#princess luz au illness timeline

[crimeronan]

one concept i don't think we've ever explored in princess AU is the idea that belos wasn't actually lying about grimwalker lifespans & hunter DOES get sick. and need a magical organ transplant or two.

the good news, of course, being that luz is Very Very Very Prepared for this.

the bad news being that after hunter wakes up in the castle infirmary with a brand new galdorstone heart that hasn't worn out from too much magical exposure or whatever, luz has to be like.

heyyyyyy. heeeey. hunter. sooo.

i just..... want to make sure you hear this from me.... before you hear it from anyone else....

[crimeronan]

"I have almost all of his body and all of his memories minus the ones from the past two days, but I am clearly not him " Hunter probably.

GOD, YEAH. @turretpolygamy suggested that hunter's immediate assumption when grimwalkers are explained to him would be that he himself is a copy of luz's hunter, who is """real""" in the sense of, like. being the half-human half-witch guy who grew up with luz

so it's like.

hunter: but i have... his memories. i can remember you really well. is that not -- that's not real??

luz: wh-- OH. oh, no, no no no. you're my hunter, you've always been my hunter. you were just a grimwalker from the very beginning

hunter: but. why...? you were too little to make me. who...?

luz: um.... belos.... he had, um. issues.

hunter, visibly relaxing: oh. that's all right then.

[crimeronan]

Imagining Hunter being Legitimately Bedridden for the weeks it takes to recover from such a big surgery. He keeps trying to leave early, to be with Luz, and ends up lengthening his recovery even further.

Eventually it gets to a point where they decide to just wheel his sorry ass to his place beside her throne. In his medbed. His suspiciously queen-sized medbed.

Once her duties are done for the day, Luz plops herself right onto the other side of the bed, and lets someone wheel her and Hunter back to the infirmary. Probably Amity, so she and Luz can be insufferable (affectionate) about it.

Actually, better make that medbed king-sized.

"his suspiciously queen-sized medbed" is making me giggle and kick my feet.

the other coven heads and the scouts being like "i don't get it. he Clearly can't guard her like this" while luz is like "joke's on you all. this is my most trusted advisor and the specialest boy in the universe. ignore how he's gently snoring through all these meetings with petitioners."

[crimeronan]

Was about to suggest Hunter having his first medical episode when they are the owl house for the sake of one my all time favorite "Hunter wakes up injured on Eda's couch" tropes, then I remembered who I'm talking to :)

who, me..... have i Ever done anything with the "hunter wakes up injured on eda's couch" trope..... shoves like 15 fanfics behind my back

but yesss. hunter has a POTS-style tachycardic fainting episode or whatever & wakes up to an extremely distressed luz hovering over him while having a whisper-hissing argument with eda... eda's saying "you have to tell him, kiddo" and hunter's like ".....tell me what....?"

[crimeronan]

Thinking about "Post" sickness Hunter forcing himself back into shape and how I can see him ending up trying to pick a fight with Amity and it is the absolute opposite of the main AU.

amity, being so gentle and kind for once in her life: okay. i've kicked the shit out of you like five times. hunter. you are absolutely not in any shape to fight right now. go back to bed

hunter: >:(((((

[crimeronan]

For Hunter getting sick, I can't decide if it's better if he starts out feeling a little off but mostly fine, mentioning it to Luz who IMMEDIATELY freaks out for reasons he doesn't get ("it's just a mold, please relax"), then gradually starts declining more and more as Luz gets more and more frantic and being like wait... did you know this was gonna happen? I trust you but what's going on? + potentially trying to keep the illness a secret as it gets worse, ending with sequestration as it gets too obvious/bad for him to be up and about - which drives Hunter insane of course, but also drives Darius insane because (esp depending on the point in the timeline) his kid has vanished and the empress is acting weird and the official story does not add up. OR if he just suddenly keels over someday with no warning. Maybe even in public :3c Talk about meltdowns

I DO LOVE ME A SLOW DECLINE. luz frantically trying to solve things on her own with homemade cures, and then finally eventually bringing hettie cutburn to hunter while very sternly like "i know his anatomy is Off and you're gonna want to do science experiments. i cannot express enough to you how much i am going to crazy torture-murder you if you hurt him unnecessarily. capiche??"

meanwhile darius finds out that cutburn is involved in some mysterious back-door treatment of the golden guard and is like. nope. Nope. time to go hunt down the empress demanding answers!!

[crimeronan]

Hey consider Luz, in an utter panic, threatening Cutburn with petrification if she does anything wrong to Hunter while treating him. And possibly making that interaction clear to Darius when he starts demanding answers from her.

I still don't think she'd go so far as to actually do it even if Cutburn experimented on Hunter (only because it would ruin everything she's been trying to do in destroying Belos' empire), but 1. She'd genuinely consider it 2. Her retaliation WOULD probably be closer to the level of cruelty she thinks she's deep down capable of than anything else she's ever done in her entire life. She would make Cutburn REGRET it.

And! Even with Cutburn on the level, imagine Luz having a breakdown at some point talking to Eda about the whole situation, admitting how she threatened Cutburn with petrification and she Totally Meant It and she's a tyrant just as bad as her father if not WORSE because she can't even COMMIT to an ideal no matter how broken and evil she'd discard everything she's worked for if someone hurt Hunter—

And I think the admission of genuinely threatening someone with petrification (no matter how much that someone deserves it) and nearly following through might be the only thing that could make Eda unsure about Luz at this point however briefly (not because Eda's a bleeding heart but because that specifically more than any other form of punishment is a major symbol of Belos' reign).

I suspect that doubt would get pushed aside pretty quickly by "daughter panicking :(((" because Luz didn't follow through with it and also she's crazy and needs absolution and comfort from a wild witch or (at least in Eda's mind) she might genuinely consider suicide but I think it would be there.

And Eda having to pull her out of this specific spiral would make Luz's guilt complex EVEN worse EVEN faster.

WHEE i do love any excuse for luz to be vicious and scary. sorry baby girl i know it's not in your nature at all but that's why it compels me. darius being like "WHAT are you letting cutburn do to him" and luz being like "she's fixing him. if she does anything else i am Going To Destroy Her." and darius being like .....hm. you actually mean that, don't you. well. i'm still going to demand to see him but. carry on.

as for eda.... YEAH these thoughts are so good. i think any doubts eda had wouldn't last too long because like, this is a teenage girl, of course she's going to reach for a familiar threat to protect herself... eda doesn't doubt that luz truly does want an end to the empire. any pause in her would just be "can a kid really be trusted with this much power, even with the best of intentions."

but she'd want to calm luz down more than anything. eda care her :(

[crimeronan]

theres a Lot of an implication that losing your memories gives you illness like symptoms at least for a time in understanding willow if memory serves (fever, general out of it-ness, etc.) and like.. if that applies here.

luz being sick and vulnerable and miserable and maybe even just the SLIGHTEST bit trusting of belos for a minute there with disorientation and loss of memory.. while completely subject to his whims... Auughhhh.

thinking about it just makes me a Little Sick. You Get Away From Her Old Man. the idea of belos Reveling in being her Dad again.. AUGHHH. while simultaneously, somewhere deep in his fucked up heart, wanting her to be the "adult"

:(((

reminds me of him manipulating her when they kill the grimwalker, when she's telling herself he's a good father because he's putting up with her hysterics and holding her like he hasn't since she was way younger....

except like. worse.

belos earnestly telling luz that he brought her to the human realm because she's Sick, and he's Making Her Better and Fixing It, & luz being like. that doesn't feel right but i'm too tired/confused to dispute it. even her intact memories seem so jumbled and fragile that if belos tells her she's remembering Wrong, it's hard for her to be confident that she's right....

also later i can only imagine like. luz's human doctors establish that her injuries are healing and she doesn't have any infections and she doesn't seem Super sick, so they Cannot explain Why she has a fluctuating low grade fever. and so much confusion/disorientation. but they're kind of like. well. it's probably some autoimmune thing brought on by all the stress. and the being a woman. can't forget the being a woman thing.

we'll do some tests to make sure your kidneys don't fail but otherwise this is probably just kind of how things are forever 💕 best of luck, byeee!!

[crimeronan]

the other thing with the concept of worst timeline luz losing most (or all) of her memories of hunter is Just How Bad it would fuck her brain up. like i don't think it would quite be an "understanding willow" level catastrophe, because there's enough left to create a relatively coherent construct of the Self..... but i also think she'd be a fucking Wreck. there's a 100% chance belos would also gank everything he can find about wild magic, so like. the two biggest defining aspects of her childhood up in smoke.... i think she wouldn't trust her other memories at all. CONSTANT confusion. constant feeling like she's dreaming awake or like she's forgetting something really really Really important. if vee isn't with camila here then i think luz could Easily convince herself that what she Does remember of her upbringing was an elaborate fantasy. something she made up to cope with Whatever happened to her. because other realms don't exist and neither do demons and neither do witches and all of her memories are so jumbled and nonsensical and indistinct anyway.....

she's just a human. who was kidnapped by another human. and grew up in the human world. and that's all there is.

she's forgetting something.

she's always forgetting something.

[crimeronan]

hey what is wwaitsoatl?

oh! it's what we are is the sum of a thousand lies, my most popular toh fic by FAR and the thing most toh people here started following me for. back before i got sucked down the princess luz hyperfixation rabbit hole. it's a fic that takes more work to write than any of my others because it has an incredibly involved drafting & editing process. bc i am a perfectionist.

the premise is a canon divergent timeline wherein belos suspects that hunter lied to him at the end of hunting palismen. and completely wrecks hunter's shit forever. and infects him with curse goop in the process. and darius (who, Very Importantly, does not yet have a friendly rapport with hunter) trips over the kid's half-dead body.

and freaks.

and kidnaps hunter n takes him to the owl house. bc that's the one surefire place of refuge on the isles.

there are a bunch of emotional threads, hence why it's novel-length and not even finished yet despite being about just four characters chilling in a house together.

mainly it's about:

hunter unraveling his cognitive dissonance and cult brainwashing in an AU where he doesn't have all of hollow mind's answers; his feelings are Incredibly complicated and messy & he gets incredibly mean and snarly about it

darius grappling with the fact that his own grief and resentment blinded him to a kid who Very Much Needed Him, darius dealing with the fact that actually he never DID grieve his mentor or his mentor's dead family

darius and hunter developing a rapport in a timeline where hunter very much has Not broken out of all the cop shit that darius disdains So Much. so darius is so fucking exasperated and tired all the time

eda trying desperately to help hunter learn to live with a curse / chronic pain / chronic illness, while having very little faith in herself to begin with

luz feeling Horrifically guilty about hunter's curse and injuries, bc she thinks she should have clocked the abuse and brought him home with her or otherwise stopped it

hunter developing an almost immediate and pathological emotional attachment to luz because of her kindness, which complicates all of his complicated feelings WAAAAAY MORE

eda, darius, AND luz all desperately trying to get hunter to admit that he's been abused and that what happened wasn't his fault. you would not believe how fucking long it takes.

i'm actually really, really, Really proud of it -- it's rare for one of a writer's best works to be their most popular, but this genuinely is one of mine. if not my best work, period. there's a lot of nuance and messiness and emotional complexity and grief and arguing that i'm SO happy with.

also, despite the subject matter, it's often extremely lighthearted. some of the funniest dialogue i've ever written is strewn throughout all these serious emotional threads.

i'd apologize for how long this response is but this story is a heart project and has 67,000 published words on ao3 so far. (the chapter i'm writing rn will likely be another ~8,000 words, then there are a couple more chapters to come.) so there's a lot to say!!

it's my most popular ao3 fic for any fandom, ever, in the 12 years i've been on the site. the response has been WILD. if you sort by kudos, it's the 31st most favorited owl house fic Of All Time, the 7th most popular fic involving darius, and the 5TH most popular hunter & luz relationship fic. again, of all time. which is. insane.

people have been very kind and patient with me having been too sick to work on it for a while. there was a seven-month break between chapters 8 and 9, and if i finish chapter ten soon then there'll have been a nine-month break between chapters 9 and 10. so i don't know how many people are actually going to come back to read it, a lot of ppl have moved on from the fandom and such. but i'm extremely extremely extremely grateful to everyone who's given it a look!

[crimeronan]

can i read any of your toh fics without having watched toh because they sound really good but i don’t want to watch a bunch of tv first i don’t have the timeee (ugh college)

i've actually had more than one person read my fics without having watched toh & i'm told they're more-or-less coherent!

i have a couple oneshots that are just about hunter getting hugs or being sick with fantasy illnesses or processing grief. my longfic "what we are is the sum of a thousand lies" is an episode-specific canon divergence, so that one may be hard to jump into without having watched the show...

BUT the princess luz AU plays with the show worldbuilding in a parallel timeline. characters, relationships, and canon events are all very different, so there's a good amount of exposition within the fics themselves. what i've learned from people's liveblogs is that if you've watched the show, there's a lot of horror in little details that call back to the canon..... but if you Haven't watched the show, then there's a lot of horror in simply "OH GOD. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS. WHAT THE FUCK??"

basically all you need to know going in is that the emperor of this fantasy realm is a secret human, he's a colonizing piece of shit, he has a peculiar fascination with the human protagonist of the show (who, in the AU, is raised as his daughter), and he's been creating necromantic corpse copies of his brother n then murdering them for 400 straight years. Yikes.

[crimeronan]

For your princess Luz AU, I hope it’s okay if I ask you two things!!

I’ve been curious on which role, if any, the collector would play here. Imo I’d guess Belos got rid of him (probably yeeted him off a cliff too) pretty much immediately after he decided not to go through with the day of unity but like, would Luz ever stumble upon him? And as a child agent of chaos who’s probably also genuinely mad at Belos, might jump at the opportunity to help Luz dismantle the empire in every way possible. But he’s also a GOD and extremely powerful and someone Belos used so what in the world would the collector make of her, and her of him?

Also, another question, going with Lumity as endgame, how would you see Amity growing closer to Luz knowing she never went through the canon character development? Like, that girl is utterly traumatized and wants NOTHING to do with Luz’s convoluted political shenanigans ™ which kind of just means anything related to her personal life (empress life amiright fellas). And, she’s also unwillingly getting involved BECAUSE she’s like no pls leave me alone and Luz’s like omfg she’s trustworthy and honest and someone my age who isn’t Hunter???? While Amity just wants to stick to Lilith and get maybe one or two motherly smiles. And Luz opening up to Amity by throwing random things out in the open or starting a conversation sometimes would just freak her out more, in a NO STOP way. Would it come through Lilith then? Maybe through Lilith talking to Amity about the Eda/Luz interactions?? I can’t wrap my head around how the heck these two will eventually grow closer and I LOVE IT

GOD these are SUCH GOOD QUESTIONS. both of which deserve full-length fic but since i'm never sure how much energy or inspiration i'll have, i will tell u what i know for now!

the collector actually played a role in my original outline for the luz POV fic -- in that storyline, he was the one who told luz that the grimwalkers don't "break" by themselves, that belos just gets mad and breaks them himself and then fixes them. because the collector does not understand that all of the grimwalkers are different. i ended up scrapping that because i wanted to play more with the horror of luz's growing isolation & her putting two-and-two together herself... i had an ao3 commenter suggest that maybe belos never FOUND the collector in this timeline, since elsewhere and elsewhen couldn't have happened. i definitely haven't thought about a branched-off no-time-travel canon divergence to worldbuild properly around that, but it's a possibility. at the same time i AM compelled by luz meeting the collector and having this extremely complicated "to free or not to free" dilemma -- if i bring him into the storyline, i want to be able to do him justice, you know?

as for amity.... god i'd need to write a Much slower-burn fic to work out the precise details of exactly how and why and when amity starts warming up to luz. but i think you're spot-on in that it happens through other people more often than through luz herself. i'm really compelled by the concept of amity and luz having this complex mutual attraction and these complex shared secrets and messy power dynamics prior to luz being able to cede more of her power.... there's something SO delicious to me about amity being terrified of catching luz's attention while also wanting her while also having no idea what that means, and luz being so careful about not abusing her power and so sick with guilt and so worried that she's overstepping while also being so starved for any honest connection..... whuff.

i don't think that amity will Eternally be as mistrustful of luz as she is in the immediate aftermath of belos's death. she has a lot going on stress-wise and has funneled that into projecting ill intent & danger onto luz. as time goes by and she becomes more confident that lilith is safe and that luz herself actually intends to keep her promises, and that luz really Doesn't have any interest in framing amity or ruining her life.... there'll be more of a sense of understanding. granted, still with the trappings of the political situation, amity's worries about autonomy aren't going away anytime soon & neither are luz's worries about abusing her power. but it won't always be this Fraught, if that makes sense.

in addition to taking cues from lilith, i think the other biggest factor is actually hunter. amity TRULY believes at this point that she doesn't care about him, because he's mostly just been a nightmare pain in her ass, but like.... she does. she Really does. around 80% of her fear of luz is wrapped up in what she sees in hunter and how she thinks he's being hurt/mistreated/exploited. amity has enough insight to guess that something is deeply wrong with hunter + with his relationship to luz, but she Doesn't have enough context to know WHY that is. it's way more belos's fault than it's ever been luz's. she doesn't understand that luz loves hunter for his own sake and considers him irreplaceable (she cannot stop assigning values to people based on power & assumes that everyone else does the same thing). so luz's anxiety and grief and clinginess read to her as possessiveness, control, entitlement.

i think that amity's view of luz will Drastically change once she realizes how genuinely luz loves hunter and wants him safe/happy/taken care of. that recontextualizes pretty much all of the scariest things that luz has ever done.

in the meantime, though, it's definitely in luz's best interests to back off. and i think that she does know that. she's not always great at reading social cues but she IS smart enough to figure out that amity is scared. when reassuring amity and extending an olive branch just makes amity shut down, luz will be like yeah, okay. i don't want to force you to spend time with me any more than i want to force hunter to spend time with me. you can hate me forever i'm fucked up and evil. just keep giving a shit about my hunter. ok??

[crimeronan]

Quick question about your Princess Luz AU, does Raine still try to fake brainwash like in the show?

right now i don't THINK that the events of eda's requiem happen in the same way. i'm playing fast and loose with the canon timeline, i've basically postponed or overwritten all of the canon events that Should have happened (eda's curse overtaking her completely when the elixirs stop working, the day of unity, raine and eda reuniting, etc).

so with my current timeline, raine and eda haven't reconciled until after belos's death. i'm not sure how darius and raine find each other out in this timeline, but i think it's less dramatic than the canon.

but it IS possible for the events of eda's requiem to happen, in an alternate timeline of this AU. the only reason i'm saying they haven't happened in the main timeline is because i think that the luz POV fic would have referenced it, especially if luz and raine are close.

(the fic really only involves luz's relationships with belos and hunter because that was the only way to keep it from being a complexly plotted monstrosity.)

it's interesting and compelling as HELL to think about, though. ESPECIALLY if the events happen during luz's Year Of Hell. aka when she's sixteen and belos is still alive.

at that point, belos trusts her a lot more with the truth about his Atrocities, he fully believes that she's on his side and is just as nasty as he is. so i think he might just straight-up tell her the truth about raine being drugged bc of rebel antics.

and like. wow TALK ABOUT YET ANOTHER THING TO FEEL HORRIFIC ABOUTTT WHUFF

like. luz knowing that the music teacher that she likes So Much is getting all of these headaches for a reason.... that maybe they're developing an illness that will last even after the drugs wear off... when she's already so hypervigilant about looking for chronic illness symptoms in hunter...

knowing that she could tell raine the truth about what's happening to them. and being scared to do so because she can't risk any personal rebellion getting back to belos. and having to choose what matters most to her. and knowing that no matter what choice she makes, she'll feel horrible about the risks and potential consequences

and then RAINE becoming distant from luz, because they're scared they'll blow their cover if they don't. similarly to how they pulled away from hunter and started acting weird and quiet around him in the canon. that goes doubly if they clock that luz knows what's going on. raine wouldn't want to make her feel more guilty and also wouldn't be able to stand it if she Didn't feel guilty and would feel bad about that.

and raine can't risk telling luz the truth either. bc if she lets something slip to belos (or goes to belos on purpose) then raine is Fucked

HOOOO BOY. what a horrible horrible horrible mess for both of them. it's honestly good that i didn't concept it back when writing the OG fic bc it would have been too delicious not to write. and poor luz has been through Enough. omg.