Your Touch
Finally, after sitting on this for seven months, I can post this wonderful Lumity piece from the endlessly talented @gibbledygoo! This was the last piece I was able to secure before their work on the upcoming The Elves of Amaranth took precedent. Luz and Amity in the library was one of the earliest scenes I envisioned in my fic, Your Touch | Freedom to be Me, but it underwent a number of changes along the way as the lore (and word count...) expanded in my head. Originally, Luz and Amity would wind up in an arrangement where Luz would treat Amity's severe touch starvation in exchange for Amity not betraying her knowledge of the wild witch Eda and apprentice to the Emperor's Coven. A lot has changed. A lot stays the same. It's always tragic and it's always beautiful, and it's always worth it. EDIT: Wow, this went way more viral than I expected! Hello everyone! A little something about the fic this art is for. Your Touch is a fanfic of The Owl House, an alternate timeline AU in which Luz was homeless for five years before finding her way to the Boiling Isles, but more than that, it's an exploration of how trauma continues to shape a person long after the situation which caused it has ended. It's about how hard it can be to move on when the memories still feel utterly pertinent to the present, and the challenges faced by people even after their situation has improved. It's about how healing isn't a linear process which necessarily leads to a life one might call "normal," and how relationships and love are impacted by maladaptive coping mechanisms. It's also a story about being queer, and how even an accepting culture isn't necessarily a utopic one. It's about learning how to go on after breaking, because even broken people can be beloved. TLDR: I'm an older writer with a background in psychology and I overthink the heck out of things. I wrote this story as a love letter to both the series and the themes behind TOH, and drew a lot from my own experiences as an autistic, impoverished, bisexual trans woman with PTSD. If there were any more letters after my name, I really would just be a bowl of alphabet soup.