Archive of Our Own ^beta

Luz has been on her phone a lot today. 

They’re supposed to be visiting the Gravesfield zoo together, since the place is promoting the newly renovated exhibits they’ve been working on, but so far, he’s the only one doing the visiting. He can’t get more out of her than her eyes flicking up at an exhibit and muttering something like ‘that’s cool,’ before she turns her full attention back to her phone. None of his social scripts have prepared him for this scenario, and the sweat dripping down the side of his face isn’t just from the heat. He wipes his palms on his cargo shorts and re-examines the paper map in his hand.

Luz holds his other hand while he drags her through the exhibits. She looks up only when Hunter warns her to watch her step when they’re close to a ledge. He thinks to tap her to point out a cute baby koala in its habitat, but one look at her down-turned lips tells him that for some reason, she doesn’t actually care about any of this. 

It’s okay, though! If she’s not excited about the zoo right now, he’ll be excited for the both of them. Her joy tends to rub off on him—Maybe it will work the other way around, for once.

They reach the bird exhibit soon enough (and no, he totally wasn’t rushing to get there!). He feels a flutter of childish joy in his chest, and he doesn’t think it’s just from Flapjack. He can’t help but gawk in awe at all of the exotic birds and the information panels along the enclosure’s fence. He made sure to call ahead and confirm that there are also parrots (Luz’s favorite bird) at the bird exhibit just in case he needs to convince her it’s worth her while. However, as soon as he fills his lungs with air to start pointing them out, she walks off to take a phone call.

It’s comical how much he misjudged her interest. He was so stupid to think she’d like this. It’s obvious now in hindsight that she was just placating him. He should have let her take him to Lilith’s new library to have a (platonic, obviously) study date, like she did last week. At least he knows she would’ve fully enjoyed that. They both would have enjoyed that! Stupid!

“We can leave if you want,” Hunter blurts, the second she returns. 

He cringes at how anxious he sounds. He shoves his map-free hand in his pocket and shrugs, trying to play it cool. “I’m fine with whatever.”

Luz flicks her eyes up from her phone, then back down to it. “Okay, maybe in a minute.” 

She finishes up a text as they walk, then tucks her phone in her pocket. She turns her full attention to him for the first time this entire outing, “Now where to?” 

It’s funny—he was just boo-hoo-ing about how little attention she was paying, but now that her eyes are focused one-hundred-percent on him, he doesn’t have the slightest idea of what to do. Especially since she’s still frowning and her tone is still a couple pitches too deep to be safe.

“Um…We really can just leave if you want. I don’t mind.” The words feel like he’s speaking through a mouthful of sand.

Her eyebrows pinch together. “What? No, we’re already here. What do you want to go see? This was your idea.”

This was his idea. He had wanted to see the new bird exhibit with her, but that ship already sailed. If he were two years old, he’d be throwing a tantrum about it right about now, but he’s not. He’s a mature seventeen-year-old who can handle a little disappointment in the face of fixing his mistakes.

“I’ve seen what I want to see. What do you want to see?” He asks.

“Maybe the otters?” Luz suggests.

Hunter nods and takes a look at the map. He briskly leads her there—he’s on a mission, now that he knows she’s even the slightest bit interested. While they wait for a particularly oblivious family to move out of their path, Hunter takes the time to really examine her body language head on. She’s hunched over the device again and frowning, which is very unlike her regular, excitable self. Luz has been working on allowing her friends to comfort her when she’s upset, so the sudden stonewalling has him blindsided. It’s starting to dawn on him that if she’s not telling him what the problem is, he must be the problem. The question is: why is he the problem?

He combs through his memory to examine every interaction he’s had with her today, but can’t think of any instance of himself being rude. He’s still catching up with his well-socialized friends after years of being isolated from his peers, so sometimes, he says or does things that offend others without meaning to. There’s a high chance that he did do something wrong today and just doesn’t know it yet. 

He will say, it’s strange that Luz is choosing to ignore him instead of just explaining his misstep and instructing him on how to remedy it. After all, Luz is the one who made a deal with him early on in their stay in the human realm that he would stop being so afraid to make social blunders if she was there to save him from shoving his foot too far into his mouth. True to both their words, Hunter has taken more risks, and Luz has diverted him plenty of times from piloting group conversations straight into ‘extremely awkward’ territory. 

Luz once told him she’s gotten so good at being friendly because she’s always practicing what works and what doesn’t work in social situations. She’s always creating maps of behavior in her mind of ways to interact with others successfully, complete with off-shooting branches of nuance for particularly difficult situations.

Hunter, on the other hand, goes into social situations with a single defunct flowchart of coven etiquette. His friends tease him for his stilted way of asking for things, get mad at him for the smallest amount of manipulation, and lord over him the one time he was drunk enough to say ‘I love you guys,’ without hesitation. However, they don’t actually know what it was like in the coven. They don’t know how impossible it is for him to upheave his entire communication style with the snap of his fingers like they seem to think he can. Being raised to behave like an actual functioning member of society is something they take for granted.

In the absence of Luz’s help, the only other applicable advice that comes to mind is a quote Belos said he learned from his brother. Hunter can still see the frown on the Emperor’s dry, cracked lips as he berated Hunter after every unsuccessful mission. The emperor loved to remind him that he wouldn’t have failed if he had simply followed the golden rule of “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” 

Hunter later discovered that the quote came from a historical figure in the human realm after Philip’s time there. The man must have heard it somewhere along the grapevine of human realm-demon-realm-portal-shenanigans. It’s just another retrospective clue that Hunter was being manipulated all along. Hunter often finds himself wondering if Belos’s carefully curated narrative convinced him to misremember Caleb’s charm, or if this was just another bold-faced lie to convince Hunter to fall victim to his.

Either way, what is true is that Hunter doesn’t count his body weight in pounds like everyone else. He’s only as safe as razor sharp tones, microexpressions of discontentment, or the mercy of a fist slammed against the wall by his ear. He has every scrunched nose, every crooked smile, and every frown categorized in a tiered list of how angry someone is with him at any given time. It’s the only framework he has locked and loaded to work with, and it seems to be serving him well here, too.

He’s not sure exactly why Luz is mad at him, but he can at least try to mitigate the consequences. Maybe if he can help Luz regulate her annoyance, he can guarantee his peace for later. He can usually predict other people’s future satisfaction with him with a seventy-five percent accuracy (he always likes to leave the extra twenty-five percent chance open, just in case he’s thrown a wild-card mood that doesn’t respond well to his presence). He’s dealing with the usually-in-a-good-mood Luz though, so he’s feeling pretty good about his odds of success right now.

“Hey, look! There’s the otter exhibit!” Hunter announces. He points to it and silently begs for a positive reaction.

Luz looks up. “Aw, it looks closed,” she says.

“What? Psh, no, it shouldn’t be…”

He trails off as they approach the signs blocking the entrance. His heart sinks at the “Closed for construction” signs. Of all the times for Luz to be right about something, and of all the exhibits the zoo hasn't finished yet!

“I’m sorry,” Hunter says. 

He resists the urge to wring his hands together and keeps them firmly locked around hers. It’s a conscious effort to keep himself from squeezing too tightly.

She hums, low and sad, “It’s not your fault. It’s not like I haven’t seen them before, either.”

She says that, but everything about her screams ‘disappointed,’ from her tone to her stance. He hates knowing that he caused it.

“Okay, um…Maybe they have something else cool that you’d like somewhere around here?”

“Probably,” Luz says, “Want to look at the map? I could take a look too.”

“Don’t worry about it!” Hunter says, “I can figure it out! Want to go see the, uh…snakes?”

Luz smiles, “Yeah, that would be nice! I love snakes.”

Hunter knows. He knows all of his friends' favorite animals, favorite foods, favorite drinks, favorite activities, favorite books, favorite songs, favorite spells, favorite clothes, favorite movies, favorite…He could go on and on. It’s a little stressful, trying to figure out how each of his friends tick, but it's worth it. The cold, hard facts tend to comfort him whenever he’s trying to think of ways to make things up to them.

For this time with Luz, maybe they could go see the snakes, see any other animal she wants to see, then go to the cafe and gift shop before leaving? He’d already looked at the cafe menu before coming to make sure they have dairy-free coffee options for Luz. They have vegan double chocolate muffins here too, which he knows are her guilty pleasure. As for the gift shop, he imagines that despite the apparent construction on the exhibit, they’ll probably at least still have plushies of the otters. He’d been saving up his money for this outing, so hopefully feeding Luz and letting her pick out a gift will make her a little less mad at him.

Luz perks up a little when they look at the snakes. The buzzing of her phone apparently isn’t as tempting to respond to once she starts infodumping. Hunter nods along and follows her finger as she points to each different species. An illogical part of him wishes she would have listened to him talk like this too, but he dismisses the notion. He’s boring, and she’s not. It’s only fair.

He’s so relieved that she seems to be less angry with him already. It makes sense to him now why she was. She may have signed off on letting him be the leader on this trip (she said that she trusted him; according to her, he’s way better at planning things than she is), but he should have made the zoo trip more exciting to her—he didn’t even do the bare minimum of making sure all her favorite animals were there. Like an idiot, since the rest were there, he just assumed the otters would be, too. He needs to apologize, but he doesn’t want her to be reminded of his error so soon. Not when he just made up for it. He’ll save his confession for the privacy of the car, later.

After the snake exhibit, Luz picks out a couple more animals she wants to go see. She even asks Hunter if there’s anything else he wants to see, and her face isn’t flat when she asks this time! The only other thing he can think of wanting to see is the wolves, and since she doesn’t seem to mind, he leads her over to them.

He finds himself overthinking everything on the walk there. He knows, logically, everything’s fine. She’s not mad right now. She’s not. He’s getting a good grade in being a friend, which is both normal to want and possible to achieve. She’s indulging him, he’s getting another chance, and he won’t mess it up.

When they get to the wolves, all of his worries melt away. They’re so cool. A million words want to fall out of his mouth right now to explain the awe he feels in this moment, but his incessant rambles are better suited for his journal. 

He doesn’t quite know what to do with the fizzing energy inside himself, so he squishes his body up against the railing and tucks his hands into his armpits. He’s not going to make Luz look like an idiot by flapping his hands and squealing like a child. He doesn’t stop himself from grinning though, since that’s normal enough to do in public. Luz smiles at his expression too, which makes him even happier.

He’s floating on air by the time they decide to leave. He and Luz talk about random topics along the walk out. She’s even laughing at his jokes— actually laughing! At something he said! He couldn’t be more pleased by how well the day is going now. He could have messed up so much worse.

Having a second to relax in the cool air of the cafe is very nice, too. Luz is pleasantly surprised at the amount of options she has here to choose from that won’t make her stomach hurt. Hunter smiles against the rim of his water bottle and agrees. 

She tells him that she can find them a table if he waits at the counter for their drinks. He agrees and follows her instructions. After he receives the drinks, he putters around to look for their table. He finds Luz after a minute of searching. He sits down across from her, prepared to tell her about the funny way the barista called out her name, when he notices the frown on her face. 

She’s on her phone again.

Hunter really can’t do anything right.

He bounces his leg under the table and hopes no one else can see it. The cafe is too loud all of the sudden and the world feels like it’s shifted ten feet to the left. His body is crumbling from within, and the carnage bubbles up and gets trapped behind his chest. He needs to get out of here. He hates her, he hates her, he hates her; it’s not fair. He always tries so hard, and it’s never enough. He’s so stupid; he doesn’t deserve to have friends if he can’t even keep them happy, and most of all, he hates himself for always being a problem.

“I have to go to the bathroom. My stomach hurts. I’ll be back,” he says. It takes all his willpower to keep his tears from exploding out of him right there.

“Okay, I’ll wait here for you here,” she responds absently. 

Hunter, like the coward he is, scurries off to the bathroom. He locks himself in a stall and sits on the toilet. Rocking back and forth and crying silently for a while helps him regulate enough to temporarily pull himself together. He splashes cold water on his face and checks himself in the mirror to make sure it doesn’t look like he just bawled his eyes out like a child. He doesn’t look great, but his alibi is going to fall apart if he stays in the bathroom any longer.

Reentering the main part of the establishment makes him want to punch something. The noise of the patrons and the hustling of the workers around him returns full-force to disorient him. He takes a deep breath and forces himself to get over it. They’re almost done here. After they eat, he can drive them back to Luz’s house. She can go do whatever fun activity she wants to do with someone else, and he can disappear into the basement to cease existing for a few hours until he stops being dramatic. Afterwards, when he reemerges into the world and finds it bigger than just himself and Luz, he can relax enough to come up with practical solutions.

For now, he makes his way back over to her. She greets him when he sits down. He can’t seem to make his mouth cooperate to say “hey” back. She takes notice and sets her phone aside.

“Are you okay?” She asks. Her eyebrows are pinched like she’s worried, or something.

He nods. His body feels fuzzy and his brain is filled with cotton. It’s hard to think straight. He really wants to put his hands over his ears and hum as loud as possible to block out the unpredictable noise around him, but he doesn’t. That’s the dumbest idea ever.

“Okay…Well, are you ready to skeedaddle?” She asks.

She’s obviously trying to lighten the mood, but her face still looks off. He nods again, but unfortunately, his other extremities seem to be a bit frozen. Luz must sense this, as she takes it upon herself to lead him around. The feeling of her hand clasped around his is so wrong and backwards that he wants to throw up.

After weaving around countless patrons and wilting under the glare of the fluorescent lights in the cafe, they breeze through the just-as-overstimulating gift shop. He can’t even tell her that he wanted her to pick out a gift for herself. He only wants to leave, and she can obviously tell. She asserts that she’s driving them home, which makes him feel even more useless. He wishes she would yell at him and tell him to stop being a brat. Maybe then he would snap out of it.

Instead, she does the opposite. The atmosphere in the car is quiet and awful. He tries to take a page out of her book and play on his scroll to ignore her, but he really can’t focus on it through the mist in his eyes and the grating sound of the air conditioner. She doesn’t blast the music like he knows she likes to, and she doesn’t talk like he knows she likes to. Instead, she keeps glancing at him out of the corner of her eye and biting her lip. She’s catering to him and it sucks.

“I’m fine,” he manages to get past his lips. It’s a huge undertaking.

“No, you’re not,” Luz says quietly, “Are you overstimulated?”

“No,” he says. 

“Really. So if I turned the music on, you wouldn’t care?” She asks. 

He grimaces. “That’s fine,” he says. 

“You’re lying.”

She’s right. He really needs to work on getting better at lying when he’s in this state. 

“No, I’m not,” he tries again.

He’s not sure how his tone comes off, nor can he expend enough energy to care at this point. He looks out the window and tries to get lost in a daydream. Of course, it doesn’t really ever work on command for him, so he’s stuck feeling here like he’s going to die.

Luz sighs. “Hunter…It’s okay if you are. Or if you’re upset or something. Everyone gets upset sometimes, and I’m here if you wanna talk about it.”

“There’s nothing to even be upset about,” he says, crossing his arms.

She taps her fingers on the steering wheel. “There’s plenty to be upset about. Were you bummed about the otters? You looked so sad when they weren’t there. It’s okay, I was too, a little bit. I was excited for them.”

“I’m sorry, okay?!” He snaps and waves his arms around, “I tried. I should have asked to make sure. I asked them about literally everything else to make sure we’d have a good time, but I dropped the ball on that one. I know.”

“What?” Luz asks, furrowing her eyebrows, “No, that’s not—It’s not your fault. I’m not mad about it.”

“Then what are you mad about?!” He asks a little too loudly. 

He feels like he’s losing his mind. It’s so annoying that he’s getting angry over this. Poor little Hunter, always making himself the victim. If she’s not going to yell at him, she wishes she would just stop talking before he has the chance to completely ruin everything with his smartass mouth.

“I’m not mad at all…” Luz says. She’s looking at him like he’s crazy. He may feel like he’s losing his mind, but he’s not. Not about stuff like this. He knows when people are unhappy with him. 

“Stop lying. You’ve been mad at me all day. I shouldn’t have even brought you here. I messed everything up and I’m sorry.”

“Hunter, what the hell are you talking about? What makes you think I’ve been mad at you all day?”

He finally cracks. He can’t stop the impending tantrum, now that she’s poking and prodding at all of his efforts to stave it off until he gets home.

“You’ve been on your phone all day! And it’s okay if you were venting about me or something, but I didn’t know what I did wrong at that point! You could have just told me! And I wanted to show you the birds, but you didn’t want to see them, which is okay, I’m just being annoying about it, and then I fucked up the otter thing, and I was going to let you pick something out from the gift shop, but I froze up and you had to drag me out of there, and—”

He wipes his teary eyes. 

“I’m just…” His voice cracks, “I wanted you to have a good time, and you didn’t. I’m sorry.”

He wants to laugh at how shitty his apology was. Belos would’ve beat his ass for daring to insinuate he had any part in Hunter’s failures. Unlike Belos, he knows she’s not going to slice him with a vine or anything, but he thinks any of his friends cutting him off would be a thousand times worse. She has every right to, so really all he can do at this point is wait to see if she’ll forgive him. If she doesn’t, well, like he said, he’ll go home and think of ways to make it up to her after he has his inevitable little freak-out in his bedroom.

“Dude,” Luz says, “I don’t even… Hunter. I’ve been on the phone with my mom all day. We’ve been arguing over my plans for spring break. She wants me to go with her on a trip to see my abuela in the Dominican Republic, but I already planned a date night with Amity in the demon realm, so I—”

She shakes her head, “The details aren’t important. I’m trying to say that I haven’t been mad at you at all. I was just annoyed with my mom. I should have been more present with you, ‘cause this was our day…that’s totally my fault. I’m really sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

It takes a minute to sink in. He sniffs and wipes his eyes. 

He dares to look at her, and she looks devastated. It doesn’t surprise him that by trying to avoid making her mad, he made her sad. It’s almost like that human story, Oedipus Rex that Luz did a book report on not too long ago. Some people are just doomed to ruin everything, no matter how hard they try to prevent the inevitable. At least sadness is easier to deal with than anger.

“So…you’re not mad at me?” He asks, just in case.

She shakes her head wildly. “Not at all! I actually realized I was being rude to you, like, halfway through, and tried to stop responding to her. I meant to apologize to you then, but we moved onto the next thing so quickly I forgot.”

“Oh…” Hunter says. He can’t really compute how this whole disaster of a trip isn’t all his fault. She seems so earnest, so she’s pretty sure she’s not lying. There’s gotta be something else he did wrong, though. People aren’t just sad for no reason.

“Well…I’m sorry for thinking you were mad at me,” he says.

Luz groans good-naturedly and lightly shakes his arm. “Stop saying sorryyy. Not everything is your fault. Just know for next time that if I’m mad at you, I’ll just tell you. And if you’re upset with me, you can always tell me, and we’ll try to fix it.”

He doesn’t believe her, but he doesn’t argue. He knows that she shuts down at the slightest bit of criticism. It’s something she’s been working on, but he always does his best not to invoke that reaction in her anyway, just in case. He doesn’t plan to start trying to upset her now.

He’s silent. His ugly, scarred-up hands have never been more fascinating to look at.

“I really appreciate you bringing me, by the way. It sounds like you put a lot of effort into today and did a lot of research,” she says.

“I tried,” he says hollowly, “I called to make sure they had parrots and snakes because they’re your favorites, I called the cafe to make sure they had food you could eat, I checked like, five times to make sure it wasn’t going to rain on us, and a bunch of other stuff…I really did try.”

He wipes his eyes and stares at the license plate of the car in front of them. It’s a ‘Florida’ license plate. ‘Florida’ is in the south, right? He wonders what they’re doing here. He assumes it’s a long drive from there to Connecticut.

“Aww, Hunter, that’s so sweet! You’re such a softie. You don’t need to worry so much about everything being perfect all the time, though. It’s really not that deep.”

“Whatever,” he says. 

He looks out the passenger door window. There are cows out there in the sprawling fields they’re passing by. He doesn’t have much interest in cows. He doesn’t think Luz does either. There was probably something interesting about otters he could have learned today, but he didn’t.

The shame radiates off him in waves so strong that he’s sure she can feel it.

She taps her fingers on the steering wheel again and hums. “Tell you what, I’ll take you to something else you want to do another day. I’ll plan everything and make it up to you.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he says. He wants to squirm out of his skin. 

“I’d like to. You’re my friend and I really like spending time with you. It’s fun!”

One thing he admires about Luz is that she’s really funny. To him, this is her best joke yet.

“Do you really? Or are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

“I do! I like seeing you get all excited about stuff you’re passionate about. And you’re a good person, even if you don’t think so. I always feel safe when you’re around. Best of all, you’re the perfect person to go on adventures with! No offense to Amity, but I think she would have chosen death over going to a zoo with smelly animals on a hot day.” She laughs.

Hunter doesn’t remind her that Amity has already gone to this zoo before during their time in the human realm and enjoyed it, for the most part. He’d like to keep Luz’s image of his redeeming qualities untarnished. He doesn’t quite agree with her assessment of him, but it does make him warm to know she thinks so highly of him, regardless of the inaccuracy.

“Thanks…” He says. 

He’s not sure where to go from here, so he goes quiet again. So much for being ‘fun.’ She’d probably have a more engaging conversation with a brick wall.

“You know…” she starts, “...You don’t have to put all this pressure on yourself to make sure everyone is happy. You do that a lot.”

He turns his body slightly to tuck into the door, rather than keep letting her see his traitorous face. Fiddling with the seat belt doesn’t do much to stave off the oncoming anxiety.

“I don’t know how to… not,” he says in a small voice.

“Reason 2,000 you need to go to therapy,” she jokes. 

Subconsciously, he curls up further into a ball. Luz is very funny, but can’t bring himself to laugh like he’s supposed to. He can’t see her face, but gets confirmation that he gave the wrong response from the way she scrambles to correct herself.

“I mean, you don’t need to go to therapy. Everyone just thinks it would be good for you, you know? Get rid of that coven brainwashing they beat into you,” she says.

He grimaces and shoots her A Look.

“Wow! Super bad wording!” Luz chastises herself, then slouches, looking at him miserably, “Sorry. I’m not good at this.”

His heart rate picks up. Classic Luz, blaming herself for things that have nothing to do with her.

“You’re fine. I can go, I guess, if everyone wants me to go that badly.”

He despises the fact that no matter how hard he tries to be normal, everyone still sees him as broken. They’re right of course, but it still hurts. Maybe a therapist can tell him how he’s supposed to live in the way everyone wants for him. Maybe it could be good for him. He just has to keep convincing himself that it’s the right course of action to take until it feels natural.

“If you still don’t want to, though, you don't have to,” she amends.

She makes him want to pull his hair out sometimes. She lives in a world where her decisions are good. Level-headed, despite her surface-level spaciness. She doesn’t know what it’s like to have every choice drenched in unspoken consequences that muddy the water enough to leave him unable to see the bottom. He needs someone to pull him out, otherwise he’ll be stuck treading water forever.

“Which one do you want me to pick, Luz?”

“I want you to pick what you think is best for yourself.”

“I obviously don’t know what’s best for myself. I only do well when someone tells me what to do. You know this.”

“Uh, no, I don’t know that, because during our time in the human realm, you were starting to think for yourself and doing what makes you happy instead of just going along with whatever makes everyone else happy. Now it’s like you’ve reverted back to square one.”

“You act like I’m not better this way,” Hunter mutters.

“You’re not,” she insists, “You know, I’ve never asked, but based on your vibes, I’m guessing Belos was the type of weirdo guardian that treated you almost like—Okay this is going to sound gross, but I can’t think of any other way to describe it—but like, a romantic partner?”

Hunter wants to gag at the thought. “Yeah, gross, no.”

“Okay, but you can’t deny that he was at the very least extremely toxic and codependent on you to take care of him.”

“He really wasn’t as bad to me as you guys think he was.”

“I’ll believe you when you stop having panic attacks anytime someone sends you a short text with a period at the end.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

Out of the corner of his eye, she sees her throw her hands up, “Maybe! But my point still stands. He sucked. Your relationship with him sucked. He treated you like you were his nurse, his personal therapist, and his punching bag, all at the same time. I get why you feel like it’s safer to act like you used to, but it’s not healthy. You’re your own person.”

He rolls his eyes. “I’m not my own person. Get it through your thick head and stop being so naive. There is no me without him. He was my entire life, and just when I thought maybe I could finally be my own person, he came back to remind me why that’s never going to work out.”

The sharp words linger, and he hates how much they sound like Belos. He’s dragging her into their world—their disgusting, stagnant lake water—and drowning her.

She doesn’t respond. He doesn’t know if she’s judging him or if she’s just waiting for him to spew more cutting words that she doesn’t deserve, but he gives in to the compulsion to confess further, all the same.

He sucks in a breath, “That was mean. Sorry. And I get why you don't like how indecisive I am, and I’m really sorry for being annoying. I’m just not good at… not. Being that way, I mean. And for being too much. I’m too clingy with everyone, but I keep bugging you the most, I think. I’ll try to stop.” 

He scratches his cheek and cringes when his fingers glide over the deep grooves in his skin. 

She scrubs at her face and sighs. He thought he was being responsible and owning up to his recent behavior, but obviously feels otherwise. Wrong choice again! He really is a losing battle.

“Jesus Christ. I changed my mind. My one order is for you to go to therapy, actually. This is only the third time we’ve hung out together alone all month. You’re not some huge burden or an awful person, but your ego is insane and your entire understanding of interpersonal relationships is positively fucked, dude.”

Despite everything, Hunter quirks a small smile. 

“Based on what everyone says, I can’t argue with that,” he relents.

She grins. “Good! Now, is there anything else you wanted to get off your chest? The floor is yours. Well. The car.” 

“Not really.” He doesn’t want to fall into whatever trap she has brewing now.

She ensnares him in it anyway. “How about the meltdown stuff?”

He sighs and glances over at her. She’s staring ahead at the road, but the side of her head is tilted slightly in his direction. She chews a piece of gum she suddenly obtained out of nowhere, waiting for him to speak.

He scrunches up his nose. “I did not have a meltdown.” 

“Oh really? So you didn’t go to the bathroom to cry?”

He stills. How does she—

“Yeah. I kind of figured. You were in there a while, and you’re usually quick in the bathroom. Your face was red when you came back too.”

Knowing that she observed him just as much as he observed her fills him with nearly as much existential dread as when he found out he was a grimwalker. His cheeks flare with heat.

“Fine. Maybe I was a little bit overwhelmed,” he settles on.

“You couldn’t talk until we got into the car.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” 

Luz gives him a deadpan look. 

“What?!” he snaps.

“Let’s go through Autism 101. A crash course just for your dense little un-diagnosed brain,” she says, poking the side of his head.

He nudges her hand away and glares. 

“I’m not even,” he makes air quotes, “‘Autistic.’ So why does everyone always say that?”

“Because it’s obvious to everyone but you, and you refuse to get tested.”

It’s true that he’s been encouraged by his family to seek a diagnosis to explain away all of the embarrassing quirks he’s stubbornly held onto all of these years. He scored pretty high on the “Aspie Quiz” that Luz begged him to fill out once. His “likely on the autism spectrum” score doesn’t mean anything, he’d insisted. People get false test results all the time. One time, he took an online “Best Friends” test with her too, and just because he got all the questions about her correct, she insisted that no matter what, they’d be best friends forever.

“So anyway, back to our lesson: when you’re overstimulated by your senses and/or emotions and can’t or won’t do anything to alleviate that overstimulation, your brain goes apeshit. For you, you cried and you couldn’t talk. I bet it felt really bad on the inside, too, like the whole world was ending. Am I onto something?”

He really doesn’t like that she explained exactly what happened so easily.

“Yeah, so what?”

“So, next time you feel that way, stop worrying about what other people think and just let your body do its thing to calm down. You flap your hands and bounce your leg and wring your hands and rock back and forth when you don’t think anybody’s watching you. Do some of those things next time.”

“What, and go back to looking like a reta—”

“Hey, hey, hey, nope! Absolutely not, we are not going to say that word. It’s not nice.”

He gives her a strange look and shrugs. “And? Truth hurts sometimes.”

He can see the exact moment when it clicks for her.

“Wait, Hunter, did Belos used to call you names like that?”

“Yeah?”

Her jaw drops. “Cool cool cool, add ‘ableism’ to the list of why he was the most miserable creature ever,” she says, smoothing back her hair.

“It’s a pretty long list,” he mutters.

“He shouldn’t have said that to you,” she says, “Stim however you want, especially during a meltdown. Regulating yourself is more important than whatever anyone else thinks.”

He holds in his laugh. She’s such a hypocrite.

“Interesting. So I shouldn’t sit on my hands when I’m excited in public like you do?” He asks.

Luz frowns and leans back in the seat. She locks her arms completely straight while holding the steering wheel and gives it a squeeze. She thinks on it, sighs, and looks over at him with an expression he can’t quite read. Sadness, maybe? Shame?

She relaxes her arms. “That’s…Okay, you got me. There shouldn’t be, but…maybe there is a time and a place to do certain stims.”

“The time being never and the place being nowhere,” he agrees.

She sighs. “No, it’s…Look, masking is a whole other topic of discussion I’d love to infodump about some other time, but for now, let’s just say: if you want to mask, maybe keep the big stims private, but the little ones like bouncing your leg or flapping your hands by your sides or fidgeting with your hands are probably fine. That’s kinda the guideline I go by. But at home or around our friends, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, as big as you want. We won’t judge.”

“You ‘stim’ around me, then,” he challenges, ready for her to fold under the pressure, “I’ll do it if you do it. But deep down, I know you’re afraid of judgment, so you won’t.”

“I’ll flap my hands right now, bitch,” she says. 

“Oh really?” Hunter says skeptically. 

Luz clicks on the hazard lights and pulls off to the side of the road. The car bumps around as it rolls off the asphalt and onto the grass. Hunter’s holding on to the handle above his head praying to the late Titan that they don’t get stuck in a ditch.

“Luz!” He yells, “What is wrong with you?”

The car rolls to a stop. While Hunter’s catching his breath and holding his hand over his racing galderstone, Luz reaches over and flaps her hands in his face.

“Your turn,” she says, slapping her hand over the hazards light button to turn it off.

He drops his hands into his lap and stares at her. Her eyebrow is arched and her mouth is pulled into a small, challenging smirk.

“I don’t want to,” he says, looking away.

“You made a deal.”

“Fine!”

He gives her one last glare and flaps his hands for about two seconds at chest level. The sparks don’t quite leave his fingertips, but it does leave him feeling the slightest bit better, physically.

“Longer,” she demands.

He huffs and closes his eyes. He repeats the action, intending to do it for ten seconds max, but he gets stuck. The icky feelings swirling inside of him start to flow out of his body the longer and more intensely he moves, and now that he’s started, he can’t stop. He suddenly needs every last ounce of wrongness out of him.

While this fluttering may be perfect for releasing good feelings, it's never strong enough for the bad ones. He needs to add something else that will shock him back into normalcy.

He doesn’t care if Luz is watching anymore. If she wants to see him ‘stim,’ so badly, he’ll show her. She’ll realize soon enough how crazy he is when he’s left to his own devices and why he always insists on staying safely consumed by someone else who will always keep him in check.

He punches the car door with his fist, then brings the radiating palm up to his mouth to bite it as hard as he can. He thinks about the stupid rationalization he just made and how unfair it is that she talked him into making a fool out of himself. He lets out a low, embarrassing hum as tears spring to his eyes. 

He uses the hand not already in his mouth to pull his hair. It reminds him of Flapjack, which brings a fresh round of wrongness, so he uses that hand to punch his thigh several times instead. He wants it to bruise, just like he wants his hand to bleed. He needs something, anything, to hold up as proof later, when she tries to tell him he’s good enough on his own.

“Dude, woah!” Luz yells, “It’s okay!”

She tries to grab his hand and pull it away from his mouth. He bites down harder and shoves her hand away with his free hand. He whines, and it’s so embarrassing he wants to slash his own hands right now.

“Hunter!” She cries, “Stop, we can find something better to bite. Uh, here!” 

She turns around and grabs a blanket from the back seat. She bunches it up and shoves it in his direction. She’s got that worried look on her face that he hates being the cause of, so he sucks it up and accepts her offer. He takes his hand out of his mouth, pulls his knees up to his chest, and buries his face into the soft fabric.

Once his face feels the awful texture of microfiber, he starts sobbing. If he could disappear right now, he would. He would rather die than put the staticy blanket in his mouth, but the one good thing about it is that it hides his face and dries his tears, at least. It’s kind of hard to perform his next trick, rocking back and forth and crying, while in a car seat, but somehow, he manages. 

Luz stays quiet. A small, vindictive part of him hopes she feels bad. A bigger, hugely ashamed part of him gives up and hopes she never wants to see him again.

When all the wrongness settles into a fuzzy numbness he can’t be bothered to do anything more about, he stops rocking and unfurls himself from his ball. He squeezes the blanket against his chest and tries to take deep breaths to stave off a deep dive into another tantrum. He needs to get a grip. He allows himself one more deep hum, then forces himself to look into Luz’s eyes.

“Sorry,” he signs, “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry—”

He’s starting to like the harsh swirling of his fist against his chest better than his fist against the car door. At least this movement accomplishes something productive that she might like. He’s not going to put his hand back into his mouth like he wants to. He’s not. She doesn’t like that.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Luz says. “It’s okay. Everything’s fine. No one’s mad, I’m still here, and you’re doing good. Okay?”

She looks so genuine he wants to cry again. He aches to bite the flesh off his hand until there’s nothing but bone. He clutches his nails into the car seat and wishes the fabric was his skin. She looks down at his hands. If she were interested in his growth, she’d at least slap them, but since she likes to see him be the worst version of himself possible, she doesn’t.

He shouldn't be blaming her. It’s his fault, really. He doesn’t know why he just can't be good like everyone seems to think he is. He wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not he deserves a punishment if he were just good in the first place.

“Want to hold my hand?” She asks.

That’s just asking to get scratched up by the demon inside of him. He shakes his head.

“That’s okay. We can just sit here for a minute. Do whatever you need to do, just don’t hurt yourself, okay?”

This whole tantrum is an example of hurting himself socially, but he doesn’t say that. He physically can’t, now, even if he wanted to. His throat is sealed shut with no hope of opening up until tomorrow. It’s probably for the best.

He rubs his aching palm over the rough texture of his jeans. Because it’s just on this side of being harmful, he’s able to get away with it under her watch.

“Hey. Do you want me to talk, or be quiet?” She asks softly.

He doesn’t answer. He can’t.

“One, or two?” She amends, “One for talk, two for quiet.”

He glances over at her, then back to his jeans. With his palms still glued to the fabric, he lifts up his pointer finger just enough for her to get the message. He’d appreciate a distraction from all the disgusting physical and emotional sensations he’s feeling right now. 

She takes a deep breath, and instead of berating him for his unacceptable behavior like she’s supposed to, she chatters away about the newest live-action version of the third Azura book. He’s only half paying attention. He tries to focus on the slower-than-usual cadence of her voice and the calm, gentle rocking she’s doing in her seat. She’s being quiet enough that her voice isn’t stabbing into his eardrums.

After a while of him sitting stock-still, she rolls her hands to encourage him to rock, too. He has nothing left to lose at this point, so he follows along. 

It helps. They rock and she talks until his body is just as calm as hers.

“You okay now?” She asks when she notices he’s stopped rocking.

He nods and wipes his eyes.

“Good. Ready to go home, or stay here for a little longer? One or two?”

He finds himself secretly liking that she’s figured out a way for him to still make decisions while in this state because strangely, it feels like there really aren’t any right or wrong choices with her at this moment. It’s almost as if they’re in their own little world where no matter what he chooses, there are no negative consequences. It’s as freeing as it is terrifying.

He holds up a his pointer finger a little higher this time.

“Okay. Thank you for telling me. Good job!” she says. 

Something like pride blooms in his chest. It takes everything in him not to make fun of himself for it. He knows that if Luz were to hear his thoughts, she’d be sad that he’s being so mean. In their own little world, he thinks it might be safe to feel good things.

“Thanks,” he signs.

“Of course. Hey, do you want to hear the plan I’m thinking of? You can disagree if you want and I won’t be mad. There’s a notebook in the back we can use for you to talk, if we need it.”

He nods.

“Okay. I say we go home, take a nap, and if you get hungry, I can make us something to eat. We’ll turn the lights down low and tell everyone not to bother us. Or, uh, if you want me to leave you alone, I understand. I wouldn’t blame you after today,” she ducks and scratches the back of her head.

Hunter’s audio processing isn’t the best right now, but when it sinks in, he’s mortified by her suggestion. He mimes writing, so she pulls out the notebook for him.

“Too much,” he writes.

“Is it? Sorry, I just figured you might want to sleep it off since—”

He taps the pencil eraser against the words again, a little more forcefully than he intended. Luz tilts her head.

He adds the word nice to the end and taps the pencil eraser again. His language isn’t really ‘languaging’ right now, as the human teens would say, but he knows she’s smart enough to get the point of his abysmal communication.

“I’m not being too nice. Hunter, you just had a meltdown, the stuff I’m suggesting is the bare minimum common courtesy.”

He huffs and underlines the phrase a few times, each stroke deeper than the last.

“Nothing changed,” he adds, “Same me.”

“Nothing about you changed, but the way people treat you after a meltdown will. I’ll make sure of it. You’re not going to be shunned or sent away to your room or hit or…whatever Belos’ old-school ass liked to do.”

Hunter frowns. In an impulsive moment of vulnerability, he pulls up his shirt sleeve and points to a few different slashes wrapping around his upper arm. He then splays his hands and presents the multitude of criss-crossing scars on both sides. He knows in his head that what Belos did to him is apparently wrong, but she’s not getting that this special treatment she’s suggesting is light-years away from his normal. It’s scary.

Luz deflates, just like he knew she would. Consequence, consequence, consequence. But sometimes, consequences are required for ideas to click. He knows all too well.

“...Yeah. Like that,” she says softly, “That wasn’t okay. He shouldn’t have done that, and it wasn’t your fault. Not a single out-of-pocket reaction he had to everything you did that was ‘wrong’ in his eyes was ever your fault.”

He shrugs. She’s entitled to her wrong opinion.

She reaches over to hold his hand. 

In their own little world, the warmth she fills him with in that moment makes him quietly consider the possibility that she’s right.

“No one’s going to do that anymore,” she says, smoothing her thumb over the bite marks on his hand, “No one’s going to punish you for not being perfect. You’re allowed to be upset, you’re allowed to call people like me out on their bullshit when they’re being rude to you, and you’re allowed to do whatever you want with your body. As long as you try not to hurt yourself.”

In their own little world, he thinks he might believe her. He nods and flaps his hands a little to dispel the wave of sentimentality that threatens to make him cry again.

She flaps her hands with him until he winds down again.

“Thank you,” he signs.

“You’re welcome,” she says, smiling at him like he’s something special. He can’t make his face smile back, but he grabs her hand and squeezes. He thinks she understands he’s truly grateful.

She smiles and squeezes his hand back. “Now! I think we should probably hit the road, if you’re ready. Now that I think of it, I think Vee said earlier that she was getting take-out later. We don’t want to miss that,” she jokes.

Hunter nods. Reluctantly, he lets go of her hand so she can drive. Once she gets her seat belt on, starts the car, and steers them back onto the road, she holds out her right hand for him to hold again. His heart melts.

He fidgets with her hand while she drives with the other. She chews her gum and hums quietly to herself and moves her body side to side and smiles at him with a crinkle in her eyes that matches his own when he’s happy.

She’s so Luz. She’s so Luz, and she’s so much like him, but she’s not him. He doesn’t think he’s ever been so much of someone without being an extension of them, ever.

He lets the affection he has for her fill his body. He sits with it and doesn’t chase it away. In their own little world, he lays her palm out flat and channels the energy into tracing a heart into the lighter skin of her hand.

She grins at him.

In his own little world, he knows he's going to be okay.

Link to art by MegaTism404