Chapter Text
It's not uncommon for witches and demons alike to claim that the day they woke up to their numbers was one of the most important days of their lives, second only to the moment they were officially accepted into a coven to receive their sigil.
It's a subject often spoken about. As common as discussions about the weather or the latest update in the neighborhood gossip.
Willow grows up on a steady diet of slightly embellished stories about the moment other people first received their numbers, all set in an alternate version of reality where morning breath isn't a thing and it doesn't take several minutes to roll out of bed because the floor is way too cold. Tales of the moment they first woke up to a set of colorful numbers tick, tick, ticking away on the inside of their left wrist, destined to reach zero only after making physical contact with their fated other half for the first time.
Proof that somewhere out there, there is someone who will love them unconditionally.
At the ripe age of five, Willow sits down on her best friend's bed to stare in wonder at the bright purple numbers etched across Amity's skin. Her friend dreams of a strange world with blue skies, green grass, and people who speak a language neither of them understands. It sounds both beautiful and strange. Maybe, Amity says, she lives on another Titan.
(At the age of fourteen-going-on-fifteen, Willow makes a new friend who shows her a photograph of a strange, unknown realm and Willow realizes — oh. The grass is green and the skies are blue.)
At the age of six, Willow no longer has a best friend and she wakes up screaming in terror at an all too vivid dream of clawing her way out of the darkness while her lungs burned and her fingernails were torn to shreds. She remembers crying hysterically, begging for her fathers to come save her, all while choking on her own saliva and feeling very much like she was about to die. There was suddenly not enough oxygen left in the world. Her lungs were cursed to spasm and burn for the rest of her life. Supposedly, she was so inconsolable that it took her dads three hours and a little bit of blood orange blossom water to settle her nerves.
Willow does not notice the golden numbers on the soft inside of her wrist until several hours later. It's her papa who becomes aware of them first, nearly dropping the crystal ball remote in shock after she hands it over.
As it turns out, receiving her numbers does not feel as beautiful or sublime as the tales made it out to be.
It makes her feel wrung out and hollow. Like someone has taken her soft innards and scooped them out with a spoon. At the age of six, it feels like a fresh wave of terror right after her heartbeat finally settles. It's the slow realization that her nightmare was someone else's reality. The knowledge that her soulmate is somewhere out there — and she truly does not know if they're safe. The horrifying understanding that she had no way to know if they were safe because the vague, sporadic dreams she experiences for the next eight years of her life are never enough to establish identifying details, and the Titan has decreed that they will not cross paths until the day the numbers on Willow's wrist all reach zero.
She didn't have the words to properly articulate what she saw back then. It's not easy for a little girl to sit down and tell her dads that someone she already cares so deeply about may or may not have been buried alive at some point.
She still doesn't have the words to properly articulate it now that she's older and (hopefully) wiser, standing in Eda's bathroom and staring down at the numbers on her wrist like she can force them to move faster through sheer determination.
Of course, it doesn't work.
Her numbers stare back at her, steadily ticking away second by second. Helpfully informing her that she needs to be patient. That it's a little under five days now.
(But so much can happen in only five days.)
"... Hey, it's me again," Willow whispers to a soulmate who cannot hear her. "I'm coming for you soon, got it? So please be okay." She rubs her thumb over the inside of her wrist, each digit slightly warmer than the rest of her skin. Her soulmate is alive, she reminds herself. Her soulmate is alive and they did not die alone in the dark with dirt on their face and blood on the palms of their hands.
Her soulmate is alive, and she will make sure no one hurts them ever again in only a matter of days.
She hears Hooty's voice loud and clear through the small bathroom window, high pitched and just as disturbingly chipper as ever. "Heyyyyy, Luz," he sings, while Willow straightens out her dress and mentally prepares herself to sit her butt down on Luz's couch and be totally normal about this. "It's your friend, the angry green gi— ow!"
Willow will be so normal. Illusionists everywhere will weep at her ability to hide the uncomfortable truth until a veneer of normalcy. For her first act, she will present the facade of a young witch who is not at all weirded out by the fact that her former best friend stood up for her after several years of contributing to her bullying, possibly because her conscience finally caught up to her but maybe mostly because of the painfully blatant crush she seems to have developed on Willow's current best friend.
Her current best friend who is a human, and due to the fact that humans lack timers (woefully so, as Luz put it), has yet to put two and two together. Rumor has it Amity Blight skipped school the day after the covention.
Willow would know, because she distinctly recalls being slightly less miserable that day.
But, again, Willow is so normal.
When she makes her way back downstairs, she finds Amity forcibly removing Hooty from her shoulders by ramming the butt of one of her crutches into his face. Gus sucks in a breath and winces from where he's sitting, splayed across the arm of Eda's couch with a bowl of popped teeth precariously balanced on his stomach. It cannot be good for his back.
It's Luz who notices she's returned, a big smile spreading across her face when she spots Willow awkwardly skipping and hopping down the last step. "Willow!" she says, grabbing a bowl of eyeballs from the table with a flourish. "Come sit down! We got snaaaacks."
From the corner of her eyes, she spots the moment Amity freezes up upon realizing Willow was now in the room as well. When their eyes meet, Amity stares back at her for a moment — and then she offers her what may be the most painfully awkward smile she has ever seen on a Blight.
This is the story of how Willow Park finds herself crammed on Edalyn Clawthorne's far too small couch, squeezed between her current best friend and her former childhood friend.
She could not make this up even if she spent several hours coming up with the most unlikely scenarios.
Amity sits ramrod straight to her right, shoulders tense and face flushed as she stumbles her way through a conversation with Luz. It's a little impressive how all her eloquence seems to abandon her the moment she opens her mouth within ten feet of the human. It's also, in a way that makes Willow's stomach churn uncomfortably, a little reminiscent of the way she would sit at the dinner table the scant few times she had been allowed to visit Willow's house when they were little girls. Amity's hands would always stay folded on her lap, prim and proper in a way Willow had only seen in the sud operas, and her eyes would widen whenever Willow's dads asked her if she needed something.
The answer had always been no, thank you, it's okay.
Willow didn't really get it back then. And for the longest time, she had pushed it to a corner of her mind, left to gather dust and only carefully retrieved when she was looking for ways to self-flagellate.
Then Willow's mind had been literally set on fire — and then she finally understood.
"But you know," she hears Luz tell Amity, "it's a big week for Willow! First she conquered the world of grudgby, and now she'll conquer the world of love."
"The world of love?" Amity says, something strange and wobbly in her tone when she looks up from the steaming cup of goopberry tea cradled between her hands. Her eyes flicker to Willow first, and then she quickly turns her gaze back to Luz. "What do you mean?"
"Weeeeeelll..." Luz begins, elongating the syllable for suspense. She does that thing where she waggles her eyebrows and winks, ready to pull Willow and Gus into a new bout of shenanigans.
Willow sighs and indulges her, knowing that Luz is trying her best to make things not awkward for Willow despite the fact that there's no escaping it. "I only have a little time left," she explains, pretending not to perceive the way Amity's eyes widen. "It should be a few more days now."
"Oh," Amity says eloquently, staring at her. Maybe it's because she had pushed Willow away before her numbers manifested themselves. Or maybe it's because when the bullying and harassment began, she never cared enough to ask.
Willow hums, reaching down to grab an eyeball from the bowl so she has an excuse to dip out of the conversation. After all, it's terribly rude to speak with your mouth full.
Luz, beautiful and sweet Luz, seems to take the hint — because she smoothly moves on from the subject.
"By the way, Amity," she says. "I never asked about your timer."
Amity turns her head so fast, Willow swears she hears her bones crackle and pop. "Mine?"
"Yeah!" Luz says. "How much time is left on yours?"
Amity opens her mouth. She closes it. She opens it again.
She makes a sound not unlike a tea kettle that has been left on the stove for far too long.
Then, she shouts.
"Igottagotothebathroom!"
Of course, she promptly trips and falls all over the living room table. This is something that happens when one forgets their leg is, in fact, still very broken. The leftover tea spills on the couch, soaking into the upholstery. Their snacks land on the floor with a sad plop, eyeballs squished under the weight of Amity's body. Everyone startles and stands up.
Amity groans, lifting a shaky hand. There is a single eyeball impaled on the carefully manicured nail of her index finger. "I'm okay," she wheezes.
She is not okay.
But they help her get back on the couch and very politely pretend nothing embarrassing happened. Amity's pride will survive the day, if only with some mild bruising.
As Willow carefully dabs the excess tea from Eda's couch, she realizes — this actually isn't too bad.
She doesn't mind this at all.
She's doing better in school. She has friends (plural) who love her unconditionally and would go to war for her honor. She's finally studying something she's passionate about, instead of forcing herself through a curriculum she hates for fear of letting her dads down. She no longer feels like an endless chasm has opened up in the bottom of her stomach every time she wakes up in the morning and realizes she has to go to school. She's even standing within arm's reach of her former best friend without bracing herself for catty insults and scathing remarks.
Slowly, but surely, she is becoming the witch she has always wanted to be.
And in a matter of days, she will meet her soulmate. In only five days, she will take their hand and make sure that they're safe, that they're okay, and that nothing can ever hurt them again.
Things are finally looking up for Willow.
Days later, Luz gets kidnapped by the Head Witch of the Emperor's Coven and Eda is arrested. A public petrification is scheduled to take place at sundown.
The universe, it seems, has decided to readjust in the worst way possible.
Gus' gaze feels heavy on her back as she pulls her cowl further down her face, trying her best to obscure her features. The conformatorium is crowded, packed wall to wall already, with even more witches and demons slowly trickling in to watch the proceedings. It's the kind of turnout she would expect to see at a major league grudgby match.
Instead, they're all here to watch an innocent woman get petrified.
Willow feels short of breath. It is not because of the oppressive heat of the crowd around her.
Not even a day ago, she was excited to go on a silly little field trip with her classmates. Not even a day ago, she was daydreaming of all the possible ways she could meet her soulmate, ranging from the plausible to the ones she stole wholesale from one of her favorite novels. Not even a day ago, she had foolishly thought everything would be okay when she set out to help Luz indefinitely borrow a priceless artifact from the Emperor's castle.
She had been stupid. So, so very stupid.
For a moment, she existed in an alternate version of reality where she wasn't herself and life did not always find a way to get worse.
Now, her feet firmly settled in the true version of reality, there are less than thirty minutes left on her wrist, her best friend is missing and she really shouldn't have eaten breakfast, because she is absolutely going to puke if they don't come up with a plan to stop this.
"Willow..." Gus breathes, a slight tremble to his voice. When she takes her eyes off the crowd to look at him, she notices that he's staring at her wrist before he lifts his eyes to meet her gaze.
Well, that won't do.
Willow reaches over to take his hand, giving it a light squeeze and offering him a smile that she hopes is reassuring. "We'll find Luz and figure out a way to rescue Eda," she tells him, all while trying to convince herself it's not a lie. "It's going to be okay, Gus."
She knows that's not the only reason he's looking at her like that. But right now, in this horrifying version of reality, she does not have the luxury of acknowledging anything else.
Gus purses his lips in a way that she knows means he's judging the heck out of her, and wondering whether or not he should call her out on it. In the end, the subject is momentarily pushed aside but not forgotten — if only because it's getting a little hard to even move as the crowd continues to grow denser around them, and this is not the type of conversation one should have in front of the Titan and everybody.
"I don't see Luz anywhere," she says, holding onto Gus' hand to avoid losing him while they push their way to the front of the crowd.
"Do you think Lilith let her go?" Gus asks, barely audible over the cacophony of voices around them.
Luz did not answer the crystal ball when they tried to reach her after learning the news of what happened to Eda. The crow couldn't find her when Willow tried to call her. Gus tried sending a penstagram message, too. But of course, Luz doesn't own her own scroll. She always used Eda's account.
In other words, Willow has no way of knowing if her friend is alright or not. She can't even begin to guess if she's still being held prisoner by a regime she used to admire and look up to not even twenty-four hours ago. She thinks she would be thoroughly experiencing whiplash if she had the time for it.
Well, there may still be time for it to catch up to her later.
But for now, she taps her fingers against her thigh — one, two, three, four — and forces her breath to remain steady. "Why wouldn't she?" she asks, as if she has even an ounce of confident in the answer. "She only wanted Eda."
Gus opens his mouth to respond, but before the words can even leave his mouth, he's interrupted by the sound of drums. Twelve coven scouts march out of the west and east wings of the conformatory, walking past the balcony reserved for the media and settling down in front of the stage. The sigil of the Emperor's Coven looms above them as a cage rises from the ground, with an impossibly large figure held inside.
The shape may be unfamiliar, but the face is all Eda.
Then, just when she thinks it can't possibly get worse — two more figures emerge on stage, only to be promptly thrown in the cage alongside Eda. Even while standing on the tips of her toes, struggling to keep her head above the crowd, Willow could not mistake them for anyone other than King and Lilith.
"Oh, no," Willow breathes out, just as she feels Gus' grip on her hand tighten almost painfully.
"Willow," Gus says, "what do we do?"
"I, I don't know," she admits, willing her stupid brain to come up with something. Anything. "I—"
"Wait!" Gus suddenly shouts, tugging at her and pulling her towards the east wing. "I know— My dad!"
It's an explanation sorely lacking in details. But, despite that, Willow immediately understands. "We can get the crowd on our side!"
She sees Gus nod while he leads her through the crowd, pushing and shoving and shouting rushed apologies to anyone who happens to be in their way as they try to reach Mr. Porter as quickly as possible, their clothes getting horribly crumpled and their skin bruised in the process. Eda's screams are bloodcurdling when the petrification begins. Willow does not think she will ever manage to forget the sound of Eda's agonized wailing for as long as she lives. They do not have the time to worry about things like good manners or asking for permission.
Once they've pushed their way to the space reserved for the media, Gus makes quick work of distracting his dad on live crystal ball — giving Willow the perfect opportunity to steal his microphone and take over the broadcast before anyone can stop her.
"What's happening to Eda isn't right!" she says, not even sparing a moment to think about the fact that her cowl is no longer obscuring her face like she originally intended. "She might not always follow the rules, but she hasn't done anything worthy of a petrification. The Emperor should let Eda go!"
(Later, should anyone ask Willow about the precise order of events, she would have a hard time coming up with an answer.
All she knows is that one moment, she was rallying a crowd of peaceful protesters.
The next, there were coven scouts coming out of seemingly nowhere, and—)
"—Willow!"
Gus is shouting at her, urging her to move.
This is now a riot.
Willow's body reacts before her mind can fully process the events currently unfolding. She moves out of the way of a coven scout's binding spell, waving her hand in the same move to summon thick vines to restrain their feet before they can give chase. The crowd below has descended into chaos, pushing and pulling against the coven scouts that have joined the fray to control the crowd — as if it wasn't their presence that aggravated the situation in the first place.
(In the midst of all this, she can still hear Eda's agonized screaming.
Willow does not know if she made the situation better or worse.)
Of course, she hardly wants to throw herself into the chaos, knowing fully well she might get crushed if she does, but she's left with little choice when even more scouts come out of the woodworks to arrest her.
It's a bit of a struggle to stay on her feet after she catapults herself at the crowd to escape the coven scouts. It's even harder to keep track of Gus, who is shorter than she is, as they try to make their way to the exit. Even with the aid of her magic, conjuring vines and thickets to put some space between herself and anyone trying to crush her, it is still the most suffocating, claustrophobic experience of her life. It feels like everyone is squeezing, pulling, tugging, shoving at her in such rapid succession that she can hardly keep track of how many times someone has touched the bare skin of her arms in the past five minutes.
The panic has made a home out of her intestines at this point, devouring her ability to feel anything but a horrible, nauseating sensation that she has ruined everything for everyone forever. It manifests itself in the clamminess of her hands as she knocks a coven scout clean off their feet, and then turns around to look for her friend in the crowd.
Much to her horror, she cannot find him.
"Gus?!" she shouts, her heart jackhammering against her sternum as she pushes her way through the crowd in hopes of finding him. "Gus, where are you?!"
So caught up in her panic, she momentarily loses track of what is happening onstage — until she hears the sound of something large and heavy crashing somewhere above her, and realizes she can no longer hear Eda screaming. One quick glance is all she needs to understand what has changed.
Standing behind Kikimora, clad in witch's wool and wielding a fire glyph in her left hand, is none other than Luz.
It sure would be nice if Willow had the time to feel relieved for more than five seconds.
But then there is a gloved hand grabbing at her wrist, tugging her back with enough force to nearly knock her off her feet. When she turns around to get good look at her assailant, her eyes meet an expressionless mask. A figure dressed in white and golden hues, shockingly only taller than her by a few inches. The Golden Guard. The right hand man of the very Emperor who had no trouble using her best friend as live bait to sentence an innocent woman to death.
"You," the Golden Guard hisses, "are under arrest by orders of the Emperor!"
And this is just about the point Willow loses it.
"No," she hears herself say, utterly consumed by the sheer rage and indignity accumulated over past twenty-four hours. "I don't think so." She feels like a cauldron that has been superheated past the boiling point. Like a gorenado that's hellbent on ripping everything in its path to shred. The audacity of the words that have come out of the Golden Guard's mouth, as if the Emperor weren't the cause of everything that has gone wrong since this morning to begin with.
With a flick of her wrist, vines rise up from the ground to grab the Golden Guard by the collar and drag him down to the earth, forcing him to let go of her wrist as he begins to wrestle against the hold of Willow's magic. She feels him grab at her legs, his hand snagging on her boots for a brief moment — before she kicks him in the face and runs for it. It gives her enough of a head start that she manages to push closer to the exit, eyes frantically scanning the crowd for any sign of Gus.
But she's unable to truly escape before there is a flicker of red light to her right, and she feels someone's very gross, very sweaty hand gripping her own. The sensation sends shivers down her spine. It feels almost electric.
Of course, it's the Golden Guard again. This time with a slightly dented mask and a strange looking staff clutched in his other hand. "I command you to stop!" he shouts, as if she's any more likely to listen than she was five seconds ago.
"And I command you to leave me alone!" she shouts back, as if that's the correct way to get rid of a coven official.
If someone had told Willow days ago that she would find herself wrestling with the Emperor's right hand man after inciting a riot on government property, she would have called them crazy.
Truly, she had underestimated how much could happen in only five days.
The Golden Guard slaps her hand with the tip of her staff when she begins to form a spell circle. She punches him back, forcing him to drop his staff from the force of the impact. It's an exchange of both physical and magical blows, with the Golden Guard trying to restrain her and Willow trying to get the heck away from him. All the while, the crowd continues to push and shove at them, either trying to get away from the coven scouts or fighting back against them. Eventually, Willow finds herself with both of her wrists held in a vice grip and nowhere left to run.
Luckily, Willow has friends who love her unconditionally and would go to war for her honor.
One moment the Golden Guard is looming over her, struggling to catch his breath while gripping Willow's hands in both of his own. He glances down, obviously trying to figure out where he dropped his staff.
The next, someone is hitting the Golden Guard over the head, knocking both him and Willow down in the process.
Willow quickly shoves the man off her, scrambling to her feet, and when she looks up — she finds Gus holding the Golden Guard's own staff, poised and ready to whack him over the head again if he shows any signs of getting up.
"Gus?" she gasps, her eyes wide. Her friend grins, looking very cool despite the fact that he is also horribly sweaty and has obviously been squished between a group of very angry adults for a good while. "Where did you— No, never mind. Let's get out of here!"
Gus drops the staff over the Golden Guard's head for good measure, and they run.
They run and run and run — and Willow does not look back to see the Golden Guard push himself up to his knees on shaky limbs, clutching his dented mask with one hand and staring at her retreating back until he can no longer see her.
They run and run and run until their lungs burn and their legs feel like Yell-O and the glimpse they caught of Eda's cursed form flying away is lost between the treetops and the bones of the Titan.
They run and run and run until Gus loses his footing about ten minutes away from Bonesborough, and Willow has to guide him to sit down on a nearby tree stump so he can catch his breath.
Then they rest. And they breathe. And they try to squeeze the events of the past few hours into a shape they can compartmentalize and digest without losing their minds.
It is easier said than done when their scrolls are buzzing up a storm, their penstagram accounts filled with an insane amount of mentions and direct messages. Clips and screenshots of today's broadcast. Gus and Willow's faces immortalized on the World Wide Spiderweb where no amount of scrubbing and deleting can erase the fact that they were recorded live inciting a riot, as unintentionally as it may be.
A series of increasingly worried, frantic messages from Willow's dads, begging her to stay safe and come home.
"Willow," Gus says, slumped forward and staring at his scroll like he can somehow will everything on his feed to go away. "What did we do?"
Well, the blunt and emotionally wrung out part of Willow's brain says, I'm pretty sure we just committed treason against the crown.
She does not say that.
"We did what we could to help Eda," she tells him instead. "It's... It's going to be..."
Alright, Willow means to say. It's going to be alright, she wants to say, like a liar.
But the words leave her when she catches sight of her wrist. The golden digits have gone still, no longer changing with each passing second. What she sees now is a row of neat zeros.
She met her soulmate, and she does not even know who they are.
She met her soulmate and she doesn't even know if they're okay, after all that.
"... Oh," she says, softly.
Gus sits up, looking at her in concern. "Willow, are you okay?"
Yes.
No.
Of course she is.
Of course she's not.
(There is a strange taste in her mouth. It's what she imagines the damp soil of her garden would taste like.)
Willow takes a deep breath and dismisses her scroll, clasping her hands together so her wrists are pressed against her abdomen. It's fine. It's fine. Her dads are worried sick and Gus isn't looking too good. She can do this, one thing at a time.
"Let's keep moving, Gus," she says, proud of the way her voice remains perfectly even. "We'll go to my place and call your dad to pick you up when it's safe."
(Nestled deep in the Titan's ribcage, a boy clad in white and golden hues prostrates himself on one knee. He purposefully does not look at the smattering of bright green on the inside of his exposed wrist. Gloves, at least, can be easily replaced.
"Well?" Belos prompts, not even sparing a glance at the boy in front of him while the scouts gather every piece of the shattered portal door they can find.
"My apologies, Emperor Belos," the Golden Guard says, head bowed. "I was unable to capture the agitators and they escaped into the crowd. But... we have recordings and photographs. They can be easily tracked down and apprehended. If you just allow me to—"
The Emperor holds up a hand, and that alone is enough to silence him.
"It was the will of the Titan that today's events unfold the way they did," he says, simply. "Worry not, Hunter. Now, there is something else you can do for me.")