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A week had gone by.
A week had gone by, and she was still wearing the exact same jacket.
Luz doubted anyone noticed, but she’d refused to wash it. She just prayed nobody asked her about it. And that it didn’t smell.
Actually, the issue was that it did smell. But not in a bad way. It smelled like dirt and teenage sweat, but also like a warm fireplace and tender arms and a little fuzzy creature sound asleep at her feet. It smelled like home.
Luz didn’t want to ruin that magic. After all, it was kind of the only magic she had left.
She hoped her friends didn’t notice. It was embarrassing enough for just her to know just how attached to it she was. Eda’s jacket was glued to her body at all times, whether warming her arms or fastened securely around her waist. She had hardly taken it off since she returned to her home dimension, and definitely had not once let it out of her sight. It became an anchor of sorts—its function wasn’t just to warm her body anymore, but to make her feel safe. To remind her that she hadn’t made it all up. To give her something to keep fighting for.
And, if she were being completely honest, Luz was terrified of what would become of her if she managed to lose what little bit of the Owl House she had left. She knew her current state was delicate enough.
Her biggest fear was forgetting.
She couldn’t bear the thought of not having the comfort of Eda’s scent to remind her that the Owl Lady was, in fact, real—that Luz hadn’t made it all up. Even sometimes in the presence of other witches, it was easy to convince herself that the Demon Realm had been a fantastical dream.
So when her mother interrupted her with a simple question, holding a laundry basket against her hip in preparation for the Saturday morning wash, Luz reacted viscerally.
“Want me to wash your jacket for you, mija ?”
Luz froze, fingers automatically moved to grasp at the fabric of the jacket hanging off the back of her desk chair.
She wasn’t sure how to respond. Would it be weird if she said no? She knew her mom wouldn’t want her to go around wearing a dirty jacket if she could help it.
Anxiety pooled in her stomach. She felt her mouth dry up as she opened it. “No, thanks,” she said finally, trying to put on a smile to show that she was A-okay.
She most definitely was not. And she had a feeling Camila could tell. Luz had never been a very good liar.
“Are you sure? Has it been washed at all since you got back?” asked Camila. She was careful to keep delicateness in her voice. She could tell the jacket meant a lot to her daughter. And the circumstances of her arrival were still a sore subject for all of them, even a week afterward.
“Uhh…”
Camila waited patiently as Luz pretended to think. Luz finally shook her head, bottom lip jutting out shamefully. She wasn’t quite sure why, but she felt bad.
Camila set the laundry basket down in the doorway and entered the room. Luz appreciated that she didn’t treat crossing her threshold as entering a hazard zone so much anymore, though the guilty expression on her face still made it clear she was trying hard not to look at Luz like a wounded animal.
Luz turned in her desk chair, taking the jacket into her lap and hugging it to her chest. She must have looked like she was about to cry, because Camila knelt down to lay a gentle hand on top of hers.
After a moment of hesitation, as though assessing whether or not she was allowed to say anything, her mother swallowed. “I noticed you wear it a lot.”
Luz nodded. “It’s-...it was Eda’s.”
Camila’s eyes filled with understanding.
“You don’t have to let me wash it,” she said, “but I’d like to at least clean it for you.”
A beat. Then Luz spoke again, voice small. “...I don’t want to part with it.”
“...Maybe you don’t have to.”
She looked confused, so her mother went on.
“We can hand-wash it. We don’t even have to use soap, if you don’t want to. That way you don’t have to put it in the hands of a machine.” Camila placed a supportive hand on her daughter’s shoulder, which felt all too familiar.
The voice Luz missed the most whispered in the back of her head: Whenever you know what you want, we’ll start carving.
She had been too afraid to trust herself then. But maybe now she could.
The girl gave a nod of consent. “That would be great. Thanks, Mom.”
. . .
An hour or so passed, but it felt longer. Luz lingered by the washing machine, spectating, readying herself. Eda’s jacket was clutched within her anxious palms, fingers absently running over the letter E on the front.
She tried not to mull over everything that could possibly go wrong–accidentally messing up the jacket, ripping the fabric, ruining the patches. Or if everything went completely right, and at the end it was so pristinely clean that there was not a single trace of the Owl House left.
She lifted it to her face, burying herself in it, savoring the smell of grudgby fields and King after a bath and Apple Blood as old and potent as the witch who’d spilled it there.
Camila came to find her daughter with watery eyes, hugging the thing like it was a lifeline. And in some ways it kind of was.
But she didn’t judge. She never had, and she never planned to. She simply guided Luz to the kitchen sink with a gentle hand on her back, shooing the other kids into the living room with a movie and assuring them that Luz would be joining them shortly. And while the noise didn’t die down enough to give them focus, there was peace in the absence of direct conversation. Luz slipped into a peaceful reverie as the faucet turned on and she began to wash. It quickly became a simple and repetitive series of motions. Rinse, scrub. Rinse, scrub.
She was finished before she knew it. Her mother supervised from the kitchen window while she laid it over the porch balcony to dry, a soft smile on her face. While not quite her usual energetic grin, it was more than Camila had seen in a long, long time.
And in a few hours, when Luz would eventually pick the jacket back up and hold it up to her face, she would find it warm from the sunlight and smelling like the most comforting mix of both her homes.