A/N: During the off-season, Lightning maintains his modified throwback 'cruising' paint scheme seen in the end of Cars. Sponsorship logos and number are magnetic or adhesive clings for simplicity's sake, but fixing the paint still requires multiple colors and layers of work.

In a now-familiar game of How Hard Can Jade Lean on the Fourth Wall, fanfiction is discussed and several character pairings are mentioned/discussed and dismissed by the characters in question within this chapter. This is not intended as ship hate, and please remember the opinions of the author and the characters are not necessarily the same! And besides; if you love a ship, sail it. Cars 2 is also explained.

This chapter did not want to cooperate, and I have been very annoyed at it for some time and rather dislike it. Hopefully you'll all enjoy it more than I do!

The Epic Cars Fanfiction

(Explicitly Not 'OF DOOM')

CHAPTER TWO

"...an' then the beautiful Jaguar swooped down from the sky -"

Lightning gave a soft chuff of laughter as he rolled into the lot of Flo's Cafe at a quarter to three, acutely aware of the half-dried patch paint itching on his sides. Mater was obviously trying to impress Kori and her camera team if he was breaking out that particular tall tale.

Everyone else was there already; Anne and Sally deep in discussion with Kori, Mater entertaining the camera van and the sound tech, and Doc at his usual pump, a can of oil in front of him. A second can, in Lightning's preferred weight of synthetic, was waiting at his left front tire. Through the window of the Cafe, Lightning could see Flo and the Miata twins cleaning up after the lunch rush, and Sheriff was watching from one of the far pumps. The majority of the Radiator Springs residents tended to stay out of the way of the cameras, although it wasn't uncommon for several of them to linger outside of the shot to watch the filming.

"Stickers, there you are! We were starting to wonder if you'd forgotten again," Sally smiled, rolling up to greet him as he pulled in. Anne and Kori both nodded their greetings to him before going back to reviewing notes on Kori's skyPad - probably approving the interview questions, if he had to guess.

"Nah, just waiting on the master artist to complete his work. Careful, I'm still wet," he added quickly, and Sally backtracked away from her intended kiss to his fender. Doc had been in and out of Ramone's in half an hour - his sturdier steel skin meant both fewer dents and faster repair, and his monochrome paint was definitely a faster touch-up than Lightning's.

" - an' then with the rockets, I won the race!" Mater concluded, grinning broadly, as his audience exchanged bemused glances behind him. "Hey, Lightnin'! Ya just missed my best story!"

"That's okay, Mater, you can tell it to me later, right?" He'd heard the story a few times now, and it always grew with the telling. The first version had simply been a global rally-race - probably because of all the news coverage of the Wings Around the Globe rally last year - but by the third telling, the story had been expanded to include international spies and a vast oil company conspiracy.

The fifth telling would probably involve invaders from Mars, but at least they were never bored in Mater's presence!

"I'm still not sure why your story requires me to be dead," Doc grumbled, hunkering down a little on his suspension, and Lightning glanced towards Doc in some concern at the tone of his voice. The old Hudson's mouth was tight with something that wasn't quite annoyance, although Lightning couldn't put a name to it.

"Well, tha's simple, Doc," Mater answered, cheerfully oblivious to Doc's irritation. "Lightnin' wouldn't do nothin' that stupid with you around!"

"...I think I've just been insulted," Lightning remarked, circling around the pumps to pull up beside Doc, who slid him his oil without comment. Lightning risked a light nudge of his tire against Doc's, mindful of both their paint jobs, and the corner of Doc's bumper loosened into a faint smile.

"Well, 's true!"

"Don't worry, Doc, you're merely joining the legions of characters killed off in fiction for the mere function of plot advancement. It's something of a milestone," Anne grinned from beside the camera, passing Kori back the skyPad as the reporter gave a startled snort of laughter.

Doc's eyeroll might have been better suited to a car half Lightning's age. "I'm flattered."

"Usually, it's for romantic purposes, though," Sally remarked, scrolling through something on Anne's phone. "I can't count the number of times I've been written out or killed off for the sake of pairing Lightning up with someone else."

Lightning couldn't quite stop the incredulous noise that escaped him. "Seriously? They think I'd - with who?!"

Anne - who was, in some way, contractually obligated to keep track of such things - shrugged, not quite managing to stifle her amusement. "Mostly young, female authors' avatars, but I've seen Junior, Mater... even you occasionally, Doc."

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that."

"I think I'm gonna pretend that too," Mater declared, after a moment of speechless astonishment. "No 'fense, buddy."

"None taken," Lightning answered, watching as Sally raised an eyebrow at the phone before tilting the screen for Anne to read.

The Blazer raised an eyebrow at the phone in an identical expression of surprise. "Pairing you with Dusty Crophopper, that's a new one," she remarked levelly. "Maybe we should try to do a publicized meet between you two, capitalize on people's interest... We can emphasize the rookie championship and the mentor-trainee dynamic, too, his instructor is a retired Navy Corsair."

"As long as you don't expect me to kiss him, sure," Lightning shrugged, earning another round of startled laughter from Kori and her crew and another eyeroll from Doc.

"Lightning, you seem remarkably comfortable with the fanfiction. Isn't it a little strange, knowing people are writing stories about you?" Kori asked. It was her on-camera voice, more sharply enunciated and pitched slightly deeper than her normal speaking voice, and Lightning snuck a fast glance behind her at the camera, unsurprised to see the recording light on.

Well, it wasn't the first time they'd started an interview in the middle and spliced the segments into a more logical order. Quickly toning his amused grin down to a slight smile - and so what if he'd copied it from The King? - he put on his own camera-voice and answered.

"Well, it surprised me a little at first. But to be honest, my friend Mater makes me a character in so many of the stories he tells that I got used to it pretty quick. And I've been really lucky, I get to talk to a lot of my fans, both face-to-face and through social media with the help of my PR Manager, and most of them are awesome people with great imaginations. I don't see anything wrong with them having a little harmless fun with my public image."

Doc pulled a face beside him. "I just can't understand the whole concept. Playing around with someone's name and face like you have a right to it, or their private life."

Lightning chuckled, shaking his head. "You're showing your age, Doc."

"A reasonable expectation of privacy is showing my age?"

"I think our definitions of reasonable privacy are kind of different," Lightning countered. "I mean, had they even invented color televisions when you were still competing?"

Doc shot him a narrow-eyed glare for that and took another sip of his oil before responding. "They caught on in the sixties."

Lightning, very focused on projecting a mature and polite appearance, did not smirk, merely considered Filmore's paint job for a moment and nodded. "Yeah, that makes sense. The sixties were... colorful."

"Right on, man!" came Filmore's cheer from the street off to Lightning's left, predictably followed by Sarge's groaned "Don't embarrass us, hippie!"

Doc heaved a sigh, and Lightning shot the camera a full-on grin. "This is why I love living here. And as for the fanfictions, Kori, as long as they're just stories, they're not hurting anything. Naturally, I'd prefer they stopped trying to put me in a relationship with someone other than Sally, but a little fantasizing never hurt anybody."

Kori, consummate professional that she was, had stifled her laughter at Sarge and Filmore's banter and moved on to the next question with her usual calm. "Have some of the fans crossed the line?"

Doc shot Lightning a raised eyebrow, clearly remembering the incident during Lightning's third year of racing. Lightning shot him back a grimace - it hadn't been his fault the girl's cousin had been working security. Although he still wasn't sure how she'd slipped past Mack - or gotten the keycode for his trailer. There had been a few occurrences his rookie year, too, but 'crossing the line' depended a lot on where the line was...

"It's happened a couple of times, yeah, and I give the Piston Cup security team a lot of credit for handling them! It's been a few years now, though, so maybe they've gotten the message that I'm a happily married car."

Behind the camera, Anne and Sally promptly began an animated discussion consisting entirely of sharp looks and tire waves. Kori glanced briefly back at them, making a small, questioning gesture with the tire not holding her microphone, to which Anne nodded vigorously and Sally shook her head.

Kori raised an eyebrow at them before turning her attention back to Lightning, who quickly planted his tires on the ground to pretend he hadn't been beckoning to Sally as well. "You and Sally are coming up on your third anniversary, right?"

"Yup, July fourth!" Lighting answered, leaning slightly sideways to catch Sally's eye around Kori's fender. "We figured it was a date I probably couldn't forget. And who'd notice a few more fireworks?"

That startled a bark of unscripted laughter out of Kori, and Sally's wide-eyed look became significantly wider when Anne set her front tire squarely on Sally's back bumper and pushed.

Grinning broadly, Lightning sidled over until his side was an inch from brushing Doc's, making room for Sally as she circled behind the pumps to join them. Conscious of his still-damp paint, she pressed a very careful kiss to his front bumper and offered a shy smile to the camera.

"Sally, as always, it's a pleasure to have you on," Kori smiled, earning a more relaxed smile from Sally in return. "As a former corporate attorney, you're both the legal adviser for the Radiator Springs Racing Team, and a business adviser and attorney for McQueen Enterprises, as well as Lightning's wife. Are your current combined roles easier or harder than being a partner in your family's Los Angeles law firm?"

Sally laughed softly, Kori's matter-of-fact question putting her tires back on solid ground. "It's definitely different! The work is more varied and diverse, so it's helping me gain a lot of experience that remaining in L.A never would have offered. And even if it's a little more complicated sometimes, working along side my husband and our team here in Radiator Springs makes every minute of it worthwhile," she finished, pressing another careful kiss to Lightning's bumper.

"And working together doesn't put a strain on your marriage?"

"Well, it hasn't so far!" Sally laughed, as Lightning chuckled and shook his head.

"Our first few months together, dating, were the hardest, I think. It took us a while to learn to work as a team, not just Sally and I, but Radiator Springs as a whole. Establishing my racing headquarters here and getting this town back on the map took a lot of effort on all of our parts. "

"Especially with the way Doc was pushing your training during that first off-season."

"Yeah, well, that paid off in the end," Lightning laughed, as Kori nodded in agreement, moving smoothly towards the next topic.

"You proposed in Victory Lane, immediately after breaking Doc Hudson's season-wins record following your fall Talladega win six years ago. You later said that you hadn't planned for it -"

"I hadn't!" Lightning interrupted, with a soft, disbelieving chuckle. "Either the win or proposing, I mean. Superspeedways aren't my strong point, and I wasn't at my best that week. But we pulled it off, and when I rolled into Victory Lane, I just knew that I had to ask, because her saying yes would make everything perfect."

There was a sharp scrape of metal on concrete as Doc shoved his oil can, skidding it a few inches across the worn surface of Flo's lot, loud enough to startle everyone to silence for a moment.

Doc wasn't a consummate professional on camera - unlike Lightning, he still wasn't accustomed to the media being an inescapable part of racing, and he was too firmly set in his mold of 'cranky, secretive old man'. His team radio communications and Victory Lane appearances besides Lightning tended to mean bleeps, cuts, and the occasional FCC fine - but when he could be persuaded to join Lightning during off-season interviews, he generally did his best.

With everyone's eyes on him - including the Sheriff's - Doc frowned, gathered up the oil can, and muttered a low 'Excuse me' before slipping out from between Lightning and the pump and through the doors into the Cafe.

There was a moment of silence as Lightning, Sally, and Kori scrambled, before the cameravan shifted the focus of the camera and gestured to Kori with one front tire.

She shrugged gamely in response and kept going. "Was the lack of preparation the reason for the long engagement?"

It took Lightning a moment to track back to the conversation, and his laugh was probably a bit forced. "Everybody teased me about that. Four years isn't that long! But no, not really. Sally's the one who taught me how to slow down and live my life in the first place, so it didn't seem right for us to hurry. Besides, she'd made things perfect for me by agreeing to marry me, so I wanted enough time to make sure our wedding was perfect, too!"

"Well, perfection is pretty hard to obtain, but you seem to be coming close..." Kori paused, her smile turning slightly fixed, and glanced towards the door of the Cafe as Doc rolled back out, a fresh can of oil balanced neatly on the corner of his bumper, and pulled back into his space besides Lightning.

"...especially following last year's record-breaking performance," Kori finished, the faintest thread of confusion in her voice and her eyes on the old Hudson.

"Kid's leaving me in the dust," Doc remarked, tone calm and level, a faint, proud smile on his mouth as he slid the oilcan off his bumper and onto the concrete with a practiced twitch.

"Oh, come on," Lightning shot back, giving Doc's tire a sharp prod - slightly sharper than it might have been otherwise, with the faint tightness still at the corner of Doc's eyes. "You kicked my bumper eight runs out of ten today!"

"That's because I'm old and smart, and you're still young and stupid."

Lightning gave an agreeable shrug to that - it was hardly the worst thing he'd ever been called, and really wasn't that far off the mark - and pressed a quick kiss to Sally's fender as she discreetly rolled forward. She threw him a quick wink in response before slipping quickly out of camera range, ducking around behind Kori's crew and into the Cafe.

Lightning turned his focus back to the cameras again, poking at Doc's tire as he did so. "Look, I'm racing against this guy every week, so I can tell you; he has not lost one bit of the drive or talent that made him a champion sixty years ago."

"Oh, can it, kid," Doc chuffed, swatting Lightning's tire away, but he didn't bother hiding the upward twitch on the corners of his bumper. "You make it sound like I'm going back on the track instead of you."

"You could, you know, Tony's practically begged you to come run at Eldora. I think you'd be a bigger draw at his track than he is."

"Not a chance, kid. I'm retired. It's up to young punks like you to keep setting crazy records now."

"Hey, I've only got two crazy records!"

"In the past six years."

"Well, it probably won't happen again. I think the other racers would probably get mad if I won more than thirty races in a season."

"Sporting of you to leave six for the other guys," Doc drawled, exaggerating the roll of his eyes for the camera.

"You only left nine," Lightning countered, poking at Doc's tire again. "Twenty-seven wins in a season, old man."

"Twenty-eight and twenty-nine wins in a season, brat," Doc countered, poking him right back.

Kori, the concern from a moment before gone from her eyes - not forgotten, but at least well-hidden, chuckled softly. "So, do you foresee another record-breaking year in your future?"

Lightning glanced briefly towards Doc, who replied with a 'go ahead' motion of his tire and took a sip of his fresh oil. Two quarts in a day was a lot for him, even if they had run for a good three hours that morning.

"You keep guzzling oil like that, I'm gonna think you've blown a gasket, old man," he teased, just loud enough for the boom mic to pick up clearly.

"Well, when you get your medical degree, I'll listen to your opinion of my guzzling, you punk," Doc shot back, not missing a beat, and Lightning snorted. If Doc was still snarking, then the world was still spinning. Whatever else was wrong, they could sort out later.

For right now, he had an interview to finish. "Well, Kori, racing is impossible to predict. But the last few years have been really good to us, and my team and I have been training hard the past few months, so with the support of my fans and my sponsors, I hope we can make this year the best one yet!"

"And cut. Perfect," the cameravan declared, and the recording light on the camera blinked off. "We'll reset for the introduction - if nobody else needs a top up?"

The question was asked with more than a touch of sarcasm, and the raised eyebrow the van shot at Doc made its target more than clear.

Doc, for his part, cocked his chrome-edged windshields in response, his bumper twisting into a faint sneer of annoyance. "Well, sonny, when you get to be my age, there are a few systems that start to degrade, including -"

"Uh, Doc, that conversation's probably better off in your office than where we eat," Lightning interrupted. "I think I'm still mentally scarred from driving in on you and Sheriff that one time -"

Kori dropped her microphone, Anne cracked up laughing, and Lightning nearly overheated on the spot. "That is really not what I meant, it was a perfectly valid medical exam."

The Sheriff's snickers were audible from where he was parked at the corner pump, but the 'that's what you think!' that Lightning half-expected never came, just chortling and the familiar squeak of the old Mercury's suspension. When Lightning risked a glance over, he saw the Sheriff rocking in a familiar, very deliberate motion, the very thought of which made Lightning want to clap his tire over his eyes.

Getting the rest of the interview done was going to take a while. And his patch-paint still itched.

END CHAPTER 2

NOTES: While full-color televisions were introduced in 1953, and the first nationwide color broadcast occurred in 1954 - the same year as Doc's career-ending crash - due to the expense of the televisions themselves and the rarity of color programming, it did take until the mid-sixties for color televisions to become popular.

Eldora - Eldora Speedway is a high-bank half-mile dirt track in Rossburg, Ohio, owned by NASCAR legend Tony Stewart.

Bleeps, cuts, and the occasional FCC fine - NASCAR drivers and their crews communicate on two-way radio systems during races, which fans can buy or rent scanners for and listen in on, and audio from which are occasionally broadcast by the television commentators. Swearing on these radios is 'technically' a no-no - although that guidleline is often ignored - but it has gotten broadcast companies fined in the past when it slips onto the live television broadcasts. Dale Jr rather hilariously dropped an f-bomb following a wreck at Martinsville, which was subsequently aired on the broadcast, much to his amusement. And obviously, the drivers are not supposed to swear during interviews, although that has happened as well - generally incurring the wrath of NASCAR and some fairly stiff fines, as they market themselves as being a family-friendly sport.

...no, Lightning's still not mature enough to handle the thought of cars half a century his senior having sex. And the Sheriff is not mature enough to resist temptation to make Lightning overheat from mortified horror.