Chapter Text
The summer passes in a golden-orange hue, lazy and kind. Aelwyn doesn’t notice how much she’s changing, but change she does, until her arms have become strong from swinging her bat and carrying her shield.
She has steady gig work from small quests around Elmville— when that’s not going on, she does two days a week at Compass Points, and an occasional subbing spot for early wizarding classes at Oakshield. She did blackmail the principal, but she didn’t have to blackmail Ayda or Sklonda Gukgak to grab her other gigs, so she considers it a win.
By the time the Aguefort students start school again, Ragh and Tracker have headed off to their religious adventure. Aelwyn’s sure that Kristen would be being absolutely insufferable about it, but she’s become quite busy since her younger siblings showed up on Mordred’s porch at three in the morning a week before school began.
The Applebees parents had came screaming down to try to get their children to come home— something never afforded to Kristen— and were promptly met with Aelwyn and her baseball bat taking some well-earned hits at their car (one for Kristen, one for each younger child, one for Ragh, and one for Zayn— retribution for all the Harvestmen had put them through). Suffice to say, they had not come back since. Any threatening mail is burned by Fig before it gets anywhere near them; Sklonda gets Kristen some help with taking custody, and that’s that.
Bricker and Cork are snot-nosed and annoying, exactly like Adaine had been at that age, and Aelwyn has somehow become their favorite babysitter despite her adamant refusal to admit she cares about them.
Bee Applebees spent the first three weeks hiding in Kristen’s room, then marched into the kitchen one day with her face screwed up in preparation, wearing a dress. When she was only met with a few compliments, she burst into tears and was carried on Sandra Lynn’s hip for the rest of the morning.
As if that wasn’t enough excitement, Fabian had moved a week after Hallariel and Gilear left for their vacation, dragged in by his ear by a very angry Fig.
(“All alone in that fucking house, Fabes, are you kidding me?”
“I don’t want to play happy family here!” Fabian had shouted. “My father is dead, and my mother doesn’t give a fuck about if I live or die, and—“
Aelwyn had rushed in just in time to watch Fig catch Fabian as he crumpled; they’d moved his stuff in by a record hour later, and he’d apologized for the screaming. No one took it personally.
“It’s just— hard,” he told Aelwyn later in his new room, quiet like he’s telling a secret. “I have no idea how a functional family is supposed to work.”
“You’ll figure it out,” she offered. “Jawbone tries really hard not to be overly nice. If it gets cloying you can come find me and we’ll go throw rocks through your old house’s window.”
He’d tipped forward to lean on her shoulder, and in the back of her mind, her oath glowed proudly.)
Riz and Gorgug continue to be parasitic hangers-on, along with the Seven, Max Durden, the entire Aguefort AV club, and a dozen other random people popping up time and time again.
All this is to say that Aelwyn has found an inescapable truth: doing the dishes in the morning is a proper bitch in a house with anywhere from fifteen to thirty residents at a given time.
Somebody has to do them, though— might as well be the dumbass paladin who’d pledged herself to the protection of this godsforsaken house. So it’s become her main chore, something that eases her mind when she gets stuck thinking about how much she owes these people.
When Adaine wakes up to her school alarm, Aelwyn does too, usually after being elbowed in the ribs by her sister. These days, she’s often up to standing for about half an hour before needing a break to work through her PT exercises.
So, on a rainy morning in October, she follows Adaine down to the kitchen where the schoolchildren are eating breakfast, just as she does every morning. As she passes by, she steals bacon off Riz’s plate, grinning crookedly when he hisses at her.
Gorgug (who had slept over after band practice) leaves five minutes into the meal to go turn on the car and get his allotted Before School Quiet Time. He hugs her goodbye after lobbing her an orange. Again, no one tries to tease her for this; she just eats the fruit and moves to the sink.
She’d been so worried for so long that kindness would be cloying, dread-inducing, needing repayment and sweetness and all the things she sucks at. It turns out that most of the time (save for the occasional mistake, which is always apologized for if she becomes overwhelmed), the Mordred group meets her at her level. They do nice things, but never do they admit it or demand thanks. They’re catty and they banter with her and she pays them back in kind. It’s comforting, and she’s learning to take more of the sweeter stuff, especially since she’s started therapy on Jawbone’s gentle insistence.
The residents left at the end of breakfast are good enough to fill up the dishwasher, so she’s just stuck with pans and pots and leftover cups. It’s worth it for the warm water easing the ache of her knuckles and getting hugs from behind as everyone runs to fight for shotgun in the van.
(Turns out she likes physical affection, when she knows it’s coming. The rest of the residents have taken that to mean making as much noise as possible before they approach her. It’s the least nice way they could possibly accommodate her; thus, it means the world.)
Today, Cork narrowly avoids slamming into her leg, instead gingerly hugging her after a second of bouncing on his heels. “Bye, A’wyn.”
“Goodbye, Cork.” She looks down at him as she continues to scrub at the bastard plate in her hand. “You lost a tooth?”
“It’s in my pocket,” he informs her giddily. “I’m going to throw it at Bee, ‘cause girls think blood is gross.”
Okay, not her job to teach misogyny out of this kid. Plus, it’s sweet of him to try to make his middle sister feel validated, even if it’s in… a very strange way. “You should tell Kristen that, see what she says.”
“I will!” he replies, before Fig rushes by and scoops him up by his armpits to throw him over her shoulder. She punches Aelwyn’s arm as she sprints out, the Hangvan’s engine revving in the driveway and Cork squealing at the top of his lungs.
“Bye, dude!” Fig screams, pounding down the front steps.
Behind Fig, as expected, is a flood of incorrigible children. Kristen hugs her quickly, Riz on her shoulders so he can reach to push her head with one hand (his favorite form of affection). Adaine flies over them, hellbent on shotgun, and kisses her temple. “Goodbye, Aelwyn!”
“Goodbye, Adaine.”
Fabian does a trick shot to land a fork in the sink. “Thanks, Aelwyn!”
“I’m not washing that, fuck you!”
Bee and Bricker sprint past Fabian, squabbling about not being stuck in the middle; Zayn, with his traditional horrible case of bedhead, teleports through a portal to land on the backseat of the Hangman. He waves at her enthusiastically as they all floor it down the street.
She checks the time. Five minutes before the bell, those idiots. One more late slip and they’re all going to be stuck doing detention in the Last Stand arena, she remembers Fig moaning about it.
She finishes the last dish and goes to sit at the table. Like every day, in her blessed and perfected routine, a mug of tea has been set aside for her by Sandra Lynn before she went to work, kept warm with a spell of Kristen’s.
Unlike every day, Jawbone is walking down the stairs, in his favorite blue robe over a Cig Figs t-shirt and ripped jeans.
“Hey, bud,” he says, rubbing sleep from one eye as he makes himself a coffee. “How you doin’?”
“Good. Why are you home?”
“Y’know, million projects to get done.”
“Mm.” She sips her tea. “Oh, I finished that stupid quest with the golf ball and the treant.”
“Hey, good on you. Did you end up having to do the—“
“Shield fastball special? Of course I did, because no one in the group besides myself was anywhere close to qualified.”
“Truly the struggle of a lifetime.”
“Absolutely.”
Jawbone sits down across from her, jiggling his leg, his ear twitching just a little bit.
Oh. Hm.
“You’re nervous,” Aelwyn states.
“Wh— no I’m not.”
“You absolutely are,” she accuses, gripping her mug a little tighter. “What’s wrong? Did someone get cursed? Is Tracker okay? Did Ragh—“
“Hey, hey, slow your roll there. I— you’re right, I am nervous, but it’s nothing bad.”
Aelwyn narrows her eyes. “That makes no sense.”
“I— hmph. You really do not give an inch, do you?”
“Never once in my life.”
Jawbone chuckles, sipping from his mug. “Don’t I know it. I— alright, you caught me. I wanted to talk to you about somethin’.”
Oookay, panic response, let’s calm it down. Aelwyn blinks once. He’s not kicking her out, because her birthday was a month and a half after she moved in and the adults had sworn she wouldn’t be out on her own just because she’s nineteen. All the cats must be fine, because he said it’s something Not Bad. So what could this be?
“Okay,” she says, her voice coming out small.
“I promise it’s— well, I hope you’ll agree it’s a good thing.” He sighs, long and measured. “I’m about to drop some hardcore compliments, prepare yourself, ‘kay?”
“I suppose,” she mumbles. Her hands are tight around her mug, and she forces them to relax.
“I’ve been seeing how much you’ve been really thriving for the last little while, and all of that is due to the incredible work you’ve put into your life, okay? You went and grabbed your diploma from fuckin’ Arthur Aguefort and he couldn’t even argue with you. Your jobs are goin’ well, therapy’s goin’ well, you haven’t been pushing yourself too far… it’s impressive, it really is.”
She nods once when he pauses, glancing up at her. The compliments wrap around her chest and stay there, warm and bright.
“An’ I know that you’re an adult, and you’re brilliant, and you— I know you miss your parents, Aelwyn, and that’s understandable.”
She does; she’s talked about it with her own therapist and with Jawbone. She misses them because of her former routine, her former life and her former understanding of the world. But now she’s got a new one, and it’s starting to be enough to ebb that terrible missing feeling, the guilt that never quite goes away even though she hates the elder Abernants with a fire reserved only for them.
“When you got here, I couldn’t— I couldn’t imagine what you needed. And now, you’re here and you’re brave enough to tell me.” Jawbone looks at his hands around his own coffee, then back to Aelwyn. “And I— well, y’know me, for a long time when people asked after my family I couldn’t name anyone. But then Track got here, and your sister and the rest of those goobs, and now I’m so proud to be a guy who lounges around and fixes shit in my boxers on the weekend, instead of the dude doing laced coke in the back of a van with six people who are all incredibly interested in everything he has to offer.”
“Gross,” Aelwyn notes, and he grins.
“What ‘m tryin’ to say here, bud, is— well, I know you’re an adult, and you’ve got a family. But I, uh. Well, I’ve been saying I have seven kids for a while now. That’s—“ he’s ticking them off on his fingers— “in order of meetin’, that’s Tracker, Adaine, Fig, Kristen, Ragh, Zayn, an’ you.”
Aelwyn suddenly notices that her vision has gone quite blurry.
“I don’t wanna force anything, and you sayin’ no won’t change anything about you belonging here. But I’ve got the papers, and I’ve had ‘em since the week you moved in. And now I feel like I can ask and you’ll know I mean it when I say that you’re one’a my kids, an’ I love you, and it’d make me just about the proudest guy in the world to make that official.” Deep breath out. “You take as long as you need to think on th—“
“You’d be my dad?” Aelwyn asks. Her voice is shaky, she notes distantly. “You— want that?”
“Yeah, kiddo.”
“Even though I’m fucked up and yesterday I threw the remote at Fabian because he was chewing too loudly?”
He chuckles, voice wet. “Yeah, of course. I don’t mind that you’re fucked up, there ain’t no one here that isn’t. And that was a fuckin’ beautiful remote throw, honestly.”
“Even though I used to avoid you at the Black Pit because I thought you’d be nice to me and I’d have to curse you forever?”
“Yup.”
Her voice drops into something less than a whisper. “Even though ‘m mean?”
“Baby,” and that’s the first time he’s called her that, and it makes a crack along her heartmeat start to mend, “I think you vastly overestimate your meanness, okay? Literally nobody else in this house coulda managed to teach Cork how to read music without goin’ bonkers. You’ve got a good heart, Aelwyn. I hope you know we all see that, ‘specially your sister an’ ‘specially me.”
Well, okay, that’s it.
She bursts into noisy tears and stumbles up— shaky on her legs, so she grabs her crutches— to get over to Jawbone and all but collapse into his open arms. She cries for what feels like forever but is probably only a minute or two, leaving a large wet spot on his robe. He takes her by the shoulders when she quiets. “‘M gonna say something intensely sappy right about now, okay?”
“Okay,” she replies, meeting his eyes.
“Nothin’ could make me stop lovin’ you, even if you mess up. Even if you go bring back the fuckin’ Nightmare Forest with your own two hands, I’d go in and I’d get you back. There’s only one thing I’d ever get mad at you for, and that’s for breakin’ a goddamn strike line, because this is a fucking union household, y’get me?”
She sniffles like a toddler. “I— I’ve got you.”
“I love you so, so much, kiddo.”
“I love you too,” she says, tucking herself back against him. “I want— I want. I want you to adopt me, legally, and I want a red velvet cake when it goes through and I want to be an O’Shaughnessey like Adaine is and I want Sandra Lynn’s last name, too. I want to keep being a librarian and I want to go into protective services when I’m older and I want to be your kid.”
“‘Course,” he says, and now he’s even more choked up. “You got it, bud, all of it. Anything for my oldest.”
“Gods, I can’t escape being the eldest child,” she breathes, and he laughs and picks her up and spins her around and it’s the softest she’s ever, ever been and she doesn’t feel anything about it save for joy.
She signs the papers with Adaine in the wizard’s tower that evening, her baby sister holding her frog and leaning on her shoulder.
“I think Aelwyn O’Shaughnessey-Faeth is a damn good name,” says Adaine. “I’m gonna copy you and take Sandra Lynn’s too, now that I know I can. I’m going to collect names like Fantasy Pokémon.”
“Lydia and Ragh said I have to take Barkrock, too, they just only let you do two last names at a time and we agreed it would be better for Fig’s Archdevil connections if I’m a Faeth, on the off chance I end up in hell for some sort of botched job.”
“You can do it next month,” Adaine says, grinning. “Aelwyn and Adaine Barkrock O’Shaughnessey-Faeth. We could grab Gukgak too– Sklonda appreciates your help with your job n’ Riz has been my brother since I was fourteen. Same with Gorgug. I won’t take Kristen’s but she’s gonna have ours in a few years once her and Tracker get married. Oooh, do you think Cathilda would mind? I know Fabian uses hers sometimes.”
“Let’s start with these names and go from there,” Aelwyn says, and signs her signature at the bottom. She turns to look solemnly at her sister. “Adaine, we’ve done it. We’ve killed the Abernant bloodline. We’re such utter disappointments, didn’t you know?”
“Fuck those bitches!” Adaine crows. “I punched Angwyn Abernant to death!”
“We sent a van with hands after Arienwen and she couldn’t do shit about it,” Aelwyn adds, giggling deliriously as she hangs upside down off her bunk.
“And now we have a wholeass family!” Adaine’s hands flap and Boggy ribbits.
Ticking off her fingers, Aelwyn lists: “A dad and a mom and another mom and a cousin and so many siblings because they keep coming out of the woodwork, where do you find these people?”
“Oracular duty specifies that I must adopt at least fifteen people a year and have a knight who’s also my stupid big sister,” Adaine says in her thickest Fallinelian accent. “Who is incredibly tender even if she tries to act badass, check and mate.”
Aelwyn Blinks over to try to noogie her.
Adaine shrieks, rushing away. “I thought you loved me, you traitor!”
“I do!” Aelwyn shouts back. “More than anything in the world! And now you’re going to pay for your crimes!”
Later, there’s cake in the fridge to eat and many, many squeezes to receive. The holes in Aelwyn’s mind are still there, and the world is not perfect, and later there will be screaming matches and wounds and nightmares just as there will be joy.
But for now, a candle burns brightly in the center of her mind; in her ribcage, a creature made of her trauma and her terror finally rests.
Aelwyn and her sister throw spells in their crooked wizard’s tower, cackling as they fight with no real malice to speak of. Rain beats against the windows. There is nothing to fear in this present, perfect moment, ever-shining even as the sun sets on Mordred Manor.