Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Much, much later, when the Shadow War was a distant enough memory that everyone involved could laugh about it, they would say that the day had been saved by Donald’s hard head.

In the moment, though, there was nothing especially humorous about the Sumerian orb at the end of Magica’s staff cracking, and the explosion of magic that immediately followed.

Scrooge shielded his eyes with an arm, peeking out at the blaze of light connecting the screaming sorceress to the vortex of shadows high above the Money Bin. As he tried to make out any visible shape in the chaos, he saw one shadow break away from the quickly-shrinking mass in the sky and fall towards the ground. As it fell, the shadow gained dimension, and then color, including – Scrooge couldn’t help but grin – a distinctive lock of pink hair.

Lena hit the ground near Scrooge’s feet, and at the same moment Magica landed in the center of the crater borne from the mass outrush of magic. Above them all, the sky was clear and starlit, the army of shadows completely dispersed.

Scrooge grabbed Lena by the collar of her sweater (admittedly not the best thing to do after she’d fallen several dozen feet onto a pile of gold, but the girl had survived so much so far, surely a neck injury wouldn’t do her in now) and pulled her away from the crater, stepping forward as he did so, placing himself firmly between Lena and Magica.

Magica de Spell stood, glaring at Scrooge. She made an arcane gesture with her hands.

Nothing happened.

An odd, high-pitched giggle forced its way out of Lena’s mouth. Scrooge shot a glance down at her, and saw the teenager staring across the crater at her aunt with bleary eyes, a disbelieving grin on her face, as Magica stared at her own hands with shock and dismay. The sorceress was helpless. Lena’s tormentor for god-knows-how-long was standing there like an idiot, unable to hurt her.

“My powers! They’re gone!” Magica exclaimed, confirming Lena’s conclusion. “You ruin everything!”

“Sorry to crash the partyyyyyy!”

As Launchpad McQuack came plummeting towards the Money Bin, everyone except Magica had the good sense to dive for cover. Scrooge grabbed Lena as he leapt away, as she seemed too disoriented to do so on her own, for the third time that day putting his body between her and danger as they were showered with coins.

“Huh,” he heard Launchpad say, “never crashed a me before!”

Magica struggled her way out from under Launchpad, gasping and completely devoid of dignity. Her eyes scanned her surroundings, passing over the infuriating and strangely violence-capable children at one side of the crater, the adult lieutenants in her war against Scrooge at the other, and then Scrooge himself, helping Lena to her feet.

For a moment, Magica and Lena made eye contact. Then the sorceress returned her focus to Scrooge, as though she couldn’t care less about the girl’s presence.

“Curse you, McDuck!” Magica shouted as she drew a smoke bomb from her robes. “You haven’t seen the last of me!”

She threw the bomb, which didn’t do much besides create a small cloud for her to run away from as she fled the Money Bin, to the sound of whoops and applause.

Lena laughed again, that strange, hysterical giggle that came in response to nothing particularly funny. It was over? They’d won? What even was happening right now?

Her knees buckled.

“Easy now.” Scrooge helped lower Lena into a seated position, her back supported by a pile of gemstones. “Remember to breathe, lass.”

“Lena?! Lena!!”

Scrooge stepped out of the way just in time to allow Webby to come flying over, nearly crushing Lena’s ribs with a hug and talking a mile a minute.

“You’re here! You’re back! You’re okay! I knew she was lying about you not being real! I knew it!”

“Lying,” Lena said, trying to figure out what to do with her arms, and whether they’d respond to any signals her brain sent them anyway. “Yeah.”

Webby grinned up at her, eyes shining with tears.

“I thought you were gone,” she said. “You sacrificed yourself to save me. You really are my best friend!”

Webby buried her face in Lena’s sweater again, and Lena remembered how to hug her back, squeezing as tightly as she could and hiding her closed eyes in Webby’s hair.

“That’s right,” she whispered. “I am.”

The next few hours passed in a blur. There were group hugs in the Money Bin, and the family’s weird habit of swimming in it – Lena opting to sit on the “shore” with Beakley and the scientist guy, giving her front row seats to the ensuing discussions/arguments about the fate of Donald’s houseboat and the Gizmoduck suit (casualties of war), and the subsequently ensuing plans/attempts to dredge up their remains.

And then somehow they were outside, on the streets of Duckburg, facing crowds of the public and the press, while Scrooge made his usual promises to pay for repairs in between repeated reminders that this all would have been a lot worse if the McDuck family hadn’t stepped in to save the day, and he was a victim here, too, just look at the state of his mansion…

Maybe it was normal for the other kids, but Lena wasn’t used to any of it. Her thoughts were gradually returning to a normal speed, but every sound seemed too loud, and all the lights seemed too bright, and she wasn’t sure if it was a side effect of spending several hours as a shadow, or spending several days possessed by an evil sorceress, or just from hitting her head in what was left of the Money Bin – she felt ungrounded, less than real.

She’d been feeling like that a lot lately.

There was a microphone in front of her face, a camera lens not far behind it.

“And what role did you play in all this?” the news reporter was saying. “Who are you, anyway? What’s your connection to the McDuck family?”

“I… uh…”

(Am related to their greatest enemy? Am the reason all this happened? Am a liar and a traitor and a terrible friend and –)

Beakley’s hand landed on her shoulder, gently but firmly turning Lena away from the cameras and stepping in to take her place.

“She’s a friend of the children,” she said. “Over for a sleepover when the chaos began. Proved herself to keep a level head in a crisis, nonetheless…”

There was more, but Lena’s feet, evidently opportunists, were carrying her away from the interview, away from the crowd, away from the lights and into the one place that had been her consistent safe haven these past few years: the shadows.

It seemed counterintuitive. But she’d realized, very soon after The Mistake, that darkness was the only reliable place you could hide from a shadow.

So into the nearest patch of darkness she went, stepping sideways into an alley and huddling in the shade of a dumpster.

Lena sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, her eyes closed and her hands over her ears. Usually, shoving away any and all light and sound was enough to make her stop shaking, to refocus, to get enough mental clarity to figure out what to do next. Enough to let her scrounge up enough dignity to appear cool and aloof again the next time someone saw her.

It wasn’t working.

She let her hands drop, tilting her head back until the cold metal of the dumpster stung through her hair. She’d spent too much time this past week pushing back against that little lightless, soundless space in the back of her head Magica had shoved her into while using her body. Now, retreating there again felt like returning to a prison.

It was bad in there. It was bad out here. She had nowhere to go.

Nowhere to escape the voice persistently ringing in her memory, either:

“Aunt?! You’re even worse than her! You aren’t my family! You are nothing!”

It shouldn’t have hurt to hear. Why did it hurt? She was stronger than this, she didn’t need anything from her, or anyone, she hadn’t for a long time, she could sit out the pain, get through and move on, she could, she would, she had to –

Remember to breathe, lass.

Easier said than done. Her lungs felt like they were still two-dimensional. But she tried anyway, putting her head down again against her knees, sitting here in the darkness where she played “if I can’t see you, you can’t see me” with her shadows, and air slowly came back to her, as it always eventually did.

Maybe she’d stop shaking soon, too. Outside and inside. That’d be nice.

“Lena?”

Lena looked up. There was Webby, standing in front of her in the alley.

“We’ve been looking all over,” Webby said, holding out a hand. “Come on, it’s time to go.”

“Go where?”

Webby’s eyebrows rose. “Home, of course.”

Her hand was still waiting there. Lena just stared at it, uncomprehending.

“Home?”

“Yes, home.” Scrooge stepped into view behind Webby. “I promised you a place in my family if you helped me get it back, didn’t I? Never let it be said that Scrooge McDuck doesn’t keep his bargains.”

“Lena, let’s go.” Webby’s wide grin wavered at Lena’s hesitance. “What’s the matter?”

It was the danger of letting that smile fall that gave Lena the energy to shove herself to her feet. Her head hit the moonlight – silver once more – and immediately turned to look at the ground, at her shadow. Her still, silent, Lena-shaped shadow, quiet and lifeless like it hadn’t been since before The Mistake.

“Nothing,” Lena lied. “Nothing at all.”

Perks of having an obscenely huge mansion: a massive hole in the roof of one room did not make the entire building unlivable. And despite there being a frankly absurd amount of pizza boxes piled into the triplets’ room, Webby’s loft had been completely spared by both Magica’s wrath and Scrooge’s depression.

So Lena followed Webby away from Beakley’s lecture-her-boss-on-his-slobbiness-while-attempting-to-restore-some-kind-of-order-to-things session, to that one library the little McDuck enthusiast had claimed as her own, and up the ladder.

There they went through the motions of setting up for a sleepover – retrieving the pajamas Lena had stashed there when it had become clear she was welcome for more than one night, rolling out the sleeping bags (two in the name of fairness; according to Webby it just wasn’t fun to sleep on a different height level than your friend, she didn’t get the boys’ love of the bunk bed), and brushing their teeth (Lena did it twice, as per usual, since she was the last one upstairs).

Through it all, Webby said very little, which Lena accepted gratefully, even though it took away from the idea that this was a normal sleepover. On a normal sleepover, Webby would be chattering away about anything and everything between the early adventures of a young Scrooge McDuck and the diplomatic relations between sword horses and pegasi, and Lena would be nodding and “uh-huh”-ing and cracking sarcastic jokes at all the appropriate moments, while trying to ignore the constant whisper in the back of her head to just get on with it, kill the annoying pink insect already, and get me that dime!

But now, for the first time, the whisper was gone, and its silence was somehow more deafening than its harshness, and somehow it seemed fitting to Lena that she and Webby were equally silent.

(And she almost managed to not flinch every time she caught sight of her shadow out of the corner of her eye. Almost.)

Of course, silence only lasted so long when Webby was involved, and it was after they’d crawled into their parallel sleeping bags and the lights were safely off that her little voice piped up:

“So… Aunt Magica, huh?”

Lena pulled the covers over her head, took a breath that didn’t provide as much air as it should have, and lowered it again. No use hiding now.

“I should have told you,” she said. “I should –” Her voice caught on the word. She swallowed and tried again. “She was – She sent me to –”

The heck was wrong with her throat?! It almost made her think the shadowy sorceress was still restricting her speech. But she couldn’t be. Could she?

“No, it’s okay, I think I know already,” said Webby. “Fifteen years ago, in a climactic battle on Mount Vesuvius, Magica de Spell tried to trap Uncle Scrooge in his number-one dime. But he outwitted her and trapped her inside it instead. In her last moments of consciousness, she cast a spell that brought her shadow to life, probably connecting it to that Sumerian talisman you used to wear. And through that talisman, she used you as a puppet to enact her evil bidding, bringing you to Duckburg to help her steal the dime before the next lunar eclipse, so she could take revenge on Scrooge.”

Lena blinked. “That’s… pretty close, actually.”

“I read your journal,” Webby confessed. “A page of it, anyway. We went looking for you and found your room under the amphitheater. I’m really sorry about reading your journal. I only did it because I thought you might have been kidnapped by the shadow army.”

“I don’t mind,” said Lena, surprising herself by meaning it. “I don’t… I’m not sure I would have told you, if you didn’t already know. The truth and I aren’t really great friends.”

“I’ve noticed.” A pause. “That came out harsher than I meant it to.”

“I deserve it.”

“No you don’t.”

“I do! Webby…” Lena reached out a hand, and pulled it back again. “All I’ve done is lie. Since you met me. Since before you met me. I don’t want to lie to you anymore. Or anyone. I – I promise, I won’t lie anymore, about anything.”

“Good,” said Webby, “because I want to know everything.”

“E-Everything?”

“Yeah! Like, how does your magic work? Do you need a magical talisman, or can you do some without it? Did you create the Money Shark? Exactly how are you and Magica de Spell related? Do you know anything about her past and her vendetta against Clan McDuck? What’s it like to have a cursed shadow? What’s it like to be a shadow? And did you really get that sweater at a Featherweights show in Paris?”

Webby’s questions were like a riptide – once caught in their flow, there was no use swimming against it; you just had to float along and hope for the best.*

It was how she talked about everything. But she’d never once asked so much about Lena. So this was both normal and not normal and what the heck is going on, this is uncharted territory, what do I…?

“I should tell you,” said Lena. “I should tell you everything. I… She…”

But the words wouldn’t come, and the thoughts all jumbled themselves up in her head. Where even to start? What could she say that wouldn’t forever change how Webby looked at her? What could she say that she herself could even bear to hear?

Lena put a hand to her face. It came away wet. The realization that she was crying – crying in front of Webby, she’d never done that before – only made her cry harder.

“Lena?”

Lena rolled over, putting her back to Webby and pulling the sleeping bag over her head again. It didn’t actually stifle the sound of her sobs at all, but it seemed the considerate thing to do, short of leaving the room entirely.

“Lena. Oh, Lena…”

Webby kicked her own sleeping bag out of the way and scooted up to Lena’s. She peeled away the soft cocoon, gently but firmly tugging it out of Lena’s grasp, and pulled Lena’s now-exposed head into her lap.

Lena put token effort into resisting before wrapping her arms around Webby’s leg and crying into her pajama pants.

“Lena, you beautiful brave magical princess,” said Webby, one hand stroking Lena’s hair, “you’re safe now.”**

It was both awful and wonderful, to be so needy, and to be comforted. It was true, what Lena had said to Scrooge earlier that evening – she so wished she had his family, and all the caring and chaos that came with it.

But there was a part of her that wished she didn’t wish for it, that she didn’t need it. It was the part of her that had balanced on a set of monkey bars and muttered to Webby that family was “not really my thing.”

She wondered how long it would take to get rid of that part of her, to stop feeling guilty here in Webby’s embrace, and only feel comforted.

But she’d spent her whole life, all fifteen-or-whatever years of it, building up that part of her. That’s a heck of a habit to break.

At least that part of her wasn’t getting in the way of her being here now.

“It’s okay,” Webby said, after a long time, when Lena’s tears had lessened somewhat. “You don’t have to tell me everything right now. I can be patient.”

Lena snorted, and instantly felt bad about it.

“I can!” Webby insisted. “I do want to know, but I can wait as long as you need me to. Until you’re ready to talk about it… I’ll be right here, waiting and ready with all the hugs you pretend you don’t need.”

Lena’s shoulders twitched with something like laughter.

“Don’t ever let me tell you I don’t need them again,” she said.

“I won’t. I promise.”

Chapter Text

For such a large place, the McDuck mansion was rarely quiet, what with the argument-prone adults and adventure-game-prone children who lived there. And aside from that, there were the occasional explosions from the yard, which always caused a quick round of bets about whether it was from the houseboat, from whatever Launchpad was driving, or from a new Gearloose invention before anyone looked out a window to check.

But this was one of those rare days where it was quiet. Scrooge was at the office, for once, making an obligatory CEO appearance. He’d sent Donald off on some errand, and evidently everything Launchpad was working on was, for once, in working order.

As for the boys, Huey had dragged his brothers to some kind of Junior Woodchucks event; Lena wasn’t sure about the details. She’d stopped listening when it became clear that he was trying to get everyone else to go along, and “stop paying attention and act like I’m texting someone” was the most reliable way she’d found to avoid doing something that she didn’t want to do.

But eventually the boys had left, and Lena had looked up from her phone to find that Webby was still there in the loft, sitting next to her on the bed.

She hadn’t really expected that. “The kids” – the four of them – were nearly as much a unit as “the boys” were. Despite everything, she wouldn’t have been surprised at all to have looked up and found herself alone in the room.

This was a pleasant surprise, though.

“So,” Webby broke the quiet, “what do you want to do today?”

Lena shrugged, pocketing her phone. “Got no plans. Lunch would be nice, soon.”

“I’m hungry too. Hey!” Webby clapped her hands together with an idea. “We should go into town and get burgers! Funzo’s is still iffy about us going there, but I haven’t broken anything at the Burger Barn yet.”

Lena considered this. Stealing food from a fast-food restaurant was tricky, even if appealing, because it had to be paid for before it would be made, while something from a grocery store, she could sneak from their fridge to hers –

She pulled her train of thought back into the station. No, she was done with that, that kind of living was over. Any day now, the paperwork would all be figured out (as best as they could figure it out, anyway, with Lena not knowing several of the key things you’d find on a birth certificate – Scrooge had stopped pushing when he realized she wasn’t being obtuse, but genuinely ignorant, regarding her surname and date and place of birth), and she’d be a denizen of McDuck Manor in both legal and informal ways.

The Lena who lived in a mansion with her best friend didn’t steal her lunch.

So instead she said, “With what allowance, though?”

“I’ll ask Granny for lunch money.” Webby hopped off the bed and through the loft entrance, sliding down the ladder to the floor, leaving Lena considering this new detail.

“You can do that?” Lena shook her head. “Of course you can. Family.”

Sure enough, Mrs. Beakley supplied the girls with lunch money, along with a to-be-expected range of grandmotherly questions about where they were going and how long they expected to be away, and a few slightly-less-normal questions to Webby about what she’d do if anyone tried to kidnap her while they were in town.

“Bring back the change,” she finally said, “and text if you’ll be late for dinner – though of course I expect you to be back when the boys return.”

“Got it.” Webby gave Beakley a quick hug before bouncing out of the room again. “Thanks, Granny!”

Lena turned to follow Webby out.

“Lena.”

Lena paused with one foot out the doorway, looking back over her shoulder. “Yeah?”

“Make good choices.”

“Don’t I always?” Lena turned to keep walking, only to come face-to-face with Webby, who gave her a pointed, eyebrows-raised look.

Lena winced. “Right,” she muttered. “Not lying anymore.”

She turned to wave at Mrs. Beakley. “I will!”

Beakley just nodded and went back to her vacuuming.

Outside, the day was objectively beautiful – enough clouds to provide shade without making it gloomy, enough breeze to cool the skin without stealing hats. Webby walked alongside Lena, then skipped along, and then flipped over to take a few steps on her hands, just for the joy of it.

“This is great!” she said. “We never used to hang out in the daytime. It was all sleepovers and late-night movies and nocturnal subterranean adventures – not that those weren’t awesome, but it was all evening-afterward, and that’s only half the day! Why didn’t we do this sooner?”

“It’s harder to see your shadow at night.”

Webby paused, putting her feet back under her and looking down at the gray shape extending from her feet across the sidewalk. A harmless shape. For the moment. Not even Huey was science-stuck enough to call a shadow “just a dark shape caused by a body coming between rays of light and a surface” anymore.

“Oh, right,” said Webby, swallowing down at least a dozen questions about how long Lena had had Magica de Spell living in her shadow, and how did that come about in the first place, and what was that like to have a living shadow 24/7, and – no, no, she’d promised patience just as Lena had promised honesty.

Lena hadn’t stopped walking, so now she looked back at Webby from a few feet ahead.

“Hey, we’re making up for lost time now, right?” she said.

Her tone and smile were reassuring, and so Webby smiled back, pretending not to notice how Lena’s eyes flickered to and away from her shadow as she turned around.

Webby dashed forward, grabbing Lena’s hand.

“Come on,” she said, pulling her best friend further down the street. “Onward, to burgers!”

Lena handled the purchase at the Burger Barn, sending Webby on a quest for napkins, condiments, and a table outside in the shade. She handed over the money and collected the change, enjoying both the novelty of actually paying for something and the complete normalcy of doing something like this – for once, she had no ulterior motives, no shadowy sorceress prompting her through a convoluted plot. She just ordered two burgers and two sodas, and received two burgers and two sodas, and that was that.

Incredible.

At the picnic table, Webby had collected about four of each kind of condiment packet the little restaurant had in stock.

“I wasn’t sure which ones you like,” she explained as Lena approached. “And I'm still not sure which ones I like, either. So, I’m gonna try them all!”

“Careful how you combine them. They might explode.” Lena set the tray down on the table between them. “That was a joke,” she added.

“Oh,” Webby said, sounding genuinely disappointed. But she brightened again quickly enough, like she always did, and got to work decorating her burger.

Lena stuck to ketchup.

“So this is what, the third burger you’ve ever had in your life?” she said.

“Fourth,” Webby corrected. “All in the last year, since the boys moved in. Before that, Granny never let me out of the house, like, ever. Except for training. So if it wasn’t on Granny and Uncle Scrooge’s shopping list, I didn’t eat it.”

“And all they eat is stuffy U.K. stingy old people food,” said Lena. “You poor neglected dear, all alone in that lavish mansion.”

“Was that sarcasm?” Webby asked around a mouthful of meat and conflicting flavors.

“Only partially. How did you spend the first decade-plus of your life?”

“Researching the McDuck family. Granny had all kinds of stories about Uncle Scrooge’s old adventuring days, and when I was old enough to play on my own I really started exploring the mansion, finding books and artifacts, putting it all together…” She smiled a little at the memories. “Sometimes, even though I knew he was there in the house, it felt like he was more a legend to discover than a person. He didn’t talk to me, and Granny said not to bother him. I hoped we’d connect eventually. That he’d reach out to me, and we’d have an adventure together. And, we did! I told you about that, right? A real McDuck and Agent 22 adventure!”

Lena took a bite of her burger, chewed it, swallowed.

“It was kind of like that, at first,” she said. “A legend to discover.”

“What was?” Webby took a sip of soda.

“Aunt Magica.”

Webby froze mid-sip, looking carefully across the table at Lena. Lena’s eyes had settled on some point in the distance, but in an unfocused way, like she was looking at something no one else could see.

Webby set the soda cup down slowly, feeling that any sudden movement might startle Lena out of this state, and that wouldn't do at all, she had too many questions.

“You heard stories about her?” she prompted.

“Just the one,” said Lena. “I think… I don’t really remember who said it. I got passed around a lot; the homes kind of blur together after a while. Not to mention the schools. I must have been owned by a relative, though, at least once, when I was really little. Someone who knew what magic was when they saw it. And knew to tell me to avoid it. ‘You don’t want to end up like your Aunt Magica,’ that’s what she said.”

She flinched a little, and shook her head to cover it up, making more solid eye contact with Webby.

“I put the pieces together later,” she said. “Not as in-depth as your lecture on Scrooge McDuck, by any means. But I had the name, and there were these old newspapers in the library, articles about her schemes… It was enough to make me think that there was someone out there, a family member, who understood magic. Who would understand me. Maybe even, I dunno, want me.”

Webby told herself to take another couple bites of her burger before replying. Just to seem nonchalant, like Lena’s tone of voice. Nope. No over-excitement at finally knowing something of your best friend’s past here. No emotional overreaction whatsoever to your best friend’s tragic backstory.

“So you were born with magic,” Webby said.

Lena shrugged. “As far as I can tell. Supposedly Magica de Spell is descended from a line of powerful witches, so, I guess I am, too, if we're really related. But you saw her in the Money Bin; with her staff gone, she couldn’t do anything. Me, though…

“I’ve always had this, I dunno how to describe it, buzzing?” she wiggled a finger near her ear. “In the back of my head? Like there’s something just out of hearing range, that if I just focus enough, I could listen to. And tell it to do things. Nothing huge, just, small manipulations.”

Webby was having a very hard time holding still. “Can I see?” she squeaked.

Lena took a moment to glance around, but they were the only ones eating outside, and no one across the street was paying them any mind.

“Alright,” she said, looking down at the table for something to use as an example. Her eyes fell on an unopened packet of ketchup.

Lena pointed a finger at the packet, her brow furrowing in concentration. After a moment, the packet began to glow with a pink aura, and levitated a few inches.

The effect lasted for only a few seconds before the pink light faded and the ketchup packet fell to the table again with a soft impact.

Lena exhaled, a bit winded.

“It takes a physical toll,” she said to Webby’s wide-eyed expression. “I’m not that strong; there’s not much I can do just me. With a magical totem, though…”

Her and Webby’s eyes turned as one to the friendship bracelet on Webby’s wrist.

Webby leaned forward on the table, reaching out to place her hand – the one with the bracelet – on Lena’s wrist.

“‘With the hand of my best friend…’” she quoted with a nervous-excited little giggle.

Lena smirked.

This time, as Lena pointed her other hand at the ketchup packet, a blue light spread from the bracelet, to her hand, and all the way up her arm to cover her entire body. The ketchup packet glowed blue as well, lifting up off the table. As Webby watched, the ketchup packet turned over in the air, tore itself open, and squeezed out a gooey red smiley face on top of Webby’s burger.

“That’s so cool,” Webby breathed.

Lena shrugged, letting the ketchup packet rest on the table again. “Power of friendship, or whatever, I guess.”

She shook her head, dispelling the blue aura. “After the money shark thing, my aunt made me throw away the bracelet you gave me. That’s why I don’t have it anymore.”

“I’ll make you a new one,” said Webby. “Friendship Bracelet 2.0. New yarn, new colors, and just as powerful a bond.”

Lena smiled. “Sounds great, Pink.”

“And then we can do experiments!” Webby bounced a little in her seat at the thought. “This is awesome. We’re going to learn so much about magic! We’ll go to the Wing of Secrets, and –”

Lena’s smile vanished. She pulled her hands back, placing them under the table.

“We’d better not,” she said, attempting to force a joking grin and failing. “Scrooge doesn’t allow magic inside the house, remember? I probably shouldn’t test the boundaries so soon after he let me move in.”

“He wouldn’t kick you out,” said Webby. “He would never do that!”

“Look, can’t I just be normal for a bit?” Lena snapped. “We’re just two girls, eating burgers, like normal people, okay? Is that too much to ask of you?”

She shoved another bite into her mouth and chewed, scowling down at the table.

Webby slowly took a bite of her own burger, letting the silence stretch as they ate.

“…I’m sorry,” Lena finally said. “That was uncalled for.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Okay, I do,” Webby admitted, “but after everything that's happened, don't you think you have every right to be angry and say angry things?"

“Not to you. You don’t deserve that.” Lena took a gulp of soda and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “You should know… literally no one else in my life has ever thought that this stuff,” she wiggled her fingers in a magic-y way, “is ‘cool.’”

Webby’s eyes widened. “Then literally everyone else in your life has done you a great disservice.”

Lena smiled. Then she pointed at what was left of Webby’s burger. “Are you going to finish that, or is it art now?”

“It’s edible art,” Webby replied, “and my stomach is its biggest fan.”

As they left the Burger Barn, this time it was Lena who grabbed Webby’s hand, pulling her in a different direction down the street.

“Come on, this way.”

“Where are we going?”

“Nowhere important.”

Webby pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Is that a lie?”

“Honestly?” Lena kept her eyes on the road ahead of them. “I’m not sure.”

Webby considered this for a moment, and shrugged. If Lena didn’t want to say where they were going, then she didn’t have to. She had promised to make good choices today.

“Let’s call it an adventure, then,” said Webby.

“Yeah, no, I hope not.” Lena led Webby across the street, with a quick, casual glance both ways for cars. “I’ve earned a couple years of mundanity, at least, right? Don’t I get time off for good behavior?”

“If it’s mundanity you’re looking for, then you picked the wrong family to move in with,” Webby joked.

“Hm. Fair point.”

“You’ll learn to love it.”

“Maybe I already do.”

Webby grinned up at Lena, squeezing her hand.

It didn’t take long for Webby to figure out where they were going, as Lena’s path led them away from the center of town, in a general beach-wards direction, back up the streets that Webby had followed her down on the day they met.

The amphitheater was the same as it always was – empty and in disrepair, pieces of props and scenery from long-forgotten plays hanging here and there – but it had a different kind of feeling to it, now that Webby knew about the dark little room hidden beneath the stage.

“You could have told me, you know,” Webby said.

“That we were coming here? Yeah, I probably could.”

“No. That you lived here.”

Lena sighed. “No, I really couldn’t. That would have opened the door to too many questions. Having Child Protective Services on my case was the last thing she – I mean, the last thing I needed.”

She kicked at the trapdoor, and it swung open.

Webby eyed the entrance apprehensively. “I should have figured it out, anyway,” she said. “I mean, what kind of friend doesn’t notice that her best friend is, you know, homeless?”

“Hey.” Lena put her hands on Webby’s shoulders, leaning down to look her intently in the eyes. “Don’t you dare feel guilty about anything, okay? Nothing that's happened to me is your fault.”

Webby nodded. “I’ll try.”

Lena nodded as well, and gave Webby’s shoulders one quick squeeze before letting them go. She began to climb down the ladder.

“Why are we here?” Webby said, though she was ready to follow Lena down anyway without an answer.

“Just to pick up a few things,” Lena replied.

As Webby entered the black-lit room, Lena was already standing in the center of it, turning in a slow circle to look everything over.

“Garbage,” she said of the dead potted plants, and “Garbage” again of the expired food in the fridge, and “You guys really did your detective work, didn’t you?” of the curtain, which still hung open, leaving the glow-paint picture of Magica’s plans there for all to see.

“We were trying to figure out where you were,” Webby explained. “And… by that point we kinda thought you were a shadow brought to life by a spell.”

Lena closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. “Sometimes, it felt like I was.”

“So…” Webby gestured at the picture. “Magica liked to doodle, huh?”

“She liked to monologue.” Lena stepped forward and pulled the curtain closed again. “Let’s leave that behind; it’s really not my decorating style.”

Webby nodded, taking a step back to look at the rest of the room. It had an overall dank atmosphere – it must have been freezing at night, this close to the water. But Lena’s attempts to decorate were clear. There were the posters, of bands and singers Webby didn’t recognize but seemed cool by association. There were the assorted natural elements scattered around the space, the plants and rocks and bones, all dead and/or dusty now but likely initially meant as a way to liven up the chamber. And then there was the lava lamp, the only other light source in the room, which added a nice touch of pink and slow, gentle movement to an otherwise still, gray space. Lena, artistic Lena, had brought color down into the shadows.

How could Magica de Spell have ever expected Webby to believe that Lena wasn’t real?

“Where’d you get that?” Webby asked, pointing at the lava lamp.

“Stole it.” Lena unplugged the lamp and passed it to Webby. “Do you think it’d look good on your dresser?”

“Uh. Yes?”

Lena ducked under the bed and pulled out a ratty old duffel bag.

“Put it in here,” she said. “Let’s do some packing.”

And so they decided which items would follow Lena from one part of her life to the next, and which would stay behind.

The posters they carefully peeled off of the walls, rolled up, and placed into the duffel bag around the lava lamp. The journal went in as well, along with some paperback books with covers so worn that Webby couldn’t make out the titles.

They held a brief fashion show for the few outfits Lena had stashed away down here. Webby quickly realized that Lena’s preference for the ostensibly-the-Featherweights-singer’s sweater was likely out of necessity more than anything else; there wasn’t much there beyond a few t-shirts and an extra pair of shorts. But they laughed anyway as Webby made a runway of the creaky bed, twirling a too-large purple tank top that had enough holes in it for someone with several additional limbs as if it were a fancy dress.

“That’s definitely staying behind,” Lena said as Webby hopped down from the bed again.

“If you don’t want it, I’m keeping it,” Webby replied, pulling off the tank top and stuffing it into the duffel bag. “What’s left?”

“Just these.” Lena held out a couple small vials of colored liquid.

“Magical potions?”

“Basically. It’s hair dye.” Lena put them into the bag. “I’ve been thinking it’s time for a change. Maybe blue, for a while? Or black?”

“Oh, but I like it pink!”

Lena laughed. “Of course you do. Maybe I’ll just touch it up, then –”

She fell silent, her eyes darting up towards the ceiling. Webby followed suit, and the sound reached her ears a split second after Lena had noticed it – footsteps on the stage above them.

Wordlessly, the two friends sprang into action. Lena zipped the duffel bag shut, slinging it over her shoulder. Webby switched off the black-light and crept her way back up the stairs to the ladder.

Pushing the trapdoor open just an inch, she squinted out into the daylight. Three pairs of large black shoes, attached to thick jean-clad legs, paced the stage nearby.

“I’m telling you,” said a voice from above the shortest and squattest pair of legs, “we can use this to our advantage! All we gotta do is nab a couple construction hats, and then we walk right up to the Money Bin and tell ‘em we’re here to inspect the repairs. Nobody will suspect a thing!”

“But Ma said to keep a low profile,” said a voice above the skinniest pair of legs. “What with all the spooky stuff that happened around the eclipse…”

“That’s why we go in disguise, Burger! Come on, use your head.”

Webby ducked down through the hatch again, where Lena stood waiting on the stairs. “Beagle boys!” she hissed.

Lena sighed. “Yeah, see, this is what I was hoping wouldn’t happen. You just had to call it an adventure, didn’t you?”

“We could wait them out.”

Lena shook her head. “I’m not staying down here longer than I have to. Besides, sooner or later one of those idiots are going to trip over the trapdoor.”

Webby nodded thoughtfully. “Okay. It’s just the basic three; we can take them. All we need is a distraction, and an exit plan.”

“I have some ideas,” said Lena. “You go high, I go low?”

“Deal.”

“And what if our shadows come to life and turn against us mid-robbery?” said Bouncer, a quiver in his deep voice. The day of the lunar eclipse hadn’t been fun for anyone.

Bigtime rolled his eyes. “Then we use the chaos to our advantage. All the real construction workers will run away, while we rob McDuck blind!”

Burger shook his head. “I’m not sure about this, Bigtime. We –”

A soft thud drew all three Beagles’ attention. A couple feet from them across the stage, an old brown duffel bag flopped onto its side, as if it’d just been thrown there – but there was no one else in sight.

The Beagle Boys approached the bag with suspicion. Burger picked it up and shook it.

“Where’d this come from?” he said, sniffing at the bag and reaching for the zipper.

Behind them, Lena pulled herself out of the trapdoor. She carefully lowered it again, doing her best not to make a sound – only for the old hinge to finally give out, bringing the door suddenly shut with a slam.

Three pairs of eyes snapped towards her.

“Hey!”

Lena made a break for it, but Bouncer’s massive fist shot out, snagging the back of her sweater and knocking her off-balance with the snap-back. She ended up half-fallen, her hands on the ground, looking up over her shoulder at the boys with a glare that hid whatever fear she might have felt.

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you it’s not polite to grab a lady?” she said.

“She taught us to never forget a face,” Bigtime said as he and Burger appeared on either side of Bouncer’s hulking torso. “And you’re that rat who ruined Ma’s birthday party by shoving a cake in her face!”

“You sure her face didn’t look like that already?” said Lena.

The Beagle Boys looked at each other.

“…okay, you’re really gonna get it now,” said Burger.

“Hey! Beagle Bums!”

Three masked faces looked up at the shout. There they saw Webby, standing high in the scaffolding above the stage, among the shabby curtains and rotting set pieces still held up by the old fly system. Her hands were full of halfway-untied rope.

“You let go of my best friend!” she shouted.

“That’s her!” Bigtime gasped. “Scrooge’s ward who’s always making fools of us!”

Lena took advantage of Bouncer’s distraction and kicked upwards, her shoe colliding with his funny bone. Bouncer yelped and let go, sending Lena rolling a few feet before she got her legs under her and made a dash for the water, disappearing over the edge of the stage.

“Hey, come back here!” Bouncer snarled.

“Forget that one!” Bigtime pointed up at Webby. “She’s the one we want!”

Burger scratched his chin. “There wasn’t a splash, though.”

“What?”

“When the other kid ran off. There wasn’t a splash.”

“Forget the splash, Burger,” said Bigtime. “Let’s grab the McDuck brat!”

Webby’s laugh was more a cackle than a giggle as she undid the last knot. “Too late!”

With perfect comedic timing, the Beagle Boys looked upwards at just the right moment for a large wooden crescent moon to come crashing down on their heads.

It was almost enough to make one feel sorry for them.

Almost.

But not quite.

Maybe next time.

This time, Webby shimmied down a pillar, deftly snatched the duffel bag out of the dazed Beagles’ grip, and dashed across the stage to flip off of the edge – landing neatly in the boat Lena had retrieved from under the dock.

Lena passed Webby a paddle, flashing her a wicked grin. “Just like old times, eh, Englabeth?”

Webby grinned back. “The very best of times, Britannia!”

“I knew there should’ve been a splash…” Burger muttered as the girls’ boat disappeared into the distance.

Soon they were traveling along the shore on quiet waters.

“If we stay the course, we’ll be back near the mansion in no time,” said Webby, pulling her paddle back into the little boat. The gentle current seemed to be taking them in the right direction without much guidance.

“We don’t have to tell Granny about the Beagle Boys,” she added conspiratorially.

“Sounds good to me.” Lena pulled her paddle out of the water as well. She turned her attention to the duffel bag, opening it for a cursory check of its contents.

“Nothing’s broken, but those dumb dogs crumpled up my posters,” she said, closing the bag again.

“We can get you more,” said Webby.

Lena tilted her head to the side in a half-shrug. “There’s only so much wall space in the loft anyway. Now, if I got my own room…”

She didn’t complete the thought.

Webby hesitated. “Do you want your own –?”

“No. Maybe. Not yet. Not until… Not yet.”

There hadn’t been a night yet that hadn’t been interrupted by Lena waking up, choking on imaginary shadows and desperately needing to check that Webby was still there, unharmed.

Webby thought it wise to change the subject. Fortunately, she was never out of questions.

“Why did you have us crash Ma Beagle’s birthday party?” she asked.

Lena shrugged. “Seemed dangerous enough to get your attention. All I knew about you was that the McDucks and Company were crazy reckless adventurers. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“I’d been in Duckburg for a couple weeks, just learning the lay of the land. Anything going on in the shadowy parts of town, I knew about. The Beagles aren’t exactly hard to spy on. I heard about the party, and it seemed like a good opportunity. And sure enough, there you were, abandoned on the beach. After that I just threw out a bunch of lures to see what you’d bite.”

“The message-in-a-bottle pranks,” said Webby.

“And mentioning Paris, and calling the party an adventure, and a lot of other things I don’t really remember now.” Lena shrugged. “Mostly compliments. You ate those up like you’d never gotten them before. And you served them back to me just as quickly.”

Webby nodded, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her chin on them, trying to figure out exactly how she felt about this explanation. She knew Lena was her best friend, and that all the trickery was in the past, and of course she appreciated her honesty about her thought processes back then – it could be so hard to tell what Lena was thinking.

But at the time, on that first night, she hadn’t known that there was any deceit going on at all. It wasn’t nice to have her memories of that fun, absurd night, spent riding a high of both adrenaline and newfound friendship, colored by hindsight.

Sometimes knowing things wasn’t all that fun after all.

“You surprised me, though,” Lena continued, drawing Webby out of her thoughts and back into the present.

“Surprised you how?” said Webby.

“You were fun to be around.” Lena leaned forward against the side of the boat, letting her fingers trail in the water and mess up her reflection. “My intention was to pretend to like you. But it came so easily. It never came that easy for anyone else. So after a while… I realized I wasn’t actually pretending.”

Webby sat still for a moment, enjoying the warm feeling in her chest. Then, out of a desire to share that warmth, she scooted over on the boat until her torso was flush with Lena’s, and leaned her head against Lena’s shoulder.

“I like you too,” she said.

A sort of shiver went through Lena’s body, and she let her own head rest against the top of Webby’s. There were perks to being taller than the person next to you.

Neither girl cared to count how many seconds passed, with no words except the whispers of the water passing under the boat. But when Lena moved away again, calmly turning her back on Webby and picking up one of the paddles, Webby had the brief thought that it hadn’t been quite long enough.

She didn’t try to re-initiate physical contact, though, not with Lena so clearly drawing herself back into herself like this. There would be another moment like that, Webby was certain. She’d make sure of it.

“Steady as she goes, Captain Vanderquack,” Lena said, putting the end of the paddle in the water.

“Aye-aye, matey.” Webby grabbed the other paddle and set to work helping Lena propel the boat closer to shore.

“Hey,” she said after a pause, “did I ever tell you about the time Dewey almost sold us out to sky pirates?”

“Oh, no,” Lena laughed. “Please do."

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.

Chapter Text

Scrooge McDuck hated magic. It didn’t matter what kind of magic. The fake mentalism-and-slight-of-hand kind and the real witches-and-sorceresses kind received the same level of his disdain.

Frankly, Lena understood his vitriol. Fake magic was just plain annoying, and real magic… it hadn’t exactly improved her life. Maybe it had proven useful, once or twice, but ultimately, Lena was about ninety-eight-point-five-percent certain that the eighteen-or-whatever years she’d lived so far would have gone much more smoothly if magic had never been a part of her life.

But magic had been a part of her life. And it was, whether she or Scrooge or anyone else liked it or not, a part of her, too.

In the three years since Lena moved into the mansion, Scrooge’s anti-magic stance hadn’t officially changed at all. But recently he had begun to occasionally shove an old cardboard box of ancient, mysterious trinkets into Lena’s room, with a comment that she should “make yourself useful and see if there’s anything of value in there.”

And if Webby were in the room, which she usually was, she would run over to the box and start to eagerly rummage through it. Lena would get up more slowly, with a shrug like she had nothing better to do, and say, “Sure, if you say so.”

And Scrooge would give a curt nod and warn her to “just be sure you don’t damage anything” before leaving again.

So yeah. Mushy and affectionate and family-like, they were not. But it felt nice, in a weird way, that Scrooge would offer this vague, roundabout kind of encouragement for Lena to explore this part of her life that he officially wanted nothing to do with.

Usually, they didn’t find anything special in the boxes. Sure, Webby would know what a lot of the ancient junk was, or at least she’d know what continent and century it was from, or at least she’d have a very creative guess about what it was and where it was from. But it was all mundane. And Lena was fine with that. Magic was dangerous, and she had every intention of being sure she didn’t damage anything – or anyone – in what she still sometimes caught herself thinking of as her “new life.”

(Evidently three years wasn’t quite long enough to think of all this – living in a mansion, going on adventures, and having a family of more-than-one that actually cared about you – as “normal.”)

Of course, whenever the McDuck family was involved with something, things never stayed mundane for long.

“Ooh, take a look at this!” Webby said, lifting the small, grey cube out of the box. It fit neatly in her cupped hands, and was covered in faint, wavy lines, like irregular rings on a cut-open tree.

“What’s it made of?” said Lena.

“It feels like petrified wood.” Webby started tapping at the sides of the cube with her fingers. “But I think this is a hinge, here. Maybe it’s a puzzle box! Only the right combination of movements will unlock the secrets of the – oops, never mind, it’s open.”

Lena smirked. “That was easy.”

Webby flipped open the little box’s lid, revealing a hollow interior, filled with even smaller cubes – white, and covered with black markings.

“Are those dice?” Lena said. “Did Dewey’s Ducks & Dragons buddies get their stuff mixed up in here?”

“Hm.” Webby took out one of the little white cubes and held it up to the light. “If it’s a modern game set, then they put a lot of effort into weathering it.” She rotated the cube, looking at each side. “These symbols aren’t from any alphabet I know.”

“Must not be an alphabet, then, if you don’t recognize it,” said Lena.

Webby’s cheeks turned a bit pink at the compliment, but she kept investigating the tiny cubes, putting the first one back into its container and picking up another one. “There’s lots I don’t know yet. It’s more fun to think about the world as having things I haven’t yet discovered, than thinking that I know everything about it already, you know? Maybe it’s some kind of code.”

“It kinda looks like a Boggle set.” Lena stepped around to take a look for herself, peering over Webby’s shoulder – the hadn’t really changed their height difference at all.

“Hey,” she said, “what are you talking about, Pink? It clearly says –”

She fell silent.

Webby giggled. “Very funny,” she said, turning her head back to look at Lena. Then she stopped laughing, because Lena’s brow was furrowed in a serious sort of way – and not teenager-who’s-too-cool-for-fun serious, but actual serious.

“Lena?”

Lena shook her head. “Sorry. For a moment I thought… Never mind.”

“No, what? What did you think?”

“That I could read it.” Lena rubbed her eyes and looked again. “They looked like normal letters, for a second. And then, I dunno, they slipped away again, back to gibberish? And they took whatever it was that they said away with it. Sounds crazy, right?”

“Definitely crazy,” said Webby, “unless it is a language, after all – a secret language only witches can read!”

Lena laughed. “That’s not a thing, Webs.”

“Well, it’s my theory.” Webby closed the little once-wooden box and set it on a shelf near the bed. “Let’s hang on to it, just in case.”

And there the box sat, untouched and innocuous, for about a week.

Webby’s room was still their preferred haunt, but on that evening they were hanging out in Lena’s room again. Webby had dragged herself into it after the latest McDuck Family Adventure, and plopped herself down onto Lena’s underused bed.

“Loft’s too far away,” she mumbled into the comforter. “No more ladders, please…”

She was too tired even to explain any further about the adventure (which Scrooge would later mark down in his autobiographical notes as “The Jacob’s Ladder Escapade”) – which was unusual, but Lena supposed that even Webby had her upper limits. Lena was content enough to settle in next to her dozing girlfriend and scroll through social media on her phone until she, too, fell asleep.

Which was when she got the distinct feeling that she was being watched.

Lena hated that feeling. Nobody likes it, of course. But you can’t go through more than a year of your evil sorceress aunt stalking you from your shadow without developing a supreme distaste for that prickly sensation of unseen eyes scanning your skin.

So Lena slowly, cautiously lowered her phone, her eyes searching the room for the hidden spy. They landed, oddly, on the little grey box on the shelf. It was just within her reach without having to move so much that she would disturb Webby, and Lena, without really knowing why she did so, extended an arm and picked it up.

As soon as her fingers closed around the box, the feeling of being watched dissipated.

Lena opened the box. There were the little dice-like cubes, with their symbols that didn’t make any sense. Except that they had made sense, just for a moment.

She picked up one of the cubes, and set it back in the box again. Then she swapped that cube with one of the others, but it didn’t make any more sense with them switched. She continued to shuffle the cubes around, thinking as she did so that this was like cheating at Boggle, taking a jumble of letters that formed gibberish and moving them around until they formed something coherent –

– and then the die in the upper-leftmost corner clicked into place, one side’s symbol pointing up at her. It was an M. Which was ridiculous, because just a moment before it hadn’t been an M, and Lena had a hunch that if anyone else were to look at the dice right now, then they wouldn’t see an M. But right now, to her eyes, it was an M.

And just as she had felt someone watching her before, she then felt a sense of… approval? Like someone was nodding at her in a “good job” sort of way, except that she couldn’t see anyone there. There was only Webby at her side, and the box in her hands.

“Is that you?” she whispered to the box.

The box said nothing, of course; it was petrified wood.

Lena continued to swap the dice around, leaving the M where it was. If she kept going, if she found the correct order and arrangement of dice, then perhaps another letter would become clear. Perhaps a word, even, something that made sense. Something important. It was nonsensical of her, but she felt that this was somehow important.

Which is why after a few minutes of shuffling the dice around to no avail, Lena grew very frustrated with the little box. She shoved a die into place with a frown and a little more force than was necessary, and the lid came down on her fingers.

Lena hissed, nursing her pinched digits. She had the distinct impression that the box was laughing at her.

“Well you don’t have to take an attitude with me, I’m doing my best!” she snapped.

Webby stirred. “Whazzup?”

“Webby, I think the ancient Boggle set might actually be magical.”

Now that got Webby awake and alert. “What’s it doing?” she asked, sitting up and leaning over to look at the box.

“Making fun of me.” Lena re-opened the box. “It’s not speaking to me, really, I just…” She pointed at the dice. “Do you see an ‘M’ there?”

“No. Do you?”

“Well that’s one theory confirmed.”

Webby’s eyes widened. “Secret witch language?”

“Yeah, no, that’s still not a thing.”

“Can you read any of the other letters?”

“No.” Lena closed the box. “But I feel like I should be able to. Like it’s a puzzle, and if I just keep at it...”

“Is that a ‘keep at it’ in a hey-this-is-cool-let’s-figure-it-out kind of way, or a magic-compulsion-to-obsess-over-this-thing-until-you-go-mad-and-starve-to-death kind of way?”

“It doesn’t seem malicious.” Lena put the box back onto the shelf. “Like, there, it isn’t stopping me from not working on it. I don’t think it means any harm, it just… wants to be solved.”

She shook her head. “I dunno. It’s just a hunch.”

Webby made a thoughtful sound. “Well, I trust your hunches about magic stuff.”

“I’m not sure I do. But thanks.”

The next time Lena tried to unscramble the Boggle box, she managed to get the second letter out of it: A.

And upon seeing the two letters “MA” staring back at her, with plenty of space left over for the rest of a name she’d rather forget, Lena had slammed the box shut, thrown it under the bed, and spent the next half-hour in the bathroom, counting her way through the breathing exercises Beakley had taught her.

Two weeks later, morbid curiosity compelled her to retrieve the little box. Everything inside was as she’d left it; though the cubes inside seemed like dice, evidently none of them had scrambled when she’d thrown it. They were all stuck in place, “MA” and whatever came next, waiting for her to move them.

And she did so, turning and shifting and swapping the cubes until one of them clicked into place in the box and in her mind.

The letter was T. Not G.

Lena released the breath she’d been holding.

“Still at it?” Webby said, hopping up onto the back of the couch where Lena was lounging, cautiously fiddling with the box.

“I feel like I’m getting somewhere,” Lena said. “Boggle’s being less of a pain today; I’ve locked in three more letters in the last hour. Latest hunch: it wants me to hurry up and solve it, so it’s making things easier for me. Though why it would change its mind about that, assuming that it has a mind, I don’t know. You found out anything on your end?”

“Not much.” Webby let herself flop backwards, so her head rested against the seat cushion closest to Lena’s head. “Nothing in the mansion’s library describes anything remotely like it, besides a few Middle-Age precursors to Scrabble. Uncle Scrooge says he found that box while dealing with a phony fortune-teller in Sierra Leone in the fifties. Apparently she was scamming a village with her ‘prophecies of doom’ and her ‘mysterious artifacts from distant shores.’ So who knows if this is actually from that part of Africa, or if she stole it from somewhere else.”

“Huh. Guess the phony had something real among her wares,” said Lena. “Assuming the point of this is to predict the future or whatever, and not just to annoy me.”

The lid of the box slipped, pinching her finger.

“Ow – okay, point taken.” Lena sat up, swinging her legs to the floor. “Well, Granny keeps telling me that I should think more about my future. This is definitely not what she had in mind, but hey, if it works…”

Webby didn’t say anything, so after a few moments of silence Lena looked over at the upside-down duck. Webby was staring over at her with a goofy grin on her face.

“What?” said Lena.

“I just love that you call her ‘Granny’ now,” Webby said, switching to an upright position, scooting closer on the couch, and wrapping her arms around Lena’s middle. “It’s so nice!”

Lena huffed a laugh, and lifted one hand to push Webby’s head close enough to her own to give her a quick kiss to the temple. “Just another habit I’ve picked up from you, Pink. Along with believing that I even have a future.”

“Optimism is always a good habit,” said Webby. “If you think things will go well for you, then it won’t surprise you when they do!”

The front gate buzzer rang a few times in an upbeat sort of rhythm. Beakley emerged from the kitchen to answer it.

“McDuck Manor, kindly state your business.”

“Hey, Mrs. B!” came the cheerful voice through the speaker. “Tell the kids to grab their hats and come on down – this new yacht I’ve won is big enough for all, and it isn’t going to catch fish on its own!”

“The girls are ready to go, and I’m sure the boys have already noticed your arrival,” Beakley said into the intercom. Sure enough, Webby and Lena could hear the thumping of three pairs of feet coming down the stairs.

“Is Don around? Tell him he’s welcome to come too, of course.”

Beakley raised her eyebrows. “As a matter of fact, Donald told me to tell you that he will under no circumstances set foot onto whatever indulgent, ostentatious watercraft your luck has handed you this time.”

“And you understood him? He must be getting pretty coherent, pulling off multi-syllabic words like that.”

“Was that a ‘speak of the devil’ moment?” Lena wondered aloud, making Webby giggle. After all, things always went well for Gladstone Gander.

The yacht was, as Donald had predicted, both indulgent and ostentatious. Not that that bothered any of the teens. Sure, they lived in a mansion, but Scrooge McDuck and Gladstone Gander had vastly different ideas about what it meant to live like you were rich. A day out with Scrooge may be an adventure, but a day out with Gladstone? That was a vacation.

“Aw, come on!” Dewey sighed at the dripping hook dangling from his hand, the worm having vanished without bringing a fish up with it.

“You pulled it in too soon,” said Huey. “The key to fishing is patience. The slow lure, and the final reward!”

“Don’t tell me,” said Dewey, attaching a new piece of bait to the hook. “That’s the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook’s advice for earning your fishing badge.”

Huey beamed. “And I earned all three of them!”

“You guys are going about this the wrong way,” Webby said from her perch on the railing. Her eyes were scanning the surface of the water, and she had a wooden spear in her hands, connected to the deck by a long rope. Lena was pretty sure that the makeshift harpoon had come out of Webby’s backpack, but she wasn’t about to guess how it had fit inside there in the first place.

“They don’t need to be lured,” Webby continued. “You already have the element of surprise. You just have to wait for your enemy to make a mistake – ha!”

She threw the spear at the water, sending it slicing through the surface. When she reeled in the rope, sure enough, pinned at the end of the spear was a little red fish.

“Ta-da!” Webby said, holding the fish high.

“Let me try that!” Dewey and Huey said at the same time.

Webby laughed and tossed the fish into the bucket in between the two deck chairs – one occupied by Louie, who was working on his tan (though heaven forbid anyone refer to it as “working” within his earshot), and the other by Lena, who was shaking her head at the fishers.

“I thought after that whole thing with Cousin Fethry, you two were ‘friends to all the friendly creatures of the deep,’ or something?” she said.

“Evidently not the delicious ones,” said Louie, adjusting his sunglasses.

Eventually Lena bored of watching Huey, Dewey, and Webby play with the spear. She wandered to the other side of the deck, where Gladstone stood, fishing rod in hand. He didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what he was doing; every minute or so, he pulled up the line and there was something on the end of it, which he casually tossed over his shoulder into one of two buckets – labeled “fish” and “valuables” respectively. Both buckets were nearly full.

Lena reached into the “valuables” bucket and pulled out a small golden ring with a heavy green gemstone on it.

“You can keep it, if you want,” Gladstone said over his shoulder. “I’ll probably get another one, soon.”

“I’m not much of a jewelry person,” Lena said, dropping the ring back into the bucket.

“Neither am I. But there’s bound to be someone back at the docks who’s been looking for something like that for years. Who knows? They might even treat me to dinner to trade for it.”

“Huh.”

Lena hadn’t had many opportunities to talk with Gladstone. He didn’t exactly show up often at family events. Webby had told her all about the casino incident in China three years ago. And the few times she’d asked Donald about the rest of the family, his response had included a brief rant about his infuriatingly lucky cousin. But this might just have been the first time that she was ever alone with him.

So she made the most of the opportunity.

“Can I ask an invasive question?”

Gladstone laughed. “Points for honesty. Sure, go ahead.”

“How does this luck thing work?” Lena asked. “Is it just for you, or is it a generalized, anyone-near-you-gets-a-boost sort of deal?”

“Just for me,” Gladstone said, reeling in yet another sparkly ring. “Of course, what’s good for me is usually good for my family, too. And every now and then someone finds a way to exploit it. But my luck doesn’t rub off onto others.”

“Oh. Good.”

Gladstone slowly turned to face her. “Good?”

“Yeah.” Lena sat down on the deck with her back against the taffrail, pulling the Boggle box out of Webby’s backpack. “I’ve been working on this puzzle for a while now. I wouldn’t want to suddenly solve it just because you were here. Then it wouldn’t really be me solving it, you know?”

“...you’re right,” said Gladstone. “It wouldn’t.”

“And that feels important, for some reason,” Lena said, speaking more to herself and the box than to Gladstone. “Doing it for myself...”

Gladstone watched her fiddle with the box for a few moments before turning back to his fishing. It was rude to stare, of course, but it wasn’t every day that he met someone who didn’t want to use him for his luck.

It’s hard to keep track of time on a boat, but Lena had only been sitting there for a few minutes before she flipped over a die and her brain said yes. There it was, the seventh letter: another A. The rest of the dice were still gibberish, but they didn’t seem to matter anymore, not now that there was a complete word, a name in fact, looking up at her.

“So what’s it mean?” Lena whispered to the box. “Who is that? Why are you telling me this?”

But Boggle didn’t give her anything, not even a sense of amusement at her confusion.

Lena sat back against the railing, brow furrowed. The puzzle had become suddenly easier today. And if her hunch from earlier had been correct, that meant that Boggle wanted to be solved today. Maybe even right now, at this very moment. Which meant that this name, for some reason, was important right here, right now.

It was conjecture. A theory. A hunch.

But Webby had said to trust her hunches.

“Mr. Gander?” said Lena.

“Oh, please, it’s Cousin Gladstone to you,” he replied with a casually dismissive wave. “From what I’ve heard, you’re practically family to our practically family!”

Lena had to smile a little at that. “Cousin Gladstone, then,” she said. “I have another question.”

“Another invasive question?”

“I don’t know. It might be.”

Gladstone dropped a fish into its bucket and re-cast the line, not even pausing to put any bait on it. “Well, then, shoot and let’s see what happens.”

“Okay.” Lena looked down at the box, and then up at Gladstone again.

“Who’s ‘Matilda’?”

The fishing rod slid out of Gladstone’s hands, bounced against the railing, and clunked onto the deck of the ship. One could have blamed an unlucky gust of wind or an unexpected tilt of the deck for the fumble, if this had been anyone other than the luckiest man alive.

Gladstone was still for a moment. Then he sighed, and walked over to pick up the fishing rod.

“I’d wondered if that would ever come up,” he said. “Don told me all about you, you know. Pretty soon after that whole mess with the shadows. Almost like he was trying to warn me – ha, as if I need his protection.”

“Protection from me?” said Lena.

“From who you might remind me of.”

Gladstone recast his bait-less fishing line.

“You get one guess to what her name actually was,” he said.

Lena suddenly became very aware of her shadow on the deck, and made a deliberate turn towards the sun, so that the dark shape was out of sight behind her. If Gladstone noticed, he didn’t comment on it.

“It was a long time ago,” said Gladstone, paying even less attention to his fishing than he usually did. “She’s been after Uncle Scrooge’s dime for, oh, at least as long as I’ve been aware he had that silly old thing. And every now and again, she’d try to use my luck to get it for her. It never worked, of course – my luck is mine alone – but there were some interesting attempts. That trick with the game show, I can laugh about it in hindsight, but at the time… Well, that’s beside the point.

“One day she changed her tactics. Instead of trying to use my luck, she zapped me with a spell that took it all away. I was normal.” He shuddered at the memory. “It was awful. I don’t know how you people live like that, having to work and worry all the time!”

“We manage,” Lena said, unable to hold back the snark. Fortunately, it made Gladstone laugh.

“Well, I didn’t,” he said. “And I’m not ashamed to admit it. I love my luck. It takes care of me. Without it, I was the lowest of the low. And she swooped right in to fill the void she’d made. Disguised herself as an ordinary girl, completely changed her appearance, and introduced herself to me as Matilda.”

“I think I can see where this is going,” said Lena.

“Oh, yes. The flirting. The flattery. It all meant nothing, of course. It was just so that I’d bring her back to the money bin with me – Scrooge had me working there, you see. Sweeping floors, polishing the roof of the bin, all kinds of menial labor. Of course I wanted company in my misery! I saw through her in the end, naturally, but she did get into the building.”

Gladstone pulled up the line, but the hook was empty. He shrugged and threw it back. “My luck must be taking a little break.”

“What happened then?” Lena prompted.

“Well… that’s the funny part,” said Gladstone. “I was up on the roof, cleaning, and my ladder slipped out from under me. I could see her through Uncle Scrooge’s office window, as I fell by it. I thought I was done for, with thirteen stories to fall and no luck to save me.

“And then… a chance gust of wind, a well-placed awning… I was saved. My luck was back, and it brought me safely to the ground. And I looked up, and there she was, looking out through the window – not Matilda, but Magica. She ran for it as soon as she realized her cover was blown.”

“The spells wore off?” said Lena.

Gladstone shrugged. “Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

“So what do you think? That she did it on purpose? To, what, save you?”

Gladstone raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

Lena scoffed. “We can’t be talking about the same Magica de Spell.”

“Oh, there’s definitely only one Magica de Spell. The world isn’t equipped to handle two.” Gladstone pulled up the line, empty again, and set the fishing rod down by the buckets. “What made you ask about Matilda?”

Before Lena could decide what level of honesty she should be operating on at the moment, the deck of the yacht pitched violently, forcing both her and Gladstone to cling to the taffrail. The buckets went rolling along the deck, but rather than go overboard, they fell neatly through an open hatch in the polished wood. They probably even landed right-side up while they were at it, their contents safely stowed.

Lena shoved Boggle into Webby’s backpack and wiggled her arm through the straps, a tricky feat to accomplish while holding on to a railing for dear life. Something roared, making the entire ship tremble with the sound waves.

“Don’t worry!” Webby shouted over the ruckus. “We got this!”

Lena looked over – or, down, actually, given the angle of the deck. Several enormous tentacles had emerged from the water, wrapping around the opposite end of the ship. Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Webby were already leaping into action, like the true adventurers they were.

“Isn’t your luck supposed to keep things like this from happening?!” said Lena.

“No! That’s where everyone gets it wrong!” Gladstone pulled himself up to a seated position on what should have been the sideways part of the railing. “Bad things happen to everyone, even me. The difference is –”

Another tentacle came shooting up out of the water, giant suckers bearing down on Lena and Gladstone.

Lena held up a hand. The bracelet on her wrist glowed with a bright blue light, which expanded into a dome-like shield, covering both herself and Gladstone. The tentacle glanced off of the dome harmlessly, and it crackled with stray sparks of blue lightning as it retreated back into the water.

“– my luck makes sure I have just what I need to come out on top in the end,” Gladstone finished, grinning at Lena. “Whatever this beast is, it’s unlucky enough to have chosen the one ship in the entire ocean with the Duck kids on board!”

“So, we’re all agreed that nobody is going to tell Cousin Fethry that we punched a kraken in the face, right?”

“Hey, it attacked us first,” Dewey said, giving Huey’s shoulder a brotherly jab. “It was one-hundred-percent an unfriendly creature of the deep.”

“It’s a shame about the yacht, though,” Louie said, looking across the docks at what was left of it. “It doesn’t have any trade-in value anymore.”

“The solid diamond teeth the kraken left stuck in its hull, on the other hand...” said Webby.

Louie sighed dramatically and lay backwards on the dock. “Oh to have the life of Gladstone Gander...”

Dewey’s phone buzzed with a text. “Launchpad says he’s on his way.”

“I still think we should’ve just driven ourselves,” said Huey. “We do all have our licenses now, right?”

“Huey, Huey, Huey...” Louie shook his head. “When you have a driver, you don’t drive.”

“Yes, but our driver is Launchpad McQuack.”

Webby looked over at Lena, who was sitting with them on the docks, but otherwise didn’t really seem to be there, her eyes on the distant horizon.

“Hey, Lena.”

“Hm?”

“Everything okay? You’ve been quiet. I mean, quiet’s fine, you can stay quiet if that’s what you want, I just wanted to check on you in case you didn’t want to be quiet.”

Lena considered this for a moment.

“Do you think Magica de Spell was ever a good person?” she asked.

Webby blinked. “Where did that come from?”

Lena shrugged. “Something Gladstone said to me. Well? Do you think it’s possible?”

Webby bit her lip. “I mean, in the grand scheme of possibility, I guess...”

Her eyes flickered towards the boys, looking for help with the right thing to say. Lena took pity on her, dropping the vagueness.

“It’s just got my brain in a twist,” she said. “Trying to figure out what would take a person who had the capacity to care about whether another person lived or died, and turn them into someone who would – you know,” she shoved her hands into her lap to keep them from shaking. “And if, if we should take that into account, when we think about who she is now. I mean. Whatever goodness she may have had, it was definitely all gone by the time I brought her soul back from the Shadow Realm.”

“Wait, what?” said Dewey.

“I mean getting immediately turned into a shadow by someone who was supposed to be your loving aunt, and then getting press-ganged into her evil plot as she dragged you across the entire world, is kind of a big stinking clue that she’s bad news.”

“Can we back up a few steps to where you mentioned souls and shadow realms?” Dewey tried again. Webby elbowed him, mouthing not now.

“You know, you don’t have to forgive her just because she might have been a good person at some point,” said Louie. “That’s not the Magica de Spell you knew, so that isn’t the one you should react to.”

“Louie’s right,” said Webby. “She doesn’t deserve it.”

Lena raised an eyebrow. “And here I thought you were Little Miss Forgiving.”

“Not to her.” Webby wrapped her arms around Lena’s middle. “Not after everything she did to you.”

“I just can’t help but wonder,” Lena continued. “After all the effort you’ve put into convincing me that I’m good. If she was good, and then somewhere along the way she went bad… I have to wonder if the more I try to understand this magic stuff, the closer I get to becoming her. The world isn’t equipped to handle two Magica de Spells.”

Louie sat up. “Okay, enough pity party. One: that isn’t going to happen. You’re too smart to go evil.”

“Two,” said Dewey. “If you did go totally evil and power-crazy, we’d stop you. The Ducks don’t back down.”

“Three,” Huey held up his fingers, “we wouldn’t give up until you got back to normal again. And in case it isn’t clear, ‘normal’ means this, as you are now, hanging out with us, your family who cares about you.”

“And four.” Webby squeezed Lena tightly. “To reiterate. That isn’t going to happen.”

Lena put her hands over Webby’s arms and pressed them even more into her stomach, closing her eyes. And although she didn’t say thank you, the others heard it anyway.

Lena sat on her bed, turning the little grey box over in her hands. The dice inside had returned to unreadable gibberish once more. Perhaps they’d been scrambled by the kraken chaos, or perhaps their work was simply done.

“So, what,” she said aloud, “you give me a word that I should ask someone near me about? Is that how this works? ‘Fishing’ for info, per say?”

Silence.

“Yes, I know, it was a lousy pun. So sue me. Just, give me some indication of why you thought I should ask about Matilda? Why the heck would I need, or even want, to know about that?”

Again, Boggle gave her no response. It was, after all, just petrified wood.

“Alright, then, keep your secrets,” Lena said, setting the box back on the shelf. “Until you nudge me to start nosing into other people’s secrets again, I guess.”

She slid down from the bed and walked off towards Webby’s room, closing her bedroom door behind her.

Chapter Text

“I’m not sure why it matters who designed the McDuck family tartan,” Lena said, flipping over a piece of paper titled “Questions To Ask While At Castle McDuck, Page 4.” She and Webby were balanced on opposite ends of the piano bench, while the rest of the bench – and the piano itself – was covered in similarly-titled pieces of paper, an assortment of crayon and marker doodles, and a wide variety of colorful, laminated university ads (Innovation Is Our Tradition – Maltipoosetts Institute of Technology).*

Webby’s eyes widened. “It absolutely matters! The tartan is the symbolic national dress of Scotland, a vital aspect of Gaelic culture! While some tartans can be worn by anyone, many are only worn to show allegiance to a certain family or clan – because of tradition and, in some cases, trademark law. The design is –”

“Focus, Pink.” Lena turned Webby’s head back towards the paper. “The plane leaves in an hour, and we are getting this list narrowed down to twenty-five questions or less if it kills us.”

Webby pouted. “Just twenty-five?”

“Or less. We agreed.”

“Why not forty?”

“Nope.”

“Thirty-five?”

“Save ‘em for the next five years. Now, if you don’t start picking which ones don’t matter as much, I’ll start crossing them out at random.”

“Okay, okay!” Webby snatched the pen out of Lena’s hands. “Sheesh.”

But she couldn’t help but smile as she pored over the list, and Lena couldn’t help but smile as well as she watched.

The van was a bit more crowded on this journey through the moors, with Donald and Della joining Scrooge and Launchpad at the front and Lena joining the teens in the back with the luggage. Everyone in the back took up a bit more legroom than they had last time, too. Despite the tight quarters, there was a jovial atmosphere inside the van to counter the gloomy environment outside of it.

Lena held her phone up to the window as they came around the final turn and the mist parted to reveal the castle, snapping a picture of the ancient, towering structure and the two people standing at its front door waiting to greet them. The others had described it to her, of course, and she knew objectively how old Scrooge was and how long-established he claimed his family line to be, but it was different to see this monument to history in person.

The reception was much warmer than the last visit, from what Lena had heard about it, with Scrooge stepping forward to embrace his parents (granted immortality by mystical druid stones – this family never stopped being strange), Della dragging Donald off towards the castle to find their old haunts, and the boys immediately beginning to strategize the Templar Treasure Hunt.

Webby managed to choke out a “This is Lena,” before she stopped trying to talk and just let herself stare up at the castle, a huge, goofy grin on her face.

“Aaaand there’s the joy overload.” Lena put one arm around Webby’s shoulders and passed the folded piece of paper to Downey with the other. “That’s why we made this. Would you mind writing down the answers to these questions here? I know it’s a lot, but it’s better than the first draft of two hundred and three.”

“Why certainly, dear,” Downey replied.

The family divided quickly enough into a catching-up-while-dinner-prepping group and a getting-a-jump-on-Templar-Treasure-hunting group. Since neither activity really appealed to Lena, she planted herself and Webby in one of the bedrooms, Webby curled up and giggling at the center of the bed while Lena lounged at the foot.

She could have sworn that there hadn’t been any cell towers in the last leg of the journey through the moors, but still her phone buzzed with a text message. Webby’s phone buzzed, too, in her pocket; they were all in the same message group.

Vi: What century was Castle McDuck built in?

Lena couldn’t help but roll her eyes, just out of habit, before she texted the picture she’d snapped of the castle’s exterior to the group. She’d really only taken the photo in the first place because she’d known Violet would ask.

Lena: you tell me. bet you’ll know just by looking at the architecture.

Lena: assuming it sends, we’re so far from civilization here

Vi: I received it.

Kass**: Same

Kass: Creepy cool pic! Surprised everyone showed up in the photo haha

Vi: You’re thinking of vampires. Vampires are the creatures that don’t show up on film.

Vi: At Castle McDuck, Lena and Webby are much more likely to come across the sort of spectral being that is only rendered visible in photos, rather than to the naked eye.

Kass: Oh suuuure, everyone knows that…..

Lena: this is basic info, KP. it’s all covered in Spooky Magic Stuff 101

Kass: Must have played hooky that day lol

Vi: If you would like, Kassidy, I can lend you a few books about the differences between types of supernatural beings.

Kass: How bout you send me the cliffnotes link instead

Vi: I will make a reader out of you yet.

Kass: No way – Lena needs at least one person in her life who isn’t a total nerd!!

Kass: Speaking of which how’s little pink?

Lena looked over at Webby, who seemed happy enough lying there mumbling to herself.

Lena: overwhelmed. in a good way. i think.

Vi: Did you hand over the list?

Lena: yep

Vi: Good. She has detailed her anxieties about not having any questions answered on her last visit to me at length, on multiple occasions over the past four years.

Lena: we’re not leaving without answers.

“Ah, now there’s my favorite sister-by-neither-blood-nor-law!”

Lena looked up from her phone and raised her eyebrows at Louie, who was leaning against the doorway with perfectly-sculpted casualness. Really, he was probably one of the few people on Earth who could pull off that attitude as well as she could.

“Thought you’d be off on the treasure hunt,” she said.

“I was.” Louie came over to sit on the bed. “But then I started weighing the pros and cons.”

“You are a pro at cons,” Lena said, shifting her legs aside to give him space to sit next to her and the still-horizontal Webby. Once upon a time, all five kids could have lounged together on a bed this size without anyone’s elbows brushing. But that was several growth spurts ago.

Louie grinned proudly. “I am, thank you for noticing. So I realized that the gang of nerds down there are going about this in entirely the wrong way. Why waste time and energy stumbling around for hours in the dark, facing unknown horrors, in the name of a treasure that you might not actually find because nobody who has done this aforementioned stumbling-around method in the past has actually ever succeeded… when we have a literal witch in the castle?”

Lena crossed her arms. “Your point being?”

“Could you whip up some kind of locator spell that would lead us directly to the treasure?” Louie actually bounced a bit on the bed, he was so excited.

“I might have something that could work,” Lena said carefully. “But why would I do that? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not down there with the Indiana Bones crew.”

Louie held up a finger. “One: it’s money. Duh. And I’d let you have, like, ten percent of it, or at least five percent – don’t give me that look, I’m the heir here so I obviously deserve the majority, and that will still be a lot of money.

“Two,” he held up another finger. “Just think of the look on Scrooge’s face when we find the treasure before he does. Also the look on Dewey’s face. And Huey’s. And – well, everyone’s faces, really.

“And three: you can bring any weird McDuck family history stuff we find along the way back here for Webby to geek out over.”

“Hm. Tempting.” Lena looked down at Webby. “Still...”

Louie sighed dramatically. “Come on, Lena! Webby’s fine. She’s just gonna lie there all night, giggling, until someone tells her it’s time to go home. Meanwhile, you and I will be making history! And a lot of money.”

Lena hesitated. Then she put her phone in her pocket and hopped down from the bed.

“Alright. I could use some good ol’ teenage rebellion anyway; family reunions are stifling. Can you believe she called me ‘dear’?”

Louie punched the air. “Aw yeah, magic time! So, what do you need?”

“The treasure belonged to Simon McDuck, right?” Lena rubbed her hands together thoughtfully. “Let’s see if we can find something else that he owned...”

*

“You know, ‘found’ and ‘avowed’ don’t really rhyme.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying – you’re a poet and a witch. You really ought to have higher standards for your magical rhymes.”

“Webby’s the one who’s good at improv. Look, do you want my help or not?”

“Okay, okay, shutting up now.”

The two teens continued to follow the floating red cloak down the dark hallway. The pale blue glow emanating from the cloak wasn’t quite enough to let them see where they were going as they traversed the catacombs beneath Castle McDuck, so Lena kept their feet illuminated with her cell phone flashlight.

“At least it’s working,” Lena said. “Simon McDuck owned this cloak, so it’ll lead us to his treasure.”

“Good.”

“Or maybe to his grave.”

“Wait, what?”

Lena shrugged. “This is one of my aunt’s spells. She’d have me use it to track down obscure ingredients and such. But the terms of the precis are pretty nonspecific, so depending on how much we can claim to ‘own’ anything, even our own bodies, after we die...”

“Sometimes you scare me just as much as Webby did when we first met her.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

The cloak paused in the air, and Lena reached up to tug on its hem, after which it started moving again.

“This is really gonna piss off Uncle Scrooge,” she said. “‘Magic!’” she added in an over-the-top Scottish accent. “‘Nothing but a supernatural shortcut for hard work!’”

“Ha! And who says finding more efficient ways to get a job done is a bad thing?”

“Someone who spent a century and a half doing things the slow way.”

“But making him mad is the reason you’re doing this, so...”

“Excuse me. Annoying Scrooge is just one of the reasons that you used to get me to do this. If things go sideways, I’m not taking responsibility, Llewellyn.”

Louie hissed. “Low blow, Lena. Low blow.”

They continued in silence for a while, following the hovering cloak around a few corners and through the middle path of a fork in the hall.

“So,” Louie finally said. “Webby’s taking that application to Corvidnell pretty seriously, huh?”

“Seems like.” Lena matched his casual tone.

“And Huey’s all set for Hawkvard.” Louie’s eyes were on the hall in front of them. “Full ride. Which is fortunate for my future inheritance.”

Lena was well over ninety percent certain that not even the out-of-state-tuition for every university in the nation would put a noticeable dent in the McDuck family assets. But given that Louie had inherited Scrooge’s nigh-on-neurotic tendency to notice any dent, she didn’t say so.

“Yeah, I bet the bursars are thrilled,” she said. “Getting Scrooge McDuck’s nephew, but not a coin from his money bin. I wonder if they have the guts to send alumni donor requests to the mansion?”

“Ha. I so hope I’m in the room when that junk arrives.”

“You probably will be, unless Louie Inc. suddenly takes off, Mr. Unpaid Intern.”

“It’s called taking the time to learn from established and experienced members of the business world, Miss Not-Going-To-College-Either-And-So-Has-No-Place-To-Judge.”

“Hey – that’s Ms. Not-Going-To-College to you, dude. According to my papers, I’m a legal adult now.”

“For a moment there I half expected you to correct it to ‘Mrs.’”

Lena rolled her eyes. “No, Louie, despite all your oooh-ing, Webby and I have not run off to get married.”

“So you’re okay with it?”

“Okay with what?”

“With Webby going away for four years.”

Their footsteps were the only sound for a few seconds.

“It’s not like I’ll never see her again,” Lena finally said. “She’ll be back for, like, holidays and stuff.”

“But it won’t be the same. This is going from living in the same house, sleeping in the same room, even, for years, to not doing that anymore. From sharing almost every living moment together, to the point where you kinda maybe sometimes get sick of it, to suddenly having to be apart. That’s just, I dunno, for some people it might be a little scary, don’t you think?”

Lena looked sideways at Louie. “It’s not like you three are gonna forget about each other,” she said.

Louie tripped on a crack in the stone floor. “Wait, what? I don’t – You think – We’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you!”

Lena smirked. “Are we?”

Louie stuck his hands in his pockets and sulked. Lena backed off.

“Since you’re so concerned, I guess I appreciate it,” she said. “But don’t worry about me and Webby. We’ll be fine. We always are.”

“You’re not worried?”

“Of course I’m worried! I’ve been afraid of our friendship and – and everything else we have – falling apart since the day we met. That’s just a part of caring about people, as much as I know anything about caring about people, which, yeah, let’s be honest, I don’t really have a ton of experience there. But like… as much as I worry that we might fall apart, I don’t actually think that we will.”

Lena rolled up her sleeve, uncovering her friendship bracelet.

“We’ve been through a lot,” she said. “We all have. We’re connected. That’s just, a fact. And maybe it’ll be a good thing, to be apart for a bit. I mean – I sort of start counting the days of my life, the ones that really matter, after meeting Webby, if that makes sense? So I don’t really know who I am outside of this. Maybe I should learn. And maybe… Maybe Webby will be better off being away from me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Louie said, but that was when he walked right into the cloak, which had stopped in midair.

“Watch where you’re going,” he muttered, brushing the fabric out of his face.

Lena reached up to tug on the cloak again, but it didn’t start moving. Instead, the magical glow around it dissipated, and the cloak fell to the floor, once again a lifeless heap of fabric.

“We must be here.” Lena held up her phone, casting the light around the room. They were still surrounded by the same dark stone that the rest of these snaking hallways had been, though the walls around them had expanded into a sort of plain chamber.

“Place your bets, gold or grave?” she said.

“It doesn’t look much like a treasure room.” Louie brushed his fingers against the wall, and they came away covered with dust. “But then again – maybe that’s what they want us to think!”

“Who’s ‘they?’”

See that? – I hear – but who – this deep in the castle?

“I dunno, the Knights Templar?” Louie had begun to make his way around the room, tapping the stones of the wall and floor to see if any of them sounded hollow.

“Did you hear something?” Lena turned the light around the edges of the room again.

“It’s quiet as the grave down here,” said Louie. “And that was a very poor choice of words on my part. Bring that light over here, I think there’s a crack in this rock.”

Lena took a step towards Louie.

What is it – that one’s ours – the other, though, what was she doing –

She whirled around again, but there was no one there.

“What is it?” Louie was paying attention now.

Lena shook her head. “I’m jumping at shadows.”

“Coming from you, that’s not super reassuring.”

 “Yeah, well, I assume some shadows aren’t malicious.”

She speaks of shadows – her look, mark you, her face – but he wouldn’t let one in, not to our ancestral home –

“Oookay, I definitely heard that one.” Louie turned so he and Lena were standing back-to-back, taking his phone out for an extra light source.

“This castle isn’t actually haunted, is it?” said Lena.

“By a demon dog, yes. I’m pretty sure we would have noticed last time if there were other ghosts here.”

Are you sure – the young lad, though, he wouldn’t – probably fine – no, I’m sure, I’m sure!

“You know, it’s rude to whisper!” Lena said, forcing her voice to remain steady as she raised it. “If you have something to say, why don’t you say it to our face?”

“Pleasegoddon’tletthisbeastupididea,” said Louie.

With pleasure!

A large, translucent figure – a duck, fully armored, with a club in his hand – suddenly loomed before them, emerging from the wall.

The ghost grinned menacingly and swung the club at Lena with a grunt. She leapt backwards, accidentally bumping Louie aside as she lifted her hands, palms outward. The bracelet around her wrist glowed with blue light, as did her eyes, as the glow expanded into a transparent shield in front of her.

Her phone, dropped as she summoned the shield, clattered to the ground, flashlight pointed up at the ceiling, providing enough light to see the dozens of ghosts that were now appearing along the circumference of the room, all exclaiming with varying degrees of shock and fury.

I knew it, I knew – Magic! Sorcery! – A de Spell in Castle McDuck?! – Get her!

They rushed forward, and Louie and Lena were instantly separated. The ghosts didn’t seem to pay him any mind as they converged on Lena, who backed herself up against the only part of the wall that didn’t have a ghost coming out of it, keeping herself shielded off.

“Louie!”

Lena’s eyes shifted from one furious semitransparent face to the next, trying to figure out what to do. They couldn’t come through her shield, or at least they hadn’t yet. What could she do? There were too many of them – and they were family, weren’t they? The ancestors of Clan McDuck, Webby would know what to say to them, how to find her way out of this, what was she supposed to do –

“Hey – leave her alone!” Louie tried to duck through the ghosts and get to Lena, but he scampered away again nervously as they crowded in.

“As the future owner of this castle, I command you!” he tried again, from a distance.

Foolish youth – he doesn’t know – Defend the castle! Drive out the witch!

One of the ghosts, a woman with a bushy mane of hair, ducked down through the floor. She re-emerged through the wall behind Lena, her fingers closing around Lena’s arm.

It is difficult to describe the experience of being grabbed by an incorporeal being. The moment of contact defies logical language – something that should not be able to touch you is nonetheless holding you still, and your brain and body can’t help but notice the complete wrongness of such a sensation.

But it was a sensation that Lena knew all too well.

She screamed, and despite all the terrifying adventures they’d been on, Louie didn’t think he’d ever heard her, or anyone, scream like that before. A blast of pink energy shot out of Lena’s hands, and the ghosts scattered to avoid the crackling ball.

“No! I won’t go back! I can’t! No!”

Another blast, and this one collided with the ceiling as a ghost slid through it to escape, the stone cracking and crumbling. Louie covered his head with his arms, barely avoiding being hit himself, by both magical blast and falling rock.

“I won’t go back!” Lena shrieked again, eyes darting wildly around the room.

“Lena!” Louie shouted, coughing in the dust-filled air. “Lena, wait –”

But she didn’t respond, and maybe she couldn’t hear. Instead she turned and ran, further and deeper into the catacombs, leaving Louie standing alone in the light of her cellphone.

*

At one end of the spectrum of overwhelmed reactions is the panic attack, in which the mind and body interpret a perceived threat as the worst possible thing and consequently respond in the most heightened fashion. Ironically, the thoughts and behaviors that come from a panic attack are overwhelmingly counterproductive to actually dealing with the threat at hand, so while the mind and body may have the best intentions, they don’t really manage to protect the person at all.

(Though perhaps huge pink fireballs were an appropriate response to being attacked by ghosts. It wasn’t exactly a common situation.)

At the other end of that spectrum was what the Duck boys had dubbed a “joy overload,” in which the mind and body respond to something which is, for that person, the best possible thing. Castle McDuck was a joy overload trigger for Webby, and just as panic attacks ironically make it difficult to get away from the threat, joy overloads make it equally difficult to actually enjoy the best possible thing.

Some awful part of Louie’s mind drew this connection between what Lena and Webby were currently experiencing as he raced back up the stairways and halls to the room in which he had first found them.

None of them had really tried to snap Webby out of it the last time they were here, which was something that Louie in hindsight felt some amount of guilt over, mainly because he now had no idea what to do to wake her up.

But Webby was the only person he could think of to get, the only person who he knew would still be where he’d left them, who wasn’t off searching for treasure – and how stupid had that treasure made him? Telling Lena to do magic in the McDuck family ancestral home! Stupid, stupid, stupid…

So he did what his gut told him to do, which was slam the door open and shout, “Webby, Lena’s in danger!”

Webby sat up straight on the bed, her eyes locking with Louie’s.

“Where?”

“In the catacombs,” Louie panted. “I lost – I don’t know where –”

Webby held up her wrist, and the bracelet tied around it flashed blue as she pressed two fingers to the little bead tied into it.

“Guide me to her,” she said to the bracelet.

Even if Lena had had any mental space leftover to wonder how long she had been running, she couldn’t have known. There were no clocks, there were no windows, there weren’t even sconces for torches in these corridors. It was dark, completely dark, but dark was good, she could hide in the dark, the shadows couldn’t see her if she was already a part of them, Magica had said she was nothing more than a shadow anyway, hadn’t she –

A scratching sound, a flicker of breeze – something moving past her in the dark. Lena shrieked and sent another blast of energy at it, for a moment blinding herself with the light, not that it mattered, not that there was anything to see, there wasn’t anyone there except she knew that there was.

She couldn’t breathe. She was gasping, but her head was spinning like she had too much oxygen. She was backed against a wall, or was it the floor? Could she really tell which way was up, here in the dark? Did she have the time to figure it out?

She had to keep moving. She couldn’t let them take her. She had to keep moving, she couldn’t move another step, she had to, she couldn’t –

“Lena?”

She lashed out towards the sound, and the bright pink explosion left gaping cracks in the wall and ceiling.

In the middle of the falling rocks and billowing dust, someone other than Lena screamed.

Lena froze. “Webby?”

Silence, and darkness. But not all darkness. Moonlight was filtering in through one of the cracks in the wall – she was back near the surface, somehow.

There was something on the floor at the edge of the moonlight. Something small and skinny and twisted into a knot. A ribbon, a pink ribbon, one end caught under a rock and its edges all scorched and smoldering from the energy blast.

Was that all that was left? Just like in the Other Bin?

What had she done?

“No, no, no…”

Lena fell to her knees, grasping at the ribbon, her fingers failing a few times before finally getting a grip on it.

“No, Webby, no, no, no…”

“Lena! Lena, it’s okay!”

“No, it’s not, it’s not, you’re not –”

“Lena, it’s just a bow, I’ll get a new one!”

Lena tore her gaze away from the floor. Sure enough, there was Webby, kneeling on the ground in front of her, a bit dust-covered but all in one piece.

“Webby!”

Lena lurched forward, grabbing her girlfriend in a rough hug, and with an equally forceful movement shoving Webby away again and retreating across the floor and into a corner, her chin to her chest.

“Lena?” said Webby.

“Stay away!”

Maybe if she pushed herself hard enough into the wall, she’d shove aside enough old dust and bury herself, there beneath this awful castle, with all the other ghosts and monsters.

“Lena, what –”

“Stay away – from me,” Lena said again, struggling to talk through the weight in her chest. “Stay – away.”

Behind Webby, footsteps and scuffling around the rocks heralded the arrival of others. Webby threw out an arm from her crouched position, blocking the path of Scrooge, Fergus, and all three boys – Louie had found them. They all obeyed her silent command to be still.

“Lena?” Webby said softly, and she paused to give Lena time to respond, but received no answer besides gasping breaths.

“I’m going to come a little closer now, Lena. Is that alright?”

“No. Stay back.”

“Why?”

Silence. Out of the corner of her eye, Webby saw Scrooge open his mouth to say something. She shook her head furiously, and her uncle nodded, closing his mouth into a grim expression.

“I’m not leaving, Lena. I’m not leaving you here like this.”

“Maybe you should.”

“I won’t.”

Lena said nothing. Webby scooted an inch towards her. Lena flinched.

“It’s okay, Lena.” Webby came forward another inch. “I’m okay.” Another inch. “You’re okay.” And another. “We’re all okay.”

“Webby – please –”

“You’re not going to hurt me, Lena.”

“How could you know? How – could you – possibly know?”

“Because we’re friends.” An inch closer. “Because you’re my best friend.” Another inch. “We’re the Beagle Birds.”

Lena gasped out another breath, but this one almost sounded like a laugh. One eye peeked out from under her pink lock of hair, bleary but alert. “You – sentimental fool.”

“Always.”

Another inch closer, and Webby set her hand on the dirt-strewn floor, right next to Lena’s. And after a moment, Lena’s fingers shakily slid over to meet it.

Even after Webby got Lena on her feet, it was like she was walking through a dream, and Lena was only really aware of a few sparse moments. The boys ducking down a hallway to make sure it was clear of ghosts before they led Lena into it. Della laughing at the back of a painting and saying that it meant Donald’s hat was lost forever, for some reason. Scrooge shaking his father’s hand, and then pulling him into an uncharacteristic hug. Downey handing Webby the folded piece of paper, her eyes on Lena with a much too concerned expression on her face.

When time started moving at a normal pace again, Lena was in the van, her head on Webby’s lap, and the castle was far behind them, once again hidden in the mists.

“I’m sorry,” Lena said.

“Sorry for what?” said Webby, running her fingers through Lena’s hair.

“For making a mess of the family reunion. And the treasure hunt.”

“None of this was your fault,” said Webby. Lena snorted.

“She’s right, Lena,” said Huey. “I know you feel like everyone’s mad at you, but we’re not.”

“We were just running into dead ends, anyway,” said Dewey. “We’ll find the treasure next time.”

“If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine,” Louie added in a very quiet voice. “I put you in harm’s way. I did that.”

“They didn’t attack me because of you,” said Lena. “You heard them. It was because of who I am. What I am.”

Webby’s hand tightened on Lena’s head. “And ‘what you are,’” she said, “is a wonderful person, and a part of this family, and my best friend who deserves so much better than what you’ve gotten so far in life, and if those stupid McDuck ancestors are so stuck in their anti-witch prejudice that they can’t see that, then they deserve to rot in those catacombs for all of time!”

There was silence in the back of the van. Webby blinked; all three boys were gaping at her.

“What?” she said.

“You just called the McDucks ‘stupid,’” said Dewey.

“Well, they are!” Webby grabbed the paper of answered questions out of her pocket, crumpled it up in her fist, and threw it across the van, where it landed in a cupholder.

“Nothing justifies what they did,” she said. “Nothing! And nothing about them is more important than what I have right here, right now.”

“Webby, I don’t…” Lena began.

“You don’t what? Deserve this? I think you deserve the world, Lena. Five years in, you don’t know this?”

“Webby, I could have killed you tonight, don’t you realize that?”

“I don’t care.”

“I do!” Lena shoved herself upright, ducking around the seatbelt to avoid strangling herself on it. “Five years ago – when we went into the Other Bin? We were looking for the dime, but we found the dreamcatcher instead. It sucked me into my worst nightmare, and do you want to know what happened in it?”

If anyone in the back of the van didn’t want to know, none gave voice to it. Webby held Lena’s gaze steadily.

“I killed you,” Lena said. “Magica came into her full power. She captured you, transformed you, turned you against me. And I killed you. Not on purpose. I lost control and killed you. I’m not afraid of things that can’t happen, Webby. I’m afraid because there is very little in the way of that nightmare coming true. I’m a witch whether I like it or not. I’m traumatized whether I like it or not. And those things together – you’re not safe around me, Webby. Nobody is. And that’s not going to change any time soon. At least when you’re away at school, that won’t be an issue.”

Webby reached out and put her hand on the back of Lena’s head.

“College is not going to change anything between us,” she said.

“Maybe it should.”

“Lena, if you need space sometimes, if that would make you feel better, then that’s fine, I can give you that. But I love you. And that means your fight is my fight. No matter how long it takes.”

“What if I never get better?”

“Then I guess we’ll just have to stick together forever, huh?”

Lena shuddered, closing her eyes. They were wet when she opened them again.

“I love you, too,” she said.

Webby pulled her close again, and Lena let her head rest on Webby’s shoulder as the van traveled onward through the darkness. And even as Launchpad swerved around half the trees in Scotland and Della barely managed to stop him from ramming the van into the other half; even as the boys grew testy with the long, late drive and each began insisting that the others were on the wrong side of the imaginary line they’d drawn across the seat; even as Webby not-so-surreptitiously retrieved the crumpled-up list from the cupholder, smoothed it out on her leg, and began to read; Lena felt, more than she had ever felt in her life, that everything was truly going to be alright.