Chapter Text
"DID YOU FIND IT YET?!"
"WHICH PAGE WAS IT?"
"I DON’T KNOW, I WASN’T THINKING ABOUT THE PAGE NUMBERS!"
Luz lost her grip for a second and fell about a foot down the Troll’s back before her fingers managed to clutch at its fur again. But she was lucky she had, as the creature’s giant hand reached back and swiped at the spot where she’d been a second ago. It snarled and started turning itself around trying to reach her. As it spun on the spot Luz glimpsed Amity across the forest clearing, frantically flicking through the demon book.
The witchling’s hand suddenly stopped on one of the pages. "I’ve got it!" she called.
"Well, don’t wait for me!" Luz leant back as the huge hand swiped at her again, her arms stretched out to keep holding on to the Troll’s fur.
Amity lifted the book up and started to read.
"We hear your dreadful cry,
oh man of moss and bone,
you’ll suffer here no longer,
now turn ye back to stone!"
A white glow covered the Troll’s eyes and it raised its hands to its head, giving a mighty roar. Luz kicked off its back to launch herself away from it, and landed roughly on the ground. The Troll’s feet were stumbling near to her and Luz raised her hands protectively. But just before she was stomped, a layer of stone spread over the creature’s fur and it froze, immobile.
Luz panted and got to her feet. She turned to Amity to give her a relieved grin, but saw the other girl sprinting towards her.
"LUZ, WATCH OUT!"
Amity tackled her out of the way just as the stone Troll toppled down onto the spot where Luz had been stood.
The human raised her head from the floor and looked up at Amity; the green-haired girl was lying on top of her, fear in her golden eyes as she checked Luz was okay. The fear was quickly replaced by embarrassment at their close contact, but Luz began to laugh. She lifted Amity up by the waist as she got to her feet and spun the other girl around, both of them now laughing from the post-fight exhilaration flooding through them. Luz kept giggling as they came to a stop and looked into the face of her friend, who was still blushing but had a wide, helpless smile on her face.
Then Amity was closing her eyes and leaning toward Luz.
What happened next was pure instinct. As soon as Luz realised what Amity was about to do, she flung herself backward with a surprised yelp and fell to the floor again.
Amity stood as motionless as the fallen stone figure behind her, her arms still held out grasping the space where Luz had been. Her eyes were now filled with terror at the realisation that she’d just tried to kiss the other girl.
"I’m sorry…" she whispered.
Luz scrambled up. "No, I’m sorry!" she said quickly. "I didn’t mean to act like – I was just surprised, that’s all!"
But Amity was covering her face in her hands and running out of the clearing.
"Amity, wait!" Luz chased after her, turning her head to look through the trees as she ran, trying to spot the shock of bright green hair in the dark woods. But there was only gloom.
Luz stopped. The elation she’d just had from their victory was now replaced by a churning sensation in her stomach. She groaned and slumped down at the base of a tree, feeling a sudden rift having grown between her and her friend.
"You’re serious?" Willow was asking. "You never noticed?"
"No!" Luz insisted. The bespectacled Witchling sitting across the cafeteria table from her gave a deep sigh and put a hand to her brow.
"Luz, she’s not been subtle about it. She goes as red as apple blood every time you get close to her."
"But I had to work so hard to get her to be my friend!"
"Yeah, at first. And guess what happens when a girl who’s only ever had the tough version of love meets someone who constantly wants to help and support them?"
Luz stared down at the table, questioning everything. She’d had plenty of crushes of her own in the past; in fact at her human school she seemed to get a crush on almost everybody. But she’d never had anyone feel that way about her before. And for it to be someone as cool as Amity? Despite remembering full well what had happened in the forest the previous night, she still had trouble believing it. She raised her eyes again to see Willow looking past her, and turned to follow the witchling’s gaze.
The green-haired girl herself was stood in the doorway to the cafeteria, staring across at them. When she saw Luz looking back, Amity suddenly tensed and dashed away back down the corridor.
Luz groaned and lowered her forehead onto the table. "Now things are really awkward. Why did I have to act so weird?"
"You just need to get together and talk about it," Willow said.
Luz lifted her head and huffed. Just the thought of doing that made the feelings of awkwardness double. She wished they could go back to how they were before, and that the previous night hadn’t even happened.
A clatter sounded across the room and the human's eyes were drawn to the source of the noise; a student had dropped their tray, their food falling onto the floor. The student sighed, but drew a glowing ring in the air with their finger and the dropped items all leapt back off the floor, reversing their arc. The tray landed back in the student’s hands and the food all flew back into place.
Luz felt a surge of hope. Maybe on the Boiling Isles, there other were ways to help her situation.
"Luz?" Willow asked, an almost scolding tone to her voice. "Are you thinking about you and Amity having a healthy, open conversation about your feelings?"
"Yeah, sure," Luz replied dismissively, already formulating a very different plan in her head.
The human girl wandered through the market eyeing the different stalls, without an exact idea what she was looking for. Her backup plan was to ask King if he knew about anything that could help her, but the small chaos-loving demon would be just as likely to gleefully exacerbate the situation between her and Amity. Luz turned down another aisle of stalls, and her eyes fell on a surprisingly familiar one. The little pig-like demon looked back at her from his perch on the counter of his reconstituted stall, and pointed a finger at her as she approached.
"Oh, no you don’t!" he cried. "I’ve had enough of you Owl Housians coming and ruining my businesses!"
"Relax Tibbles," Luz said, raising her hands. "I come in peace." Although she had accidentally flattened his stall once before with a walking house, the last time she’d met the diminutive capitalist he had shrunken her and her friends and tried to feed them to a circus of tiny monsters. But Luz decided not to bring that up. "I see you’ve switched to the day market."
‘Yes,’ Tibbles folded his arms over his purple waistcoat. "A lot of my more… interesting stock was destroyed a little while ago, if you remember."
Luz guiltily avoided his glare and glanced around at the trinkets he had on display. "I don’t suppose you have anything that could help me change something?"
"Change what?"
"Something that’s… already happened."
Tibble’s long ears pricked up at her surreptitious tone. "Ahh," he smiled. "You’re looking to alter something in your past? And you’ve not gone to our favourite outlaw Owl Lady for help, so it must be something juicy."
Luz grimaced as she felt herself start to go red, but the small demon waved his hand at her.
"I don’t care what it is, but if you’re really serious…" Tibbles glanced around at the market, and when he looked convinced that no-one was watching them he hopped down behind the counter and went over to a cabinet, pulling off a blanket that had been covering it. Peering over, Luz saw him open a drawer and pull out a necklace with a blue, star-shaped jewel hanging from it before he came back to clamber back onto the counter.
"This is the Pendent of Yesterday," he said, keeping his voice low. "It can take you back to the moment you regret and allow you to change it, and then live your life again from that moment."
Luz looked into the blue jewel, which glimmered in the sunlight as it dangled from the string gripped in Tibbles’ paw.
"How much?" Luz asked.
The necklace had a one-time use, and Tibbles had assured Luz that any changes she made would be incorporated into a single, unsplit timestream, and that there wouldn’t be a world left where she had disappeared and was never heard from again. She’d suspected that he was overcharging her as some amount of revenge, but had handed over the snail bills she’d saved from the tips she’d made making deliveries for Eda’s potion business. The pig-demon had put a spell on them that made them immune to any changes in the timeline; apparently in the new version of events, they would disappear from her pocket when she reached the moment of sale again and reappear in his moneybox. It seemed to make sense as much as Luz could follow it, and she was now sat in her room wearing the necklace, holding the string up to look at the jewel. She could go back to the fight with the troll and then when it was over and Amity tried to kiss her, she would have a normal, non-awkward reaction.
Except she still had no idea what that would be.
"Luz!" a voice called from downstairs. The human girl ignored it; soon she’d be back in the previous night, she could see what Eda wanted the second time around. She just needed to figure out what she’d be doing when she got there.
After a couple of minutes she heard a knock on the door, and quickly tucked the necklace into her hoodie. She looked up to huff at Eda, but froze when she saw her green-haired classmate stood nervously in her doorway.
"Amity!" she gasped.
The other girl smiled awkwardly. "Eda said to just come up," Amity finally said.
Luz nodded. Tension began to build as neither of them spoke or moved. The human started to feel her insides burn with the awkwardness and cursed herself for having hesitated before using the necklace.
"I’m sorry," Amity broke the silence. "I shouldn’t have tried to… I can see you don’t like me back, and now things are different between us and it’s my fault."
"No!" Luz said. "It’s my fault, you were just… I’m the one who acted weird!" She covered her face in her hands, and heard the witchling walk over and sit next to her on the floor.
"I wasn’t thinking," Amity explained. "I was just so happy that we beat the Troll, and that I was with you, and… and I wish I could go back and change what happened."
Luz looked up at her with surprise. She suddenly realised that the tension between them was coming from their shared fear of what the other person was thinking – but they were both thinking the same things.
"You know what?" Luz said. "I don’t. I had no idea you felt that way, and someone cool like you liking me has never happened before. And now that it has…"
The human trailed off. Amity was gazing at her, those golden eyes looking so soft and vulnerable. Luz felt her heart tighten, which would obviously be because the already awkward situation was being made worse by the closeness.
The closeness to the very pretty girl that she cared for deeply.
The same shock Luz had felt when she’d recognised Amity’s feelings flooded through her again as she recognised her own.
She had no idea which one of them started the kiss, but once it was going she made no effort to stop it. Thoughts raced by at lightning speed, none of them remaining in her head long enough to be grasped, and all of them overwhelmed by the sensation of the other girl’s lips on hers.
After a few seconds they pulled back from each other, but as soon as they made eye contact Luz felt a hot burn spread across her face. She felt briefly fearful of her own reaction before she realised that Amity had gone bright red too. Luz giggled slightly, the awkwardness now something they were sharing rather than a barrier between them. She could even feel the burn on her face spreading down to her chest.
"What's that?" Amity frowned down at the spot where her hand had come to rest just below the neck of Luz’s hoodie. The human girl glanced down and realised that the heat on her chest was in a concentrated spot.
She pulled the necklace pendant out and held it up; there was now a light pulsating inside the blue jewel.
"Yuh-oh," Luz said, and vanished.