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The day after Magnus Burnsides makes the final cut for the maiden voyage of the Starblaster, his parents throw him a party. The whole craftspeople's quarter turns out for it, crowded into the bakery and spilling out into the courtyard at the rear of the building. They bring food and wine and little good-luck notes that they press into his hands, because yes, Magnus Burnsides was kind of a little shit and a thorn in their sides when he was a kid, but also, he’s their boy and he has made good.
Magnus has the time of his life. He dances and drinks and soaks up the attention, smiles and laughs and promises each neighbor in turn that he’ll bring back stories, maybe even souvenirs, from whatever he finds out there beyond the edge of the world. Everything is shining and bright with joy, and at least for tonight Magnus feels like the center of a warm, beloved little universe.
The party finally plays itself out after midnight, and the last neighbor is shooed out the door so everyone can get a few hours of sleep before the next day’s work begins. Magnus sits at the big wooden table in the bakery kitchen, the one he played under as a little kid, and it occurs to him that this is probably the last night for a very long time that he’ll spend sleeping in his own bed, roused early by the sound of Pops and Dad stoking the oven to bake the first morning loaves long before the suns ever crest the horizon. But he’s riding high, too drunk on gifted wine and youthful pride for the thought to make him sad.
He sleeps late the next morning, shambles downstairs with the king of hangovers. Pops laughs and brushes flour off his hands and pours him a mug of strong coffee before he goes back to kneading. Magnus watches him for a while, how his big sturdy hands keep effortless time with the dough. When he was a little kid Pops had seemed like a giant, a big mountain of a tiefling with broad shoulders and a tail big enough to lift Magnus off the ground without effort. He’s still taller than Magnus, but only just.
Magnus thinks blurrily that the whole world is probably like that, getting smaller the longer you’re around in it, and then Dad bustles in through the front door with a package wrapped in patterned paper and plops it on the table in front of Magnus. His smile is too broad to be even a little bit hidden by his big black walrus mustache, and not for the first time Magnus wonders how Dad, who’s a head and a half shorter than him, can drink twice as much as he does and never appear hungover in the least.
His father claps him on the shoulders, still grinning. “It’s not much,” He warns, going to pour himself coffee before he pulls out his chair and sits.
Pops tsk at him, giving the dough one more good punch before he sets it to rise and goes to wash his hands. “You say that about every gift we ever give the kid, Husband.”
"I'm not a kid!" Magnus protests, without any real offence in his tone. It's just something he always says, the conversational version of a well-worn shirt.
"You're our kid," Pops retorts, which is how he always replies, and he squeezes Magnus's shoulder before he slides into his own seat. "Go on and open your present."
Magnus can guess what it is but that doesn't make him any less excited as he rips into the paper. Inside is a cardboard box, stiff and shiny, and Magnus grins as he lifts the lid, hangover forgotten. It's brim-full of hard candy wrapped in twists of glossy, foil-stamped, brightly colored paper, the specialty recipe from Inga Whitestone's sweet shop at the end of the road.
Magnus lights up. "Aw, hell yeah!"
"Figured you'd need a taste of home while you're out there in the great beyond," Pops says, smiling into his coffee mug.
"Don't eat it all in one sitting." Dad adds with a crooked grin, thumping Magnus on the back.
Magnus grins in return, already unwrapping one of the candies and popping it in his mouth. It tastes like every special occasion they've ever celebrated, like birthdays and Candlenights and the rare times he ended up with extra pocket money as a kid.
"You're the best dads in the world," he says, and means it, and for just a moment that bittersweet sadness from last night is there again, because he knows that things will never be quite the same as they are at this exact moment. He breathes in, the safe smells of yeast and flour and oven-heat mingling with the sweetness on his tongue, with coffee and the soap his dads shave with.
The sadness doesn’t last, because he’s twenty and the planar system is ahead of him, because nothing sad has ever lasted in this safe, warm room, because there will be so many more happy moments like this one when he comes back with two months of stories and the glory of having been where nobody else in the whole world has ever gone. Magnus finishes his coffee and makes himself breakfast while his parents fall back into the rhythm of work that has surrounded him his whole life, and when he’s eaten and washed his dishes he wraps each of them in a hug.
“Be safe.” Pops says, kissing Magnus’s forehead and leaving a smudge of flour he won’t notice until tonight.
“You've made us proud, son,” Dad says, his voice gruff because he’s tearing up.
Magnus shoulders his overnight bag, picks up his box of hard candy. He turns at the end of the street to look back at his parents one more time. They’re standing in the bakery door, Pops with his arm around Dad’s shoulders, Dad scrubbing the back of his hand across his cheeks. Magnus grins and waves at them before he turns and heads back to the IPRE campus, back to his training, back to the most exciting thing he’s ever done.
***
The thing is, they all try their best not to think about it. Magnus isn’t, like, a genius at people, but he can tell that the rest of the crew is trying to do the same thing he’s trying to do. They’re trying to push through the days by focusing on the things at hand, on learning new languages or studying the Light or mapping the new world or whatever, because if they don’t focus and push through then it creeps up on them like it creeps up on him. The world is dead. The whole world and everyone in it, his dads and his neighbors, the first girl he kissed and the guy he was kind-of-sort-of seeing at the Academy and the people whose asses he kicked that last night in the bar, they’re all dead. Every animal and plant, every building he ever spent time in.
Most days he muscles past the ache in his throat and his chest, shoves it aside and buries it under his newest goal, which is making himself stronger and faster and tougher because there are only six people left in the universe -- seven, counting him -- and he has to keep them safe. That’s his job, and maybe there is no longer an Institute to look over his file, maybe the idea of a personnel review died with everything else in the whole entire world, but Magnus Burnsides doesn’t quit on a job once he’s got one. There are only six people left, plus him, and if he doesn’t want to lose them the way that he lost literally everyone else, he’d better be on his godsdamned toes.
So. Sad can wait. Loss can wait. Grief -- oceans of it, planes of it, vast uncharted worlds of it -- can wait. And on days when it can’t, he steals off into his room and lifts the lid of the cardboard box on his desk and takes out one of the candies inside (just one at a time, never more, because there will never be anything else like them again and they have to last him as long as possible). Sometimes just having it in his pocket, the crinkle of the bright wrapper under his fingers, is enough to soothe the ache. Other times he unwraps it and puts it in his mouth and loses himself in a memory for a while, sweet and warm and safe in a room he’ll never see again.
It helps. He doesn’t know what everyone else does when it gets to be too much, but this is what he does and it helps him.
He really doesn’t mean to sneak up on Lup. It just happens: he makes his way to the common room one morning and she’s sitting at the table staring out the window at nothing. Elf hearing is crazy good, way better than his, but she doesn’t seem to hear him as he walks into the room. He was planning on settling in on the couch, but something in her expression stops him. She looks like he feels when the enormous weight of an entire dead planar system starts bearing down.
Magnus hesitates for a minute. He doesn’t know her quite well enough to know if she wants company, if a distraction would help or if she’d rather be alone. But if he were in her position (and he has been, of course he has, they all have, it’s probably the thing they all have the most in common), he wouldn’t want someone to pretend they hadn’t noticed.
So. He clears his throat and slides into one of the empty chairs, reaches into his pocket and wraps his fingers around the hard candy there. “Hey.”
Lup shakes herself a little, and he can almost see how she tries to put her walls back up. “Oh. Hey, Magnus.” Except it doesn’t work, exactly; the sadness is still there behind the casual confidence, showing through like the light left on in a window. “What’s, uh. What’s goin’ on, big guy?”
Magnus shrugs awkwardly. This was a mistake, he thinks. He shouldn’t have bothered her. Except that the sadness is so huge, so overwhelming, that he can’t help the way it pulls at his own. He holds his hand out, with the candy in it. Offering, like that can be any real help.
Hell, it helps him. Maybe it’ll help her.
Lup’s expression creases, falters, and the facade of okay-ness slips away as she takes the candy from him and stares at it. “ . . . thanks.” She hesitates and turns her eyes back out of the window, and she doesn’t say anything for a long minute.
Magnus has just gotten around to wondering if he should leave when she blurts out “Do you ever catch yourself waiting for the other sun to come out?”
“Yeah.” Magnus relaxes, just a tiny bit. Maybe he hasn’t totally misread the situation, or at least maybe he’s not making it worse. “The sky’s never the right color, either.”
“Ugh, right?” Lup sounds lost and frustrated and sad. “Like. How are we ever gonna know what time it is? It’s always the color of right before night falls.”
Magnus smiles, a flat sad smile, because she’s right, she’s so right, and they will probably spend the rest of their lives on this planet waiting for it to feel like it’s actually daylight.
They lapse into silence again. Lup turns the candy between her fingertips, looking sad and distant. Magnus shifts in his chair and watches her, wondering what she’s missing right now.
"What was your hometown like?" He blurts out, trying to reach out and find more of that connection, trying to maybe understand her a little more and maybe relive a little bit of the world they can’t regain.
Lup turns and stares at him. "My . . ."
"Uh." Magnus casts his brain back over the crew dossiers he forced himself to read through. "New Elfington, right?"
Lup stares for another second and then she just dissolves, not into tears but into helpless, wholehearted laughter. She puts her head down on the table and slaps her palm against the wood. "Oh my gods," She manages to gasp after a minute, "Oh my good gods, you thought New Elfington was a real place and that's adorable."
Magnus can't decide whether to be stung by the laughter or glad that she didn't start crying. Lup looks up, catches the look on his face, and composes herself with obvious effort.
"New Elfington doesn't exist," she says, clearing her throat and finally unwrapping the sweet in her hand, "It's an elf thing. Slang. Like humans say 'bastard'? It's what assholes say about people who grew up without a place to stay."
". . . Oh." Magnus feels his expression go through a complicated kind of sequence, because he hates people who say that kind of thing, and also, if people said that kind of thing about the twins it means they grew up . . . what, homeless? And that's tragic as hell. He thinks about the bakery again, the warm safe smell of it, and can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to not even have the memory of a home left to wrap around yourself when you feel lost. "Shit. I'm sorry."
Lup waves a hand and pops the candy into her mouth, talking around it. "It's cool, big guy, no worries. Me and Taako, we fuckin' own it. Why d’you think we put it on our paperwork?" She lifts an eyebrow. "Oh, hey, these are tasty as hell."
Magnus grins and tries not to let it be as bittersweet as it feels. "Yeah. Present from my dads. Lady in our neighborhood makes 'em." His face falls, and he stares hard at his hands. "Made."
Lup's expression softens and she thumps him hard on the bicep. "Thanks," she says, folding the candy wrapper into careful thirds before she tucks it into her uniform pocket. "C'mon, tell me about this fighting-a-giant-bear plan you got going on."
***
It gets to be a habit after that. Not a frequent one or anything, because there’s only so much candy and he’s really trying to make it last. But once in a while, when Lup gets that hurt, distant look in her eyes. And then once in a while when the edge in Taako's voice is just . . . so obviously from being tired and scared and sad, not just flippant and aloof.
(Magnus isn't a genius at people, but that one's really not that hard. Taako is nothing like his sister except in all the ways he's exactly like her. Lup is funny and tough and brash and she wears her heart on her sleeve; Taako is magnetic and flashy and guarded and sharp as a chef's knife. But they carry their sadness in the exact same way, and sometimes when Magnus sees it for just a second he remembers what Lup said about how they grew up, and fuck, man, how can that be possible? How could anybody ever not want them?)
And then one time when Merle is putting Magnus’s shoulder back in place after a round with the Power Bear, and giving him a chiding lecture on not being a dumb asshole with his own safety just to prove a point, and Magnus maybe punches him pretty hard in the sternum because having your shoulder reduced fuckin’ hurts. He feels terrible about it immediately afterward, because Merle was just trying to help, and so he slips into the sickbay the next day and leaves a piece of candy on the counter by way of apology.
Barry figures out a way to synthesize alcohol from the tubers that are one of the planet’s staple foods, and he invites Magnus to give it a try. They both drink too much and end up staying up late, late into the night, staring into the campfire Magnus builds, and Barry starts crying talking about the farm he grew up on. Magnus puts an arm around his shoulders and a hard candy in the pocket of his robe, because he lost his home, too, they all did, and of course a hug and a piece of candy doesn’t replace that, but it’s better than nothing.
Lucretia tells him about her parents one day, and Magnus tells her about his, and then about the neighborhood, and then about every building in it and every person who lived there. It pours out of him like water out of a cracked glass, and she just listens to all of it with intense concentration and never stops writing, not once. When he’s finally finished she shows him that it’s all in her books now, preserved in her journals, and Magnus bursts into tears because it matters, it matters so fucking much that someone else knows about his home and the people that made it. There’s not enough candy in the world to say thank you for that, but that doesn’t stop him from trying.
Davenport shows the hurt of what they’ve lost the least of any of them, which Magnus can understand. He’s the Captain, and just like Magnus’s whole job is to keep them safe Davenport’s whole job is to be in control, even of himself. But he still lost a whole world, same as all the rest of them, and sometimes there’s a heaviness in the line of his shoulders that Magnus could recognize from a hundred yards away. Magnus doesn’t have any idea of how to approach the Captain about it, wouldn’t feel right about trying, but he does make sure to leave a candy at Davenport’s seat on the bridge every once in a while, all the same. Because even if he has to hold himself apart from the rest of them, Davenport's still a part of them, part of this little circle of people Magnus would give anything to protect.
***
The sadness recedes for a while as the year goes on, but as Candlenights get closer it surges back like a tide. It hasn’t been a terrible year, all things considered; the new world has had its moments of beauty, of discovery and camaraderie, and Magnus can't speak for anybody else but he's probably already learned more from the Power Bear than he has from any other instructor in his life. In another couple of years maybe this place will feel more like home, less like somewhere they’re merely surviving the shipwreck of the universe they knew. But right now it's still just the place they are because they can't be home ever again, and the idea of celebrating the holiday here is . . . it's hard.
He's not even sure what to get everyone. Hell, he's not sure if anybody else is even thinking about the holiday, let alone thinking of gifts. But if the idea of celebrating Candlenights on this world feels just a little wrong, the idea of letting it pass without giving any gifts feels even wronger. More wrong. Whatever.
The problem is that there's not what you'd call a lot of retail opportunities in a world full of talking animals who haven't invented money. Magnus isn't that good with his hands; the last time he made a gift for somebody it was the extremely lopsided clay dish he made for Dad's birthday when he was seven and he's really not prepared to try and pick up arts and crafts again at his age.
So that leaves him with not a lot of options. Eventually he settles for writing everyone’s names on slips of nice IPRE stationery he lifts from one of the storerooms, twisting them around pieces of his nearly-depleted hard candy reserve. He’s done a pretty good job of stretching out the available supply, all things considered. Might even have a few left by the turn of the year, depending on how things go.
Barry pulls him aside right after breakfast, the day before Candlenights. “Hey, Magnus, can I, uh, borrow you for a sec?”
Magnus nods and follows him down to the lower storeroom, where there’s a couple boxes of lab supplies stowed. “They’re not heavy or anything,” Barry says as he pushes the door open, “This place is just kind of a disaster.”
“Sure, no worries.” Barry wasn’t kidding. It takes them a few minutes to get things moved around and back on the proper shelves, and another minute after that for Barry to decide which boxes he actually wants to take up. Magnus hoists one box easily and Barry grabs the other one. They really don’t weigh much at all, Magnus could probably handle carrying both of them at once, but he doesn't feel the need to show off these days quite as much as he used to.
Barry’s acting kind of odd as they make their way up to the lab. That’s not unusual: Barry gets in his own head about stuff, gets distracted from what’s happening around him. Magnus wonders what’s on his mind this time, if it’s science stuff that Magnus wouldn’t be able to say anything intelligent about or if it’s something simpler that Magnus could maybe help him work out. He likes Barry; he’s a genuinely nice guy, and he’s probably the smartest person Magnus has ever met but he’s not like, an asshole about it. He doesn’t make Magnus feel stupid like some of the arcanists he met at the Academy did.
Barry cracks open one of the boxes and starts unloading the contents, making awkward, stilted small talk the whole time. Magnus thinks about asking him what’s up, but he figures Barry will probably work his way around to it eventually if he just lets the guy keep talking. Before that can happen, though, Lup appears in the doorway of the lab and gives Barry a quick double-thumbs-up. Barry relaxes, and Magnus has no idea what that’s about and doesn’t have time to wonder because Lup immediately grabs his hand and starts dragging him out of the room.
She’s grinning from ear to pointed ear, obviously super pleased with herself about something, and Magnus just kind of lets himself be towed along because that’s the thing about Lup, she’s a godsdamned force of nature in the best sense of the expression. She finally comes to a stop in the passageway outside Magnus’s bedroom door and drops his hand.
“Okay now, close your eyes.”
“Uh.” Magnus officially has no idea what’s going on, although if he had to guess he’d say he’s about to be pranked in a truly historic fashion. “Okay?”
And he does, because again, force of nature, et cetera. Lup sounds gleeful. “Good. Keep ‘em closed.”
He hears the door to his room open and Lup puts a hand between his shoulderblades and gives him a gentle shove. Magnus obligingly steps forward, feeling for the doorframe so he doesn’t walk into it like a dumbass.
“Little bit more . . . okay, aaaaand now you can open your eyes.”
Magnus does. And then he gasps quietly, because whatever he thought he was gonna see, this wasn’t it.
There’s a scattered handful of tiny magic lights hovering near the ceiling, glimmering silver and soft gold. Taako’s the one casting them, apparently, because he’s sitting perched on the edge of Magnus’s desk, chin in his hand with a self-satisfied grin on his face.
The lights reflect off dozens of little folded-paper starbursts that hang from the ceiling, suspended by thread. He recognizes the paper they're made from, would know it anywhere: they're made from hard candy wrappers. Lup must have saved every last one, he realizes, and more than that she must have scrounged all of the wrappers left over from every piece of candy he's given to everyone else over the whole course of this year, and possibly some of the ones he threw away himself. She's had this planned for a while.
"Like it?" Lup sound proud of herself for pulling off a surprise, but also maybe just a tiny bit uncertain.
Magnus really doesn't trust himself to answer, not with the lump in his throat, but he turns and grabs her and pulls her into a crushing hug. His eyes well up and spill over, because this is honestly one of the nicest things anybody's ever done for him. It's definitely the nicest thing anybody's done for him since he sat in the warm bakery kitchen with his fathers almost a year ago.
"That's a yes!" Taako chirps smugly from the desk, and Magnus laughs even though he's still crying and nods into Lup's shoulder.
"Thank you," he manages after a second. "Both of you."
Lup hugs him in return, squeezing hard, and she's actually got a deceptively strong hug grip as it turns out. Taako hops down from the desk and pats him on the back. "Happy Candlenights, big guy."
Magnus nods, finally pulls away from crushing Lup's ribcage enough to take a deep breath and scrub a forearm across his eyes.
This isn't an antidote, exactly. The grief of losing his Dad, his Pops, his home, his world, that's still with him. Maybe it always will be. But they survived it, him and his crew and their ship, and whatever else you can say about the new world, they're together in it. That's not nothing.
He looks up at the ceiling of his room again. The stars turn gently in place, moved by air currents too faint for him to feel. The lights catch glints of foil and flashes of color, and he knows even when the spell fades he's going to remember how they look right at this moment.
Like literal magic, like a little miracle. Like clumsy attempts at comfort and connection, received and remembered. Like his best efforts made better, caught and transformed and returned.
He does not feel like the center of the universe here, but he does feel like a part of it.
It turns out that's enough.