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“C’mon, Lena,” Webby wheedles, “just try? Just a little?”
Lena lifts her eyebrow.
She also lifts the sword, dangling it from one finger like it’s a dirty dishcloth dripping muddy water all over her nice converse shoes- If dishcloths were long and silver and could flash pink and gold in the sunset. And if shadows could drip. Which they could! Magical ones anyway- But these weren’t, they were just doing very neat things to Lena’s eyes right now.
“I’m a poet not a soldier, Pink.” Her drawl is punctuated by the sword’s pendulum swing. “The pen is mightier than the, blah blah blah, you know the drill.”
Webby sighs and drags her eyes away from the prettiness and back to the sword at hand. She pokes at Lena's limp blade with her own, making them chime.
“But it’d be fun!”
“This thing is, like, three pounds heavy.” Lena grimaces and polishes her neatly trimmed nails on the front of her loose sweater. “That’s work. This is a workout. There's nothing fun about sweating and getting tired and gross.”
Webby pouts. “You never call me gross after I do it.”
“You’re incapable of being gross.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” with a hum Webby taps at the dangling sword again. Swish clang, swish clang, very nifty. “I get all sweaty and stuff. Sometimes I even hug you while being gross! You just like how much fun I have with it, so you don’t care what happens afterwards.”
A flick of the wrist and Lena spins her sword up and over in a full circle, smacking Webby’s away lightly, still dangling hers from one uninterested finger.
At least now she also looks amused as she tilts her head. “Really picking up on my morally grey qualities today, huh?”
“Grey is pretty!" Webby volleys back brightly. "Like you!”
Pleated plum skirts flutter at her knees as Webby extends out into a smooth lunge, stage boards squeaking softly underfoot. Carefully she pokes blunt sword tip into the front of Lena’s grey-on-grey striped sweater. A direct hit. Straight to the heart.
“I mean it looks good ON you.”
Loose fabric bunches up a Webby twists the blade, fidgeting, overextended and not wanting to move enough to correct her stance. So she doesn’t step back. Notices, instead, how Lena also doesn’t, and how she hadn’t even flinched.
Maaaaybe Webby feels a bit giddy about that.
“…I mean, most things do. Look good. On you. But grey is kinda your thing?” It looks softer than normal in the amber evening sun, like something from an old photograph. “Um with the blue and the green, and the pink…”
Webby bounces a glance from Lena’s off-kilter shirt collar to her shoes and then up, very quickly, towards the dyed tips of her over swept bangs…
And her face. Heavy lidded with the eternal veneer of slight boredom and dark eyeshadow. Not quite pulling it off half the time. Not even really trying to, right now, the edge of a smirk just muscle memory as something softer shines through. Her face is always fun to look at- but sunset just does something extra special, brings out the tired, late night writer’s shadows under Lena’s eyes and underscores the lopsided twist of her beak.
So much going on under that bored looking face, but secreted away, like a riddle.
Even the first time seeing her, Webby’d noticed that. She just wishes she was better at saying it, dang it.
“It makes everything pop! Very cool! Gorgeous!”
Boooo, not at all good enough words.
Or maybe good enough? Because Lena’s smile crinkles at the corners as she looks back at Webby, and it suddenly seems like there's an extra helping of warm sparkly sunlight catching in those eyes of hers.
She reaches up, grabbing the tip of Webby’s sword, and drapes her other hand over her face dramatically.
“Ack. My heart,” she says flatly, falling to one knee. “Alas, by your very sword and word, I am slain.”
“I’m serious!” Webby presses, keeping sword steady and level as she skips a few steps forward into arms’ reach, free hand coming up to catch Lena’s on the blade tip and squeeze it earnestly. “The grey and the highlights- It’s so cute, just like you! Like when you’re all standoffish and sly, right up until suddenly you’re not!”
The dramatic hand covering Lena’s face drops with a scoff. “Rude. I should seek damages. Maybe sue your whole rich family for slander.” She avoids Webby’s eyes as she says it. “When am I ever not sly?”
So she says, reaching over to re-adjust one of Webby’s rolled-back shirt sleeves, fixing where it’d gotten tugged out of place by the lunge- a rumpled cloth feeling that Webby knew that Lena knew Webby hated.
The grin on Webby’s beak feels as fizzy and sparkly as a freshly opened can of Pep. “I love you.”
It slips out, as easy to say as breathing.
There’s a split-second pause before Lena rolls her eyes. “Har har very funny. Look down, Pink.”
It’s a clear ploy to keep Webby from staring or noticing the little blush, and it’s also supposed to be a rebuttal, and it absolutely fails at both.
“Nope!” Webby chirps. “Don’t have too!”
She feels the sword. Steel tickling her ribs through sweater vest and shirt, blunt tip aimed up and in.
She’s been trying so hard not to laugh about it- The pitch black arm bleeding along floorboards and up into the sword’s shadow, abandoned blade floating in its hand, a cunning reverse grip and the potential energy of angles and leverages- the thrill of a move so smooth she only felt it afterwards.
She didn’t want to ruin it, the atmosphere, how cool it was, but now the giddy pitter-patter of her heart comes bubbling out.
“Heheh-” she leans in, giggling, “you’re holding it backwards, Lena. It’s a sword not a knife.”
Lena’s face is starting to match the dye in her hair. “Yeah, and? I sharpen quill tips not sword blades.” A last smoothing of Webby’s sleeve, neatly put in place, and Lena drops the hand to her knee with a sigh. “Apologize for calling me a sap.”
“Youuuuu’re bluuuushing~” Webby sing-songs instead, gently prying Lena’s other hand off the sword at her heart and flicking the tip up, tapping one pink cheek.
“I’m dying of exercise.” Lena deadpans, shoulders slumping in defeat. “These are my last moments. Farewell.”
“Wo-o-e!” the word comes out jumbled with more giggling. “Oh fair maiden, I pray thee- leave me not here to suffer anon without ye at my side, in misery and despair!” Webby’s sword falls with a clatter as she clasps Lena’s hand fervently between both of hers, also falling to one knee. “Fade not from my grasp, you blossoming briar thicket of my, uh, of the garden of um… my heart?” Frowning, Webby hunches in conspiratorially. “Is that a thing?”
Lena snickers. “It is now.”
“Oh good. Live! Don’t go into that shadowy realm!” Webby declaims, their clasped hands held aloft before her. Then she reconsiders. “Or, uh- if you do have to, for some awesome reason like winning a sword fight or something, just make sure you come right back out again. I’d miss you!”
“I’ll always come back to you, Webby.”
Soft and simple and following Webby’s words like an echo, Lena’s free hand comes up to cover Webby’s, layer over layer, hers in Webby’s in hers again.
Webby’s heart does a little skip in her chest. “Oh?”
“Like a bad penny.” Guiding their hands down again Lena leans in over them. A touch of their foreheads, loose swept bangs butting softly against Webby’s primly pinned up ones. Those heavy lidded eyes. Cavity-dark. The tooth-achingly sweetness in Lena's stare. “Always, and no matter what. I swear.”
Just for a moment a faint blue light glimmers up from between their fingers. Fizzing and rippling, it chimes softly without a sound. Then it’s gone.
Webby doesn’t look down to check. “I, um, I think you maybe did something magic just now.”
Lena shrugs, also not looking away, their foreheads knocking gently together with the move. “Shadows don’t have blood for blood-oaths. Sorry. Magic’s the best I can do.”
Webby giggles. The bubbles in her chest have sharp edges now, but they’re also warm and snuggly, like the hug she pulls Lena into.
“Silly,” she coos, nuzzling into grey sweater as Lena groans in protest even as her arms drape comfortably around Webby. “You don’t have to promise that. I’ll come get you wherever you go- nothing’s ever gonna stop me.”
“Heh.” A chuckle hums through Lena's chest and up against Webby’s cheek. “Is that a threat?”
“It’s a fact! I owe you three rescues already anyway, and you earn a freebee one every time you blink.”
More chuckling. “You’re like, the last person who’ll ever owe me anything.”
“Hmph. I can owe you stuff if I want too...”
The grumble comes out muffled. Probably because Webby is trying to burrow her way into Lena’s sweater and never leave. Huffing, she cinches her arms tighter around Lena’s ribs- or well, where ribs would be, if shadows had them.
Everything is soft and nice and Cozy. So she doesn’t know why she says it.
“I didn’t rescue you, the first time.”
Everything goes still and stiff for a second.
Then Lena sighs in a way that ruffles Webby’s pink hair bow. “Yeah you did.”
Webby doesn’t wanna argue the point or remember it, but- “Magica banished you right in front of me.”
“Uh- no.” Arms tighten, Lena’s frown a tactile full-body response. “Magica for real dispelled me like a half hour before then. I woke up again later because of you.”
“I didn’t do anything.” Webby whispers. “I fought her and I lost.”
She’d fought with everything she could, hoping, if she just broke the staff- but she hadn’t.
She’d failed. And then... “That was it.”
“You believed in me.”
It feels like Lena is trying to curl herself around Webby as they huddle there, hunched up on the otherwise empty stage, washing waves around them like faint applause.
“You didn’t take off the friendship bracelet, even after hearing how I was- that’d I’d-” The words catch. Lena swallows them hard. “-I mean, duck, Webby, the whole reason you had to fight her was because I-”
“Shhh…” Webby rubs a slow circle into Lena’s back, smoothing down the tremors like how Lena had smoothed down the sleeve of her shirt. “No. Magica did all that. She’s evil and bad and everything that happen that day was HER fault. Not yours.”
Lena breathes out hard, a sharp, painful contraction. “Whatever. Sure.”
“Lena, it’s true-”
“Then what about you, huh?”
Quick Lena with her quick brain and fast words, always spinning Webby around without even trying to. Saying things that make sense even if they don’t match the hollow space in Webby’s chest.
Lena goes on. “If it’s all her fault then none of it can be yours either, right? Look-”
Look- She doesn’t mean that literally though. She can’t, with how close she’s holding Webby now.
“Magic, that part of me that pulled me back- it’s- it’s just- It’s hope, trust, and pixie dust, Pink. It’s, ugh, it’s like- I don’t know- It needs stuff for it to happen, specific stuff, and-”
She stutters and stumbles.
Webby smiles into her sweater- funny, a sorceress who didn’t know how to talk sorcery.
“It’s usually got flashy lights and chanting involved.” Webby half jokes. “I didn’t do any of that.”
Lena doesn’t laugh.
“…you told her she was wrong.”
Lena’s also a poet and never at a loss for words for long.
“You said, there was part of me that wasn’t hers. Something that didn’t have anything to do with Magica. You told her we were friends.”
“You heard that?” Webby whispers.
“I felt it.”
An extra little squeeze from Lena’s arms- was that what it’d felt like-?
“The magic was listening. You said I was real.”
Webby’s smile melts away, twisting like the non-existent knife between her ribs. “Because you are!”
A laugh, dark and threadbare with ragged edges.
“Not right then I wasn’t.”
THAT slams into Webby like a punch to the solar plexus. THAT makes Webby push back and look up. “What do you mean?”
Lena cobbles together a crooked smile. Her eyeliner is smudged where it got smooshed against Webby’s hair.
“Oh, you know,” she's trying to sound airy, her eyes flickering away and again, uncomfortable in the way Lena only ever is when telling the truth, “I kinda. Didn’t feel like much of a friend in the, what, half second before she vacuumed me back up into the rest of her shadow? Like, she'd won, I'd helped, your lame hero Scrooge was at her mercy, and I wasn't gonna get a chance to explain or even say sorry.. And that was… you were sorta… that was the only other thing I had going for me, outside of Magica. You were, I mean. So like. Yeah.”
Webby doesn’t want to hear that. That she'd been the only thing, that Lena had ever been so close to actually- “That’s not true,” she argues, “what about the Featherweights?”
“The Feather-? HA! Pfft!”
Cackling Lena slumps back. Her hands slide up to brace on Webby’s shoulders as she shakes her head.
“No shade on the Featherweights, I totally loved watching Magica fake-retch every time I played their music- But nah, magic needs more than that.”
“If it was good enough for you then it should be good enough for any stupid magic.” Webby grumbles at the floor.
“That’s not how it works, Pink.”
Lena’s voice is fond. Her eyes, when Webby looks up into them, are steady and serious.
“I’m a shadow." Lena says. "Shadows mimic stuff- sure we can twist it around a bit, distort things- but we need someone to cast us first and make it happen. My whole life the only person I had was Magica. I was her shadow, literally, but also just… in every other way too. It was just me and her, me and wanting to get away from her. Until you came summersaulting along.”
“Handspringing.” Webby corrects automatically.
“Handspringing, right.” Lena echoes. “You showed up and everything changed.”
Something in Lena’s voices changes too as she says it.
“You told Magica I was real, even though I was for real her shadow spy and you knew that- but you said- And then suddenly, I wasn’t. I wasn’t just her shadow anymore. I was with you. I had- magic, I could protect you- I could reach over and yank myself out of the shadow realm, our of her shadow, and when she dispelled me again, it didn’t work." Lena's face is fierce, dark eyes burning as she looks at Webby. "She could only get rid of the shadowy part, not the new stuff, the magic, the friend, the whole rest me.” She smiles. “The rest of me is yours.”
Webby gnaws on her lower beak, thinking suddenly of Scrooge diving into his money bin, and how she kinda wants to dive like that too right now, right back into Lena’s sweater.
“…really?”
It barely comes out at all, a tiny little question that feels bigger than the whole sky hanging over them.
Lena squeezes on her shoulders gently, reassuring.
“Always.”
And Webby-
Webby leans in and kisses her quickly on the cheek. “Good.”
Bounding to her feet she kicks both forgotten sword blades up into her hands and flips one expertly, offering it hilt first to Lena, grinning and bouncing on her heels to the Bizet - Carmen Suite No. 1, Overture: I. Prélude thrum of her heart.
“Then face me in honorable combat!” she dares, “the other part of you demands it! Or is asking you very nicely and needs to work out some energy before she explodes into confetti and glitter!”
Gingerly Lena reaches up with one hand to touch her cheek, right where Webby’d kissed her.
Then she flops backwards onto the floor, groaning.
“Webby…”
“C’mon, please? Please please please?” Webby pods her in the chest with the sword hilt, dancing in place and laughing. “You can use your shadows and magic! I’d LOVE to try disarming something not bound to cruel realities of mortal flesh and bone!”
“My shadow? Pink. I AM a shadow.”
“Oh? Oh!”
Cocking her head Webby contemplates the complete lack of any shadow on the floor under Lena.
“Oooh right, shadows don’t cast shadows, uh duuuuh. But I saw something! Black! Non-corporeal! Vaguely Lena shaped and juuuust the right mix of terrifying and cool!”
“You mean the grim existential ooze of my true self,” Lena drawls dryly, “seeping through the fractures that my very existence creates in veil between our world and an endless realm of dark amorphous entropy, through which otherworldly horrors beyond mortal ken and beings of fell wild magic may someday squirm through and into the mortal plane like the corrupting roots of a strangling tree following tiny cracks in solid stone until the entire façade of reality crumbles and entombs us all into it ruins?”
Webby stops bouncing. “Wow. Is that from Violet’s newest dissertation draft?”
Lena pouts. It is the most adorable thing. “It would’ve been, if she ever listened to me. But does she want her dumb paper to be not boring? Noooo…”
“Dumb paper.” Snickering, Webby pokes her again. “Oh she must’ve LOVED that!”
“Why d’you think I got kicked outta our room in the first place?”
With a last rub to her cheek- pink again and probably doomed to stay that way for a bit- Lena sits up and looks at the offered sword hilt, her expression one of great distaste.
Webby wiggles the sword enticingly.
“You don’t even have to stand up,” she reminds Lena, batting her eyes. “An amazing sorceress like you could just, wheee! Do the floating trick!”
“I still have to move to do magic.” But Lena sighs as she says it, already flicking her wrist so the sword hilt glows a pale blue, now enameled in soft, scintillating light. “You get that, right? I gotta do the gestures and everything. With my arms. Like a workout.”
The sword lifts as Lena raises her hand and Webby skips back into the en garde position, grinning. “Movements are good for avoiding carpel tunnel!”
“I type my stuff, Webby. With my thumbs.”
“Still-!”
Lena’s phone blinks to life just then, cutting her off.
Webby doesn’t know the song it plays, something bright and peppy and sung in Korean by what sounds like five teen boys, but it has to mean something important from the way Lena instantly reaches for it.
She fishes it out of a pocket with her free hand, and Webby watches patiently as she unlocks and reads the text.
Well, mostly patiently.
Webby maaaaybe takes a few light swings at the floating sword, to test it’s give and play. Just a few though. Because she can’t stop moving. Or because if she stops moving the inertia of Lena’s words- “The rest of me is yours” and “Always”- will crash though her internal organs and make a gooey, mushy, wonderful pasta sauce of the girl then formerly known as Webbigail Vanderquack.
Her next swing binds on the other sword’s edge and she twirls it around, giggling to herself. “Who’s it from?” She asks as a distraction.
“Vi.” Lena’s eyebrows lift as she reads. “She says-
‘Whatever strange new arcane phenomenon you unleashed mere moments ago, I have registered it on my ectoplasmic crystalline scryers, and demand a full observational account as soon as I am no longer mired in erasing all your absurdly dramatic additions to my freehand draft No. 14C. Be advised, I am in no mood for failures to comply. My future doctoral thesis hangs by a thread, as does my patience, and with it, your very lives. Regards and love to you and Webbigail. Violet.’
Slowly Webby lowers her sword.
Lena looks up at her, a small, worried furrow digging between her eyes.
“… you didn’t, uh,” a nervous swallow travels down the length of Lena’s throat, “see what kind of magic thing I did earlier. Did you?”
Webby shakes her head as the back of her neck prickles uneasily, sensing danger.
“No… I was. Kinda busy… I think it glowed?” She hazards weakly. “It was coming from our hands, maybe?”
“My hand or your hand, or both?”
“No idea.”
“Any patterns or shapes? Thaumatic fractals?”
“Uh-” Webby blinks and tilts her head. “What?”
“Like how the magic moved or something.” Lena waves a hand over the words she also clearly doesn’t get. “She’s only got five pages on it, and she wants at least a dozen… If you saw literally anything-”
“Oh! Um! …No.”
Well she HAD seen the most beautiful eyes in the world, which she thought was pretty magical, but Violet had covered her ears and groaned very loudly the last time Webby tried explaining how pretty Lena was, so that probably wouldn’t help.
Lena drops the phone and claws at her hair. “Jamm checazz’,” a low, guilt-wracked Neapolitan moan of despair, “she’s gonna kill us. Worse! She'll be disappointed in us.”
Webby eyes the phone and then checks the angle of the setting sun, just as it disappears over the horizon. “At least it’s beautiful day to die.” She muses.
“Webby.” Lena’s hand drags down her face, catching the smear of her eyeliner. “Our final day is already over. It’s evening.”
“Exactly! Dark and lovely and draped in shadow. Veeeery atmospheric.”
Lena sighs and shakes her head. “Well if we’re going to die anyway,” she relents, staggering to her feet. “Might as well go down fighting.”
Webby’s bouncing renews at double pace as she lifts her sword. “Each other!?”
“Sure, what the heck. Why not.”
“SUCCESS! I shall end thee rightly!”
Lena levels a warning finger, gesturing her own sword into position with her other hand. “You keep that pommel screwed ON, okay? You’ve got an arm like a major leaguer, and if Tea Time finds out I’m in any way part of why there’s a hole knocked in a public area, she will ALSO kill me. Probably with an English muffin. Or a stale scone or whatever.”
Webby gasps and doesn’t hear most of that though.
“OH OH- the pommel thing! You really WERE listening to my history of historical martial arts presentation!”
“You were glowing the whole way through it, Webby. Looking away wasn’t an option.”
“Aww!”
Lena rolls her eyes. Her hand flicks, sword reaching to tap Webby’s- and Webby dips the tip of hers just enough to avoid the test, grinning hard, chest bursting with giant flesh-eating butterflies of bliss.
Technically speaking, Lena wasn’t the best or most convenient choice of a sparring partner- Dewy would put up a better fight, Huey would follow all the rules and point out every flaw in Webby’s form, even Louie she could bribe and or threaten into a duel, if she wanted to.
She doesn’t want to.
She wants the slouching, smirking girl with smudged eyeshadow, and for Lena’s attention to stay fixed on her and ONLY her as they start circling each other in the blues and soft greys of twilight, prowling the empty stage together. She wants to watch Lena watching her. Just her. Just for a little while! A few minutes, that was all.
“Ready?” She asks, maybe a little breathless.
Lena smiles, under-lit by blue magic on a velvet backdrop of painted stars. “Always.”
Or maybe Webby want to keep looking at this forever. That’s another way of saying ‘always’, isn’t it?
Grinning, she lunges forward and easily pins her sword to Lena’s heart again, feeling- at the exact same time- a soft press over her own.
Hers, Lena had said. Her heart. Property of Webby Vanderquack McDuck, tucked safely inside Lena’s laughing chest.
She likes the sound of that.