Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Motorhome. Trailer. RV. Recreational Vehicle. Trash.

They all meant the same thing to Lightning, the same thing he had run from the second he saw a chance, the same thing he had spent years trying to hide from, even as it seemed to chase him. It seemed to lurk around every corner, looming in the same way the shadow of a woman he once called “mom” did. Sometimes the secret felt as though it had slapped him in the face with the same hands and same calluses he knew the ins and outs of before he turned 4, and sometimes the secret felt like the weight on his chest or the lump in his throat he used to get every time someone asked him where this or that bruise was from.

It was the same thing he consistently paid people off to keep out of the media, and the same thing he woke up in a cold sweat dreaming about more times than he can count, making Sally worry even though she had no business worrying about someone like him.

They all mean home. And no matter how much the rookie would tell people he had no home, that the road was his playground and his car his only love, he will still find himself searching every trailer park he passes for the ghost of a woman and the ghost of the back of her hand, as if he can still feel the sting of her cheap costume-jewelry rings breaking the skin on his cheek and staining her fingers green.

He would often ask, innocence in his lips and crab-apples in his cheeks, why would she wear them if they were bad for her, why wear a ring that rots your skin, why keep something that will kill you? Instead of answering, she would tell him to fetch her a cigarette, and she would blow the smoke in his face and not speak to him for the rest of the night. Sometimes he thought it was a punishment, for asking such a question. Should he already know the answer? Is that why she’s doing this? Or had he done something wrong? Spoken in the wrong tone, used the wrong words?

Now he knew it was different. That his mother probably wasn’t smart enough to even think of hurting him in such a way, probably didn’t think it hurt him at all. That she probably just had no real response, didn’t know how to explain to him that her rings were the least of her worries, that she had been killing herself since she was old enough to even stand herself, that her poison was her cigarettes and they painted her lungs black, not green, and that her cancer was her coke and it dusted her nose white.

He sees her in people sometimes. The way Flo stands, the way Doc speaks, the way Sally cries. He will find himself flinching away from a touch he has no reason to flinch away from because for just a moment he could have sworn he saw those rings and that green and the back of his mother’s hand, but it never will be. Instead it will be the comforting hand of his girlfriend on his back, or the ruffle of his hair from his mentor, and he will feel an ache in his chest and wonder if she ruined touch for him.

He will flinch when he has no reason to flinch, and lie when someone asks him why because he has lied his entire life, lied so much that it echoes off his tongue with more grace than truth does, has, or ever will. He will lie and laugh and yet know deep down they will not believe him, like his mother never believed him when he told her he loved her, but still, they will drop it. They will drop it and even though he is the liar and he is the fraud, everytime he wishes they would push harder, care more, ask him what’s wrong, boy, why are you afraid of my palm, why do you cower at the raise of my voice?, but they will not, and they will never, because boy, you’re too much effort than you’re worth.

It is his mother’s voice telling him these things, his mother’s voice in his head every time and he knows now that he will never escape her. He can fly across the world, he can have all the money and fame he could ever want, but it will never fix him.

Radiator Springs, in a lot of ways, is very similar to Martin’s Lake. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone borrows from everyone, except instead of borrowing whores’ phone numbers and drugs they borrow flour for cookies and books. He still lives with the same ever-present, ever-suffocating tumor of guilt in his lungs, which he used to be sure was benign but maybe it’s turned cancerous from the years and years it’s been stuck there, growing, with the guilt his mother planted in his heart the day he was old enough to understand what the word “freeloader” meant. He had been a leech to his mother’s side since the day he was conceived, and no matter how much you will it or wish it you can’t turn water into wine. You can’t turn a leech into a person.

He is a freeloader, has been since birth and he might be until death. He was a freeloader off of his mother, who sold him to Harv who abandoned him when he found Doc. He lives in his mentor’s house, eats his food and even though he pays for the rent and contributes to the bills, he’s been a leech since he was born, and he will be a parasite until he dies.

It’s why he started racing, to get away from his own thoughts, to get away from his own teeth, to stop them from sinking into anyone else, to stop them from ruining anyone else like he ruined his own mother.

He knows now she was ruined before him, and she was ruined after him, and she will die a ruined woman, whether or not she had ever had him. This thought does not soothe him.

When he was on the road, blood in his ears and foot pressed so deep on the gas it feels as though the pedal is his foot and his foot is the pedal, he didn’t have to worry about if the kids in his history class saw his purpled wrists on Tuesday or if the trailer Mark OD’d in right next to theirs would sell. He just had to check his mirrors to make sure there were no cops on his bumper, even though there never were, because even the five-o’s hated Martin’s Lake, almost as much as the residents hated it.

It's why he’s spent years of sleepless nights keeping everything about his past out of the tabloids, telling fables almost as fake as Aesop’s to the media about a posh upbringing with loving parents in Alabama, even though any Texan could tell his accent was Mississippian.

It’s why he refuses to go to after-parties anymore, because he went to one once in his first season. Because while he was there someone offered him coke and he went outside and threw up, feigning alcohol poisoning even though the bile was fear. Because he knows, he just knows that if the dust ever touched his sinuses he would never be sober again, because addiction is in his blood, and maybe he inherited it from his mother or maybe he drank it straight from her veins while latched onto her, while he was her parasite.

And it’s why now, when he walks into Flo’s Diner after having not thought about her, or Martin’s Lake, or her greened finger in months, and sees the very woman that is and has been the center of every nightmare he has ever had sitting there, he just.

Runs.

Maybe he runs because he is scared, because he is scared that if he ever got too close to her again he would latch right back onto her veins, sinking his teeth into the scar they left when he had to rip them out of her the first time, when he left and he never looked back. Maybe he runs because that is muscle memory ingrained in his very bones, tendons and joints, because that is something that never leaves you.

Or maybe he runs because he’s gonna be sick, and he is still scared to throw up in front of his mother after she made him clean it up the first time he got the flu.

Maybe he runs because he is Lightning McQueen.

Or maybe he is Lightning McQueen because he runs.

He sometimes wonders why he named himself Lightning. If he always knew deep down he was a coward, or if he just wanted to outrun the ghost of the poor delinquent kid from Biloxi, named Montgomery in irony because his mother always hated Alabama. Because he is not Monty, and he hasn’t been since his tongue was scrubbed clean of his words, his life and his name.

“Monty!”

The scream of a name he hasn’t heard aloud in years breaks him from his thoughts, and he thinks maybe it didn’t work the first time. Maybe the soap didn’t go far enough down his throat, maybe he needed to choke on it, swallow it and digest it for it to work. For him to finally be clean, be cleansed.

It is then he realized he had not run as far as he thought, as far as he wanted, and he realized his mother had come after him.

“Monty, please just talk to me baby.”

He stopped and he turned around and for a minute he just stared. She looked the same. The same as when he was 4 and he tasted smoke for the first time, the same as when he was 8 and he tasted soap for the last time, the same as when he was born to her and the same as when he left her. For a second he pondered whether he had finally broken. Maybe she was a hallucination, and poor old Montgomery had finally lost his mind.

But then he saw how other’s also perceived her, how their eyes lingered with a question unspoken on their lips as they walked past, and Lightning wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not. Because maybe having a psychotic break was a better alternative to whatever his mother had come here for, because she never sought him out unless she needed or wanted something from him.

She never missed him, she never just wanted to visit just to see him, never wanted to even bother to know him. He would pretend like it hurt him, but he was secretly grateful he could interact with her the least amount possible. Maybe that made him a bad son. Or maybe it made him human.

“What do you want with me,” he finally manages to utter after a few minutes of opening and closing his mouth. His voice shakes more than it has in years.

She feigns offense, says some bullshit about a mother not being able to just visit her son even though he hasn’t seen her since last time she begged him for money, and since then the last time. It’s like a game they play every few years, maybe months if the old witch gets really desperate. She plays the caring mother and he plays the ingrate son in the world’s worst rendition of the hit Broadway show, “How Far Can I Push Montgomery Fayard?”

“-And the Lake’s not doin’ so good, and I can’t find work nowhere, and none of my usual people can help me, Mont-”

“Do not call me that,” and he realizes he said it maybe a touch too loud, because a crowd is starting to gather around them and he really doesn’t want all of his friends being extras in this poorly produced play that is his relationship with his mother-

“I can call my son whatever I want! I gave you that name, boy, always remember that,”

“That’s funny, you know, you only seem to remember that you even fucking have a son whenever you want something.”

“I-, Well that’s just not fair,” her accent comes out thick and her voice has taken that quality it takes when she’s desperate, “Please, baby, I’m sorry- I just need-”

“What?” he spits, “What more could you possibly need from me?”

And there’s a shake to her hands that is familiar, a tremble in her voice, and suddenly her dilated pupils and her pale face and her sandbags for eyebags create a picture so familiar he sees it when he closes his eyes-

“Oh my god,” and he knows exactly what she wants.

It is at this moment that Doc begins approaching, because of course it is, and poor little Monty doesn't notice, because of course he doesn’t, because when you’re on a stage the crowd below you is like empty space.

Lightning takes a step back, disgust evident on his face, “Mom, god, I’m not here to give you your fucking drugs,”

“Monty don’t be so crude about it-,”

“No, I told you when I left I’m never fucking touching that shit again. God-, what makes you think I would have your weekly fix of fucking coke? What, did your usual dealer fucking OD yet?”

And he really should have expected it, because his mother is nothing if not a woman of pride, and she reaches forward and the back of her hand is right there where it’s been his entire life, and she has those same rings on where he can see the exact angles that used to tear his skin.

Everything is exactly as it has always been.

This is his life and he will never escape it.

He braces for impact and it never comes. He looks up and he sees…

Doc?

The older is saying something, no, screaming something, at his mother, but Lightning feels as though he’s back in ‘89 with hands on the back of his head pushing down down down down and he’s underwater and he can’t hear and he can’t breathe and his vision is blurred and he tries to come up again but he’s shoved back down and water goes up his throat.

No one’s ever done anything.

He is eight years old and he is begging his math teacher to not let him go home, please don’t make him go home, he just can’t go home. She scolds him and calls his mother.

He is ten years old and the track coach sees a bruise on his wrist, and Lightning lies and tells him he fell down a flight of stairs even though there is no plausible way for the bruise to be that shape from stairs. The coach tells him not to be so clumsy.

He is twelve years old and he has to ask to go to the bathroom every class to sneak out the backdoor and smoke. He smells like cigarettes and his teachers say nothing.

He is thirteen and he is in his friend’s dad’s car and he is asked when they can meet his mother, and Lightning has to choke out an excuse as to why that’s impossible, because she’s always high or gone or getting fucked or getting beat. Lightning tells him he lives at Martin’s Lake and he doesn’t hang out with that friend anymore.

He is fourteen and his friends ask why they never hang out at his place, and he doesn’t have the heart to tell them he lives in a trailer with coke stuffed in plant vases, “just in case.”

He is fifteen with a bloody nose and bloodier fists from a fight that is safe to say he won, and the guidance counselor calls and calls and calls and calls his mother but she never picks up. He walks home and Mrs. Teller lets him.

He is sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Ninteen. Twenty.

He is twenty one and dissociating, being led to Flo’s Diner with more care than anyone has ever treated him with in his entire life. He is twenty one when someone does something. He is twenty one when he is believed.

He is twenty one when he is loved.

Chapter Text

Doc Hudson is a lot of things. Kind? Sure. Loyal? He hopes, yeah. Honest? Yes. Stubborn? Have you met him? Parental? He’ll deny it ‘till he dies but he’ll smile every time Filmore calls Lightning his boy.

Emotionally intelligent enough to handle whatever the fuck just happened in his town? Yeah, safe to say fucking no.

He looks over and his heart breaks again as he sees the sight before him; Lightning (Monty-?) sitting in a booth with Sally, the poor girl holding his hand on the brink of tears, and Mater’s across from them and he just looks so sad, but like he doesn’t know where to put any of it. Lightning hasn’t said anything since they got him here, and people keep asking Doc of all people what’s wrong but he’s a doctor, not some shrink-

Sally’s voice rings in his ears telling him people don’t call it that anymore, and that therapy has exponentially been less ostracized and infantilized by the general populace since the 1990s, and calling it a “shrink your ego,” is just disrespectful. She stops talking when Lightning disagrees and goes on a spiel about how nobody actually needs therapy, and how it’s just something rich people do to make themselves feel better about their childhoods, because if everyone actually needs therapy then why is it so expensive? Poor people have bad childhoods too, you know, and he slips in a, “and I’m doing just fine without it!” and Doc wants to punch himself in the face because that’s not something okay people just say-

-and he doesn’t know what to do, how to help and he feels more useless than he did the weeks, the months after his accident.

“Is she fucking gone? Did anyone check?” He asks. He’s standing in a circle by the bar with Fillmore and Sarge.

Sarge is the one who responds, “The Sheriff went and escorted the woman to her car. If she knows what’s good for her, she’ll stay at least 6 miles out from this town from now on,” His expression turns dark as he talks about her. Doc’s sure the same happens to him, too. He didn’t hear much of the conversation, but he saw the kid’s face, and that was enough.

He’d never seen him so.. thoroughly distressed. Doc didn’t think he had it in him. He had looked older than he actually was by years, decades even– Like he had carried the world on his shoulders since he was old enough to stand, since before he was old enough to struggle, before he was old enough to beg for it off.

Doc didn’t like it. No one that age should look like that, should have seen the things he’d seen, been through the things he’d been through. He himself had never had children, the closest he had was the boy in the booth over there, but he could never imagine treating them with anything but kindness. How you can hold something so small, so pure, so innocent, so happy in your hands and use those same knuckles you used to cradle it to beat the joy, the life, the very essence out of it is something Doc never understood, even less after he met Lightning.

His fist has turned white from how hard he’s been clenching it, unknowingly. He didn’t have enough energy left in him to care.

“I just,” Fillmore spoke, still gazing at the booth with the younger, “I didn’t know the kid had all that in him, you know?”

He turned back to Doc, “Have you read his interviews? I have. Not in a weird way, you know- I just-” He stops to collect his bearings, and if Doc were a less trained man, he imagined he would look far worse, “I wanted to know the kid more, you know? I know you know, obviously he lives with you but- In all his interviews, he says.. He says he loves his family. He’s asked, you know, all the time, why they’re never spotted at races, because even the old racers have their families there, you know, but never him, which is even weirder because he’s so young, you know? And he says- he says their jobs just take up too much time, but-”

He chokes again.

“I mean obviously he was lying. He was lying to them, and he was lying to us too,”

His breathing comes out shaky, “Sally and Mater didn’t even know. Did you know that?”

Doc, in the decades they’ve lived side by side, neighbors by a 2 minute walk, has never seen Fillmore cry.

He pulls the younger into his chest and he knows after this he can never deny the father-figure allegations again, because he is only realistically 2 decades this man’s senior but he realizes he would protect each and every town member with his life if he needed to.

Realistically, he knows they would too, just from everyone’s reaction to this, and he knows now he made the right choice. This town is his home so much more than a race track ever was or ever would be.

Moments, seconds, minutes pass and eventually Fillmore excuses himself to the bathroom, and Sarge goes into the kitchen and raids the pantry to see if they have anything Lightning would like, “For when he’s lucid again,” he reasoned, but Doc knew it was an excuse to not have to sit in the lobby and just stare at the boy, to not have to sit and stare at a wall and feel the bile creep up his throat from worry. To busy his mind and feet with something tangible.

It’s an old habit from his military days, Doc knows. Give yourself a task to distract yourself. It’s a method of escapism, if anything, but Doc doesn’t say anything because really he would do the same if given the opportunity.

He’s a coward and he’s known it since the day he saw a race-car for the first time since his accident and feigned disgust instead of longing, since he pretended to be who he wanted so desperately to be instead of who he was to the only people who actually liked him for himself and not his Piston Cups.

The door opens suddenly and steals him from his thoughts.

“She’s gone,” The Sheriff’s voice rings through the diner, and he lets out a breath he hadn’t even known he had been holding in. It gets noisy, and the man is instantly bombarded with questions, too many to answer at once, but then-

-Then, the entire diner goes silent again when Lightning snaps his head up, no forewarning or sign or anything. He stares directly at the cop and speaks for the first time since that morning and nobody dares move a limb.

“Did you give it to her?” His voice is strained, dry and Doc winces as it grates on his ears, “Please don’t tell me you gave it to her I can’t, where did you get it I can’t do it please don’t tell me you gave it to her-”

His breathing is quickening and his words are slurring and he’s clutching his head in his hand like it would split in half if he let go and for a second Doc wonders if it might, maybe the boy’s been broken from this morning and maybe his mother the woman broke him, because he’s never seen this before, never heard this from the boy he’s called son too many times to count and he wonders if this is the lie or if the version he’s come to love is the lie.

How long have you been hiding? How long have I been laughing and teaching and ruffling the hair of a boy who doesn’t really exist?

“I don’t-” The Sheriff begins, “I don’t know what you mean, boy, I didn’t give her anyth-”

“Then why did she leave she doesn’t just leave if she needs something she always gets it because I can’t-” He chokes on his own sob, “She doesn’t leave unless I give it to her and I can’t take that-”

Those who weren’t crying certainly are now, and Sally takes him by the shoulders and puts his face in her chest to muffle the wails, though it does nothing to soothe the ears of anyone who loves him. He clutches her shirt and Doc can see his own fist just moments before in the whitening of his knuckles.

He thinks he cares, now-

He resurfaces moments later, Doc can’t tell if its seconds or minutes, hell, with his current perception of time you could ask and he might tell you days, but he eventually comes back up and fully faces Sheriff this time and he says, voice small and cracked,

“Drugs,” His voice is low but everyone can hear him, “She came here to ask me for drugs.”

There is silence in the diner once more, as if they’re at a shitty one-hit wonder’s concert and the crowd keeps switching between silence and screaming because they know one, maybe two songs, but this time even the flies and the crickets are silent because they don’t even know the right lyrics.

There is silence in the diner once more and in the silence is where Doc comes to the realization, not for the first time that day, that he is a complete and utter idiot.

Him and Lightning are in his car and there’s an ad break on the radio talking about the dangers of long-term narcotics use. Lightning changes the channel even though it's both of their favorite.

They’re at an afterparty for a race and they watch someone do a line off of their friend’s back. Everyone cheers. Lightning begs to leave early.

It’s someone in Radiator Springs’s birthday, and there’s a celebration and Doc watches Fillmore offer Lightning a drag off his joint and Doc watches all the color drain from the boy’s face as he declines.

Lightning crashes during practice one day, nothing too crazy or life-threatening, but he goes to the ER and they prescribe him pain meds. No matter how much Doc hears the kid cry into his pillow, the orange bottle in his cabinet stays full.

Everything was right there, wasn’t it? Everything Doc ever needed to know about the boy was right there- He should have said something, done something when every time he tried to pat him on the back he flinched away from his hand like it physically pained him, because now Doc knows it probably fucking did.

How much pain, how much strife could he have saved Lightning from if he just asked him about himself? What was your childhood like? Why haven’t I ever heard your parents call their twenty-one year old son living away from home? Why do you flinch when I raise my fist, raise my voice?

Would it make a difference? Would he even tell the truth? Would he put on his media face, tell him a lie he’s practiced in the mirror?

He has no time to dwell on it because the boy’s begun hyperventilating again, and Doc himself doesn’t even know it before he’s grabbed the boy’s hands (not rough, never rough, not after today, he couldn’t bear it if Lightning looked at him and saw his mother.) and leads him out front, away from the crowd because though he knows they care it can’t exactly be helpful to be surrounded by a bunch of people having a panic attack.

“Hey, Lightning I need you to breathe, okay, can you do that for me, son?” Lightning looks up, cheeks still wet and he nods, obviously making an effort to smooth his breathing but ultimately failing. He chokes on a sob like it’s caught on his tongue when he realizes he can’t do it on his own.

“I-I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry please I’m sorry-” He stops for a minute to catch his breath, and when his knees collapse in on him Doc is right there to guide him to the ground before he can skin his knees, “M-mom please I’m sorry-”

This will not be the last time Doc Hudson will be mistaken for Lightning McQueen’s mother, but it will hurt just the same every. single. time.

Calloused fingers cradle the boy’s calloused soul as he lifts his cheek to look him in the eyes, because Lightning has been staring at the ground for the past two minutes, in some holy position like he was praying to be forgiven.

“Hey, hey look at me.”

For the first time in what feels like hours the his boy’s eyes lock on his.

“I am not your mother. You’re safe, son, I promise you’re safe,” He says it like it’s a godsend, and maybe it is, “I just need you to breathe with me. You can do it, I know you can. C’mon, 1, 2, 3, In, 1, 2, 3 out.”

He repeats it a few times before his breathing slows, and Doc is patient and waiting by his side the entire time.

It’s silent, then, again, and Doc doesn’t know if he’ll ever hear silence the same ever again. Maybe he’ll forever sit in the quiet of his room and instead only hear the product of today on his son’s voice.

Lightning doesn't look at him. Not when seconds pass, not when minutes pass. He's still staring at the floor, and tremors rack his body and if he wasn't still upright Doc would question if it was a seizure. 

He looked small- Smaller than he'd ever looked. He looked his age, really, because twenty-one is so young, and he sometimes let himself forget that. The kid carried himself so strong, so confident, so mature that it made him forget that he was mostly surrounded by men five, maybe ten years his senior, and he made them look like jokes. 

A twinge of pride surfaces from somewhere buried deep in the parental side of his chest, the part that saw Lightning and clung to him like his life depended on it, but that same part aches a moment later when he remembers exactly why this boy is so capable.

Through the shaking Doc can see Lightning's mouth opening and closing, as if contemplating what to say, contemplating how to say it, why to say it, if he even should say it.

"When-"

A pause.

“When I was eight,”

A cough.

“When I was eight I called her a whore. She uh- She didn’t like that. She knew she was, obviously, my mother is a lot of things, but stupid is certainly not one of them. I think-”

A cough.

“You know I think it was ‘cause it was me. I was her escape, kinda. Because to me, she could be who she wanted to be, and not who she was. She still does it. Pretend. Act. I don’t even know why, because we both know it’s fake. I think that was the first day that I saw through it, truly, even though her act really wasn’t much better than she herself actually was. But I think that word, it just. It made her realize that even if her little boy could tell she was a whore, she would never escape it, you know?”

He looks up and pink paints the boy’s eyes.

“But uh- She really didn’t like that. She-”

A cough.

“She grabbed me, shoved me to the kitchen. It wasn’t a far walk, it being a trailer and all, but she made sure she skinned my knees on the way there. And she bent me over the sink, and she picked up the bar of soap by the faucet and she shoved it down my throat.”

He giggles.

“You know, you hear about it all the time. Parents’ washin’ out their kids mouths after they swear, but, uh, this was different. She shoved it between my teeth and held her hand over my throat-”

A cough.

“And she wouldn’t let go until I swallowed it. The whole thing. And I couldn’t throw it up, or she’d punish me some other way. And it- It took a while, you know? Because it’s not exactly easy to swallow a bar of soap. But I just-”

He chokes on a sob and disguises it as a cough.

“I just wanted her to love me.”

A pause.

“Doc, why doesn’t she love me?”

And Doc Hudson is a lot of things. Kind? Yeah, he’d say so. Loyal, fucking obviously. Honest? He hopes so. Parental? Yeah, kinda hard to deny it after the day he’s had.

Emotionally intelligent enough to handle this situation? Still no.

But him and his son have a pair of whitened knuckles, and there’s a definitive wet spot on his sweater and he knows now better than he’s ever known anything that he loves this boy, and his heart breaks for him in a way he never knew was possible, and maybe-

Maybe that’s enough.

Lightning McQueen will never have to question whether a parental figure loves him ever again.

This is only after he accepts that family does not have to be your blood. There will be a hole in his heart where the love of a mother should have gone for the rest of his life.

Lightning McQueen has accepted this.

Lightning McQueen is finally real.

And Montgomery Fayard is laid to rest.