Darkwing Dork

Predictably hot on his trail was Fethry, stumbling over the hem of his oversized sweater and too-long sleeves both. When Gladstone stopped a couple feet away from the ‘twin splash zone’ as he called it, Fethry kept barreling forward, on a beeline for Donald. He had a split-second to brace himself before they collided bodily, nearly knocking them both to the ground (or with Donald’s luck, into the hole).

“Whatcha lookin’ at?” Fethry asked eagerly, wrapping his twig arms tight around Donald’s midsection and looking up at him with big, gleaming eyes. 

“Wak! Fethry, let go!” Donald griped, scrabbling at Fethry’s clinging arms without getting any purchase. “It’s just a big, dumb hole that Dell found.”

Next to him, Della was scrutinizing the hole way too seriously. “Y’know, I think it’s more of a pit.”

“Whatever!”

“What’s in it?” Gladstone asked, moving a couple steps closer once he seemed assured that nothing was going to spontaneously combust or get his dumb suit dirty. 

“We dunno,” Della replied brightly. “It’s too dark to tell. Maybe it’s a bottomless pit!”

Still wriggling against Fethry’s slippery eel grip, Donald took a swipe at Della but she danced out of the way. “I think we’d ‘a heard if Grandma had a bottomless pit on her farm. It’s probably just some animal’s burrow and it’s gonna jump out and bite me ‘cause we woke it up from its nap.”

Della shook her head sadly. “My poor, dear brother. As a disgraced former Junior Woodchuck, you likely neglected to notice the distinct lack of animal tracks or droppings of any kind nearby.” She gave a stupid little know-it-all sniff, raising one finger as she lectured him. She lowered it to pat him on the shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known.”

Donald snarled, snapping at her hand, but she snatched it back too fast for him to bite her, and with Fethry still holding him in place he couldn’t go after her. Della burst out laughing with Gladstone’s own laughter soon to follow. “Shove it, Dumbella! The Junior Woodchucks just couldn’t handle me.”

“Neither could that circus.”

Fethry finally let up on his stranglehold and knelt at the edge of the pit. Donald resisted the urge to tug him back onto solid ground. 

“Maybe it’s a tunnel to China!” he wondered aloud. 

Della walked up next to him, her survival instincts seemingly comparable to the six-year-old’s. With her hands planted on her hips and her furrowed thinking face on, she looked like Uncle Scrooge. 

“No dice, Fethry. Got that pesky lava at the Earth’s core in the way.” 

Fethry drooped. “Oh, yeah.”

“What if it’s a way to get to the center of the earth?” Gladstone suggested, shooting Donald a side-eyed grin as he sidled up to the other two.

Donald fumed. “That’s–you got that from a book!” He finally stomped over to them, if only to get a chance to shove Della in. 

“What are books if not windows to reality?” Gladstone replied sagely, making Donald second-guess who was getting pushed into the hole. 

“We should really investigate to make sure,” Della added, smiling at Donald like the traitor that she was. “Like proper adventurers.”

Fethry, predictably, perked up. “I’ll do it!” 

“No, you’re not.” Donald yanked him back by the collar of his sweater as he started to straighten up. Fethry all but crashed into him again, flailing limbs and everything. 

“Be careful, Donnie” Fethry chided, reaching up to adjust his collar. “You could’ve hurt my new friend!”

Donald scoffed. “What friend? Another imaginary walrus?”

Fethry pulled down on his collar. “Eustace isn’t imaginary!” 

When Donald glanced down he saw a long, thin dark shape uncoil from around Fethry’s neck, peering up at Donald with a diamond-shaped head and round black eyes. Its forked tongue flicked. 

Donald shrieked, and when he leapt back, his foot met open air. Gravity did the rest, and he did all the work of throwing himself into the pit. 

Donald looked forward to Duck family reunions as much as he dreaded them. 

Don’t get him wrong, he loved his family. Even insufferable cousin Gladstone, who acted like being thirteen made him so much more grown up.

Besides, they had reunions basically all the time. It seemed like every birthday, holiday, and random weekend was devoted to the drive out of Duckburg, past the Tulebug River and onto the rolling hills of farmland where Grandma Elvira and Grandpa Dabney lived. And disgraced former-Junior Woodchuck or not (they just couldn’t handle his spirit), Donald did appreciate getting out in nature, away from their boring brownstone in the too-loud, sometimes claustrophobic city.

The open air and endless blue skies were great songwriting inspiration, and besides, Grandma Duck had been the one to teach him how to play the guitar in the first place. Da, Aunt Daphne, and Uncle Eider all grew up on the farm, and as far as Donald knew they all still loved it. 

Well, maybe except for Uncle Eider. 

Mum seemed to like it too. She always said she was making up for not getting enough fresh air as a kid. 

They’d been coming out to the farm since he and Della were still in their eggs, often for the long weekends that their parents wanted for themselves. It was basically a second home, and he was able to relax there more than he ever could in Uncle Scrooge’s huge mansion. There, the walls hung heavy with portraits depicting greater deeds than he’d ever accomplish, and shadowed corners held secrets and dangers the likes of which he never could’ve imagined before that first adventure on Phantom Island. 

While adventuring with Uncle Scrooge was awesome, heart-pounding fun, he never liked their sleepovers at the mansion afterwards. He couldn’t imagine living there full time. But increasingly at Della’s insistence, their visits to that old miser’s house nearly started to outnumber those to Grandma’s.  

Grandma Duck’s farm was great, even if sometimes he got struck by lightning. Or thrown off a horse. Or got chased by the chickens. Or, hey, this was a new one: rolling straight into a sandspur patch and getting himself impaled head to foot by thorn-covered burrs that were impossible to remove by himself. 

“Ow. 

“Ow. 

“Ow,” Donald complained, each louder and more garbled than the last. 

Hortense flicked him lightly on the back of the head. “Och, quit yer haverin,’ dove. The less you squirm, the sooner yer Mummy’ll be done.”

His mother was right, as per usual, but Donald found it increasingly impossible to sit still and patient with the brilliant blue sky beyond the covering back porch and the hollering of the adults fishing at the pond tempting him back outside. Oh, and all the dozens of painful, prickly sandspurs piercing through his feathers and to his skin were another measure of added difficulty. 

“Remind me again how my son got turned into a living pincushion?” Hortense asked dryly. 

“He got scared by Fethry’s snake and fell into a big hole full of sandspurs,” Della helpfully supplied.

Donald bristled indignantly. “I wasn’t scared! Fethry just—surprised me.” 

“You screamed!”

“He shoved a snake in my face!”

Fethry popped up from where he was playing just on the other side of the porch railing, his garter snake sticking out from under his beanie. “Eustace didn’t mean to scare you!”

Donald scoffed, opening his beak to yell at him some more, when without warning his Mum yanked out a sandspur that had been digging into the back of his neck. It took a few feathers with it, and the breath escaped him in a yelp instead. “Wak!”

With an air of practiced nonchalance, Hortense dropped the newly extracted sandspur into the plastic mixing bowl containing the rest she’d removed from Donald’s person. “Why were you even standing over a hole filled with these blasted burrs?” she demanded, getting the conversation back on track. 

“Well, we couldn’t exactly see them,” Della hedged. “We thought we might’ve found a bottomless pit.” 

Hortense huffed a laugh. “Well at least ye had Donnie around to disprove your theory.” She planted a noisy kiss on his sandspur-free cheek, holding him tight to keep him from wriggling away like a fish on a hook. “My wee adventurer!”

Donald scowled, starting to cross his arms but he let out a squawk and dropped them again when he smushed a line of burrs down against his stomach. 

“I’m gonna be a sailor,” he protested as Hortense applied herself to removing the newly offending sandspurs. 

She chuckled. “I thought you were going ta be a rockstar?” 

“I can do both. Can’t I?”

“Oh, aye!” Hortense tweaked his beak, grinning warmly. “The first McDuck rockstar sailor with a college degree.”

Della wiggled from her seat atop the lunch table. “Oh, you should’ve seen him, Mum! Uncle Scrooge took us to the Dead Sea to look for the Sea Salt Caves of the Sorceress Circe, and Donnie tripped and knocked the captain out but then he took the wheel and it was so cool! He only crashed the boat a little bit!”

“I’ve never heard ‘Dondon’ and ‘cool’ used in the same sentence before,” Gladstone snarked as he climbed the porch steps behind his mother. Donald glared at him and his stupid serene smile with the fiery force of a thousand suns, until the sunlight bouncing off the pond somehow redirected to blind him. 

Aunt Daphne was in one of her fancy party dresses, golden hair pinned up and pearl earrings dangling by her ears, but her usual contented air was dampened by a small but troubled frown and a tightness around her eyes. She was holding Uncle Goostave’s Nokea in one hand, a slim and modern contrast to the brick Uncle Scrooge still insisted counted as a cell phone.

Hortense yanked another sandspur free, making Donald yelp and interrupting his observation. 

“Gladdy, don’t tease,” Aunt Daphne chided in that gentle way of hers, almost lyrical. After dinner, she would sing, Donald would pull out his guitar and Da his banjo, and they would play long into the night, when the moon was high and the air was redolent of the lavender that Grandma planted around the porch to keep the bugs away, and fireflies skittered through the field and over the surface of the pond like shooting stars come to earth. 

“Ma,” Aunt Daphne called through the closed screen door. Alongside her voice came the mouthwatering scents of Grandma Duck’s cobbler, fried chicken, pot roast, cornbread, greens, and gosh knew what else that Donald had been trying to put out of his mind until dinner. “D’you need any more help in there?”

“Depends! Was that my sous chef I heard?”

Grandma bustled out through the screen door, wiping her hands on a dishrag. She had a dusting of flour across her apron and a few gray hairs escaping from her carefully maintained bun, curling around her pinked cheeks. 

“I was just about to put the pies in the oven before plating everything up,” she said wryly, already looking expectantly at Gladstone. 

He perked up at once, dropping the veneer of cool he lived to torment Donald with. “I’ll help!”

Aunt Daphne kissed Gladstone on the cheek before nudging him forward. “I knew you would.” 

Once the screen door had closed behind Gladstone and Grandma Duck, Daphne crossed the porch and all slumped into one of the cushioned rockers with none of her usual grace. 

Donald watched her curiously, wincing as his Mum pried a sandspur out from under his collar. How many more of the stupid things could there be?

Without looking, he felt her attention lock on Della, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet the last few minutes. She was swinging her legs over the side of the table. 

“Della dear, go see how your father’s fairin’,” Hortense instructed. 

Della made a face. “Whyyyyyyy?”

“Because the adults need to have an adult conversation, my wee yin.” 

“But Donald's here!”

“Aye, but Donald’s not goin’ anywhere until I track down every blistering burr from his feathers. Unless you’re keen on joining him for a dip in that bottomless pit of yours?”

Della groaned, slumping over like the weight of Atlas’ burden had been transferred to her tiny shoulders. “Fine,” she spat out, long-suffering. 

“Hey, Fethry!” she yelled, jumping down from the table. “Let’s go try an’ push Aunt Matilda in the water.”

“Okay!” Fethry shouted back readily. “Can I bring Eustace?”

“Can he swim?”

“I dunno! I’ll see if he wants to.”

As Della and Fethry and their shouting match faded away in the direction of the pond, Hortense ran her hands over the top of Donald’s head, down to the back of his neck. When she didn’t encounter another sandspur, she drew him back against her lap in a proper hug. Donald moved willingly, silent but curious. A glance up at what he could see of his Mum’s face provided little insight. Her attention was all on Aunt Daphne, who by now was sitting in the rocker with her eyes closed. 

“You’re looking a bit peely-wally there, hen. No word from Eider?” she asked carefully. 

Daphne sighed wearily. “Or Abner. I swear, I wonder why I even bothered to send them a phone if they don’t even have the decency to let me know they’re alive out there in the boonies. And I don’t even want to think about Lulubelle, out there on that commune of all things…” The bite to her words, slight as it was, faded into further disappointment. “I know Fethry was hoping to see them. Just like last time. And the time before that.”

Hortense nodded slowly. “The laddie certainly is something else. Dinnae know when ta quit. But he’s young still, and got your Mum raising him up right; not to mention the rest of us. He’ll learn to forget about the ones who aren’t here.”

An uncomfortable look passed over Aunt Daphne’s face. 

Donald could feel his Mum rolling her eyes. “Spit it out.”

“Did Scrooge say why he couldn’t come?”

Hortense scoffed so harshly it was nearly a growl, rumbling against Donald’s ear. “‘Too busy,’” she bit out scornfully. “With the business or some dafty scheme, he wouldnae say. Hung up the phone before I could pry any further. Too busy for family! Can ye imagine?” 

They lapsed into silence, but not completely. The trees rustled in the dry summer breeze, and inside the clatter of plates nearly drowned out Gladstone and Grandma’s voices. On the water, Donald could hear Aunt Matilda and his Da yelling something, and a great deal of splashing as Della and Fethry shrieked with laughter. Uncle Goostave and Grandpa were quieter, but soon they were shouting too, pulled into whatever craziness Della had wrought upon them. 

Aunt Daphne must’ve heard it too because her far more familiar smile climbed back onto her face, and she stood back up. “Well, that’s enough moping about people who don’t want to be here. I’m gonna see if I can’t sneak up on Goostave and get him in the water too. Care to join me?”

Pressed against Hortense’s chest, Donald felt his Mum take a deep, silent breath, releasing it with a heave like the swell of the tide. “Nah,” she replied, every trace of rage vanished as though it had never been. She tightened her grip around Donald, rocking him back and forth and pressing an obnoxiously loud kiss against his cheek in spite of his garbled protests. “I've caught this wee barra in my net and I’m not keen on letting him escape again!”

Donald groaned. “Muuuuuum.”

Daphne giggled. “Good luck! Tell Gladstone to give us a holler when dinner’s ready.”

It was only a few minutes later that they heard Uncle Goostave’s cultured voice rising sharply, breaking over a shriek of, “Daph! Daph, don’t you da—” before it ended with a tremendous splash. 

Alone together on the porch, Donald didn’t shy away from curling under his mother’s chin, tucking himself against her like he was still a duckling, and not the eleven-year-old he actually was. They hadn’t even had dinner yet and he was already exhausted, aching all over from his tumble into the pit, the lingering prickling pain from all the sandspurs stabbing into his skin and tangling in his feathers. 

He’d gotten mad too, when he landed face first in the patch of burrs. Mad enough that he saw red, and sense left him, and in his scrabbling fury just landed himself in more sandspurs, which only hurt more which only made him angrier…

Hortense brushed the bangs out of his eyes. “What is it, dearheart?” 

Donald shrugged against her, not looking up. “I think I’m bad luck,” he whispered. 

She clicked her tongue reproachfully, giving him a squeeze. “Och, my lad. You are not bad luck. Ye’re just clumsy, like your Daddy. And ye have my temper. The McDuck temper.”

Hortense leaned back and Donald finally looked up at her, wild, curly red hair threaded through with gray and the warmth of her brown eyes behind her glasses. “You and your sister are my life. My heart. And a million sandspurs wouldnae change that.” 

Donald laughed without meaning to, the sound just as garbled as his father’s. 

Hortense grinned back at him, tweaking his beak. “There’s a lad.”

Behind him, the screen door slammed open to reveal Gladstone carrying a covered food tray, flour and fruit juice staining his stupid fancy clothes. He was smiling as Donald had never seen.  

“Soup’s on!” he hollered.

-

2019

Just a little ways from the water, shaded by a massive umbrella, Daisy was in the middle of a heated conversation with Beakley. She was saying something about the stealth benefits of synthetic versus cotton wool when Donald ambled over. As she paused to take a breath, he swooped in and kissed her cheek. 

“Need anything from the house? Another aperol spritz?” 

Daisy giggled, rosy-cheeked and beautiful. She’d done a complicated sort of braid with her hair that still let her wear her sunhat (Huey helped) and her sundress was a floral yellow number that she’d designed and stitched together just for the occasion. 

She wrapped an arm around Donald’s middle, leaning into him with a squeeze that made his heart flutter. “Thanks, hun, but I’ve had enough for now. I’m gonna need my wits about me for our dance later.”

“Alrighty.” He looked to Beakley, who’d been applying herself to a plateful of the meats, fruit, and cheeses Gladstone had laid out to tide everyone over until dinner. “What about you, Mrs. B?” 

“No thank you, Donald. I’m still working on my lager.”

Daisy prodded him. “What about you? Why don’t you find some shade, take a load off? You’ve been on your feet practically since we got here.” 

Donald opened his beak to dissuade her, hesitated too long. There was a porch swing that had been calling his name. 

“What about the kids?” he tried to protest. 

Daisy rolled her eyes with a fondness he cherished. “I think they’ve been doing a fine job keeping themselves entertained.”

As if on cue, a chorus of elated screams arose from the pond, and he instinctively craned his head over to take stock of everyone. The pond was so wide it was practically a small lake, allowing for everyone to split up and spread out across and around the water. 

Huey, Boyd, and Fethry were fishing off the side of the dock, though they’d yet to catch anything for tomorrow’s lunch because Fethry insisted on naming every fish they caught. The behavior forced an aggrieved Huey and increasingly giggly Boyd to throw them back. 

At some point over the last few years, Gladstone had a little deck built over the water. It held a mini bar and a wooden slat roof woven through with solar powered string lights, the former currently not in use. Drake and Louie were using it to nap on deck chairs, Drake barely visible under his sunhat and Louie half-hidden behind the ridiculous sunglasses Daisy had bought for Dewey in Milan, which he subsequently lost to Louie in a bet. 

Della was in the shallows trying to teach Penumbra how to swim, while Launchpad tossed the rest of the kids around in the water and let Gosalyn use him as her personal jungle gym. The two groups were getting dangerously close, splashing and ribbing one another, and Donald knew his sister. At some point, Drake was getting dragged out of his comfy respite and into a chicken fight with Launchpad against Della and Penumbra. 

Lena was using her magic to float the more adventurous kids over the water (i.e., all of them), letting them go at random and dropping them in the pond. They would scurry back out in record time if Launchpad didn’t get ahold of them first and, appropriately enough, launch them further away into deeper water. 

“Alright,” Donald muttered begrudgingly as he surveyed the controlled chaos with a trained eye. “The kids’ll probably be okay if I take a little siesta, right?”

Daisy laughed, giving him a shove. “Definitely okay. Take a load off, handsome.”

“We’re all here to help if need be,” Beakley reminded him. 

Donald nodded distractedly. The kids were all fed and watered, he reminded himself, and they weren’t helpless little ducklings anymore. They didn’t need him hovering for no good reason. 

He made himself step away, and then forced himself to keep walking, one webbed foot in front of the other as he turned his back on the pond. His garbled stream of consciousness trailed after him. “Right. Yeah. Just take it easy for a spell. What’s the worst that could happen? Wait, no, don’t answer that.”

His foot had only just touched the first porch step when a gut wrenchingly familiar sound pierced the air—one of his kids letting out a sharp cry of pain. 

He knew it was Dewey before he even turned around, before he even started running. He zeroed in on the source immediately, and there was his kid, sitting in the dirt with his hands wrapped around his ankle. 

Della started clambering out of the water by the time Donald was dropping to his knees beside Dewey, there between one blink and the next. It wasn’t due to any lack of care; Donald just had the advantage of twelve years of bandaging scraped knees, kissing bruises, anticipating the next dangerous stunt and thwarting it in its infancy. 

“Ow, ow, ow, owwwwwww,” Dewey hissed, eyes clenched tight. “Uncle Donald, it hurts!” 

“You’re okay,” Donald soothed, sounding calmer than he felt. His heart was pounding so hard he felt his chest trembling, that short burst of adrenaline still singing through his veins, but just being with his kid made the immediate surge of terror fade. Dewey was conscious, he was talking, and Donald was here. He’d dealt with far worse.

“Let me see.” With the barest nudge, Dewey released his death grip on his ankle, letting Donald survey the damage. 

While the ankle already looked a little red, on the brink of swelling up fairly spectacularly, there wasn’t any blood or visibly broken or dislocated bones. Carefully palpating the area confirmed that.

“What happened, Dew?” Donald asked gently, half trying to distract Dewey as he winced through his ministrations. 

Dewey leaned forward, slumping into Donald’s chest and effectively hiding his face against Donald’s new Hawaiian shirt. Della called it an eyesore but Daisy thought it was sweet of him to find a shirt that matched her dress. 

“Twisted my dumb ankle in a dumb hole,” Dewey grumbled, but his voice was thick, on the verge of tears if Donald had any guess. “Why did Great-Grandma put a bunch of booby traps around the farm? Is she trying to attack us from beyond the grave?”

Donald very carefully didn’t laugh. “It sounds like you just stepped in a gopher hole. And if you wanna blame anyone, blame Uncle Gladstone. Upkeep of the farm was his job.”

He leaned back to actually get a look at Dewey’s face, crumpled in pain but without any further trace of tears. Donald brushed Dewey’s wet hair out of his eyes, longer than usual since he decided to start growing it out. He insisted he wanted it long enough to braid like Daisy’s. 

He kissed Dewey’s forehead. “C’mon, kiddo. You gotta be off your feet for a while and there’s a porch swing with both our names on it.”

Dewey made a big show of sighing, long-suffering as anything, but he didn’t protest when Donald picked him up, holding him close against his chest. He and his siblings were on the brink of getting too big for Donald to cart around comfortably, not that it would stop him anytime soon. 

As he made his way back to the porch at a more leisurely pace than his previous sprint away from it, he caught Huey’s eyes from across the pond. He’d been on his feet, still and watchful since Dewey cried out, on high alert in his own hyper-protective fashion that Donald felt only a little bit bad about instilling in his oldest. It had certainly helped keep all three of them in one piece even before they moved in with Scrooge. 

Donald gave Huey a nod in lieu of a reassuring wave, and called out for the benefit of him and every other concerned pair of eyes. “All good! It’s just a sprained ankle.”

Relief broke across Huey’s face and he leapt to attention as Boyd and Fethry cried out beside him, his fishing pole lashing at the water with their latest catch. 

Daisy looked up at Donald with a chagrined smile as he walked past for the second time. He just shook his head with a resigned smile. “Bad luck, buddy,” she murmured to Dewey, giving a quick squeeze to the hand he held out to her. 

“Tell my storyyy,” he moaned pitifully as Donald kept walking, cruelly dragging him away. Daisy’s laughter followed them across the grass.

By now the sun was inching toward the horizon and the dense, rolling hills framing the valley where Grandma Duck’s farm had sat for the last hundred and fifty years. It had been an unseasonably hot day in June, but the sun was finally relenting and it was calm on the porch, far enough from the pond for the renewed shrieks of delight to turn distant rather than piercing.

Donald got Dewey settled on the porch swing, a pillow tucked under his ankle to elevate it. He’d left a handful of towels by the patio table for everyone to dry off with so they didn’t end up tracking water, mud, and various flora and fauna across Grandma Duck’s hardwood floors. He tossed one over to Dewey.

“Ack!” He let the towel land on his head, not even bothering to catch it, and Donald snorted. 

“Start drying your feathers, Dew. I don’t want you catching a cold on top of a sprained ankle.”

As Dewey grumbled but set himself to his task, Donald opened the cooler sitting beside the porch railing in search of ice to tend Dewey's ankle with. The half melted slush he found half a dozen beer cans swimming in was disappointing. Clearly, whoever brought the cooler hadn’t thought about insulation. 

Well, a chilly beer can wasn’t going to cut it. Donald yelled through the screen door instead, where the smells of Gladstone’s cooking were already wafting out, rich and heady and impossible to ignore. “Hey, Gladdy, do we have any more ice? Dewey hurt his ankle.”

Almost immediately, he heard a familiar irritated squawk from the direction of the kitchen, and Gladstone’s affable retort drowning it out. “I’ll do you one better, chief!”

With much scrambling and Scottish protests, Gladstone emerged from the house pushing a harried Scrooge out ahead of him. 

“Now see here, lad—”

“Donaldo!” Gladstone crowed. “Just the man I wanted to see. You mind taking our dear, beloved Unc here off my hands? He’s distracting a master chef at work.”

In what was becoming an increasingly familiar sight, Gladstone had forfeited one of his ostentatious ten-grand-but-you-inexplicably-don’t-owe-a-cent suits for a plain button-up. It probably still cost more than Donald’s entire scant wardrobe put together, but with the sleeves rolled up and a smudge of flour across his beak, his hair falling into its more natural curls, Gladstone actually looked like he belonged at the farmhouse.

“Ye need a second pair of hands!” Scrooge protested fervently. “How do ye expect to get all that cooking done by yourself?”

Donald knew the exact moment that Gladstone’s gaze alighted on Dewey, who’d been watching the shouting match Scrooge was losing with gleeful attention. 

“Well, I might be able to take on a sous chef,” Gladstone said, grinning. “If they don’t mind taking on extra duties as taste tester.”

Dewey whipped his head around to pin Donald with his best, most piteous begging look. “Please, Uncle Donald! Uncle Donald, he made pie! And-and probably some other healthy stuff! Please?”

Donald groaned within the privacy of his own head. “What about your ankle?”

It had started to swell by now, fortunately not too bad, but red and painful looking. Dewey scowled down at it like it had willfully betrayed him. 

“Hey, no sweat!” Gladstone quickly interjected. “I can get you set up nice and comfy, put some ice on that ankle. No rule saying you can’t sous chef while taking a load off.”

Dewey clasped his hands together. “Please, Uncle Donald, let me be sous chef!” 

Donald pinched his brow between thumb and forefinger. You’re not being a pushover, he told himself. To Gladstone, all he said was, “Just don’t spoil his dinner.”

Dewey let out a whoop, while Scrooge crossed his arms with a defeated huff. 

“Let’s get a move on, Blueberry! I think I left the stove on.” Gladstone crouched beside Dewey with this back to him, letting Dewey climb onto him for a piggy back ride. He stood with an exaggerated groan. “Man, what’s Mrs. B been feeding you? Grilled gold bricks?”

“Sautéed, thank you very much,” Dewey shot back as Gladstone carried him through the farmhouse doorway. 

Once they were gone, Donald collapsed on the porch swing with a sigh so protracted he felt himself melt into the cushions a little. After a beat, he felt the swing jostle as another body settled beside him, more restrained than him.

“Bah,” Scrooge grunted. “Kids.” 

Donald snorted, not bothering to open his eyes. “What were you even doing in there? You can’t cook to save your life.”

Scrooge scoffed. “Tell that to Benzino Gasolini, the taste-testing tyrant of Tripoli who forced us to earn our freedom through a pizza pie baking competition!” 

“You tried to tell Gladstone what to do in his own kitchen, didn’t you?”

Scrooge sputtered, extra-Scottish when he was put-upon. Donald just chuckled under his breath, reveling in the breeze coming off the water ruffling the feathers on his face. 

Beside him, Scrooge eventually wore himself out complaining and settled into the silence as well. Donald let himself enjoy the peace. Above them, the hinges of the porch swing squeaked gently and in the distance water was splashing and Daisy was laughing, doing that little snort that she hated but Donald adored to death. 

He could hear Uncle Scrooge’s breathing next to him, steady and deep. Once, Donald had known it as well as his own. It was a familiar reassurance in the dark when he and Della were painfully small, newly orphaned, and snuck into Scrooge’s bed just to remind themselves that they weren’t alone. 

The swing creaked beneath Scrooge as he moved, incrementally closer to Donald.

“Thank you,” he said lowly, making Donald’s eyes snap open. “For inviting me, Donald, lad.”

Donald looked over at his uncle, fiddling with his cane in a show of weakness he wouldn’t have allowed even a decade ago. Even the old coot had dressed down for the reunion, and in concession to the heat, in a linen guayabera he’d purchased on one of a hundred trips to South America. 

“Thanks for accepting the invitation,” Donald replied. 

“Look alive!” 

A part of him still gave a jolt at hearing his twin’s voice, a meager year incapable of overwriting a decade of grief. But instinct still won out, and Donald held out his hand, snatching the beer that Della lobbed at his head out of the air. 

Scrooge let out an outraged squawk. “Della, ya pure dafty! You could’ve bludgeoned your brother, and then what would Daisy do to us?”

Della collapsed into the scant amount of space between Donald and Scrooge, effectively sitting on them both and forcing them to scoot aside for her. “I dunno, but she’d probably have to get in line. The kids have first dibs.” 

She was still damp with lake water, and smelled like it too, little bits of duckweed and other plants sticking out of her hair and feathers. Donald dropped his head onto her shoulder anyway. A glance over at Della’s other side saw her wrapping her arm around Scrooge’s, who let her cuddle close with minimal protest. 

Della breathed in deep, waiting a long moment before exhaling, like the air itself was something precious. “I never thought I’d see this place again,” she murmured, almost to herself.