Fandom: The Adventure Zone

Ship: Julia/Magnus

Rating: Teen

Wordcount: 2,684

Notes:

It’s not what Julia would have thought, the Raven Queen’s office. Sure, it’s large and regal, fairly imposing like the lady herself, but it’s got none of the dark velvet drapery or brass furnishings with ominous imagery that had flashed before Julia’s mind’s eye when she was summoned to this meeting. Instead there’s a desk and chair, paperwork and filing cabinets. It’s big, but ordinary.

Death has never been what Julia expected.

The Raven Queen looks up when Julia knocks tentatively on her open door and waves her in. “Please,” she says, gesturing to the empty seat on the far side of her desk. “Sit.”

Julia sits, tucking her skirt carefully under her. “Yes, my lady?”

A funny look crosses the Raven Queen’s face, almost as if she’s amused. Julia has seen this look from her before, during their brief, passing conversations, and as she always has, she lets it pass uncommented. After a moment, the Raven Queen removes her glasses. Placing them folded on the desk, she gestures to Julia.

“Tell me about yourself,” she says, and Julia blinks.

About me? she almost says, but thinks better of it. It strikes her as unwise to second-guess a deity.

Her confusion must show on her face, however, because the Raven Queen clarifies. “About your life, I mean. I’d like to know who you were before.”

Who she was. That’s a simple enough question.

She tells the Raven Queen about her childhood. She tells her about the time she broke her leg thinking she could fly. She omits her first name, the name her dad gave her, but she tells her of the joy of choosing her second one. She tells her about the hug her dad gave her when she shared it with him, the way her relief was a pressure welling up within her until she thought something inside her might burst.

“He raised me inside his shop,” she explains. “I knew how to take an order for him before I knew how to multiply. It was his furniture that people came in for, but it was me they trusted to haggle with them. It almost felt like an intrusion when Dad decided he was ready for an apprentice and brought in Magnus.”

Abruptly the bottom of Julia’s stomach drops out from under her. She feels, as she always does, like she’s been walking the familiar bridges of Raven’s Roost and a slat has crumbled under her foot.

She had once assumed that there would be no grief in death. Death is not what she expected.

When she looks up, the emotion finally settling back to the periphery of her mind, the Raven Queen has cocked her head. “Tell me about him,” she says.

For the first time since she entered the room, Julia smiles.

They first met in Raven's Roost's apothecary. It was still in its own shop, then, back before Callen and his cronies had nearly run Dia the apothecary out of business. Julia was picking up her monthly supply of the potion Dia made for her, and her dad had come along for the walk.

It was busy that day, abnormally so, but Julia had just made it to the front of the line. Dia was fussing behind the counter, measuring and pouring Julia’s potion out into a series of smaller vials, when a voice from somewhere behind Julia shouted her dad's name.

"Magnus!" her dad replied, and Julia tossed a quick glance over her shoulder. A burly young man she didn't recognize was making his way across the room, weaving carefully through the crowd. She turned back just in time to see Dia capping off the final vial.

"Now, make sure you follow your schedule with these," Dia said as she packaged up the vials and handed them over. "And don't get impatient. Too much can—"

"—can have the opposite effect, I know." Julia looked up from counting out her money long enough to shoot her a fond smile. "You tell me that every month, Dia."

Dia grinned toothily. "I've been mixing this up for girls like you longer than you've been alive, Miss Waxman. I know what I'm doing and want to make sure you do, too."

"You tell me that every month, too." Julia handed Dia the money and took the bag with her potion in it. She was about to say her goodbyes when someone jostled her, almost knocking her aside.

"Sorry," said the young man who'd called out to her dad. He was too busy shaking her dad's hand vigorously to do so much as look at her. Up close like this, Julia took in just how big he was, how muscular and sturdy. He was at least half a head taller than her, and she was no slouch. She disliked him instantly.

"Come by the shop later," her dad was saying, "I have a few new jobs for you."

The man nodded, painfully eager. "I'll be there as soon as I can," he said, and her dad laughed.

"No rush, son. Oh," he added, noticing Julia watching them, "have you two met? Magnus, this is my daughter, Julia."

Magnus turned to look at Julia, smiling — and then he froze. His eyes widened. Several moments too late, he said, "Nice to, uh. Nice to meet you."

The longer he looked at her, the more heat rushed to Julia's face. "You as well," she said politely.

No response. She glanced questioningly at her dad, who only smiled at her. Magnus was still staring and Julia was suddenly, horrendously aware of herself: her hair that hadn't quite grown out yet, her jaw that was still a little too prominent, the way she was clutching a bag of potions like a lifeline. Julia squared her shoulders and met Magnus's gaze. "Are you a carpenter too?" she asked.

This seemed to snap Magnus out of whatever trance he was in. He blinked once and nodded fervently. "Yes, ma'am. Steven — I mean, your father has been teaching me."

Julia's dad rolled his eyes fondly. "He's being humble, Julia. Magnus is a very talented young man."

"Well," Julia said, not quite able to keep the stiffness out of her voice, "it was nice to meet you. If you'll excuse me…"

"Oh, of course!" Magnus said, actually thwacking his forehead with one large hand. "You two must be busy. Sorry to keep you."

"Not a problem," Julia's dad replied, smiling again. "We'll see you later, I hope."

He and Magnus said their farewells while Julia turned to wave goodbye to Dia. Julia and her dad pushed their way out of the tavern and into the open air.

"What was his problem?" Julia asked once she was sure they were out of earshot.

Her dad just laughed.

“I hated him at first,” she says, laughing a little herself at the memory. “And it wasn’t just that first meeting. It didn’t take me that long, after, to figure out why he’d been staring, but somehow that just made it worse for me.”

“Worse how?”

She shrugs. “Worse in that… I mean, like I said, he was an intruder, to me. It had always been me and my dad, just us two, and here was this mountain of a man Dad had suddenly adopted as his own. Magnus following on my heels like an overgrown puppy just made me feel like he was trying to insinuate himself into my life even more.”

Julia is silent for a moment, remembering. Remembering, and missing her husband.

Eventually the Raven Queen says, “So how did he change your mind?”

Julia thinks about this. “Gradually.”

Some traveling group from the country had arrived in Raven’s Roost, and they’d set themselves up playing music at the tavern. They weren’t awful. People were dancing. Julia was tapping her foot to the beat. She wouldn’t pay to hear them play, she thought, leaning against the bar and sipping her ale, but as free entertainment they were diverting enough.

It was while she was gazing at the lute player and thinking this that Magnus appeared at her side.

“Julia!” he said, eyes bright and skin glowing with the glow of the slightly drunk and very happy.

Julia sighed inwardly. “Magnus,” she returned, offering him a smile and raising her mug to him.

He held out a hand to her and bowed theatrically. “May I have this dance?”

Shit. Julia racked her brain for a polite way to decline. Magnus may not have been her favourite person, but he was her dad’s apprentice and Julia didn’t want to be rude. Seconds passed and Julia came up with nothing, and Magnus kept looking at her, so hopeful it was hard to look away. With acute dismay, she heard the word, “Sure,” slip out of her mouth.

Magnus’s entire demeanor lit up. His posture straightened, his smile widened, he wrapped his fingers carefully around hers when she put them in his hand. Julia set her drink down on the bar and was tugged into the open space that had been cleared for dancing.

She was a good dancer. She knew this about herself. Magnus, on the other hand, was awful.

He must have been dancing before he came to get her, and she was surprised she hadn’t noticed, because his limbs went everywhere. He danced with the confidence of a small child who hadn’t yet learned social shame and moved like a frenzied elephant. A fond warmth trickled into Julia’s chest before she caught and quashed it, and she kept dancing, keeping a careful distance.

It was when the group transitioned from the upbeat fare they’d been playing for a while to something slower that danger really came knocking.

They hadn’t been out on the floor long enough for Julia to politely excuse herself under the guise of exhaustion, so she didn’t argue when Magnus moved cautiously closer to her. She put her arms around his shoulders. He set his hands gently on her waist. He promptly stepped on her feet two, three, four times.

“Holy shit,” Julia said, “what do you have, six left feet?”

Horror dawned on her as she realized what she’d said. Her dad was going to kill her. Before she could scramble to apologize, though, Magnus started laughing a big, booming laugh.

He laughed so hard and so loud that several other sets of dancers nearby stopped to stare at him. Magnus continued unfazed. After a few seconds Julia found herself giggling, too, at the absurdity of it all, at the sheer joy in Magnus’s laughter, at her own big mouth. A dwarf couple swayed past them, giving them a wide, wide berth, and Julia found she didn’t care at all.

“That was probably the start.”

She’s been doing so well, she made it through the whole story, but somehow it’s this last word that makes her voice catch. Grief claws its way back up her throat, pulling at her tongue. The Raven Queen waits patiently for her to gather herself.

Once she feels she can speak again without crying — and once the peculiar shame of being seen in such a vulnerable state has passed — Julia continues.

“That was the start," she says. "But it was during the rebellion that I really saw him for who he was. I hated Callen as much as anyone, and when the time came to resist I was one of the first to volunteer.”

“You were one of the rebels,” the Raven Queen says. It isn’t a question, but Julia nods.

“They put me to work strategizing. I’m good at that, I’ve always had a brain for it. I helped map out the best places to ambush his men in the beginning, the most important places to rally our defenses. And Magnus… he helped. He helped a lot. They didn’t make him the leader for nothing. I—”

She cuts herself off. She changes tack.

“That’s something I loved about him,” she says. “Love, I mean. I still love it. The duality of him. He’s brilliant at what he does, and he has this fire in him, but he always had a… a tenderness, too. We were always laughing. He always made me laugh.”

A drop of sweat trickled down Julia’s scalp, past her hairline and down her face and neck. It slid uncomfortably over the curve of her right breast to be absorbed by her bra and Julia prayed to whoever was listening that it wasn’t visible from a few feet away, where everyone she’d ever said so much as “how do you do” to was seated.

Magnus saw it, though. She could tell by the sympathetic scrunch to his nose.

The cleric presiding over them took no notice of Julia’s discomfort, however. “I, Magnus,” she droned.

“I, Magnus,” Magnus repeated, unscrunching.

“Choose you, Julia.”

“Choose you, Julia.”

“To be my lawfully wedded wife.”

“To be my waffly— uh, lawfully—”

Julia snorted. Before she even realized what she’d done, Magnus squeezed her hands and said, “And pancakey. And crêpey and sconey and—”

She couldn’t help herself. Laughter exploded out of her. It filled the gazebo they were standing in, this beautiful gazebo Magnus had made, and traveled out, she was sure, in all directions. Trying to stop just made it worse; she couldn’t seem to contain it within her body. Julia thought back to their first dance, the first time they’d laughed together, and she laughed even harder.

Am I hysterical? some level-headed part of her thought. Are these hysterics? The cleric looked like she was getting more and more annoyed with Julia by the second and Julia could hear some people in their audience laughing, too, and thought, horrifyingly, that they might be laughing at her, but when she looked at Magnus he was beaming. He was, in fact, looking at her the way he always did when he made her laugh: like he’d accomplished some incredible feat. Like he’d saved Raven’s Roost all over again, somehow, just by tickling her funny bone. It was Magnus’s grin and his crinkly eyes that got her, finally, back under control.

“All right,” she told the cleric, her mouth still quirking against her will. “You can tell us to kiss now.”

She falls silent for a while. The Raven Queen waits.

Finally, Julia says, “It isn’t fair.”

The Raven Queen doesn’t do her the disservice of asking. Instead, she says, “It rarely is.”

“I was going to be someone.”

“You already were someone. You are someone now.”

“I know. But I…” She pauses for a moment, thinks of a way to phrase this. “I miss the me who could have been.”

The Raven Queen inclines her head, acknowledging this. Acknowledging all of it.

Julia rubs her eyes. Exhaustion has set in, and she feels it to her bones. “Why did you ask me here?” she asks finally. “Why ask me these questions?”

The Raven Queen smiles. She has a kind smile. “I was curious about you.”

“Why?”

“Because Istus came to visit today. She told me about a trio of exceptional adventurers who were recently caught up in something… interesting. Your Magnus was one of them. It reminded me that some time back — and I do hope you’ll forgive my lateness on this, I am a busy goddess and it seems that something or other always needs my urgent attention — but some time back, Magnus met my bounty hunter and asked him to pass on a message. He wants us to tell you that he loves you.”

Even now, Julia thinks, startling herself. But it’s true, isn’t it? It’s been so many years for him. By now he must be someone she can’t fathom. And he loves her even now.

He loves the memory of her, of course. He loves the her that was. But she thinks, maybe, that he would love this version of her, too.

Julia smiles back. “Thank you,” she tells the Raven Queen, pushing back her chair to stand. The Raven Queen dismisses her, and Julia turns to leave. Maybe that’s enough, she thinks, and then: Yes. For now, that can be enough.