, said Doc. Training a rookie. 

I see. You train rookies or you got sons, ain’t that right? 

McQueen came looking for Doc in the clinic lobby a few minutes later. Golden, careless McQueen, grinning as he held out his hand to shake, saying, Hey there, Doc’s doc! 

And the response: So you’re Hud’s boy. McQueen’s eyes blew wide when he heard it, grin wild at the edges. Like those words from some stranger were as good and as gleaming as a trophy.

“Car’s gonna be too heavy for any funny business on the way home,” says Doc as he closes the trunk. “Thirty over and I’m putting you in the slick again.”

“Was gonna let you drive anyway,” McQueen calls from the passenger seat. “I gotta watch you, right? Pay attention?” The little shit. He’s got his knees up, book open on top of them. “What? I thought you liked it when I watched.” 

“You gotta watch and learn,” says Doc, like there’s anything at all he can teach McQueen now, driving on the same old sleepy stretch of the 66, his routine the same as it was when McQueen was born. “Watch all you like, so long as you do something with it. Otherwise, all that watching—it’s just indulgence.”

“Mmm,” hums McQueen. “Dunno, ’s nice to—indulge.” Words like that in a mouth like that, eyes flashing up at Doc like little suns. “Don’t you ever?”

“Indulge?” asks Doc over the sound of the engine starting. New sweat birthed in the dry lines of his palms from loading the car, from listening to McQueen all day.

“Watch,” says McQueen.

Quietly: “It’s all I do. All I’ve done for decades.” 

McQueen won’t stop looking at him. “I didn’t fool you for a second, did I?”

“No,” agrees Doc. “I knew you as soon as I saw you.” 

McQueen’s silent a long time. Turns to stare out the window at the setting sun, the miles and miles of dust.

“I lived in my car my first year in California so I could afford it,” he says quietly in the next age. “I sucked such shit those first few races because I’d spent the past two months drinking protein shakes and rewatching old championships post-op in a hotel room. I wished I’d never done it. Wished I’d stayed in the game and ripped my body apart later.”

Doc remembers it—seeing McQueen early on at the back of the line with the rest of the rookies, struggling to keep up. Thinking nothing of him until he came out of the blue a few weeks later and crushed Daytona, golden brow gleaming with sweat when the interviewers swarmed. His big break, his beginning—a homecoming that looked to everyone else like a prologue.

It’s a familiar tale. How easily it all came to McQueen: the speed, the glory. How lucky he was to have been flayed in an operating room instead of on a dirt track. 

Doc wouldn’t have known if McQueen hadn’t decided he wanted him to—as a friend, as a crew chief. As someone well practiced in the art of hiding scars.

But you knew me. You saw me and you knew it all, McQueen wants to know, wants to believe it when Doc says yes. He wants to believe that when Doc calls him boy he means it every time.

“You said it first,” says Doc. “Under the hood we’re the same.”

Doc chances a glance. Big mistake. McQueen’s lashes are low, eyes glittering. 

“You’re getting soft, Doc.” I know all your tricks, old man. “Thought you’d never come around. But you’re used to this, aren’t you? Boys like me?” 

Boys like me. Gorgeous, untouchable things, each one an Achilles, none of them so pretty in the shame and the pitch-dark of memory as they were in the golden light of day. None of them so fast and incandescent as the creature burning beside him. None of them so whole or so fractured.

“I’ve never met a boy like you in all my life,” says Doc. Stops himself from flipping open the console to pull out the cardboard box with its blister packs rattling inside. I’m old, son, he wants to say. You’ll kill me. I’m an old man and you’ll kill me.

The off-season is dangerous for McQueen. Makes him lonely, reckless. Interminable nights turning to wild mornings turning to dust-hot afternoons, speed fleeing the kiss of torpor. No inch of open dirt left untouched by burning rubber. 

Doc can’t watch him all the time. Can’t keep his schedule. Doesn’t mean he doesn’t try: he still stands out under the early morning sun before it gets too hot to think, shoes turned pale and hazy in the dirt like the skin of a peach. Still sees McQueen through it all, striving and winning and spinning out all over again, knowing that he’s always looking at Doc, always waiting for a nod, for a hand on his shoulder, for a smile. Still comes home in the evenings with McQueen at his heels, still lets him conquer all eight hundred square feet of his rancher and get his own beer from the fridge and lounge all over his old couch and put on movies that make Doc feel old, Risky Business and Point Break and Dirty Dancing. Still pulls the old blue quilt up to McQueen’s pale, gleaming neck after he’s fallen asleep, impressions of wrinkled leather seeping onto the side of his face, and turns out the lights.

“You ever gonna let me drive the Hornet?” asks McQueen instead of good morning, fresh out of Doc’s shower, hair burnished dark and dripping. Pink fingers tending towards the cup of coffee that Doc’s already poured for him, knuckles curling around the handle. 

“Stop asking,” says Doc, because he’s forgotten how to say no when McQueen is looking. When he’s chasing Doc down and prying him open.

“I let you drive the 95 all th’time,” McQueen says around a cheesy mouthful of eggs and bacon. “Unfair trade, I guess. Bronze for gold. Gotta wait for some god to snatch your mind away first.”

He already has. 

“Book six, huh?” Doc hides his smile in his coffee, looking away from the growing brightness in McQueen’s face. 

“You said to go slow, Doc,” McQueen groans, the tips of his ears red now. 

“I did,” says Doc, letting McQueen see his smiling eyes, watching the tension melt out of him. “Didn’t mean anything by it, kid.” McQueen’s gaze goes glassy, lips open. Drinking in everything from Doc’s mouth. “Take your time.” He might as well have said, good boy. 

“Yeah,” breathes McQueen. “Okay,” and soars his way through the morning.

“Got a call from my mom yesterday,” says McQueen, wiping bread crumbs from the corner of his mouth. The only remaining food on the table is on Doc’s plate—cooling green beans, some more grilled chicken. He slides it over to McQueen with his knuckles, gets up for another beer.

“Thanks, Doc,” McQueen breathes, like Doc isn’t the one who cooked the entire meal to begin with.

“How is she?” asks Doc. 

McQueen’s mouth is full when he speaks again. “She’s got a new job. Retail. They built a strip mall in town.” He drowns the chicken in Tapatío until it’s red. “Kinda weird hearing her voice, you know? It’s been, like…three years, I think. Since we last talked.”

“Long time.”

McQueen doesn’t look at him. “Yeah.”

Doc exhales. “Kid, I—”

“My old man’s gone,” says McQueen. His plate—Doc’s plate—is empty now. Just a bright streak of leftover hot sauce smeared over the white. “Like, gone gone. For real this time. My mom, uh. Got a call from the government, I guess. He had the same idea I did—go west. To California. Drove himself off a cliff in Salinas years ago, only a little while after he left us. Drunk, probably.” 

Doc thinks about the way McQueen looked out around the butte earlier, wild with energy, riding Doc into the ground until the sun set and Doc hauled him home for dinner. The sharp edges that appeared when he said, gimme a break, Doc. Can’t spend all my time on homework.

“It wasn’t like I knew him.” In the dim light, McQueen’s flaxen hair is the color of dirt. “Last time I saw him I was eleven. He was as good as dead to me.”

“Different now, ain’t it,” says Doc after a long stretch of quiet. “Knowing he’s gone.”

There’s a burning ache in McQueen’s frame, his whole body bending towards the corner of the table, towards the space between their shoulders, searching. Ravenous still, like a flower reaching for the sun, like a homing missile. Like his heart would be an engine thrumming to life if Doc laid a hand on his sternum. 

Doc would touch him if he knew how. Clasp his shoulder. Wrap an arm around his back. Hold his head to his chest and let him stay there as long as he needed. A fantasy of contact, so vivid and selfish it hurts to hold for longer than a moment, so he sets it down, pushes it away.

“You ever cried at a movie?” McQueen asks.

Doc blinks at him. “A few.” McQueen waits. Doc sighs. “Top Gun.”

“You fuckin’ cheeseball.” He’s laughing now. “I’m putting it on.” 

“Not before you clear your dishes, son,” says Doc, automatic, even though McQueen’s already stacking the plates up and making his way to the sink. Not flinching once at how easy son sounds in Doc’s mouth, how careless his tongue has become. 

“I’ll even wash ‘em,” grins McQueen. “Yours, too.” 

Doc can’t remember the last time someone stood in his kitchen like this. Singing along to Elvis while scrubbing at his old ceramic plates. Talking at Doc about every damn thing. About how it was to be thirteen and only have eyes for the 356 Speedster when all the girls looked at Cruise and the boys looked at Kelly. How the dirt felt on the track that morning, grit raw and perfect. How reading isn’t anything new after all: looking at all those names of heroes and gods like listening to the race-callers, learning each person and their world one by one, the shape of the letters on the page not so different from the crackling syllables on the car radio.

McQueen doesn’t head out till they’ve finished the movie in the early hours of the morning, kicking up dirt on the road back to the Cozy Cone. Leaving Doc drinking alone on his porch again, thinking about families and fathers, flying and racing. Phantom synth strains looping, chasing their own dust. 

“I feel like I know this story,” says McQueen, fingers drenched in pulp and juice from the bowl of orange slices balanced on his lap. “Arrogant hotshot with a god complex faces consequences of his actions, makes it everyone else’s problem.” 

He’s smiling to himself, sly and glittering. Of course he knew it was a test as soon as Doc let him take the book off his porch table, eons before Doc ever realized what sort of challenge he had set, what McQueen would do to prove himself. 

McQueen’s cheek dimples. “Except people actually die, and his mom is actually a goddess.” 

Doc snorts, burying the dangerous, thrumming thing that’s roused from its slumber inside him beneath a thick layer of cigarette smoke. 

“Reading’s like that, kid. If we look hard enough we can always find something we know, something we don’t,” he murmurs absently, eyes on McQueen’s hands and the teetering bowl. “Something to sink our teeth into.” 

McQueen’s got an orange slice in his mouth, the bowl resting safely on the low table again. Knuckles pressed to his lips, fruit-flesh glistening on his chin.

“God, I wish you taught at my school,” groans McQueen. “You woulda been perfect. With the glasses and the whole—” He gestures at Doc, who’s got his old work button-up rolled up to his elbows in the heat. “All that.” McQueen grins, eyes flitting up Doc’s neck. Doc needs a drink. “Coulda been doing this instead of listening to Mrs. Pugh talking nonsense about Shakespeare.” 

“You want me to be your crew chief, your English teacher—what next? I’m technically retired, kid.” 

“Gonna remember you said that when you go into the clinic next week,” sings McQueen, because he knows Doc now. Because he’s flipped open those pages that had been pressed together so long by dust and age, laid waste to Doc’s old, crumbling walls. 

“Got people who need takin’ care of,” murmurs Doc, watching McQueen’s pale brows draw together. He huffs an incredulous breath of a laugh, opens his mouth to say something he’ll regret. “Hey, now, don’t give me that look. It’s just a few hours a week, making sure everyone’s in good shape. You gotta know you’re still my number one boy.” 

Silence. Glass-sharp eyes blown wide, so bright that Doc can’t even look at them. 

“Yeah?” comes McQueen’s shivery voice, so obviously hungry. Rising creakily from his sweat-drenched slouch on the porch swing with stiffening spine, ready to pounce. 

Doc swallows hard. “Yeah, kid. Whatever you need, you got it.” And then quietly, like a secret, like a prayer: “I’m not going anywhere.” 

McQueen gleams.

“Nothing scares me like it used to,” he says. “Like I’m—whole, now, when I wasn’t before. You fixed me right up, Doc.”

Doc watches him look at his own hands, the mud gathered and dried under his nails, the flush of his palms in the heat.

“I got practice with that. The fixing-up,” Doc says roughly. “You just got lucky. I’m too old to be chasing insolent boys around in the dirt.”

“I did get lucky,” says McQueen. Eyes up through his lashes again. He has to know what he does to Doc, has to know that Doc looks at him and feels the force of all the sun’s rays making a home on his body. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Doc’s heart pulses in his ribcage like it’s shrinking away from itself. 

You terrify me, Lightning McQueen. I’d do anything to see you win, see you flying exultant over the track, the barren fields. I’d kill for you, steep myself in gore. I’d waste away, dissolve into dust. I’d lie down at your feet, boy. My boy.  

“You got a lot of bests ahead of you, kid,” he says, a dull ache settling into his bones. “You got time. Pace yourself.”

“Slow me down, then,” says McQueen, leaning back into his shameless sprawl again, nothing at all to fear. “Do your worst.”

Midday again at the butte. More clouds than usual, white-grey streaks across the bright sky, sharpening the light to steel. A storm rolling in, maybe. Doc peers into the sun and wonders. 

McQueen’s running himself ragged in the slick again, fighting for control. Same as ever—around, around. There’s nothing different about the day until there is: McQueen misses a turn for the twelfth time and comes wandering towards Doc with his helmet still on, a red dot approaching on the horizon.

He’s close-range in seconds, lifting the red away to reveal the shining skin of his jaw, hair plastered in damp curls to his temples. 

“Did you know,” says McQueen, sitting down on a rock across from Doc’s folding chair, “that Sally’s heading back to California?”

A burning sensation begins somewhere in Doc’s chest. “I didn’t.” 

“She says she’ll be back, she just doesn’t know when.” McQueen’s not looking at him. “Do you think—”

“No,” says Doc, wanting to talk about anything else. Softens his voice by force when he says, “It’s not about you, kid. You told me you two settled things.”

“We did.” He’s silent for a moment. “I mean that—am I—”

It’s harder to breathe with McQueen looking right at him like that, mouth downturned and brows drawn high. 

“Her mom’s not well,” says Doc, hoping to God that Sally will forgive all his indiscretions where Lightning McQueen is concerned. He’s had good luck with it so far. “She lives out in Ventura. She’s the only family Sally’s got left.” 

McQueen is even paler than before. His voice high and thin, quieter and quieter as it escapes: “She said you’re like a father to her. Like the father she never had.” 

Against the desert wind McQueen is crowned in gold, hair like tiny, wisping rays of sun around his head. He’s the one looking away now, like it hurts him as much as to look at Doc as it hurts Doc to look at him.

“Sally’s twelve years older than me, Doc,” McQueen says. 

Doc looks at McQueen and sees reality finally catching up with him—youth catching up with him—after a few months of rapture in Doc’s town, in Doc’s life, just when Doc’s realized he won’t survive letting him go.

“You’re young,” agrees Doc roughly. It comes out wrong. Bitter in his mouth, formless. When he looks up he sees McQueen’s eyes blown wide and electric. Color sudden and high in his cheeks like he’s just been struck. Doc runs a hand through his own hair. “I’m old. Getting older.” 

A pause more heavy and more sharp than steel. 

“I don’t know how I didn’t notice before,” McQueen’s saying. “How many years have you spent like this?” 

“Like—what?” 

“Acting like you’re on the fucking—brink of death.” Rage, now, hotter than the sun. “You don’t race like you used to, yeah. You can’t eat bacon anymore—fine. But look at you. I’ve been looking at you. You’re—” he darts over Doc’s face, his torso, his arms. Anguished, awed, like he can’t believe Doc is real. “I thought—we’re the same, aren’t we? Like you said. Like I said.” 

“How many years,” Doc echoes. 

How many years had it been since they dragged him out of that wreck of metal and tried to make him whole again? He’d lost count. What did counting matter, anyway, after the few men who ever dared to love him were lost to those years with the ugly hospital rooms and the ugly wedding invitations and the ugly, ugly war. Who could blame him for hauling himself out to Radiator Springs? For making himself a quiet life that would keep the years at bay until that blessed death he was destined for in the fifties finally took him. 

“You’re a racer. You were made for it.” Doc pulls out a cigarette. The heat is unbearable, now—the sun high in the desert sky, diffuse over the flatlands, so bright that the whole world could light him up, sear him to his core. “You should know by now that people like you and I look death in the face every time we get behind the wheel. To get to keep on living—that’s just corollary.” 

“What the fuck, Doc,” says McQueen, stopping and flushing hard, like he isn’t grown, like he thinks Doc’s gonna say something. Watch your mouth, boy. It’s easy enough to imagine, close enough to taste. How wide McQueen’s eyes would look on his face, glittering pretty and chastised, how red and blotchy his cheeks. He’s halfway there already, incandescent and gorgeous for it. 

“You think life’s—punishment, or something,” he hisses, the words slamming into Doc like impact on the track, sending him into a slow, awful spin, “you think you deserve this, being all alone until you die, letting people just leave you behind.” He’s—crying, Doc realizes with a lurch, lower lids puffy and red, eyes shining. “Are you gonna push me out, too? Let me have my fill and let me go? Is this—am I”—his voice breaks, a fissure in his rage, ribboning out and seizing Doc by the chest—“not worth holding onto?”

“If I knew how,” Doc says, “I’d hold onto you as long as you’d let me.” 

“You know how.” McQueen wipes at his face, dirty hands leaving darkening salt-mud tracks on his cheeks. “You taught me how. I slowed down. I’m—waiting for you, like you waited for me.” On a ragged inhale: “I thought I was your boy.”  

“You are.” Doc half hopes the wind carries the words away. “You are.”

“Then why won’t you touch me,” McQueen gasps out like he’s dying, hot blotches of red blooming their way up his neck and over his face, his whole body a glorious rictus of shame and wrath. 

Doc drags a hand over his face, looks at McQueen between splayed fingers. 

“I’d ruin you,” Doc says, meaning, you’ll ruin me. 

In another world, he’d step forward. Stretch out a hand. But McQueen isn’t real enough—he still looks like he walked right out of Doc’s memory, his dreams, his nightmares, and Doc will shatter along with him if he tries to touch. 

It’s better like this: asymptotic, the way Doc’s always known it, the way Doc’s kept it so he can stay intact, because he’d still rather die on the track after all these years, broken bones instead of a broken heart. Still selfish, even after his boy tried to change him, tried to teach him new tricks.

McQueen comes to him. Radiant and swaying close enough that a twitch of Doc’s hand would send him skidding along the soft skin of his arm. The wind pulls the smell of his sweat into Doc’s nose, sets him burning, and then he’s gone, stalking out over the dirt, leaving Doc sitting in his folding chair to bleed out.

It’s been years since he touched the Hornet. He has no real reason to be doing it now, rummaging around inside, sticking his hands into dark places they haven’t been in years, trying to fix things that aren’t fixable. Autosurgery: his body’s nothing without this old metal shell. His flesh deteriorates away from its gleam; forgets its purpose. Still he looks at the blue, covered in dust but not tarnished, and sees shining red.

Inside the safe, dim world of the garage, his old underhood light still does the job. Casts harsh planes of light and harsher shadows over the Hornet’s internal organs, its pale glow too yellow and lonely, too sallow to be gold. Just bright enough to make time slip away, to outshine the darkening sky outside. 

Dusk, thinks Doc, catching a strip of purple out of the grainy old window. Squints beyond the light, waiting for the rest of the landscape to materialize, the familiar old willow and the mountains in the distance, and something dark approaching. Thunderheads. The shape and the weight of them as familiar and as dangerous as an omen. 

He hears the dust before he sees it: the hiss of a million motes rushing against the walls outside at once, almost human as it changes. Groaning, whispering, groaning again. The whole landscape roaring with dirt, like the earth heard Doc was working on his metal and decided to sweep itself clean too.

For a moment all he can think about are his living room windows, the ones he leaves wide open to let in the cool desert air at nightfall. The ones he can’t look at now without thinking about the wiry strength in McQueen’s golden arms, the sound of his voice. Let me take care of those, Doc. Get some fresh air in here. They’re closed, he remembers, because he hasn’t left the garage for hours. Because McQueen left him—he left McQueen; he broke his promise—out on the dirt. 

Nothing to do now but wait for the dust to settle. He burns and he listens, grease-stained hands clenched hard and terrified, and thinks of what storms leave behind.

The wind’s still dissipating when he finds McQueen by the butte, the line of his back glowing under Doc’s searching headlights, huddled down off the road in the shallow curve of a rock, turned away from the stinging dust. Something dislodges in Doc’s chest at the sight of him, frees his lungs just enough to let him suck in a painful breath, to remember to keep going. 

Doc doesn’t think he’s ever moved this fast, not on the track or in a race. It feels like no time has elapsed at all when he falls to a crouch next to McQueen in the dirt. He remembers pulling off the road, lights slamming to the empty expanse and its impressions of rock in the distance, leaving McQueen in shadow again. Remembers getting out of the driver’s seat, seeing a car-shaped mass down in the ravine below beyond the clouds of dust, but none of it is situated in time, because all that matters is McQueen, his boy, shoulders warm and rising under Doc’s hands, whole and alive.

This is all it ever would have taken for Doc to get his hands on him anyway: a little dirt; the safe dark blanket of the gloaming. Doc clutches at him—his sides, his arms, his neck—and wonders if he’ll ever be able to do anything else.

“Doc? Doc, I’m fine, m’okay. Justa l’il bruised. Not broken,” McQueen’s saying, blinking up at Doc with red, dirt-singed eyes, debris clinging to his cheekbones, his temples. Doc runs his thumbs over them, collecting dust. Smoothes gentle fingers over the lines of his jaw, trying to commit it all to memory at once, as much as he can, as much as McQueen will allow. 

“You’re here,” McQueen whispers.

Doc doesn’t trust himself to speak. He can only hope that McQueen remembers. I’m not going anywhere.  

McQueen leans into him like he’s never been touched before in his life, like he’s waited a hundred years for it, like Doc’s hands were made to cradle his face. He’s the most beautiful thing Doc’s ever held. Lashes low and blinking, thick with dirt, his flaxen hair gone dull and textured. Exhaling shaky and thunderstruck, shivering more under Doc’s fingers than he ever has in the wind or behind the wheel.

“The storm caught me. Lost control of the 95 slowing down the ridge, but I must’ve gotten that turn perfect, ’cause I didn’t hit the butte, just flew down the track with the dust rolling in behind me.” 

Dust changes, Doc’s told him a hundred times over, just like wind and water and fire. Sometimes all you can do is let it run its course. 

“Wish I coulda seen it,” says Doc, aching. He’s too old for regret; seems like it’s all he does anyway. “But you’ll do it again, and I’ll be there.” Arms around McQueen’s shoulders, his face pressed against Doc’s collarbone. Too greedy to let go now. 

“You knew I’d come back to the butte.”

“You told me you were waiting,” says Doc lowly. And then, because he’s made an awful habit of being honest with this boy: “It’s what I woulda done.” 

McQueen tilts his head, chasing Doc’s hand, and a layer of dust falls from his curls, collecting on the dark hairs on Doc’s forearm. Doc’s been here a thousand times before: on his knees in the dirt, hanging onto a beautiful boy for dear life. It never gets any less devastating. Doc suspects it never will. 

“What was it you said?” murmurs McQueen, teasing, breath hot against Doc’s neck. His cheek dimples under Doc’s palm. “You ain’t no dirt boy?”

Doc exhales, feels his own mouth twitch. “You’re getting there.” McQueen’s tongue darts out to wet his cracked lower lip. Doc skims knuckles underneath a scrape on his jaw, stilling him. “Let’s get you cleaned up, dirt boy. We’ll worry about the 95 tomorrow.” 

“I told you, I’m fine,” McQueen protests, even as he goes willingly, letting Doc haul him up and hold him by the shoulder, by the waist. “She’s probably wrecked, Doc.” 

“Better metal than bones,” replies Doc—something Smokey used to tell him, something he’s been telling himself for years—and wants for the first time in his life to mean it.

Doc sees it the moment he pulls a chair from the table up to the couch where McQueen is sitting, clean and drying in nothing but his briefs and his old white dollar store crew socks: that ruinous look designed to drive Doc out of his mind, lips bitten up, eyes downcast and glittering, shoulders flushed a pretty red even though Doc told him not to run the water too hot. 

It’s Doc’s own fault—he was the one who couldn’t help it, had a hand on McQueen’s knee all the way back to the house, couldn’t let him go for a second as they made their way inside, hands at the curve of his spine, his elbows. Still holding on as he flicked on the lights and checked McQueen’s head, his eyes, his range of motion. Knuckles brushing against his back even as he marched him to the bathroom. 

How wrong Doc was to think it would be easier to leave himself alone in the quiet dark with only the sounds of dry thunderclaps and running water to keep him company. He just ended up burning instead, thinking about the boy in his shower and wishing he hadn’t let him out of his sight.

McQueen’s here for him to look at now, lying on Doc’s couch and smelling like Doc’s soap, exhausted and bruised all over but still putting on a show for him, open and transparent as always, like Doc wouldn’t be helpless with wanting him anyway.

“Let me see that arm,” says Doc, suddenly terrified to reach for him again, but McQueen is already leaning in, his elbow slotting easily against Doc’s palm. 

Doc goes at his own pace—his best pace: slow, methodical. Testing the joints, cleaning up every bit of broken skin, all low murmurs of hold that for me and that’s it and good through McQueen’s wincing and hissing. The worst of it is a gash down the inside of his left forearm—not deep but bleeding enough that Doc had the foresight to wrap it up earlier. Doc re-bandages it with care, swaddling that pale golden skin until the red isn’t visible.

The tension leaves McQueen’s body slowly, seeping out with every minute, his exhausted slouch turning to a boneless sprawl, pillows strewn haphazardly underneath him. Soon enough Doc has no more cuts to cover, no more bruises to make note of. 

“How’m I looking, Doctor?” asks McQueen lazily, head tilted, mouth curling.

“Good news,” says Doc. Rough and affected even to his own ears. He tries a smile. “You’ll live.” He swallows the rest of it down: the heat, the terror, the guilt. You’ll live. I probably won’t, though. 

McQueen grins up at him like he could lie under Doc’s hands forever. Doc would let him, would keep touching him until the two of them were the only things left in the world. He settles for this: smoothing his hands over McQueen’s skin, working absently at the knots in his shoulders, down his front. 

Doc lingers at McQueen’s chest, watches McQueen’s throat work a moment, and marvels at him. Aches at the way his lips part when Doc brushes thumbs over the raised lines of flesh. Healed textbook-perfect and fading into the musculature, shimmering remnants like welding joints. 

“You’ve seen mine now,” says McQueen, hips twitching as Doc drags his hands down his abdomen, towards the pale gold hair below the dip of his navel. He reaches for Doc’s knee, hovering. “’S only fair if you show me yours.”

McQueen’s taking a shot in the dark, aided only by divine luck—he knows Doc’s left leg is bad, but he’s never seen the flesh. It’s an ugly, gnarled thing, crawling up from knee to thigh like an invasive vine, like rot. Even Doc doesn’t look if he can avoid it. Once it healed, it was easier to forget it existed at all. It was only something he had to think about when he felt it against the pads of his fingers in the shower; when the Iliad was left open on the bed and the man who gave it to him was mouthing up his thigh in the dark, following the arc of the scar with his teeth. 

“It’s not pretty like yours is,” Doc warns him. “Came from the Hornet instead of a scalpel.” 

“C’mon, Doc, don’t,” McQueen tries, incensed first, then choked-off and miserable, leaning forward, leaning up. “You’re fucking gorgeous. You don’t think I’d—” he stops, bites his lip. Begs. “Please. Show me.” 

Doc never stood a chance against this boy. He breathes. Stands slowly, focused on the shape of McQueen’s brow, the sun-freckles littering the bridge of his nose.

“Go ahead, then. Get those open,” Doc murmurs, and McQueen moves like he’s been waiting at the starting line, fingers quick at the button and the zipper all at once, thumbs crooked and pulling down, down, until Doc has no choice but to hold onto McQueen’s shoulders and step out, the salt and pepper hair of his thighs brushing against McQueen’s bare forearms.

Danger, thinks Doc, because this is nothing like what he knows—nothing like dark bathroom stalls where he’d only unzip as much as he needed to. Nothing like looking down at a curly head and a face he wouldn’t remember. 

This is McQueen, a boy Doc couldn’t even forget in death. Lightning McQueen—in Doc’s house, in Doc’s life. Looking up at him slack-jawed in the lamplight, his whole body visible, his gaze so clear and bright and hungry. He’s practically flickering with want, so radiant that it takes Doc a moment to realize he’s stopped moving. Still as he can be, sitting there on the couch between Doc’s legs, waiting for permission. Waiting for instruction.

Doc sinks his fingers into the soft hair at McQueen’s nape. Hears his own voice pitched low and rumbling. “You can touch.”  

McQueen’s hand flies to his knee like an arrow. Grips it, first, with his small fingers, thumbnail circling, scratching at the edge of the scar tissue where it streams in a pale, uneven line towards his kneecap. 

“Doc, I want—” says McQueen haltingly, his breath thick against Doc’s skin, so Doc says yes, reassuring, automatic, and then McQueen’s lips are there with his fingers, mouth leaving a hot, wet trail up Doc’s leg.

Like this, McQueen can see everything: Doc filling out under the cotton of his own boxer briefs, his quads going tight and aching at the press of McQueen’s mouth. 

“You loved racing this much,” says McQueen into the dark inner space of his thigh, right over the apex of the scar. 

Doc holds McQueen’s head by the temples as gently as he dares. “I spent most of my life wishing it had killed me.” 

“And now?” Blue eyes alight with challenge.

“Now I got other things to worry about,” says Doc. 

McQueen’s fingers tighten fractionally on Doc’s sides—the only warning Doc gets before McQueen’s nose is pressed into the space between his cock and his hip, inhaling deep and wretched. Doc clutches at McQueen’s hair on instinct, stopping just short of hauling him away. Rough enough that McQueen looks up at him, the question already in his eyes.

“Please, Doc, can I,” he breathes, squirming on the couch cushions. “You take such good care of me. Wanna make you feel good.”  

Some god robs Doc of his wits. He huffs a breath that feels like a laugh. Incredulous, amazed. 

McQueen’s not finished. His thumbs arc closer. Quietly, like a murmur is somehow less filthy than a cry: “Wanna suck you. Want you to fuck my mouth. Use it.”

He’d take it so well. So open, so eager to please. Doc’s perfect boy. Plucked straight from the heavens, dragged through hell, deposited on Doc’s doorstep.

“Christ,” mutters Doc, scrubbing a hand over his face. He’s halfway to aching in his underwear, now, even untouched. “You ever even done this before, boy?”

McQueen shivers, throat rolling, lips parted. “Not enough, probably,” he says, a grin teasing at his mouth. “I’m a fast learner, though.”

Doc closes his eyes. Reaches down to card through McQueen’s hair. “I know.”

He lets McQueen hook his fingers into the elastic at his waist, knuckles burning. Sucks in a harsh breath as McQueen takes him in hand, his fingers so small and seeking. Inhales again—sharper, like smoke caught in his throat—at the first kiss of spit from McQueen’s mouth. 

McQueen won’t stop moving, body trembling and jerking, lips shining and messy over Doc’s hardening cock. Eyes wide and flitting between Doc’s face and his task. He’s nervous, Doc realizes, the way he gets when doubt creeps into his mind during practice, during a race. Unwilling to tell Doc that he wants a guiding hand, an encouraging voice. Sometimes unwilling even to admit it to himself. 

Words spill from Doc of their own accord. “That’s it, baby,” he hears himself say, “get it wet for me.” He thumbs at the bare skin behind McQueen’s ear, sinks his fingers into McQueen’s golden hair, holds his scalp. “So gorgeous,” Doc murmurs. 

McQueen’s apprehension disappears, running from him so quickly Doc wonders if he imagined it in the first place. He’s brazen again, taking more of Doc in his mouth than he can handle, lips catching, wrist twisting all frantic and eager. Rolling his hips on the cushion below with intent, now. Doc would tell him to touch himself if he weren’t so pretty like this—his hands visible, busy. The rest of his body aching, waiting.

“Easy,” says Doc at the first scrape of teeth. “Open up. Relax that jaw, let me in.” McQueen’s lips soften at the head, sink down wet and slow and easy. Doc brushes approving knuckles over his brow. “Good,” he rumbles, just to see his boy twitch.

“F—uck,” McQueen whines, choking and pulling off in a mess of spit, writhing in Doc’s grip like a feral animal. “Again, Doc, again,” he begs, so Doc lets him heave in a few wretched breaths before grasping his head by the jaw and fucking right back into that red, ruined mouth, gentle as he dares, only far enough to fill his mouth and tease his throat. McQueen’s eyes start watering anyway—hot, stubborn wetness gathering on his lashes, his whole face shining a brilliant pink. Doc catches the tears as they fall, wiping them from his cheeks with firm fingers, watching out for the cuts and the bruises. 

McQueen’s not quiet, either. Louder than any boy Doc’s ever done this with, groaning around the cock in his mouth and keening every time Doc pulls away for him to breathe, leaning into Doc’s hands while he pets his face and tells him how good he’s doing, how perfect he is. Breathing hot and shivery through his nose, hips bearing down to grind desperately against the edge of a pillow. 

“God,” breathes Doc in wonder. “You were made for this.” McQueen’s rocking back and forth, his jaw rising to meet every thrust of Doc’s hips, even though they both know he’d gag if Doc pushed down his throat. 

McQueen makes a sound deep in his sternum, tongue catching as Doc drags him off and replaces McQueen’s hand with his own. He pumps fast and easy, his other palm splayed over McQueen’s jaw, thumb dipping into the wet heat between his teeth. He’s leaking, close already, because this is what McQueen does to him.

“In my mouth, Doc,” McQueen begs around the intrusion, breathless even as Doc pulls away to hold the back of his head, “want it in my mouth, please, I don’t care, you taste so fucking good—”

“Never do anything if you can’t win it, huh? Don’t know when to quit,” Doc grits out, jaw clenched hard at the pressure of McQueen’s greedy mouth back on the tip of his cock; messy, hungry. Doc’s powerless to stop, to decelerate. Unable to do anything at all but lose himself all over McQueen’s tongue, the corner of his mouth, his chin. 

McQueen looks up at Doc through it all in rapture, glassy-eyed, licking his lips, hands still pressed obediently to Doc’s thighs. He looks fucking ruined, hair in wild curls around his head, mouth drenched and sticky, his whole chest heaving with the effort of drawing breath. Doc could stare at him forever. Drink him in and nothing else for the rest of his days. 

“So beautiful like this. So good for me,” says Doc, leaning down to press his lips to McQueen’s gleaming forehead. He moves like he’s underwater, feeling slower than he ever has. Licks the taste of McQueen’s brow-sweat off his lips as he tucks himself back in, spit-slick and dripping. 

Doc’s whole body creaks as he bends to a crouch, tending towards McQueen of its own accord. He drags his eyes down McQueen’s limbs, the pale, taut expanse of his stomach, the sweat glistening on his thighs. A little pillow nestled between them—one of the sky blue ones gifted by Sally years ago; some color would do you good, Doc—darkened at the edge by a palm-sized wet spot. 

He runs a hand over it, resisting the urge to lean in and inhale. Skims his way up McQueen’s thigh instead, knuckles grazing the inside, where it’s still sticky and hot to the touch.

“Cleaned you up just for you to get yourself all messy again, huh,” says Doc. He’s done for the night at least, but heat still shoots through him at the evidence, at the reality of it.

“Oh, fuck,” says McQueen, extracting the pillow, trying to press his legs together. Doc holds him fast, presses his thumbs into the space below his kneecaps, kisses the roughened skin there. 

“I think I—came, maybe,” McQueen blurts in a rush. Hand thrown over his face, ears a vibrant red. “Holy shit. I didn’t know I could even do that,” he says, incoherent the way he only gets when he’s drunk or exhausted. “You’re really—I was really—um. I just—wanted that. Wanted you.” 

Doc has to close his eyes again. A brief respite from the bottomless blue of McQueen’s gaze; his sweet, earnest embarrassment. From the knowledge that he came in his underwear like a teenager while sucking Doc off on his couch. 

“Your pillow’s probably ruined,” murmurs McQueen, and Doc can’t help but bark a laugh. 

“I got a laundry machine,” Doc reminds him, smoothing his hands down McQueen’s arms. McQueen goes pink again but relaxes under his touch, spread out loose and pliant, like he could fall asleep right there on the couch like he always does, like nothing’s changed at all, even though he’s got Doc’s come drying on his chin and his own soaking through his briefs. 

“You stay right here,” Doc murmurs. Hides a wince at the strain in his knees as he rises. “I’ll be back.” 

McQueen lets him go reluctantly, fingers dragging on Doc’s arm, but he hasn’t moved at all when Doc comes back with a couple of hot towels and a glass of water, sitting beside him on the couch this time. 

He starts with McQueen’s face—wipes him down just like he did earlier, replaces a wet bandage. Goes slow and gentle over his lips until all that remains is the taste of Doc inside his mouth, on his tongue. Works his way down McQueen’s neck, his chest, slowing all the way down at his hips. Runs his thumbs over the edges of McQueen’s briefs, questioning.

“Um. I dunno what you’re expecting. But ’m not—like you. Like the other boys you’ve had,” comes McQueen’s voice, quiet and guarded, and Doc aches. 

“Give me a little credit, son. I’ve been around a long time,” Doc says. “I don’t have to expect anything. I know you’re gorgeous.” And a confession: “I can’t look at anything else. You’ve ruined me.” 

He lets McQueen take his hands, lets him guide them down to his waistband. Matches McQueen’s movements as he extracts his legs one by one. Soaks up the way McQueen shudders and nods when Doc asks if he can touch the way the desert soaks up the sun. McQueen exhales sharp when Doc runs fingers over his dripping hole, circling the rest of him, still swollen and rubbed raw. Doc can smell him from here—heady as the bitter-damp before a summer storm.

“Look at you. Such a pretty cock,” breathes Doc, leaning close enough that he could take him in his mouth if he wanted to, and McQueen shivers, pulses around nothing. “Could suck you for hours, make you come until you can’t anymore.”

Doc listens to McQueen’s throat work in the silence. “I want that, Doc, fuck,” he breathes, and then it comes out all at once, gaining strength as he goes: “Want your mouth. Want you to lick me open. Want you to fuck me on your fingers. On your cock. I think about it all the time, I fucking dream about it. Been making myself crazy with wanting it.”

Doc forces his grip on McQueen’s leg to gentle, exhales slowly through his nose. In another life Doc would tell him how it’s been to burn alone. To have ached for so many years and not known it until the sun came along and blinded him. It hurts too much to confront the shame; to think about time wasted. Maybe McQueen can be shameless enough for them both.

McQueen says, eyes low, halting, “But only if you want to give it to me. If you’re—do you—”

“Like nothing else,” Doc says. He runs the towel between McQueen’s legs, leaving his skin flushed and glistening, listening to the sound of McQueen’s labored breathing. 

“Teach me how to make it good for you,” says McQueen, the full force of his intent on Doc again, body tensing so he can sit up and look Doc in the eye. “Please. Ruin me. I want it, Doc. I can take it.”

Doc presses him back down with a palm to his sternum, laying him flat. “Slow down, boy.” McQueen doesn’t fight it—he dissolves back into the couch, his eyes burning and dangerous. Doc shakes his head. “Where would you be without me to watch your pace?”

“Dead on the track, probably,” answers McQueen without missing a beat. “Smitten to the dust by an angry god.” 

Doc can’t respond in any way that matters—McQueen knows the story. Knows what happens when you fall in the dust and stand up again, because Doc’s living proof.

“I don’t remember what it was like before,” mumbles McQueen after a while, when the wet towel has gone cold and Doc’s started drying him off. “Not really sure what I was before I was your boy. Sometimes I think I was nothing at all.” 

“You had to get to me somehow.” We’re the same, Doc wants to say, because McQueen was right, they’ve been over it before, and Doc won’t forget it until he dies. Under the hood, you and I are the same. “Just like I had to get to you.” 

The look on McQueen’s face is revelatory, like he can take what Doc says as the word of a god, even though McQueen’s been the one sharing immortal knowledge with him all along. Breathing life into him on the battlefield, reminding him to keep fighting. Holding the knife to Doc’s throat every time he takes the wheel and risks his own life, and Doc loves him anyway, loves him because of it, because McQueen reminds him how beautiful the hunger can be. 

They sleep in Doc’s bed. It’s been an age since Doc’s had someone close enough to leave their smell behind on his pillows. McQueen’s a miracle of an intrusion, falling asleep like it’s a race, curling tight around Doc and hanging on. His small body like a golden shell around Doc’s heart, protecting him. Part of him.

Doc drifts in and out of consciousness to the sound of wind and thunder. In his dreams, McQueen chases him through the dust in a chariot. His whole body bare and golden and gleaming under the noonday sun. Blazing brighter as he approaches, hair licking up into the wind like flame. A spear in his hand—or a shield—made of metal too sharp and shining to tell if its surface is marred red with blood.

Mater gets to the butte around the same time Doc does. It’s barely dawn and the skyline is still hazy from the dust storm, but Doc knows the shape of that truck as soon as he sees it on the horizon. 

“Thanks for coming out,” says Doc. Busies his hands with pouring coffee from his thermos into foam cups: one for Mater, one for himself. 

“Shit, Doc, y’know you don’t gotta thank me when you’re bringin’ me coffee,” laughs Mater, and takes a sip so he can burn the hell out of his tongue like he always does. 

Doc smiles into his own cup. “Gotta make sure I’m useful for something,” he says. Turns to peer out over the ridge and down into the brush below. The 95 is still so red under all that dust and debris. Too stubborn to be reduced to the dull matter it is.

“You weren’t kiddin’ when you said he’d probably wrecked her,” comes Mater’s voice. “We’ll get ‘er on outta there, though. Fixed up and ready to go by the end of the week, I bet.” 

It could be worse, Doc knows. The car could be shredded. McQueen could be dead. All they’ve lost right now is a week. Doc thinks about what it’ll be like to tell him, to head back to the house, wait for McQueen to wake up. Rip off the bandage during breakfast, watch McQueen’s open-book face fall, watch the abashed downturn of his lips when he starts to think it’s his own fault.

You chose this, Hud, Doc reminds himself, and it’s true—it was his decision to save McQueen the shame of coming out to the butte this morning. His choice to keep the ugly truth to himself: that he blames himself for letting McQueen go, even for a day. For seeking out his old hiding-places and dusty memories while the wind beat his boy into the ground outside. 

“Now, I seen McQueen pull some crazy shit,” Mater’s saying. “On the track, sure, but I remember that first time in Vegas—” 

Doc shoots him a quelling look.

“Alright, alright, off-topic.” Mater’s got his hands in the air, mock-surrender. “What I mean is—y’can’t blame me for not believin’ you about the storm when you called earlier.” He’s not looking at Doc anymore—he’s looking at the 95, squinting at it like it has answers. “McQueen ain’t stupid like that.” 

The coffee’s still too hot to drink, but Doc sips at it anyway, grateful for the little prickle of numbness. The excuse not to speak for a moment. He thinks about McQueen tangled up in his sheets like he belongs there, hair spilling over his pillow and body pressed against Doc’s along every seam, and feels the weight of his reality shifting.

How differently the day would have gone—how differently all the months could have gone—if Doc had just reached for him earlier. Given him the home he wanted in Doc’s hands. Let him take from Doc what he needed, what he never got from anyone else.

“I let him down,” Doc settles for saying, instead of: I’ll ruin him. I’m ruining him.

Mater’s quiet a moment. Watching the steadily rising sun with a little half-smile on his face, like he knows something Doc doesn’t.

“Pardon my sayin’ so, Doc,” he says eventually, “but I don’t think you could let McQueen down if you tried.” There’s a little glint in his eye when he glances back, kinder than Doc deserves. “He just ain’t used to people stickin’ around.” 

I’m not going anywhere. 

“You heard Sal’s heading back to Ventura?” Doc says.

“Oh, yeah, she did say somethin’ about California when I was helpin’ her get that sad abandoned van outta the Cozy Cone lot last month. Thought it was gonna have somethin’ interesting inside, like corpses or clown costumes. Nothin’, though. Turned out to be just an empty shell. Drives good, though. Not so sad after I got her all fixed up.” 

“I didn’t know till yesterday,” says Doc, thinking about the look on McQueen’s face when he said you’re like a father to her. Thinking about his own sad, empty shell, still sitting in his garage. 

Mater blinks at him. “How d’you mean? You just said the van was lookin’ good when I came by to pick up McQueen last week.”

“About Sally,” Doc clarifies.

Mater’s eyebrows climb even higher. “Doc,” he says, like Doc’s gone crazy, “she didn’t tell you ’cause she doesn’t have to. You know she’s comin’ back. And you two call each other on the phone even when you’re both in Radiator Springs, so you sure as hell ain’t losing her to California.” He smiles toothily. “’Sides, you got McQueen to worry about now. Sally wouldn’t miss his next season for the world.” 

Doc swallows hard. Hums his agreement because his voice is stuck somewhere deep inside.

“Gotta be fate that McQueen stormed in and started causin’ trouble,” Mater laughs. “We ain’t used to people stickin’ around, either.”

“The lord Apollo, son of Zeus, broke the corselet upon him. Disaster caught his wits, and his shining body went nerveless,” McQueen reads, incredulous. 

He’s still perched on the same kitchen counter Doc hauled him up onto barely an hour ago, dripping wet and taking Doc’s fingers three knuckles deep, clawing at Doc’s neck, begging for it. Doc can’t look at him sitting there now in his tiny jersey cotton shorts, chewing his lip red as he reads, or he’ll set the kitchen on fire. 

“Pretty fucking unfair that it’s all down to Apollo,” McQueen’s saying, eating the last of Doc’s olives straight from the jar. 

“War ain’t ever fair,” says Doc. “By definition. There’re rules—like racing—but anything goes out on the dirt.”

He reaches for the cutting board. The onions hiss on impact in the pan. Omelets for dinner because they missed breakfast—Doc came home after meeting Mater at the butte and going to help open the clinic to find McQueen messing around with the ancient gym equipment in his garage, sweat-damp and glistening from a run. Lips parted and shining, waiting for Doc to kiss him, to throw him over the dusty old bench and roll up his shirtsleeves and try him with his tongue, his fingers. 

“When’d you figure out he was gonna die?” asks McQueen after a long moment, fingers restless at the page-edge.

“I knew before I started.” Doc switches burners, goes to whisk the eggs. “Had it all spoiled for me. My friend thought he could convince me to pick it up by reading me all his favorite parts aloud.”

“And one of those was Patroklos dying,” says McQueen, flat.

“Keep going, kid. You’ll see it underlined.”

Quiet envelops the kitchen while McQueen reads. Doc’s grateful for the low crackling of the stove and the scrape of plastic against metal, drowning out the sound of McQueen’s breathing. Steady over the roar of his own thoughts.

No, deadly destiny has killed me. You are only my third slayer.

“Y’know, I thought these were your notes,” murmurs McQueen in the silence, looking down at the page. “Guiding me through like always.”

“They might as well be.” Doc remembers clinging to that dark ink like he could reanimate touch from memory. Like he could speak to the dead through those lines. Change fate by sheer force of will.

McQueen smoothes a hand over the paper. Thumbs past the first page of book seventeen, and there it is, stuck in the crevice—a tiny little slip of paper Doc recognizes even at range. Something he thought he’d lost; something he wouldn’t have remembered without seeing it again.

Doc watches McQueen tug it out of its hiding place with those pretty, slender hands, gentle as an archivist. It’s a goddamned newspaper clipping from his racing days, a tiny cutout of the Hornet in the background of a larger photo Doc can’t remember. And written on the back in Doc’s perfunctory scrawl: 

Your Fabulous Hornet. 

With love. Hud.

Another life; a man Doc loved enough to read a book he thought he’d hate. He’d asked Doc for an autograph. Grinning and offhand, Doc’s head lying in between his thighs or on his stomach, smoke wisping through his teeth. Told him he’d use it as a bookmark. 

McQueen flips it over again and stares at that grainy picture for a long time. Doc tries to force himself to look away, to escape, but he can’t get his body to move. Stock still and aching, looking at the book in McQueen’s hands, nestled there like it’s the most precious thing he’s ever touched. The clipping held under between his fingers like he knows he’s got a chunk of Doc’s heart.

“Let me drive the Hornet, Doc,” says McQueen, eyes on Doc now. Hungry again. It’s worse now that Doc knows he wears that same look for everything: for when he’s pushing himself on the track, for when he’s after Doc’s fingers. “I know you’ve been working on him. Come on, Doc, it’d be perfect—I need a car to race in. I’ll be careful, I swear. I’ll go so slow.” 

Doc retreats to the fridge then. Takes his time coming back, tries to ignore the way McQueen’s angled his whole body in his direction, beseeching. 

“It ain’t as simple as trading armor.” A metal bowl falls from the cupboard with a clang. He reaches for it, puts it back, extracts the cheese grater carefully. “You got to earn it.” McQueen’s got his mouth open, something filthy on his tongue, no doubt, so Doc says: “Not with me. With the Hornet.”

“Just show me how. I’ll get it as long as you show me how,” says McQueen, breathless again already. I’ll get it right. Leave you in the dust.

McQueen drives the Hornet like he was born for it. 

He has barely a morning of instruction from Doc before he gets straight out onto the dirt, so at ease he could have fooled anyone into thinking he’d been training for it his whole life. He takes every hitch in stride, more bold with each success, hardly bothered that the Hornet’s as temperamental as Doc is. Thrilled by it; by the challenge. Even Apollo wouldn’t be able to stop him from storming Troy alone in Doc’s car.

Three days in, Doc’s losing his mind. Knowing what McQueen looks like inside the gleaming walls of the Hornet drives time out of joint. Doc’s dreamed this boy up: his smile from the driver’s seat, bandaged knuckles curled around the wheel, temples shining with sweat. He looks at Doc like they’re alone in the world, like Doc can keep up with him the way he would’ve been able to in the fifties. A fantasy of youth, a phantom made of all Doc’s long-buried desire brought to life on the desert sand, miles and miles away from the Carolina dirt track where Doc learned how to race, how to look. 

It’d be easier if McQueen weren’t already a permanent fixture in Doc’s life. If he weren’t coming home with him after long mornings of training to work out in the garage while Doc makes them lunch. They’ve exhausted McQueen’s supply of action movies, so Doc’s been digging out his old favorites: Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden and Newman’s Westerns. McQueen pays rapt attention to every single one. Eager to learn about anything and everything Doc likes, to wait for the end credits to roll so he can go straddle Doc in his chair and kiss the whiskey off his lips.

McQueen’s stopped pretending he doesn’t know the game. He’s so obvious it sets alarm bells ringing in Doc’s ears: wetting his lips when he sees Doc forgo his usual layers for a plain undershirt in the heat, looking up with his shining collarbones on full display while Doc leans through the window on the driver’s side, adjusts McQueen’s grip on the wheel. Shimmering with satisfied energy behind the wheel when Doc tells him, good job today, kid.

McQueen takes them back from the butte the long way. Grinning and exultant and dust-stained, transformed from that lacquered, city-dwelling creature into a boy made in Doc’s image. He’s going faster than the Hornet can handle and he knows it, but he keeps driving anyway, shooting wild looks at Doc. Baiting him. Hurtling dangerously along old, winding dirt roads like the cocky little shit he is, grin dimpling under the heat of Doc’s gaze. 

Doc holds his tongue even while McQueen pulls too fast into the dirt in the shadow of his garage; doesn’t wait for the dust to clear before pocketing his aviators and climbing out. Half-dizzy as he circles around the back of the Hornet, listening to McQueen cut the engine. He stops mid-stride between the low steps into the garage—his shot at escaping—and McQueen, who’s standing and closing his door, eyes darting after Doc like he’s gonna chase him down.

The decision makes itself for him. Doc’s got him pressed up against the Hornet in a matter of seconds. Palm to his chest, mouth hovering over the side of his neck, inhaling the dirt-sweat musk of the track.

“You’re killing me,” Doc hears himself say, rasping and ripped from deep in his throat.

Neither of them move for a long moment, inches away and breathing in each other’s air.

McQueen roars to life. He strains forward, presses the whole line of his body to Doc’s, licks furiously into his mouth. Doc has to slam him back and grip him by the hair to remind him to breathe. He looks wrecked already, lips wet and pupils blown. Doc hooks two fingers in his mouth to keep him quiet.

“Is this what you want, boy? Want me to fuck you right here, huh? Right up against the side of the Hornet?” Doc runs his other hand down McQueen’s front, cups him through his jeans. “All this when you coulda just asked for it.”

“Didn’t think you’d say yes,” McQueen gasps around his fingers.  

“Like you thought I wouldn’t let you drive?” Doc grabs McQueen’s wandering hand by the wrist, pins it to the windowpane. “I got a bad habit of indulging you, kid. I should take those keys after that stunt you pulled on the way here.”

“Please,” begs McQueen, “Doc, don’t. Driving the Hornet’s a fucking dream, don’t make me stop now.”

Doc wouldn’t ever make him stop. He’d do anything to see McQueen as radiant as he is behind the wheel of his car, driving him better than anyone ever has. Maybe even better than Doc himself. 

“It ain’t about that, though, is it,” murmurs Doc, fingers slipping beyond McQueen’s waistband. “You’re just trying to rile me up. Trying to get me to take what I want from you.” 

“Always,” admits McQueen shamelessly, his half-lidded eyes going wild and drunk when Doc starts mouthing his way down, down, down. “Doc—” he breathes, fingers sinking into Doc’s hair, the sweat-damp skin of his shoulders squeaking against the sleek metal as he shifts, hips lifting while Doc pulls down his jeans and bares him to the desert air.

And Doc won’t ever go back from this: McQueen shaking around the fingers Doc’s got curled inside him, bucking into Doc’s mouth. His sweet little cock hardening under Doc’s tongue, swollen red and aching. His thighs flushing angrily under the brush of Doc’s rough chin, his mustache. He tastes like pure heat, flooding Doc’s senses in waves of fire, as greedy to consume him as he is to be consumed. 

McQueen comes hard and shivering, slicking Doc’s hand down to the wrist, an incoherent stream of sounds fleeing his mouth. Doc laps up his triumph, fucks him through it, until McQueen grabs his wrist and starts begging again.

“Fuck me, Doc, god,” he chokes out. “Need your cock, fuck, please, please—” 

Doc stands and hauls the car door open. 

“Down on your knees, baby,” he murmurs, gripping McQueen by the waist, guiding him onto the leather of the Hornet’s front seat. Face down, ass up. Jeans still half-zipped at his knees, forcing his legs together. “Good boy.” 

Doc can’t resist thumbing over his much smaller hole, furled pink and sweet, even though he wouldn’t dare without a little lube and a lot more patience. McQueen’s already asked him to take him there: make me your boy. Glowing with a tender sort of devastation when Doc reminded him, you already are. 

McQueen’s sharp little inhale at the press of Doc’s thumb is enough to make the thought unbearable, too hot to touch. He crouches down to fuck McQueen with his tongue again instead. Drinks him in while he frees his own aching cock from his pants and strokes himself with a warm, wet hand. 

“I’m ready, Doc, c’mon, please,” McQueen babbles, pushing backwards into Doc, seeking. His words dissolve into a formless litany when Doc nudges up against his hole: all Doc and fuck and please and Daddy, muffled by the press of his face to the crook of his elbow where he’s braced against the console.

“You take your old man so easy,” Doc says when he bottoms out, hips flush against McQueen’s ass, huddling under the roof of the Hornet to grab the back of McQueen’s neck. He runs fingers through the sweat glistening at the base of his spine, grabs him by his slender hips, and fucks him deep and rough enough for his legs to shake. “So wet for me. So needy.” 

McQueen’s stopped trying to speak, reduced to low, keening noises, gasping breaths punched out of him by the force of Doc’s thrusts. The creaking of McQueen’s knees against the leather of the seat and the wet sound of their bodies meeting work in tandem, obscene in the silence of the car. 

Doc realizes with visceral clarity that he’s never done this: he’s never fucked a boy in the Hornet, never even dared. The closest he ever came was a kiss up against the hood; an autograph-bookmark-love-letter stashed between yellowing pages.

I knew you as soon as I saw you, he’d told McQueen. He thought he knew him then. Another golden boy whose father didn’t raise him right—whose father maybe didn’t raise him at all—destined to crash and burn or make it big by some divine stroke of luck. Another pretty young thing for Doc to look at and wonder at and hate himself for it. Not this, never this: a friend, a lover, a mirror. Not only golden but burning. Life and death and everything Doc has ever loved and hated about racing rolled into a boy, a man, a self-built mechanic of his own flesh. 

McQueen’s clenching around him like he’s gonna come again, and Doc’s had enough time figuring him out to know that he will, that this is only the beginning, that he’ll beg for it again later. Again, again, again. So much work, his boy, and still never enough. Even if Doc could fuck him all day, break his dick and sprain his wrist and ruin his heart for him, it wouldn’t be enough. 

Doc starts losing control after McQueen starts coming, shuddering hard, spine pulled taut like a bowstring. He can hold out, he knows—he’s done it before—but not when McQueen doesn’t want it, when he wants something else.

“Inside, Doc,” chants McQueen, still shaking, “fill me up, it’s okay, I want it—”

Doc’s body hastens to comply. Sense leaves him in a few sharp, unsteady thrusts, and then he’s sinking, drowning, marking McQueen as his from the inside out. 

He steadies himself through it by petting the hair at McQueen’s nape, watching the rise and fall of his back, matching his breathing. Holding him close and dear, feeling the last remnants of his walls crumbling, under siege and waiting for the blessed surge of flame.

“Mater came by the clinic,” says Doc. McQueen’s sitting in Doc’s favorite chair, arms and legs thrown about in a mess of limbs, Homer balanced in one hand. “We should be able to pick up the 95 from Ramone tomorrow.” 

McQueen beams up at him. “Holy shit, already?” 

“It’s been a week.” Doc rests an arm on the back of the chair, sets down his bag and the first aid kit he grabbed from the bathroom.

“Five days,” counters McQueen, “if you don’t count the first night.” He looks up at Doc through his lashes, legs falling open, jaw slackening. Wicked boy.

“It counts,” says Doc, circling him, coming to stand before him. “Had to fix you up first. No racing without a driver.”

McQueen’s eyes are too bright and burning to look at directly. Doc grips the armrest and sinks down onto a knee, feeling pinned. Reaches for McQueen’s wrist and pulls it gently towards him. Smoothes fingers up his forearm and frees the bandage there to reveal the healing flesh beneath. 

It’s quiet work. Doc goes as slowly as he dares, listening to the sound of McQueen’s breathing above him, steady and divine. At home in the space between his legs, basking in his brightness shining down.

Doc runs a thumb over his wrist when it’s done. “There you go, son.” 

McQueen doesn’t move. Doc doesn’t let go of his wrist.

“Nobody’s ever called me that except you,” says McQueen. It cuts like steel through the thick silence.

Don’t make me stop now, Doc thinks. Keeps circling the skin over McQueen’s wrist, the contact a lifeline. 

“I didn’t know how bad I needed it,” McQueen confesses, so low it could almost be a whisper. “Someone taking care of me.”

Doc bends his head. Presses his lips to McQueen’s wrist, his palm, the tips of his fingers. The back of his hand, the healing cuts on his knuckles.

“I never thought you’d still be here,” Doc murmurs, meaning: I didn’t want to hope. Don’t let me hope. “Boys like you don’t stick around.” 

“You’ve never met a boy like me,” McQueen reminds him, gleaming with the confidence of a god. “Besides,” he murmurs, “where else would I go?”

Late afternoon brings gold in through the window. McQueen’s limned in it, hardly human with the force of his radiance. Doc feels like he’s trespassing in his own home, a guest only as far as his little god has allowed.

“I finished this last night after you fell asleep,” says McQueen, picking up the book on the armrest. “I needed to know how things ended.” 

Doc remembers reading those last few books for the first time—faster, faster, matching Achilles’ pace, and then: nothing at all. Consummation only in death. A conversation between father and surrogate son at the end of the world. 

“But I picked it back up again right after training this morning to try again,” continues McQueen. “Gonna try to take it slow.”

Doc tells him a secret. “You and I were made for going fast.” Age made me slow, son. On the plains of Troy, you’d kill me. “I don’t think I’d have ever raced the Hornet again. No point if I had to go slow. Used to think there was nothing for me on the other side.”

“Now you have me there.” 

Swift-footed Achilles. It’s selfish—it’s sick of Doc to want to slow him down, hold him up. Keep him alive, change his fate. Leave him behind, old and slow and lonely and grieving, when Doc’s age finally catches up with him. 

“Here,” Doc corrects him, fist closing around McQueen’s fingers. “You’re here. I have you here.” He kisses the roughened skin of McQueen’s knee. Feels more than sees him glowing above. “My boy.”