Work Text:
"Miss Blight!!!"
"Hello Children!" Amity made her way through the small crowd of kids that had collected around her the second she had entered the room, everyone excitedly jumping up and down, some even hugging her legs. Amity chuckled at their excitement; it was sweet that they cared so much about her, and while it had become more and more difficult to find the time to read to her kids since she had finished college, she insisted on taking one afternoon off work each week - this was important. To her, yes, but even more so to the children. Summer break was just ahead, though - and while she was very excited about the wonderful things that would await her at that time, not having the kids around for so long would be painful.
"Everyone to their pillows!" She commanded in a strict, yet gentle voice, as she made her way up to the front of the kid’s corner library room. "Horlax, that means you too! I want to say a couple words before we start our story hour!"
Curiosity got the better of the preschoolers, and with a little patience, soon every good little kid sat on their respective pillows in a half-circle around their teacher .
"Well, children, as you know...", she made a short pause to emphasize the following words, as if to make sure that really everyone has heard the news. "...this will be our last time seeing each other before the summer break." Some kids nodded with a cool, knowing look on their faces, while some others were visibly upset about the message. "The next time we see each other will be in three months. I know, that's very long, and I already know I'm going to miss every single one of you. However... Some things will be different then." She couldn't help but blush and her heart started to bump a little faster - she really hoped the kids would be happy for her.
"I... won't be Miss Blight anymore, when we see each other again, kids. I'll be Mrs. Noceda then!"
Some kids already started beaming and cheering, while some others clearly needed a little extra push. Bastian and Horlax looked at each other in confusion, so Liza explained it out loud. "Miss Blight is getting MARRIED!!!"
Amity let out a happy giggle, while her redness spread over her entire face. "That's absolutely correct, Liza."
Now all the kids started cheering for Amity, some even running towards her to hug her again. Amity gently shooed them back to their pillows, however not without thanking them for their congratulations first.
Liza put her hand up, but couldn't wait for Amity to allow her to speak. "Are you marrying a girl or a boy or something else?"
"A girl.", Amity clarified, casually sitting down onto the table at the front where the books they had been reading for months now were piling up. "What's her name?" - "Is she pretty?" - "Do you like her?" - "When did you meet?"
The questions would not stop, so she made the sign they had agreed upon to mean 'silence', and slowly, the volume came down again.
She cleared her throat and rapid-fired her responses, turning to the kid that had asked each question in the process. "Her name is Luz; yes, the prettiest; yes, I like her very, very, VERY much, and we met a looong time ago, longer than all of you are old, in fact!"
That blew some of the kids away.
"I wanna hear how you met!", Bastian exclaimed, and more kids joined in. Amity uncomfortably scratched her neck.
"I... don't know, kids. This is our last time before the break and we wanted to finish 'One hundred and one dematians', remember?"
"But Miss Bliiiight, we can do that later, this is so much more interesting!", Liza whined. She had actually really enjoyed the book, but learning more about her teachers' life was suddenly so much more interesting. "Pleeease?"
Amity sighed, mulling it over. While meeting Luz was the best thing that had ever happened to her, she did not like to remember the exact circumstances of them meeting... But maybe she could make this into a story her kids could learn from. Although she would most definitely leave out the part where she almost got her future wife dissected.
"Fine. Okay, so we first met when we were 14 - that was a little over ten years ago! What you need to know is that... I wasn't a very nice witch back then. I always tried to be cool, to be the best, to be seen by everybody as the best, but really, I was only being cold, and mean. I bullied other kids who weren’t as capable a witch as I was. I had a lot of friends, sure, but deep inside, I was lonely. Really, really lonely.
Nobody really cared about me. About my feelings. My dreams. And then, Luz came into my life.” Her eyes lit up as she reminisced about the past, while the children followed her every word. “And… I wasn’t very nice to her, either. See, she’s a human, and -”
“A HUMAN?”, a little cyclops suddenly threw in, utterly surprised. She’d never seen a human before, let alone spoken to one. “You know, no, you’re marrying a human?”
“Yes, Saray. Luz is a human. Her coming to the boiling isles was an accident, really, and I don’t even want to think about how my life would’ve gone if that hadn’t happened. Anyway; we first met at school. A… friend of hers had failed at her abomination homework, so she disguised herself as her abomination to trick the teacher” With a crooked smile, she shook her head in disbelief at the first of Luz’ many, many dumb, but incredibly well-intended schemes that nearly got her killed over the years. She loved that dork way too much. “That obviously didn’t work out so well. She got busted, and I was incredibly jealous because I suddenly wasn’t the top student in class anymore. I… really didn’t like her, at first.”, she admitted in a sad tone.
There was a bit of shame for how she behaved back then, but mostly, she just pitied that lonely, ice cold little overachiever. If she got the chance to talk to her fourteen year old self, she’d pull her into a tight hug, comb her fingers through her poison green hair and whisper into her ear that everything would be okay, that it’s fine to fail, fine to rest and fine to let people who genuinely care about you into your life. That she was a strong witch out of her own right, and not because Odalia forced her to become a carbon-copy version of herself. That she was strong, and beautiful, and loveable, and that she didn’t need to be anything but her true self for anyone to realize that. She just wished she’d come to this conclusion sooner - but she would forever be grateful to Luz for helping her see that eventually.
“Miss Blight?”, Liza suddenly asked.
“Hm?”
“Is everything alright, Miss Blight?”
She didn’t even notice the single tear that was rolling down her cheek. “Oh, uhm, oh, yeah. Sorry. Got a little lost in thought, there.”, she wiped it off with the ball of her hand, a slight blush of embarrassment creeping across her face. “Where were we?”
“We were wondering why you didn’t like Luz at first, and what changed!”
“Well… I didn’t like her because things weren’t going so well for me back then, and she was an easy target to blame. I took the easy way out, and pushed her away. But I soon came to realize that this girl… was something special. Despite me being a sour, mean witch, she reached out to me, believe it or not - riiiiight…” She pointed at little Bastian, “there, where you’re sitting right now, Bastian.”
“Right here?”
“Right there. Back then, I was already helping out here at the library, reading to some of your siblings and cousins!”
Horlax raised his hand and started to groan in his deep, demonic voice “You read to my brother Braxis, right?”
“That’s right, Horlax! I remember him very well.”
“Yay!”
“In any case…”
“... I asked her if she wanted to take turns reading!” A cheerful voice suddenly diverted the kids’ attention to the back of the room, where suddenly another young woman was standing, casually leaned against the frame of the open door. She was tall and skinny with light brown skin, dark brown, curly hair and a broad smile on her face. Immediately, Bastian was in love with her. “Right, batata?”
“Luz?!”, Amity was at a loss for words, while a surprised moan went through the audience, “l…What are you doing here?”, she couldn’t help but feel a tinge of embarrassment that she so willingly shared their entire love story with the kids - at least without talking to her first.
Luz made her way to join Amity at the front, high-fiving the excited kids next to her. “I hope it’s okay that I’m interrupting?” The kids furiously nodded, making Luz’ grin even wider. “Awesome, hi, kids! I’m Luz, and you have no idea how cool it is to finally meet you! Ami - I mean, Miss Blight has told me so much about you! You must be Liza, right?”, she said, confidently pointing to the right girl who immediately started blushing. “And you….are Vinny, right?” Vinny nodded and grinned back at her. “I’m sorry if I interrupted, I wanted to surprise you guys and read with you and Miss Blight! But then I noticed that you’re talking about some even more interesting stuff”, she turned back to check with Amity who had “I’m so sorry” plastered all over her face, but Luz just winked at her and gave her one of those trademark smiles that seems to slowly wash away any discomfort.
“I’m not sure if you know it, but I’m an expert on this topic, too!” Some of the children started to giggle. “So go ahead, shoot your questions, give me your worst!”
As she continued to play back and forth with the students, Amity let her have the stage, remaining silent, simply watching that bubbly, hyper-energetic girl of her dreams command the room with the confidence that made her fall for her all these years ago. She got lost in her acting as she vividly described their confrontation with Otabin, the Slitherbeast, and Grom, observing her every move and listening to every cute word from her lips, as well as the excited cheers from the children who were absolutely enamored with her. Seeing her like this awoke a deeply felt wish she never knew she had - the idea of childlike laughter, but outside the library, suddenly seemed very desirable to Amity. Luz would make a fantastic mother, no doubt.
Minutes flew by, with Amity watching and occasionally filling in some gaps in Luz’ narration. She laid out how they slowly became friends, eventually fell in love with each other, defeated the evil emperor Belos together, brought peace to the Boiling Isles and helped rebuild and restructure an entire society.
“And that’s about it, right?”, Luz concluded, checking back with Amity, exhaustedly taking place next to her on the desk in the front of the room.
“For now.”, she whispered so that only Luz could hear her. Immediately, her hand made its way to Amity’s, holding it tight, sending her a desperate gaze as if to ask for permission to kiss her, even though she knew that doing it in front of the class would probably be in bad taste. Amity was seriously tempted to give in anyway, but a quick glance at the clock brought her back to her senses. “Titan, look at the time! It’s almost five, kids, I’m sorry! We’ve been talking for WAY too long, there’s no more time le-”
“Can Luz come back after the summer?”, Liza suddenly interrupted, her question receiving a lot of approving nods and “Mhm”s from her fellow kids. Nobody seemed bothered at all that there was no more time to finish reading One hundred and One Dematians, or any other book for that matter.
Luz exchanged a quick glance with her fiancé as if asking for approval; she knew that these children and her time with them were important to her, and she didn’t want to overstay her welcome, but Amity grinned at her before turning back to the kids. “Well, I’d say she has no other choice, so rudely interrupting us like this! I feel like we need a second reader so that we won’t fall behind after summer” A wave of “yay”s and other cheers rolled through the kid’s corner, as the witch squeezed her human’s hand. “...if that’s okay with you.”, again so that only Luz was able to hear her.
“I’d love to come here more often, as long as you want me to.”
“I’ll always want you around”, she giggled, “it would be a pretty dumb idea to marry you if I didn’t.”
“Point taken”, Luz chuckled back, the urge to kiss her growing more intense with every passing second.
Just KISS already”, Bastian suddenly screamed, drawing the pair out of their shared trance and painting their faces red.
“Well, would you look at that”, Amity chuckled uncomfortably, “Time’s up. Have a wonderful summer, everybody! I want to hear what you’ve been up to when we see each other the next time!”
Restlessness broke out as all kids rose from the floor, packed their bags and stored the pillows in the pillow chest, the air filled with squabbling and babbling of preschoolers as everybody prepared to leave. However, as she reflected on the past hour, one final thought came to mind that she wanted to share with the kids before they’d leave for the summer. “Kids, one more thing I wanted to say!”, she said as she rose from the desk, with only about half the kids actively turning back towards her, “It’s the reason why we told you this story in the first place. We didn’t tell you our story to boast, or did we?”, she looked back to Luz, who jokingly made a “eeeh”-face, “nooo, I told you about my childhood, because I want you to take one thing away from my story: Kindness always wins. Don't be mean. Don't try to feel better by making others feel bad. Be kind, and forgiving, and nice to other people. Speak to them. listen to them. Be there for them. Help them. Try… try to be the light in someone's life, okay? That - that’s all I want you to know.”
The kids were already out the door, yelling “bye, Miss Blight”, from outside in the main library where their parents were waiting, clearly not having paid any attention to the last few sentences. Before they knew it, they were alone. Amity sighed, incredulously shaking her head, as she felt her future wife’s hand on her wrist. “That… was beautiful”, Luz whispered, her cheeks burning red with emotion as she stood up in front of her. “You’ve been my light too, you know.”, she breathed as she came closer, loosely laying her arms around her fiance’s neck, “More times than I can count.”
“Is that so?”, Amity grinned like the lovestoned dork that she was as she gently placed her hands on Luz’s hips, pulling her just a bit closer. “I love you”, she whispered, right before their lips met with a light smack, silencing any possible response from Luz. It was gentle and tender, yet it seemed to go on forever, a kiss they got lost in, one that said more than a million words ever could, so Luz wasn’t too mad she didn’t get to say it back this time; she would find a different occasion. For the next while, they just stood there in the empty kids’ corner, the place where their friendship had begun all those years ago, silently swaying back and forth in nothing but each other’s presence to the tune of their hearts, yearning for the day they could finally call each other their wife.
They didn’t even notice the door closing, as Liza, who had returned to properly say goodbye to her favorite teacher, gave them the privacy they so clearly deserved. “Goodbye, Mrs. Noceda”, she whispered to none but herself, as she pulled the sliding door shut as silently as she could, “and goodbye, Luz. See you after summer.” With that, she excitedly made her way out of the library; after all, Papa Steve promised he’d make pizza tonight, and this time, she would help him make it!