Chapter Text
She’s always been completely reverent of you (and rightly so, you think, you’re exceptional), but as the months pass and your pregnancy progresses, you find details and traits in her that you never would have imagined.
She is attentive and protective like she never has been before; what starts as teas and massages and orgasms swiftly becomes hovering and magic used so you don’t have to. It causes more than one argument - you’re still an incredibly capable witch - but you understand her. You think you might be the same if the tables were turned. You’d only ever appear to be soft with her.
So you try something you never really have before — patience. It makes you itch, but you try. Because you don’t mind the attention, or the protection. You do, however, mind the silence.
And she has gone incredibly quiet.
She sits on the floor most mornings and evenings, pouring over books and spells and incantations. You often wake up alone, and find her hunched over parchment or leather-bound textbooks. It’s endearing at first, until you start wondering just what it is she’s looking for so intently.
Answers, you think. But more than that? A reason. Some kind of explanation for your divine miracle.
Some kind of logic in this - the rarest, most base form of magic.
You could rationalise that it’s the way she sees the world. A cycle, in black and white. That’s it’s the only way Death could.
But rationality is bullshit. You’re pregnant, and pissed off, and you really would just rather enjoy the moment.
“You can make flowers bloom at will,” you insist, irritated that you even have to justify this to her.
“Babies are different from flowers,” she points out, rather unnecessarily and without looking up from the passage she’s reading.
“The principle is the same, no? Life?”
“Life out of death, Rio murmurs, setting one book down to grab another. “It’s impossible…impossible…it’s not….”
“My love,” you interrupt softly, kneeling down to close your hands over hers. “You speak of impossible things, but look. This is real. Borne of our own design.”
Rio frowns, clearly torn. She glances down at your belly; you watch the struggle on her face.
You don’t necessarily want to call it a miracle, but maybe it’s just that. You’ve never been one for believing in those kinds of things, but you feel content enough to let this one be.
You wish she could do the same.
“Why do you seek fault with the life we made together?”
Rio softens in front of you, as though realising for the first time how you’re feeling. “Agatha,” she breathes out, shaking her head. “It is not that I seek fault. I just want to understand.”
“Is it not enough that we love each other?” you argue, feeling yourself becoming irritable. “That we are powerful beyond measure? That maybe after everything in our lives, we deserve this?”
Hearing your own words aloud, their impact makes your breath hitch, and your irritability bleeds deep.
It occurs to you then, that you should’ve anticipated this. That you, a covenless witch, defy the very rules of nature - you bend them to your power, isn’t that what you’d told Evanora? You don’t care for the rules. They’re mouldable.
But for Rio, they’re infallible.
Suddenly, the room is too small. You need to be alone.
“Agatha, wait,” she calls after you, but you’re already gone.
You walk through the woods, listening to the wind in the trees. It whistles — the sound is sweet, like the chime of a bell.
The path you’re on is windy, stretching out in front of you. You hum as you walk it. “Down, down, down the road…”
Suddenly, inside of you, your baby kicks for the first time.
You stop to gasp, covering the spot in bewilderment. “You like that, sweetheart?”
Another kick. You grin, and keep singing as you walk the road. Eventually, it bends, round and round, leading you back home.
Your wife is waiting for you. She smiles, somewhat sheepishly, and holds out her palm to you. An azalea blooms there, your favourite colour. An apology.
You sigh, soft in your acceptance. Already, motherhood is changing you.
She takes you into her arms, lifts you up because she knows it will make you laugh.
For now, you think, you’ll let it be.
Later, you lie in bed with her, in the kind of silence you don’t mind.
“Our son likes music,” you murmur with a smile, your fingers stroking through her hair where her head rests against your bump.
She looks up at you, brow raised. “Really?”
At your nod, she grins, pressing her lips to your belly. “Sing for us, then, Mama.”
And you do. You hum the beginnings of a ballad you started on the road through the woods outside your cottage. You feel her exhale, finally content for the first time in weeks. If you’d known all you had to do was sing, you’d done have it right from the start.
*
Nothing’s ever that simple.
*
She is getting more and more obsessed with every day that passes.
You, in turn, are growing more and more frustrated.
It builds inside you, like chaos magic (if that even exists), and you fight it back, back, back –
– until one day, she appears in the garden like a grand surprise, home early from a job she has no release from.
She frowns at you from the lush splendour of her prized flowerbeds, confused by your irritation. “Aren’t you pleased to see me, my love?”
“You said one month. It has barely been a fortnight.”
“Here I thought my wife would be most pleased by my early return.”
Her attempts to flirt with you only make you angrier.
“You are neglecting your work,” you insist, willing her to understand why that bothers you. “People are in pain.”
“You do not care for others, Agatha,” she laughs, unable suddenly to meet your eye. “They are unimportant.”
“I care for you,” you argue harder, stalking towards her. “You cannot do this. You cannot abandon your birthright.”
“You do not want that? You do not wish for me to be yours, and yours alone? Answerable only to you?”
And oh, she’s trying to turn it on you. It would be attractive, clever even, if it weren’t so fucking rude.
Because, yes, obviously you want that. But –
“I do not want the weight of the world on me,” you bark out. “I am carrying enough.”
Anything she is thinking to say in retort, dies in her mouth. Rio bows her head to the flowers, and this, right here, this is the most fucked up thing of all.
The silence. The acquiescence.
The malleability.
So you strike out, like a viper in the grass.
“Do you not wish to be a mother?”
Rio falters in front of you, visibly hurt. “How can you ask me that?”
“Is it not true? You are disappearing from me.”
Her cheek twitches as she gets to her feet, her spine ramrod straight as she stares at you. “I am here, when I ought not to be. How dare you question my love for our child?”
“Yes, you are here,” you say harshly, “but you are absent. Our child grows and you stay silent. You are obsessed by the unknown, and now? Now, you fear it. You fear our son.”
“Agatha.” She’s snarling now. She’s warning you. You welcome it. “I want you safe. I have to protect you and I will not be punished for that.”
“I am safe! I am not weak!”
“I did not claim you were!”
“I am not weak!”
“Agatha!”
“STOP!”
Your arms fly out, magic blasting from your palms and eviscerating the landscape of your garden. No flower survives it.
Rio is slack-jawed, silent in the carnage. You can tell you’ve upset her.
Good, you think, as you storm back inside the house, fingers still tingling. She upset you first.
That night, you pull the blankets around you, screw your eyes shut hard and try to settle. Your magic is flooding inside you - you’re unsure how much of it is you, and how much is your child.
You briefly wonder if he will have magic - if it will be lilac, or sage, or a combination of both.
A single tear slides over your nose.
You’re aware you probably over-reacted. Your wife just worries, and you’d promised both her and yourself that you’d be patient. But you’re also not stupid. It’s more than treating you as if you were made of glass. It’s treating you with caution. Like you’re a wild animal, caught in a trap.
She’s never treated you like that before. You hate it.
You hate it.
*
You do not see Rio for the rest of the month, just as she’d initially said, and while it’s probably hypocritical of you, you miss her. Fighting is not something the two of you do very often – there’s little you disagree on – and while you don’t regret what you said, you regret how it happened. There’s nothing you’d like more than to be wrapped up in her arms –things will change soon, when the baby comes. You want to enjoy being alone with her while you can.
When she does return, it is to the garden, clean and mostly fixed. You don’t have the ability to create like she can, but you’ve done the best you could — even managed to make a tulip sprout after spending hours trying.
She sees the effort you’ve gone to, and from your place inside the kitchen, you see her smile, touching her fingers gently to the tulip and the sparse patches of buds and thorns.
You know she sees it for what it is. Flowers are their love language — universal and beautiful, like both of them.
She comes to find you, and before you get the chance to speak, she’s kissing you. She presses in deep, cupping your face, and when your hands come up to clench her hips, she sighs against you.
“I love you,” she tells you, forehead pressed to yours as she stares at you, resolute. Her hand drops from your face to your stomach. “I love our son. Never doubt that.”
Your breath hitches in your throat, thick with emotion. You shake it off, sniffling as your hands sweep up her arms, settling on her shoulders.
“I won’t,” you say, kissing her again. “I promise.”
*
You don’t notice the pain in her face until it’s too late.
You’ve been feeling sick, so you’ve been resting, too caught up in recovering to notice the way your wife if acting. Like she’s lost. Like she’s mourning. You think you hear her crying in the bath one evening.
She tells you she’s fine. She tells you to take care of yourself. So you accept. You’re too tired to argue.
It’s the third day of your illness when her obligation beckons, and she announces she has to go.
She stops with one hand on the door, and turns to you over her shoulder, cheeks drawn tightly in pain.
“I will be home by the full moon,” she insists, and the meaning is not lost on either of you. Your belly is huge, and the full moon is fast approaching.
“Be safe,” you murmur, turning back to the fire and stabbing at it with the poker, daring it to spark harder.
You stare into the flames until your eyes are burning, and you don’t breathe until the door has latched softly behind your wife.
*
You’re not feeling well. You haven’t been for days. And when your wife finally returns, sombre and ashen, you finally, finally understand why.
But you don’t accept. How could you ever?
She kneels in front of you, trembling, cautious, and you start to cry. You clutch at the swell of your belly, desperately feeling for the thud of your baby’s feet inside you. They’d been there last week.
But he’s still. You’re burning, because he’s still.
Your precious miracle, your chance at redemption, is still.
And now, you are the only thing standing between him and your wife.
“My love,” Rio whispers, and how dare she have the nerve to beseech you right now. This is why she’s been quiet. This is why she’s withdrawn.
She knew.
From the moment you’d fought, she knew.
“No,” you choke out, clutching harder at your bump. “No, he isn’t…he can’t be…he cannot!”
She covers your hands, as tears fall down her cheeks. “I’m so, so sorry,” she weeps, leaning in to rest her forehead against your son (your still, baby son). You don’t know if she’s apologising to him, or you, or both of you.
And then, as shattering as realising the life inside of you is no longer growing, the truth hits you, crushing you under its weight.
For the first time in decades, you don’t want her here.
You don’t want her here.
You look down at her, where her head lays against you, and you swear to yourself this will not be the end.
You won’t let her take him.
You won’t.
“Do not come,” you say, voice shaking with a sudden anger that you makes you feel sick. “When the day arrives. Do not come.”
She exhales shakily against you. You can feel her tears on your dress.
You’d thought you’d figured it out. How to be tribal. How to have love.
Sending her away feels like dying.
Feels like death.
*
When the day comes, you run. You’re so sure you can outsmart her, with lemons and prayers and hope.
You’re so sure you can outrun Death.
But she finds you, near the river, under a rowan tree. Isn’t it always the way?
It guts you.
“I told you not to come,” you sob, across the distance that she keeps between you both. Even from afar, you can see the shadows swirling her eyes. She’s dark with her duty. Her grief.
“You do this and I will hate you forever,” you hiss, pressing yourself tighter to the tree at your back.
She is visibly struck by that - you expect her to acquiesce immediately. To refuse to gamble the love you’ve forged together.
But you see her nod, almost imperceptibly, and you choke on the way it makes you feel.
You should’ve known her love for you would never be enough to sway the law of nature.
“I cannot fight what I am,” Rio whispers, vulnerable in a way you seldom see her. She doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with her hands. “Or what I must do.”
You whimper, abruptly caught in the throws of another contraction. You feel like you’re being torn in two. You want it to stop.
But the second it does, you will lose him, so you hold onto the pain. You can’t let him die.
“Rio,” you plead, breathless and contorted as you grips the swell of your baby, holding dear the life inside so desperate to get free. “You are…the only reason…he is real.”
You watch Rio’s face tighten at that - pain you can understand. It makes you ache. “You gave him life,” you beg through tears. “Don’t take it away! Please, let him live! Please, my love! Please!”
Exhausted and burning, you dissolve, broken against the tree bark as you howl. You screw your eyes shut; scream and hurt and cry. “Please,” you wail, over and over, helpless to do anything else.
Hands on your face make you sob once more, and when you open your eyes, Rio is there, kneeling by your side, nodding.
“I can offer only time,” she says quietly, thumbs smoothing over your cheeks. At once, you can feel her magic, soothing the pain in your body.
“How much?” you pant, leaning closer to her touch as you contract again. “How much time?”
“Just breathe, Rio murmurs, reaching down and grabbing your hands in hers. “Squeeze. Push.”
She’s breaking the rules of time for you. Forsaking the one infallible truth that is the natural order.
She gives.
She gives.
*
When Nicholas is born, the pain is unbearable, and you think this must be the closest you’ve come to dying.
Rio shows no sign that’s true. She is wrecked in a way you seldom see - flush and emotional, grinning and soothing you, murmuring in your ear and stroking your hair. You welcome her cold fingertips against your burning skin, and breathe and scream and push, as everyone instructs. The pain rips and tears, but then it’s over, and he is here.
He cries and flounders in your arms like a wild animal, and you cry with him, overcome. You’d been terrified you’d never hear him; never feel the life bursting from him. You can’t look away from him, this tiny little incomprehensible thing. He settles against your chest, gurgling and snuffling, and already you can feel his strength. His magic. Your whole body swells, and you force yourself to look at Rio, though your eyes are blurry and burning.
She is utterly awestruck, you realise. Tears stain her face, and her hands are everywhere, cupping your head, cupping his, gentle and trembling. You’ve never seen her like this.
“You are incredible,” she whispers into your hair, pressing prideful kisses there as she strokes your shoulder.
And looking at your son - a baby you created together out of nothing but love and magic - you feel incredible. Powerful, in ways you imagine your mother would have sought to kill you for.
You won’t be like her, you vow, looking into your son’s tiny face (and oh, you realise, he has Rio’s nose). You won’t be his Evanora.
You will be his Rio.
You surely would break the rules of the universe for him, too.
You whisper his name for the first time - Nicholas. You try it in the air as gently as you’d tried your first spell. Rio echoes the word in wonder. How strange it must be for Death, you think, to so valiantly revere new life like this. It looks completely natural on her.
You’ve never loved her more.
*
Your home is so filled with love it’s almost suffocating.
Nicholas is a happy child - light clings to him, seems to follow him from room to room where you carry him around, filling the whole house with his aura. Rio does this too, you notice – she whirls and speeds, devout to making your baby boy laugh.
He does, every time, and every time, Rio smiles like she has the sun between her teeth.
You’re not ashamed of the fact that you spoil him - trinkets, toys, clothes, anything you can get your hands on. He deserves everything - everything you were never given.
Rio never once questions it. In fact, she’s an enabler. On occasions where she’s gone for more than three days at any one time, she brings him things from all the places she’s been – handcrafted figurines and pine cones and warm wool blankets.
You get azaleas, every time, as assuredly as Nicky laughs at Rio’s attempts to humour him. You never grow tired of it.
You lie on the grass together with him between you, showing him the leaves of your rowan tree. You do this a lot. He grins up at the leaves happily, cooing in delight as he watches them sway. He laughs like Rio —full-bodied and free.
You’ve never felt love like it.
*
You think you can ignore the final days of your pregnancy, and to your credit, you almost manage to.
Until one day, when Nicky is barely a year old, you find Rio standing over Nicky’s crib, the familiar shadow of Death along her jaw, blooming like blood on fabric.
Panic surges inside of you, and you bark her name like an order, or a threat.
She turns to you, and oh. Not blooming, you realise, but receding. This happens sometimes, after she’s been reaping. The vestige lingers, nought but a swirl in her flesh.
She seems to understand what you’d been worried about, though. She steps away from the crib, tentative in her humanity.
You try to smile through the overwhelming sickness you suddenly feel, and you hold out your hand for her to take. A silent assurance to both of you that everything’s okay; that you hadn’t actually assumed the worst.
You’re sure she doesn’t believe you.
*
It happens again when Nicky is three.
Children fall all the time, you think, when he stumbles and scrapes his knee on the windy road outside your cottage.
You clean the wound and dress it, but it gets infected anyway. Quicker than you can catch your breath, he’s feverish and weak, reduced to whimpers of pain and discomfort that make your skin crawl. You soothe his little limbs as Rio lulls him to sleep in Spanish, dabbing at his forehead with a cold compress.
“Heal him,” you beg her, tears blinding you. “Like you used to do for me.”
She just stares at him, like you don’t exist, her singing tapering off into gentle whispering notes, like fragments of a spell.
You almost miss it, could pretend you imagined it, but it’s there. Imperceptible, fleeting, but you see it. The shadow, threatening to climb the length of your wife’s neck, and swallow her face whole.
You grip Nicky’s hand, feeling that familiar panic in your gut.
You’re so sure you’re right this time — that three years was already asking too much, that you’ve taken it too far, that you don’t deserve more time with him.
You fight back tears, ignore the way she’s now looking at you as you will your magic to do what it’s never done, and heal.
Rio reaches over then, fingers snaking over your hand to squeeze as she leans down, pressing the softest of kisses to Nicky’s knee.
The wound fades — black, purple, red, pink, clear. You’re hit suddenly with memories of her doing the same to you after Evanora’s beatings — that had been okay to do, she’d said at the time. She wasn’t playing with the strands of fate.
She not supposed to do this, you think, feeling your heart break inside of you.
You’re not upset, like you should be. You’re not grateful, like you should be. You’re angry.
Not because you get to keep your son — but because it’s like she’s taunting you with it.
You know she’d never. You know that. Once again, she’s broken the rules for your family — abused her power and her authority to keep your son alive.
You love her with every fibre of your being.
Nonetheless, his existence hangs between you, growing heavier with every passing day, like a witch hung from a tree in Salem.
One day, she will take him from you. She gives with one hand, and she will take with the other.
And you, Agatha Harkness, for all your magic, will be powerless.
*
You hate that you’ve come to fear Death. You’d promised you never would.
But little Nicky is your thread of fate - he holds you together. And Rio is constantly hovering, always hovering - over the thread drawn tight, ready to take.
You know she doesn’t want to. You know she’d give anything to change the inevitable. You think she might even sacrifice herself, if she could.
She loves your son, deep in her ancient, ancient bones. And you think that’s miraculous. Death has seen the world through its inception, its wars, its pains and aches and triumphs and achievements and creations and destructions. Yet it all fades to nothing compared to him. Compared to you.
Rio doesn’t need to tell you this. It’s plain as daylight on her face, all the time. But she does tell you - in sacred moments of heat when she’s fucking you, and in the quiet of your bedroom while Nicholas lies sleeping between your bodies.
You love her with everything you have. Every breath and bone and ounce of magic.
You love her hardest in the moments when you remember that one day, you will hate her. It’s the only way you can think to keep hold of her.
It’s the only way you can hope to survive.
*
“I will leave. If that is what you want.”
It’s said in the dark; quiet and earnest, even if it sounds like she will break at any moment.
You say nothing - close your eyes and rest your head on Rio’s thigh, concentrating on the feel of fingers scratching at your scalp. Nicholas sleeps soundly in his room, alive and well.
Rio bringing this up now unnerves you, but you’re too afraid to ask if this is the beginning of the end for your boy.
You fear it definitely is for your marriage.
The thought destroys you.
*
The routine changes with the seasons, and in much a similar way. Quiet and inevitable, without fanfare.
Rio starts to keep her distance when she returns from her duties, waiting for you to notice her. It’s such a deep understanding of your fear that you hate yourself for feeling it.
Always, you freeze when you see her, and in your stillness, you wait to see if this is the day your life falls apart.
Today, like every other time, she shakes her head. No. Not this time.
Your shoulders deflate in relief, and you turn to five year old Nicholas, smiling as best you can.
“Mamí is here,” you tell him, gesturing over the clearing.
Nicholas is a bright ball of energy all at once, and he takes off running towards Rio, calling out for her.
You watch Rio grin, crouching with open arms to catch him as he barrels into her.
“Mamí, I missed you!” You hear Nicholas giggling, wrapping his arms tight around her neck.
You see Rio’s face over his shoulder - flushed and pinched, as she fights back tears through the most brilliant smile.
“I missed you too, mijo,” she whispers, eyes connecting with yours across the space between them. “I missed you so much.”
When she sets him down, he keeps a hold of her hand, dragging her to you as fast as his little legs can take him.
“Mama!” he calls out. “Mamí is home!”
You can’t help the way her heart constricts at that. When Rio is close enough, you step to her at once, arms slinking around her waist to hug her close.
“Hi,” you whisper against her hair.
Rio sinks into you, half-relieved at this welcome, and presses a grateful kiss to your cheek.
“Hello, mi amor.”
You live in fear of the day when you see Rio across the clearing, and realises your son’s time has run out.
But today is not that day.
That night, you take her face into your hands like you always do, utterly transfixed by the planes of her body. Hands find your hips; so familiar and confident a touch that you moan under her breath.
It’s easiest to forget, in these moments. To just be the two women you’d once been, before.
“You killed many witches this week,” she murmurs, kissing softly at the nape of your neck.
You hum, stroking along her face where it tucks against your shoulder. “Did I keep you busy?”
She grins, lips brushing over your collarbone. “Maybe.”
Your fingers thread into her black locks then, gentle on her scalp. “We are going to travel tomorrow. Through to the next village.”
“Is Nicky looking forward to it?”
“He’ll enjoy it. He always does.”
She hums, lips now soft on your jaw. “Can I come find you?”
You catch her in a kiss to avoid the question. She doesn’t seem to mind.
When she takes a breath, she gazes at you, hands creeping along the edge of your nightshirt, sliding against your skin.
And fuck, nothing compares to this. To her. Nothing could ever even come close.
“Your touch lights me on fire,” you confess in a murmur. “Still. After all of these years.”
Rio’s response is to pull you closer, kissing the conversation out of you with expert precision.
*
She submits so deliciously in the dark. You grab her hair, throw your head back, roll roughly against the pressure of her in the cradle of your hips.
You moan, low and loud, for hours. It drives her on.
She moans against you; grips your thigh as she kisses along the inside, teeth nipping at your flesh.
She’s less gentle with you, these days. You’re far less gentle with her.
Neither of you mind.
She cries when you fuck her – muffles the sounds in the pillow, hips still bucking back against you, sharp and needy.
You wind your fingers in her hair, tug, and her head lolls against your shoulder, letting you see the flush pink and wet on her face.
You don’t stop. She’s gasping your name, she’s begging you, and when your hand locks around her throat, she comes hard around the three knuckles you have deep inside her.
You kiss her through it – swallow the sounds of her pleasure and her pain, lick at the tears on her jaw until they sting your lip.
She tells you she loves you – that she will always, always love you.
You have no choice but to say it back. It’s more instinctual to you than magic or motherhood.
*
When Rio comes for him, exactly one year later, you are asleep.
You feel the phantom brush of one kiss on your cheek, and then two, and then nothing.
When you awake, he is cold and smiling by your side, and you scream until you’re numb.
*
You bury your son on the road you were travelling together. You sing his song, and weep. You think she’s lingering close by, afraid to show herself.
Good, you think. She should be.