The light of abyss (The owl house x Marvel)

Amity stared down the three jerks. Despite the threatening display, none of them had made the first move. Seeing that the jerks were hesitant, Amity decided to try and intimidate them into giving up.

...And show off what they were missing out on.

"Luz, would you care to dance?" Amity asked while offering a hand to her awesome girlfriend.

Luz smiled and took Amity's hand and, just like against Grom the two immediately fell into perfect synch. They danced together, in something that Amity hoped would become a trend, flawlessly, requiring no words to know exactly what they each wanted out of the dance.

"...Uh, what are you doing?" Clara asked suddenly.

Instead of answering, the two girls went into a spin, Luz twirling Amity so that she could use the heal of one foot and the toe of another to draw a large spell circle and Amity then summoned a giant abomination that lifted the two of them up into the air, spiraling around each other, as it formed. Once complete, Amitty looked down at the three jerks and smiled smugly, and unlike it would have been a few months ago this smugness was well-earned.

"What... What kind of power was that?" Scott demanded.

"It's not a 'power,'" Amity denied. "I misled you earlier, sorry not sorry, I'm not a mutant: I'm a witch."

...This did not get the response that she'd been hoping for.

"Oh, I get it," Clara declared with absolutely unearned smugness. "Loony Noceda realized she'd never be a witch and settled for the next best thing."

"Luz," Amity began, "would you care to show her how wrong she is?" She then turned to her Luz and gave her a reassuring smile.

Luz had clearly been nervous when Clara called her out, but it seemed that Amity's smile had chased the nerves away. Luz gave a determined grin and drew one of her glyph cards. Upon activating it, the human girl tossed a fireball into the air: "Spicy toss!"

"As you can see," Amity lectured while coming behind Luz and wrapping her arms around the other girl, "My Luz is a real witch. An adorable, talented witch who is an excellent dancer and she's all mine so don't get any ideas." Amity punctuated this declaration by leaning forward to plant a kiss on Luz's cheek, which caused the human girl to blush and giggle. "Abomination," Amity finished, "pose."

With that command, the giant abomination upon whose head the power couple stood took a knee and flexed both of its arms.

This seemed to tick off the three jerks. The blonde in particular glared up at them and screamed. The sound she made was ear-splitting and Amity found herself pained and disoriented even as the abomination rippled and lost its consistency. The sudden fall was dizzying and even if Amity could normally adjust and land on her feet after such a drop the scream had still left her too off balance. Adrenaline spiked, and her heart beat faster, but rather than landing in a heap on the ground the next thing Amity knew she was in Luz's arms in a bridal carry, and Luz was in her adorable, cloaked symbiote form.

"What the heck, Clara!?" Luz shouted. "We could have gotten hurt."

"What... Where?" Clara began and... And now the tree jerks were scared of Luz. "Did, did you ide with."

"Don't change the subject!" Luz commanded. "If I didn't have symbiote powers, long story, that could have killed us." Oh right, humans were more fragile than witches. With everything that had happened since Amity met Luz, she'd forgotten that.

"Your little girlfriend started it by showing off," Clara defended.

"No," Masha interrupted as they moved up to stand next to Luz. "You started it. You're the ones who came up to us and made a big deal about them having fun the same way everyone else in the park was. You're the ones that issued a challenge to fight. Don't try to shift blame."

"I don't get you..." Luz admitted. "Like, you don't like me, fine. You don't have to like everyone, but... You.. All of you. The second I... Why? Why are you so mean?"

Clara scoffed. "What? Do you think I, what, have some really toxic home life that left me seeking status by putting people down? Grow up, this isn't a cartoon." Amity was suddenly considerably less reminded of her past self. "Life's not fair and people who don't fit in get hammered down. It's as simple as that. You'd think they'd have taught you at that freak reeducation camp."

"It was a life skills and vocational training camp," Masha countered. "And while I can appreciate the fact that I now know to do most basic household plumbing and can drywall like a mother lover, at its worst the camp was just boring."

"...I liked learning about mortgages," Vee said from where she stood, sounding somewhat offended.

"And the fact that you actually mean that is your most endearing quality," Masha declared with obvious sincerity, and while Amity couldn't see Vee she could feel... Seriously, Vee's interactions with Masha were giving her the strangest case of Deja Vu for some reason.

"Whatever," Clara dismissed. "If you think I'm mean then you need another reality check. All any of us have done is tell you when you're acting weird or cringy or cheesy. If principal Hal wasn't so lenient you'd have been expelled at least twice, and you'd have no one to blame but yourself for being a little creep. Honestly," the blonde finished, "you should be thanking me. I've been trying to help you."

"...No. You haven't," Luz said. "This whole time you've been..." Amity crawled out of Luz's arms to stand next to her and put a supportive hand on her girlfriend's shoulder. "You look down on me. Just like everyone else. And yeah, maybe I haven't exactly done the best job of trying to fit in... Seriously, I don't know what I was thinking with the spiders, just got caught up in the idea, but still. Thinking back on it, I don't even know why I liked any of you."

Now they seemed offended. "Because we're all awesome," Scott defended.

"No, you're not," Luz declared. "Scott, you're a kid who acts like a jock without being on any of the teams and every so often you spout off some weird conspiracy theory you heard from your uncle. Suzy, your favorite pastime is critiquing other people's choice of clothes and Clara..." Luz took a deep breath. "Where do I begin? You're basically a mean-girl stereotype and you overreact to every little thing. And another thing," Luz continued, "but... None of you ever hung out before this summer. The only thing you have in common is being a mutant so..."

"So what?" Clara asked. "Do you think you're better than us all of a sudden?"

"...Yes," Luz admitted bluntly. "I think, I think I do." Then she started laughing. "I... I've never looked down on someone or made fun of them. Not even to make myself feel better and, let me tell you, I've had a lot to feel bad about. I think," Luz continued, "I think I was interested in you because you were normal. If I could approach any of you, and make you like me, then maybe people would... And I'm sorry, that was shallow and awkward, but... I have friends now. Real friends who support me but who aren't afraid to help me get back on track when I go off the rails—really help me, not just make fun of me. And a girlfriend who loves me for me. I'm a witch now, I'm learning magic, and... And I talked with Mami and I finally feel like I'm understood..." Luz kept laughing. "I don't... I don't need your approval. Or the approval of the rest of the kids at Gravesfield High or anyone else here in town. I have people whose approval matters to me for the right reasons, and I have it." Amity could feel a shift in Luz's emotions. "For the first time in forever, I feel... Okay with myself. Is this... Is this what it's like to have good self-esteem?"

Amity wouldn't know what good self-esteem feels like if she was going to be honest, but she knew what she was feeling now: Pride and joy, both for and of Luz. Amity made sure to give her girlfriend a supportive hug.

"And another thing," Luz continued, "two weeks ago I beat up the evil emperor of a magic dimension. School bullies and mean ex-crushes are a little under my pay grade after that, right, so if you don't mind I'll... Be..." Luz turned back to Amity. "Amity. Are you... Purring?"

Amity felt all the blood rush to her face as she realized that she had been. "Um, yeah."

"Witches purr?" Luz asked with the same tone as a small child finding out that it was raining their favorite soda.

"Um, no," Amity shyly corrected as the purring stopped. "I purr. It's ah, a throwback trait." Most witches had at least some biped demon ancestry, so anything out of the norm regarding witch anatomy was assumed to be a recessive trait inherited from demon ancestors. Of course, neither her parents nor her older siblings purred or had other throwback traits... "I'm sorry, I'm just... So happy for you and... I can stop." Amity's Mom had hated it when Amity would purr when she was little. She said it was undignified, so Amity taught herself how to override the reflex but this time it'd just...

"Don't you dare," Luz insisted while her cloak rose up to wrap warmly around Amity. "This just makes you even more perfect than you already were."

Amity smiled and started purring again.

"Anyway," Luz continued, "I'm basically already a superhero, and fighting high school students is a little... Unbecoming, I guess? Even if they started it, so I'm just gonna take my awesome girlfriend, my new friend, and my soon-to-be foster sister and leave if you don't mind." Luz let Amity go and moments later the couple, flanked by Masha and Vee, were crossing the ice bridge in preparation for heading back into town.

"I can't believe that Loony Noceda thinks she's better than us," Suzy deadpanned. Because, yeah, that was the takeaway. Not that Luz had outgrown their bullying, not how pathetic they were for being bullies, just...

"Oh, my Titan," Amity realized. She turned back to Luz's former crushes. "You started hanging out when you found out you had something in common... None of you have any real friends, do you? At best, you have people you associate with because of your roles in your school's social hierarchy."

"Shut your mouth, freak! You don't know what you're talking about!" The boy, Scott, commanded.

Amity ignored him. "Trust me, I'm intimately aware of how this kind of thing works. I bet none of you have romantic partners, either. You didn't come up to us and start this because Luz was acting disruptive, everyone at the... The music thing was dancing. You did it because you saw that she was happy with friends. Because someone who you look down on was 'beating you' at something." Amity couldn't help but chuckle. "you're jealous of her."

This, Amity soon realized, was the wrong thing to say. In one instant, Clara exploded in rage and screamed. The next, Luz had pushed Amity down and took the full force of the shockwave herself, being sent flying back.

In the third moment, the ice bridge that Luz had conjured cracked, and Amity felt herself plunge into the flooded cemetery.

It was, pun not intended, colder than a grave and Amity did not exactly have the best head on her shoulders at that particular moment. She thrashed, trying to gain some sense of balance or equilibrium or at least get her head back over the water but she couldn't. Things started to go black as Amity lost her strength. She had just enough time to lament that she and Willow had skipped out on their swimming lessons at Lake Lacuna as children before something grabbed her. A quickly serpentine figure cutting through the water pulled her swiftly and the next thing she knew she was back on dry land and coughing up water.

Breathing heavily, there was only one thing on her mind. "Luz!?" She called out as she twisted around to where her girlfriend had landed only to see that she wasn't there.

"The jerks took her," Masha declared while holding out another ball of the Flames of the Faltine. Amity noticed then that Vee was in her true form again and that she was also wet and shivering and leaning very closely to the warmth of Masha's fireball. "When she hit the ground and didn't get back up, they panicked and carried her off."

TLOA

"This is your fault, Clara!" Suzy screamed while carrying three other people, one of whom was out cold, through the air over the path to Old Gravesfield. Everyone laughed when she said her power was to control her clothes but an Omega Level was an Omega Level: Making them float through the air and strong enough to carry her was the first thing she figured out.

"Don't blame me," Clara insisted anxiously, "That pink-haired witch started it."

"Should we have left her in the water?" Scott asked nervously.

"She'll be fine," Clara dismissed. "Everyone knows witches float. You sure your uncle will meet us in Old Gravesfield?"

"When I texted he said he'd be right over," Scott answered. "There's not exactly much traffic this late in the afternoon so..."

"Is Luzer still breathing?" Suzy asked.

"Yeah, I think," Clara said. "Still out cold though."

Emerging out into the old town proper, which was thankfully empty most of the year, the trio of teens was met by a large truck pulling up, with Scott's uncle getting out shortly afterward.

He adjusted his glasses and looked down at the conscious dork that had the teens so panicked. Gears were clearly turning in the man's head.

"You did the right thing by calling me, Scott," he declared. "Get her into the truck. I know what to do."

"Oh thank God," Scott exclaimed quietly. "You're the best, Uncle Jacob."