Work Text:
Luz kicks a pebble under her foot, feeling a little bit silly.
She doesn’t know what she was thinking. No, that’s not true, she knows. She was fueled by the rush of passing her driving exam, thinking that she’d show up to her cool girlfriend’s house to whisk her away in the middle of the night, acting like an equally cool and suave playboy. Luz the playboy. No stretch of the imagination could make that believable, no matter how much Amity likes her.
All Luz has to do to set her plan in motion is fly up to Amity’s balcony and knock on those double doors to get her attention. She’s done it countless times before, she can do this, she can do this, and she’s busy pondering how completely the ridiculous the butterflies in her stomach are when she’s just coming to see her girlfriend of two years, seriously, we’re not in the schoolgirl crush phase anymore, when Stringbean squirms out of the collar of her shirt to give her a teasing hiss.
She’ll be happy to see you. Luz hears her palisman’s voice reverberate in her mind. It’s been nearly a week.
This is a fair point. Also a very true one. Luz has been staying with her mamá in the human realm for the past few days while Hexside goes on what could be best described as the Boiling Isles’s rendition of spring break. Seasons aren’t quite the same in the demon realm— the solar and planetary cycles don’t align with Earth’s, making the calendar difficult to adjust to— but Luz has inferred that this time of year marks the end of the brutal weather period that coincides with human winter. She’s become unfortunately and intimately familiar with trying to race back to the Owl House before the forecasted shale hail hits her on the way home from school over the past couple months. (The bruise on her leg from weeks ago is still a little tender to the touch.)
Point is, it’s been a minute since she’s been to the demon realm, since she’s been trying to pack as much mother-daughter bonding time as she can into her short school break. If Luz misses Amity terribly, she knows her witch must feel the same. She shoots her palisman a grin and nods. Okay, this whole plan is a bit silly, but so is Luz. And Amity likes Luz, so she clearly likes silliness too. Her staff extends in her hands and she hops on, floats up to Amity’s balcony, and disembarks. As expected, her girlfriend is wide awake, visible through her arcing windows. She’s hunched over her desk, working on what looks like an abomination tech project that Luz can only assume is a collaboration between her and Alador, her face screwed up in a beautiful picture of concentration. No doubt she’s been working for hours. Luz is far too aware of her tendency to fixate on designs she’s particularly enthused about, but she can infer from her purple nightgown and bare face that she’s almost ready to turn in for the night. Luz delivers a sharp rap to the glass of the door and watches the spell on her girlfriend be broken, watches her features be clouded by surprise, then confusion when she directs her attention to the source of the knocking.
“Luz?” Then delight. She jumps from her chair and tosses her pen haphazardly on her desk. “Luz!” Amity runs to the door and flings it open, where Luz is already waiting with open arms.
“Hello, batata ,” Luz giggles when she’s met with the force of Amity throwing herself into a tight hug. “Hard at work, I presume?”
Amity snorts. “Of course, but if an opportunity such as this presents itself at my doorstep, I suppose I can bear to tear myself away from it.” Amity’s workaholic tendencies have improved tenfold since her mother never returned to Blight Manor after the Day of Unity, Luz reflects. Sure, she gets wrapped up in passion projects (like whatever is sitting on her desk right now), but these projects come from a place of genuine interest, and not the toxic need to prove herself. Gone are the days of Amity Blight burying her feelings in an insatiable quest for achievement.
“Guess I should consider myself pretty special then,” Luz quips, and oh, those butterflies are back, soaring from the pit of her stomach to the arch of her esophagus, and she can’t imagine a universe where she could ever not feel that familiar flutter upon seeing her girlfriend’s face, even after years.
“I guess you should” And then their lips are meeting, and it’s sweet, and it’s perfect, and Luz almost forgets why she’s even here in the first place, until—
“So, what’s the occasion?” Amity asks with a final peck to her lips. “I thought you were with Camila until we went back to school?”
“I was! I am. But…” Making an active effort to look as roguish as possible, Luz unclips the keys to her mom’s car from her belt loop. She twirls the carabiner around her index finger and gives Amity her best bad boy grin. “I thought, since I just passed my driver’s test this weekend, I could take my girlfriend out on a midnight joy ride.”
Amity looks between Luz’s waggling eyebrows and her keys skeptically. “You mean in one of those machines that humans are always crashing? Isn’t it safer for you to just use your staff?”
“I can’t exactly fly up to the grocery store on Stringbean, Amity. That would be like, I don’t know. If I parked the car in the middle of the Bonesborough Marketplace.” Amity’s face still betrays a sense of unease, so Luz doubles down. Her fingers rise up to intertwine with Amity’s, and the cool metal of the keys presses into the skin of their palms. “Come on, hermosa. You’re safe with me, let me show you some human magic.”
When Luz sees the faint pink dusting Amity’s cheeks give rise to a deeper, more heated red, she knows she’s won.
—
The portal door replaced the front door to the Owl House when the Collector rebuilt it, but it still doubles as the normal front door, meaning when Luz enters and exits she has to be exceptionally careful. Using it reminds her a bit of when she would use glyphs, when she’d have to focus real hard on what she wanted the outcome to be. If she was using a simple plant glyph, and she wanted strong, thorny vines, she’d have to envision them as if they were already real. Feel the sturdiness in her hands as if they were already there. Any slips in her focus and she’d suddenly have a fistful of petunias mid-battle. The portal door functions similarly; there’s been more times than she can count where she’s come home, distracted or preoccupied in some way, expected to walk through the door into Eda’s living room, and found herself suddenly standing in the middle of the Gravesfield woods. A silly mistake. Easy to fix and laugh off. But on the other hand, a handful of the times that she’s been on her way to Hexside in the early morning coming from her mom’s house, when she opens the door to that old domicile in the woods she comes face to face with not Bonesborough, but the remnants of her friends’ old hideout from the summer they were trapped in the human realm. An empty house with no one in it. Her stomach always sinks, and she slams the door shut to open it again, focus broken, open and shut, open and shut, panic rising to her throat like bile, before—
She takes a deep breath, recenters her mind, and steps through a working portal to the other side.
Luz hears a gasp from beside her at the exact moment she feels the cool raindrops hitting her skin. When she turns to look, Amity is staring at her wide-eyed before she bursts into peals of laughter.
“I’ll never get used to this!” Amity exclaims over the noise of the torrential downpour. Luz grins back at her before shrugging the jean jacket off her shoulders.
“I’m sorry! It wasn’t raining when I left.” Luz silently curses her lack of foresight and drapes her varsity jacket over Amity’s already shivering form.
“Don’t be sorry,” Amity giggles. “I love human rain.”
There isn’t a sight in the universe more beautiful than the one playing out before her eyes, Luz thinks. Amity, pulling Luz’s jacket taut around her; Amity, tilting her face up to the sky to catch the cool droplets on her cheeks; Amity, lavender bangs flattened by the rain and strands sticking to her forehead; Amity, unadulterated joy present in her beautiful smile that never fails to make Luz’s heart stumble and stutter over itself in her chest.
“You’ll love it more when you’re warm in the car.” Luckily, Luz had the sense to park her mom’s car at the edge of the woods before crossing through the portal, so they didn’t have to walk far.
“Does Camila know you’re taking her car out?” Amity teases when the sedan comes into view. Luz cocks an eyebrow devilishly.
“What Mamá doesn’t know can’t hurt her.” This faux rebellious attitude is ridiculous and they both know it, considering how her mamá would not mind if her newly licensed daughter, whom she sends to school in a different dimension every morning, drove around the neighborhood for a bit. In fact, before she’d gone to bed, her mamá had set her keys on the kitchen counter before saying with a wink, “make sure Amity keeps her seatbelt buckled with you.”
Mamá can read her like a book.
“Wait, wait!” Luz yells after Amity when she notices her making her way towards the passenger side door. She sprints ahead to get to the car before her and proceeds to make a spectacle out of opening the door for her and bowing. “Allow me, Miss Blight.”
Amity gives her eyes an exaggerated roll, but plays along regardless. “How very kind of you, Miss Noceda.” Luz extends a hand for Amity to grip onto as she loads herself into the passenger seat. Almost instinctively, her other hand comes to rest at the small of Amity’s back for support. Mostly out of fear that her cute little abomination-themed slippers have become too drenched to retain any traction. It wouldn’t be particularly romantic to stand and watch your girlfriend slip and faceplant off the side of the car’s door frame.
Luz shuts Amity’s door and goes around the hood of the car to get behind the wheel. She wouldn’t have invited Amity out for a ride if she wasn’t completely one hundred percent comfortable driving already, but it’s hard to not be a little nervous that this is the first person she’s had in the car with her that isn’t her mom or Vee. Inside, Amity already has her seatbelt buckled, back straight and hands folded neatly in her lap. Luz snorts.
“You can relax a little, reina ,” Luz laughs as she climbs in. “The seat leans back if you want it to.”
Amity makes a quizzical noise in response and begins looking around the base of the seat. “It’s uh, a little lever on the side. Nope, other side— yup, you got it, there you—” Amity suddenly shrieks as her seat flies backwards into an almost 180 degree angle, startling Luz into her own scream before she guffaws at her girlfriend’s startled face. Amity glares back at her without any real heat behind it.
“How hard did you pull it?” Luz gasps between cackles. Amity opens her mouth as if to defend herself before being launched forward into a perfect right angle, evidently having pulled the lever in the opposite direction. “Okay, stop, stop, you’ll break the seat.”
Amity can’t keep up her affronted facade for long, and inevitably joins Luz in her hysterics. The two girls let their carefree laughter fade into softer giggles, which slowly become drowned out by the pattering of rain on the metal roof. They allow the comfortable silence to cast a tranquil spell over them.
“I missed you,” Amity finally admits quietly. Luz gives a pleasant hum in response.
“I missed you, too. I’m here now.” And those words carry a heavier connotation with them than they imply, and Luz knows that Amity dreads letting her out of her sight ever since she learned what really happened during that one incident that led to her coming face to face with the Titan, even if she rarely admits it, and Luz also knows that if she kisses her like she so desperately wants to right now, she’ll get caught up in the moment and they’ll never even make it out of this dirt driveway that they’re parked at the edge of. So, instead, she grabs the keys from her pocket and turns them in the ignition.
“Where to, Miss Blight?”
Amity sends a coy smirk her way in response. “Surprise me.”
—
Honestly, Luz didn’t think this far ahead as to have a specific destination in mind, so she finds herself winding slowly around the blocks of downtown Gravesfield while Amity fills her in on the Boiling Isles gossip she’s missed in the past week.
“...and since Willow and Hunter were off doing that weird, uh, flyer-derby-training-slash-flirting thing that they get up to, Gus had to ask me and Mattholomule to come help him clear the gnome invasion from the ruins. Mattholomule! Of all people!” Amity sighs. “They’re more aggressive than they look. I still have teeth marks on my shins, see?”
She rolls her ankle so Luz can see it under the dim light of the outside street lamps. “Yikes, are those from the gnomes or Mattholomule?” Luz jokes.
“Ha-ha, funny.”
Gravesfield is so quiet at night, even downtown, Luz muses as they drive by a few more closed storefronts. They’re the only car on the road right now, and she’d normally expect some other unruly teens to be wandering around given that it’s a Friday night, but there’s no one in sight. She can’t recall the Boiling Isles being this quiet… ever. Even in the dead of night, there’s still the chatter and commotion of demons in the woods. The bustle in town from the Night Market. The distant clamor of bounty hunters seeking out their targets. The distinct, unmistakable feeling of eyes perpetually on you, something that Luz often ironically found more comforting than creepy.
“There’s a highway onramp a couple blocks away,” Luz offers casually. “You wanna see some real speed?”
Amity, who finally figured out how to lean her seat back without breaking a vertebrae, beams beside her. “How fast are we talking?”
“Oh, you know, Fifty, sixty.” Luz is aware that these are entirely unimpressive speeds, but Amity seems excited by what she must perceive as high numbers.
Amity turns the volume up on the radio when Luz makes the turn onto the onramp. A local alternative rock station comes in clear through the car speakers, and her face lights up in recognition at what she hears.
“Oh! I know this one. Foo Fighters , right? I remember liking them when we were all, well. Staying at your mom’s place.” Luz doesn’t miss how she always avoids saying things with negative connotations about that time period, like ‘when we were trapped in the human realm for months on end.’ Which she appreciates. Better to remember the good than the bad, she supposes.
“Yeah, that’s right. Honestly, it figures you’d like them. Seems like your taste.”
Amity snickers. “Human music always has such funny names. Foo Fighters. What even is a foo?” Luz very purposefully does not point out how one of the most popular demon realm music acts that’s emerged since the end of Belos’s reign is named The Merry Mandrakes , which is far more ridiculous sounding than any human band Luz has heard of. Must be a cultural difference.
And then they’re at the peak of the onramp, and way, way in the distance, Luz can make out the twinkling lights of the New Haven skyline. It’s muted through the heavy canopy of the trees surrounding the highway, but it’s visible nonetheless. She lets her foot press a little harder on the gas pedal, watches the speedometer needle creep up into the mid 60s. It feels sort of like one of those coming of age movies teens her age seem to love, the ones where kids take their parents’ cars out for joy rides and hang out of the sun roof, arms outstretched, eyes closed while they “discover'' music that was already popular 30 years ago. It’s a cheesy thought, but Luz has always been a sucker for cheesiness, so she turns up Everlong a bit higher.
“Sometimes I can’t believe how big everything is here,” Amity speaks in awe beside her. “I mean, you could drive like this for hours and never even hit the sea. If I ride on my staff for a few hours, I’ve cleared almost the entire Isles.”
Luz hums. “It’s kinda crazy to me how little you’ve seen of the human realm. Like, we have something like, a hundred and fifty countries? I can’t remember. And I don’t think you even know what Greece is.”
“You have a country named Grease?” Amity wrinkles her nose.
“Yeah, well. G-R-E-E-C-E. You’d like it, everything there is super old and they’re always digging up new artifacts. Can’t believe you haven’t heard of it, actually, we get a bunch of our myths and legends from them, which means they must have been in pretty close contact with your realm.”
“Have you been?”
“Oh, no way. It’s super far away and from what I hear, really expensive. I’d like to go though. I’ve seen pictures and it’s really pretty.”
“Will you show me pictures?”
“Why don’t I just show you the real thing?” Luz cocks a finger gun and winks at her girlfriend, who flushes in response.
“Didn’t you just say it was really expensive?”
“Hm. Future aspiration, I guess. We’ve gotta take you someplace where you can really flex your Spanish skills, too. Ooh, we can take a girls’ trip to la República Dominica. Me, you, Mami, and Vee.”
When she turns to face Amity again, she has an adorable, content little smile on her face. “I’d like that,” she says softly, and Luz’s heart all but melts.
The sights along the highway fly past them while they continue their conversation, comfortably mindless chatter about anything and everything that pops into their heads. Luz is recounting a particularly hilarious (in her opinion) story about Eda getting herself banned from the Gravesfield Historical Society on one of her last visits to the human realm when she notices Amity letting out a sleepy yawn.
“Getting tired, batata? ” Luz teases.
“Mmm. No. Hush. ‘M wide awake.”
Luz glances at the clock above the dashboard and balks at it reading nearly two in the morning; she makes a point to get off on the next exit and make a left back on in the reverse direction. “Wide awake, huh? Guess I have to be the responsible one and decide to take you home.”
“Go right ahead, I could use a break from being the responsible one.”
Luz sticks her tongue out at Amity, which makes her girlfriend dissolve into a fit of drowsy laughter.
—
When Luz pulls the car back up to the dirt driveway at the edge of the woods, she hesitates for a moment. Amity notices.
“Your midnight joy ride a success?” Amity asks through a yawn.
“What do you think?”
Her girlfriend brings her hand to her chin, as if she’s giving the question some serious thought. “I think… that you’re very attractive behind the wheel.”
Luz snorts in response. “I think… that you’re a massive nerd who totally has a huge crush on me.”
“What an honor to be bestowed upon me by the queen of nerds,” Amity sighs dreamily. “But yes, it was a success. I had a great time, thanks for coming to pick me up and everything. I needed a night out like this.”
“Any time, hermosa .” Luz pauses for effect. “And… the other thing?”
“The other thing?”
“About you having a huge crush on me.”
Amity looks like she’s unsure whether she wants to blush, laugh, or sock her on the shoulder. “Obviously.”
“Obviously, what?”
“Obviously I have a huge crush on you.” And now they’re just grinning at each other stupidly, just grinning and staring while the rain still comes down around them in the car.
Luz isn’t sure who leans in for the kiss first, but when they collide, it’s all sparks and fireworks that explode behind her eyelids. Amity’s lips are as soft as ever, and Luz finds herself involuntarily sighing into them. She feels more than hears the resulting giggle her girlfriend lets out, feels herself smiling into the kiss in response.
Amity’s hand rises up to rest on Luz’s cheek, a move that makes Luz’s chest feel like it’s going to burst. Her own hand flies up to hold it in place, her larger palm pressing to the back of Amity’s. Cute little mittens, a tiny, ridiculous part of Luz’s brain offers, the only words that survive the melting away of every thought in her mind as their lips begin moving against each other’s purposefully.
It very suddenly feels almost unbearable that there’s any part of them that isn’t touching the other. Luz briefly laments the fact that it’s not physically possible for two atoms to occupy the same space because she wants her and Amity’s every molecule to be fused. Amity seems to be on a similar wavelength, as her other hand embeds itself in Luz’s hair at the back of her head, and slowly, hesitantly, Luz’s free hand snakes around to rest on Amity’s back, pulling her impossibly closer. Her varsity jacket is still draped around Amity’s bare shoulders, a fact that makes some hidden possessive part of Luz roar to life.
She tilts her head ever so slightly, an adjustment that allows her to kiss Amity deeper still. If Luz were standing, she’s sure her knees would be buckling. It’s so warm, and so safe, and so good, and it feels so right, like the two of them were made for each other, like they were born from the same stardust and somehow found each other again in this physical plane.
Amity breaks the kiss first, gasping for air, though her hands don’t move from where they rest on Luz’s cheek and entangled in her curls. Her face is flushed in a way that makes Luz worry she might faint from the rush of blood to her head. Distantly, Luz is aware that she probably isn’t faring much better.
They gaze at one another for a moment, just catching their breaths. Luz breaks the silence first.
“It’s, uh. Still coming down pretty hard out there.”
“What?” Amity turns to look at the downpour out the windshield. “Oh. Yeah.”
“You might catch a cold if I bring you out in that again.”
“Yeah. I might.” Neither of them mention how witch's immune systems don’t quite work like human's, so the likelihood of Amity catching a human cold is next to impossible.
“Well, drat,” Luz stifles a snicker.
“Too bad. Guess we’re stuck here.” Neither of them mention how the portal door is, at most, a 60 second walk away from where Luz has parked the car.
Luz reluctantly disentangles herself from Amity’s hold to shift the gear stick into reverse. “Not to fear! Lucky for you, I know a place where we can crash for the night.”
“My fearless champion,” Amity swoons. “How could I ever repay you for saving me from this dangerous human weather?”
“Nonsense.” Luz leans her elbow against her seat to look behind her while she backs the car up. “No payment necessary, it’s my honor and privilege to assist you.” With that, they begin the short drive around the corner to her childhood home.
They enter the house as quietly as possible, toeing their shoes (slippers, in Amity’s case) off next to the door and hushing each other’s quiet laughter as they sneak up the stairs. Luz tosses Amity a pair of dry pajamas to change into and the two girls topple into the bottom bunk together. Stringbean, who had flown back home after Luz stepped back into the human realm, gives a soft, happy hiss in greeting from her bed perch in the corner. Luz blows her palisman a kiss goodnight.
“I had fun tonight,” Luz whispers so as not to wake Vee, who’s snoring above them from the top bunk. Amity beams.
“Me, too. I’m glad you thought to come get me.”
“I’m glad you came home with me,” Luz counters, pulling Amity closer. As if they weren’t already close enough in the tiny twin bed. “I missed your snuggles.”
“I missed you .”
“I missed you, too.” Saying those words is the last thing Luz remembers before sleep takes her. She dreams of Greece, and endless miles of tree-lined highway, and a pretty girl with lavender hair beckoning towards her in the soft glow of the rain.
—
“Seriously?” Vee’s groggy voice wakes Luz from her slumber early the next morning. “You two couldn’t go one week?”
“Mmm, nope,” Luz counters sleepily. She feels Amity stir beside her.
“‘Morning, Vee,” Amity mumbles.
“Good morning, Amity.” Vee sighs. “I think Mamá is making breakfast already. I’ll tell her to make up another plate.”
“Thank you, Vee,” Luz and Amity sing-song simultaneously.
“Yeah, yeah,” Vee responds with a smile. “Don’t just roll over and fall back asleep, though.”
She closes the door behind her, and, well. If Luz curls up, safe in her girlfriend’s arms, and catches a few more minutes of shut-eye, who has to know?