Chapter Text
Lena pressed her forehead to the little glass window of the plane, watching the ocean pass by far below. So far the Sunchaser hadn’t completely fallen apart, which meant that her expectations for today had already been exceeded. Of course, the plane and its accident-prone pilot had ferried Webby and the others safely to and from plenty of adventures over the years. But it wouldn’t have surprised Lena at all if the time she set foot on it was the time it failed.
“So!” Webby jumped up onto the seat next to Lena’s. “Your first McDuck Family Adventure begins! How are you feeling?”
Lena considered this. “Do you want honesty or enthusiasm?”
“Preferably both!” said Webby. “But if you can only muster one, then I’ll take honesty.”
“Honestly,” said Lena, “I’m wondering if I should have just stayed home and practiced piano scales.”*
“Honestly,” Louie said, sliding into the seat opposite Lena with the kind of casual ease she wished she could muster right now, “you’re going to give yourself early arthritis, you spend so much time playing that thing. If anyone needs a treasure-hunting vacation – besides me, of course – it’s you.”
“Yeah,” Dewey piped up – evidently the whole gang was converging on her. “It’s been what, almost two years since you moved in? You can’t go two years as a part of this family and never come along on a Scrooge McDuck adventure.”
“It took me almost fourteen years to get to go on a Scrooge McDuck adventure, and I lived in the mansion the whole time,” Webby pointed out. “To be fair, he was retired for most of it.”
“It’s a rite of passage, then?” said Lena.
“Yep!” Webby clapped her hand onto Lena’s wrist, the friendship bracelets overlapping. “You’re really part of the family now!”
“Wish I had your confidence.” Lena glanced up towards the cockpit, where Launchpad was consulting his co-pilot, Bobblehead Darkwing Duck, while Scrooge looked on. “Maybe it’s the turbulence, but I’m having trouble getting into this whole adventure thing.”
Webby squeezed Lena’s wrist comfortingly. It was a sign of how long she’d been one of “the kids” that she admitted it at all. Probably-seventeen-year-old Lena had had more time to grown comfortable than probably-fifteen-year-old Lena had.
“Don’t forget, you were the one who initiated that adventure with the Terra-Firmians,” said Huey. “You didn’t have any trouble getting into that one. You’ll be fine!”
“And if not, just let the pros handle it, and then you’ll be fine,” said Dewey, striking an overly-confident pose. “Trust me – we know how to Dewey it!”
Lena rolled her eyes, but smiled, and the others took that as a success.
“The Apinionine Mountains!”** Scrooge proclaimed, one arm sweeping over the landscape around them. “The backbone of Italy, and once-protector of the heart of the Roman Empire. And, according to legend, the home of a god.”
“Didn’t we find the gods on Ithaquack?” said Dewey.
“The goofy ones, at least,” Louie snarked.
Lena had to admit that the view was impressive, and the natural beauty untarnished, if you ignored the smoke coming from the downed Sunchaser’s engines.
She wasn’t super keen on being back in Italy. But they were well to the north of Vesuvius, closer to Florence than Pompeii, and with a lot of mountains and rivers and towns between here and there (she’d checked the map before they’d left). And no one had seen hide or hair of Magica de Spell in a long time.
So she had nothing to worry about. Probably. At least on the “evil sorceress aunt returning for revenge (again)” front.
“That’s the Greek pantheon,” Scrooge was correcting the boys behind her. “There’s some overlap between that and Rome, but Cupid kept his home here instead.”
“Cupid?” said Lena. “Really? Like, hearts-and-arrows Cupid?”
“His image has regressed a bit over the centuries, but yes,” said Scrooge, “hearts-and-arrows Cupid. The self-proclaimed god of love.”
“Soooo, just as a warning, how sappy are things going to get today?” said Louie.
“Not as sappy as Hallmark would have you think.” Scrooge tightened his top hat on his head. “Keep your wits about you, kids. Cupid was a devious one, full of cruel mischief. He dipped his arrows in foul mixtures to bring about all kinds of bizarre behavior in his victims, sowing chaos wherever he went. And he built his lair in the stone beneath this mountain.”
“Do you think he’s still down there?” said Webby, sounding a bit excited at the prospect.
“This mountain’s stood undisturbed for thousands of years,” said Scrooge. “Some say Cupid finally fell in love himself, and left his work behind. But – who knows what else he left behind? Secrets from the ancient times? The treasures of lost lovers?”
“Cherub babies!” Launchpad guessed. “Hopefully the cute, chubby, Valentine’s card kind. Not the creepy movie kind.”
Scrooge quickly pointed them towards the entry cave, a nondescript indent in the mountainside which, once entered, turned out to be the beginning of a long downwards tunnel.
They proceeded down the tunnel with flashlights and phone-lights in hand, and before long the cave expanded into a wide cavern. Though they were far from sunlight, it wasn’t too difficult to see; all around them the rock walls glistened with veins of a pink-red crystal, its color putting all the kids in mind of a particularly tacky Valentine’s Day sale, if the sale was in an underground cavern instead of the local mall.
“Cupid’s Crystal,” Scrooge said of the sparkling veins. “The stone he made his arrowheads from, unique in all the world.”
“It’s everywhere! Get a mining operation started down here, and you’d be golden. Or, red-golden.” Louie was already running the numbers in his head. There was definitely an online market for love charms made from Cupid’s literal arrows…
As the group spread out throughout the cavern to explore – some investigating the veins of crystal, others leaning more towards the tunnels continuing into deeper catacombs on the opposite side of the cavern – the ground beneath their feet trembled noticeably.
“Tectonic shifts,” said Huey, tugging on the straps of his backpack nervously. “I definitely have to be right about that this time.”
“Italy is pretty earthquake-happy…” Lena said, casting a cautious glance at the ceiling. These tunnels had held up for this long, but there was a lot of loose rock scattered about, and underground was definitely the last place you wanted to be during a quake…
As if the mountain itself had heard her thoughts, the shaking returned with a vengeance. Rocks rolled around the edges of the room, and with a deafening crack, a fissure opened up in the floor, deep enough that none could see the bottom, and quickly widening.
Lena, who had a well-trained sense for danger and a strong instinct to avoid it, scampered back towards the entry tunnel. Scrooge, Dewey, and Louie each managed to plant themselves on a sturdy part of the floor. Launchpad was knocked off-balance by the quake, but tumbled to relative safety, with a not-so-soft landing in a pile of rubble.
Huey was not so lucky, and found himself right on the edge of the widest part of the crack, the rock under his feet crumbling.
“Whoa!” he yelped as he skidded down the edge of what was now a cliff, fingers scrabbling for purchase.
He hadn’t fallen far, though, before Webby slid down next to him, her hand grabbing his.
“Hang on!” she shouted. With her other hand, she held the grappling hook aloft (and Huey wondered, not for the first time, just where she kept that thing stashed when she wasn’t using it; maybe her pockets were bigger on the inside) and fired it at the ceiling. The hook lodged in the rock, and she swung the two of them across the gap – quickly assessed that there wasn’t enough length on the rope to get them all the way there, and so let go of the hook mid-swing, reaching for an outcropping of crystal and stone on the far side, catching them both mid-fall once again.
“Ow!” she yelped as the crystal’s jagged edge cut into her hand, but she held on, and Scrooge, Louie, and Dewey were there quickly enough to grab forearms and collars and pull her and Huey back onto firm ground. The shaking had, for the moment, stopped.
“Excellent reflexes, Webbigail,” said Scrooge. Webby beamed at the compliment.
Huey unzipped his backpack, checking for damage. “No need to worry, the Guidebook’s safe.”
“Yeah, ‘cause that’s what we were worried about, you big nerd,” Dewey said, punching his brother in the arm.
“This is not a safe place to raise a cherub baby,” Launchpad observed.
Lena edged around the crack in the ground to join the others, walking over to Webby, who was nursing her hand. “You’re hurt?”
“It’s just a scratch,” said Webby, smearing away some drops of blood. “I stabbed myself when I grabbed onto that outcropping. Those crystals are sharp! I can see why Cupid made arrowheads out of them.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Lena placed a hand on Webby’s shoulder. She knew how tough Webby was, but it had still shaken her a bit to watch her best friend throw herself into an expanding canyon. “Let me see.”
“It’s fine,” Webby turned her head to smile at Lena. “I told you, it’s just a –”
Webby’s eyes locked with Lena’s, and she stiffened suddenly, a weird, blank expression on her face.
“Webby?”
A lazy, goofy grin spread across Webby’s lips, and Lena thought she saw a strange glint in those dark eyes – but then she couldn’t see them anymore, as Webby launched herself at Lena, practically crushing her lungs with a hug and enthusiastically kissing her right on the mouth.
Lena stumbled several steps backwards, fortunately away from the crack in the ground, barely avoiding falling over as it was. Webby had pinned her arms firmly to her sides, and was starting to snake her feet around Lena’s legs as well, her beak still firmly on Lena’s as though glued there.
“Hardly the time or place…” Scrooge muttered. Everyone else just gaped, too shocked for words.
Lena managed to work a hand free, lifting it to push against Webby’s chin, gasping for breath as they separated an inch. Webby immediately pulled her in to close the distance again.
“Webby –” Lena squeezed the words out as best as she could, as wrapped up as she was, as startled as she was. “Webby, stop –”
Her strangled protest snapped the others out of their surprise.
“Something’s wrong,” Scrooge said, and the triplets rushed forward, by sheer force of numbers prying Webby away from Lena and holding her still.
“Spoilsports!” Webby accused, straining against their grip. “Hey Lena! Leeee-na! Get back here!”
But Lena just backed away, stepping up onto a pile of rocks. There she sat, shaking her head in a constant, uncomfortable way, pressing her trembling hands into her lap.
“What – what is this?” she said.
“Come on, Lena, what’s the matter?” Webby continued with a giggle. “Not a good enough kisser for you? There’s more where that came from! And all for you! Seriously, guys, let me go!”
Scrooge strode forward and grabbed Webby’s wrist, twisting it around to take a look at the puncture mark on her palm.
“Cupid’s Crystals,” he snarled. “The magic wasn’t something he dipped the arrowhead in – it was in the arrowhead itself!”
“So Webby’s been love-drugged?” said Dewey. The thought should have been hilarious; he was a teenage boy after all. But it was hard to find anything funny about the way it was taking his and his brothers’ combined strength to keep Webby from tackling Lena again.
“Lust-drugged,” Scrooge corrected, dropping Webby’s hand and pacing along the edge of the crevice. “Hormone alterations, loss of rational judgment, an uncontrollable drive towards the object of your simulated desire – you can’t fake love, and this is worse than that would be.”
At that moment, Webby broke free of the boys’ hold and darted towards Lena’s rock pile.
“I’ve got you now!” she said, starting to climb up the rocks. But where she would ordinarily have easily scaled the loose terrain, she stumbled, tumbling down with the rocks once more, while Lena pushed herself another half-foot away.
As Webby hit the floor, Dewey took the opportunity to pin her hands behind her back again. Webby just giggled.
“That was fun,” she said. “Let’s do it again!”
“She can’t stay down here,” said Scrooge. “In her state, she’s a danger to herself.”
“Well, what should we do?” said Launchpad. “Lock her in the plane?”
It wasn’t easy to haul Webby back to the Sunchaser; though they had the advantage of numbers, everyone knew that even in her something-like-inebriated state Webby could handily take on every one of them in a fight. But as Lena (who, much like the others, really didn’t think this was a good idea, but didn’t have any better ones) took the lead, Webby seemed all too happy to follow her, and ultimately the boys managed to shove her into the plane’s cargo bay and slam the door shut, Launchpad quickly locking the door behind her.
“Playing hard to get, are we?” Webby knocked on the inside of the door. “Come on, Lena, let me out of here!”
“We have to fix this.” Lena looked over at Scrooge. “Isn’t there something you can do?”
Scrooge frowned thoughtfully. “In the oldest stories, there was no outlasting the effect of Cupid’s arrows – his victims remained as he made them, until they met their end.”
“But this isn’t just some magical legend,” said Huey. “The crystals are here, and their effects are real. We could analyze them, figure out how they work, and reverse-engineer a cure!”
“And how’re you gonna make a lab for the reverse-engineering on the side of a mountain, Mr. Mad Scientist?” Dewey challenged, worry making him angry. “How about we make test tubes out of rocks!”
“Or maybe you’re thinking about this the wrong way, and we don’t have to make anything that Cupid already made for us,” said Louie. “Come on, the guy was dealing in mind-altering drugs. He’s gotta have an antidote stashed in a lab somewhere, in case someone accidentally or maliciously gave him a dose of his own medicine. That’s what I’d do, anyway, if I was pretending to be a love god.”
“And where better to hide your lab than in some mysterious catacombs, surrounded by your product’s primary ingredient,” said Scrooge. “Once more unto the breach, then.
“Launchpad!” he barked. “Have this bucket of bolts ready to depart for civilization as soon as possible. Sooner, even. If we come back empty-handed, a hospital’s our best bet.”
Launchpad slapped the side of his hand to his head in a salute. “Yes sir, Mr. McD!”
Huey, Dewey, and Louie immediately began running back towards the cave entrance. Scrooge took a few steps before noticing that Lena hadn’t moved.
He paused to look back at her. “Aren’t you coming?”
Lena’s eyes were on the shut door of the plane.
“Someone has to stay back and make sure she doesn’t hurt herself,” she said.
A sympathetic frown added creases to Scrooge’s already-wrinkled face. “Are you sure, lass?”
Lena gave him a sideways glance. “You’re not getting me back in that cave, old man.”
It was almost a joke. Almost.
Scrooge took a step towards Lena, and placed a hand on her shoulder, just for a moment. Then he turned and set off after the boys, into the tunnel and out of sight.
Lena sat down to wait.
Past that initial accident-prone cavern, the catacombs closed into something more deserving of the name – a series of dark, skinny tunnels winding through the rock, keeping who-knew-what concealed within.
At several points, the tunnels diverged into separate paths, from which echoes of rushing water and the whispers of some being deep beneath them beckoned the adventurer’s spirit. On any other day, Scrooge and Dewey would have followed the sounds.
Throughout the tunnels, the boys’ flashlights revealed words and pictures carved into the walls, ancient words and histories promising long-forgotten knowledge of long-ago times. On any other day, Huey would have stopped to study the marks.
And periodically, a path ended in a vault-like door, sealed shut with a puzzle or riddle, promising great treasures within for the one who took the time to solve it. On any other day, Louie would have taken the time, and perhaps even put in some effort.
But this wasn’t any other day, and Webby – sister and niece – weighed more heavily on their minds than anything else they loved.
And so the ducks descended deeper into the mountain, with one destination in mind.
“Lena… Lena, I know you can hear me…”
Indeed she could. Launchpad’s work on the engines was causing plenty of noise, but not enough to drown Webby out. Lena was sorely tempted to dig out her headphones from wherever she’d stashed them and turn the volume on her phone as loud as it would go, Beakley’s opinions on what that would do to her hearing be damned.
But that didn’t seem right. She was supposed to be keeping watch, making sure nothing worse happened. That required being able to hear what was going on around her.
Besides, she was pretty sure she’d left her headphones at home. Something about wanting to be fully involved in the family outing, wanting to be something other than a stereotypical sullen twenty-first-century teen for once.
Not that wanting that had done anyone any good.
Not that Lena wanting anything had done anyone any good.
Webby had always been affectionate, certainly. She was free with her praise, and her hugs, even back when Lena pretended not to need or want them.
And Webby loved Lena, undoubtedly. Lena had known this since Webby threw herself into the mouth of a Money Shark for her. It had taken her more time to fully realize that she loved Webby back; that hadn’t really clicked for Lena until their misadventure in the Other Bin. They didn’t make a point of saying it, that they loved each other, but then nobody in the mansion did. It went without saying.
And she and Lena were close to each other, undeniably. Over the past two years, they’d gotten to the point where if an adult was looking for one of them, finding the other was a sure bet, in much the same way that any one of the triplets could be used to locate his brothers. Lena had a room of her own that was more a place to put up her posters and hang out in when Webby wasn’t around than it was an actual bedroom she ever slept in. More often than not, she still spent the night in Webby’s loft.
More often than not, in Webby’s bed.
They were close. And Lena liked how things were.
But this – this wasn’t how things were.
And now, almost as if she could hear Lena’s thoughts, Webby was giggling through the door, “Just wait til we get back to the mansion, to our little loft, just you and me, and oh look, there’s only one bed, I guess we’ll have to share it, and who needs pajamas anyway, you look great without them, we’ll just go in the –”
“Webby please, for the love of god, do not finish that sentence!” Lena begged.
“Make me.”
Lena squeezed her eyes shut, her fingers forming fists in her hair. “No…”
Webby let out an exasperated huff. “What’s your problem, anyway? What’s the matter? You can tell me. You can tell me anything.”
No, she couldn’t. She really couldn’t.
“This isn’t right,” Lena said. “Webby, don’t you see, this isn’t right, can’t you feel it?”
“Oh, I’m definitely feeling it.”
“That’s not what I mean! You don’t understand.”
“Nuh-uh. For the first time ever, I do understand. I understand what you want. Do you really think I don’t see how you look at me?”
Lena’s eyes flew open. “I don’t – Do you? I didn’t mean –”
Webby shushed her stammers. “It’s okay. Lena, it’s okay. I understand now. I want it, too. I want you.”
“You don’t,” Lena tried to say, but it came out as less than a whisper.
“I want all of you. Your body. Your hands, all over me. Your lips. Those can go all over me, too.”
“Stop. Webby, please, stop.”
“Why aren’t you happy about this?! I want you!”
“No you don’t!”
Lena was suddenly on her feet, without any awareness of having told her limbs to move.
“You don’t!” she said again, throat stinging from the force of her words. “If you did, you’d have said so already! You wouldn’t need some magic date rape drug to make you say it! You’re Webby! You don’t hide anything! I’m the one who hides, and lies, and pretends I don’t – that I don’t want – You’re the good one, Webby, not me!”
“Lena, I – you – literally nobody in the world is better than you!”
Lena let out a single bitter laugh.
“I’m a good liar, Webby,” she said, “but not even I could make that sentence sound true.”
“I get it now,” Webby said after a pause, and Lena could practically hear her frown. “This is self-deprecation.”
Lena shook her head. “No. This is an entirely different issue from if I… if I think I deserve you. This is about reality. Webby…”
She sat down again, leaning her head back against the closed door of the plane.
“Webby, this is fake,” she said. “As much as a part of me would love it to be real, it’s fake. And if you were in your right mind, you’d see it, too.”
“I swear these carvings have to mean something,” Huey said, quickly sketching a copy of one of the marks, like a twisted tree, into a black page of the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. “Why would they be everywhere if they didn’t mean something?”
“This one looks like a Bunsen burner,” said Dewey. “Right here, over the one that’s shaped a bit like a key…”
He reached up to touch the image, and the stone felt loose under his hand.
“A-ha!”
Dewey pushed the stone, and the carving sunk into the wall with a click.
There was a rumbling sound, and for a moment everyone feared that the earthquakes had begun again. Then a large chunk of the wall swung open, revealing a side room.
Scrooge and his nephews stepped into the room. Though a few thousand years old and from a culture they had next to no familiarity with, the room was unmistakably some kind of scientific laboratory. There were tables piled high with odd tools, and something like an ancient blackboard, though any drawings that might have been on it were indistinguishable from the dust covering every surface. And everywhere, stacked on shelves, were containers of every size – metal crates, clay pots, and glass jars, all full of odd powders and liquids, each labeled in a pre-Germanic script.
“Ooookay,” said Louie, “anyone here who can read ancient Latin – which is not me – get searching!”
It had been quiet for a while, aside from the occasional rumble in the ground, and the irregular clanging of Launchpad’s wrench. Lena had her face pressed into her knees, and now she lifted it, blinking blearily in the sunlight.
“I can’t say I expected anything different,” she finally said. “No. That’s a lie. I did expect better, from the universe, but I was wrong to. All it gives me is, is twisted versions of what I wish for. I spent so long wishing I’d find someone, a member of my family, who would understand me and my magic. And I found her.”
Lena’s fingers formed fists in the dirt as she glared at her shadow.
“And she understood, alright. Understood how she could use me. And hurt me.”
She threw a ball of dirt at the gray shape, and it scattered harmlessly across the ground.
“I stopped wishing after that. Wishes were useless. But bargains, those could work. So I bargained for my freedom, and she sent me to Duckburg.
“And then I met you. And you were… you. You’re sunshine, Webby, all parts of it – the glow, the burn… I looked at you and saw a light so bright it didn’t cast a shadow. And you looked at me like I was something special, you smiled at me like I deserved it, you trusted me… And I started wishing again. Wishing that I could be what you saw in me.
“And something changed, Webby, it really did. Everything in my life is better, with you in it. I’m better, with you. That’s all I need. I don’t need...” she made a helpless gesture with her hands. “…any romantic crap. Or sexual, or whatever. I don’t really know what I want, but whatever it is, I don’t need it from you. I just… You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And I don’t want anything to twist what we have. Least of all me.”
Lena sat there in the dirt, waiting for a response.
None came.
Had she finally been so much of a downer that even Webby had had enough?
“Or maybe I just have bad luck with mountains in Italy,” she added, in an attempt at a joke.
Still, no response.
“Webby?”
Silence.
“Webby!”
“Hunh?”
Lena put a hand on the door, as if doing so would help her see through it. “Webby, are you alright?”
“What, yeah, sure, I’m listening. Really.” A pause. “I just got kinda dizzy there for a moment. Still am, a little. My head’s all… fuzzy.”
It took all of Lena’s will not to go grab the keys from Launchpad, or to claw open the plane with her bare hands.
“Is it because of the crystal?” she asked.
“Um. Maybe? I feel a bit – I’m just gonna check my vitals, quick. Yeah, I can do that.”
Another pause. Lena stood, looking over her shoulder at the tunnel entrance. Where were Scrooge and the boys? How long had they been gone?
“Body temperature’s pretty normal,” Webby piped up again, “as far as I can tell without a thermometer. My hands are a little shaky, and sweaty, but you know, we’ve been having a heart to heart here, so that could be normal. My pulse… Oh. Oh, um, that’s high, that is really fast, that can’t be good.”
Lena felt very cold. Hormone alterations, Scrooge had said. Could those cause heart rates to skyrocket? She didn’t know enough about medicine. Was that something she’d have learned in school? If she’d ever been able to, or wanted to, attend a normal biology class in a normal high school like a normal person? She didn’t know. She didn’t know.
But Webby was in trouble. That, she knew.
“Hang in there, Webby,” said Lena. “I’m going to find the others.”
“No, no, this isn’t it,” Scrooge muttered, shoving a crate labeled odium aside. “Dosing her with aversion will only create new problems, there’s no guarantee the opposites will counteract each other.”
The floor trembled again, sending dust falling from the shelves as the various containers clanked and rattled against each other. The earthquakes were becoming more frequent, and stronger now. Perhaps Cupid had built his lab on top of an awakening volcano. Wouldn’t that just be the icing on the cake?
“I’ve got it!” Huey called from his perch on a high shelf. “Here – remedium. That has to be it!”
“Good lad!” Scrooge crossed over to him, Dewey and Louie hot on his heels. “Pass it down!”
Huey put his hands around the little clay pot, and then thought better of it.
“This bowl’s all cracked and crumbling,” he said. “It’ll break if I move it. Hang on – Dewey, check the front pouch of my backpack!”
Dewey grabbed Huey’s backpack from the floor and unzipped it, rummaging for a moment before pulling out a small glass vial.
“Here!” He threw the vial up to Huey, who caught it.
“A Junior Woodchuck is always prepared,” he said, scooping some of the goopy, green liquid into the vial and stoppering it shut before passing it down to Scrooge. “Test tubes out of rocks, huh?”
Dewey winced. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“Let’s get back to the Sunchaser,” Scrooge said, stashing the vial in a coat pocket. “I don’t like these quakes one bit.”
Lena stared at the fork in the tunnel with a mixture of frustration and dismay. There were three paths, each leading downwards into darkness, each made of stone walls veined with that damnable crystal, glistening in the beam of her smartphone’s flashlight.
Maybe the others were pros at finding their way through old tunnels, but to Lena it was a maze she didn’t have the time or perspective to solve. She’d need Gladstone Gander’s luck to pick the path they’d gone down. And if she had luck like that, then none of this would have happened.
She needed a shortcut. A miracle. A way to break through. She needed…
Her eyes, without any conscious direction from her brain, fell on the bracelet around her wrist. It wasn’t the bracelet she’d dropped into the sea, nor the one that Webby had made for her after that; not even the power of friendship could keep yarn from falling apart through two years of constant wear. This was Friendship Bracelet 3.0, with regular stripes of pink, blue, and black, and a little purple bead sewn into it for variety. Webby was getting more creative with the patterns.
But it was still a magical talisman, though it had gone to this point practically unused.
Lena hadn’t practiced magic at all since the Shadow War, except for the occasional small demonstration to placate Webby’s insatiable curiosity. She certainly hadn’t put any sort of energy into creating a significant spell. She’d barely even written a poem, out of fear it might have more power than it should – except once in a while, when her eye was caught by a particularly striking sunrise or when Webby was being especially adorable, but that was just in her head, and never given voice or committed to paper.
Suffice to say that Lena was very much out of practice with anything like what she was considering now.
That kind of thing was forbidden, also, in an unspoken sort of way, from McDuck Manor. Magic was the domain of despicable villains like Magica de Spell, not teenage wards grateful to finally have a welcoming home and family. Scrooge hated magic.
By all logical reasoning, Lena using magic right then was out of the question, impossible.
But Webby was in trouble.
And that went beyond logic.
So Lena touched two fingers to the friendship bracelet, right over the bead, and focused. She called upon the power that Webby had woven into it and its predecessors – at first innocently, and later intentionally – and at the same time reached deep into herself, to that buzzing in the back of her head, the thing in her blood that was always listening, always waiting to be asked a favor.
The bracelet began to glow with a pale blue light. Lena chose her words very carefully.
“So I might end this peril we’re in, / Show me the way now to our kin.”
She said it twice, and then a third time, because things in fairy tales always came in threes, and she could really have used some “happily ever after” right then. Then she held her wrist out towards the split tunnels ahead of her.
A ring of light extended from her hand, sweeping across the floor, brushing away dust and causing sparkles to dance in the veins of crystal. As it passed, bright blue footprints illuminated on the ground – several sets, many small and fewer large, heading down the leftmost tunnel.
Lena set off down that tunnel at a run.
“Come on, hurry!”
The four adventurers ran back through the catacombs, climbing ever higher as they retraced their footsteps. But their progress was interrupted by the most violent shuddering yet.
“Get down!” Scrooge shouted, and the boys didn’t need to be told twice. Knees hit the floor and arms shot up to cover heads as the earthquake sent heaping chunks of rock and crystal tumbling all around them.
After several tense seconds, the shaking stopped. Scrooge checked the vial – it was, fortunately, unbroken by the chaos.
Not so fortunately, as he and the boys got back to their feet, they could no longer see the tunnel ahead of them, and not only because it was dark. The hall had completely filled with fallen rock.
“Why am I not surprised?!” said Louie. “Literally everything else has gone wrong today!”
“We can figure this out,” said Huey. “We have to.”
“Guys?”
The voice came from the other side of the rock wall, muffled but recognizable.
“Please tell me that’s you over there,” it continued.
“Lena!” Huey leaned closer to a crack between the rocks, hoping it’d help his voice carry across better. “We have the cure. But the tunnel’s completely caved in!”
“If we work together, we may be able to shift the rock,” Scrooge mused. “But we must be careful. One wrong move could bring the whole mountain down on top of us.”
Lena snarled. “That will take too long! Webby’s getting worse; I think the crystal’s wearing out her heart!”
Everyone on the other side of the cave-in exchanged nervous glances.
Dewey kicked a rock in frustration, sending it clattering back into the temple hall. “What do we do?!”
“Maybe there’s another way to the surface,” Louie suggested.
“We might not have time to look for it,” said Scrooge. “There has to be a way through, here and now. Lena?” He raised his voice for the distance. “Do you see anything on your end?”
“Are you kidding?! I’m useless here! You’re the ones who go crawling through old ruins! You’re adventurers, this is your scene. All I can do is…”
Lena trailed off mid-sentence. Out of the boys’ sight, her eyes had fallen once more on her fist, raised in frustration, and the friendship bracelet tied around it.
“Lena?” Scrooge prompted, sensing a lead. “Lena, what can you do?”
“…everybody take about five steps back,” said Lena. “Probably more, just to be safe. And, Uncle Scrooge? Technically we’re not in the house, so I’m not breaking any rules, but I’m sorry anyway.”
“Wait,” said Huey, “what are you going to –?”
Scrooge grabbed him by the shirt collar, yanking him away from the rock wall.
“You heard her,” he barked. “Everyone get back!”
As the triplets obeyed, backing several steps down the hallway, the huge pile of rock began to glow with a pale blue light. Individual stones trembled, shifted, and finally with a creaking, groaning sound, lifted – and then all of the loose rock was hovering in the air, larger stones pressing into the ceiling to keep any other pieces from falling. On the other side of it all stood Lena, her teeth gritted and her trembling arms outstretched before her, every inch of her body ablaze with the same blue light.
“Run,” she gasped, and nobody was stupid enough to ask why. They all darted forward, ducking under low-hanging rocks and hurrying past Lena. As soon as they were clear, the light flickered, and faded, leaving just a soft halo around Lena’s body as she stood there, breathing hard, in front of several tons of rock that were about to suddenly remember what gravity was.
“Gogogogogo!” Louie shouted, him and Dewey each grabbing one of Lena’s hands and pulling her along as they ran up the tunnel. With a shake of her head, dispelling the last of the magical haze, Lena refocused on escape.
All around the fleeing adventurers and witch, Cupid’s Catacombs fell apart with a deafening rumble.
When Webby woke up (wait, when had she fallen asleep? Had she fainted? Oh yeah, dizziness and lightheadedness from accelerated heart rate due to a hormone-altering love god’s crystal, that was a thing), the Sunchaser was in the air, and there was a weird, bitter taste in her mouth.
Above her, four faces stared down with anxious expressions – Dewey, Huey, Louie, and Scrooge. Her family.
Each of them was covered in a thick layer of dust.
“Granny’s totally going to make you all take a bath when we get home,” Webby said. “What, did I miss all the exciting parts?”
Everyone around her visibly relaxed. Scrooge stuffed an empty vial into his pocket.
“Welcome back, Webbigail,” he said, a warm smile smoothing out some wrinkles and creating better, kinder ones.
“See, this is why we don’t just grab things in mysterious catacombs without knowing what they can do,” said Huey.
“Or what they’re worth,” Louie added.
Dewey just smiled, patting Webby’s foot. “You missed a lot of falling rocks, and the complete destruction of Cupid’s lab, but that’s all.” Then his grin widened mischievously. “Or it would be all, if I forgot to mention the super awesome magic we saw, courtesy of our resident teenage witch!”
“Magic?” Webby tried to sit up, and the world tilted – whether it was because she was still dizzy, or because Launchpad McQuack was flying the plane, she couldn’t tell. Several pairs of hands reached out to steady her. But none of them were Lena’s.
“Where’s Lena?” said Webby.
“Over here, Pink.”
Webby looked up towards the voice. While she and the boys were on the floor of the cargo hold, Lena was sitting on the upper level of the plane, her legs dangling over the edge. She was equally covered in rock dust. Not that any amount of grime could tarnish her beauty. Is a thought that Webby had and instantly felt kind of awkward about.
If Webby had been a very different kind of person, it might have occurred to her to feign amnesia of the past few hours. But this was Webby. The good one.
“Lena,” she began, “I’m –”
Lena stood and turned away. “Dibs on copilot,” she called back over her shoulder. “Somebody’s gotta make sure we get home in one piece.”
“Aw, come on,” came Launchpad’s reply, “the way home is almost never as crash-y as the way there! I mean there was that time with the singing pirates, but I think that counts as mid-adventure more than going home from the adventure.”
“Uh-huh, sure.” Lena slid into the empty seat in the cockpit, the picture of nonchalance, at least when viewed from the back.
Webby bit her lip, trying to figure out what this meant, and what to do next. The boys looked at each other.
“…hey Webby,” Huey said, “we saw some really interesting carvings down in the halls around Cupid’s laboratory. I copied them into the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook, so now we know they’re real. Wanna take a look?”
“Sure,” said Webby, allowing herself to be distracted. They had a long flight across the Atlantic ahead of them. Surely she’d have a chance to talk to Lena before they reached Duckburg.
But she didn’t have a chance to talk to Lena during the flight, or after they got home. Whenever Webby came by, Lena always seemed to have just gone walking in another direction to do something else.
Mid-bath (she had to take one, too, even though she wasn’t nearly as catacomb-dust-covered as the others), Webby resolved to bring things up as they tried to sleep. But when she got to her room, Lena wasn’t there. One of the sleeping bags was missing, too, leading Webby to conclude that Lena had found someplace besides the loft and the room down the hall that was sort of also Lena’s to camp out for the night.
She could have gone to find Lena. There wasn’t a single hiding spot in the mansion that Webby didn’t already know about. And it wouldn’t be the first time she and Lena had slept somewhere unconventional. No one really cared if they were in their room, as long as they actually did go to sleep at some point before dawn.
But Webby could tell when she was being avoided.
So she reached under the bed and pulled out that ratty old purple tank top, the one Lena had wanted to throw away and Webby had kept anyway, which still smelled like old dye and seaside moss, and held it to her chest as she tried to sleep.
Webby was no good at sleeping in even on the best of days. She was too well-trained to not be ready to go with the sun. Lena was a later sleeper by far – at least in part because her dreams usually woke her up midway through the night. But by that point, they were used to each other’s sleeping habits. Webby could give Lena a reassuring smile and squeeze and drop off again immediately afterwards, and Lena could roll over and let Webby out from under the covers at dawn evidently without waking up at all.
It had become unusual for Webby to wake up and find herself alone in the loft.
She sat upright in the bed, which felt much too large, and thought to herself that this might turn out to be a very long day.
“There you are, Webby,” said Huey. “I overheard Scrooge having some new mysterious stuff moved into the Wing of Secrets. Wanna investigate?”
“No thanks,” Webby said. She was lying on the piano bench in the room under her loft, arms and legs dangling limply over the edges.
“Hey Webby,” Louie spoke up, “we haven’t had a good dart gun fight in a while. I call dibs on your team!”
“Not right now, Louie.”
“I could use an interviewee for my next video,” Dewey prompted. “Wanna come by the studio, Webby?”
Webby shook her head. “Guys… I get what you’re trying to do, and thanks for that, but I just need some time to think.”
The boys nodded, and one by one headed out of the room.
Dewey paused in the doorway, saying back over his shoulder, “If we see her anywhere, we’ll let you know.”
“That’s alright,” said Webby. “I’ll find her. When she wants to be found.”
That “when” turned out to be very late in the afternoon, just before sundown. Webby was wandering the west wing of the mansion when she noticed a balcony door standing ajar. She peeked outside, and there was Lena, wearing a dark purple hoodie, her arms folded on the balcony railing and her face angled up towards the setting sun.
This wasn’t the first time Webby had noticed how much care Lena seemed to put into positioning herself facing towards light sources, her eyes pointed upwards towards sunbeams and lightbulbs, keeping any shadow she cast well out of even her most peripheral vision.
It couldn’t be good for her sight in the long term. But maybe it was good for her brain, for now.
“Lena?”
Lena didn’t turn around. “Hey, Webs.”
Webby considered about seven different conversation starters before discarding them all and cutting to the chase: “I think you’re avoiding me.”
“I think you’re letting me.”
“I am. I mean, I was.”
Lena said nothing. Webby shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and then back again.
“Look,” she said, “about what happened in Italy –”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I know,” said Webby. “But I think we should. Or at least, there’s something I want to say about it. You don’t have to say anything back, but, if you listened, I’d appreciate it.”
After a pause, Lena nodded. Webby stepped forward to sit near Lena’s feet, her legs dangling through the bars of the balcony railing and kicking the cool evening air. As she did so, Lena pulled up her hood, keeping her face hidden. But at least she wasn’t walking away.
“I’ve been thinking,” Webby said to the balcony railing. “About family. And all the kinds of people and relationships that can make up a family. Like, there’s the mom-and-dad-and-two-point-five-kids kind of family, which is supposed to be the most ‘normal’ kind of family, but it always seemed a little weird to me, because, what did they do with the other point-five of the kid? Not that I’m judging anyone for lacking the standard number of limbs, it’s just the specificity that… uh…
“What I mean is,” Webby forced her train of thought back onto the tracks, not looking up and so missing the little twitch of Lena’s shoulders that might have been laughter, “there are other kinds of families. With more or less limbs, and a lot of different kinds of relationships in them. There’s parent-to-child, and grandparent-to-grandchild, and uncle-or-aunt-to-nephew-or-niece, and spouses, and – and friends.”
She did look up then, briefly, at a hoodie-clad figure who might as well have been faceless, silhouetted in the sunlight. Like a shadow.
(No. Bad thought. Move on.)
“And as I thought about that, I thought about how there are so many movies and legends and fairy tales focusing on the spouse kind. And the stages before it, boyfriends and girlfriends and things like that. All these stories building up to the dramatic kiss at the end, like that’s the goal, as though of all the other relationships you might have in your family, that one is the most important one. And all the other ones, they’re not so important, because this is ‘more than just friends,’ this is the only thing you’re ever going to want, and the biggest thing you’re ever going to feel.
“But. I feel a lot of big things. And maybe that’s weird.” Webby’s thumb worked its way under the friendship bracelet on her opposite wrist, rubbing back and forth against the yarn, bringing it ever so slightly closer to the day it eroded enough to merit replacing it with Friendship Bracelet 3.5. “Maybe it’s really weird, or just my kind of weird,*** but I don’t think that any kind of relationship is more important than the others, especially not that kind, I don’t think I can think that, because…”
She hesitated. Closed her eyes. Said it all quickly in an exhale: “because-I-don’t-feel-that-way-about-you.” Breathed in. “Or anyone. Not ever. Everything I felt while under the influence of Cupid’s Crystal, all that wanting, I’ve had over twenty-four hours to think about it, and you were right, Lena, it was all fake. It was the closest I’ve ever felt to those movies’ happy endings, and I’ve never felt like that any other time in my life, and in hindsight it all seems so… wrong.
“I don’t know what that says about me. But I do know, I’m pretty sure, that it doesn’t mean I don’t have any important relationships.”
Webby opened her eyes and looked up at Lena, and it was a little easier to do so now that the sun had gone down a bit more, and a little harder to do so because what if something in all of this that she’d been running over and over in her head before saying out loud had been hurtful or just plain too weird for even Lena, who had taken all of her weirdness so far in stride, to handle? But it was too late to stop, she was so near the end of it anyway, she might as well finish.
“Everything in my life is better with you in it, too,” said Webby. “And if that’s not important, then I don’t know what is.”
She was silent for a few moments, and then added, “That’s all I wanted to say. Just in case it wasn’t clear that that was the end of it.”
Lena took in a long breath, and let it out even longer.
“Of course it’s important,” she said. “‘More than just friends’ – those movies are so stupid.”
“Yeah.” A relieved grin spread across Webby’s face. “‘Just friends’ – why ‘just’? Friendship is the best. It’s more like, ‘yay, friends!’ We should write letters to Hollywood. Or just make our own movie. And launch a hostile takeover on Hollywood!”
“I’ll do the camerawork for the movie and weapons inventory for the hostile takeover.” Lena lifted an arm to rub a sleeve across her face, sniffling a little as she did so. When the sleeve came down again, so did the hood, showing Webby that while Lena didn’t have any make-up on to ruin, her eyes were very red, and her cheeks all streaky.
“Oh no, Lena…”
“This isn’t you,” Lena said quickly as Webby pulled herself up onto the balcony railing to sit at eye-level with her. “It’s me, and the nasty voices in my head… None of what I’m feeling is your fault. None of it.”
“I still feel bad when you feel bad.”
“I know.” Lena rubbed her eyes again, trying her hardest to keep them dry. “I just… I will never pressure you into anything. You know that, right? And I don’t want you pressuring yourself into anything that you don’t want to do because you think it’ll make me happy. And don’t go justifying it, pretending that you want it because I want it, because that’s not how things should work. It’s not how we should work. Does that make sense? Anything that would make you uncomfortable for my sake, I don’t need it. I don’t need it.”
Webby nodded. “And the same goes for you, you know. I know how much effort you’re putting in, to fit in here, and to seem less… hurt. You don’t have to run off and hide when you feel bad, if you’d feel better feeling bad with me here with you.”
“Sometimes I prefer to feel bad on my own.”
“That’s fair, but, feeling bad not on your own is an option, too.”
“That’s fair.”
“And, you don’t have to come along on more McDuck Family Adventures if you don’t want to.”
Lena laughed softly. “I might pass up the next few.”
The sun was nearly all the way below the horizon now – not quite enough to show stars through the orange and pink in the sky, but enough that the sunset didn’t sting the eyes anymore, and enough that the shadows on the balcony had faded to near-invisibility.
“You know,” Webby said with a nervous sort of giggle, “that really wasn’t how I thought my first kiss was going to go.”
“Me neither.”
Webby blinked. “Wait, what? Really? You never – But you’re so –”
Lena rolled her eyes, with a little more force than was strictly necessary. “Having an evil sorceress in your shadow keeping you from going where you want to go and doing what you want to do through your early-teenage years kind of puts a damper on your love life.”
“Oh. Right. That makes sense.”
Webby wished it wasn’t so easy to accidentally make Lena bring up that part of her life, but some shadows were just too long to leave behind. The silence between them didn’t stretch out for too long, though, before she thought of a way to break it.
“How about we say that that one doesn’t count?” Webby said. “I mean, there’s got to be exceptions for when someone’s under the influence of mind-and-body-altering magi-mythological crystals. So let’s just say that that one doesn’t count, as a first kiss.”
Lena shrugged. She’d begun to watch the sunset again. “Fine by me.”
“So we can do it over again.”
Lena’s eyes snapped back towards Webby’s. “What?”
Webby suddenly became very interested in her own feet, dangling in the air.
“I mean, not again,” she said, “because we just agreed that what happened yesterday didn’t count, so this one would have to be the first. If we did it. But that’s the idea. It’s supposed to be something special, right? The first kiss should be when you’re somewhere happy and safe, and with someone you really care about, and it isn’t forced or awkward or – unless you don’t want to, because then it would definitely be awkward, and anyway it’s probably just a thing from those stupid movies we’re going to destroy Hollywood over, so we can just, forget I said anything, and –”
“Webby.”
“Yes?”
“Do you want to kiss me?”
The evening had been cool when Webby had first walked out here. It had definitely gained several degrees of heat since.
“…yes.”
Lena exhaled. “Then get your feet back on the floor, because I’m not going to do this with you poised to fall three stories. That’s too dramatic even for this family.”
Webby hopped lightly off the railing. Though she’d grown a few inches over the past two years, Lena was still the taller of the two of them, and so Webby stood there looking up at her, wondering exactly what she was supposed to do next.
Lena seemed no more certain, and so they just stared at each other for a bit.
Finally Lena’s face cracked into a smile.
“Alright, come here,” she said, placing her hands on either side of Webby’s head and closing the distance between them, gently pressing the tip of her beak to Webby’s.
And Webby still didn’t really understand those movies, but there was something to kissing. Something different than hugs or cuddles. Something about putting the most vulnerable part of your body right up to someone else’s, and breathing the same air as that someone else, and being so close to them that you just had to close your eyes and feel.
And so when Lena leaned away again after not very long at all, Webby put her arms around Lena’s torso and pulled her back in, and this second kiss was a bit more forceful than the first, but not in a bad way – it felt a bit like pressing a crest into the wax seal on an important letter, and so they stamped their mark onto each other.
When they came back out of that kiss, neither really pulled away. They just stood there, eyes locked mere inches apart. And Webby wasn’t sure exactly where the line was between the things she wanted and the things that those stupid movies said she was supposed to want, but she did know that this moment was a good moment, especially if Lena’s thumbs kept stroking the skin behind her ears, if that continued then everything would just be perfect.
“So,” she said, still not moving away, “that’s something we can do now.”
“When you want to,” said Lena.
“And when you want to, too.”
“Webby, I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.”
“How long?”
Lena squinted her eyes in a sort of guilty wince over an apologetic smile. “…two years, give or take?”
“…ohmygod, Lenaaaaa!”
Webby crumpled, her head falling forward onto Lena’s chest.
Lena laughed softly, wrapping her arms around Webby, holding her upright. “I’ve got you.”
“That’s adorable. I can’t. How long have you been holding onto that line? Forget camerawork, you should be writing the movie, how did I forget that you’re a poet…?”
She kept rambling, and Lena gladly drank in every word, continuing to hold her as the darkening night wrapped them both in its own safe embrace.