Work Text:
If Rio had to come crawling out of an unmarked grave and worm her way into the coven right in the middle of the Road, Agatha does wish she’d have the basic decency to fulfill every part of the summons, request for Advil in particular. Strong and smart, pleasant-looking and the best at her craft—whatever, sure, fine—but couldn’t she have bagged some pills to go with her knife? She moved in and out of Agatha’s house easily enough anyway, and she doesn’t doubt for a second that she knew everything Agnes had kept in her bedside drawer.
(Agatha’s never even been one to shy away from pain, and Rio knew that. Maybe that makes her growing headache yet another game disguised as a gesture, another flower served with a flourish—maybe this is just meant to be another thorn-prick to her finger, right before her lady takes it to her tongue.)
At the very least, it’d give her the option of a coma the next time Jen started running her mouth. Suppressing the permanent migraine that presented itself around these witches might also subdue the niggling feeling of homicidal rage coursing through her bloodstream, and as much as she hates to admit it, that might be what it takes for them to get out of this damned place. Not that their green witch is much inclined to agree.
Don’t, she’d begged, a young boy bleeding out in her hands. A teenager, a son, a witch in their coven—a witch still in their coven, death drawing in and away like the tide. Agatha stands her guard until the rest of the coven retreats too, and as she watches a child bundled in her own cloth breathe, she remembers what it’s like for her mind to be quiet.
What it’s like to hope.
“Still alive,” she observes, once Teen stirs. “Great.”
He doesn’t falter, and isn’t that familiar, the furrow in his brow and the twitch to his fingers when he asks whether that sigil of his is hers too. Her answer disappoints him, unsurprisingly, but she opens her big fat mouth and says something kind. Reassuring.
“You don’t have to know a person’s name to know who they are,” she tells him, and she thinks of a green hood drifting between the dappled leaves, a tiny hand wrapped around her index finger. The boy with dark brown eyes staring into hers as he chanted in Latin, who smiles now at her when she speaks.
It’s a nice moment. But Teen has a big fat mouth too, and the second he says her name, she already knows what’s coming. “What really happened to your son?” he asks, and Agatha—Agatha sits there for a split-second, staring into those young doe eyes and debates actually telling him the truth—and Agatha doesn’t know who she is anymore. Who she might become on this Road, how it might change her again. She doesn’t know who he might be either.
Here’s one part that never changes: Agatha stands and does what she does best. She leaves.
The ache uncoiling in her temples doesn’t abate, not even as she walks away, not even at the sight of Rio, sprawled out long and lithe with her feet to the fire and familiar petals sprouting at the other end of the log. Agatha summons her usual mask for the coven, but the edges fray almost instantly as she finds herself reaching—at last, as expected—for the stupid flower and claims the seat it held for herself.
(She doesn’t miss the way the witch at her right draws her knees closer to her chest, fingers tapping restlessly along her wrists, eyes tracking all over her only to drop to the dirt when Agatha glances over.)
Jen goads her into joining the rest of them in bragging rights and battle scars, the first to smile even before Agatha relents—because why the hell not.
Because Alice had asked about Teen, because they’d been laughing around the fire, because she’d taken the spot next to the person who already knows about most of her scars anyway. Because this is the first time that she’s had the chance to feel the warmth off her skin and the heat of a good pyre in centuries. Because she’s able to think, and that means that she’s able to admit—to herself, at least—that she’s missed this.
She can sense the weight of Rio’s attention slip over her as soon as she reaches for her sleeve—like a breeze, like a cloak, like a second skin, parting clean under a blade to expose the temple of a beating heart. Like homecoming. Agatha meets a death stare with a smile to match, the wicked curve of Rio’s mouth blooming pleased and proud as she turns back to the flames with a soft chuckle.
“You ever hear of the Daughters of Liberty?” she throws to the crowd, and straightens a bit when cackles ring around the clearing without further aggravating her in the slightest. Rio seems to sway closer with every caught breath, and for one moment, she sees it all over again—dark hair rippling under endless nights and a changing moon, fingers kissed with earth tracing reverentially over each scar she can no longer name, that same brilliant, indulgent smile leveled directly at her with a rush for every passed trial—and then her favourite headache parts her lips once more.
“I’ve got a scar.”
“No, you don’t,” she returns, rapid-fire. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been; some things have very much always been the same, will always be the same—many parts of Rio included. But Rio doesn’t even deign to look at her now.
“Yes,” she insists, slow and not quite so soft now, but not unlike it either, “I do.”
She can tell when the witches’ attention swirls in towards her, fog in a funnel, the predator in a play. The glee in the atmosphere falls away to roving eyes, and Agatha bites down hard enough on her tongue to taste blood.
“A long time ago,” she says, drawing in the breath of a whistle through her teeth. “I loved someone.” The ghost of her gaze skirts here and there and again as she speaks; light and gentle, all the good and none of the nuance. One act, distilled down to a job rather than a choice. Rio turns her head partway to the left, and Agatha turns too; as usual, as always. “And it hurt them,” she continues, and Agatha’s elbow presses so hard into her hand it feels like she’s pinning it in place. Maybe she is, maybe she’s stopping herself from doing anything stupid. Maybe she wants to do it anyway. Maybe it’s more than simple want.
Then, “She is my scar.”
Silence; loud, encroaching. Her eyes slide towards Rio against her will, only to find that same stare already locked in on her, and pain flares everywhere through her body—twin stars at her temples, white-hot behind her eyes, claws closing tight at the base of her skull and the hollow of her throat, a vice of a grip around the treacherous thing in her chest. That same never-ending agony washes back in through all the channels she left open, all the ones Rio carves through over and over, headstrong and stubborn against her thin-stretched mind and useless hands, curling white-knuckled around Teen’s shoulders less than an hour ago.
Agatha shoves herself back to her feet, never one to sit for long. “I’m going to stretch my legs.”
She doesn’t make it far, whatever intrinsic force that’s always told her where her path leads—born in her bones, scratched down to the marrow by time—tugging her to a halt soon enough; beyond the branches, left among the weeping leaves. Her masks are gone here, with nobody to witness them; it’s been so long since she cared to even think what any other witch would make of her, and now she has four of them circling her. Like sharks in the water, a dagger scraping across wooden boards, creeping near and nearer the more time she throws away.
But it’s time Teen now gets to keep.
(Even now, in the liminal, limitless space between trials, she’s being tested—and she can say with complete and utter certainty that it hasn’t grown any more in her regard compared to centuries ago. In fact, if she includes recent developments, these past hours have soured her taste for it entirely.)
Agatha stands, alone, and she tries to ignore further examining any of the individual thoughts racing through her head. The trial and Lorna Wu’s ballad, the flicker of relief on Alice’s face to harmonize with Jennifer’s out of the firelight and Rio’s voice twisting by her ear all night, the blossom of an offering tucked in her pocket and Teen laid to rest with blood still staining his skin. The past, present as ever. The shattered pieces of her magic, stolen so far from her grasp and screaming for her attention anyway, begging to be brought back—to be made whole once more, put together and drawn through to reality the only way she’s ever known.
In the only place where her power has been defined as something exceptional rather than evil.
Agatha knows she’s unsuccessful when she hears footsteps striding up behind her. It’s done with intention, leaves crunching underfoot rather than a shadow drifting through to claim what’s hers, and she knows, power and pain building behind her eyes, that this is the death blow she might as well take.
Those same fingers that sealed every wound and every break with a kiss tangle gently, so gently in her hair—careful, soothing, kind. And it doesn’t matter what she knows or not, because this is what she did: the woods and the wild, the touch and the taming of her own mind, the hearth, and at the terrible, tender heart of it all, the home. Revival, reunion, release, and Rio, winding through the strands of her hair. Agatha revels in the foreign-familiar sensation, tipping her head back before she turns to meet eyes gone soft in the night.
She operates by pure instinct, then. By what her bones tell her, what her body has always known—there is damage, and there is death, and there is everything she can do to reach the closest thing to it. Mind clear and made, she draws Rio in, and Rio lets her, palms burning like beacons at her shoulder and waist, a siren and a storm and a shore to dash herself upon. Agatha’s eyes sink shut in response, a ritual remembered in the posture and the pose, one hand clasped over the nape of her lover’s neck, cradled close enough for her to catch the sweetest notes of myrrh and rising smoke. Rio doesn’t move away, reluctant to even shift enough for Agatha to take her heart in her hands, sweeping back the hood of hair that hides her gaze.
(She can’t conduct the thinnest stream of magick anymore, can’t pluck the threads weaving among each element around her, can’t reap what sings behind every spell on stage. Yet Rio blinks at her, silver in the stardust, leaning into her touch, and isn’t that just as real as a kind of witchcraft balanced between her fingertips anyway? Isn’t that the world nestled between her palms, glowing savage and settled without spilling a single drop, balanced on a knife’s edge and a whisper, waiting for her turn?)
It’s instinct, she thinks, and the best part is that she doesn’t need to think at all, not until—
“Agatha,” she murmurs; like an oath, a vow, a promise made to each other under the unlit sky of a new moon, none as witness but the Triple Goddess and the trees.
Like something to break.
Rio’s hands curl over her wrists as she tilts her chin, an approximation of a challenge if she didn’t know the habit indicated a confession. She remembers what happened the last time all too well.
Lie, truth, something straddling the line, she doesn’t want to hear it again.
Agatha hums a little instead, allowing herself a fleeting, searching glance as she dips back in—does she even taste the same, she wonders, scorching and vivid with the embers of a bonfire searing clear from the back of her throat so that she speaks with all the spark and flame to nature condensed at its truest form, tongue searing and new life singeing her breath on Agatha’s skin—and Rio’s grasp tightens, barely, lips parting once more.
“That boy isn’t yours.”
Honesty, at long last. A boon, so rarely given until the end of the road—and she’d pleaded that it couldn’t be, for someone else; a stranger, maybe, and an accompanying sigil, but a son nonetheless. A burden, withheld with all the benevolence her beloved could afford until it had to be shared—finally a part of the coven, if that had ever been in question, as if Rio would ever find another.
A blessing, then. One that doesn’t come for free.
Rio had presented her with the truth before, and the pain has been anything but phantom ever since. Their paths had parted, and as she walked away she’d told herself it wasn’t forever. The Darkhold had said otherwise.
Her mind is her own now, and she knows who she has to thank for it, still watching her with eyes that pierce her to her core. Agatha also knows herself, and what else might be forever. What might for real, this time.
She forces herself to match Rio’s steady stare, and gives her a smile through whatever expression she wears now—whatever mask is the easiest to retrieve. The peace had been good, while it lasted. It always is.
(It’s always harder to walk away. And yet.)
For now, she leaves this too.