He wanted this so much, wanted the way the car jerked under his feet, wanted the screech of his tires, wanted the cry of the engine in his ears. There was no one around, no other cars this late at night, and he was pushing the engine hard, harder than he should, harder than he had in years. He glared out at the dark water of the bay and shifted gears almost before he hit the clutch, heart pounding steady in his chest in the wake of the adrenaline. The energy and emotion he usually experienced behind the wheel were gone and he just felt numb inside. Even his beloved engine couldn't bring him relief.

He didn't know what else to do. After the sun had set, he just didn't know. So he drove and drove and drove, and it wasn't helping. It was supposed to help, and it wasn't. He'd already lost so much, and now he'd even lost the joy of driving, of an army of horses at his command. And he felt his resolve harden further the longer he drove.

He wanted the empty street, no witnesses. His only company was one lone car going the opposite direction on the other side of the median, out of harm's way. He wanted the way his charger drifted toward the rail, the way the car tried to convince him not to but finally gave in. He wanted the crash.

And yet he couldn't stop the way his chest choked on fear with the final swerve and the way his foot let off the gas just before the crash. Not that it made a difference. He was still doing eighty. He still collided with the metal guard rail and crushed it like tinfoil. But he was angry at himself for the hesitation.

The charger grated on the remains of the rail and then careened into open evening air, and then it didn't matter if his foot was on the gas or not. There was no way to stop. He hit the water.

And then he woke up.

Jerking up in his chair, pulling himself off the desk in front of him, Dom had to take a moment to fully realize he was no longer in the car, in the bay. He surveyed the room, heart racing in his chest, trying to place himself. He was alone, accompanied only by the frames on the walls, the books on the shelf, and the desk set in front of him. This was his father's office at the Toretto Racetrack.

The frames on the walls didn't match, some brown, some black, some in between, and they held widely different documents – the health code approval, the certification for passing structural inspections, the print out from TripAdvisor about the track being a must-see item when visiting the city, and the paper award for the Toretto team winning the national races. Not matching was kind of his father's thing.

The bookcase was filled with books on business and racing and mechanics, and there was a half-dead plant on the middle shelf that his father always forgot to water. Dom stood and looked away from the memory of a dozen plants in trashcans and instead looked over at the photos his father kept on a filing cabinet. The frames of these at least tried to match, and from within them, he saw his family. Dom, his sister, his mother, his father, their cars – because the cars were like family too. They were all there, in need of a dusting but in plain view for everyone to see when they walked into the office.

The desk was old, gray and worn from use, but the calendar that took up most of the surface was new. The word 'January' stared up intensely in thick black letters on a white background, and Dom frowned just as intensely back.

It was all exactly as Dom remembered it. Except it wasn't January, and his father had been dead for six years. Which could only mean one of two things: either Dom had fallen asleep on his father's desk and dreamt the last six years of hell, which was unlikely, or he had succeeded in what he planned to do by driving his car off the bridge. He was dead. And that was far more likely.

In his chest, his heart pounded with the clarity of truth. He'd died when he hit the water. He was dead. It was quick and he remembered no pain, so it actually went smoother than he'd expected. But if he was dead, then why was he in his father's office? Was the afterlife full of familiar buildings? That could be rough.

It was all just as Dom remembered it, and yet the office gave him a cold, empty feeling, and he backed up to the door stiffly. He needed to get out of the stifling pocket of nostalgia. He couldn't stand there with all those smiling faces staring up at him. Their eyes seemed to follow him the whole time and he just couldn't handle that right now, not after he threw away the life they all fought for.

Out in the hall, paintings hung on the wall of different locales and different seasons, those stupid generic things you saw in office buildings and hospital hallways, and Dom hated them too. They meant nothing to him, to anyone.

There was another room on his left, but he bypassed it without a glance. His eyes were focused on the end of the hall, where he could see light pouring in through the glass block window of the exit door, and despite the seriousness of the situation, all he could think of was the sky. Would it look different in death or would it still be blue?

Death. Dom stopped with his hand on the doorknob. He'd killed himself. Shouldn't he be in some kind of hell or something? What if he opened the door and found something worse than the life he'd lived? What if the sky was fire and the ground ended just on the other side of the door? What if he was stuck in this hallway and this office forever? Maybe that was a kind of hell.

Stuck in a hallway without personality. Stuck in an office filled with his father's memories, memories already six years cold. Stuck with his mother and his sister smiling up at him from cold photographs. Stuck with always seeing what he used to have before it all went wrong. That had been torment enough in life.

Setting his jaw, Dom turned the handle and opened the door.

Much to his disappointment, the sky was a normal pale blue and there were even fluffy clouds drifting by. He was at the top of the stands that surrounded the track, which had always been where his father had preferred his office. The ability to step into the next room and get the best view of the races and hear the commentator who sat in there was a perk of the job, he'd always said. Let the lazy and the lame have their offices on the ground floor.

There was no one in the stands or anywhere else in sight. Not a single person outside of Dominic Toretto. The emptiness took the breath from his lungs and he slowly stepped down into the rows, stumbling slightly. Each step was hard and he had to hold onto the backs of the chairs so he wouldn't fall.

It wasn't what he expected. He had imagined the ground would try to hold onto him, try to suck him down. He imagined the sun would burn, the wind would whip. He imagined jeers from the faces of people he missed. He imagined darkness. And the fact that this place was none of that scared him more than he could express. It was too normal, too much like the world he'd tried to leave behind.

He was all alone in the place where everything went wrong. He felt no wind and no heat from the sun. He heard no bird song, no airplanes, no voices. The ground was solid beneath him, but it didn't feel real. The emptiness clenched his chest in its muffling grip and he fell to a knee on the stair landing, holding the railing for support.

It was not the hell he'd imagined, but damn it was fitting, and it was just as painful.

Sound.

Not just any sound. A familiar sound. Dominic sucked in the first full breath he'd managed since opening the door and snapped his head up to look for the source of the engine sound. It revved and shifted through the gears and revved again and roared, but there was no car on the track below. Confused, Dom narrowed his eyes when he thought he saw a glint of light.

The sound grew louder and louder, and before Dom's eyes, a car started to materialize on the track. It was no racecar. It was a Nissan Skyline in bayside blue. The sound of its engine grew until the car was as solid on the track as the railing was under Dom's fingers, and he watched in stunned silence as it drifted the curves of the track and bolted through the straights. He wasn't sure if he believed it was real yet, but real or not, the driver was good. Really good. Like smooth moves and deft hands and a quick mind. The engine purred, never growled, and Dom admired anyone who kept their car that well maintained.

The Skyline's tires screeched in protest the third time Dom watched it drift through a turn, and then the car bucked and rolled over the cabin once before landing back on its wheels and slamming into the concrete barrier.

Instinct forced energy into Dom's shocked muscles and he shoved himself back to his feet, rushing down the steps and shoving the gate open to get to the track. Years of helping bad drivers out of their own stupidty filled him with the knowledge of how bad the situation could be by the time he reached the car.

The Skyline was smoking and the smell of burning rubber was so strong that it almost choked Dom, except he'd been around the stench his whole life. He imagined fire breaking out, imagined the driver having been choked by his own seatbelt, imagined the damage was worse than it looked and there being a lot of blood. Mostly he tried not to imagine his father.

"Hey!" Dom shouted, shoes skidding on the asphalt as he came up next to the car. "You alright in there?!"

The body of the car was scratched and dented and the hood was bent up, but the chassis seemed intact and there was no immediately noticeable damage to the doors. Still, the smoke kept the driver hard to make out. They coughed though, and waved their hands at the smoke, so at least they were real.

"Hey!" Dom shouted again, annoyed this time at being ignored.

The door popped open and a white sneaker hit the asphalt, found stability, and was joined by a second. Then a hand gripped the window frame and the driver got out. He was young – late twenties or early thirties, like Dom, but paler, and he had a head of blonde curls that begged Dom to smooth them back with his fingers. As he moved away from the wreck, he sort of hopped, and a grin pulled wide on his stupidly handsome face.

"Not exactly what I had planned," he said with a laugh in his voice, and Dom didn't know if the high timbre of his voice was soothing or annoying in that moment.

Dom crossed his arms and frowned deeply. "Can't imagine you meant to crash," he said. The other guy had been driving really well up until that point, and only carelessness could account for the accident. Carelessness had no place on a racetrack, and the goofy attitude of this driver scraped at Dom's skin, trying to get under it. Did he have no respect for the track? For his car? For what almost happened to him?

"Well not yet anyway," the driver said, that same excited laugh just under the surface of his words and Dom bristled. "But I got carried away. Trying to show off, you know?"

"Show off for who?" Dom grunted and looked around at the empty stands. There was no one here to impress. No audience, no fans, no judges, no scouts.

Now the driver snorted. "For you, obviously." He tapped one foot on the ground like he'd stepped on something painful, probably an effect of the crash, and then crossed his arms in imitation of Dom. "And Dude, you should have seen your face. You were impressed."

"Not likely," Dom lied and dropped his arms when he noticed the imitation. "Now who the hell are you? And why are you here? How are you here? I'm dead. This is supposed to be my hell, not yours."

"You're awfully protective of hell," the driver noted. "But this isn't it."

Dom rolled his eyes and started to walk away from the wreck, convinced now that the driver was not harmed physically. How could anyone be hurt here, anyway? They weren't alive. Dom shook his head, angry at himself for letting worldly instincts override what he knew was true. No wonder this idiot was so easy going. What was a crash if you were already dead?

"Oh yeah?" he asked sourly. "Then what is it, Blondie?"

"Kinda like a waiting room, really. Or a train station. The mid-way between two end points." The driver was following him, which Dom had expected and yet still found annoying. A moment ago he'd hated the silence and emptiness, but now he wanted it back.

"Well call the conductor. I'm ready to go to my final resting place or whatever," Dom grunted and walked back through the gate. He shut it behind him, before the driver could follow him through, but when he turned around, the driver was gone. "Wha-?"

"No can do," and the voice was behind him. Flipping around, Dom found the driver sitting in the third row of seats, calm smirk on his face. "For one thing, you have to be dead to pass on."

"How did you-," Dom started to growl but then cut himself off. "What do you mean 'have to be dead'? I am dead!"

The driver stood up, his chair squeaking, and dusted himself off. "Not dead yet," he corrected. "Just dying. There's still a chance for you to live."

"Well I ain't takin' it," Dom said and started to walk away, around the edge of the circuit. He heard the light footsteps of the driver coming down the steps to follow again and he wondered again how the driver had appeared out of nowhere and how he'd gotten into the third row. "Who are you? What are you?" Dom asked, whirling around on his company. Sarcastically, he added, "Some kind of angel of death?" He definitely had the looks to be an angel – blonde, strong but lithe, and gorgeous.

The driver stopped abruptly and held out his hand. "Brian Spilner," he greeted. "But yeah. You can think of me like a… well like a… an angel of destiny."

Now Dom definitely snorted, but he took Brian's hand to shake anyway. For a dead guy, his grip was firm and steady. "Oh yeah? I don't see any wings."

"Maybe you will at some point, but that's not important," Brian said and waved the idea away.

Sure, Dom thought. But the truth was probably worse. Brian had faded into Dom's personal hell. At best he was a wayward spirit, lost on his own way to the afterlife, and Dom did not want to be distracted from accepting his own fate. He didn't need some buster confusing him.

Busters were no good. This guy probably died trying some piss ass stunt to impress a girl, a boy, his brother, someone. He probably died by being stupid, and Dom hadn't. Dom had died from- Well it wasn't from being stupid. He had good reasons. Or maybe they were bad reasons. But he had reasons.

"Hang on a second, Mr. Angel," Dom said, a thought crossing his mind.

"Brian," the man corrected.

"Brian," Dom repeated blandly, causing Brian to frown for the first time, and Dom felt a little guilty about that. "You said 'for one thing', I have to be dead to die, that there was a chance for me to live. But what's the other reasons I can't move on yet?"

"Just one other reason," Brian said, holding up one finger in case Dom couldn't hear apparently. It felt like a teacher scolding him.

"Fine. What's the one other reason?" Death was proving to be just as annoying as life, really, and that was not part of anything Dom had ever heard about the afterlife.

"Me," Brian said and stood up tall, almost as though he'd finally decided Dom would be more impressed by a serious attitude than a goofy one. "For one thing, you have to die to be dead. For another, I'm here, and it's my job to make sure you take that chance and choose to live."