Work Text:
“Lulu!” screeched Hooty out of his ever-growing esophagus, navigating his slender body through the various windows and halls of the Owl House before eventually settling on the living room (and the area directly in front of Lilith’s face).
Lilith jolted back in surprise, accompanied by an “Oh Titan”, but eventually recovered enough to ask her bestest friend in all the Isles, “How are you doing today, Hootcifer?”
“I’m doing great, Lulu! I saw a bug, and then I ate it, and then I saw another bug, and then I ate it, and then I…” While the talkative tube regaled his patient pal with tales of insect eatery and (very scarcely) other things, Luz tried to slide down the bannister of the stairs leading to the ground floor of the house, fell over, got back up, and ran into the kitchen.
“Hiya, Eda— oh.”
Rather than being greeted with an enthusiastic “Hiya!” back, she instead was greeted with a vision of Eda, unhinged: one hand grasping the apple blood bottle harder than Amity grasped Hooty’s unending throat, the other hand detached, along with the arm, resting on the table in an eternal facepalm, and her hair somehow even messier than usual, rivalling the chaos of the Bonesborough Market on a day that isn’t shared with Covention, this truly was a scarring sight for Luz to see.
“What’s your deal?”
“I can’t stand that stupid cylinder yapping about every single thing that crosses his mind for hours and hours and hours ! I’m sick of it!” lamented Eda, periodically interrupting her speech with slams to the table that progressively increased in loudness until shattering the vessel of her most vicious vice into smithereens, causing the glass to shoot out into her disconnected arm, and her own screams to shoot out into Luz’s ears.
After a brief period of recovery (that may or may not have involved a couple feathers sprouting), Eda eventually parted with an ultimatum:
“I’m going to go put some bandages on,” gesturing towards her myriad wounds, “all of this. If you can’t get Hooty to shut up, you’re on mucus duty.”
“No, Eda, not again, please not again!”
“King’s off at the playground, I’m clearly preoccupied, and… well, I’m not sure about Lilith. You can get her to do it. Or, you can just get Hooty to shut up.”
“That’s literally impossible.”
“And they said it was impossible for a human to be a witch, but look where you are now!”
“But those are two completely differ-” a quick slam of the door to Eda’s nest and a signature “ BYEEEEEEEEEE! ” nipped that conversation in the poison-spraying bud.
---
“Hey, Lilith, could you, um, do me a favour?” asked Luz, peering around the corner to the living room and ready to curl up into her cat hoodie at the slightest hint of embarrassment.
“My first trip home, and you’re already asking for something?” Lilith rolled her eyes and snorted haughtily. “Typical.”
“Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry…” Luz’s perpetual apologies were thankfully cut short by a now much less haughty, significantly more… familial? laugh.
“Luz. I was joking. I hear you call it joshing in the human realm?”
“Ah yes! Of course! Joshing!”
“So what favour do you need me to do?”
“Normally I wouldn’t ask you, but since you and Hooty have become such good friends recently…”
“Are you asking me to clean his mucus?”
“I’m asking you to clean his mucus.”
“I am not going to clean his mucus.”
“Well I’m not going to clean his mucus either!
“ I’ll clean my mucus!” hollered an elated Hooty, making various noodle-like gestures with his body before wrapping Lilith and Luz into a tight, slimy hug.
“Oh, Titan, let go of me!” and other various cries for help echoed out of the room until the god released the mortals into the safety of the carpet, smiling with teeth that, up until this point, had not existed.
“Hooty, we’ve tried that.” Luz said, patting his head with great remorse. “Do you not remember being trapped in a pretzel shape for an hour and a half?”
“What’s a pretzel?” asked Hooty and Lilith in unison.
“Not important. What is important is that you can’t clean yourself without scarring the rest of us, and I don’t want to see you turn yourself inside out ever again. Capiche?”
Hooty’s upbeat demeanour was slightly diminished, until a realisation whacked him like Hunter’s staff did Kikimora: “Why don’t you just swap my body with someone like Eda did with you and King? Then I can clean myself in someone else’s body!”
Lilith chimed in, “would that work on you, as you’re a demon and all?”
“Well, it worked on King, didn’t it?”
“I thought you determined he wasn’t a normal demon!” said Luz, still wiping Hooty’s viscous juices off her cloak.
“Oh, is this post-season 2 episode 8?”
“Post-what now? ”
“Nevermind.” Hooty grinned with somehow even more teeth than before. “But I’ve been bodyswapped before! Trust me, it’ll work!”
Luz soaked in pensivity (and demon mucus) on the coach for what seemed to be minutes, and eventually decided upon “Sure. But how are we going to cast the spell? Lilith and Eda can’t use magic, and I’m only human, after all.”
“Can’t you get your girlfriend to do it?”
---
“Okay, so how do I do this?” asked a frantic Amity, desperate to impress her awesome girlfriend, but even more desperate to not accidentally transfer her consciousness into Hooty’s body.
“How am I supposed to know? I’m a human!”
“Sorry!” She covered her face. I’ve just never done a spell this advanced before.”
“It’s okay. You’ve got this. You’re the most powerful witch I know, and…”
As this incredibly touching scene unfolded, Hooty kept himself busy, imagining the countless things he could do once freed from his cylindrical shackle.
“I can’t wait! I’ve never had hands before. Right now, I’m basically just one long finger!” said Hooty, taking a position that could hopefully not be interpreted as an offensive gesture.
“Dear Hootcifer,” began Lilith, “shut up.”
After far too long of nothing said, a nervous voice shattered the silence from behind.
“I guess I’m ready!”
---
“Lulu! Lulu! Lulu!” said Hooty, possessing his friend’s body with utmost joy, “isn’t this amazing?”
Lilith extended Hooty’s body in and out and in and out and in and out.
“Hooty.”
“Yes, my dearest Lulu?” said Hooty, rolling his newfound neck back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
“When you extend and detract… where does the rest of you go? There isn’t anything behind the door, and the door simply isn’t large enough to contain you.
Hooty ran, for the first time ever, towards himself, and met Lilith’s eyes with his.
“I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”
“Well, I’m the one currently inhabiting your weirdly-capable-at-being-an-assassin body, so I don’t think you could do that.”
They stared into each other’s eyes with more intensity than a grudgeball match between the main character, a love interest, an often-used-as-an-excuse-for-other-characters’-development friend, and three bullies.
“What is going on here?” genuinely wondered Eda as she walked into the living room.
“I’m Lilith!” said Hooty.
“I’m Hooty!” said Lilith.
Eda blinked, blinked, and blinked, then pointed at the worm.
“Is he clean yet?”
“Not yet!” exclaimed the two in uncomfortable synergy.
“Just… get that done. Dear Titan, my family's weird.”
Eda slammed the door for the second time in this fanfiction, followed by Hooty inhabiting Lilith’s body to shout “ She called me family! ” Unfortunately, Hooty, accustomed to the ability to twist and curve through any nook and every cranny when excited, but not being excited in a witch’s body, simply fell over.
---
“Dear God, and I thought fighting Belos’s guards was a workout!” exclaimed Hooty, just having finished cleaning himself, covered in bird-worm-mucus (and various other demon sauces).
“Who’s that?” asked a confused Lilith, twisting back to an upright position.
“Belos? You know, your ex-boss that you sacrificed your sister’s magic for? Who tried to kill her?”
“No, I know who Belos is. Who’s God?”
“Oh! He’s…” Hooty looked everywhere but at his own body. “A friend.”
Luz threw the back, non-Hooty, most certainly canon door open and off its hinges, exclaiming, “¡Belos capturó mi amor!”
The besties looked at each other.
“Hooty, what did I tell you about leaving captions off.”
“They distract from the watching experience!”
Luz yelled in frustration. “Amity! Belos! Castle!”
“You know how much I love the alphabet, Luz!” said Hooty-in-Lilith, continuing with “Darius! Eda! Frewin! Goops!”
“You do not understand the gravity of the situation!” said a remarkably angry (and somehow more red than usual) Luz. “If Amity is trapped in the Emperor’s palace, she can’t reverse the spell, and you two are stuck in each other’s bodies.”
Hooty smiled with all of Lilith’s teeth. “I love my new body! I never want to leave!”
However, Lilith-in-Hooty’s face became as determined as a character voiced by Alex Hirsch can get.
“Give me a moment.”
At that, Lilith-in-Hooty shot into the ground. The rumbling of a speed/worm-demon not digging, but punching through the Titan’s decaying body at speeds faster than the hiatus (so admittedly not that fast) caused multiple Titanquakes throughout the residential areas of the corpse, but that simply did not matter to Lilith. All she wanted was to be saved from the horrors of Hooty’s endless body.
“So…” said Luz. “Come here oft—”
And bang! A beak gripping a cotton-candy-haired blur flung through the window and slammed a body onto the couch.
“Change us back!”
---
“So what did we learn about shirking responsibility towards chores around the house?” asked Luz sanctimoniously.
“You started it!” shouted Lilith-in-Lilith, finally reunited with her frighteningly pale body.
“We all started it.”
“This isn’t even an episode of the show! There doesn’t need to be a moral at the end!”
“Hooty, will you shut up?”
And everything was back to abnormal.