Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Magic Brian wasn’t the first corrupted Seeker Killian ever had to hunt down, but he was the first she knew well. If you’d have asked her a week before, she’d have told you he was incorruptible. He wasn’t a violent guy. He liked everyone, sometimes in a way that was off-putting, but still. A lot of people at the Bureau came with baggage, and when he came up to them in the courtyard and just started talking like they’d been friends for years, they thought he was fucking with them. That’s what Killian had thought when they first met. But that was the thing about Brian—he was always sincere, always genuinely happy to see you, and eventually Killian grew to love that about him.

Only Brian could have tamed that giant spider. It took him more than a year of bringing bags of crickets, of sitting by the mouth of its cave and talking to it, before it let him get close. But afterwards, those two were inseparable. Killian hadn’t known that spiders had the capacity to care, but that one did. It leaned on him and tapped on his shoulder when there was danger coming, and it protected him like he was its baby, and he loved it in return.

If anyone was going to be able to refuse the call to violence, it would have been him.

In the crowd, Killian could see Brian’s fiancé. There was an empty chair next to them, and that space was like a punch to the gut. She was supposed to have danced at his wedding. He was supposed to be here, talking too much, building bridges. But his fiancé was smiling at her, and there was no jealousy or bitterness in that smile. It was sincere, genuine, and maybe Brian was here after all, just a little bit.

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“Auntie Carey!” A tiny Dwarven girl burst into the room where Carey was getting ready, her arms around Carey’s legs before she could even process what had happened.

“Hey, Galena. It’s good to see you.” She reached down to ruffle the girl’s hair, feeling a smile creep across her face. It was hard to be anxious when Galena, the youngest of Boyland’s many, many children, was in the room.

Another Dwarven girl, this one a little older and wearing a blue ribbon in her hair, peeked around the doorframe. “Sorry, Aunt Carey, but she wouldn’t shut up until she saw you.”

“Were you being very loud?” Carey asked Galena, hoisting her up onto her lap.

Galena nodded, beaming.

“Well, that’s no good. What happened to wanting to be sneaky like your Aunt?”

“Being loud is better! You get what you want when you’re loud! And anyways, Aunt Killian is loud.”

Carey laughed at that. “That’s true. She’s very loud. So maybe you should go bother her and let me finish getting ready.”

“Okay!” Galena squirmed out of Carey’s lap and scampered out of the room, presumably to make trouble somewhere else. Her older sister turned to leave, too, but Carey watched people closely, and so she caught the tightening of the girl’s expression.

“Luna, come here a minute.”

Luna stepped into the room, the smile fixed on her face, but now that Carey knew to look, she could see the sadness under it.

She stood up and put her arms around Luna. “I miss him too,” she said.

Luna pressed her head into Carey’s scaly shoulder. “Galena isn’t even sad,” she said. “She barely remembers Dad. And Mom keeps saying he’d want us to be happy. But how am I supposed to do that?”

“That’s a big question. I wish I knew the answer. But I think it’s okay for us to be sad today, and to be happy, too.”

“I guess.”

Carey didn’t know what else to say. Boyland’s absence was a hole in her gut, too. He’d already been at the BOB when she’d joined, and he’d taken her in, helped her find friends. It was like he couldn’t stop being a dad, even living that far from his comically large family. He should have been here now to calm her nerves, to blow smoke in her face and make her laugh. He should have been there for this girl, who was now crying in her unprepared arms.

She was saved from having to say anything else by a tremendous crash from down the hall. Both she and Luna winced, and Luna pulled away. “I better make sure Galena hasn’t smashed anything important,” she said, turning for the door.

“Hey, Luna,” Carey called after her. “You forgot this!” She tossed Luna the bow that she’d stolen from her hair while they hugged.

Luna flashed her a watery smile, clutched the ribbon to her chest, and headed out to find her sister.

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Carey and Killian hired a band for their wedding.

It was the last bit of planning they did. They chose a venue, bullied Merle into officiating, picked out cake flavors and invitation fonts and place settings quickly and without much fuss. Neither of them were prone to indecision. The only choice Killian had worried over was proposing, and that wasn’t because she wasn’t sure that she wanted to spend her life with Carey, but because she wasn’t confident Carey felt the same way. (When she did finally propose, Carey had laughed and brought her over to the puzzle box, which Killian had been stuck on for weeks. “Of course I want to marry you, dumbass,” she’d said, and opened the box to show the wooden ring).

The impending apocalypse slowed down their planning, but after the Day of Story and Song, after the rebuilding efforts had gone far enough that bakers and florists and printers had opened their doors again, they didn’t waste any time.

And yet, it was less than a month before the wedding when Killian finally sighed and said, “We need to do something about the music.” She hadn’t been able to talk about it, had barely been able to make herself think about hiring someone. Unpicking the assumptions she’d made, the image she’d created for herself when Carey said yes—when she said yes—took a long time. Thinking about that day with a hired band, or even Lup, who had offered to help, made her sick to her stomach.

Because Johann wasn’t going to play at their wedding.

Killian and Johann hadn’t been friends, exactly, but the BOB was a small place, and you get used to people’s presence. Johann had played at every event, and lots of moments that were otherwise uneventful. Of course he would play at their wedding. Of course he would.

Carey and Killian hired a band for their wedding. They picked one that didn’t have a violin.

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The first time Carey met Captain Bain, she was sure she was going to hate him. Just looking at him, she knew he was a narc. He had a stick so far up his ass, she could almost see it coming out his ear. His first name was Captain, for fuck’s sake. She went to see his Test of Initiation with everyone else, expecting to watch him shatter under the unexpected attacks.

That’s not what happened.

In a fight, Captain Bain was calm and sharp and surprisingly adaptable. He took on his part of the test with a kind of unself-conscious focus that she’d never seen before. And then, when everyone went to congratulate him on his victory, he smiled and joked with them like he’d known them all for years.

Carey hung back, watching. She was kind of pissed off, to be honest. How dare he come in here and act like he belonged? This was her home and she was not having it invaded by some fucking cop.

She stated hitting the gym and the dojo at the same time as him, keeping an eye on him as he trained. If he did fifty pull-ups, she did fifty-one. If he fought the training androids on hard, she fought them on impossible. And what made it worse was, he didn’t even seem to notice that he had a rival. He smiled at her when they passed, but didn’t try to make conversation with her the way he did with everyone else.

Carey seethed.

And then, one day, after she’d executed a particularly sick series of moves that culminated with her taking a training android’s head off with her tail, Captain Bain approached her.

“You’re really good at that rogue stuff,” he told her.

“It’s my job,” she said, not looking at him.

“I know. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine.”

She turned to walk away, but he caught her by the shoulder. “Any chance you could show me how to do that kick? It seems like something I could really use in the field.”

And that was it. As soon as she started teaching him (maybe as soon as he acknowledged that she was better than him), her anger melted away, and she saw the affable and competent man that her coworkers knew.

The next week, Captain Captain Bain returned to Goldcliff to take up his post as a secret agent. Carey never saw him again.

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Not every goodbye is a heartbreak. Not every goodbye is forever. Fisher and Junior probably wouldn’t have been at Carey and Killian’s wedding anyway, even if they were on Faerun—the logistics of that alone would be enough to terrify any wedding planner—but their absence was still felt. Magnus and Lucretia would have been surprised to know that, as they watched Killian swing Carey around the dance floor, they had the same thought: If Fisher had taken in this moment, it would be the sweetest thing they’d ever tasted.

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And now we get to the big one. Carey and Killian lost friends in the fight to reclaim the relics, and they lost more on the Day of Story and Song, but no one left a deeper, more hug-sized hole than Noelle. They’d known Boyland for longer, but he went home every weekend. He was older than them—he had a life outside of their little trio. He hadn’t needed them. Noelle had. She was like their baby sister.

They were supposed to protect her.

It didn’t matter that she was living on borrowed time, or that the sacrifice had been her choice, or that she’d saved thousands of lives and maybe the entire universe. They were supposed to protect her, and she was gone.

Sometimes, the guilt that came with that knowledge drove Killian to the nearest punching bag in the middle of the night, where she’d fight alone until the skin on her knuckles cracked and bled. Sometimes, it drove Carey to curl up in spaces that were too small for her, where she would hide and refuse to come out for hours at a time. It drove them to their first real fight, where they blamed each other to cover up for the way they were blaming themselves—and then it sent them back into each other’s arms, to the only person who could really understand what it meant to fail that badly.

But of course, it wasn’t just the guilt. There was good old-fashioned grief, too. Noelle hadn’t been a symbol or a burden, she’d been a person, and a person they loved. She gave a shit about everybody. She could tell when someone needed a drink or an ear or a shoulder to cry on, and she’d give it to them. She was so straightforward, in an environment where people were bullshitting each other all the time. Killian most missed the way she’d laughed, how it burst out of her like she didn’t expect it, like she’d never laughed enough. Carey missed how positive she always was, how she never let anyone else get down on themselves. Carey got down on herself a lot these days.

When people die, it’s almost never clean. There’s always something they leave undone.
It was Carey who found the letter, which lay a half-written on the desk in Noelle’s room. It was addressed to her parents. She never got to send it.

If the other lost members of the BOB left holes in the wedding, Noelle turned it into goddamn Swiss Cheese. She should have helped Killian with her hair. She should have gone dress shopping with Carey. She should have helped them pick the menu, since she knew better than anyone how to source the best food. She should have been laughing with Magnus, chasing after his new dog alongside Angus. She should have been delicately startled by something Taako or Lup said—she should have met Lup. She should have let Merle tuck a flower into one of her joints. She should have hugged absolutely everyone. She should have been part of the joy.

No one deserved it more than her.

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The wedding was joyful anyway. They’d saved the world, and each other, and now they got their happy ending. Merle pronounced them married, and Carey and Killian kissed, and Taako tried to pretend he wasn’t crying, and Magnus and Lucretia sobbed openly. They danced and ate and laughed late into the night. Angus fell asleep on a chair, and someone—probably Barry—draped a robe over him. Lup caught one of the bouquets, and the other one hit Kravitz, who wasn’t paying attention, directly in the forehead. Carey smashed cake into Killian’s face. Merle tore up the dance floor. Davenport got shitfaced and gave a moving, if rambling, speech about the power of love.

But before any of that, Kravitz, who had asked the Raven Queen to bend the rules, just this once, and been shot down, hid a Fantasy GoPro in the flowers on his lapel. The whole wedding was recorded, all the jokes and the tears. Taako wanted him to stay over after the reception finally ended, but he declined. He had friends waiting on the other side.