Chapter Text
At a young age Amity learned never to show any kind of weakness or oddness to her parents. She was a Blight and that meant perfection at all times. It meant excelling at school and having the right friends. It meant never ever being different, unless the difference was that you were better or stronger.
So of course when she turns ten and sees her soul string for the first time she lies and tells them that it goes off into the distance and not into the ground. Upon further inspection it didn’t even go into the ground like her soulmate was on the other side, it just kind of stopped.
She was confused of course, especially when everyone else was either quite literally finding their soulmates at school or talking about how they could see it going off into the distance. Why was hers just going into the ground?
She didn’t dare ask her parents; they looked at her and nodded in appreciation when she lied and said it went into the distance like everyone else's. She knew telling them would be a bad idea, worse than the fact that she lied. If she told them, that would mean that their little girl wouldn’t be perfect.
Amity decided to ask her teacher, the one who was in charge of teaching the young witches about the string attached to their fingers. The teacher had explained that the person on the other end was your soulmate and that they were bound by the same magic energy. That when you found them you became stronger together.
After explaining that, the teacher asked if there were any questions before she moved on. Some kids raised their hands and asked how they found their soulmates and others asked if they would be stronger if they found them sooner. The teacher answered many star-eyed students' questions before Amity got the courage to ask hers.
In all honestly she was waiting for someone to ask it, it only seemed natural to ask. But as people kept asking, she started to realize maybe she was the only one who’s string went into the ground. She swallowed and raised her hand quickly asking the teacher what a string going into the ground meant.
The teacher gave her a sad look and explained that a string going towards the ground or straight up meant that one did not have a soulmate or that their soulmate had died. The teacher then looked at her carefully before asking if her string went into the ground. The teacher, while probably having the best intentions, set off the whole class with whispers about how Amity Blight didn’t have a soulmate.
Naturally Amity panicked because she could not be different, she was a Blight. She said she was curious, when that didn’t work she claimed she was asking for a friend, and when Boscha her ‘friend’ asked who it was, Amity panicked and said Willow. That Willow was the one with her string going into the ground, that Willow was the imperfect one, the broken one, not her. Not Amity Blight.
Willow gave Amity an odd look, but did nothing to refute her statement. In a matter of seconds the class turned on the other girl and were throwing insults at the poor girl. Things like you’ll be alone forever, or now you're not only half a witch you're half a soul. That maybe she just wasn’t powerful enough to warrant a soulmate.
It wasn’t until after the class that Amity realized what had happened. She ran for the bathroom, tucked into a stall and cried. She just let Willow, someone who was her friend for years, get bullied by the whole class because she was too afraid to admit she didn’t have a soulmate. She didn’t have a soulmate. Amity Blight wasn’t perfect, she didn’t have another half waiting somewhere in the world to find. She was the one not powerful enough for a soulmate.
She pushes that to the back of her mind and forces herself into the idea that soulmates were stupid. That the concept of them were stupid. And it was, wasn't it? The idea that there was someone out there that would make her stronger. She was a Blight, she was plenty strong on her own. She didn’t need anyone else to make her more powerful. She didn’t need or want to be half of something. She was a whole person on her own.
That’s how she operated for years, telling herself she was fine on her own. That she wasn't broke. That it didn’t matter. She was excelling in classes, and that's all that mattered. She told herself she wasn't jealous every time someone her age found their soulmate. Frankly she was almost disgusted that some of them found their soulmates so early. Wouldn’t they get tired of each other at some point? Or fall out of love/friendship like her and Willow?
When asked about her soulmate and if the string was getting tighter, Amity always brushed it off saying when it happened it would happen. To her friends it made her cool how blasé she was about the whole thing. Amity was grateful for that, but wasn’t grateful when they wondered who was on the other end of her string. They always joked that on the other end of her string was a strong handsome rouge witch that was fighting his way through every monster on the boiling isle to get to her. She would just snort and tell them they were stupid before heading off to the nearest quite place to cry. There was no one coming for her.
She became okay with it eventually. She stopped crying anytime after people talked about it, she didn’t run away and hide when people found their own soulmates. She just became numb to it. She had to or she would go crazy, especially with her brother and sister constantly teasing her about it.
Amity just kind of learned to ignore the string all together, it wasn’t hard after all it just limped on the ground. So, imagine her surprise one day when she wakes up looking in the mirror and notices that the string was no longer going into the ground but was jutting out the window tight for the first time since she was ten.
She jumped about five feet in the air and screeched loud enough her siblings to come crashing into her room ready to defend her. If she wasn’t so worried and confused about how in the actual heck her string was working now four years later, she would be amazed at how fast her siblings came to her aid. Or that they came at all.
“Mittens!” they exclaimed, running, checking her over for any possible injuries before grilling her on why she screamed. She tells them the truth that her string was tighter. They gave her an odd look not realizing why that was such a big deal. After all, didn't it do that all the time? Loosen and tighten.
Amity quickly nods to get her siblings off her back thanking the stars that her parents weren’t home to hear the outburst. They would be much less forgiving about her freaking out. After all Blights were calm and collected at all times.
Amity decides to ignore the string at first thinking that maybe it was some kind of joke and soon it would just go back to the ground where it has been since she could see it. She doesn't let herself hope, instead pushes harder into her school work. Adding ten more reps to her after school training every time she got distracted by the string. It ends up being a lot and she wonders if the others get distracted by their strings or if they are just so used to it flowing where they could see it that they just ignore it like she used to.
She gets control of it after about a week. At which point she’s convinced she’s broken it again, worse than before. How could a string go from in the ground towards nothing to suddenly alive and moving like it was attached to an actual person. A person who, from studying the string, moves around a lot.
She thinks about asking about it, if that was normal, but doesn’t for fear of people finding out about her string. So she ignores it to the best of her abilities and tries to quell the hope that is slowly spreading though her heart.
Amity is on her way to school with her newest and best abomination yet when her string gets tighter than it’s ever been. Slowly forming a straight line rather than the wavy line she was used.
She decides to investigate a bit, and finds Willow in a small clearing doing magic on a plant. Something the other witch isn’t supposed to do. Her string leads over to a bush past Willow. It would be easy to walk past or around the other witch and find what’s behind the bush, but instead she panics, like when she was a kid, and Willow suffers again because of it.
Amity tries to tell herself that she was just trying to push Willow to be her best but knows down in her heart that her old friend never responds to harsh criticism like she did. Amity would be pushing herself to the point of passing out if someone talked to her the way she talked to Willow. Willow on the other hand, was a gentler soul and needed a different kind of encouragement.
Amity puts the whole thing into the back of her mind and goes to school triple checking and then checking again that her abomination was absolutely perfect to present to the teacher. She’s feeling confident up until Willow walks in wheeling her abomination pot with her, Amity stares at her; or rather her pot. The pot that her string was going straight into. She gets up and circles Willow and the pot making sure that, yes her string went into the pot and not just through it towards something else.
Willow questions her, Amity snaps not feeling bad one bit, but could you blame her? Her string went straight into an abomination pot! An abomination that Willow made of all things. There was absolutely no way this was real and she was going to kill her brother and sister when she found them because this had to be a prank.
She tries to ignore the fact that the string on her ring finger flows right behind her the whole class period. She debates leaving the room to go to the bathroom when Willow presents, so that she doesn't have to see her string attached to an abomination of all things. Oh god, what would her parents think? Was it even possible? Abominations were creatures created out of magic and a bunch of measured ingredients, there was nothing of real substance in them.
She decided that it’s a metaphor for how she's connected to the abomination track. That she’s doing something right with her life.
Amity tries to go before Willow so that - A: they don’t have to do more homework and B: she can ask to leave when Willow presents. Even though she’d come up with a metaphor for why her string went into an abomination pot, she didn’t want to see it. She didn’t want to watch her string curl around the finger of a pile of goop. The idea of that was almost worse than her string never attaching to anything.
She doesn't get to go before Willow and is forced to watch. She debates closing her eyes but decides against it, she couldn’t look afraid or weak in front of the class.
The thing that quite literally shoots out of Willow’s pot was unequivocally not an abomination. Amity is very extra sure she’s dreaming. She pinches herself to make sure. It hurts which means indeed her string was attached around the finger of - of whatever the heck that thing was that came out of Willow's pot.
At least her string wasn’t attached to an abomination, though it could be attached to something much worse. The teacher is enthralled by whatever it is and gives Willow an A+, which if Amity wasn’t freaking out about the whole string thing, she’d be angry that the teacher gave Willow and “A” on something that so clearly wasn’t an abomination to begin with. Instead she watches and pinches herself again when the ‘abomination’ goes back into its pot and with it the string that attached her to her soulmate.
Amity is a bit miffed when the teacher takes her top student badge but decides that her pride can wait second to figuring out who and what was in the pot. She wanted to do it with poise and grace, maybe talk to Willow after school or something. She intended to handle it like a Blight. She did not intend to make a huge scene in the lunchroom, but when she caught Augustus giving the ‘abomination’ food she rushed over there fast.
She picked it up by the collar shaking it demanding answers, ignoring the looks from the other students and her own string that was as tight as could be. Amity gets into trouble with the teacher claiming that he suspected she might be jealous. This goes so much beyond jealousy over a badge, but she couldn’t get into that, not with him, not in front of everyone.
So she convinces Principal Bump that Willow had cheated, and encourages him to go have a talk with her. She goes as green as her hair when he pulls out a knife and tells Willow to cut open her project. That project was Amity's soulmate, and it wasn’t an abomination which meant it would likely die if Willow cut it open.
Amity is relieved when Augustus topples over the other abomination pots and they get away. What she's not relieved about is she finds out that that thing was a human. A human! Her soulmate was a human! A human from the human realm, where witches and magic were not even real.
It couldn’t be real, but when she runs into the human again her string is once again wrapped around the other girl's finger. The human -Luz- apparently can’t see the string or is just stupid. Either way she seems to have no real reaction to running into Amity.
Amity can’t believe her luck. First her soulmate is human, then her soulmate can’t tell that they're connected, and of course her soulmate is being taught ‘magic’ by a wanted criminal. Amity decides she’d be okay with dying.
She didn’t really mean it, she decides days later when she’s quite literally being sewn into a book by one of her favorite childhood characters. She quite liked living, even if she didn’t like how life happened sometimes.
The hu-Luz saves her despite doing it clunky. Amity decides maybe Luz isn’t that bad, but that wasn’t the problem was it. She knew Luz wasn’t a bad person even if she did accidentally go through her diary. The problem was Luz wasn’t supposed to be a bad person or a good person, she was supposed to be Amity's person.
Amity tries to ignore it as best she can, acting as if her string was still in the ground and not wrapped around Luz’s finger. It’s easy enough mostly because she’s hardly ever around Luz. There is an odd moment when walking through the town market her string is attached to Eda, which she ignores entirely for her own sanity.
It gets harder to ignore when Luz tells her she’s going to be going to Hexside next semester. She tells Luz she needs to know two spells and frankly Amity is hoping that Luz doesn't get into her class, if only so she doesn't have to deal with all this. Of course the universe hates her and Luz gets in.
So they go to the same school now, that doesn't change anything, Amity tells herself over and over. It wasn’t so much now that her string was distracting, that Amity could deal with. What she couldn’t deal with was the fact that she actually found Luz funny and adorable. She was soulmates with a dork who hissed back at her locker. It’s kind of a win to Amity that she hasn’t gone crazy and burned the whole place to the ground.
Instead she ends up just burning all of Willow's memories. In her defense it was kind of an accident, she only meant to put a small whole in one photo, not turn them all to ash. Luz finds her and makes her help with restoring Willow’s memories. Which is honestly the least Amity can do, and she’s more than willing to help. That is until she sees two memories, the one in which she cuts Willow out of her life due to her parents, and the one where she lies and says that Willow's string goes towards the ground instead of her own.
Inner Willow almost kills them several times and Amity reinforces her resolve to never ask The Owl Lady for help, but they make it out alive with an intact, full-memory Willow, who, bless her heart, actually forgives Amity for leaving her and then getting her bullied for something that wasn’t even true. Amity is glad Willow says they’re not quite friends yet mostly because she knows in her heart she did horrible things and doesn't deserve to be forgiven.
Amity’s a good forty feet away from the owl house when Luz called after her. Amity tenses, was Luz about to yell at her finally for all the bad things she’s done? She’d deserve it, she knew, but she also knew she would likely break if Luz was disappointed in her. Even without the string attached to Luz’s finger saying they were soulmates, Amity liked Luz and cared what she thought of her.
When Luz brings up soul-strings Amity almost faints. “Willow says she knew yours pointed to the ground ever since that day,” Luz says, making Amity hang her head. Amity knew of course that Willow would put two and two together. Willow never told anyone despite how mean Amity had been to her. The fact that she didn’t tell anyone said a lot about her character.
“I just want you to know that I don’t have a string either, er well no humans do so you’re not alone,” Luz tells her and Amity does her best to not melt on the spot because how was she so perfect and stupid all at once.
Amity manages to thank Luz for trying to make her feel better. Luz gives her a big smile, and a pew pew with finger guns before walking back towards the owl house. Amity holds her hand up watching her string loosen spilling out as Luz walks further away.
“You’re right Luz, I’m not alone.”