Work Text:
The house is silent when Amity wakes up, roused by the feeling of empty space next to her and the soft breeze rushing in from the open window next to the bed.
She sits up, blinking away the drowsiness. It’s early morning — sunlight pokes through the glass of the windows and catches on the floorboards. The light glyphs Luz left to hover in the corners of the room last night are sinking low to the ground, small and dim and lonely. To the left of the bed, curled up under the dresser, are Ghost and Stringbean, still fast asleep.
And Luz is gone.
Amity breathes in, out, and tries not to panic.
Somewhat blindly, she feels for Luz’s side of the mattress. Still cold — no glyphs left behind, not even a note. She can’t have gone too far; she’d never so much as leave the room without her palisman, and if she was upset, she’d wake Amity before she could spiral too far.
Right?
It’s then that her mind puts it together — the window is open .
Amity nearly throws herself off the bed, thoughts whirling with images of Emperor’s Coven masks and flashing glyphs, and scrambles over to the side of the room. She knows she’s just being paranoid, she knows it’s only the effects of the horrific last few days rubbing off on her, that Luz likely just went outside for some peace and quiet, but —
“Oh! Hey, Amity,” Luz says cheerfully from somewhere above her. Amity sticks her head out of the window and suppresses a small yelp.
She’s perched on the roof of the Owl House, standing on the slanting tiles as easily as if they were solid ground, and somehow she looks both at ease and deeply, deeply tired. Her wonderful, brave, self-sacrificing girlfriend, still in her pyjamas, standing in quite possibly the most dangerous spot in the entire house and watching the sunrise with her arms wrapped around her waist.
All of the breath leaves Amity in one go and she slumps forward, resting her head on the cleanest-looking spot on the window sill.
“How the hell did you get up there?” she manages.
Luz laughs sheepishly, kicking at the tiles. “Oh, you know. Climbed.”
“ Climbed? ”
“Oh, yeah, I used to do it all the time. Me and Eda used to come up here to think. Before everything happened.”
“Climbed,” Amity repeats, somewhat breathlessly. “Well, I mean, as long as you’re okay.”
Luz’s answering smile is radiant. “I am okay. Very okay. Are you okay?”
The odd cold feeling that had appeared in her chest after she’d woken up melts away. Amity grins up at her, propping herself up on her elbows to lean out of the window. “I’m okay. I just didn’t know where you’d gone.”
She’s kicking at the tiles again. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
Amity peers up at her, blinking in the golden morning light, and shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it. Did you sleep well?”
Luz shrugs. “About as well as I expected, so — pretty okay, all things considered. You?”
Amity takes a step back from the window and extends her hands towards it, focusing on the small amount of abomination goo there is in her vicinity. “Yeah, alright. Considering, you know, all of yesterday.”
Luz’s laugh floats in from the roof. Amity smiles to herself as she calls everything within her reach to her. She loves hearing Luz laugh. It was part of what drew her to her in the first place, what made her fall.
“Do you want me to show you how to climb up?” she hears. “It’s not too hard once you get the hang of it, and the fall isn’t that far if you’re worried about that.”
Amity starts to shake her head before remembering that Luz can’t see her. “Abomination Coven, remember?”
It’s harder than she expected to pull everything she needs together. Usually she has abomination goo on hand — in a bottle attached to her hip, in a pocket dimension she can pull from in desperate times — but now, it’s simpler to just pull it from the environment than go looking. Still, it resists her at each step, sticking and tugging and pulling until she gets it under control, winding itself into a staircase curling up from the window onto the roof with some reluctance. Amity makes a mental note to check that out later as she climbs onto the window sill.
Luz is sitting down when she finally climbs up, staring slack-jawed at the staircase as she dispells it like she’s something wondrous. Amity ducks her head to hide her blush and moves to sit beside her, hauling herself up over gnarled and brittle tiles and up to where the slope of the roof gradually becomes less steep.
“I’ll never get over how you look when you do that.”
Amity’s heart flips in her chest. “Do what?”
She sits down, and instantly Luz is pressed up against her, knocking their shoulders together and tucking herself into her side. “Magic.”
Amity feels her face becoming more flushed and ducks her head again, fixing her gaze on the tiles underneath her hands as she settles into place at Luz’s side. She really doesn’t know how to respond to that. One of the many wonders of being kind of useless when it comes to romance. “Oh, uh. Thank you?”
Luz laughs at that, shoving her gently with her shoulder. “You’re pretty, Ams.”
She’s heard her say it so many times before, but it still makes her heart leap right out of her chest. Amity tips forward to hide her face against her knees, muffling the laugh that bursts out of her and threatens to spill into the quiet morning air.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get over magic being real.” Luz shoves Amity’s shoulder again, and even without looking, Amity can sense her smile. “I spent so long wishing it was, you know? Since before I first started reading Azura . And now — here I am. Cool, isn’t it?”
Her voice is soft. Contemplative. Amity sits up and hums in agreement, giving Luz’s head space to fall onto her shoulder.
“Cool,” she agrees. “Really cool.”
Luz’s smile stretches wider. “Yeah.”
“So,” Amity says, when the silence has stretched on long enough to be painful, “what’re we doing?”
A smile pulls at the corners of Luz’s mouth. “Just thinking.”
“Good thinking?”
“Good thinking,” she confirms.
Amity leans over until her head is resting on Luz’s shoulder and hums contentedly. “Okay. Good to hear.”
Luz breathes out, long and slow. Her hand, resting on Amity’s knee, works its way into her lap and loops around her wrist, finger skittering up and down in a familiar pattern. They used to sit like this back in the human realm, pressed up against each other on the back porch of Luz’s house, and listen to the wind and the birds and try to clear their minds. It was comforting to be close then, and it’s comforting now.
“Did I tell you about Belos?” she asks finally. “What happened when we killed him? It was really cool.”
Amity closes her eyes, grinning. Luz’s excitement is palpable, vibrating out of her as her free hand taps at the tiles under them. “No, you didn’t. There were, like, a million other things going on at the same time.”
“It was so cool , Amity,” Luz repeats breathlessly. She’s moving more now, swinging her feet ecstatically and kicking at the bricks above their window. “I was like — I was like Titan Luz .”
“Titan Luz?” Amity asks.
“Titan Luz! I — actually I have like, no clue what I looked like, but it was cool and I had claws , Amity!”
Amity laughs, and Luz laughs too, and it’s the most they’ve laughed in days.
“I’m going to get some breakfast,” Amity says eventually. “Wanna come with?”
Luz shrugs. “I think I’m going to stay up here for a little while, if that’s okay.”
“Okay, cool.” Amity leans over, kisses her cheek. It’s natural enough now that it doesn’t make her heart want to fall through the bottom of her stomach, and somewhere in the back of her mind she realises that they’ll have been together for almost five months soon.
She uses abomination goo to hop down from the roof and climb back in through the window. Both Stringbean and Ghost are still asleep, tails poking out from underneath the dresser, and Amity makes a mental note to get them both something from the kitchen, if she can find anything they’ll eat.
Eda and Raine are awake downstairs, stumbling half-asleep around the living room. Eda raises her hand in greeting when she sees Amity coming down the stairs, mumbling something about pancakes and waffles, and she waves back, too preoccupied with the thought of awkward first dates and echo mice to muster a response.
(It’s nice, feeling loved, she thinks. The domesticity of it all is soothing.)
The Collector is in the kitchen, bouncing between surfaces with a dozing King curled up on the counter. Amity isn’t particularly surprised. Nothing surprises her anymore, really.
“Morning,” she offers. The Collector, spinning on his head over by the window, glances over in surprise.
“Oh! Good morning. You were on the roof.”
“I was,” Amity agrees. “Me and Luz were talking.”
Their eyebrows shoot up. The Collector flips onto his side, peering at her through kaleidoscopic eyes. “What were you talking about?”
There’s a heap of pancakes on the counter. Amity heads to make a couple of plates, narrowly avoiding a hovering fork and a dishcloth the Collector is spinning around the room for his own amusement. “Gross girlfriend stuff. Nothing important, really.”
“Oh. Eww.”
She suppresses a grin. It’s surprisingly easy to forget that the multidimensional horror who fucked all their lives up for several months also happens to be a child.
And then —
“Did Luz tell you about the Titan stuff?”
“Yeah,” she answers easily, heaping pancakes onto a plate. “She said she turned into Titan Luz and she had claws and everything. Was it cool?”
The Collector grins. “ So cool. But kind of sad, you know?”
“Sad?” Amity asks absent-mindedly, opening the silverware drawer. It’s delightfully Eda — the strangest collection of utensils she’s ever seen, very obviously stolen. She thinks she recognises some of the spoons from the Blight Manor in there.
“Yeah, sad,” the Collector says brightly, floating over her head. “It really sucked, actually. Like, really sucked. I hated that so so much.”
That — what?
Amity closes the drawer gently, focusing all of her attention on the soft sound it makes as the wood slots back into place. Curiously, her hand has started to shake.
(Later, she’ll think it was almost as though she could sense what was coming. Like she knew it in her heart, or something equally mushy.)
“Hated what?”
“The part before the transformation.” Their voice drops solemnly; the utensils spinning overhead start to sink to the ground, pulling Amity’s heart down with them. “The dying part.”
Amity’s hands are cold as she crawls out of the window. Cold as she slides up onto the roof, pulling herself up and over the tiles, and cold as she leans over and raises the plates up to join them.
Luz is still there, watching the sunrise. Luz is still there, sitting by herself, arms folded over her knees, hands fisted in the fabric of her pajama bottoms. She doesn’t know why she thought she wouldn’t be.
“Hi,” she hears herself say.
Luz doesn’t answer. She can feel her eyes on her, taking in the tension in her expression, the way she’s gripping onto the fabric under her hands, and she can feel her heart sinking like it’s her own, and she can —
“Are you mad?”
“What? No! Why would I be mad?”
Luz relaxes, tearing her eyes away from Amity’s face. “Okay. Cool. Cool, cool, cool.” A pause. “You look mad, though.”
Amity pushes Luz’s plate towards her. “I’m not. Promise.”
“Upset?” she tries.
She shakes her head. “Not at you.”
Luz’s face falls again. She reaches towards her, pulls her in, and Amity sinks against her shoulder gratefully. “Oh, wow. Why are you upset?”
Titan below, she’s so kind. Amity leans into her, buries her head in Luz’s shoulder. “I saw the Collector in the kitchen,” she begins, and instantly Luz’s entire body tenses up.
“Oh,” she says quietly. “Huh.”
“They told me about what happened.” Her voice feels hollow. She powers on. “I just — holy shit , Luz. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d lost you.”
Luz’s hand closes around hers. Amity feels her breathe in, out. She doesn’t look up; she keeps her eyes fixed on the sun as it clears the horizon and crawls up the sky. She doesn’t need to look to see the expression on Luz’s face.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” she says finally, quietly. “Yesterday — all of it — since we got back onto the Isles, really — it’s all sucked. Really, really sucked. I didn’t want to make it worse for you.”
That — that hits something in her chest. Something vulnerable, something aching. She thinks about Luz as she was in the human realm, quiet and reserved and furious with herself, and she thinks about the way she’d looked as she’d confessed everything, face cast into shadow by the spiraling lights of the portal, and she understands.
This is something they’re going to have to work on — both of them, over all the time they have. This is something they can’t fix easily, something Amity can’t dispel with a few words and a hug. She can try, and she can listen, but it isn’t going to just go away .
She’s known this all along, really. But she didn’t think it would show itself like this. That’s what she’s upset about, Amity realises.
That’s what she’s upset about, and she can’t fix it now, so instead she slips her arms around Luz’s waist and says quietly, “I know. I get it. It’s hard.”
Luz buries her face in her hair and nods. “So hard. I hate it.”
“It just —” Amity hesitates, curling her fingers into the fabric of Luz’s shirt. “It just worries me, is all. Like, I know you’re fine — all I need to know right now is that you’re okay, yeah? — but I don’t want to make you feel like you can’t tell me about any of this stuff. Because you can, and I want you to.”
Luz sighs, slow and soft and quiet. “I — yeah. I know. I’m sorry.”
Amity shakes her head. She hates having these kinds of conversations. She never knows what to say, what to do. “We just had the worst few months ever. It’s not like you can just have all that happen to you and be fine.”
She sits up, and Luz sits up too, brows drawn together, eyes fixed on the air just above her shoulder. “Yeah,” she says, slower. “Yeah, I get what you mean.”
“Yeah,” Amity echoes. “I just want you to know that. That you can tell me things.”
She sighs again, lighter this time. Like a weight is lifting itself off of her shoulders. “Okay. Okay. Thank you.
The tension building up in Amity’s chest lessens a little. “Hey, for what it’s worth, I still think Titan Luz is cool,” she tries, and Luz laughs.
“Yeah. Really super traumatising, but cool.”
It takes three days for Amity to have her first nightmare after the defeat of Belos.
It’s not like she wasn't expecting it to happen. Luz has started getting them too, waking up in the middle of the night screaming for her mother, for Eda, for the Collector, for King. Amity is sleeping in Luz’s bedroom now, a consequence of the rapidly dwindling space in the house now that everyone seems to want to be together all of the time in the aftermath of the liberation of the Isles, and so each night since the nightmares began she’s taken to climbing into her makeshift bed and whispering to her until she falls back asleep.
It’s not great, but it’s familiar. And Luz has even started talking about it, both to Amity and the adults in the house. So it only makes sense that it’d rub off on Amity too, considering the week she’s had.
She was expecting it. She can deal with it.
(She can’t. She can’t.)
She sees her mother, first. The abominations from that night in that warehouse, grabbing and clawing and reaching, and her magic, too weak to stop it. Her mother — not my mother anymore , she reminds herself fiercely — clutching at the pendant around her neck, whispering into her mind. And Luz, bolting between rafters and firing glyphs as best as she can, dodging explosions and reaching hands and so impossibly small in the face of it all.
This is the usual kind of nightmare. The kind that is routine, dependable.
This, however, is unusual: the hand of an abomination reaching out, heaving all the mass of it up onto the rafters in front of Luz as she runs to the ladder. The fire glyph she throws at it, sending it reeling back. The spray of fluid that bursts from it as it topples backwards, covering Luz in purple-and-black.
Amity stands frozen on the stage and watches as the fluid turns to rot, as the rot turns green and thick and heavy.
And then she startles awake when Luz — the real Luz — grabs her shoulder and shakes it.
(“You were screaming my name,” she explains later. “Kind of hard not to wake up when you hear that.”)
She lurches upright, tugging her blanket up to her chest. Her cheeks are sticky with drying tears, cold in the cool night air. Luz — blissfully intact — is staring at her with wide eyes from the other end of her bed. And her throat is raw from screaming.
A light flickers on — a torch, not a glyph. Amity gazes numbly at it, too exhausted to process anything else.
“Amity,” Luz says softly. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”
She shakes her head to clear it. Her hands are cold. “I — yeah. I’m here.”
Luz smiles faintly. “It was about — Titan Luz, wasn’t it?”
Feeling hollow, feeling distant, Amity nods.
Her smile tenses at the corners. “Yeah. Do you want a hug?”
She nods again.
They don’t talk for a little while after that.
(In the morning, Luz takes Amity’s hand as she’s climbing out of bed and asks, in her usual cheerful voice, “You know, when you said that stuff the other day about feeling okay to talk to you about things, I don’t think you realised you were repressing your own problems as well.”
Ah.
“Yeah,” she mumbles. “Yeah, I might have been doing that.”
Luz laughs, high and clear. “Wow, we’re so emotionally intelligent.”
Something in her chest snaps and floats free. “Hey, at least I’m trying,” she grins, and Luz laughs again and leans forward and kisses her cheek.
“So, let me guess — you were pushing down the whole ‘extreme horror over hearing from the space kid that I died’ thing?”
“Well, it sounds dumb when you put it like that!”
Her laugh grows, blooms, fills the entire room. Amity loves it when she laughs. “No, no, it’s not dumb.”
She lies back down on the bed, letting her entire body go limp. Luz follows her. “Yeah. I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out.”
Luz nudges her shoulder, still smiling. Always smiling. “Well, I think this is an excellent example of the positives of communication, don’t you? We can talk about it more after breakfast.”
Breakfast. Right. Amity had forgotten about that. “Yeah, that sounds good. I could always do with processing some more feelings.”
“And food.”
“And food,” she agrees.)