Chapter Text
On the second day, Luz remembers that she never saw the damage of Hunter's sigil.
She makes a point in talking to him when he's alone — which has become increasingly challenging ever since they left the demon realm. Especially now, with a total of seven people roaming around the house. It hits Luz that the last time they were able to have a private moment with each other was before they gathered to break into the Blight manor. When she conjures the memory in her head, she can barely grasp it: there was the top of the trees, the pungent menthol scent of the Bonesborough forest. Hunter's leather-clad finger in her face. It happened two days ago yet feels centuries away, and it's enough to shrink Luz's stomach into what it feels like half its size.
It's not a surprise to find him hunched over at the dining table, tinkering with some of the sewing tools that her mom had entrusted him while Flapjack looks curiously, perched around the back of one of the empty chairs. Still a bit too early to take out the sewing machine, Mamá had confided to Luz with a wink, and over the layers of guilt and anxiety she was struck by warm rush of gratitude towards her.
Hunter's head snaps upwards once he realizes he isn't alone, and the sunlight from the window shines through the wild mane of his platinum hair. Luz wonders for a brief moment why he'd chosen to sit facing away from the light, before she begins tapping her index fingers together.
"Um, do you know where the others are?"
Hunter's gaze drops down, shoulders rising in a disinterested gesture. "Gus said he was going to follow the trail of the water stream behind the old house. I dunno about Willow and Amity, but they left together."
"So… no one will be here for a while?"
This time, Hunter's eyes lay consciously in Luz's face. He slowly lowers his arms.
"I think so."
Luz nods before taking the chair closest to Hunter. "Because, I've been wondering… Did uh, anyone check for any of your injuries?"
Hunter raises an eyebrow at her. "Why?"
"Well, you're the only one of us with a sigil." She absently rubs the skin of her right forearm. "And with the draining spell…"
"Oh." Hunter freezes for a whole second. Flapjack instantly hops into the table, forcing Hunter to follow the movement with his gaze.
"So like, did it… hurt? "
Luz cannot help but feel like she's overstepping, but even then, it's not like Hunter can talk about this with anyone else in the house. Well, Flapjack aside. Said cardinal steps into the space between Hunter's arms and picks up a wide needle with its beak. Hunter's gaze stays on his palisman as he tries to retrieve the tool for himself.
"Um. Not… really?," he sighs, closing his eyes for a moment. "It's a bit of a blur."
"Tell me about it," Luz utters, her tone low.
He shoots a small smile at her. "I guess… I don't even understand how that pain threshold works for you guys. Or how different it is."
It's a good point, but it is a tangent that Luz has no intentions to devote any of her energy into. They can have this discussion later.
Luz laces her fingers together in an attempt to keep them still. "Alright, sure, but even then. How did it feel for you during the spell? I didn't even get to really see you for the worst of it."
Hunter grows silent again. He finally catches the needle from the little thief, and Flapjack lets out a few cheerful chirps.
"Well, judging by how the rest of the witches were doing…" he scratches the glove right above his forearm. "Pretty fine? It was more of a dormant pain. Like a headache on the back of your head."
Luz's eyes squint. "Do you get… headaches?"
The blank expression she gets is deserved.
"...And then, it's all some cuts and bruises. Nothing else. Say," he suddenly lowers his voice, and Luz leans forward. "What if we had someone from the healing track here? I didn't really want to think about it." He gulps, his chest rising and falling with his next breath. "Guess I got lucky there, huh."
Luz can understand the sentiment. The real nature of Hunter's body could be way more obvious to someone who actually studies the physiology of witches — and it wouldn't take much for the rest of the secrets to start spilling out. She was happily married to the idea of taking some time before breaking the bad news to the group — hell, they had been in the Boiling Isles a little over twenty-four hours ago. The fact that there were no instructed witches to inspect their injuries was more of a blessing than a curse.
"I took the Healing track at Hexside, along with the other eight," Luz scratches her chin. "But there wasn't much I could figure out with just the glyphs. Besides, we were barely taught about anything that wasn't witches, demons and bugs…"
Hunter snorts. "Yeah. I guess we know why now."
Maybe there was something she could figure out if she prodded Hunter enough, but even then she'd only have the knowledge from being there for a few weeks. It left Luz with the only option of assuming everyone's wounds would heal up on their own, and that nothing ugly was happening underneath their skin.
"What about the sigil?," she tries again. "Did it… I don't know, burn? "
"Uh, no? I don't know?," Hunter rubs a little harder over his skin, like it will help him remember. "Like I said, it was mostly dormant. I don't think it was supposed to burn. Maybe?"
Luz hums at the response. She doesn't want to appear discontented, because she can see as Hunter's furrowed brow begins to darken his expression. With how knowledgeable he seemed to be about all things magic, he's been plucked out of his world and put into a situation that Luz herself recognizes as nothing other than mind-blowing. Still, back then Luz had some expectations about this new world. In contrast, Hunter seems already pretty overwhelmed, staring at a table full of strange contraptions that are supposed to satisfy the needs of one of his hobbies.
Luz sighs deeply, only because she needs to take a big breath to ask her next question.
"Can I look at it?," she says, rubbing her hands together.
Hunter is allowed to look a little weirded out, Luz thinks. If he reacted at all, that's it. It's less encouraging if he just stares blankly at his extended arms, just like he's doing right now.
"Uh… Sure."
His gloves are in the way.
Come to think of it, Luz has never seen Hunter's bare hands. Even without the armor, or the under armor, there seems to be a barrier to the skin of his hands that he's still a bit hesitant to let go of. Luz lets the thought simmer in her head as she drags her chair closer to him. She's touched him before, too. Clutched at him during falls, tugged his arms while running away. There's a pointed image in her brain, too, where she offered her hand out to him. The memory is dusty, almost dream-like — and rightfully so, but he had taken her hand then. Desperate, too quick to really think about it. When Luz is phased by the vast extension of Hunter's forearms in front of her, she suddenly wonders if she'll be able to conquer the challenge.
"Um," she starts, fingers hovering in the air.
It hadn't been easy before, and it sure as hell wasn't right now.
"I'm just, gonna…," and she grabs him just below his elbow to start tugging the glove off.
What is it that Grimwalker's skin is made out of? As her fingers keep Hunter's arm in the air, she's almost disappointed with how grounded the touch feels. The skin is soft, if not a little stretchy and thin, with a light dust of hair creeping below the elbow. The temperature might be the only thing that feels a little off, it being a bit under the normal heat Luz would expect. But otherwise, it's a scaringly normal arm. Maybe it was stupid of her to even expect him to feel different.
With one glove finally coming off, the image of his hand is just as underwhelming. His skin is damp and soft, and his fingers are red on the tips. Hunter flexes them in the air before he turns his palm face up, allowing Luz to see a handful of moles and healed cuts, yet no sigil in sight.
"That's not the right arm," she mumbles, clicking her tongue. She lets a moment pass by, waiting to see if Hunter would take initiative, and then quickly resumes her work when he barely even makes a gesture to acknowledge her words.
As she digs her thumb into Hunter's elbow joint to take off the other glove, Luz gathers enough courage to glance at his face. She's not sure of what she's expecting — but still her stomach drops while looking at the picture: eyebrows pulled as high as they can, his mouth open in what could either be disgust or expectation. The cherry on top, of course, is that he's blushing. High and creeping back into his ears, and Luz's eyes drift away as soon as she realizes, feeling like she's taken a glimpse of something that she wasn't allowed to see.
It's a real blessing that her darker skin doesn't allow her own blush to be as noticeable.
"Ah," she exhales, dropping the second glove on the table right over the other one. "There we go."
She shuffles her chair closer to Hunter, carefully keeping his hand steady over hers. Up close, the sigil looks just like she remembers: a symmetrical figure of a double winged sword cutting across a triangle, tinted with opaque gold in Hunter's rosy skin. It's neat and detailed, like a fresh tattoo, yet doesn't shine when the light reflects on it. Luz maneuvers his hand from left to right, then sweeps her thumb over it just to find out that it has no texture. It doesn't bump upwards nor downwards. It just blends on his skin, like a birthmark. A shiver runs down Luz's spine when she thinks about the implications.
Hunter clears his throat. "Um, so?"
Luz moves her finger out of the way, straightening up for a second to check Hunter’s arm at a distance. After looking at it for a few seconds, she replies:
“It looks fine. So, no pain?,” she asks, eyes darting up again. The tip of Hunter’s ears are red, but that’s the extent of his blush, and Luz suddenly feels twenty pounds lighter.
“No pain,” Hunter confirms.
That’s good news then, right? It’s always unnerving when things appear to be okay from the outside. Luz has learned to never take normalcy for granted, and the squirm under her belly doesn’t let up.
“Did you ever see any other person with a sigil during the draining spell?,” comes Hunter’s voice.
There's a sticky layer of dread permeating his tone, and Luz's heart skips a beat. The way the group avoided talking about the consequences of the spell felt overly familiar to Luz, and she felt both annoyance and reticence at their attitude. It made it hard to center her thoughts in Eda, who had gotten a sigil just for the occasion. Really, how horrifying did it turn out to be if no one even dares to speak about it? As far as Luz could tell, Hunter hadn't been greatly affected by it, and that made the extent of the sigil-bearers she managed to witness. Although, there was one more person...
“Does Belos count?,” she says, raising one of her eyebrows.
Hunter immediately frowns. “Belos has no sigil.” His tone is firm, authoritative. A little too loud.
She might have reacted to this somehow, because Hunter’s face suddenly bounces open, jaw falling with a click of his mouth. The hand that Luz still holds in her fingers squirms.
“No, no,” Luz shakes her head, mainly as an excuse to draw her eyes away from Hunter. “When you guys arrived, and he was all… beast-like… that’s what I did to him.” She recalls the chill that had crawled its way down her spine when she heard him screech for the first time, shaking her from her forehead to her toes. “I branded him with a sigil.”
When she looks at him again, Hunter’s eyes are filled with vacancy, his stare aimless and head cocked to one side.
“That’s…,” he starts, and immediately stops. He tries again: “You're right. Sorry."
The ball of panic that has started to settle under Luz's larynx grows in size, and abruptly her eyes dampen at his reaction. Her mind goes over the memories like they're happening in real time: Luz glances over her shoulder and it’s like she can see the branding glove displayed in a busy corner of Belos' room. Laid carelessly atop the table, as if ready to continue the mindless task of dousing every witch with its venom. It hits her now, how she was able to give him a taste of his own medicine, although that's a rather morbid way to put it.
Eyes landing back on Hunter, Luz tries to make sense of his expression: it definitely isn't neutral, but the thoughtfulness that pulls his eyebrows together feels a little too unnatural. The prospect of Hunter masking his feelings in front of her ignites a bite of anger on her insides. She's already seen him at his worst, in multiple different situations: what could he gain from hiding it from her now?
"But that wasn't just one," he says suddenly. His eyes pull into focus, and Luz gets the tiniest bit intimidated when he lands a determined stare into her face. "He was completely covered by them— not, not sigils, but with glyphs. Do you remember?"
Luz's mouth drops open: "Oh."
He's right: what Luz had quickly branded as flashing lights in her head — as she concentrated on scrambling away as fast as she could from his disfigured body — were actually glyphs, connected all over Belos' skin like an intricate web. A continuous string of magic covering his form head to toe; almost a second skin. If there was any humanity left in him, it surely was below that, and nowhere else.
Luz notes how the knot on her throat slowly begins to unravel. "The source of his magic," she says under her breath. Her heart clenches on her chest when she catches the hint of reverence in her own tone. Wonder, envy, aspiration — she can never allow herself to direct any of those feelings into Belos' actions.
Still, however, the thought persists in her head: ever since coming back, none of her glyphs have materialized. It had felt like cutting off one of her limbs, and she'd cried bitter tears during her first shower back in her home. Could there be a way to canalize the power of the glyphs to just infuse that power into herself? The idea it's too morbid to really entertain it now. Not when she's not even alone: when Hunter's hand falls in the nest formed by her own, and his eyes burn a hole into her forehead.
"Do you remember getting the sigil?," she says.
If Hunter was about to throw an acknowledgement to her previous words, then he either forgets quickly about it or just doesn't let it show in his face. Instead, his left hand circles around nothing in the air, as the arm in Luz's grasp obeys the pull of the action. A little startled, Luz holds onto Hunter's wrist: her fingertips turn white against his skin, and she notes the shape of bone under her digits when she presses down.
"Uh," Hunter says. Luz watches as his free hand gives up and lays on the table again. "Yes. I remember."
He stops pulling; Luz retreats her grip and sees the faint circles of red on Hunter's wrist. Distractedly, her brain takes note of this fact. "How old were you?"
Once again, the arm in Luz's hand pulls away, but this time Hunter throws an icy glare to his left hand and scoffs. He's trying to rub the sigil with it, Luz finally realizes.
"...Very young?" His gaze softens, but the scowl deepens between his lips. "It was a long time ago. Might be one of my first memories."
So not a birthmark, but pretty close. For some reason, this information loosens the knot in her stomach. The image of Belos branding Hunter with the sigil as a toddler is terrifying... but not as bad as the thought that, from a certain point in time, all Grimwalkers were made with the sigil in their design.
The shape of the sigil is not a circle, but Luz traces its edges with her thumb anyways: this time, the drag is slower, more deliberate. She follows the pattern in a clockwise motion, and as Hunter's skin heats up under her digit, she feels the faint whoosh of Hunter's exhale breaching the space between them. Luz’s next breath is filled with the smells that she’s learned to associate with Hunter: the warmth of damp soil, topped with what resembles the aftertaste of a slightly bitter almond in the back of her throat. It shocks her how familiar his scent feels, like she’s known him for years rather than weeks.
Hunter's voice raises again: the moment shatters in a millisecond, and Luz feels awake all of a sudden. "I wonder if he was aware of what the sigil would do to... you know. Me."
Frowning, Luz lets her thumb stop, choosing for it to rest atop of his skin for a second. "How so?"
A dark shadow has settled in Hunter's expression. Like this, he manages to look both older and younger than what he actually is. A persistent thought assaults Luz's head: how Hunter never had a real childhood, at least how every other kid in the Boiling Isles got to do. His brain might be ahead of theirs in certain aspects, but so, so far behind in others.
"Well, if the sigils were meant to incapacitate the witches — if not straight up kill them... That wasn't what happened to me." The shadow dissipates a little, and free of the veneer of fear Hunter just looks tired. "I wonder if it's just part of Grimwalker nature, or if maybe Belos..."
Turning his head away, Hunter leaves the idea on the air. Flapjack has spent the last minutes walking circles in the table and inspecting the tiny tools with its beak, but he opens his wings and flies up to Hunter’s right shoulder once he’s done talking. Hunter acknowledges his arrival with a fond look to his side, but the spam on his mouth can barely be called a smile.
“I guess he had a change of plans last minute anyways.” He sighs, leaning back into the chair — enough to lift his elbow off the table, but his hand remains immovable atop Luz's. She tenses her grip for a moment, unwilling to cut off the contact just now. “I dunno. I still believe he’ll come back here and finish the job, you know.”
A tinge of agony climbs up Luz's chest, embracing her heart like a dear old friend. She hates to admit that he's right. A little over 24 hours ago she saw the flick on Belos' face when Kikimora delivered her to his chamber: a crack on his mask. Annoyance, inconvenience, before he quickly regained total control over himself. The man who used to inhabit his husk might have had the tiniest bit of respect for a fellow human, but Hunter was neither human or witch. Undeserving of dignity, respect, or even hatred, Belos would've had him gone in seconds.
That lasting image of Belos' figure splattered across the palace flashes in her mind. Luz's eyes find Hunter's again, where he's also fallen into a pensive state.
"So like… you don't think that what the Collector did to him…" She can't find the words to finish the thought.
Hunter's eyelids drop, and his index finger creases the tablecloth into tiny waves. "I don't know," he says after a moment.
Luz hums softly, yet again reminded of the tensing on the insides of her stomach. Call it part of the grief process, but Luz found it hard to believe Belos was truly gone. If she had stayed in the demon realm, and was able to see what the Collector was up to... But she hadn't, and all she has is the terrifying minutes in the end where everything had crumbled into pieces. In Hunter's case, accepting that fact must be an even bigger challenge.
Her aimless stare leads her to the thing that has been happening for the entirety of this conversation, the reason she came for him in the first place: the back of Hunter's hand under her palm. When she grips his hand this time, it's not to keep it in place or to inspect his arm. She squeezes softly and deliberately, and uses her other hand to grasp over the space where his wrist begins. In response, Hunter closes his fingers, replicating her gesture. Luz gathers some courage to look at his face, and instead of a blush he just sees a tight half smile in his face: the way he burns her with his purple eyes sends a zap through her chest, much to her dismay.
Sweat starts gathering in the center of her hand, so she loosens her fingers and watches as Hunter's hand slips out, and then returns close to his chest where he starts rubbing it with his other one. Luz twists her lips outwards.
"Oh, I didn't give you a cramp, did I?," she says.
Hunter lets go of his right hand as it had caught on fire. "No, no, it's fine." He clears his throat, tilting his head to the side to briefly nuzzle at Flapjack. "Uhm. Thank you."
"It's nothing," Luz says. She grabs the sides of the chair she's sitting on, letting her hands cool against the wood. "I kinda soured the mood at the end there, so..."
Hunter frowns. "I mean, not really. Like... Amity doesn't even look at me, you know. And it's not like me and Willow talk either. Even Gus has started to treat me like I'll shatter at any second." He inhales through his teeth, letting the air out in a huff. "It's nice to have someone to just talk to."
A smile finds its way out through Luz's lips. "Same."
Hunter smiles too, his finger straightening the tablecloth where it got all crumpled. Even with his gaze turned away, she can sense in it a faint sheer of fondness — the kind that she has identified from watching him behave around Flapjack. It's nothing like the hostile looks he'd flash at her, those times back in the Boiling Isles, and Luz relishes in the fact that she can too be a recipient of those evasive gestures of affection from him.
Out in the distance, Luz hears the overlapping cacophony of two female voices: she immediately recognizes Amity's laugh, and she sets her panicked stare in Hunter's face. Likewise, he flinches at the sound of company, and scrambles out of the table, almost dropping the chair in the process. Flapjack chirps in protest as he follows Hunter out of the kitchen.
Luz gets no time to wonder why he fled like that — it's not like they were doing anything bad — as the house gains a new degree of life with Amity and Willow's voices traveling through the narrow entrance hallway to the open area in the kitchen, their steps growing in volume.
Willow is the first one to breach into the room, with Amity following close behind. They’re flushed and smiling, and it’s contagious enough for Luz to feel her face relax into a grin.
“Hey!,” Willow says. Amity wastes no time sliding behind the chair, and the hand that she rests on Luz's shoulder gets immediately grasped by Luz’s own.
“How did everything go?,” she asks.
“We visited the center of your town,” Amity says, and gives Luz’s shoulder a gentle shake. “I think it was mostly a success.”
Willow snorts and heads towards the sink. “Amity swore to me that it was free to ride the bus.”
“Sweet Titan, don’t remind me.” As Amity begins walking away, her blush returns with a vengeance. “I already said I’m sorry!”
“The driver was so unamused,” Willow says between giggles, and manages to take a sip of water before continuing. “He said he could tell we weren’t natives, and let us stay in anyway.”
Amity leans on the counter, delicately fanning her face with her hand. “I thought that was a little mean of him to say.”
“Yeah, what was that supposed to mean?” Willow shakes her head, not quite managing to blur the smile out of her face.
“We got lucky with the rest, anyways.” Amity swipes the table with her eyes, and lands back on Luz’s face. “What were you guys up to?”
The heightened pulse of Luz’s heart slams against her chest, and for a horrifying second she is left speechless. Does she know? Is she aware of… and Hunter…? There was no way, right?
Oblivious to her reaction, Amity walks up to the table and lets her fingertips graze the rolls of thread and needles carelessly sprawled on its surface. Only then Luz takes notice that Hunter’s gloves are gone — and there is no other piece of evidence to reveal his recent presence. The realization eases the stress forming knots in her throat.
“That’s some of my mom’s stuff. For, you know.” She half-asses a charade for sewing, and manages to hold the cringe from showing in her own expression. It's barely a decent explanation, but it will have to do. “I think she wanted to show it to Hunter.”
Amity nods once and retreats her hand, eyes still surveying the table. It’s clear she’s not really interested in it, and Luz lets out a whoosh of air through her mouth as discreetly as she can.
“Well, I wanna know!,” she says instead, injecting some life into her delivery. Even manages to make a show of clapping her tights with her hands. “How was the trip? What did you guys see?”
A few hours later, when Mamá asks her to empty the baskets in the trash can at the front, Luz’s eye catches the brown of Hunter’s gloves beneath the dinner leftovers and paper plates. After a few seconds of hesitation, she lets them meet their destiny with the rest of the garbage. It’s fanfare enough that the sight lets Luz reminisce briefly about earlier: the soft texture of Hunter’s skin on her hands, the words spoken between them at the table.
In particular, Hunter's last lines reverberate in her head: last night, Luz found herself aching for the company of Eda and King, and to finally let herself be able to spill her heart out. She wouldn't care about mincing her words around them — kinda how it happened today, while talking to Hunter. Under the shroud of nobody's eyes at twilight, Luz's entire face morphs into a splitting smile. That's someone she can confide on, and someone who will confide to her in return: that's someone she can be her genuine self around.
Up high, the waning moon transforms into an omen of good luck.