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The first time Jack races, Dom nearly had a heart attack.
He was five, racing a toy jeep against the dog, but it was still a race.
Mia was standing on the porch, still as an angel’s statue, a hollow sort of pain in her eyes.
Dom knows that same hurt, felt the ache in his gut that faded every now and then only to rear up and knock him off his feet when the little things like this brought him back.
He wanted to take the batteries out of the jeep, hide it away in the garage where Jack would never find it.
He wanted it to be that simple.
But with an O’Conner, it never was.
Jack didn’t understand why Mia refused to teach him how to drive.
He scrubbed the counters, cleaned the dishes, and pulled an A-B average all in the hopes of changing her mind.
She never did.
Jack didn’t understand why she cried the first time he got behind the wheel, his uncle Dom riding shotgun.
But Dom did, the moment he caught sight of that familiar gleam of excitement in his nephew’s eyes. Big, bright, and the deepest blue…
He let the little punk drive to the stop sign on the corner, before losing his nerve and making him turn back. It was already in his veins though, the feel of a pedal under his foot and a gearshift in his hand.
Dom wanted to disassemble the charger then and there, pull it to pieces that Jack would never make heads or tails of.
But knowing the O’Conner in him, he’d probably end up riding in some zippy little rice rocket anyway.
It was their own fault, for thinking they could keep him from it...keep him from racing.
Dom could spot that neon little supra from miles away, so it was impossible to miss when it pulled up in his rearview and forward to the white line spray-painted against the asphalt.
He sat there, looking out his window at the halo of blonde curls and shining blue eyes, shoulders lax with an easy confidence.
It was like looking straight into a memory, one nearly twenty years old.
“Brian.” The name passed his lips in a broken whisper, his throat going painfully dry.
When the flags dropped and the supra jumped forward, Dom didn’t move an inch, too busy watching the empty air and the ghost it left behind.
An O’Conner had finally left him in the dust, but it wasn’t the loss of the race that weighed heavy on his heart.
The first time Jack wrecked he didn’t call his mom.
Dom’s phone rattled on the nightstand at three in the morning, his nephew’s smiling face lighting up the screen.
“Jack?”
The voice that came through was pitched high with fear, the blond’s hiccupping sobs turning Dom’s blood to ice.
By the time he got out there, a tight corner on a dark country road with the guardrail chewed to pieces and bits of the supra littering the asphalt, his heart felt like it was getting ready to give.
Jack was standing there, by the battered shell of his car, bruised and bloodied but blessedly alive.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry Uncle Dom. I destroyed it, I destroyed dad’s car.” His voice wobbled, blue eyes red rimmed from the tears trailing down his cheeks.
Dom, well he couldn’t be asked to give a rats ass about the car. He climbed out of his own, crossing the distance between him and his shaking nephew in three loping strides, pulling the blond into the safety of his arms.
Cars be damned, he couldn’t lose another O’Conner.
Dom won’t ever forget the first time Jack beat him, fair and square.
That flash of orange in his peripheral vision at the tail end of an impressive quarter mile, that blinding smile as he climbed out of his car.
“Don’t look so smug kid, I almost had you.” Dom called, leaning against the charger.
The blond just grinned back at him, the sunlight bouncing off his golden curls, the wide open California sky the perfect highlight to those deep blue eyes. “Winnings, winning.” He shrugged, shoulders set back, easy and proud.
Jack would never understand why those words brought tears to his eyes.
But Dom could have sworn he heard Brian's laugh echo in the wind.