#once again im fallin sleep now tho. snzzz....

[crimeronan]

oh, the other Vital context wrt AU luz being a covid puppy is that she has some VERY specific PTSD. like part of it is her upbringing, but the shift from "i'm lonely and bored and sad when hunter isn't around" to "i panic whenever i can't reach out and touch him" is So So So Recent. on account of. the novel's worth of horror fic preceding all her separation anxiety antics.

over the course of a year she:

is forced to kill someone with hunter's face

is told that hunter is going to sicken and die bc of grimwalker biology

gets elbow-deep in grimwalker and necromancy research

learns everything there is to know about the dead grimwalkers prior to hunter

including reading all of belos's unethical science experiment notes on them

has to repeatedly talk belos out of """putting hunter down"""

FAILS to do that. at great personal cost

gets to hear belos detail exactly how he's going to torture hunter to death to punish her

only manages to save hunter's life through a combination of luck, the titan's favor, and crazy murdering belos

it's in the Very Immediate Aftermath of all this that she has her "i woke up and you weren't there" panic spiral. and then for Some Weird Reason, her anxiety only worsens over the following time period

^girl who is suddenly experiencing ALLLL the emotions she'd been repressing while running on adrenaline for ten straight months.....

like. the amount that she is exhausted and clingy and Fried To A Crisp is. directly proportional. to the amount of horror fic there is. at this point her pathological need to have hunter in her sight at all times is just Sensible. he has died 1,000 times in 1,000 ways to her by now and that he's still alive at all is kind of a fluke.