Chapter Text
The warm summer nights on Mt. Harato were always the most fun in Legoshi’s opinion. Nothing could come close to the vibrations of the summer mountain through the body of the car. The sensation of driving a fast car through narrow corners created a feeling of exhilaration unmatched by even the fastest of planes.
Simply put, it was the best experience any racer could ever ask for.
Tires squeal and engines roar as the gray wolf traverses his way down the side of the mountain. Every corner, executed with mathematical precision as if he permanently had his finger on the pulse of the road. Felt every bump, every imperfection, every individual stone as if they were running through his veins. Almost as if he was ‘at one’ with the road, and ‘at one’ with his car.
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Of course, one does not simply buy a sports car and race without any driving experience whatsoever.
The moment Legoshi turned 18, he could legally apply for a driver’s license in his hometown of Cherryton, and he would have if not for the entire, shall we say, fiasco with Cherryton’s sublime beastar and a very effeminate hybrid supervillain. It sounds so stupid in retrospect, doesn’t it?
That’s exactly how Legoshi felt after it had all come to a close. It was almost like he had been living the kind of cheesy, cliché action movie that leaves absolutely no impression on you after you leave the cinema.
So at 19, he decided to settle down. Now he was allowed to marry Haru and had money, there was really nothing left to do. Just a smooth sailing life ahead of them.
Of course, being Legoshi, he decided to eradicate The Hidden Condo’s living space issue by adding a bedroom to the back of each room. Well, not exactly eradicate, but at least there would be enough space to actually exist without accidentally kicking the fridge and sofa at the same time during the night.
However, Legoshi also treated himself to a little present with some more of his money. He applied for a provisional driver’s license, got himself some driving lessons, and passed his test with flying colours. With his license, he could now buy the car he’d been lusting over since his first day at Cherryton Academy.
A 1996 Nissan Skyline GT-R.
Just as one lady entered, however, another one exited. Legoshi became almost obsessed with his car, and his relationship with Haru started to fizzle. Both of them tried to ignore it for the longest time, but they both felt themselves drifting away from each other, romantically speaking. It got to the point where they were just two animals living together. Not even friends, just a roommate that you kind of get along with but also not.
These feelings weren’t helped by the rabbit's constant worry that the canine wouldn’t return home from the mountain. Once or twice a month was fine, but it soon became once a week, then twice. Before either of them realised, Legoshi would leave the apartment at 19:00 every night, and return at around 04:30 every morning.
She burned herself out worrying for Legoshi’s safety, and she just couldn’t take it anymore. She had a scar from when the wolf attacked her, but not even that was as painful as having to say the words:
“Legoshi, I think we should split up.”
And the canine’s response?
“It would probably be for the best. Neither of us are in love anymore, we can both tell that.”
That crippled the herbivore emotionally, but she had no choice. Not because he had fallen out of love with her, but because he was so blunt about it. She packed her belongings into her suitcase and walked out of the door, not daring to look back. Looking back could lead to regret, and this was the one thing she didn’t want to regret.
This was a change for the better, right?
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The corners of Mt. Harato were being devoured by the sheer speed of the R33 GT-R. Tires wearing at a rate never seen on the roads as the car grips the hairpins like a baby with some candy. Being a car from racing heritage, you would very much expect it to do so. Even though it was the heaviest GTR of all the skylines, it could still put up one hell of a fight, and it still does now even against modern sports cars… given the right place of course.
The mountain pass is exactly that, especially Harato.
You may be asking why this mountain in particular, and there only is one answer. It’s a simple answer, but potentially a deadly one for those unprepared.
The corner C=225.
C=225 is a different beast altogether. Compared to all of the hairpins, its sweeping nature seems the least deadly thing about it, and that’s exactly what makes it dangerous. It plays on your unexpecting nature, using it to throw you off and crash into a guardrail.
Halfway through the long sweeping left-hander is a small bump. It’s not a big deal to those travelling at 50 km/H, but at 100 it becomes an entirely different movement. That small bump is just enough to upset the downforce of the car, so you lose all of your rear-end traction. However, even if you complete the corner without fail at top speed, you still have to do some hard braking to get the right-handed hairpin at the end of the corner. It doesn’t help that the big left-hander is almost entirely blind from the inside, so you can’t see any oncoming cars.
It’s become so infamous that the local racers have nicknamed the corner “Eau Rouge”.
Even so, there is a way to get through unscathed, and it counterintuitively uses sliding to your advantage. That slide, even if it is only small, gives the side of your car enough surface area to hit the bump with both your front and rear wheels at similar times. That helps keep the car planted, almost like a rally car.
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Legoshi powers through the hairpins of Harato as if he were trying to beat the sunrise home.
This run had to easily be one of his best. There was no question about it. 4 years of non-stop practice on a road will do that to you whether you like it or not, and it had clearly paid off. Every corner had been executed absolutely perfectly; every apex hit with enough mathematical precision to make a nuclear physicist jealous. Even though all Legoshi did was drive slowly until he could nail the lines, the sheer velocity at which he was performing this magical art was entirely out of this world.
C=225 was fast approaching whether Legoshi liked it or not, and there was no way to stop it without fucking up his run. Even with his extended, less-than-legal, self-training on this mountain, this corner still made him very nervous; even with the technique nailed down, the corner can still have a mind of its own and throw you off at a weird angle, or at least it felt like that to all of the racers. Even executing the corner perfectly still leads to the car getting terribly nervous. The way the front and rear slipped at different paces was enough to send even the most professional racers’ blood pressure through the roof, to the point where a couple of the locals suffered a heart attack behind the wheel. One of which Legoshi knew.
The white GT-R entered the corner at around 120 KM/H with the back end already sliding out. The screech of the tires as the engine fought the traction was a spectacle, to say the least. The RB26 shouted as it drew every last horsepower out of its combustion chambers, and the turbos whistled as they forced air into the cylinders. All in the name of getting past Eau Rouge.
However, something was shining through the trees. Something bright.
Another car?
Oh shit.
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“Hey, Jack!”
The labrador looked up from his technical drawing to find a female canine standing at his desk. She was an Arctic fox. Her name was Sharon and she was Jack’s good friend. She was roughly the same height as Jack, yet she had a much slimmer build (particularly around the waist), so she looked taller when on her own. She was wearing a loose-fitting T-Shirt and some jeans with a pair of Converse suede shoes.
Jack placed his pencil down next to his drawing and turned his full attention to the fox in front of him.
“Hey, Sharon. You alright?”
“Yeah, fine thanks. Listen, the group and I are heading out for fruity drinks later on tonight and I was wondering if you wanted to tag along?”
“Not tonight, thank you,” Jack replied, “I feel like spending tonight alone.”
The fox seemed confused by the dog’s reaction. She always knew Jack was less of a social animal, yet he never refused to get a drink with the group.
“Is something the matter?”
There was a few seconds pause before Jack sighed and put his head in his hands.
“Look, it’s not about you, it’s about Darren. I know he’ll show up and I don’t want to deal with him right now.”
That made much more sense.
“I can tell him not to come if you want?” The fox offered.
Since the incident a couple of months ago, Jack hadn’t been himself. He’d stopped interacting with friends, stopped feeling happy, and spent all his time on his coursework and listening to music. The once moderately social animal that everyone knew him as was no longer, and all that was left was a shell of a personality. And given the circumstances, it made absolute sense. Anyone who went through what he did would feel the same way.
From an outside perspective at least.
“Look, I just want to spend tonight alone, is that alright,” The labrador snapped.
The words echoed around the mostly empty classroom, causing the tutor to raise his head. Sharon had never heard Jack like that before. It took her back would be an understatement, because the sheer velocity at which those words hit her was astounding. This jack was a new jack that she didn’t very much want to meet.
"Ok," is all she responded with. It’s all her mind would let her respond with. The shock left on her was just so severe that she could no longer speak or think properly, so she returned to her own desk and her own drawing.
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No more than 10 minutes passed before Jack was returning his supplies to his backpack. He placed every pencil, every pen, every set square in their precise places in the left side of his pencil case, and neatly positioning his technical drawing in a plastic pocket in his folder, before leaving the classroom. Officially, the end of the day was now, however, the tutor usually lets students stay behind for half an hour to catch up on any work they may have missed, or to let them get a head start on any future projects. Today was no different, apart from the fact that Jack wouldn’t be there.
Ever since primary school, Jack has been very studious. His parents always placed a very high amount of pressure on to him, as they wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer when he grew up. Jack never had an opinion, he just had to study as much as he could. The only times he was allowed to hang out at a younger age was when it was with Legoshi, and it was only for a few hours at a time at most. Everything was all work and no play. Hell, the only reason he was allowed to go to Cherryton was if he kept straight A’s in all of his classes, and he did.
But it was all too much for him.
During his final year of Cherryton Academy, he tried to commit suicide via onion. Given the toxic nature of onions to canines, it should have been successful if it weren’t for one animal. Legoshi was right by his side when he attempted, and you know damn well that he would never let that happen while he was there. Even while he wasn’t there, he wouldn’t let it happen, so he got in touch with Dorothy from the school counsellor’s office and set up a few meetings with her and Jack. She wasn’t really supposed to help those who weren’t on financial help for any disabilities (per the counsellor’s handbook), yet she just couldn’t see a student struggle with this level of stress.
So she spoke to him during the after-school hours, and it helped. She got that labrador to open up about his stress, his worries, and his parent’s expectations, and they talked. They talked about it in depth, and slowly repaired the broken being and turned him into a chilled-out canine with a fantastic sense of humour.
When it came time for college, he had such high marks in his exams that he could get into anywhere. Naturally, that meant his parents sent an application to the top medical school in all of Japan.
The Dodome University of Medicine.
Of course, the labrador immediately got a place in the entrance exams, but something strange happened when the day came for the exams to start. The labrador with the 2nd highest grade in the entire Gunma Prefecture did not show up for his entrance examination. He was nowhere to be found, on campus or off. There was no sight of him even at the university’s train station.
That was because he was at Legoshi’s apartment having a cup of tea and discussing the very matter at hand.
The truth was, no matter how much he studied or how high grades he got, his parents were never impressed. Nothing he did could even earn a compliment from them. It was always “Do better,” or, “You made a mistake here,” or, “How do you expect to get anywhere in life with these results?” Nothing he did seemed to please them, and he was having a crisis.
So the wolf suggested something so simple, yet so effective.
“Just apply to where YOU want, not where anybody else wants. If that means having to cut all communication with your parents, so be it.”
And so he did. His first choice was always (minus his parents’ interference) Westech Engineering, a vocational college that taught trades rather than professions. There, they taught everything from art and design, to beauty, to car mechanics and even welding. So naturally, he applied for the Level 2 engineering course and got in with flying colours. No entrance exam was required to enter this college; only an interview with the head of the course.
When he went home to his parents the day after his visit to Legoshi’s (and subsequently the day he sent his application to Westech online), they were livid. They wanted him to cancel his application and redo the Dodome exam. The thought of their son being a “filthy labourer” haunted them to their very core, and they wouldn’t back down.
So Jack snapped.
He told them to fuck off, that this was his future and not theirs. They thought of not being able to micromanage every little thing in his life was what really haunted them, and that they now wouldn’t have bragging rights about a son with a doctorate. This was his future, and he was doing engineering. He was taking this course and nothing was going to stop him.
18 years Jack had lived and bent over backward to their will. 18 years he had lived without raising his voice. 18 years he had lived the life his parents wanted and not the one he wanted. All of the frustrations that had built up inside of him had finally been released on his parents, and they weren’t happy. From then on, the youngest labrador was to pack all his belongings into 3 cardboard boxes, put them in the boot of his clapped-out Toyota Corolla, and find somewhere to live. They would not have such a disrespectful, delinquent animal living under the roof of their house.
He had enough money saved for a down payment on a small house near the college, so he used that and got himself a part-time job. He moved in with a couple of his classmates with whom all pitched in for the mortgage, food, and utilities. They all lived together relatively argument-free. The only arguments came from when Jack was playing his CDs a little too late at night.
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Jack was cruising on the road to the summit of Mt. Harato. It was probably about 10 PM and there wasn’t a single other car on the road. If he was being totally honest, he expected to run into more racers than anything, yet not a single one had shown their face so far. The Accord was normally a magnet for street racers challenging him because they always thought it was a sports car. Even the one and only Durham was confused when he first saw it, and he had an S14 Silvia behind him when he saw it.
He rounded a hairpin and turned onto the small straight before Eau Rouge. In his slightly tired mind, he wasn’t totally paying attention. On an empty road, that’s fine.
Apart from when you’re not.
The squeal of a tire snapped Jack out of his trance-like state, and he moved further over to the left. Not by a lot, just enough to give a few more centimeters of space between the car and the centre road markings, and potentially save the life of the right side of his car. Animals go very fast around that corner, and that corner can be very unforgiving, The tail end of any RWD car can slide a lot further than any passer expects, and that leads to a very damaged car.
Before Jack could even comprehend what car could be behind that corner, it showed itself. A bright white coupé slid through the corner at a speed unmatched by any car he’s ever seen before, and… tidier than he’d ever seen before? The car seemed to be keeping it’s lane through the corner, and at that speed, it couldn’t have been easy.
As the car passed by, he got a better look at it. It was a white Nissan Skyline GT-R with gold wheels. An R33 to be exact, noted by the curved roofline.
He also got a look at the driver. A tall grey wolf.
The wolf locked eyes with the labrador for a split second, but that was all he needed. It was all he required to recognise this individual.
Legoshi.