A/N: Yes, it's me, back after a month of writing nothing to give you two stories in a week. Oops.
Genderbending is usually Not My Thing, but someone sent me this prompt about Luz working out that they're not cis because of it, and I had some ideas.
At first this was just post-canon to save time on trying to fit it into a particular place in the episodes, but then it turned into a thing because I can't not worldbuild apparently. The Emperor's defeated, but Luz is still in the Boiling Isles trying to build a portal home/trying not to let the Isles descend into complete anarchy.
I use she/her for Luz and he/him for Hunter initially and then switch to they/them for both of them later on; hopefully that's not too confusing. No specific labels for either of them show up in-story, but I tried to write Luz as nonbinary/agender and Hunter as transfeminine. Enjoy!
Luz wakes up, as usual, to the sound of distant screaming, punctuated by crunching noises as Eda methodically disembowels her alarm clock. At this point, she's used to it, and she might even have slept through it if it weren't for King at her feet complaining loudly about how Luz Noceda of the Human Realm, Champion of the Titan, Vanquisher of the Evil Emperor Belos, She Who Has Very Nice Hair, can't even enforce a noise ordinance.
"King, buddy, just –" Luz stops short, coughs violently in an effort to dislodge her voice, and tries again.
"King, just ignore it." Her voice is screwed up. It started off at its normal register, then cracked and lost several octaves. That's a little bit of a problem.
"Am I sick?" Luz asks, groaning and trying to haul herself off the floor. She succeeds, but it takes longer than usual and she nearly faceplants into her pillow when it feels like her limbs are all conspiring against her.
"Okay, probably sick. King, what horrifying Isles virus do my symptoms look like?"
King looks up at her and shrugs.
"None of them, as far as I know, but you do look different."
"Different how?"
"How should I know? All you humanoids looks the same!"
Luz sighs and makes her way to the bathroom to properly examine her symptoms. She stubs her toe on the threshold, but otherwise her limbs seem to be mostly under control. That's a good sign. Her reflection in the cloudy mirror over the sink doesn't look that different, but her jaw is more square than usual and there are the straggly beginnings of a mustache on her upper lip.
Luz glances around to make sure there are no unexpected interlopers, then takes a look under the waistband of her sweatpants. Okay, so overnight she woke up in a guy's body.
Honestly, in terms of weird things that have happened on the Isles, this isn't even in the top ten. It seems a little too elaborate to be a juvenile prank, and not harmful enough to be a serious attack, so she'll just get one of her friends to reverse the spell and be off to build a government and try to find a way home. And maybe she'll stay like this for a few days, since she has bigger priorities than fixing it and she's always wanted an awesome mustache.
The stairs seem longer and windier than usual, and full of weird Medieval-looking tapestries and elaborate candelabra that seem to be made out of moose antlers, but that's just one of the hazards of sentient houses and Luz puts it down to Hooty having an existential crisis. The kitchen is in much the same state, draped in fabric and pointy things. Eda's sitting at the kitchen table, grouchily staring into a mug of apple blood, now sporting a waist-length white beard.
"Eda! The curse got you too?"
"By the looks of it, it got everyone on the Isles," Eda says, gesturing toward the crystal ball on the table. A tall woman vaguely recognizable as Perry Porter is standing in the town square, surrounded by panicking witches and demons, reading off facts. "Mysterious, overnight, nobody knows who or what caused it, blah, blah, blah. The usual."
"Is there a way to fix it?" Luz asks.
"A curse this scale is incredibly powerful, and requires incredible amounts of power to remove. We might be able to remove it if we got together the old Coven heads, but the best bet is finding who cast the curse and convincing them to remove it."
"But that would mean searching the whole Isles! Are we sure we couldn't find the coven heads?"
"The ones in exile are scattered across the world. Some might even have found portals and be in other worlds by now. And unless you know nine other witches powerful enough, we don't have the power to lift the curse."
…
They sit in the newly-gloomy kitchen for a while, Luz thinking up ever more complicated plans that Eda dismisses with groans and corrections, and the dream team starts to join them.
"The dream team" is what Luz has taken to calling her friends and the inhabitants of the Owl House. Edric is the only person who doesn't hate the name, but that's not exactly relevant. They are a dream team, and if they could defeat Emperor Belos, this will be a walk in the park.
Raine is blissfully unaffected by the curse and listens to Eda's complaints and Luz's plotting, looking vaguely amused by most of it. King is also much the same, and is positively gleeful that he can hide in Eda's beard as well now. Gus has a full-body illusion on, so he doesn't look any different, but he hasn't quite worked out how to disguise his voice.
"This is a disaster!" he wails, flopping over onto the kitchen table. His feet don't touch the ground. "I spent so long waiting to get taller and for my voice to get deeper, and it's all for nothing!"
"Aww, Gustopher, we'll find out how to reverse the curse," Luz says, patting him on the shoulder.
Someone knocks on the door, and she gets up to answer it. Ever since Belos's defeat, people visit the Owl House to ask for advice, or complain about a law, or just to thank Luz, and she's still getting used to it.
Amity stares blankly at Luz when the door opens, then blinks and waves vaguely. She's about six inches taller, with dark circles under her eyes. She looks – pointier, for lack of a better term, knees and elbows and cheekbones sticking out, but she's still fairly androgynous.
"Hey," Amity says. "We need to fix this. I have hair in places where there should not be hair. I have hair in places where I didn't even think there could be hair. This is bad."
Luz sighs and listens to them complain and mutter and worry. She's not sure why most of them have deemed this an emergency, since it's not even that bad, but apparently it's an emergency. And when it's an emergency, Luz Noceda of the Human Realm, Champion of the Titan, Vanquisher of the Evil Emperor Belos, Keeper of the Sacred Toothbrushes of the Isles, is the one who fixes things.
"It's even affected the demons," Eda says. "I mean, look at the architecture!"
"The curse did that?" Luz asks, pointing at a particularly gory Medieval tapestry covering the fridge.
"Uh-huh. Demon biology is weird, kid."
"Is all this that bad, though?" Luz asks. "I mean, haven't you ever even been curious about what this might be like?"
"Sure, but if people are curious about gender and all that, they can cast spells on ourselves when and how they want to," Raine says sharply. "This is a violation of bodily integrity for everyone on the Isles."
That's a fair point. If Luz lets little things like this slide, she's setting a bad precedent for how people can use magic. If it's okay to change someone's body without their permission, what's to stop murder?
"Okay," Luz says. "I'm going to go save the day. Anyone know where this kind of magic might come from?"
There's a lot of shrugging, so Luz heads to the library. There's only one librarian on duty, and they seem preoccupied with the sudden influx of witches demanding information on how to undo curses, so Luz doesn't have to deal with the minor technicality that she still doesn't have a library card.
She pokes through aisles of dusty books about curses, but most of them seem far more concerned with the practicalities of how to turn one's enemies into lizards than with how to change them back. She does find a bit of information about large-scale wild magic, in the back of an old encyclopedia.
Casting spells over a large area, such as the entire Isles, is impractical for two reasons. First, the sheer power necessary makes it difficult, and second, the lack of precision frequently makes it unhelpful. Witches and demons seeking a specific outcome rarely use large-scale spells unless their sole aim is chaos.
Well, Luz can think of plenty of people whose sole aim is chaos: all her friends, for one. But someone powerful enough to cast a spell that all the coven heads together could barely undo? Eda, at the height of her power, the greatest witch on the Boiling Isles, might have been able to, but these days she can't even magic away a cobweb without things blowing up.
"Who else is still powerful?" she wonders out loud, and still startles herself with the sound of her voice. There's a chorus of shushes, and Luz reluctantly shuts up.
This sort of thing isn't Belos's style. It could be one of the coven heads trying to get revenge, but again, it just isn't very effective revenge to give the kid who defeated you a breathtakingly awesome mustache. It might just be a random effect of wild magic getting released, but it affected everyone the same way, so that's unlikely. Who is powerful, but doesn't care about having power and just does things because they think it'll be fun?
"Of course! The Collector!"
There's a louder chorus of shushing, but Luz is already on her way out, sending a frantic text to Eda letting her know where she's going. The Collector doesn't care about power, but they'd do something like this just to watch people freak out. That's, like, their whole thing.
…
Luz doesn't recognize Hunter until he greets her gloomily, somewhere just below the Titan's nostrils. Luz is worn out and bruised from climbing and has just about decided that it is totally not worth giving up her epic mustache for this, and Hunter looks annoyingly poised and ready for anything, even if his hair is longer and now keeps falling in his eyes.
"Hey, Hunter. Here to undo the curse?"
"Of course. You said that people don't trust me, so I'm doing good deeds to build their trust," Hunter says, looking very satisfied.
"Great," Luz says, and keeps climbing. Thank God it's not much further.
The crevice in the Titan's skull is exactly how she remembers it, cold and dark and vaguely ominous. Luz crumples one of her light glyphs, then another, marking the way back to the entrance just in case.
"Ooh, finally some visitors!" a voice says, echoing through the passageway. Luz squeezes her way past a last few rocks and into the bigger cavern beyond. There are passages radiating outward from it, and she's grateful that they marked the path.
"Um, yes, it's us, Your Honor. Or do you prefer Your Highness?"
Luz smacks Hunter in the ribs and shushes him. The important thing is not to show fear when negotiating with fae. Or maybe that's when negotiating with bears. Close enough.
"Did you curse everyone on the Isles?" Luz asks, addressing a random shadow on the far side of the room.
"Did I?" The Collector pops out of a shadow and flashes around the room until Luz gets dizzy trying to keep watching them. "Oh, right, I did."
The Collector won't respond well to orders or threats, but Luz might be able to persuade them.
"Why go to all that effort?" she asks. Hunter scowls and raises his staff, but doesn't say anything.
"Why not?" the Collector asks, bouncing off the ceiling and into Luz's own shadow. "It's so fun to mess with the fleshbags. They get all upset over silly little things like gender."
"I mean, I'm not that upset," Luz mutters. "I have a cool mustache and stuff."
"I don't mind either," Hunter says. "This is much better than my old body, anyway."
The Collector gives a shrill, cackling laugh and disappears down a side passageway, and Hunter turns to Luz.
"Well, if nobody actually minds, then mission accomplished, right?" He laughs, but it sounds like he's in quite a lot of pain. "Turns out it's better this way, let's all go home."
"Everyone did mind," Luz says sharply. "Amity and Gus were miserable, and we have to reverse the curse for them."
"Then why don't we mind?"
Well, maybe it's – no.
Or maybe – no.
What about – no.
All of Luz's rationalizations are leading to dead ends, except one. And sure, she could live without the constant voice cracks, but it's not all that different from a girl body. She doesn't love it, she doesn't hate it. And she's never felt like she fit in with the girls, although she used to assume it was because she was weird, but maybe it's not just that. And, honestly, gender just seems like a huge waste of time, and she doesn't get why people care.
She's not a girl. Good to know.
Hunter seems to be having a similar series of realizations, as far as they can tell.
"Well, uh, that's not what I expected out of this," Hunter says weakly.
"Listen, the fact that we're both having a gender crisis doesn't change the fact that what you did was totally wrong!" Luz calls in the approximate direction of where they think The Collector went. There's a faint echo from one passageway that sounds a bit like "I don't care!"
"People should be able to decide what their own bodies look like! I mean, you wouldn't like if I stuck you in a cow body or something, would you?"
"Ugh, fine," a voice says right behind them, and Luz jumps and yelps. "I'll reverse the spell. It was just a bit of fun, anyway. Titan, you people are so boring sometimes."
The Collector snaps what might be their fingers, and Luz endures the rather uncomfortable process of their bones melting and then resolidifying.
"Well, that was easy," Luz says. Their voice is back to normal. "Let's get out of here."
The walls seem to get closer and closer together, until Luz has to squeeze their way through into the sunlight. Far below them, life seems to have returned to normal, and there are no obvious explosions or gaping rips in the fabric of reality itself. Hunter has their hands propped on their knees and is hyperventilating, but that's a normal, manageable problem.
"Want to go start reforming the legal system?" Luz asks tentatively.
"No. I'm going to lock myself in my room, alone, and then sit there and come to terms with what just happened. For several days. Don't come looking for me."
"Okay, have fun with that," Luz says, starting down the narrow path down. Then, something else occurs to them, and they rush back up to pat Hunter on the shoulder. "But whenever you're ready, I throw the best coming-out parties."
"I'll … keep that in mind," Hunter says, looking a little less panicky. "Good luck establishing a stable new government."
"Good luck with your gender!" Luz says cheerfully, and sets off.