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“Well, it bloody took you long enough, didn’t it?”
Magnus opens his eyes.
He lies flat on his back, and above him is a sky so bright with starlight that he has to squint for a moment to adjust to it. It’s like staring into a burning riot of color; a swirling palette of clouds dusted with vibrant pinpricks of every shade.
“Whoa,” he breathes.
“Not many people know this, but that’s actually why it’s called the astral plane,” explains the voice that woke him.
Magnus turns his head to see Kravitz, death’s handsome harbinger, hunkered beside him. It doesn’t take him long to put two and two together from there.
“I’m dead,” he says.
“You are that, yes,” Kravitz agrees.
Magnus nods and faces the stars again, and there is a beat while that knowledge settles. Then his heart lurches.
“What about Merle and Taako?” he asks, sitting up.
“Still alive,” Kravitz assures him, holding both palms out toward Magnus as if to steady him. “Both still alive, thanks to you. They’re a bit… dispirited, but --”
“As long as they’re alive,” Magnus sighs, dragging both hands down his face. He looks back up at the stars, and for a moment the two of them sit together in silence.
“So what now?” Magnus asks when the moment passes.
“Whatever you’d like,” Kravitz replies, standing. “I seem to recall that there might be one or two people around these parts who’d be anxious to see you; am I remembering that right?”
Magnus’s throat tightens, but he smiles and tries to laugh.
“I was hoping you’d be the one to bring that up,” he says. “I was afraid to ask. Afraid that maybe… I don’t know. That there was some rule. That I wouldn’t be able to see her again.”
Kravitz nods, offering Magnus a hand to pull him up.
“Yeah, we get that a lot, actually. People are always convinced that there’s a catch. The way the Raven Queen figures it, though, you lot have been through enough. Come on, this way.”
Magnus stands and follows Kravitz. He tries to distract himself from his mounting nerves by taking in more of the plane surrounding him. The grass on which they walk is a deep and velvety blue; a perfect accent for the blazing sky. There are dark, twisting trees unlike anything Magnus has seen before, and shimmering buildings that shift with his mind as though he is dreaming them. There are people all over, doing all the same kinds of things people have always done: they are talking animatedly and sharing meals with one another; they are reading books and playing games, and they are doing it all without the undercurrent of urgency that characterized life on the material plane. There is a unique gracefulness about the mundane in this place. Magnus can’t help but wonder if he’ll ever get used to it.
“The stakes may never be quite as high as they were when you were alive,” Kravitz explains, as though reading Magnus’s thoughts, “but we’ve made significant improvements in recent years regarding our accommodation of adventurous souls, so don’t worry about feeling cooped up. Your contentment in the afterlife is our number one priority.”
“Oh, uh. Yeah. Thanks.”
Eventually, it becomes clear that Kravitz is leading him to one of the shifting, dreamlike buildings. As they get closer, however, it seems to solidify, until they are about ten feet away and it has become achingly familiar. Magnus stops walking.
It’s his home.
It’s the carpentry shop where, under Steven Waxmen’s tutelage, Magnus became the pride of Raven’s Roost. In one of the apartments on the second floor is the bed Magnus had shared with his wife. It’s everything he thought he’d lost forever.
It takes him a moment to remember how to breathe.
“You all right?” Kravitz asks him.
Magnus isn’t sure, but he makes himself nod. Kravitz smiles and gives his shoulder a squeeze.
“Right,” he says. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Wait,” Magnus says, stopping him. “Just -- one more thing. Before you go.”
“Anything,” Kravitz says.
“I -- I know there’s probably only so much you can do,” Magnus says, “being a bounty hunter for the Raven Queen and all. I know there are -- rules and stuff you have to follow. But as much as you can, please. Please look out for Merle and Taako.”
Kravitz gives a strained smile.
“I’ll… I’ll do what I can,” he says. “Now go on. She’s been waiting.”
With that, Kravitz opens a rift in the air beside him and passes through it, leaving Magnus alone.
Magnus takes a deep breath. And then another. And then one more before his feet begin to move.
At the door a muscle memory he can’t believe he still has reaches for a ring of keys he lost long ago. He smiles grimly and curls his hand into a fist. He pulls himself together.
He knocks.
“I’ll get it!”
Her voice knocks the air clean out of him -- a solid punch to the gut. Tears jump to his eyes, almost more reflex than emotion, and he hopes frantically that this isn’t just another dream for him to wake from.
The lovingly carved wooden door swings wide, and a dark-skinned woman wearing faded trousers and a loose-fitting blouse stands in the frame. She has to tilt her head up to get a good look at Magnus’s face, and once she does her hands go to her hips. After a moment’s study, a smile curls into her lips.
“You boys put on quite a show down there,” Julia says.
Magnus hiccups something like a laugh. He shrugs.
“Well, we knew you were watching,” he explains. “Also I didn’t want you to, like, divorce me from beyond the grave because I stopped being cool, you know?”
It’s her turn to laugh this time, a clear, ringing sound that seems to expand in Magnus’s chest until he feels he might burst.
“Fair enough,” she says. “A woman’s gotta have standards.”
Julia looks at him for a moment more, seeming to reread his features, smiling and smiling and smiling at her every favorite part. Magnus thinks that if time were to freeze him to this moment he’d be alright with it, but eventually, smiling even wider, Julia opens her arms to him.
“C’mere,” she says.
Magnus bends for her, and Julia throws her arms around his neck. He lifts her off the ground and holds her tightly against him, and he can feel her laughter in his chest as he buries his face in the scent of her hair. He can feel her breath in his ear as she whispers the words that undo him:
“I am so, so proud of you, Magnus.”
She presses a kiss to his scruffy cheek, and Magnus begins, finally, to sob. All the pain he’d held bound and suspended within him since the day he’d lost her bursts from him in heaving gasps -- all the grief and the guilt he had carried. He lets it all go, and he lets her fill the space.
He doesn’t know how long he holds her there; just that eventually his weeping begins to subside. Julia pulls away from him then, but only far enough to catch his lips in a long, tender kiss.
“I love you, Mags,” she says, her own tears quavering in her voice.
Magnus kisses her again, slow and gentle, savoring every movement of her mouth against his.
“I love you, Jules.”
Julia sobs a brittle laugh and presses her face briefly to his shoulder.
“Well, do you, um. Do you want to come inside?” she asks after a moment.
Magnus nods and sets her down, keeping a hold on one of her hands just in case.
“After you.”
Julia leads him across the threshold of the shop, and Magnus pulls the lovingly carved door shut behind him. He lets his lungs fill with oak and ash and mahogany.
He rests.