#cameos from red & sheriff & danny & chase

[whipplefilter]

Fic: Burning Sky

This fic is for @gillg25​, who asked for fic based on this headcanon of hers, about Lightning’s crash. I didn’t want to just steal your idea, and I didn’t want to repeat stuff I myself have already written, so this starts a bit further back. ;) Hope you enjoy! The epigraph (and title) are from Bad Company’s “Burnin’ Sky.”

The sky is burnin' I believe my soul's on fire

July, 2007.

Doc frames it as a question.

It's what he does when the idea he's had is both stupid and dangerous. Maybe it's how they teach you to talk in doctor school, or lawyer school, but Lightning has a feeling it goes deeper than that.

Doc is teaching at the edge of a sport that defines itself by exceeding its edges. Racing is, more than finish lines or pole positions, the breach between tire and asphalt when you don't have the downforce--when that bump sneaks up on you; it's the keening shriek of air better measured in cc's than inches when you're loose on a turn and skim a wall. It's teaching your hunger for the edge without dooming your student to your old mistakes.

But here's the thing. Question or not, it's what Doc Hudson would do. It's what the Fabulous Hudson Hornet would do. Lightning's never once answered 'no.'

--

November, 2016.

There's a storm up in the mountains--lightning, the works. The race is on, though--if there's anything to be said about Los Angeles, it's that it can stop a storm dead in its tracks. Traffic, grid-locked; smog, rising; inversion layer, paralytic.

"They're worried about wildfires," says Danny, whose name Lightning only knows because Danny qualified a tenth of a second ahead of him, and because he replaced Bobby. Danny's talking to Chase, who replaced Brick, because Danny still has anyone to talk to, because Danny was never friends with Brick Yardley or anyone else who's gone now.

Chase doesn't even know what a wildfire properly is. That's how young these guys are.

But Los Angeles is always worried about wildfires.

Lightning just needs to focus on Storm.

--

It's always dusk under a wildfire. Orange and hazy, Cadillac range obliterated by smoke, it feels like they're on the moon. Except it's hot. Real hot. Radiator Springs shutters, all of its residents having retreated indoors; and caught up in the sepia of wildfire, it looks the way Lightning imagines it would have, if it had been allowed to disappear.

Red's already burnt a ring of brush all around town, doused the roads and all the tractor tracks he could find. They'll probably be all right, though with fires this size it's hard to tell. It's all scrub brush out here, so they can't fuel the truly large blazes like they get up north, but if there's something this desert has in spades, it's wind. You get wind and fire on a plain together, and boy, they can dance.

Red waits, wordlessly anxious, and hopes for the best.

According to Sheriff, Red thinks the fire is far enough away, at least for now. Doesn't feel that way, though. If Lightning closed his eyes, he'd believe it were right in front of him. It's gotta be 140 degrees. It's been 140 degrees for days. It feels like it's been the last lap of a summer 500, track so slick it's almost liquid, for a full-on week.

Doc asks, "Hey, Rookie, you wanna try something?"

And so, with Red in tow, they head to Willy's Butte.

--

Los Angeles at night is a race you need to lead in order to win. Problem is, it's hard enough to hold P6 against these guys, much less overtake. Lightning stays out of the pits as long as he can to build as many hundredths of seconds as he can between him and the car behind him, snatches a few off Danny's lead on him, and prays there aren't any early yellows.

In the distance, there is thunder.

--

A couple slow laps around the Butte, and it's hot and unpleasant, but nothing awful. Lightning wasn't made for low speeds, so they always feel a little coarse. But it doesn't get better. The air's flabby, just doesn't have the density, doesn't have the oxygen, and Lightning's engine can't find its power. It's hard to breathe.

When the wind blows in, so does the ash. It coats the track like snow and it coats Doc like a fine white dust and Lightning can't see much of anything at all, just dirt and ash and the occasional snatch of the plummeting cliffside he knows is out there. He tries to find what speed he can. He feels lightheaded.

You know, when I was a rookie on the force, Sheriff told him once. He says, Any time I bulls-eyed, I couldn't ever actually see the target. When my vision went pure white I'd pull the trigger and that'd be my perfect shot. It was always the ones I couldn't ever see.

Not gonna lie, Sherif. As a private citizen living in your town, that's a little scary to me, Lightning replies.

They weren't Hail Marys, boy, Sheriff huffs. That was instinct. Experience taking over. You just don't know it 'til you feel it a coupla times.

"Watch your temperature," Doc shouts over Lightning's engine. "What you're feeling--usually you only ever get that at the tail-end of an actual race. Everyone knows you got talent, rookie, but that's only gonna get you so far when you're up against a field who's got 300, 500 races on you."

It's hard to train race circumstances as fleeting as this one--those last five minutes where the pressure's on and one poor experimental decision can cost you. But under that wildfire, it's those last five minutes forever. They train until Lightning's engine is spent and there's so much dirt and ash clogging his air filter he can't speak without hacking. He feels like he's run a thousand races.

--

Los Angeles at night. You lead, you win.

Lightning screams out of pit road just ahead of Storm. It took 450 laps to make this play. Now he just needs to hold on.

It’s honestly breathtaking how quick Storm shuts that door.

--

Sally's pretty irate at Doc when she finds out about their wildfire training, which is probably where that doctor-lawyer school thing comes in. She's irate even after Lightning coughs his way through some staccato, single-syllable version of "No, I wanted to, it's fine, I feel fine, this was actually really helpful."

"Does Spare the Air Day mean nothing to you?" she asks Doc tersely.

In truth, the phrase means less than nothing to Lightning, because he lied, he does not feel fine, and his vision's going white and he suspects it has less to do with instinct and experience than it does with oxygen deprivation, and instead of heading to the shop with Doc he groggily wanders to his cone and refuses to be roused because he'd rather be miserable and asleep at home than miserable and awake in the clinic. That can wait 'til morning. End of discussion.

It's a mistake, and the most miserable night of his life because he cannot sleep because his body keeps jostling him awake to remind him that he cannot breathe, but maybe that's a learning experience, too. Sally says I told you so.

But whatever Sally's chagrin at their bold rejection of safe common sense, he'd never felt endangered. Besides, Doc was there. Red had been there. They'd only been training the edge, not derailing from it.

They talk about this on the radio a lot, as Lightning grows his career. How good he is at finishing, at clawing to first in the last laps of a race, out of the broiling pan straight into the cool shadow of that checkered flag.

And when the Cup introduces restrictor plate races, he's skilled at that, too. He adapts well to their breathless feeling, the way they steal power that you know you have--should have. Lightning owes a lot to that wildfire.

When asked about his training, Lightning simply replies, "Doc," even though Doc's been gone for four years and the last time ash rained down on Radiator Springs was even longer ago. His answer will always be Doc.

--

Lightning remembers almost nothing from the second that back tire goes out. He thinks remembers scrambling to keep hold of the track, but being at the mercy of the elements more than anything else. Correction: His elements. This is not a dust storm, it is not a tornado. It's not even the fire, raging in the mountains under lightning far above. This is the force of himself, and at 200 miles an hour, it plows him head-first into the wall.

They say he went airborne. They say he rolled--eight times, maybe more. Straight down the track, like a cue ball. Would've been gentler in the apron. It's a miracle he didn't injure anyone else.

He doesn't remember any of that, though he swears he can remember the pain.

His nurse swears he doesn't. "Trust me, honey. What you're feeling is the pain you're in right now," she says. She sounds like she might've already had this conversation with him a couple dozen times.

He might've had an out-of-body experience. He could see what was left of himself, splayed out on the track.

"They showed it on the screens," says Sally, who's there sometimes and not, which is confusing, especially when she tells him, "No, it's Friday," except it's Saturday, because it's race night, because the ambulance was only a moment ago, and normalcy was just one tire longer ago than that.

"Yeah, they showed that on the screens," she says, in response to whatever it was he just said. "Until they cut the visual, because they thought that maybe you--"

"It's Tuesday," says Sally. "You should get some sleep."

--

The ER is filled with ashy, fire-damaged cars who've just lost their homes to the blaze that razed the hills--the blaze which was, as it turns out, not so far away after all. The news is filled with the lightning storm that started it all, and doomed them. It's filled with news of Lightning, burning too. It's a testament to how this city works that they still spare him a private room.

The number of displaced cars climbs. The fire goes uncontained. There are two confirmed deaths.

--

Lightning dreams racing more than he dreams anything else. No surprises there. He dreams the dreams where you're supposed to run your heart out, but you can't. You can't make your wheels turn faster, can't get your engine to pump air through its cylinders, can't get the life inside you spin the way you know it needs to. That's how it always happens, in dreams.

But when he wakes, alone, in the hospital, he doesn't see the difference. He smells like smoke.

"They shouldn't let you watch that," says Sally, during visiting hours the next morning. It's a Wednesday. She shuts the news off mid-cycle. (The cycle goes McQueen, wildfire, McQueen wildfire, McQueen, community interest story about cats, McQueen, wildfire…)

When Lightning reminds her that he is extremely concussed and probably won't remember it anyway, she doesn't think it's funny. She says, "I don't care. You don't need to see that."

Whether he remembers it for five minutes or five years, he doesn't need to see that. And when you watch yourself fly through the air, the screen has a way of making five seconds into five minutes, five minutes into eternity. (Remember that wildfire? With Doc watching? Five hundred last-five-minutes. A lifetime of experience.)

When Sally is gone, the TV springs to life again. It asks, "Will this be McQueen's last?"

They frame it like a question. They don't mean it like one.

--

Lightning wants to bounce back. That's sort of his style. But it doesn't come naturally this time, so maybe it's not. And there are so many maybes clogging his mind they can't possibly be helping the concussion. Which is making him feel like garbage, by the way.

Maybe they were right, putting Doc out to pasture after '54. Maybe Rusty and Dusty are wrong, for not following suit; they're not exactly business moguls. They're constantly giving away free maintenance, free bottles of bumper oil. Heaven knows how they kept on top of all those sponsor deals. But who knows? Maybe Lightning doesn't have sponsors anymore. Harv has not exactly been in contact. Maybe it was wrong to end Doc's career, but not his. He's not the Fabulous Hudson Hornet, after all; he's just Lightning McQueen. And maybe experience is nothing against what a Next-Gen's got under the hood, white-hot or not.

Maybe it'd be a mistake to come back, because it was already a mistake to have stayed.

"Well, does it feel like you made a mistake?" Sally asks, having withstood this particular litany of maybes multiple times already. It's the first time she hasn't let him get away with his self-pity, so either he's looking better or she's finally annoyed.

"It feels like I'm in pain," Lightning mutters, distracted. He's trying to figure out if she's annoyed. Present circumstances make it hard to think in anything but worst-case scenarios.

"I know you are, Stickers. But that's not what I asked," says Sally, gently. She kisses him. Not annoyed, then.

Maybe.

--

It wasn't a mistake. He ran that race because he deserved to be there. And he ran it hard, because there's no other way to race. You leave your rubber on the road and your smoke in the air and if you have to eat your own glass, then you do it. If you gotta hold yourself together with tape, you do it. And if you hit a wall and you don't remember anything, anything but this moment right now, then you get right back out there and you keep running. Even under wildfire. Just because it feels like hell doesn't mean you're wrong.

--

They're rebuilding in the LA hills, now that the fire's choked itself out. The faces of the displaced Angelenos on TV are masks of grim determination. It's not a resilience story, or community interest story (that one is about harbor seals this time); it's a 'the fire took everything' story.

"Our home is gone," one of the cars points out. "And it feels like trash; and it ain't gonna stop feeling like that. But man, I don't gotta take it lying down! Of course we're gonna rebuild. And of course it's gonna be on that same hill! It's my hill! I know I can't say this on TV but--eff that fire, you know what I mean?"

--

Lightning knows what he means.

--

Four months later, that car is back up on his blackened hill, living large in a mail-order double wide with an ostentatiously lavish fountain sitting in his front yard. It's pearl white against black char, peppered with the green of the tender new growth that made it back with the winter rains. The fountain cost four times as much as his house and he doesn't regret a single dang thing.

It has a setting where you can make water shoot up into the air like fireworks, which he uses often. So he does that, and goes back inside. He flips his TV to the Daytona 500.

He looks for the 95.

[ayellowbirds]

Keshet Rewatches All of Scooby-Doo, Pt. 25: “Don’t Fool With a Phantom”

("Scooby-Doo, Where Are You", Season 2 Episode 8. Original Airdate: 10/31/1970)

AKA, "The Gang Are Oblivious To The Permanent Skin-Altering Side Effects of Regularly Ingesting Silver Compounds"

It seems especially appropriate that the final episode of the original series, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, aired on the morning before All Hallow’s Eve. How many kids got ready for trick-or-treating with this one fresh in their memories?

Upbeat music and a shot of the exterior of a high-rise building lit by a flashing sign with the station identifier KLMN, probably not associated with the real-life station of the same call letters. The scene transitions inside to a studio where the gang participate in Johnny Sands’ Dance Game Show.

Fred and Daphne repeat the same generic, jerking dance they’ve done at every single occasion where there was music, and are applauded off the stage with a “groovy!” from the host... who introduces “Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, with their ‘Toffee Twist’!”

The boys put on a performance using an immense length of uncut soft toffee as a dance prop, and as the rest of the gang watch, the station manager Roger Stevens lauds the original performance. The only problem, Velma notes, is that Shaggy and Scooby might eat their way out of the contest.

Suddenly, the lights cut and the stage is plunged into utter darkness. Shaggy cries out the series title in spite of the fact that Scooby was inches away from him, and the lights come back up just as he gets his response. Or more accurately, something else lights up the stage.

A glowing, misshapen figure towers over the boys, moaning hauntingly, and the lights go out again as people scream and attempt to flee amidst crashing noises. The problem with this scene?

When the lights come back up, none of the studio audience has moved, and while the sign for the show is busted up, it’s clearly a completely different sign. The colors are reversed from the original, and if you look closely at the very top, you can see where the background artist(s) simply painted it over the original sign.

Velma thinks this is just one of Johnny Sands’s famous “publicity stunts”, but when the gang respond to cries for help, they find Johnny tied up in a ransacked room. He explains that the station had been receiving threatening notes signed by “the Wax Phantom”, a figure he relates back to “Grisby”, an eccentric maker of wax figures who had briefly had  a spot on the show until he was canceled and swore revenge by bringing one of his statues to life.

The safe has been emptied out, and Mr. Steven is absent—with a trail of wax footprints leading out a 10th story window as the only solid clue. Fred wants to call the cops, but Sands insists that the publicity would ruin the financially struggling KLMN. It’s the last we see of him for the rest of the episode, which really feels like a missed opportunity to add more clues and red herrings.

While Fred and Daphne investigate the wax museum, Shaggy, Scooby, and Velma are sent to check on Grisby (first name? Last name? We never find out). He greets them at the door, hushing them.

It’s never said out loud that Grisby is gray-skinned, though maybe argyria is a common enough condition in the Scoobyverse that it isn’t seen as appropriate to question it. He welcomes the trio into his home, where we immediately see a table with a skull and taxidermied raven, as well as some kind of bird of prey over the front door, as well as a crystal ball on a pedestal with the likeness of a snake coiling up it. A skeleton in an electric chair makes its appearance in the next shot, and while Shaggy investigates a cauldron cooking in the fireplace, Scooby opens a small box.

I already made one Danny Phantom joke, so i’m afraid that i’ll just have to let you enjoy this BOX GHOST on its own. What a little cutie. It makes a chittering noise and flaps its arms, so i think it might be the ghost of a bat or bird, rather than a human. More tiny ghosts—little skulls—bubble up from the stew before Shaggy can take a taste, and Grisby gleefully declares that his black magic is working, and he will soon have his revenge. A live corvid crows and swoops through the room, and Shaggy, Velma, and Scooby flee—though Scooby pauses to wave goodbye, and the skeleton in the chair giggles and waves back.

It’s a charmingly spooky little place, but having seen shots of the interior of @bogleech and Guillermo del Toro’s homes, i feel like there’s just not enough going on. A guy like Grisby wouldn’t be happy unless the walls were lined with eerie memorabilia and figures.

The scene cuts to the wax museum, where the Wax Phantom watches as the Mystery Machine drives up. Finding the front door unlocked, Fred and Velma enter, and are too distracted to notice as the Phantom bolts the door behind them, and sneaks around to moan and chase at them.

Outside, Velma struggles with the door, and bribes the boys with handfuls of Scooby Snacks to find a window they can climb through. A series of frights ensues as Scooby and Shaggy are repeatedly caught by surprise by the displays, including animatronic gimmicks like a giant bat that drops down in front of a figure of a vampire.

At one point, however, Velma is surprised by a floating, translucent gloved hand that has no rational explanation. It’s an “actual ghost” bit like so many others, never revealed as part of the villain’s setup and given no mundane cause. Spooked again, the gang run into each other—well, Shaggy runs into an Egyptian-style sarcophagus (”just dropped in to see my mummy”).

Velma spots a clue on the floor near Scooby: a “Speedy Airlines” ticket, “to South America”. Where in South America? It’s a clue, but a frustratingly vague one. The gang go looking for more clues, and Shaggy and Scooby voluntarily split when they catch sight of a display of a dining table with wax figures of dinner guests.

In particular, there’s this figure of the Space Ghost villain, Black Widow! It’s a cute little cameo. Meanwhile, the rest of the gang drop through a trap door into a pit with stone walls and no apparent exit. The scene cuts back to Shaggy and Scooby, as the Black Widow hands a bowl of fruit to Scooby, who passes it to Shaggy. Neither seem to process that the wax figure is moving, though Scooby offers his thanks just before Shaggy spits out a mouthful of wax fruit in disgust.

The Wax Phantom appears, and tells the boys that they, too, “will soon become members of my wax family.” Shaggy and Scooby distract him with the fruit and sneak away as quickly as they can, accidentally winding up in the “TOPSY-TURVEY ROOM”, a room set up to look like an ordinary household dining room turned upside-down. The boys panic and cling to the chandelier, confused by the reversal of gravity and convinced it’s part of the “haunting”. The Wax Phantom moans in the distance, and the duo crawl up the wall and onto the “floor” to rest in the chairs and enjoy a snack.

A lot of these jokes would be badly out of place in another episode, but here, they flow naturally from the setting. The Wax Museum is obviously full of weird gimmicks and spooky sights, as is Grisby’s house, so it just makes sense that the gang would keep running into them.

Well, the trap door pitfall needs some explaining. Who approved these building plans? Inside, Velma accidentally triggers the door to a secret compartment containing a bag full of cash, and then another that opens a door in the wall. They discover a grate at the end of the passage, through which they can see Scooby and Shaggy in the clutches of the Wax Phantom.

The Wax Phantom plans to turn them into wax dummies ("we’re already dummies!”), and Shaggy has been the victim of these villains enough that he actually criticizes the Phantom’s use of a conveyor-belt ride into the boiling vat of wax. “Like, that went out with the silent movies, Phantom old pal!”

As Daphne tries to get their attention, she once again leans out too far over a barrier and falls through the window, catching herself on a rope tied to a lever that reverses the conveyor belt. For once, there’s no comment about her being “danger prone”, since her fall actually helps matters. The boys are sent right back at the Phantom, and the resulting collision knocks their ropes off. The Phantom gives chase, and Fred, Daphne, and Velma follow, as the completely random musical choice of the chase song “Pretty Mary Sunlight” starts to play.

Character designer Iwao Takamoto mentions in his memoir that the cast and crew called these bits “romps”. As this is the last one for a long while, i kind of wish this one had been more memorable or appropriate to the scene. I think they didn’t start up again properly until... A Pup Named Scooby-Doo? That’s what the wikis say, at least.

The boys escape, and Fred forms a plan to trap the Wax Phantom in his own waxworks. Scooby and Shaggy try to flee their role as bait, but wind up wandering into the path of the Phantom anyway, and are forced into the trap. Unfortunately, Fred fouls up, and pours hot molten wax all over Shaggy, Scooby, and the Wax Phantom. It instantly hardens, so hopefully it wasn’t too hot, but that still must’ve been agonizingly painful for poor Scooby and Shaggy.

With the sheriff summoned, Fred does the honors of shattering the hardened wax shells around the three figures in turn, liberating Shaggy and Scooby with a small hammer.

However, as he starts to tap apart the Wax Phantom, the towering figure is reduced to the height of a normal human, who turns out to be:

Stevens wishes the gang had minded their own business, and so we end Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! with only two “meddling kids” for the entire run of the original series! Shaggy was sure that Grisby was responsible, but Stevens was just using the eccentric old man’s threats of magic to cover his embezzlement of funds (the reason the station was suffering, or simply something that he decided on as the financial troubles set in? It’s unclear) and disappearance from the country.

The fact that Fred is able to chip away Stevens’s costume along with the wax poured on it suggests that the whole suit was made of wax, which makes... no sense whatsoever. How was it mobile? Were there joints we couldn’t see? If not, why was it flexible but became brittle after more wax was poured on? In the end, it’s one of a great many monster costumes that make less and less as a costume the more you think about them.

Back in the Mystery Machine, Scooby and Shaggy look with joy on wax duplicates of themselves tucked into the back. As with many such interior shots, none of the contents of the van that were used in other episodes are visible; the walls are completely bare, without even the usual trappings of the inside of a van. It’s far from the only time the Mystery Machine’s contents will disappear and reappear, but as i said, it seems to be bigger on the inside, anyway.

Why did the boys want wax replicas of themselves, anyway?

“There’s only one problem,” Fred says in the final gag of the series, “how to tell one pair of dummies from the other.”

“Very funny, very funny,” Shaggy grouses.

“Reah,” Scooby adds, “very funny!”

And that’s it for the show. Tune in this time tomorrow for a bit of post-season analysis, and the start of The New Scooby-Doo Movies!

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