Chapter Text
Luz’s POV
She stands, feeling weightless and insubstantial while two figures crash down from the sky in front of her. Everything is grey, dark from the smoke and ash, thick and choking.
The ram-horned demon is there, skin the same shade as the ash-grey sky, molten red eyes crinkling at the corners with humorless amusement. Luz watches, trying so desperately to struggle forward, but she’s made of nothing more solid than the ash floating around her.
She feels as heavy as lead, yet as light as air.
The demon, grinning, leans back from the angel held captive under him.
It’s Amity.
Luz tries to scream while the archangel lifts her head, but she doesn't have a voice. Amity’s eyes are dull, face bruised and battered from the fall. She looks… frail, skin washed out and paler than usual. The archangel coughs weakly, her words tired and barely more than a whisper.
“You… did this to me.”
She feels herself dissolving away, as powerless to help as a memory or a shadow.
She watches as that silver knife slides out from Amity’s shoulder blades. She watches as the light quickly fades from the archangel’s eyes, wings turning grey like the ash around them, dissolving into nothingness.
Amity falls to the ground, limp.
~~~
“NO!”
Luz bolts upright, clutching the rough sheets that are now damp with sweat. Her breath comes in uneven pants as she struggles to control her racing heart. The room is dark, only the faintest slivers of early morning light streaming in through the closed curtains.
It was just a dream. Just a dream.
Only a dream.
Amity is down the hall.
She’s alive.
She’s alive, you’re alive, Mami is alive, Eda, King, Edric, Emira, Viney, Gus, Willow, they are all alive.
You’re safe.
After a few deep, shaky breaths, her heart rate returns to an almost normal rhythm.
The nightmares aren’t new.
Luz’s been having them ever since their group landed on Earth, seeking asylum in “The Owl House”, as Eda calls the glorified shack that they’re now living in. Every night, without fail, night terrors plague her like an illness, bringing death every time she closes her eyes.
It’s been…
She doesn’t actually know how many days they’ve been here, or weeks for that matter.
Anyhow, each night that Luz’s slept on this very uncomfortable mattress, the dreams haunt her. It’s always the same thing, someone, whether it’s Amity, Willow, Gus, her mother, or all of them, they die and blame it on her. Every time, she feels weightless, unable to move or call out their names.
And for Amity…
Well, let’s just say that Luz sees the archangel most often in her nightmares.
It’s gotten to the point where no one comes to check on her when she wakes up screaming. The first night, nearly everyone rushed in, Willow and Camila at the front of the pack, fussing over her for a good thirty minutes until she assured them that she was alright. The next morning, her mother and Willow came in.
The next, only her mother. After about a week, no one.
Luz prefers it this way, no one seeing the blind panic on her face, the dried tears lingering on her cheeks. She’s glad that no one forces her to come out of the little room, besides meals and to use the restroom. No one wants to have the talk yet.
She wonders if Amity can hear her screams. Surely she can, the archangel is only a few feet to her left, and the walls are thin. She wonders if Amity feels a pang in her chest when she hears them, or if the archangel doesn’t give a damn.
Not an archangel, not anymore. Because of me.
Luz doesn’t want to think of her as fallen, because it makes everything seem more real.
My fault. All of it is my fault.
If she had fangs, she’d use them to rip out her own throat.
~~~
Amity’s POV
Her screaming wakes Amity up again.
She has her own nightmares, sure, but she doesn’t understand why the angel has to be so vocal about it.
Maybe because every time Amity screams, or even breathes too deeply, the wounds down her back burn with a fury. So she stays quiet.
Unlike some people.
Then again, she has always been loud, bubbly and jubilant, warm and impossible to push away-
Stop it.
It’s safe to say that Amity has been at war with her own mind, ever since she woke up in this little room with a rickety wooden ceiling. She knows every splinter, every crack in the wood by now, having spent countless hours laying and looking at it while her back screams in agony.
She knows what happened.
She knows what it means.
And really, Amity can’t blame her for selling them out now, it would be hypocritical. For one fallen to blame another for their actions.
That doesn’t mean she can’t be angry at her, furious even sometimes. So angry that she wants to yell and hit things, but of course, that would make her wounds burn even worse.
It doesn’t mean that she wants to forget everything between them, to beg for Lu- her to hold Amity, to stave away some of the pain that echoes around her heart.
She still…
She doesn’t know what she wants.
Amity lays prone, counting the lines in the wooden beams above her. She already knows what the number will be, 246, but it distracts her from the war going on in her head. To forgive or not to forgive, that is the question. To decide to love again, at the risk of a broken heart.
She scoffs.
Her heart is long since broken. The fragments lie in her chest, cutting and sawing at everything that is still whole inside of her.
Amity’s on number 67 when the door creaks open. Eda pokes a hesitant head in, holding a roll of cotton bandages. She lets out a tiny groan.
For some reason, she expected it to be her.
“It’s time to change the bandages.”
As the fallen angel makes her way towards Amity’s bed, she doesn’t say anything else. They have a mutual agreement; Eda comes in every morning to tend to her wounds, Amity grits her teeth and lets the woman do it without complaint. Eda does this in place of Lu- her mother, because she can’t stand to look Camila Noceda in the eyes.
They’re the same shade of brown as hers.
At least Eda’s hands are gentle, careful as she unwraps the bandages from her chest. It hurts, but she bites her tongue and says nothing. The woman sighs, throwing the old ones away, re-doing the wrapping. It’s not a happy sigh.
“They aren’t getting better. Should be scarring over by now.”
Amity purses her lips and doesn’t turn to look at her.
“You should…”
The dam breaks, and bitter words leak out.
“I should what, Eda?”
The woman’s long fingers falter on her bandages.
“Let Camila fix them. I’m no healer.”
Her throat feels thick, and all of a sudden hard it’s to breathe. Amity’s fangs bite into her lip, trying to hold back irate words, or perhaps tears. She doesn’t want to think about Camila in her room, looking at her with pity or perhaps disgust over what Amity put her through. She doesn’t want to have to look at the older angel, and be reminded of her face.
“No.”
“Kid…”
“I said no.”
Eda relents, drawing her fingers away. She can feel the disappointment radiating from the woman, but she doesn’t leave the room. It’s like she’s waiting for something.
Surprisingly, Eda is really the only person Amity can tolerate seeing right now. It’s almost funny, that she has the least amount of bad memories associated with the woman than anyone else here. She doesn’t want to see her siblings, because they’ll baby her. She doesn’t want to see Willow, or Gus for that matter, because Amity’s worried that they’ll try to strangle her.
She doesn’t want to see Viney, and be reminded of what the older angel has with her sister. To be reminded of what she once had with her.
And, she doesn’t want to see Camila or her, because of the obvious reasons.
“You know, I said to her once, that the next time I ever saw you I’d punch you in the face.”
The woman laughs. Amity can’t remember the last time she heard laughter.
“Do you still want to?”
“... No.”
She feels a weight shift off of her bed, and Eda moves to take a seat in the chair across from her. When she finally lifts her head up, tearing her eyes away from the blankets, the woman is looking at her sadly. It’s not quite pity, more of a quiet weariness, new dark circles and lines etching Eda’s face.
“I know you blame this on Luz, but it’s not her fault. It’s mine.”
Amity clenches her jaw at the name, hands tightening around the sheets and wounds aching anew.
“Be angry at me.”
“I’m angry at everyone.”
“... I know.”
The room is quiet, save for the creaking of footsteps above them.
“We have to talk about this sometime soon.”
“I don’t want to.”
She sounds like a petulant child throwing a tantrum. She could fix this, the physical wounds at least, if she just let Camila heal her. It would take away the pain.
But, Amity somehow feels like she deserves to suffer this way. To pay penance for what she did to her, to everyone, for making them worry and risk their lives to search for her. All the while she was throwing herself into the thick of things, not really caring whether she lived or died.
The angel had looked so scared.
Death probably would’ve hurt less than this.