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Luz finds herself floating—figuratively in this case.
The feeling of Amity’s hand on her own, the sensation of the gentle contrast between her warm hand and her girlfriend’s colder one left her feeling like a funky little white cloud dancing in the sky.
And Luz's heart, bless her, danced in silence, and there is a smile on her face that was genuinely showing how her body was reaching the max of its happiness meter.
“I’m glad we could go on a date after all this.”
Luz’s voice is stiff and forced due to the peculiar pressure in her throat, and it hurts a tad bit. As she clears her throat, she sees Amity smile, her eyes focusing somewhere in the distance that Luz could not pinpoint.
“You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for a day like this.”
Amity’s voice is soft—gentle—any other word that could convey the calmness on her tongue, and it makes Luz feel awfully jittery and like jello.
“How long?” Luz brings her other hand on top of Amity’s before drawing circles again and again repeatedly. Her curiosity burned as bright as ever.
“Hmm,” Amity’s eyebrows furrow, and it makes Luz want to pinch the skin in between them playfully, but she holds back silently. “I can’t say. I’ve been wanting to even before we dated, back when I just had a crush on you."
Luz’s mouth drops slightly. Amity catches sight of it and bites her bottom lip to resist the urge to chuckle.
“That’s a long time!” Luz states the obvious, the smile returning to her face along with the tender sweetness of her voice, “I’m glad we got to go after so long, even if I kinda messed it up after I dropped my drink at the cafe.”
“It happens to the best of us, silly. We didn’t even realize that they provided cup lids,” Amity pats Luz on the back and keeps her hand there, "You didn't mess anything up."
“I thought it was weird that I had a paper cup without a lid,” She gestures a cup in her hand and sighs, “I thought it was a Boiling Isles thing, not gonna lie.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t think we had the decency to make paper cups with lids to go on them.”
Luz snorts when Amity shoots her a funny look consisting of a weird smile with an eyebrow slightly raised, “Look, sweet potato, I still don’t know everything that is and isn’t normal here!”
“Oh, shut up, you've been here for a long time,” Amity is between both a normal laugh and the verge of cackling, “Eres muy graciosa.”
“Did you just say that I’m very funny in Spanish?” Luz looks in surprise for a second before smiling, “Impresionante, Amity.”
“Was that the word for impressive?”
Luz nods, her smile still not leaving her face, “How did you know?”
“Uh…what’s the word…cognates…?” Amity takes her hand off Luz's back and begins making random gestures while trying to explain. She continues when Luz nods to confirm, “It just sounded a lot like impressive, so I just made the connection.”
“Ding, ding, ding! Bravo!” Luz pulls Amity into a hug, to which she responds by making a weird incoherent sound that goes undetected by Luz, “I’m so proud of you!”
“Th-thank you.” Amity shyly hugs Luz back, nuzzling against her neck. “I’ve been doing my best to practice. I want your mom to like me.”
“Aw, Amity!” Luz makes her embrace tighter but soft enough to where Amity isn’t struggling to breathe, “My mom already likes you! You don’t need to learn Spanish for her to like you if she already does.”
“Hmm, well…” Amity nuzzles in closer to Luz’s neck, almost as if she were hiding her face as if it wasn’t already. “I want to do it for you.”
“Huh!?” Luz almost pulls back in surprise, but instead jolts up slightly, “Oh? Me?! Why me?”
It was Amity’s turn to laugh, and she lets out a soft and tender one—a laugh that tickled the skin on Luz’s neck so sweetly that it almost sent Luz into a heat stroke.
“You’re wonderful. That’s why I—well—I want to do it. Not because I feel obligated to, but because I want to. That’s all.”
Luz feels Amity’s lips rise up in a huge smile against her neck.
“I’m glad we got to go on the date after so long. I hope you don't mind me saying that again,” Her arms go around Luz’s waist, and once her fingers begin to rub odd little patterns on her back, Luz’s grip on Amity loosens, “I’m so glad that everything is back to normal, that you’re safe, and that we’re still here to be able to do things like this.”
Luz smiles, a grin so wide unlike any other that she had let on her face previously.
“I’m happy, too.” Luz says quietly, the words coming out and dancing in the abyss of Amity’s ears, “So, so, so happy.”
Luz closes her eyes, taking in the comfortable silence among them both. It was moments like these where she felt most at peace—and it made her realize just how grateful she was to have such a wonderful girlfriend by her side.
A brand new and free Boiling Isles greets her when she opens her eyes, and it's memorizing in such a way that makes Luz feel more at ease. The colors of the Isles seemed more enriched and more lively, and much more beautiful than before.
Though, the beauty of the scenery was nothing compared to the beauty that Luz finds in seeing Amity's loose strands of purple hair dance in the breeze.
“I love you.”
And just like that, Luz almost finds herself dying from heart failure.
It was so close in fact, that she lets out a weird sound that is a mix of a choking and suffocating sound that was hard to describe, but made Amity snort nonetheless. Luz pulls back from the hug, her eyes sparkling in affection while her face burned in embarrassment.
“I—“ Luz cuts herself off, telling herself that she should probably, most likely, and most definitely calm her heart down before she replied.
One, two, breathe.
“I—uh“
One. Two.
Breathe.
“…”
No words come out.
She’s saying them. She can feel the words ‘I love you, too’ coming out of her throat with as much passion and love as she could have mustered at that moment, but no sound comes out.
She tries again, and it ends with the same result.
“Luz?”
Luz realizes that the world had gone quiet. Quiet enough to where she could hear her ears ringing and her heartbeat pounding against the walls of her chest, pounding harder, faster, then slower, and slower, to where she almost felt like she stopped functioning and was at her last few moments.
She takes a deep breath in.
One…
Two…
Breathe.
Breathe, Luz.
Amity smiles a little bit, but her ears droop slightly, and there’s a somber expression on her face that made Luz stop breathing for a split second as her ears continue to ring louder.
“It’s okay, Luz.”
She’s now looking directly into Luz’s eyes, and at that moment, something seeped into the cracks of Luz’s mind that immediately made her stomach drop painfully low.
This wasn’t real.
“It’s okay,” Amity says again, taking Luz’s hands into hers, which were now shaking in what seemed like shock or fear.
Curse her brain.
“It’s not your fault.”
Damn it.
—-
Luz wakes up, tangled in her own bedsheets and suffocating in her own sweat.
She's breathing—hard—it felt like someone had placed a whole pile of bricks on her stomach and left them there for many agonizing hours. Luz lifts herself up slightly from her bed, looking down. There was nothing.
She sighs loudly, her brain still not fully optimized for being awake at such an hour.
'What time is it, anyway?'
Luz squints and looks around her room, seeing nothing but a couple of her belongings shining in the moonlight seeping from her curtains. She lets her body fall back onto her pillow, and extends a hand to her dresser, feeling for her phone.
She eventually finds it, feeling the round corner of the edge of the phone, and Luz pulls it towards her while turning it on.
3:50 AM.
She hears something fall from her dresser. It was the sound of something resembling a piece of paper—or that actually was a piece of paper—falling onto the carpet.
Luz sighs, a bit more quietly than the last time as she turns on her phone flashlight and sits back up to look around.
It didn't take long to find what she was looking for.
It was a folded piece of pink paper, or at least it once was. The creases of its previously neatly folded state were permanently marked all over the paper in little square sections.
Luz squints harder. Something was written on it.
"Hey!
Here's a little surprise note. I know you're stressed right now, since tomorrow is the big day, after all. Hopefully, you found the little gift from me hidden beneath the cloak Eda gave you, I didn't know where else to hide it. Apparently, it's some human candy according to Gus? He says he has had a bag of it a bit before you came into the Boiling Isles, so hopefully, they aren't old or poisoned, or something of that sort. Gus told me to try some, but I don't know how to feel about eating this weird ball thing on a stick?
Anyway, hope you enjoy it, stay safe! Take care of yourself!
With love,
Amity."
Oh.
Oh no.
Despite the fact that the note was supposed to be sweet, a bitter taste in Luz's mouth started to intensify the more she looked at the note.
“It’s not your fault.”
Oh—no.
It was just enough acrid poison to make the tears build up in her eyes, and when she blinked, they came pouring out effortlessly.
Agony and helplessness begin to consume Luz from the inside out as she starts crying—then sobbing—then to something almost incomprehensible as her breathing hitches and her cries become louder and messier. She’s now sitting completely up, a ball of hair clenched in her hand, the other hand clenching onto her phone in frustration and anger.
‘If only we could have stopped Belos.’
Luz shoots up from her bed and plants her feet firmly on the floor, throwing her phone across the room and still near ripping her hair out of her skull.
‘If only I were better.'
‘It’s all my fault.’
She puts a hand to her throat, feeling her windpipe spasm every time she would take a breath in.
‘I’m the reason why they’re all gone.’
Luz continues to cry in pain, now bringing her arms around herself tightly as her sobs become louder, shakier, and even more painful to experience.
‘I’m the reason why everyone is gone.’
‘I’m—the reason why she’s gone.’
Minutes have passed. Luz’s nails dig so hard into the skin of her arms that she can feel a small sensation of burning beneath her emotional distress. She probably tore open some skin, but she could care less at the moment.
‘I’m the reason why she’s dead.’
It was a harsh way to put it, but Luz found herself drowning in such a dark sea of her own thoughts that her attempt to tell herself it was okay or to make things seem better than they actually were completely fell flat on its face.
‘I’m sorry.’
Luz wanted to apologize out loud to maybe—somehow—in some way—maybe tell all the possible spirits that are haunting and cursing her name that she didn’t mean it. It was all because she wasn’t good enough and that she failed everyone on the godforsaken carcass of the titan.
'I should have been the one who died.'
'I'm so, so sorry.'
But just like in her dream, her words and her apology to every living person and creature that lived on the Boiling Isles don’t ever reach anyone’s ears.
And she wishes, in the deepest part of her brain beneath all her anguish, that she could see her again one last time. One last time, where she knew it would be their last.
Luz didn't know if it was selfish to only think about her when there were many other people she was grieving for underneath all her distress for her dear girlfriend, and that uncertainty only made her hate herself even more.
'I'm sorry.'
Her biggest regret, apart from being the cause of the ending of the Demon Realm, was never going on a real date with her girlfriend.
Her girlfriend—who she would never see smile—or laugh—or feel her lips against hers ever again.
She could never see her hair flow so beautifully in the wind in the real world ever again.
'I'm so sorry.'
Luz never hated the color purple more than at that moment.