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“Alright, you two,” Camila chides amicably, her laughter harmonizing with Luz’s as she tucks her into bottom bunk, “I know we haven’t told Vee absolutely everything about our adventures, but we just got back, it’s late, I’m tired, and I finally get to sleep in my own bed after three weeks.”
“But I’m not tired,” Luz drawls conspiratorially, in the way only over-exhausted children with the newfound confidence of staying up adult hours do. From her view on the top bunk, Vee can see Luz fling out a skinny arm theatrically, gripping her mother’s forearm in a dramatic plea. “And I haven’t told Vee how you threw that bat right in Kikimora’s face-!”
“Listen to your mother, dummy,” Vee says. She flits her tail where it dangles over the banister of the top bunk, managing to swat Luz’s fingers away, reigniting another peal of giggles from the three of them.
“Your sister is right,” Camila says, and despite her calm, Vee feels a traitorous little bubble of apprehension in her throat – not enough to confront Camila about the concept of sister, but enough that the thought of saying something still makes it feel like there are words choking in her throat. “We’ve done enough world saving for the last three weeks. Now it’s time to get some rest. We can share all our tales of glory in the morning”
“Fine.”
“And Vee?” Camila continues. The top of her head pops up to Vee’s eye level, her smile concealed by the difference in height but evident in the crinkle of her eyes. “Thank you again, for taking care of everything while we were gone. The two of us owe you a vacation.”
“It’s no problem, Camila,” Vee murmurs, winding her tail around herself as Camila cinches the bedsheets around her, almost aggressive, an attack of motherly love. “Whatever I can do to earn my keep.”
“You don’t have to earn anything, pumpkin,” Camila says, and darn it, she’s using that soft voice again, the one she used so often with Hunter, that taps so politely at the shut door of everyone’s emotions and waits patiently for the locks to be undone so it can be let in. It makes Vee curl into herself a little more. “Knowing the two of you are both here and safe is all I care about right now.
“Though knowing I’ll get a good night’s sleep is a good bonus,” she adds as she makes her way to the door. “All I better be hearing from this room is Luz snoring-”
“Hey!”
“- so phones off, lights out.”
“Yes, Camila.”
“Yes, mama,” Luz echoes, before adding, “can I text goodnight to King and Eda first?”
“You’re spending one night away from them,” Camila teases, before her smile softens. “But yes, you can. And then phones off.”
“Thank you,” Luz says, and Vee can hear the kitten-like smile on her face as the bed shifts so she can snatch her phone from the nightstand. “G’night, mom.”
“Goodnight, sweetheart. Goodnight, pumpkin,” she replies. “Te quiero.”
“Goodnight, Camila,” Vee says timidly, voice lost under the duvet as Luz returns her mother’s sentiment. There’s a quiet, gratified little huff from Camila as she casts the two of them one last look, and then the light clicks off, the door shut behind her as her slippered feet shuffle down the hallway outside, and Vee is left in the dim yellow glow of Luz’s phone on full brightness beneath her.
It’s good, Vee thinks, to have another person sleeping the same room as her again. She’s happy to have Luz back in general, even without the usual parade of other young, scared witches she had brought with her when they had finally met – had truly, physically met, and Vee had had no time to reel at the awkward reversal in hospitality as she helped Camila lead them in from the rain, of knowing where to find the spare blankets in the linen closet in Luz’s own home so she could drape them over their bruised, damp shoulders. But the sound of their little huffs of breath, of someone snorting in their sleep, even Luz or Amity or Willow or even her waking from a nightmare only for the rest of them to wriggle from their cots to provide comfort had been a solace Vee ate up like magic. It was like her nights in cabin 7, the hushed nighttime voices accompanying the crickets in the woods outside not crying out in suffering but giddy with rebellious giggles and scary stories whispered in the dark. Those were the first nights of her life Vee had ever fallen asleep, as Masha sleep talked on the other side of the cabin, truly knowing she was safe.
It had been an adjustment, a good one, coming home to Camila after that. It had her anxiety through the roof, sure, her whole body a tense roiling of joy and shame as she playacted at family, playacted at Luz, dozing off only after staring at the ceiling of a bedroom that wasn’t hers. And then Luz had been there, and her friends, and somehow by some unspoken agreement they had let Vee stay in Luz’s top bunk, and there was a chorus of snores to lull her to sleep again.
And then that didn’t last, and they were gone, and Vee house sat like her life depended on it as loneliness and guilt and resentment gnawed at her gut. Even with the safety of a boring, human house and a boring, human roof over her head, the last few weeks without even the knowledge of Camila sleeping in the room next to her, of her bare feet scuffing the floor as she paced nervously in the night thinking about the lost daughter Vee had so awfully tried to replace, had unnerved her.
To the point where Luz stifling a laugh beneath her startles her happily. Vee peeks over the edge of her bed, chin perched on the railing meant to keep her from rolling off, squinting in the light of Luz’s phone.
“That seems like a really long goodnight text,” Vee whispers, giggling as shadows dart sharply around the room before disappearing, Luz fumbling to hide her phone beneath the covers.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Uh-huh,” Vee deadpans. “Sure,” and then the two are doubled over, stifling giggles into their pillows, laughing more because they shouldn’t be rather than because it’s funny.
“Sorry, Vee,” Luz says, her apology punctuated by a buzz that rattles the bedframe. “The only thing we found for King in Eda’s pile of junk was an old flip phone, and he is so bad at texting with the keypad.”
“Is it the kind where you have to press the number 9 four times to get the letter ‘z’?”
“Eyep,” Luz says, breathing a laugh out of her nose. The bed shakes with their mirth as a series of new texts come through, a constant series of buzzes that go on for comically too long. “It’s all gibberish.”
“Does he have fun clicking it shut though?”
“Oh absolutely,” Luz squeals. “He was waltzing around the house like a little drama king, clicking it shut after every call he made to Eda’s scroll that she almost grounded him.”
“I don’t hear my precious daughters snoring in there,” Camila calls from the next room, her voice muffled by the drywall. The two girls start, and Vee sheepishly tucks herself deeper in the duvet, as if Camila had physically walked in and caught them.
“I can’t hear you, I’m sleeping!” Luz calls back, and even Camila giggles at that before the two of them offer their apologies. There is a click, and the rocking of the bottom bunk as Luz places her phone on the nightstand and nestles herself for a surprisingly long time, long enough that Vee thinks she can hear Camila snoring next door, until she is settled. “Sorry, Vee,” she adds, her voice as close to a whisper as an excitable Luz Noceda can get. “You probably want to go to bed, too.”
“It’s-” Vee starts, that little bubble of anxiety in her throat again. She turns onto her side, staring out into the room, her fingers loosely wrapping around the jail-like bars of the guardrail. “You don’t need to apologize. I don’t want to impose.”
“I’m the one with my phone on,” Luz says. “Bright lights n’all.”
“I’m the one in your room,” Vee whispers to herself. Her fingers pick at the flaws in the bedrails, the sharp little points where the joints were welded imperfectly, blunted by a coat of chipping paint. “It’s not – nice – I guess, I mean-”
“Hm?” Luz hums from below. The bottom bunk creaks as she moves.
“I don’t want to tell you what to do, and I’d be happy to, like, move my stuff to the basement if I’m in your space-”
“Vee, what-?”
“Just until I figure out what to do, y’know? And then I can get out of you and Camila’s hair, once I figure out where to go-”
“Vee,” Luz says, her voice firm despite its whisper tone. It’s enough to make Vee shut up, the tense quiet of the room thick, somehow making the late November chill in the air humid – and Vee realizes she’s blushing, face burning with shame. “Vee, did you think we were going to kick you out or something?”
“I don’t know…” Vee squeaks, and darn it again, Luz learned the voice from her mother. “I guess I just thought, with you back and everything, I don’t know-”
“I mean, you took all those Spanish lessons and everything, and you’ve been helping mom clean the attic, and Titan knows someone else but just her has to help eat those custards she keeps bringing home because my stomach does not like them,” Luz is rambling now, only catching herself to moderate her volume before Camila wakes and tells them to quiet down again. “And I know I have my buddies in the demon realm now to come over for sleepovers, but we also have the rolls and everything from when they were here, and even if you stayed but moved to the basement the top bunk would just have all my dirty laundry on it again. And mom would yell at me about it. So there.”
“You know, when I first got here, I thought the top bunk was just where humans kept their stuff,” Vee muses. “I hadn’t seen it before, and then I went to accounting camp, and was like oh, I get it now!”
“You’re a quick learner,” Luz replies, giggling, “heck, you were better at being a human than I was. There are bunk beds in the demon realm, though?”
“I mean, didn’t see any beds at all, before,” Vee says to the guardrail. “We didn’t have any, where they kept us.” Luz doesn’t respond, and shoot, Vee’s made it awkward, hasn’t she? She scrabbles for the first thing to come to mind, to fill the silence. “Why do you have a bunk bed though, if it was only you?”
“Oh,” Luz sighs, almost sadly, and Vee can tell she’s stumbled onto another sensitive topic, hit another nerve. “It was actually here when we moved in, a couple years ago. I guess the old owners bought a house with more rooms and didn’t need it anymore, and didn’t bother taking it with them either, and then my parents didn’t bother getting a new bed for me, because why spend money on one bed if they had two perfectly good ones already?”
“And no one used the top bunk since then?”
“Oh, I tried,” Luz corrects. “I fell off the first night, though. Rolled right over the rail and splat.”
Vee muffles her giggles in her hands, tries to keep her voice from rising anywhere above a whisper.
“Still,” Luz says, and the last of her murmured laughter leaves her in a sigh that seems to make the room deflate. Vee keeps her ears perked up, like she can hear Luz thinking beneath her - her breaths are too even, too shallow, as if she is chewing on the next things she wants to say. Vee waits. “I remember mom fussing over me after I fell. Had an icepack on my forehead, while dad put a band-aid on – I wasn’t bleeding, but y’know, band-aids make everything better – and mom was panicking that we needed to go to Ikea that morning and get me a bed closer to the floor.
“I had to promise her I’d only sleep on the bottom bunk until I got older, and then I remember saying - saying something like,” and Luz trips up here, stutters as if wondering, again, whether what she would say next was a good idea, “we need to keep the bottom bunk for when I have a little brother or sister.”
“How did they react?” Vee asks, less because she was curious and more because she can hear the lump in Luz’s throat, because Vee knows she needs to speak, to share, and that the responsibility of carrying Luz’s words gently was a gift.
“It was a stupid thing to say,” Luz breathes. “Dad was – him being sick was never good, and we still had hope when we moved, I mean why move to a whole new city if you didn’t think the treatment there wasn’t going to work?
“But they kind of just… went real quiet, looking at each other, when I said that. And I think they thought I didn’t know that he could die from the cancer, that I really was convinced they would ever have another kid.” Vee can hear Luz gulp, and when she finds her words again, Vee can barely hear the breath they are carried on. “I did know. I knew how bad it was. But I think what I said made it, I dunno, sink in.”
Her words taper off, leaving the two girls in silence. Vee can hear a sniff, but she isn’t sure if it’s Luz, or the shuffle of sheets, or Stringbean curled in the corner.
“Do you know if, yknow,” Vee whispers, tiptoeing across Luz’s frayed nerves, “they ever wanted another kid?”
“I think so?” Luz ponders, her answer a question to no one in particular. “I think they said once they had trouble having me, which, ew-” Vee snorts at that “-and mom had a lot of complications with me. I never really asked anything else about it, and I guess it just – never happened.
“But I mean, it worked out, didn’t it?” Luz ponders, and this time when she stammers over her words, it doesn’t sound sad, but… hopeful. “Because I did end up with a baby sister, in the end.”
“Luz…” Vee warbles, and the shadows of the room blur into watery shapes, her chin wobbling.
“And you get the top bunk now,” Luz jokes. “Lucky duck.”
“I guess I was lucky your parents kept the bunk bed,” Vee laughs to herself.
“Nah,” Luz says, and her voice drips with fondness. Vee feels her mattress lift at her middle, what she suspects is Luz’s foot lodging between the bed slats to nudge her from underneath. “It was meant to be. I think it was waiting for you, manita.”
A little sob ekes its way out of Vee’s throat, at that. “You really think that?”
“Vee,” Luz says, her voice gentle, “when we said you could stay as long as you’d like, we meant it. And we would like you to stay as long as you want, too.” A pause, and then quieter, almost unsure, and it takes Vee’s heart in its grip and twists, “do you want to stay?”
“Yes.” More than anything.
“Good,” Luz says confidently. “Because I think if you tried to leave mom would drag you back kicking and screaming.”
Vee laughs wetly. “I bet.”
“And I need you to write my tests for me at school.”
“Do your own homework, dummy,” Vee retorts, wiping her tears on the pillow and then immediately thinking gross. “But – thank you. And – sorry. I never meant to doubt you or Camila’s hospitality.”
“Hospitableness has nothing to do with it,” Luz says, and Vee wonders whether she’s using the Isle’s term or just got the word wrong. “You live here now, whether you like it or not.”
Vee breathes out a laugh, and it’s like her heart can beat freely, her lungs gulping air, a vice she didn’t realize sat taut in her chest slowly unravelling from around her organs. The hand she has around the bars of her guardrail reach over, hanging down towards her sister.
“Thank you,” she whispers, and then warm skin brushes against the cool scales of her palm, Luz’s stick-thin fingers wrapping around her wrist, holding her tight.
“You’re home now,” Luz says softly, sleepily, squeezing Vee’s hand.
Their little embrace is awkward, the guardrail of the top bunk wedging itself into Vee’s armpit, the weight of Luz’s arm quickly going limp with the strain twisting her elbow at an odd angle. As much as Vee loathes having to let go, Luz’s fingertips slipping from hers as the human’s arm flops down with a muffled thud, the warmth of their shared touch, pleasantly, lingers. She tucks her hands under her head as she snuggles into bed, sleep pulling at her mind.
“G’night Luz,” she murmurs after a while, lulled by the sound of her sister’s soft breaths below her, slow and deep and even. “I love you.”
Luz, the saviour of the Boiling Isles, snores in response.