Archive of Our Own ^beta

“You mean to say to me that you have never been behind a wheel?” Aelwyn looked incredulously at Adaine as the sisters were both in their shared bedroom, discussing some summer plans that would possibly lead them to doing a sister road trip to Fallinel on matricide business.

“I mean, I have driven a little bit, but I have never been to the point where I could confidently pass my driver's test.” Adaine mumbled and continued scribbling notes as Aelwyn carefully plucked cats off herself.
“Well, I refuse to be designated driver this entire trip for my baby sister. What if I want to stop someplace and have a little fun?”

Adaine made some gagging noises.

“Stop being so immature and get some shoes on, I already had a license by your age, it shouldn’t be hard for you to at least get the experience for a permit?” Aelwyn only slightly dug at her.

Not long after, the Abernant family car was cruising out of Elmville. A perfectly hot summer day that had the residents flocking to bodies of water and having picnics in the park. For once, it seemed like the world was not ending and everyone had the freedom to enjoy the day to the fullest.
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Adaine, however, was not enjoying the heat by the pool with her friends as the boys of her adventuring party declared it a 'Bad Boys only’ pool day. She also opted out of going shopping with Fig and Kristen at the mall to buy Kristen some fishing gear that she insisted on having for an upcoming camping trip with Sandra Lynn.

Instead, she was dragged into the passenger seat of her old family car as it exited Elmville Valley and headed towards Ashgrove. She rested her head against the window, counting the passing herds of cows in the grassy fields, some taking shelter from the blazing sun under scattered trees. She halfheartedly listened to her sister prattle on about her latest shift at the library. Apparently, some arsonist pirates tried to take out the section of trees in the library.

“-so she kept yelling about a vendetta she had on them, because apparently a tree fell on her, and she wanted to burn all knowledge about them to exact revenge. And you would want to believe that it fell on her head the way she was acting, but the ward I already put on the shelves to ward off fire had already activated before she could finish her dramatic monologue.” Aelwyn paused to let out a mischievous giggle. “Oh, you should have seen her face as she got forcefully ejected from the library!”

Adaine let out a half-hearted huff in response.

“Oh, come on, that was a funny anecdote.”

“Hmm, yeah, sure.” Unsatisfied with the lack of attention from her sister, Aelwyn purposefully swerved for a pothole in the road and hit it hard enough for Adaine’s head to smash against the window.

Adaine was jolted as she rubbed the side of her head. “OW! You bitch! What the fuck was that for?” Boggy croaked in indignant solidarity from his booster seat behind her.

“Well, we are having a sisterly bonding moment, and all you are doing is staring out the window, looking like you’ve gone brain-dead.”

In response, Adaine stuck her tongue out at her sister and reached for the AC. “Well, it feels like my brain is about to start melting with how low you have the air on in here.”

Adaine’s hand was slapped away from the console. “Well, when you are in the driver's seat, you can be in control of the air.”

“No fair! You have it colder than a witch's tits in here! Even boggy aggression, this kind of cold is bad for amphibians”

“Boggy is made of magic, sister.” Aelwyn stated pointedly, pulling the car into an empty dirt lot, “Now, since you want to change the air temperature so much, it’s all yours.”

Aelwyn turned off the car and tossed the keys into Adaine’s lap. The opening car door let a hot puff of wind into the car, quickly dispelling the cool air. Almost instantly, Adaine began to sweat. Boggy croaked again from the baby booster seat that she borrowed from Fabian, who was getting rid of any traces of new baby furniture as soon as it landed in his sight. Although it seemed very dramatic to her, she did have to admit that her familiar looked adorable in his modified seat. She might just keep it to humor him, she thought as she reached back to unbuckle the frog.
“Alright, let’s get this over with.”

She walked around the car to the front driver seat, flipping her sister off with her free hand as Aelwyn opened the door for her with a mock bow. She sat
Boggy in her lap as she bucked in her seat belt while Aelwyn settled herself in. “Well, now I can be the passenger princess; how about that?”

Adaine barely nodded as she gripped the steering wheel with already sweating hands. Her mind was racing; she could barely catch her breath and was starting a spiral. She was pulled out of her own mental demise when she felt the round frog croak and put his little feet onto the steering wheel, as if to encourage her. Noticing her distress, Aelwyn toned down her snarkiness.

“Darling, breathe. This is a practical exercise; you excel at those. Father made me take all the written tests before I could even get behind the wheel. I fully believe in your ability to not completely kill us.

“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“-shut up. Let’s start with the basics: put the key in the engine and turn on the car.”

Flipping her sister off was becoming all too common on this fine day out.

“Good job, now you are familiar with the pedals, aren’t you?”

Adaine thought back to last summer, when Gorgug attempted to teach her how to drive the Hangvan. Gorgug for all his merits, was a patient teacher, but Adaine for the life of her, could not figure out how to slowly release the break, simultaneously step on the clutch, and then lift off the gas while shifting gears. Many explanation attempts ended with her stalling the engine or accidentally rolling the van into a curb. After her very brief lesson, she left the driving to Riz and Gorgug and became the designated navigator.

“Umm, shouldn’t there be three pedals?” Adaine craned her head under the wheel just to make sure that she was not already messed up by breaking the car. Something she ultimately knew she could not have already screwed up but could not help but worry about.

Aelwyn was aghast. “What are we, peasants in Birchburg? This is an automatic car Adaine, it does the hard part for you.” She paused. “You aren’t lying to me when you said you have driven before, right?”
Adaine was never allowed to drive the family car while her parents were still in custody of her, and her only other driving lessons were in the form of car chases and the stints that only led her to be banned from driving. Just as she was about to relay this, Aelwyn waved her off, “Nevermind, we’ll start with the basics. The key turns to start the car. Go on.”

Adaine rolled her eyes as she turned the key. “See, off to a great start.” The eye roll turned into an annoyed grimace at the sarcasm.

The older sister led her through the basics of how to use the stick shift, then explained that her car was superior because it was an automatic car and what that entailed. She showed her how to read the speedometer, pop the gas, and, through the process of accidentally spraying and wiping the windshield four times, learned how to use the blinker and the headlights. Once Aelwyn was satisfied with showing her the basics and calming down her sister’s nerves, she declared that it was time for her to get on to learning what really mattered. Taking a deep breath, Adaine clumsily at first, put the car into drive and slowly inched along the dirt lot. Aelwyn for her part, turned down her snark and gently prodded her to make some turns and reverse the car while she lessened the anxious tension with idle chatter that Adaine soon started to grow comfortable responding to. About an hour later, they both leaned up against the car, each with a soft drink in hand and a frog lazily lounging on the open driver seat. The warm breeze was filled with the hum of summer cicadas, and the lone whiz of a car go by every few minutes.

Aelwyn broke the comfortable silence. “Not too bad, huh?”

“I will admit, it definitely was a lot easier than I made it up to be.” Adaine responded bashfully.

“So, I take it you are up for the challenge of getting on a real road?”

Adaine stared at her sister like a deer in the headlights, as if she just suggested that Adaine should set off a fireball in a 20-foot room.

“Relax. You were doing very well in this empty lot, and no better place to learn the rules of the road than on the road!”

A reluctant five minutes later, the sisters were back in the car as it slowly turned onto the country road. Her older sister’s confidence in her helped center Adaine, helped by the bucked Boggy on her lap. She flipped the blinker on and turned onto the road. Adjusting to keep in speed limit as she kept glancing from the dashboard to the road and nervously looking through the mirrors. Aelwyn directed her to drive for just a few miles until they got to an empty gas station that they passed on the way out. A small enough distance for her to get used to spotting at intersections with only one stupidly placed speed bump with several warnings to indicate its presence on the road.

While on this small excursion, Adaine came to the realization that she now had the power that came with being in the driver's seat and leaned towards the console to adjust the air. As she was fidgeting around with it, unbeknownst to her, a scraggly opossum decided that this was the perfect time to cross the road.

“ADAINE!! BREAK!”

Aelwyn’s panicked outburst sent a distracted Adaine into a fight or flight mode, as on instinct she flashed back to her Last Stand exam. What is the proper way to reverse a vehicle's orientation 180 degrees while driving at top speed? The answer: engage the handbrake. And she did as hard as she could.

As the car spun around, it narrowly avoided hitting the scraggly, frightened opossum, who used this second chance at life to scramble to the opposite side of the road. However, the Abernant sisters had just jumped from the frying pan and into the fire, as the car swerved into the oncoming traffic lane. Just as fate would have it, the mostly empty road now had a semi-truck barreling straight towards them, blaring its horn. Aelwyn was screaming. Boggy had somehow ended up gripping for dear physical existence on Adaine’s head. Despite the death-threatening circumstances, the latter had a calculated, determined look on her face as she made the split-second decision to swerve off the road and into the corn fields.

Tall stalks of green corn clouded her field of vision as she blasted through at high speeds. Ripe corn cobs smacking against the windshield—one even lodged itself halfway through in the chaos. Eventually, the fields tore away to the cow fields.

“ADAINE, STOP THE DAMN CAR!”

“Ummm, bad news. I tried to stop in the middle of that corn field, and the breaks might have given out.”

“THEN USE THE HAND BREAK!”

Adaine sheepishly spared a glance at where the hand break used to be. In the panic of swerving past the poor rodent, she may have accidentally summoned a Bigby’s Hand and used that extra force to rip up the break, thus rendering the car a speeding hazard.

Aelwyn stared in disbelief at her sister until she seemed to realize she was still in an ever-speeding car, wrecking through the countryside. Her head snapped back forward. “COWS!!”

“FUCK!!”

Adaine roared and swerved the car past bored, uncaring cows that simply glanced at the passing vehicle with disinterest.

She somehow made her way back onto the road after blasting though a Now Entering: Elmville sign.

Being back on a road did not improve the chaos of driving, and somehow the wild car avoided all sorts of highway patrol, jumped off a train track, then blazed through a residential neighborhood. Only a few mailboxes were smashed before Adaine had managed to reign the car under her control again, with her sister yelling corrections at her with a few choice words. The chaos led her down past the adventuring academy, wherein the luck of the day kept giving: two school buses were stopped on both lanes while the drivers exchanged some words. Aelwyn thought that this would be the end of her days on this mortal plane. Adaine had other ideas. This time she cast Bigby’s Hand with a purpose, stepped on the gas even harder, and navigated the hand under the car to flip it upwards, a trick that she remembered from a trippy movie that Fig had picked for movie night.

The car landed back on the other side of the buses, skidded a couple of blocks, flipped through the air about two more times, and then perfectly landed in an empty parking space right in front of Basrar’s.
By some miracle, both girls were unharmed. They sat in silence, breathing heavily as Adaine loosened her white, knuckled grip on the steering wheel. Aelwyn did the same as one hand loosely let go of the grab handle. Frazzled hair and wide eyes both slowly turned until they met each other’s gaze. Out of pure shock, they both burst out laughing.

“That was horrifying.”

“Please never let me drive again.”

“Let’s get the hell out of this nightmare.”

“. . .my door is stuck.”
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Jawbone was having a lovely summer day. He dawned on his favorite summer button-ups, swim trunks, and fantasy Birkenstocks. After tidying up the house, he decided to get a few pints of ice cream for the residents of Mordred Manor. A small bell jingled as he closed the door to the soda fountain, and just about dropped the bag of ice cream in shock as he beheld the sight of a completely wrecked car, though perfectly parked, with two young elves surveying the damage.

The sound of ice cream hitting the ground alerted the younger to his presence. She waved at him, “Hey Jawbone! I think I had enough of a driving lesson for today. Mind giving us a lift back home?”