a little thing i wrote for promptober :-) this was day 20: drive around
the fic is set in my hs au — the only relevant thing is that fran lives with kai & maeri
AO3! (archive locked)
Summary: Corbin can't sleep. Fran helps.
Warnings: none
Wordcount: 619
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Fran, whose only wrongdoing ever, in her entire life, was befriending Corbin. Corbin was a boy whose apparent entire purpose in life was to annoy Fran. As evidenced by the earsplitting bird call he'd programmed as his personal ringtone into her phone and kept replacing whenever she changed it to something normal. Or by the thirty texts he'd sent her at three in the morning before he'd resorted to calling and waking her with said earsplitting ringtone, forcing Fran to scroll through a wall of texts that all just said "FRAN" to get to the part where he was outside her house.
Fran yanked her window open and didn't bother to hide the exhaustion or annoyance in her voice. "What do you want, Corbin?"
"I can't sleep."
Fran groaned. "You took some meds? And actually laid down and tried to sleep?"
"And waited an appropriate amount of time for both, yes, I'm not a child."
Corbin's voice frayed with irritation and probably more distress than he'd intended to come through. Fran's squinting turned from "half awake eye posture" to "trying to make out Corbin in the dark without her glasses." There was a slightly-darker-than-everything-else smudge that was probably him, balled up. He was sitting on the lawn, Fran realized, and her sleepy brain finally processed the lengths Corbin had gone through to come talk to her.
It wasn't new, but it was rare. And it meant Corbin was doing Bad.
"When's the last time you slept?" Fran asked. She tried to be nice about it, which mostly meant she didn't sound annoyed anymore.
Corbin didn't answer.
Fran sighed. "I'll be down in a minute; hold on."
She scrubbed at her eyes as she closed her window, trying to force more wakefulness into her brain. Fran slipped on her crocs and jacket, pulled her fuzzy dog blanket from the nest on her bed, and unlocked her phone one handed as she snuck downstairs and outside.
to maeri ❤️🔥👯♀️🪷: if ur mom asks then u woke me up and made me take u to get snacks lmao <3
Corbin snickered at her bedhead as she approached. Fran flipped him off.
"You want me to drive us around or what?"
"You're already awake and dressed, what are you gonna do? Leave me here?"
"Leave you here," Fran agreed at the same time Corbin asked it, though she held the car door open for him all the same. "Get in the back; you don't deserve shotgun."
"I don't even want it anyway." Corbin made a face at her as she threw the dog blanket on top of him. Like that wasn't why she was putting him in the back in the first place. Fran rolled her eyes and didn't bother to slam the door on him.
She let the car idle for a moment while they both got set up. Corbin curled the blanket around himself and wedged his head between the seat and wall in a position he swore was comfy. Fran cracked open one of the water bottles she kept in the car and pulled up a soft pop playlist. They had a short, halfhearted argument about seat belts that Corbin grumblingly folded on, both of them too tired for their usual bickering. And then they were off.
Corbin was asleep five minutes into the drive. Fran twisted around back roads and neighborhoods until sunrise anyway. She pulled over near a field to watch it rise, listened to the last few songs on the playlist, and then went back to the car to use Corbin as her pillow.
And they both slept happily ever after and well into the day.
