AN: Ooooh man...this is a rough one. This one is at least two parts.

Request from White_Ithiliel on AO3, Lightning deals with losing Doc. This one is tough to even write so if it's a chapter you want to skip that's prefectly alright.


He'd never dealt with death before, it was something he had just never thought of, surprising when his career revolved around driving a vehicle at incredibly high and dangerous speeds. So because he'd never dealt with death and had never given the topic much thought, he'd therefor never given the causes of death much thought either.

Of course it wasn't like he didn't know it happened. No one lived forever and to think otherwise was both naive and idiotic, but the closest it had ever reached him had been headlines in the tabloids. Other celebrities. So and so passed at 81 due to complications of surgery, car accidents, plane accidents, illness, he understood that, but somehow when he was forced to face it for the first time he just couldn't get a grasp on it, or when he thought he did he'd suddenly be left juggling the notion awkwardly until he was mentally and emotionally exhausted.

Why did his first experience with loss have to be Doc.

He supposed he should be thankful that it wasn't so sudden. Well it had been sudden, but not blink of an eye sudden. He should be thankful it wasn't that drunk driver that jumped the curb in front of the hotel down in Concord last fall, who'd hit two people before careening in to a street light only ten feet from where they'd been standing in an attempt to get some air after a long day of press conferences and signing autographs. Lightning had barely realized what was happening when he felt a rough hand yank him backwards, heard tires squealing, people screaming, and in .001 seconds witnessed Doc shift from crew chief to medical professional. He remembered standing awkwardly near one of the pedestrians, holding the phone in a shaky hand and speaking to a 911 dispatcher as he parroted whatever Doc told him. He'd had no idea what half of it meant but it had helped the responders who arrived on scene.

In that moment he'd actually forgotten Doc was ill.

He'd forgotten it rather frequently in the course of those seventeen months.

Had it really only been seventeen months?

Lightning would get so caught up in their usual routine that for days or weeks at a time he would forget there was anything wrong. Or maybe he'd been forcing himself to forget, because there were times when that knowledge would crash through the wall he'd worked so hard to put in place. With blinding force, that fear and anticipation of the worst would jump that barrier and slam in to those weak defenses, scrape across his senses like metal on pavement, send chills down his spine and leave deep grooves and gouges, raw and open and bleeding. It had and still left him with an unexplainable sense of detachment from the rest of the world. How could they keep going when they all knew nothing was ever going to be the same. How do you live day to day knowing that the hands on the clock were slowing down. How could you just wait for them to stop.

In those days when he could forget, though, those blissfully ignorant afternoons at the Butte, he would forget the large brown envelope he'd found on the desk and took the liberty to open. It had looked official enough to pertain to the upcoming season, and everything sent to Doc was always addressed Jesse A. Hudson M.D.

Except it had nothing to do with Piston Cup.

The forms he'd glanced at before shoving them back in to the folder had been filled with terms he didn't understand, didn't want to understand, but he'd spent enough time hanging around in the clinic in the off seasons to recognize some of it. He could only sit around so long before he'd pull those text books off the shelves in boredom. One of his favorite pass times had been flipping to random pages, finding the most ridiculous and bizarre medical facts and try to stump Doc, which of course never worked. In doing so, it was hard not to pick up a few things here or there…

He'd stomped through to the garage, intent on throwing a tantrum that would put his rookie year to shame but when he finally did find his mentor, his crew chief, his father, he'd only thrown the envelope on the old desk and glared at him with tear filled eyes.

Doc, for his part, had only regarded the offending parcel in silence from where he stood at the work bench.

"You weren't going to tell me, were you? You weren't going to tell anyone."

Doc had allowed him to rant and rave and vent his frustration over being kept in the dark and Lightning couldn't tell in that moment whether he was angry at Doc's silence or that expression of calm that had refused to break in the face of his verbal assault.

One of his most vivid memories of the whole ordeal was how much his fingers hurt when he'd held on to the back of Doc's shirt, how hot his face felt and the painful sting in his eyes when the tears had finally spilled over, of how there didn't seem to be anything wrong, there was no sign of frailness or illness when Doc had finally cut off his tirade with a crushing embrace and a muttered I'm sorry, Kiddo.

It had all started after the race in New York. Wet and cold and raining for the majority of the weekend, minus the race somehow, just about everyone had come down with some form of bronchitis or the flu. With Radiator Springs back on the map, the population had been steadily growing and so had the amount of patients at the clinic. Lightning remembered being wowed with some of the new equipment and despite his own heavy chest cold, he'd asked a thousand questions about the mobile x-ray machine.

"Yeah, it's great." Doc hadn't exactly sounded thrilled, but it might have been because while he was being granted the latest and greatest equipment, he still didn't have the technicians to use the equipment, at least in the case where he'd needed it for himself.

"You could always walk me through it." Lightning had provided. "It can't be that hard." The very idea that an x-ray machine could send images to a tablet wasn't exactly science fiction to him. It was more the fact that Doc could use a tablet that was the strange part.

"This thing costs more than you make in a year. Don't even look at it."

"Why do we need x-rays?"

"You don't. You have a cold."

"Then who needs it?"

"It's illegal to share that kind of information."

Through process of elimination, Lightning had figured out it was Sarge, who had actually come down with pneumonia.

Because the clinic had no technicians, Doc had been forced to travel for his own diagnosis, which Lightning had just looked at as a field trip, complaining both ways that if Doc had just allowed him to use the mobile machine they would have saved an entire day's worth of driving. He'd been a little surprised when Doc mentioned going back a month or so later, he hadn't been nearly as bad off as some of them but only shrugged when Lightning questioned him and offered a vague explanation that they only wanted a follow up.

It was more than a follow up.

What little Lightning had gathered from the forms he'd mistakenly opened, told him that something far more serious had been discovered through the course of the illness that had swept it's way through the pit crew.

It wasn't pneumonia or bronchitis, he hadn't even been able to bring himself to say it, let alone think it. It was a zodiac sign you looked up in the paper to read your horoscope, it was a constellation, the Latin word for crab. It was harmless when considered in that context...

But in those moments he couldn't just forget, when he was forced to face the facts in those lonely hours at night, when the shadows crept in and his defenses were at their weakest, he'd sway dangerously between fear and anger. Fear of the unknown, fear of knowing that eventually there'd come a time when he'd look up at that pit box and Doc wouldn't be there.

He wasn't real sure on how the grieving process worked and he wasn't desperate enough to google it yet, but he did know that he'd then get angry, because his crew chief (father) was such a walking contradiction that Lightning sometimes couldn't even come close to understanding his logic. How could someone finally open up and tell such fond stories of people they'd abandoned for fifty years but then make no attempt to return to old stomping grounds. How could a Medical Doctor completely ignore their own failing health but badger him over his own.

How could Doc refuse treatment.

That's what had hurt him the most, when his ranting and crying and confusion had finally mellowed and he'd gotten himself under control (days later) he'd asked in a conversational tone when treatments would start, because he'd planned to be part of it all.

"Season starts in two months, there's no time for that."

Doc had replied in a tone that suggested the conversation was over and of course Lightning had other thoughts on the matter. He'd put up a fight at times in the past, usually coming across more as banter with a suggestive edge behind it but this had turned in to a full blown argument, two hard headed individuals facing off and colliding head on, the way only extremely egotistical Piston Cup Champions could.

Doc had refused to back down, in the same way he refused to back down on anything. "I've seen what that does to a person, Hot Rod, and I am not spending whatever time left putting myself through that."

That had been the end of it, and Lightning never brought it up again.

Web MD was not his friend, and if Doc ever noticed any of his text books missing at any given time he never said anything.

It was months after that argument that he would forget. When the season started they had fallen in to the usual routine and everything seemed to have returned to normal. Or maybe it was just a new normal. It would only creep up on Lightning at random, in the middle of a conversation with the guys or after getting settled in to whatever hotel room he was put up in. Most often it was in those moments where he was able to spend too much time in his own head.

He'd gotten in to the habit of checking his phone, even more frequently than he used to. He'd started sending text messages more often, even if Doc was only in the room across the hall. He could almost feel the initial irritation seeping through the phone the first half of that year, and he was sure those replies that didn't come back until 4:00 AM and caused him to dig around for his phone blearily were more out of spite than anything else.

But then, after about six months, it had almost become an unspoken agreement between them. Instead of his constant harping and questioning on his crew chief's well being, he'd simply send a text, it was Lightning's way of checking in without checking in.

(6:42 AM)
Press conference at 8?

Generally meant Ok?

Doc (6:45 AM)
7:30 Don't be late.

Always meant Doing fine, Kiddo.

It had become the new normal and while he hadn't been sure how long that normal would last, he'd made sure to make the best of it.