Chapter Text
Luz was never really a coffee type of person, and, whenever she did order some caffeinated drink on an excursion with her friends, it was the type of amalgamation that could hardly be called a drink under all of the whipped cream and syrup which swirled over each other in her cup. But people change. Really, it's the only thing that people are good at doing.
When Willow Park started working at Bonesborough Brews during Luz's freshman year of college, she had unknowingly opened the gates for the safe haven that would greet Luz's tired body much too late at night after a grueling day of classes. It turns out, signing yourself up for every class on the course list proved to be a test of indomitable lengths of study, and unimaginable streaks of hours without sleep. So, Luz learned to like coffee.
Or, at least, the equivalent to it that the Boiling Isles offered. Derived from some sort of horrifying plant, Luz was sure, but she decided to remain blissfully unaware lest her save haven be dampened.
For sophomore year of college, the girl had resolved to quit relying on the lifts of caffeine; if she could fight monsters from each corner of the underworld with little more power in her hands than a paper and pencil, she could pass her classes without spending an embarrassing allowance of snails per week on her local café.
This resolution, however valiant, lasted solidly about a week.
"Willow!" Luz shouted, banging open the door to Bonesborough Brews. The harsh sound of the door slamming was a familiar, jarring symphony to the unlucky customers and the people who worked there, much to the dismay of the manager who had told her off at least a hundred times. The scent of roasted coffee and myriads of familiar flavorings and syrups enveloped the brunette as she stepped inside. Or, fell inside would be a better turn of phrase.
Luz barely got a foot within the door before she bent towards her knees, panting with the exertion of having outrun boiling rain to make it to where she stood. "Whew! Sorry, just give me a sec..." she ran a hand through her hair, putting back into place curls that she had just started to learn how to tame, which were inevitably made discordant by the rain. As her hand landed on the nape of her neck, she looked up and chirped "Oh, and sorry about the, uh..." she faltered.
She blinked and opened her eyes, and did it again just to make sure she was seeing the right thing.
That was not Willow.
Unless Willow Park had decided to grow her hair out and dye it teal overnight, the human had most certainly begun rambling in the most embarrassing way possible to a complete stranger. That, and she doesn't think she's ever seen her friend give this scrutinizing of a look to her before - or to anyone. She squeaked and fell a short step back. She flew her hands up hurriedly, as if they would be able to successfully counter the perturbed gaze on her and started babbling up apologies.
"Sorry, my fault, you see, usually my friend is working at around this time and I suppose I haven't been here in a while and, uhm..." her ears heated up slightly, but she forced herself to stand and make eye contact with the barista whilst looking at least presentably sane. "My apologies for being disruptive. What I meant to say was, sorry about the door..."
The barista bat her lashes with a twitch of her eye, like she was doing her absolute best to sustain an eye roll or some other indecent manner of greeting a customer.
She exhaled a breath, which caused a couple mint-colored hairs around her face to fly back into their patented position, and looked back up at Luz. Somewhat strained, she mumbled "It's... fine. Can I get you anything today?"
Luz snapped back into reality as she heard the girl's words and, looking up at her to finally get a good look, an unfamiliar itch crawled its way into her mind. "Ah, yes please!" she perked back up. "Could I get a caramel macchiato, for here please? Thank you."
Caramel maw-chiato. Unfortunately, a maw-chiato was a wild demon, as Willow had informed her to help her keep her streak. Luz shivered. Maybe she could conveniently forget that.
"Could I get a name?" inquired the stranger, as she duly noted the order down, not making eye contact.
"Certainly! Luz," she replied.
She didn't expect the way the other girl would look up from her paper pad in reaction to her answer. Her gaze had been simply judgmental before, but now her eyes narrowed after being widened momentarily. It was as if she wanted to pierce through the brunette with her cool, yellow eyes and get an answer to the question which had been conjured by Luz's few words, hardly any at all, which had tumbled from her mouth.
Before the situation could get more awkward or peculiar, Willow skipped out of the back door. "Luz!" she grinned.
"Willow!" Luz cheered, which seemed to snap the girl in front of her out of her dazed, calculating state. As her coworker cheerily came up to the counter to greet her friend, she rushed to the back to start preparing the drink, far out of the way of the other two.
"I thought you said you were going to stop coming in here," Willow noted. Her voice was perpetually mellifluous, falling from her tongue like the soft flowers she often conjured. She had switched her old frames out for red ones, and she had cut her hair at the beginning of the semester to signify "new blossomings" as she'd put it. Luz grinned back at her sheepishly. "Yeah, that was the plan, but..." her eyes briefly flitted over to the girl who had darted away from their conversation. "I'm in advanced Beast Psychology this year, and I reallyy need a coffee after today..."
Willow clicked her tongue, giving her a tut-tut noise with no embedded malice that reminded Luz of her mother.
"I can't say I'm upset at being able to see you more often, though. Classes make it so hard to make plans," she sighed.
Luz nodded in agreement. She was about to add to that statement when a porcelain cup slamming on the counter, rather loudly, drew her attention away from the conversation.
"Caramel macchiato for here," the barista stated calmly before drifting away as soon as she appeared.
Whenever Luz came into the shop late, she often loitered around the tables, doing whatever homework she could muster up the will to look at before Willow got off her shift or went on break. She returned to that same pattern that night, twirling a pencil in her hand as she squinted at the convoluted mess of disorganized papers that lay before her. Truth be told, her mind was accustomed to wander, but the world in which it ended up in that night was different from the usual state of daydreams she was used to. Something about the mint-haired girl felt so familiar, and yet she couldn't put a finger on it. The feeling crawled around her brain, gnawing at it as if it was trying to get into the folds of her mind and uncover the answer there.
She had spared a couple glances her way. Okay, maybe more than a couple glances. But she had to figure out where she's seen her before. The girl had minty-teal (green? blue-green? she couldn't put a pin on a good word for it) colored hair which went down her back, the color of which sharpened in contrast with the brown, almost auburn, roots that formed at the center of her scalp. Her hair had some form of texture to it that appeared to have been beaten out hastily with a brush, creating a wisp that flew behind the girl as she shifted between the stations behind the counter.
And her eyes. They were half-lidded, giving the distinct impression that she was done hearing it before anyone decided to start speaking in the first place. And such a piercing shade of amber that the brunette thought it could stab right through her.
Why is she so familiar? How many cotton-candy-haired witches have you seen in your life, Luz? This should not be hard!
She was in the middle of mentally scolding herself for her incompetence, so distracted that she nearly failed to recognize that her friend had just slid into the seat parallel from her own.
She perked up almost instantaneously. "Oh! Careful sneaking up on me like that, Lo," she teased with a wink.
The aforementioned giggled softly. "Well, we're almost closing up, and Amity insisted on cleaning the rest. So I thought I'd pop by."
Amity.
"Yeah, crazy, right?"
The brunette blinked. She had not been aware that she'd said that name out loud.
"It's like... she just disappears one day for years, and suddenly she's asking me for a job at a random coffee shop in Bonesborough." Willow looked over to the girl- ahem- Amity, as Luz had been doing similarly too many times to be considered normal in the last hour. She had her unchanging glare fixed on cleaning out an espresso machine in the far corner of the shop, and seemed to be grumbling at it from time to time.
"Sorry for the wait, but the espresso machine decided to bite a customer today..." Willow kept talking, but her voice fell into a smokey haze when Willow's previous statement was still ringing in Luz's ears.
The human looked back at the girl before her, retracting the conversation. "I... huh?"
Willow blinked at her. "You don't remember?"
Well, there were a couple things Luz had been worrying about during her highschool career considerably more than whatever situation this was. Such as her adoptive mother almost getting petrified, and trying not to become petrified herself with the overarching anxiety of having to tell her mother she was, surprise, living in a demon realm.
"Willow?" a voice called from behind the counter, increasingly familiar and prickling Luz with doubt. "Do you have the keys? I'll close up."
Scrambling to shove all of her papers into her messenger bag while Willow tossed Amity the keys, she thought on her last statement. disappeared? What on earth does she mean by that? And why don't I remember? She gritted her teeth, gaze fixing pointedly on the spreadsheet in her hands as if it was going to give her any answers.
"I'll walk you out, Luz," Willow stated simply. She turned behind her and waved simply but kindly back at Amity, who gave her a tentative wave back with slightly less furrowed brows than usual. The bell on the door screamed, because everything in the Boiling Isles seems to scream rather than making any other sort of pleasant noise, as Willow kicked it back and they sent off into the night.
The ground sizzled with the aftermath of the rain that fell some hours earlier, creating a smell that wasn't quite as calming as the dew in the human realm but gave this world its own distinct flavor on its own.
"Honestly, I think she's kind of trying to apologize... in her own way," Willow added as she scuffed a bit of the ground with her boot as they walked.
Campus was a short walk away from the shop, and the dorms were just around the block of it. They weren't dormmates, but they resided in the same building, so it only seemed natural to walk back together after Willow's long shifts.
Luz bit in a sharp intake of breath. "Listen, I know this is probably going to sound stupid because obviously she's done something significant enough to warrant remembering, but I just don't know where I've seen her before," she ruminated, furrowing her brows. "She's so familiar, and yet I can't figure out from where."
Willow stuffed her hands in her pockets and looked over at the girl beside her, who was staring down, her brows carved downwards on her forehead. "Luz, do you remember the first time we met?"
She nodded.
"Do you recall," she continued, "the girl who came by and called me 'half-a-witch-Willow'?"
The human had to strain her mind before the memory popped before her eyes, clear as day. Of course. Obviously. How hadn't she been able to see it before?
She started at Willow, mouth agape. "That's her?! I... wow."
There was no mistake to be made. It was Amity Blight.
It was true that she had very little memories of her to reel back on, but that strike of bright green hair could be recognized in over a mile of film.
She had been yanked into a witches duel with her once, and nearly escaped death in a library with her another time. Her first Grom came back to her, and it immediately surprised her that she had ever forgotten it. Amity was present in all of these memories.
But those were during freshman year, where other catastrophes clouded and stormed in her mind soon thereafter. And the run-ins she had with Amity - that was her name - felt completely different from the rest of her world at that time. Like she entered a different plane of the isles whenever she got involved with her, one where Amity was the center of its mystery. And once she disappeared, the mystery enveloped with her faded away, and the unfamiliar events found themselves scuffed under other matters of importance and the focus of simply surviving.
Now that she had seen her again, the itch in her mind grew. How could it make sense that she was getting so worked up over a girl who she barely knew in the past, and is even more of a stranger to her now? Whose memories feel like a wuthering wind, everpresent but constantly moving out of Luz's grasp?
Get it together.
It occurred to Luz that she had zoned out quite inexplicably. She shook herself awake. "Yeah, I remember. That was... a long time ago," she finished abruptly.
Willow smiled solemnly. "Yeah, it was." And they fell into silence.
Truth be told, Luz still had a lot of questions. But she didn't want to come off too obsessed. And the topic matter seemed to be putting a damper on Willow's petals and she didn't want to make that worse; so, with difficulty, she stopped prying into what definitely was not her business and what she definitely very much wanted to pry into.
After all, she has so much work to do already that she should not be letting herself delve headfirst into a new mystery that would surely take up all of the remaining area in her headspace. Luz worked hard to clear the visions of crystalline yellow eyes out of her head. Nope. Self-control, she thought to herself as she walked into the cool night.
. . .
She can't stop thinking about Amity Blight.