Boscha groaned as she finished hobbling up to The Owl House. Normally, a touch of healing magic was enough to get her back into action since she was pretty good at not going into shock, which was the biggest issue most had using too much of it. It was how she never missed Grudgby matches, even if an entire team decided to dogpile on her to make a fracture happen. Unfortunately, whatever that demon bitch had done to her was a lot worse than simply what a magical bolt might do. In fact, if the Blights doctor was right, the energy might still be in her knee, trying to continue to cause fracturing and bleeding. Hence why she was currently on crutches with a heavy brace over her knee that made sure she wasn’t continuing to be in agony.

She absolutely hated it and it was a constant reminder that she needed to ask Luz a few things about what happened. Unfortunately, Amity was playing with her familiar lazily on the grass in front of the house. Boscha and Luz, so as not to worry Amity or make her hate Belos and Kikimora since one day she would theoretically be working with them, had decided to use a cover story that there’d been new settings on the Grudgby field and that they’d been turned up just a bit too high, even for Boscha. That meant she’d need to wait until another time to get her answers.

She wasn’t in the biggest rush though as she hopped next to Amity. “Hey. What brings you out here today?”

Amity looked over for a second before scooping up her familiar and getting up. “We wrapped up our Azura Book Club in the library and decided to come over here to see if Eda had received the newest column about her yet. That, and Luz thought she’d bought more scones for King and so we might have snacks to go with the club…”

Boscha sighed as Amity blushed. To say that the bully didn’t care about Azura the Good Witch was an understatement. Her feelings stayed firmly somewhere close to Eda’s where it was literal torture to read something that sappy and fluffy. If she was with Luz, she’d have simply gagged but she tried to keep stuff like that down in front of Amity. That, or it was because she was on pretty heavy medication right now to suppress the fact that without it she’d kept screaming in pain.

But she liked blaming the first one more.

Boscha then glanced around before asking, “So, where is Azura’s second biggest fan? And why are you sitting out here?”

Amity rolled her eyes before crossing her arms. “Apparently Eda thought now would be the perfect time to talk to Luz about some ‘extremely important’ topics. With how she was snickering, I’m a bit doubtful on how true her statement may have been.”

Boscha snickered for a second before saying with a grin, “Sounds like maybe she wants to torture Luz with ‘the talk’. Think I should go in there to help?”

“Boscha,” Amity said in a complete deadpan, “have you ever actually done anything with anyone else?”

There was a long silence between the two before Boscha simply rolled her eyes and mumbled, “Well fine, kill my fun why dontcha?”

Amity blushed a little as she scratched the side of her head. “Sorry. I…” She glanced away for a second before squeezing one of her arms. “I’ve been thinking about why I don’t get like Luz around you, or at least as bad as Luz, for a while now. The best I can come up with is that, well, it’s that I know for you it’s a game. Just another way you mess with people. I’ve never seen you ever act like you’d act on any of the things you say. Just like you said during the sleepover; it was to serve a purpose.”

Boscha glanced away for a second before looking at her crutches and wishing she could make a one eighty with them to look away from her friend. But instead… “Look, if you’re asking for more of an explanation than ‘I like looking good and people enjoying me looking good’ you’re barking up the wrong tree.” She then fluttered her eyes at Amity as she began to say, “Trust me when I say that I do genuinely consider it with some people,” but only got halfway before her chest felt like it might collapse and her stomach was tied into knots. She meant the statement. She also meant it when she said she liked being sexual. Something about saying it to Amity though was terrifying.

Luckily, she didn’t have to keep putting up with this because that was when the door to the house slammed open. Luz stood in the doorway while one of her eyes twitched before she simply shouted, “You all rip your hearts out to have kids?”

“What!?”

======+++++======

Lilith looked down at her sister with curled fists and seething breaths. Eda, for her part, was on the floor, cackling like a maniac, even as Lilith yelled, “You. Are not. Helping!”

======+++++======

Amity waited for Luz to stumble closer before saying, “Is that what Eda told you about how you have kids? Because, uh,” she paused as she remembered who she was talking to about this before… it became all too easy for her, “it’s not. What else did she tell you?”

Luz let out a sigh of relief before turning red as she looked between the two. “Oh, well, you know, the normal stuff. Nothing too weird. Except that. Promise.”

The other two glanced at each other while Luz sweated bullets. Amity simply crossed her arms and shifted her weight a little before saying, “Luz, if any of it has to do with other organs except maybe our bile sacs, then it’s likely not true.”

“So it does have something to do with your hearts!”

Luz glanced between her friends as they looked at her like she was crazy. Or a complete idiot. Actually, it might have been both, it just depended on who she was looking at. Slowly the human calmed down before asking, “Wait, why would it only have to do with that organ? For humans it, uh, involves… a lot.”

Boscha raised an eyebrow before asking, “What sort of complicated bullshit do humans have to go through?”

Luz stepped closer to Boscha, thankful that she was the one who asked, even if in reality she was far more uncomfortable than Amity was about the subject, though a lot of that had to do with her best friend being right there with them. Speaking of, Amity got to watch as Boscha’s face got only more and more confused before she finally simply shouted, “What the fuck is wrong with your species?”

“Mine!? At least ours doesn’t involve our hearts!”

Amity leaned to the side to look better around Boscha before simply asking, “Shouldn’t the heart be the most important part in stuff like that?”

Luz opened her mouth to fight that before stalling out. “I… Uh, well… Huh.” She then shook her head a bit to clear it before fidgeting a bit. After all, until Eda had said that part of it had to do with ripping your heart out and literally handing it to your partner, there had been some nice bits to it. “So… Is it true then that you and your partner just need to both be interested in kids to, uh-”

“Yep.” Amity stepped away from Boscha to have an easier time looking at her friends, especially since Boscha kept glancing over at her for some reason and she didn’t appreciate the obvious movement. She didn’t want her brain to even consider someone wanting kids with her. “Otherwise, it’s all recreational.”

Boscha looked back at Luz and said, “Like I said before; the fuck is wrong with your species?”

Luz scowled for a second before sighing. “That…” The girl then brought her head back up with a look that drifted far into the distance. “That honestly sounds amazing. To make something so beautiful so simple. Just love, a bit of magic, and consent and you can have your own little you running around.”

Boscha blinked a few times before shrugging. “Of course you’d want to be a mom. Being mushy is a bit of a prerequisite last I checked after all.”

Luz glared back at the bully before hissing out, “Well, I can definitely see why you wouldn’t want to be. You’d just make any kid you looked at cry.”

Amity looked between them before sighing. “Can we drop this already?”

The other two girls turned to their friend. She looked tired. Exhausted even. Neither of the two had ever given all that much thought to kids, they were simply too young, so it was almost fun to take jabs at one another about the topic. It looked like Amity suddenly had the weight of the world on her shoulders though and it was draining the life out of her.

That also meant that both of them asked, “What’s wrong,” instead of dropping it.

Amity glanced over at them before rubbing at one of her eyes. It was the last straw for the two as Luz rushed over to her crush’s side. Boscha flinched, both at not being able to do so but also because, “I’m guessing Odalia has talked about this with you?”

“What?” Amity growled for a second before pushing Luz away. “No. Do you know what she would do if she found out I’d been thinking about kids at this age? Even if it was only a day before graduation that I found out I was pregnant, she’d go insane about how I ruined my future.”

Luz nodded, even as Amity turned her backs to the two of them. It wasn’t often though, not nowadays, for her crush to shut her out like this. Run away flustered? Sure. But Amity was becoming weirdly cold and the chill scared Luz, especially since she was serious about what she thought about kids. She wanted to bring the same warmth to other kids' lives as her mom brought to hers. Though, she’d prefer not to have an only child. Then there might be less… issues. “Amity, what is wrong then?”

The serious girl was quiet for long enough that she only spoke when Boscha’s protectiveness of her friend beat her own curiosity and she moved to let them drop it. A part of Amity did want to finally talk about this with someone though. “My parents aren’t around very often. They never have been. Most of my memories at home where they were truly relaxed or I knew they were going to be around the whole day because father had a day off are from when I was too young to properly remember them. Emira and Edric got time with them but…”

Amity wrapped her arms around herself as she let the thoughts really get to her. “And that’s because they’re busy. They work for Belos. They’re important. And I want to be more important than even them. I want to be in the same position that made it so that the only reason Lilith could see her sister was because it became part of her job. I… I don’t know if I want to do that to someone I’m supposed to love.”

Boscha and Luz were quiet before the human stepped closer and put a hand on her crush’s shoulder. “I understand that su-”

“How!?”

Both other girls stepped back as Amity turned. There weren’t tears in her eyes but a hate in there that neither had seen from anyone. “How? Because you had a warm home that you still dream of going back to while you leave me behind? A home that’s more important than any of us?” She then turned towards Boscha and screamed, “And do you think you do because you think you know my family? Because you don’t! You don’t know how often I’ve been left alone, or had to listen to my brother and sister complain about time with them as reasons to hate them when that’s all I want!”

She panted as she stood there, heaving as both of her friends simply stared at her. Then Amity saw as tears came to their eyes and her heart shattered. “I…” Amity shut her eyes before turning on her heel and running off. She couldn’t. Not about this. Not now. She would send a group text later apologizing but all she got was Boscha saying she was fine and that she was happy to drop it and Luz saying it was okay and trying to make sure her and Boscha were okay. That just led the two to start bickering about how two of them have now talked about not wanting to chat about this while Luz thought it was better to get their feelings out than bottling them up.

Bottling them up just left it as a private matter. Something to plague their dreams.

======+++++======

Luz leaned her head into the living room of her nice, cozy house with a mischievous grin on her face. “Honey, I’ve got something for you.”

The figure on the couch looked up before getting up and cocking their head to the side. It only made Luz’s smile widen further before she stepped into the room and held up a baby in a green otter costume. “It’s an otter!” She then brought her daughter close to her face and smushed her cheek with hers. “With a daaaaw side.”

And then her husband laughed. In their suburban home. Back in the human realm. Where she had weird, complicated, messy human sex because that’s what she was supposed to. Where she was supposed to be.

And for once, it made Luz wake up thinking it was a nightmare, rather than the dream she would have expected it to be.

======+++++======

Boscha’s body shook with fury. First their son underperforms in class, then he mouths off to his mother, and now he got home three hours past his curfew. Didn’t he get the rules? Didn’t he understand how worried she got? How angry she got? How dangerous she got?”

He sure as Titan didn’t seem to as he cocked an eyebrow at her and asked, “What, are you going to hit me?”

That was the last straw. Her body twisted around as she raised her arm. She wasn’t going to hold anything back. She was too angry. The kid too infuriating. Too loud. Too troublesome to deal with. Too much of a failure to care about.

A hand grabbed hers, but that merely redirected her attention to spin around and strike whoever was so bold. To her relief, Amity just faded into smoke, only for her ‘son’ to say in a weirdly feminine voice, “Who are you looking for? They left you alone, remember?”

Boscha was silent as she woke up, knowing that if she looked in the mirror she’d see exactly who had spoken to her. She merely turned over and fell back to sleep. The sort of dream wasn’t new to her after all. Just the context.

======+++++======

Amity walked in through the backdoor. She had to be careful since her cloak had a tendency to catch on things if she wasn’t. Even two years with the damned thing and it still felt like something she wore like a costume, rather than something she was used to. Lilith kept telling her it took time but she hadn’t spent most of her childhood dreaming and preparing for this exact moment. She just had to take her mentor’s word for it.

The coven leader then glided through the house without a sound as she searched it. No one was awake to help direct her. That was fine. She had magic if she felt it was absolutely necessary. She even cast a shrouding spell to make sure she didn’t trigger any creaky floorboards, especially as she made her way upstairs.

For a moment, Amity’s heart froze at the sight of an empty nursery before she finally found the master bedroom. She phased the door out of existence with the smallest of circles before slipping inside.

There it was. Nestled right between Luz and Boscha. So they weren’t alone. She wondered if their daughter had cried through the day or if they decided to bring her in to just show the child some affection. She liked the latter idea more. In fact, she could see Luz making it so they more commonly had their child with them like this.

She let out a soft sigh. The noise was soft and comforting for a brief moment before the stillness came back. The silence of the house. The fact that she had come unexpectedly because she’d had to. This version of her had made the trek out of her way because she knew she could spend fifteen minutes with her godchild like this. See her love again. See her old friend again.

See anyone again. No, that wasn’t for her. She had to leave. She didn’t want to though. She wanted to fight her subconscious. To go wake them up and see their smiles. And yet, her foot turned still and soon her cloak was easily missing the door out.

Amity opened her eyes before grabbing her pillow and screaming into it as she began to sob, the nightmare making her wish so badly that she’d never learned how to be more conscious in her dreams. She didn’t need that sort of action to feel like it was of her own volition. Not when she already knew it was something she would need to do one day anyways.