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It's when the front tires leave the ground as he hurdles over a striped curb at 225 miles per hour that Jann remembers he forgot to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer last night. He'd gotten distracted by a text from Matty about some drama following his switch from Nissan to Audi (traitor) and suddenly he can't remember what it was about, but apparently, it was important enough that now his favorite pair of joggers are going to be wrinkled and damp when he gets home. In his defense, chores are painfully boring after hours of training and he makes enough that he should probably just consider using some sort of service. He'll bring it up to Jack over dinner tonight and they can have their usual "Back in my day," back and forth over how his generation has it so hard, but for now, the rear wing of whoever he's managed to slam into is careening through his windshield.
The car tilts 90 degrees, driving the passenger-side door across the pavement and throwing him against the restraints, and from the view through his shattered driver's side window, Jann thinks the sky looks awfully dark today- like there's an incoming storm pulling together the clouds to cast heavy shadows across the track. He usually tries to worm his way out of practice on dreary days like this- not to avoid driving conditions, but because rainy days are the ones where Jack wakes up with a throbbing shoulder- the result of scarring from a crash that must be a lifetime ago for how little he wants to tell Jann about it, and they resign to a morning of heating pads and reviewing previous race footage instead of making Jack stand under an umbrella trackside while Jann complains about his hair not enjoying the humidity. He usually gets up earlier on those mornings to have coffee and a few ibuprofen waiting on the counter by the time Jack trudges into the kitchen. He didn't think there were very high chances of rain today, but maybe he hadn't been paying attention during the pre-race briefing this morning. He hopes Jack's shoulder isn't bothering him too much.
A horrific screeching noise pierces the already chaotic event, followed by a series of crunches- and if he was a little more aware of his surroundings, Jann would probably guess it's the sound of a growing pile up around the first bend where he last recalls having all four wheels on the ground and any control over the situation- but he doesn't actually know what's going on at the moment. It's all a bit of a loud and blurry mess if he's being honest. He thinks he can feel himself breathing heavily- that's a bit weird. He feels a little dizzy, but maybe it's just hard to orient himself when all he can really see is the oncoming headlights of the McLaren from his position dangling in the now upsidedown spinning cockpit of his vehicle.
There's a loud crackle of static, followed by silence, and oh! That must have been his radio system going out. Awesome. He actually hadn't been focused on the constant stream of panic from the operators and engineers on the other end as he performed some frankly impressively destructive feats with Team Nissan’s GT-R. Those cost a lot- Jann supposes he would also be screaming and trying to put a stop to whatever was going on if he was going to be the one in charge of fixing all this up later too. Now that the shouting is gone though, he almost misses it. Surely it would have felt a little more comforting to hear someone's voice on the other end while his car is tossed like it weighs just about nothing over the hood of another driver and into the neighboring gravel pit.
He recalls vaguely something that the therapist Danny had insisted on calling in for bi-weekly sessions following his first crash had mentioned in passing during their third or fourth meeting. Mentioning that he occasionally felt like he wasn't all there after a close call or two had led to some fancy psychological term being thrown out and he was sent back to his flat with a new description for the little episodes Jack always had to talk him down from. "Disassociation". It hadn't made much sense at the time while they unpacked his rather eventful “incident” in Nürburgring- but as he watches himself skid to an abrupt halt against the barrier from 10 paces outside the car, Jann thinks he may know what she had been getting at back then.
His brief but thrilling detour into the sport of competitive-airborne-car-racing had unfortunately ended with the car rolling onto the roof again- if it can even still be called that. His eyes are growing heavy, but even he can see that there are a few too many pieces of white and red logo-laden metal that he's almost certain are usually supposed to stay on the vehicle lying scattered across the track across the last 30 yards or so. Moving his head seems like an impossible task at the moment, so it's lucky that he ended up landing facing the previous bend where the emergency vehicles are embarrassingly taking the turn a bit better than he had.
It's a bit strange that it's getting so dark so quickly and this early in the afternoon- but that's fine. He'd really like to get out of this seat before all the blood in his legs reaches his head, but it seems to be doing a pretty good job of leaving his body on its own anyway and that may be a slightly more pressing issue, but someone else is going to have to figure that out because wow, is he tired. He can't see the ambulance anymore- maybe they're just passing through? They seemed in a hurry, so someone must have been pretty hurt. It's about when he's mentally patting himself on that back for that observation that the noise of feet scrambling in gravel demands his admittedly scattered attention.
There's not much Jann wouldn't give to open his eyes and see who's outside the smoking wreckage of what used to be a pretty nice racecar, but he's so tired and he's starting to realize that his head can ache in more ways than he's ever experienced- which is a bit much considering how much he's gone through in the past... Hour? Day? Minute? He's not exactly sure, but there are few problems that can't be solved with a quick nap, so he's just going to rest his eyes for a second-
"Hey, kid?"