"Got oil in the engine."
"Got oil," Anna confirmed while she leaned her front against the passenger side of her car, Banana, with her arms folded on the lightly rusted top.
"I checked the spark plugs," Scott straightened a second sooty finger as he continued to count. "I checked the brakes before we started." He paused and looked at her from across the car's top. "You check the tire pressure?"
"Toped 'em up at 25 like you told me."
He ran his fingers over his chin, "Alright, I think she's ready for a test drive."
Anna smiled wide enough that her cheeks obstructed the very edges of her vision. "Oh hell yeah! It's about time we saw what she can do!" She popped open the passenger side door when she heard the sound of light metal scraping on the car's roof. When she looked back up, she found the car keys sat within arm's reach just in front of her. She looked back at Scott. "Seriously?"
"Well, yeah. She's your car after all."
"Yeah, but what about all that stuff you said about 'making sure the car feels right'?"
"We've been doing this long enough you should know how she should feel." He rounded the front of the car to the passenger side and put his hand on the top of the open door near her arm. "Now come on. You're in my seat."
Anna snapped up the keys, slapped him on the arm, and jogged to the driver-side. "Alright, Scotty! Just hope you know what you're getting yourself into!" She jumped more then sat in the driver seat and jammed the keys in the ignition. She glanced over at Scott and when he nodded, she cranked the ignition.
The engine sputtered and sounded like it was giving its best effort to turn over, but it just wouldn't give. By the time Anna started hammering the gas with her foot, Scott signaled her to cut the whole thing off. She let go of the key, let her foot off the pedal, and the pair stewed in a dumbstruck silence as they both stared at the dashboard.
"Scott"
"Yeah?"
"Did we put gas in the car?"
He let out the longest sigh Anna had ever heard in her life before climbing out of the passenger door. She heard a sloshy 'clunking' sound as a steel jerry-can full of gas was half placed but mostly dropped on the garage floor followed by the pop of the car's gas cap. A couple of minutes later Scott returned, and with lips pursed he flicked his hand toward in the direction of the ignition.
Anna did her best to suppress a snicker as she cranked the key a second time. There was a loud cough, a clunk, a backfire of black smoke out the tailpipe, and then the engine they had spent weeks meticulously reassembling roared to life. Anna and Scott both shouted and pumped their fists in the air. Looking at each other, amazed, they high-fived over the center console.
"It works! It actually works!" Scott shook his hands in front of his face.
"Did you have any doubt in our capabilities, Scott?"
"Well, maybe not in our capabilities. More like the capabilities of a car almost older than both of us combined."
"Hey! None of that. There is no age shaming in this car." Anna ran her hand along the car's dashboard as if soothing a feral cat. "Isn't that right, baby? I won't let the mean boy talk smack about you. You can do just as much as any other poser car out there, can't you?"
"That remains to be seen." Scott nodded towards the open garage door. "Ready to take her for her maiden voyage?"
"Ready since the day we brought her home." Anna buckled her seatbelt.
"It's a stick. You can drive one of those, right?"
Anna blew a rass-berry, "Can I drive a stick." She repeated then curled one gloved hand around the wheel and the other on the gear-shifter. "You think there are a lot of Lexuses and Royces back home in Caladicut, there Scott? If it's not a Peterbilt truck you live in to get away from your family or shit-kickin' GMCs like this one, it's a literal wagon strapped to a donkey's butt."
"A simple 'yes' would have worked too." Scott strapped in his seatbelt.
Anna lowered her chin, shifted gears, and let her foot off the break. Slowly the relic crawled out of its home for the past several months on its own four feet. Gently she let on the gas and met the well-kept pavement on the lawn outside the mansion.
"Sounds good." Scott looked out the window. A light breeze tossled his hair and the afternoon sun reflected off his sunglasses.
Anna continued the car's easy stroll till they met the gate leading out to the main road beyond. Scott fiddled with his watch, and the great black gate split to allow them passage.
"Aren't too many people who use these back roads. Should have plenty of room to test out the higher gears and brakes and -" he looked over at her, "what are you doing?"
Anna had her left hand firmly planted on the top of the wheel and her right fist had swallowed the top of the gear-shifter whole. Through her Cheshire cat-like grin, she licked her lips and curled her left hand even tighter around the top of the steering wheel as if it were the throttle of a motorcycle. The leather in her gloves audibly crackled under the friction. The car started roaring and trembling as Anna teased the throttle.
"Anna, listen - we don't know what this thing can and can't do yet."
She looked back at him. "You're right, Scott. We don't know." She looked back through the windshield. "Why don't we find out?" She suddenly shifted gears and slammed on the gas. A cloud of white smoke erupted around them as the tires struggled for grip on the road beneath them. When they finally did, the car lunged forward like a sprinter out of a gate.
Anna was forced into a slight swerve as she got a feel for the power, but once she had it set straight, there was nothing but one long stretch of asphalt ahead of her. She pressed her foot down to the floor as if there were a nail through it and shifted through the gears till they were pushing triple digits. She didn't realize how loud she was shouting till she glanced over and found Scott had one hand braced on the dashboard and the other on a handle mounted above the door. He was shouting too, but it was pretty clear to her it wasn't coming from the same place as hers was.
She looked ahead just in time to see the bend coming in the road. She let off the gas and over-corrected to enter the turn. The car began to spin till Anna turned into the spin and set it back on course. On the inside of the curve, she pressed the aged suspension to the ground as she accelerated into the turn. On the other side, they rocketed onto a dirt road and kicked up a red dust storm behind them. The car bounced and creaked on the uneven road, but still, Anna didn't let up off the gas.
They continued till she spotted a turn-off with a paved road again and jerked the vehicle in its direction. The road led them up a hill that only got steeper and steeper till finally the sun met them at the top. Thanks to the cover of the bright sun, however, Anna didn't see that the hill had just of a sharp decline as was the inline on the otherside. The car jumped as it crested the hill, then plunged downward and picked up speed.
The road made a sudden turn Anna didn't have time to compensate for, so the pair jumped the curb, through a wire fence and into a grassy field.
"Stop the car!"
"Where's your sense of adventure, Scott?" Anna shouted over the sound of the grass whipping the undercarriage.
He pointed a ridged finger into the windshield. "Cliff!"
Anna could now see the sudden drop off in the horizon and the ocean just beyond. She slammed the brakes and cranked the wheel as hard as she could to the side. The car carved deep ruts into the soft earth and clumps of rock and soil scattered around them as if they were a falling asteroid. Anna could feel every ounce of resistance from the ground and every bit of tearing metal as the car begged to roll. She shut her eyes and clenched her teeth. The car went up on its driverside, then fell back down again hard with all tires on the ground.
When the car was finally still, Anna dared to open her eyes and found the hood completely covered in dirt, and a cow chewing on cud just a few dozen feet away staring back at her.
"Oh my god." She panted and looked at Scott. His sunglasses were dislodged but still on his face. He was covered in damp soil, and his lips were parted as if he were in some sort of daze. "Scott?"
He creaked his neck in her direction. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah…" She looked around. "Oh my god, Scott… I'm sorry. I don't know-"
"That was awesome!"
She blinked. "What?"
"You went so fast I thought the doors were going to fly off this thing! I thought - I thought we were going to freaking die or something!" He climbed out the passenger window.
Anna had to shoulder her door open, but when she eventually met him outside, she found him standing atop the car roof with his fist thrust into the sky. "We're alive!" He thumped his chest with both hands. "Let's do that again!"
"You're kind of a freak aren't you, Scott?" Anna said to him after they had both calmed down, sourced a couple of bottled waters they had rolling around the back of the half-dug car, and sat side by side on a rock watching the ocean.
"I like to let loose sometimes I guess, yeah." Scott took another pull from his water. She didn't notice till then that one of the lenses on his sunglasses had cracked.
"That was more than 'letting loose.' That was full-on 'fuck-you dad, I'm skydiving off of the Statue of Liberty' energy back there."
"Like you're one to talk. You're the one that got us stuck in a cow field to start with." Scott looked over and petted the snout of the cow that had taken to hanging around them since their car had become a lawn ornament in her grass.
"Yeah, but - you had to have seen that coming from me."
"I got the idea when you started revving the steering wheel, yeah." He looked at her and took his hand off the cow's snout. "What? We have one heartfelt discussion and you think you got me put together? Come on, Anna. I'm a little more than a repressed gay guy."
"Sure. I just didn't think you might actually be…" She shrugged, "Fun".
"Well, enjoy it while you can," he sighed and gently twisted the bottle around between his hands. "Got to put the face back on when we got to get home anyway."
"What face?"
"The Scott Summers, 'X-Men team leader' face."
"Oh, that guy. I just call him 'Captain Fuck-Face." She paused and waited for him to have some sort of quip loaded up and ready to launch her way. Instead, he only looked more crestfallen. "What? Seriously, why pretend to be so serious all the time?"
"I need to be. I need to not show weakness."
Anna made a long fart sound with her mouth. "Really? You're going to sail on the toxic masculinity ship, Scott?"
"I already told you, Anna. It's complicated. I got put into this role to be some sort of leader to you guys. To do that I need to distance myself a little bit."
"Says who? Who says you can't be a good leader and be one of us?"
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. "I mean, we never really see Xavier just 'hanging around' do we?"
"And you want to be like that guy? Mister anti-social, world-on-his-shoulders, fuck-my-life-I'm-so-alone, man? You want to be like him?"
Scott snorted, "That's not all Xavier is-"
Anna leaned toward him, "But you didn't say that he wasn't that."
"Okay, fine. Not like Xavier then. Like Ororo."
"Ororo's different."
"How?"
"Well, for one I would believe she'd smoke a blunt and not immediately freak and call the cops."
Scott grinned and shook his head.
"Second, she's like all ethereal and shit."
"'All ethereal and shit?'" He quoted.
"You know what I mean. She's spooky in a cool way. She feels the world and the elements and stuff. Honestly, it's hard to think she's just a mutant and not some sort of weather goddess come to earth or something."
"But you'd admit she's kind of aloof, right?"
Anna bobbed her head left and right. "Sure. I guess. But I think she's just like that, you know? She talks in riddles and after school special speak and plays with alien plants in her spare time. It's just her vibe."
There was a pause as the humor drained from Scott's face. He focused on a singular spot in the distance and ran his bottom lip under the top. "What do you think the hospital was about?"
Anna wanted to say something stupid like, 'The Brotherhood boys were egar to get their flu shots that year,' or 'Why wait till your 40s for that first prostate exam?', but it was obvious what Scott was getting at. No one had brought up Ororo's decision to let The Brotherhood escape with their van full of hospital supplies. When the adults weren't around, they never had a problem talking smack about Xavier or even Logan… but Ororo was different than the two men.
"I think," Anna let the words hang in the air long enough for a sea breeze to pick them up. "I think it is what we saw. We all know Ororo is former Brotherhood. I guess those loyalties are hard ones to break."
"We've fought The Brotherhood before."
"We've fought those stupid boys before, yeah. We've never seen anyone else. We haven't come up against this 'Thunder' person before."
He ran his thumb along the bottleneck of his water bottle. "That couldn't have been easy. I couldn't imagine being made to fight your family."
"Think The Brotherhood consider themselves a family?"
"If Ororo cared enough about that woman to not only let her go but stop Kurt from getting at her, I think so."
"That's some hella loyalty."
Scott looked at her. "Hella?"
"Hell-of-a-lot."
"I know what it means. It's just something I hear Kitty say a lot."
"We hang out a lot. Guess it rubbed off."
He pursed his lips, looked forward, and nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess all of you guys do."
Anna pushed herself off the rock and faced the car half dug into the ground. "So what's your honest opinion? Think she'll get us home?"
Scott took a moment to join her. When he did, he finished his water bottle and kicked one of the tires. "I think we'll be lucky if we can roll it home."
"Still got the keys in the ignition." Anna passed him and dropped into the driver's seat. On the second try the engine turned over and roared to life. She jumped out of the car and pumped her fists. "Banana lives!"