Chapter Text
There were so many humans.
Everywhere. Picking up weird colored orbs and green and orange sticks with leaves, and orbs that are green, and plastic bins full of green. Why was everything so green? The only green things in the Boiling Isles was slime, and frogs, and Abomination puke, and sometimes the ocean on a cloudy day as the sun sank low in the horizon, kissing the coast but never disappearing.
Green wasn’t for food, but he was surrounded by it, and he was surrounded by people touching the stuff, and Hunter felt very, very awful at this moment.
“Hey. You look like you’re about to be sick,” Amity says, peering at him. She’s wearing the flecked scarf today, with the blues and pinks that paint her purple hair into a kaleidoscope. Ears pinned carefully away, not smiling too broadly to show off her fangs. But her face is cold as she looks at him, now, as he leans over the… shopping cart? The rattling metal cage contraption on wheels that he pushes after Ms. Noceda. Why was there a cage with one side missing? Sure it was to hold food, but wasn’t Ms. Noceda worried about the food jumping out and escaping from the cage?
Hunter didn’t understand Humans.
“I’m not going to be sick,” huffs Hunter, as he leans more forward on the cage. “Mind your own business.”
“You’re my business,” she shoots back.
“You’re my business,” he mimics, like a baby orc.
“Ugh.” She rolls her eyes at him goes to help Ms. Noceda with the colorful orange orbs that she places into a mesh bag.
Hunter sticks his tongue out at her retreating back and sulks further into the cage, almost upending it with his weight. His hood almost is thrown back, but he adjusts it. He’s wearing the almost-cloak that Luz shoved at him—the Hood, or whatever she called it. It had a long middle pocket, which he assume was a storage space for weasels, or chinchillas, or other longer rodents, and a cloth hood that he had pulled over his head and hiding his ears. He was still wearing his leather pants, and the purple Hood clashed horribly with the dirty leggings. Whatever.
“Okay, onto getting some radishes and beets,” Ms. Nosenda announces as she comes back with the orbs.
“What are those?” asks Amity, trailing after her.
“I don’t know what you would call them. They’re roots. We pickle them or use them in soup. I wanted to make a salad with them.” Ms. Noceda explains as she goes through the aisles of greens.
"Ah, so like eyeballs," Amity says, nodding sagely.
Hunter pushes the cage behind her sullenly.
Why he was summoned on this trip, he doesn’t know. Sure he goes to the Night Market for manuscripts and potions and food, but he doesn’t need to be in a human market like this at all. He doesn’t benefit from it. He doesn’t know what’s going on. And honestly, it’s overwhelming.
He’s not like Amity, whose trailing Ms. Noceda and asking questions about the products lined in the neat rows around them, making comparisons to the Demon Realm. And it’s only the two of them today; the plan is to slowly integrate the group with, out of all things, errands. Two-by-two. As he and Amity are dragged out to the market, Luz is taking Willow and Gus to something called a shopping mall.
It’s been ten days since they went through the door and the world collapsed behind him.
“Hunter, do you have a preference?” asks Ms. Noceda, snapping Hunter into the present. She’s holding up two loaves of bread. Something he recognizes.
“…The one with seeds,” he says. He misses Flapjack.
He lets her deposit two of the loaves into the cage after his selection, and continues to roll the cage after her.
In five minutes, he finds himself in an aisle that is too, too cold, surrounded by glass, having his chest do that breathing thing where he can’t control his lungs and air in them and he just keeps going in and out and everything is short and fast and he can’t seem to get a grip on anything except the specks on the white floor and seriously, someone should clean that, but he can’t breathe, can’t breathe under this fucking bright light, Titan damn it all.
“Hunter!” Amity pushes his shoulder. “Hunter, get a grip!”
He stumbles a little against the cage. Why does he still have that? Was he pushing this the whole time? Why can’t he remember the last five minutes? Why is it so cold?
“Amity,” he gasps, and he can only say that before he doubles over gasping, eyes locked onto the green in the shopping cart.
“Where were you? Camilla is trying to find you, she has to put some yogurt in the basket.”
He only wheezes in response.
“Hunter, what’s wrong with you?”
Wheeze. Stare. At the ground.
“Oh, Titan. Aren’t you supposed to be the older one?”
“Aren’t you—supposed to—be—nicer?” He heaves out. He feels his hood start to slip from the top of his head.
Amity makes a noise – Hunter can’t read if it’s negative or positive – and he feels a pressure between his shoulder blades, right on that one puncture wound he got when he was twelve when training with some of the other guards. The ones that were a bit too happy to use more practical methods during warm-up. But that’s ok, the only thing that’s left there is a star-shaped pucker, right in the middle of his shoulder blades. Hunter almost thinks that it’s lucky.
It’s not a pressure, though. She’s rubbing in circles. She pulls his hood up to cover his face as he bends over.
“Hey, remember what Willow and Gus said before? Counting your breaths? Do you want me to show you how again?” Her voice is quieter, gentler than he has ever heard it before.
Hunter nods, he thinks.
“Okay. Breathe in, one, two, three….”
And Hunter breathes. One. Two. Three.
“How do you all know that trick?” He jokes, loosely.
After his lungs feel looser, Ms. Noceda has found them, and she innocently suggests that they buy something called chocolate ice scream.
It’s delicious, Hunter decides, even if it doesn’t scream.
“Why were you so nice to me?” He accosts Amity in the living room, later that night, after they return from the Big Market, or whatever it was called.
It’s just the two of them this late. Hunter can hear Willow’s giggles (a pang in his stomach at the sound, maybe), and Gus making jokes about human items as Luz explains their meanings, undoubtedly making up meanings to entertain the two.
He doesn’t sleep well, and he appreciates the warm lamp-glow of the common area devoid of witches at night as long as he could get it before he goes back to the basement to lie there, for seemingly hours, by himself. He likes the soft light here more than the darkness down there, anyway.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Amity says primly as she turns the page of the purple-haired wizard book that she and her girlfriend obsess over. Her legs are tucked under her and she leans on the edge of the couch, looking cozy. Exactly the opposite of Hunter, who is ramrod-straight on his end of the dark green striped couch, one of the cyclops-edias spread open on his lap (he thinks it’s “L”) as he tries to soak up knowledge on human locks and keys.
This is his time on the couch. Usually no one else joins him. Like, ever. He knows he’s snarly, but he can’t help it. And he likes being alone.
Just because he joined their side (unwittingly! Because his world crumbled around him!) doesn’t mean that he has to like anything.
“Yeah, you do. In the cold part of the market. Why did you help me?”
Amity looks at him slyly from the corner of her eye, almost looking like her missing palisman with a cold gaze and a slight smirk. “I don’t know, you looked like you kind of need the help, champ.”
“I was fine!” Hunter squeaks. His voice pitched up suddenly, uncontrollably, uncomfortably. He clears his throat and repeats, “I was fine.” Extra-deep inflection, this time.
“Sure you were, buddy.”
“I was!”
Amity rolls her eyes and doesn’t respond. Seconds tick on the wall clock above them. Hunter feels the tips of his ears burn.
Amity sighs, snapping her book shut. Even the purple-haired witch looks smug on the cover. Hunter hates all of it. “Listen. I know what its like to be overwhelmed. Do you remember my parents, and the stage? When we had to dress up in the guard uniforms and break into my own house?”
Hunter remembers. He remembers how awkward the uniform felt. It wasn’t his own. It felt scratchy and foreign.
“It was bad. But that’s how I felt every night when I was there, even before everything happened. I was always their little actor,” Amity says scornfully.
“I always had to lose against their newest Abomination product. ‘Oh no, the crossbow Abomiton got me!’” She swoons, play-acting onto the couch. She rolls her eyes up and sticks out her tongue to sell the product.
She gets up. “Or it was the catapult-aton, or the Abomination-3000, or the Abom-o-meter. Every time, I had to go on that stage. Sure, I’m used to it now. But every time before then… I never was. I never was okay with being on stage. I used to throw up, believe it or not. I had terrible stage fright.”
“I believe it,” Hunter tosses back without missing a beat.
“Ha. Ha.” Amity says. She leans across the couch to shove him. “Shut up.”
“Shutting up.”
“I would be in the wings and I wouldn’t breathe. Emira and Edric would try to help, but they didn’t get it. Them trying to make me laugh would make things worse. Or Edric shoving me on stage would make it worse. So I dealt with it myself. And I remembered Willow’s advice, when we were younger. She was the one who came up with the counting.” She ran a hand through her hair. Her roots were beginning to grow out. “I know I owe her a lot.”
Hunter can only nod.
“But, oh, Titan. Em…. Ed…. Dad.”
“Hey. I know they’re okay.”
Amity smiles at him, waterly, across the couch. “I know they are. After all, if we’re here, they must be here, right? Our universe isn’t destroyed.”
“Yeah,” Hunter agrees.
“I guess the only thing we can do is breathe.”
Hunter is in the basement. The shadows are long and dark. The lone window above his sleeping pad casts the pale summer moon across the carpet. It’s supposed to be small, cozy. Safe.
“I’m starting to think you make those things just to destroy them,” Collector-memory says.
“It hurts every time he chooses to betray me,” Uncle-memory responds.
“You’re going to be okay, you’re going to be okay!” Luz-memory screams, rippling, from the corner. “Just hang on!”
This time, Amity isn’t here to help him count breaths. And Hunter feels like he’s drowning in the dirt again.
Again, he doesn’t sleep, and only drowns.