Have you ever been hit, absolutely bodied, by an feeling you’ve never felt before—one that overturned everything you thought you knew about feelings?
Lately, that has been every day for Hunter. Leaving the castle walls to meet the wild world beyond has been a humiliating ordeal of rebuilding his idea of personhood from the ground up.
It turns out that Belos’ castle is a separate world of sorts, twisted around the Emperor’s fingers and his bespoke laws of reality. In that reality, you’re only worth anything insofar as you are of use to him. You live to a singular shining purpose, and you wrap yourself around that purpose, body and soul.
For a long time, Hunter was good at it.
Then he found out that, beyond those buttressed walls and that jagged moat, you can simply be. Choose what you'll be, and change your mind. Or at least, that’s what everyone tells him, but he’s struggling to jam the square peg of his brain into the very many round holes that make up the Boiling Isles.
It all started the day he threw his Flyer Derby team in a cell. In that moment, two thoughts swept over him: having friends is actually pretty nice and Belos is going to be so proud. The feeling-nice and the pleasing-Belos were the same emotion. So it was obvious that his team would be over the moon, too.
But he was only met with glowering vitriol. And then their captain, Willow—the one whose recruitment had been the cause of his puffed up ego, if he were being honest—call herself…a bad thing. Bad, bad, bad. An insult reserved for himself and himself only.
As she spoke, eyes glistening, he felt an unpleasant jolt—as if connected to her by an invisible cable. Just like him, she had been trying to prove herself. And he had thwarted her. If he were the one in her place, he would already be digging himself a Hunter-shaped hole.
The heat of victory drained from his body.
Unbeknownst to him, that was to be the first trip in a devastating downward spiral that would soon bring him to question everything he was. That day, all he did was set his teammates free, a tingle of warmth creeping through his face as he watched Willow walk away.
Willow is no stranger to drowning in her agonies. From the day her fathers began to call her their “sunshine,” she got it in her head that she could never concede a drop of rain.
So it all flows inward, because that’s the only place it can go. Back when she struggled to learn her second spell, she thought—guess I’m just bad at magic. When her best friend severed ties with her—I deserved it. When the Grudgeby captain yanked her by the collar and sneered “Half-a-Witch”—she was right.
Even her now-closest friend, Gus, barely glimpses the storm that has spent a decade building inside her. It leaks out in stops and starts, outbursts of sprouting vines and smashing windows, quickly suppressed like impending catastrophes.
The day Caleb (no, Hunter) put them all in a cell, she was already so practised in the art of bottling emotions that she hadn’t thought to blame him, the one who’d done the deed. No, she was the one who’d trusted him, and she had predictably jeopardised everyone, and how dare she have believed for even a second that she could do it well.
It was the only way she knew how to abet the downpour. Turn inward. Turn inward. Contort herself to fit her confines.
So she never quite noticed the way she grew through the months, shrugging off past versions of herself like old skin. While her powers unfurled, her mind curled up in its cell, making itself small.
Across a decade of training, Hunter has grown adept at erasing himself from every transaction—at seeing everything as transactions to keep his feelings out of the way. All he has known is that he doesn't exist except when he is a channel for someone else's will. All the things he hopes and dreams, those paper-thin fantasies, are to be entertained only inside his room and shredded at the door.
Then, a palisman sneaks in through his window.
He learns to fly in secret. It comes startlingly easily—and with the teleportation skills the cardinal brings, he almost feels at the top of the world.
Off the back of a series of mishaps and an accidental showcase of his flight skills, he lands face-first in the Flyer Derby team at Hexside—then betrays them that very same day. And even after that debacle and his messy backpedaling, they ask him—no, the captain asks him—to stay on.
For the first time in his life, he is being given chances without earning them (and Titan knows he didn’t earn this one). For the first time in his life, he begins to look forward to tomorrow—to the next game, and the next, and the camaraderie that unfolds on the field. He likes when he smiles and his teammates smile in answer—he’s never seen it before, the transmission of a smile from one person to another. The team captain has the greatest propensity to spread her smiles to others, and he lets himself catch them, grinning when she grins, basking in her effortless warmth.
Then, a whole cascade of alien emotions follows.
That breathless, heart-squeezing horror when an hour inside Belos’ mind eradicates a decade of tirelessly accrued goodwill, severing him bodily from the only life he knows.
The contagion of tears—like the smiles—when he and Gus fight through the halls together and crouch in a corner, relearning how to breathe.
The way he begins to notice that his heart is reacting to the sight of the team captain Willow by beating faster. It's the same sort of breathless racing that only ever comes when he’s reading a favourite book.
Even now, Hunter lies curls up in bed—the only place where he is allowed to have fantasies—staring at her latest selfie with an ache cradled in his chest. He studies how her dark hair is tucked over one ear, showing the steak of turquoise underneath, and her face radiates joy as bright as summer.
What is this? Is it that, just like his favourite books, he wants to read everything between her covers? But Willow doesn’t have covers, nor pages, and it’s not as if he could tail her like a duckling, soliciting a hundred conversations a day.
He’s already on thin ice. No need to start stomping.
Whatever the case, it is an agreeable sensation, despite its resemblance to shame: a gentle flutter over his heart, like the brush of bird wings, and a warming of his face that sets his thoughts adrift.
As he sighs forlornly and hits the “heart” button on the selfie, Flapjack snuggles closer in his lap, nibbling at his shirt, right in front of his own heart.
Suddenly the five friends are fleeing across the gap between worlds, a thousand circumstances crashing together behind them to destroy their only route home. Then they are stranded on the wrong side of the closing door.
Hands forced, they go to the only place that will have them.
Now they’ve been crammed together in Luz’s home for weeks, and every manner of fight and argument that can be had has already been had. Luz and Amity flirting too loudly at night. Hunter and Gus basement-diving without permission. No one doing the dishes properly. Luz’s mother Camila toils to keep her guests fed so they have fuel for their teen hijinks: rebuilding a portal door, grappling with the spectre of an ancient tyrant, wrestling with emotions.
Here, a world away from the people she loves, Willow will only admit in the privacy of her own mind that something has been sprouting in the past weeks. She catches her first inkling as she’s strolling through the halls and pauses at the sound of the boys yelling in the basement, perhaps at a page from their favourite new comic.
It’s been, who knows, half a year since Hunter introduced himself by betraying the entire Flyer Derby team. As first impressions go, that’s about as bad as it gets. Yet even on that day, Willow saw—in his fanaticism about pleasing the emperor, in his quips about betrayal between friends—the mark of Belos’ twisted handprint on his psyche.
She didn’t have any time to think over all the implications there and then. But she did cave to an impulse to extend him an olive branch—to keep this bond tended and let it grow.
And grow it did. From his first awkward admission that he was having fun, to when she caught him laughing when he thought no one was listening (he turned red as his Palisman), to the grin he began to wear to practice every day. She noticed how he smiled, like he couldn't help the joy pouring through, and she started to like the way the sun gleamed in his hair.
Something new is showing on the vine of their friendship. It was just a green flowerbud at first; it was easy to ignore back then.
Now there’s gold blooming from the green, and she can no longer pretend.
Hunter can tell that his problem is worsening by the day. Maybe it’s all this time cooped up in close quarters. It used to be that he would be talking to Willow and her laughter would trigger a small flutter of nerves, a pleasant flushing of his face.
Nowadays, the talking and laughter are unnecessary; all she has to do is be in the same room. The reactions have burgeoned from facial warmth to full apoplectic fevers and a tendency to spout nonsense as if his mind were losing track of his mouth.
“How’s it going, Captain? Are the plants…plants-ing?” “How you do you—do you you? Augh!” “Can I help you carry that? Not that I think you can’t do it yourself—I would just love to help. If you want it, no pressure—”
The amount of senseless babble that has passed the filter of Hunter’s brain and exited his lips this week alone could fill the world's most inane dictionary. Willow’s reaction is usually the same: polite, and accompanied by a criminally adorable laugh that steepens the sensation of his face being drenched in boiling rain. One would think the mortification of it all—of sitting there while she trims his hair, her fingers teasing at his scalp, his entire body catching fire—would be enough to make him flee her company.
But—and this is the worst part of all—he is just a little addicted to it. And he keeps trying to run into her, only to get feverish from his neck up again and repeat the whole routine.
He starts to suspect a curse—the work of a rather cruel witch—but he can’t imagine who in this house would cast it. Surely there is some document of it in Belos’ archives, but for all intents and purposes, those archives do not exist right now.
There is, for better or worse, only one place he can turn.
*
Hunter sucks in a breath, clears his throat, and knocks.
“Amity, you in there?”
The voices in the room fall silent. “Me? What do you want?”
He rolls back on his heels. “I’m having a biiit of a problem,” he replies. “A—magical problem. I can’t make sense of what’s going on…but I know you read heaps at the library, so I’m wondering if you could, maybe, come help me out?”
“Huh? What kind of problem?”
He pulls his hair. “I don’t know! I've never seen it before! But I can describe it to you!”
This is just about enough to convince Amity to poke her head out the door with a single eyebrow raised. “Carry on.”
Hunter grimaces, shoving his hands in his pocket. “Uh…could we talk about it somewhere more…private?”
“Sure! Real private in here!” Luz calls from behind her.
“I don't know about that,” answers Willow.
That is all it takes for Hunter’s mind to start chasing itself in wild circles. “No, no, no, not in there!”
“Why?” Amity mutters.
“It’s…” he pulls his arms closer, “embarrassing.”
Amity sighs, stepping outside with her arms folded and her nonplussed frown on full blast. From behind, Luz shouts, “Love you! Don't forget bedtime storytime!”
“Love you too, batata!” Amity replies, then loses the smile as she waves quietly for Hunter to follow.
The house is all dark, flat edges in the night, gleaming softly with the streetlight outside. The pair stroll past framed photographs, each holding a memory from Luz and Camila’s past.
“What exactly is the ‘problem’?” she finally asks as they pass the photos, voice tautening.
Hunter inhales deeply. “Okay. So. It's a little weird, but it's like this.” He gestures with both hands for emphasis. “Lately, I have been having…weird bodily experiences.”
Amity halts. “Are you sure you shouldn't be talking to Gus about this?”
“No, no, I don't think Gus would get it—”
“Okay?”
He lowers her voice. “This past month or so, I have been having these weird new feelings and sensations that I’ve never had before. It always happens when I’m in the vicinity of Willow. I don’t think I’m doing it on purpose, and I don’t think our friendship has changed, so the only explanation has to be that it’s some sort of magic. Right?”
In the dark, Hunter can see Amity’s expression softening a touch, but she does not surrender her frown. “What kinds of feelings and sensations?”
He start pacing in figure-eights. “I feel like my face is burning—from the inside? My heart starts beating real fast and it gets hard to breathe. Like before a Flyer Derby match. And I start saying words. Words that make no sense. You know! It’s like someone's put a curse on me and now I can only say dumb things when I'm near her.” He concludes with a huge sigh, hands on his knees. “So. Have you read about anything like this before?”
Amity begins to laugh. Quietly at first, and then cackling between snatches of breath. “You really have no idea? No one’s ever told you?”
He throws up his arms. “No! I swear, if I knew, I would have figured out what to do about it by now, but I don't, and it's driving me crazy—”
She lays a hand on his shoulder, wiping a tear form her eye. “Relax, Hunter. I know what it is. It’s not a curse. It’s a normal thing that a lot of people experience at some point. Humans and witches. I have, and pretty recently, too.”
At these words, Hunter’s eyes brighten and his mouth widens in a grin. “Really? But you got better, right? How did you fix it?”
She smirks, glancing back up the corridor. “Actually, I can't help you with that part. No one has figured it out yet, I don't think.”
His face falls again, but he presses on. “Oh. Well…uh, who was making you feel all that?”
Amity pauses for a long time. “Luz,” she replies.
He frowns even harder. “Really? But she's your girlfriend! You look so comfortable around her.”
She chuckles, flapping her hand self-consciously. “Believe it or not, I used to turn into a bumbling idiot every time I saw her, too. It wasn’t good for my image at school, let me tell you that. And it kept getting worse and worse, until I admitted to myself what was going on: I had a crush on her.”
“A—crush on her? That’s what it—is?” Hunter's eyes widen, and then his mouth does, and he claws at his face as one revelation after another cascades on him.
Of course, he has heard of this: people sometimes inexplicably develop a magnet pull towards each other and become inseparable for no rational reason. It was expedient for him to know, so he understood why some people grieved being torn from others.
By the way the scouts explained it, he always assumed it occurred without thought or guesswork or chaos, since they had no choice in who they fell for. Two witches would simply wake up one day and—zwoop—become joined at the hip, just like that.
He was not expecting an endless road of blunders and mishaps. And he certainly wasn't expecting it would ever befall him…
Ah, shit. He's flushing as hot as the Boiling Sea. His fingers instinctively reach up to pull down his mask, but of course it’s not there, so instead they start to pull at his newly-shorn hair. “No…no, no, this can’t be happening…what do I do next? What do I do next?”
Amity offers a smile. “You could…ask her out? If you want to.”
“Ask her out? As in…evict her?”
Again, she descends into a bout of hysterical laughter. “No! I mean,” she glances at the wall of photographs with a smile, “ask her if she wants to spend more time with you, and maybe do romantic things, like hold hands, or…”
The way Hunter’s entire head goes up in flames at the thought of holding Willow’s hand blasts away any straggling uncertainty about what has befallen him. Hot on its heels comes the new and devastating prospect that she might not be pleased about this—that she might even be repulsed by the affections of (he shudders) a Grimwalker…
It feels like a curse, whatever Amity calls it. Why did the curse have to choose her of all people? The most breathtaking witch on the Boiling Isles?
“By the way, I could kind of guess,” Amity’s voice cuts through his flocking thoughts.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“I mean, I had a feeling you were in love with her. Just a little. I wasn’t going to assume, but we’d be in full room and you'd always be staring at her. Reacting every time she said something. Almost like clockwork.”
He shrieks. “Does she know?”
“Relax, I don't think so. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t want me to.”
“You won’t even tell Luz?”
“This is the sort of thing where blabbing without a thought could make things more complicated for everyone. So, nope, my lips are sealed unless you give the word.”
“Whew—thank you. Okay, okay.” He catches his breath. “Everything’s making sense now. So, uh, I’m in love. With Willow.” He half-chokes out the words, fingers pulling down on his blazing cheeks. “And there's no way to undo it. And now I've got to—ugh!” He clutches his head. The explanation has answered several questions, but it has also opened up a whole new can of bloodflies. “How am I meant to be normal now?”
“It's okay! Take your time, everyone needs it. Especially if you're only finding out just now.”
“Time. Okay. Take my time. Breathe in…” One, two, three…
When the pair return at last to the girls’ bedroom, Luz flies to the door, and the first thing out of her mouth is, “Everything okay with you, Hunter? I heard you screaming.”
He rubs the back of his neck. “Uh—no–but yeah? But no?” Luz squints, but he fires a look that telegraphs no-telling-secrets.
Behind her, Vee peeks through her bedframe, and Willow props herself up on her elbows to meet his eye. Suddenly Hunter is squarely in not-okay territory again. With an awkward grin and a totally-not-deliberate brush of his hair, he murmurs, “Erm, good night…see you in the morning?”
Willow laughs. Oh, what a laugh. The birds are stirring in his belly again. “Good night, silly,” she calls, and the last thing he glimpses as he drags his sorry blushing ass to the stairwell is Amity shooting him a knowing smirk.
Willow knows the progression of her feelings better than the lines on her hands.
First, she's daydreaming about him in the solitary comfort of the couch. Next thing she knows, the daydreams have become night dreams.
Then she’s finding excuses. Volunteering to help cook with Hunter so that their arms can bump inadvertently (he drops a pancake on the floor the first time). Memorising the patterns of his movement around the house so she can run into him and make it look like an accident.
The trick is, she never has to grapple with the mess if she never names this feeling—puts it away where it can’t reach her.
Even so, these kinds of secrets have a habit of brimming over. It is for this reason that Willow creeps downstairs in the gloom this evening.
On the basement couch, Gus is busy sorting through costume parts for the upcoming festivities. She’s really fighting with herself, trying to hold it all in, and she can sense the impending spill.
This is only a necessary precaution.
“Hey, Gus?” she calls from the stairs, wringing her hands together. “Are you alone?”
He lifts his head. “Hey, Willow! Yeah, I am—what's up?”
“Could we talk for a bit?”
At once, Gus shuffles to one side of the sofa and waves her into the vacated space, littered with half-sewn scraps of fabric. “Sorry about the mess,” he laughs. “Me and Hunter have been trying to get these costumes ready on time.”
She picks up one rectangle of fabric, a black zigzag sewn onto a red rectangle. “Yeah…so…I wanted to talk about him. But I have to swear you to secrecy first.”
“Oh-kay…” He spends a second scrutinising her expression. “Before we carry on…is this about him doing something bad? Just wanna be ready, that's all.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not like that. But please don’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you. Not even our best friends.”
Gus nods vigorously and makes a circle over his heart.
“Okay, here goes…” She checks over her shoulder just to be sure no one has showed up in the past minute. “So, back when we met Hunter a few months ago, we really started off on the wrong foot. I’m sure you remember too. That day, I felt real stupid for not realising he was just there to turn us in.”
“Uh-huh, that was something else.”
“Since then, so much has happened, and I think…I’ve changed my mind.” She hugs her knees closer. “He’s become such a good teammate. He's our biggest fan! He’s always telling me I’m doing a good job.” She sighs. “And now he’s fought his old allies with us, too. I never imagined the guy who threw us in jail would turn around this much.”
“He really has.” Gus offers a sidelong smile. “It’s pretty amazing, if you ask me. The guy’s still rough around the edges, but his heart’s in the right place. He could’ve used less of the…traumatic stuff, though.”
Willow’s face falls. “Yeah. I’m really proud of him. And maybe more than just proud.”
“What’s more than proud? Advanced-proud?”
“Um, well…” She twiddles her thumbs. “It’s just, we’ve been texting a lot, and playing Flyer Derby together, and living in the same house…and I guess, maaaybe, I might have…caught feelings?”
Gus makes an exaggerated “o” with his mouth. “What kind of feelings?”
Willow puffs out her cheeks. “Now you’re just making fun of me,” she groans, and Gus breaks character, doubling over in laughter.
He claps her shoulder. “Sorry! But hey, hey, it’s all good—happens to the best of us. Besides…” He winks. “I get it. I see what you see, you know.”
Willow perks up. “Oh, you…do?”
He shrugs one arm. “Well, obviously. He’s got that, how do I put it, that unsuspecting charm, y’know? Like he doesn’t even realise how cute he’s being sometimes.”
Hearing those words out of her best friend’s mouth is enough to send her into a fit, but she keeps a rein on herself—only just. “Right? Like when we got on that airship and he started flying it like a pro!”
“Oh, yeah, and those sick tricks he pulls at Flyer Derby? Bet he could do them with his eyes closed.”
“And all those photos he posts of Flapjack, and that stupid way he types, oh Titan…” She kicks her feet on the side of the couch.
“And his mad sewing skills! Look!” Gus picks up that same scrap of fabric—black lightning on red—and shows it off with a grin. “What a guy. I had no idea the Golden Guard had all this in him all along.”
“Yeah, I feel so sad that he was cooped up in that castle for so long. But now…”
“Hey, sorry I’m late—Willow?!”
Both mouths snap shut like mousetraps, heads whipping back to face the stairwell. Gus stuffs the fabric back under a cushion. Hunter has shot back halfway up the stairs, head obscured by shadows.
“Hi, Hunter,” calls Willow, putting her feelings away. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you two up. I’ll be heading to bed.”
Hunter starts waving his palms defensively in front of him. “No, no, no, I didn’t mean to—I mean, it’s fine if you stay—if you want to! You don’t have to go!”
Willow notices she’s doing it yet again—making a note of his gestural quirks, mentally adding them to the already overflowing pile of rose-scented junk she calls Reasons to Love and Adore Hunter. No, it is high time she headed off, even if she’d much rather be talking her jaw off with him.
“It's fine. We've got a long day ahead.”
She hops off the couch, and Gus gives her a good-night and a yawn of farewell. Putting on her most convincing impression of nonchalance, she passes Hunter on the stairs.
“Hey, s-sweet dreams,” he says as she does.
Willow does her best not to freeze. She does not freeze. But she does miss the second step and tumble forward, snatching for the railing to steady herself.
Instead of the railing, her fingers wrap around Hunter’s arm.
She bites back a shriek. He has no such restraint. “Aah! I’m so sorry!” He leaps to steady her, before retracting his hands as if from a hot pan.
“It’s okay, it’s okay! Um, sleep well,” she replies with a finger gun. Her back still tingles. She tears her gaze from him and marches the rest of the way up the stairs.
Oh, she’ll be having sweet dreams, alright. And he’ll be starring in every single one.
By the time Belos makes his reappearance in the back of a ghostly glade, the group of friends is at the very end of their wits. Then, just as they find that elusive door back home, the Emperor blows everything up in their faces, and Flapjack’s life is the price they pay for it.
Now that she has cradled Hunter’s cold body by the lake, Willow has found the touching easier. Maybe next to the fear of losing him for good, the nerves of her burgeoning crush are hardly anything. She notices each time he catches her, or vice versa—how naturally it seems to come to them.
It all feels too good for her to hold out hope. Because good things are for other people, and everything she wants, she must learn to relinquish.
What isn't self-explanatory about it, though? He's kind, he’s candid, and he's always working so hard to do better, even if he doesn't see it.
The goofy grins that seep through Hunter's tough facade these days make Willow's heart feel like butter left atop a toaster too long. And as they plunge deeper into that starry dark, those smiles become her only bulwark against the terror of not knowing what the world has become, or what has become of the people in it.
So when, in the bowels of the Hexside stronghold, she hands him a photograph of his dead friend only to watch his face crumble—it all begins to crash in. The exhaustion, the big hollow in her heart where her home normally resides, the everlasting dread that her dads are no longer alive—all condensed in the tearful glittering of those eyes.
She excuses herself and walks away, the way she’s trained herself to—to ensure her tears can only pour out when no one is looking. But then she is denied that release at the lockers by Borscha, just like a hundred times before, driving the stake into her heart.
Willow's mind careens off cliff’s edge, and her body follows suit, relinquishing its control over the tenuous boundary between her magic and the world.
Everything she’s crammed into a heart too small to hold it all bursts free.
Her world is nothing but crawling, strangling vines for what feels like weeks.
But from deep in that great dark tangle, something bright wrenches her out—a pair of arms flashing gold, engulfing her as they both blink away.
He kneels before her, nails digging into her arms, pouring out a litany of apologies for which he couldn’t find the words until right now.
“You’ve been holding in a lot, haven’t you?” he sobs.
It’s the first time anyone has seen through her.
Gathered in Hunter’s arms, Willow suddenly feels herself losing the battle of fifteen years. The embankments break. That guilt, that shame—that she cannot be who everyone wants her to be—rains out of her at last.
They weep together on the floor, two misfits who never let themselves want anything for themselves—and suddenly it feels okay to be a little faulty, to not know what to do.
And oh, it only gets worse.
Awkward pats on the back. Tentative pinky-holding. The end of the Boiling Isles and its quiet return. The realisation that he's hurtled right off the deep end, actually, and that she’s somehow okay with these stolen moments of affection.
Today, they’re back on the grounds of Hexside—not as students but as rebuilders, resuscitating the campus from the throes of death. It’s unclear for a while how Hunter should go about getting enrolled, seeing as the closest thing he had to a guardian, Emperor Belos, is now a festering pile of goo near the foot of the Archives.
In the end, Principal Bump decides to let him elect the adult who should grant their consent to enrol him—and he chooses Darius for, after all, there isn’t anyone else who could make an informed decision on the matter.
“So…you’re really, officially, a student now?” asks Luz as she nudges her glyph-animated rake into place over some fragments of puppet string.
“Yeah, it’s weird, huh?” Hunter replies, positioning the catcher for the rake’s benefit. “I’ll be starting once this, uh, Post-Emperor break is over.”
Luz pauses to vibrate, and briefly Hunter worries she’s about to explode, but she only bursts into a scream. “Eee! We can pick classes together!” She’s practically dancing. “We’ve got free rein over the whole syllabus now, you know. No more tracks!”
Back by the school windows, Amity yells about a spindlepillar, followed by the sound of magic crackling. Luz laughs fondly. “I’m still mostly magic-less, though,” Hunter says, before recognising the inanity of saying this to the only other student born without magic.
“But that’s the thing!” Luz throws an arm around his back. “They’re adding glyphs to the curriculum. King’s glyphs. Principal Bump even said he might be a special guest now and then. The three of us will be,” she sweeps her free hand in an arc, “the Grand Glyph Gang.”
He chuckles. “That sounds…”
“Hey, both of you!” A voice cuts him off, and they spring apart as Willow and Gus barge in between them.
Gus cranes his neck to inspect the industrious rake. “How long until you’re done with your chores?”
Luz shrugs one shoulder. “Whenever the job’s done, I guess?” She juts her chin at the remaining trail of puppet string and wooden fragments on the boulevard. “What’s the hurry?”
Willow clasps both hands together. “Gus and I were just gonna go get celebratory snowcones for the amazing work we’ve done today.”
“I’d love to be there!” Luz declares. “I just,” she casts a glance at the lavender-haired girl by the windows, “have plans with Amity and her family already.”
“Well…I’m free,” Hunter mumbles, arms tucked behind his head in complete nonchalance. “I could…probably…join you.”
Willow and Gus look at each other. “Oh, wait,” Gus bursts out, “actually, I just remembered a really important thing I have to do this evening! Oops, sorry, can’t make it!”
“But you just said—” Willow’s eyes continue to widen as Gus decides on the spot that his Really Important Business needs attending to right now. He blurts a goodbye and flips Emmiline horizontal, zipping away.
Willow and Hunter glance at each other. “Guess it’s just you and I, then!” she exclaims. He turns away with a sheepish laugh, begging his face not to colour up.
“Hey, if you wanna head off, I can cover for you no problem!” Luz cuts in, before sticking out her leg to kick the rake back on track.
“Wait, really?” Hunter tries not to sound too eager.
Luz shoots him a grin and a thumbs-up. “You deserve the break. A bit of junk is no match for me…the Good Witch Luzura!”
“Oh, then, thank you for your service, Good Witch Luzura!” The words tumble out, syllables tripping over each other. His eyes swivel to Willow, awaiting her next move. “So…”
“So…let's go!” she declares, starting to march towards the gate. Clover descends from a tree to land on her head. He stares, the world’s dopiest grin spreading on his face, till she stops to glance over her shoulder. “You coming?”
Luz shoves his back. “You got this,” she whispers.
He squeaks and dashes after Willow.
*
Though they could well be flying to their destination, neither of them opts to do so, as if sharing some unspoken understanding about the necessity of this walk.
Even after they've left the viewing range of the school, neither of them has broken the silence. It isn't an uncomfortable one; it is warm as the late afternoon daylight glowing on the skeletal playgrounds. But that is not to say Hunter isn’t furiously turning over a dozen different conversation starters in his head.
Then the pavement narrows, and Willow's walking path begins to meander closer to Hunter’s. Closer and closer, yard by yard.
He hears her inhale deeply, then feels her fingers brush his palm.
His pulse doubles. His head is full of hot air again. His thoughts scream at him to say nothing, to leave it be, or she’ll pull away and it’ll all be over.
She starts to work a tentative grip around his hand.
He stares resolutely at the passing hedges. His own fingers have started to fidget a little, trying to find a better grip between each footstep. Her hand follows suit. Their fingers slip between each other’s, and—
—oh. This feels incredible.
Hunter finally dares to turn. Willow is looking the other way.
“Um…hey, Willow?” His voice is squeaky as a doorhinge.
Her head whips around and she breathlessly chirps, “Yes?”
“I… I…” His eyes dart away. “I don't know how to say this.”
She chuckles. “Me neither.”
“Then…maybe we don’t need to say anything?”
“Old habits, huh?"
But she’s right. Old habits. Erasing himself. Letting himself want nothing. Dreaming only in his bedroom.
He sighs, rubbing the back of his head with his free hand. “Sorry, maybe…in a sec.”
“Take all the time you need,” she replies. “I’m gonna be right here.”
Half a minute passes, their hands swinging between them.
“Willow, I think—” Hunter begins. Nope. Changing angle. “You…you know how much you mean to me, right?”
Her gaze lifts to his face, and this time he can see how shallowly she’s breathing, how dilated her pupils have grown. “A little,” she replies. “Back at Hexside. We cried about it.”
“Yeah, but I mean—do you know—that I—” He gesticulates with his free hand between every disjointed phrase, scrambling for words while his head fills up like a blimp. “—that I think about you a-all the time? That I sometimes just lie there daydreaming about how cool and strong and—pretty you are? That I—” he chuckles— “learned how to save photos from Penstagram so I could save your selfies?”
“Oh.” Her neck straightens. “I—no, I didn't know that.”
All at once, her reaction hammers it all home, that he really did just say that. His heart plummets. He drops her hand. “Ugh, wait—no—that made me sound like a total creep.”
“No! Well…um…” A smile sneaks over Willow’s lips—a different kind from those grins that light her up after a Flyer Derby victory. Halting. Anxious. “I mean…I kinda save your selfies too. And stare at them in my free time. I mean, when I’m not trying to find excuses to be around the real thing. Which is,” she huffs out an awkward laugh, “pretty much all the time.”
The words take about ten seconds to wind through the maze of Hunter’s brain before finally landing. Once they do, his mind goes full self-destruct and expunges his entire vocabulary in one go. His feet stop moving as they forget all previous directives in favour of I adore Willow and I need to be next to her forever.
“Wow,” he breathes.
Stopping beside him, Willow giggles, shuffling the toe of her shoe against the pavement. “So, I guess, I do wish I could spend more time with you. A lot more time.” She tucks a braid behind her ear. “And maybe…we could spend some of that time…”
Hunter sucks in a breath. He’s almost afraid to read into those words. He wants more time to pick through this. To 4D chess his way to certainty about her implied meaning. But his mind keeps racing, and before he knows it he has blurted, “That would be neat! Really neat!” Then he clutches his face. “Ugh. Wait, no no, let me try that again.” He inhales. “I think…if you're saying what I think you're saying…then…yes! Yes!”
“Yes?” She quirks an eyebrow.
“Yes!” he replies, clenching his hands into fists. “Whatever you wanna do, I wanna do it too! If you want more time together, then so do I! I just want more—you. Did I…” His hands slacken from his brief fit, mentally reviewing his words while his face goes numb from burning. “Did I…understand you right?”
Willow is in the middle of an extended intake of breath, high-pitched and madly endearing. She’s grinning almost as dumbly as he usually does, her face an undeniable shade of red.
Then her moment’s meekness is gone, and with an almost-desperate whimper, she hops up on tiptoes and smashes her lips against his.
Hunter reckons this is what crashing an airship into a cliff face would feel like. The breath catches in his throat, a sigh escaping through his nose because his mouth is occupied with—well, all that—and he isn't sure which way is up or down or port or starboard, only which way is Willow-ward and away-from-Willow, because he is eye to eye with her round glasses, and the feeling of her lips against his is like nothing his brain could invent—soft, warm, pleading.
And she’s into it, too.
He's pretty sure that if they weren't standing in the middle of a pavement in someone else’s neighbourhood, he would long have passed out from the crazy flips his heart is doing right now.
They sink apart, almost mercifully, and he has to restrain himself from shrieking. His vision spins and his head feels light as he pants, “Thank you.” Thank you? Really? “For, um. That.” His voice breaks on the last word.
“Hunter! You are such a dork.” Willow wheezes with laughter. “So…um…was that okay?”
Hunter is still struggling to convince himself any of this is happening. He needs a slap in the face. With something cold. “It was so okay. It was.” He needs to catch his breath again. “It was. I want it to happen again.”
Willow obliges.
By the time her lips relinquish his, he feels like he is about to replicate his uncle’s final feat of collapsing into a puddle.
Willow tucks her hands innocently behind her back and beams at the ground. “So. If I asked you to go out with me…how would you feel?”
“If you did, I think—I think I might faint.”
Another laugh, like the sound of bells pealing. “Oh! I'd better not make you faint, then.”
“What? No! I’ll stay conscious. This time. I think.”
Her hands shoot over to grab his, lifting them in front of her. “Okay, well, do you wanna…”
This is the fastest “yes” in his life.
Hunter’s consciousness hangs on by a single thread, and that single thread is the chance to keep basking in Willow’s smile. They walk with their hands hopelessly tangled, grinning all the way to the snowcone stand.
Maybe they’re allowed to want something for themselves after all. Maybe they even deserve it.
They buy a single large cup to share and find a little retaining wall under a tree, leaning together to take turns feeding each other. It's the best possible way he could imagine celebrating the end of a tyrant’s reign.