Work Text:
If you had told Aelwyn Abernant from a year ago that she’d willingly sit at a table with her sister and her sister’s adventuring friends, she would have laughed in your face. If you had told her she’d enjoy it, she would have pissed herself from the absolute absurdity of it all.
But here she is. Ragh and Lydia are setting the table, and she’s sitting politely, silently in the nook by the window. The Window is a stained glass configuration that was probably meant to be grand and beautiful, but with the rest of the house, just wound up looking gaudy and outdated. That doesn’t matter, not when Aelwyn can watch Ragh and Lydia trade little quips back and forth, and she can feel the hardwood through her socks. They’re the only people in the room, for now, but quiet and solitude never last long in Mordred Manor.
Fig and Ayda break the silence this time. Aelwyn can admit that, although she’s used to silence and solitude, she’s never enjoyed it. It’s familiar, but now that she knows what it’s like to have a real family, one that’s boisterous and joyful, silence is suffocating. So even if the noise is new, it’s welcome.
“Good afternoon, Aelwyn Abernant,” Ayda says, taking the seat across from Aelwyn. She has her own chair, wrought iron and heavy, so she doesn’t accidentally light one of the wooden chairs on fire. Usually she can avoid lighting anything else on fire, but her hair gets too close to chairs when she’s sitting, so they have a metal chair for her in all the rooms where people usually gather, and Fig’s bed is enchanted so it won’t catch. Aelwyn’s proud of herself for that piece of spellwork.
“Afternoon, Ayda,” Aelwyn says back as everyone else begins to file in. Everyone else being Gorgug, Fabian, Riz, Kristen, Tracker, Jawbone, Sandralynn, and the newest additions, Kristen’s brothers. The kitchen table is wide and long, almost the size of a tavern table, but it’s still a squeeze. Adaine makes up the rear of the group, head stuck in a book, absentmindedly attempting to herd Kristen’s brothers in the general direction of the table. She looks up and smiles at Ayda and Aelwyn.
The smiling is new. Before the… incident … Aelwyn can’t remember the last time she and Adaine had actually smiled at each other. She thinks that, really, she can’t remember the last time Adaine had smiled . And, sure, Aelwyn didn’t find smiling a problem when she was high or drunk, but she got high and drunk for a reason.
It’s taken Aelwyn this long to realize that she and Adaine had completely different parents. They were the same people, but where Adaine had been smothered, had had a plastic bag held over her face and been made to suffocate, Aelwyn had been trapped in a paper bag, trying to find purchase over and over and feeling the walls always shift away.
Adaine settles in next to Aelwyn at the dinner table, and an absolutely massive pot of chili finds its way into the center of all of them. Hands immediately go flying for the ladle, but both Abernant sisters know patience, unlike the rest of the heathens surrounding them, so they wait.
Adaine shares a smile with Aelwyn for the second time that night, and amusement is written across her features. Aelwyn hopes her face looks the same. Fun isn’t exactly something she’s accustomed to.
Eventually, everyone settles with chili in their bowls, and Adaine can magehand the ladle over to her and Aelwyn’s bowls. The two of them are still polite and quiet, happy to listen to the conversation that floats around them like music.
“Cork!” Kristen hisses, stopping her brother from using his hands to eat the chili, “Here, take a spoon.”
“And then I told him to eat shit!” Fabian laughs, and Ragh, Gorgug, Riz, and Jawbone roar beside him.
“God, that reminds me of a time, back in my day, where I was sellin’ drugs to this guy out in Bastion City--” Jawbone starts on what is obviously a long-winded and absolutely incomprehensible story about teamwork, communication, and the inevitable loss of one’s own limbs.
Dinner is eventfully uneventful, just like it always is. At some point, just as the conversation stops being comforting and starts being migraine-inducing, Boggy (once again a sweet little frog), clambers out of his little pouch and sits on Aelwyn’s lap, discreetly keeping her company.
The chili is delicious.
That night, Aelwyn sits in her bunk in Adaine’s sanctum, alone. She’s good at being alone. It straddles the line between being lonely and being a balm from all the noise. She can hear some sort of chaos in the rooms below.
The door opens, and she expects Adaine, or even Jawbone, but instead, Bricker toddles in, one of Kristen’s brothers. He’s small and curious and Aelwyn is deeply, deeply afraid of fucking him up. She’s not even a parental figure for him (she thinks) but she knows the damage older kids can do to you if they’re dicks.
“‘s loud down there,” Bricker says, scrambling up onto Aelwyn’s bunk. Aelwyn allows him, simply because she doesn’t know if it’s appropriate to tell him no .
“Yeah,” She nods, because it is loud down there, “Do you… is this rude? Do you know how to read?”
“Yeah, duh,” Bricker says, shooting her a glance, “I’m eight, not two.”
“Okay! Okay, damn--uh--dang,” Aelwyn corrects herself, “So… what do you like to read?”
“Well, we used to read a lot about Helio and his adventures, and his early followers,” Bricker says, “Sometimes I miss it.”
Aelwyn hums. “Only sometimes?”
“I dunno,” Bricker shrugs, “Kristen says that we don’t have to be Helioic anymore. I don’t know how to do that.”
“You’ll… I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Aelwyn says, suddenly feeling like she knows this child, “It might feel like you don’t know anything, right now, but sometimes, you just have to let things pass. I had parents that were sort of like yours, and I didn’t think I would ever know how to live without them, but here I am.”
“What happened to your parents?”
“Well--ah--” Aelwyn pauses. Is it okay to tell a kid that your sister killed one of them and the other one is maybe probably still wandering a Nightmare Forest being chased by a van with human arms and hands instead of wheels? “They’re just. Not around. Anymore.”
“Oh,” Bricker says, and that’s that. Aelwyn messages Adaine on her crystal and asks for a kid’s book, and thirty seconds later one of the serials that Adaine used to read as a kid appears on Aelwyn’s bedside table.
“Here,” Aelwyn says, handing Bricker the book. It’s a detective novella. Bricker’s eyes light up.
“Thank you!” He squeaks, immediately opening the book and getting lost. Aelwyn pulls out her own book, on the theory of dimension travel, but she doesn’t find herself reading it. Instead, she watches Bricker and wonders what would have happened if she’d rescued Adaine like Kristen had done for her brothers. She knows it’s different, knows that she’s only a few years older than Adaine, that there’s no ten-year gap between her and her next oldest sibling, but she can’t stop wondering if she could have spared Adaine from her parents.
Guilt is tough. Growth is tough. But later that night, when Kristen walks in to find Aelwyn carefully watching a now-asleep Bricker, and when she carries him off with a grateful look in Aelwyn’s direction, she thinks maybe it’s worth it.
She wants people to trust her enough to leave their kid brothers with her without a second thought. She wants this every single day for the rest of her life.