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No rest for the wicked, they say. Rio gives that statement the biggest middle finger she can conjure out of green smoke. Sometimes, the wicked need rest. Sometimes Death needs a fucking break.
That’s why Rio has a rustic lakeside house in the middle of nowhere, Delaware. She came upon it centuries ago and liked the location. Liked the view of the crystal water, the same color as Agatha’s eyes (this was during one of their breakup periods, and Rio had been feeling a little yearning). Liked the soft grass under her bare feet and the gorgeous, floor-to-ceiling windows.
Every so often Rio gets bored. Or exhausted, which is an interesting state for her to be in, since her body cannot physically register pain. (It’s more like a mental exhaustion, a very heavy head.) When it all feels like too much, she hangs up the dramatic-ass wardrobe of Death, puts on some sweatpants, and goes to Delaware.
Rio can stay holed up in the lake house for years at a time. She doesn’t need to leave – groceries appear on her doorstep when she wants them, the television has cable and a DVD player, and she’s got a drum set in the attic. Lately, Death has been really into learning to play the drums. She likes keeping the rhythm of things. It feels very distinctly it. So far, she’s learned to play the heartbeat of everyone within a 75-mile radius and can keep time with the lightning bugs that buzz around outside in the summers. She’s been listening to a lot of the concept of decay and rot recently and has been jamming out to it in the early hours of the morning.
Rio is also teaching herself how to cook. She doesn’t need to eat, but she likes food. She especially likes charring vegetables and mixing them with wild rice. She’s trying to perfect a green goddess sauce with the herbs she finds growing around the cabin’s perimeter. Humanity’s still got a handful of years to catch up with green goddess sauce, but Rio’s really looking forward to it.
It’s been a rough couple of years, terrorism attacks and wars and the like, so Rio’s letting the expired chill out in purgatory for a while and is spending the wintertime locked inside the lake house. People can get to heaven and hell after the New Year. Don’t they realize it’s the holidays? She needs her downtime. Example: a nothing day in 2003, sometime in early November, 3:17 AM. Death is just chilling in its living room, eating a bowl of popcorn and M&M’s, watching reruns of Saturday Night Live. When the sketches are boring, they change the channel to surveillance footage of a suburban neighborhood in Iowa and try to predict who’s going to win the PTA president race. 3:18 AM. Death suddenly finds itself on the way (via subspace highway) to Albany, New York.
Now what the fuck, Rio thinks to herself with a frown.
She stands outside a neat little townhome on a street that’s got that classic not-quite-downtown-American-city feel. Dying flowers in the window boxes and all that. Fall leaves crunch under her bare feet. Whoever decided to commit mass murder this time couldn’t even let her change her clothes first?
Whatever. Rio conjures a scarf and a wool jacket out of thin air – and you know what, some Doc Martens while she’s at it. She waits for the front door of the townhouse to open. It’s kind of a headache to look at; it’s painted an ungodly shade of bright purple.
Oh, hold the fucking phone.
Rio storms up the front steps and slams her fist against the front door. “Agatha!” she shrieks, not really caring if any of her infuriating ex-wife’s new neighbors can hear her. Agatha probably deserves a little curtain twitching. “Agatha, open the fucking door.”
The door does open, but Agatha’s not behind it. Rio almost trips over her own feet as the purple monstrosity swings open to reveal an empty foyer. The air inside is chilly. She grits her teeth and steps over the threshold.
The scent of death hits her nose like freshly baked bread. She shoves her hands in her jacket pockets, poking into the living room – ornately decorated, covered in taxidermy animal corpses, empty – and the dining room – ornately decorated, table laid with crystal china, overkill, Jesus, also empty. A loud banging from the kitchen. A voice, unmistakably Agatha’s, moans.
Rio would know that moan anywhere. It doesn’t sound like the good kind of moan, though.
She finds Agatha standing in a tiny kitchen, holding an answering machine in one hand like a weapon. There’s a man on the floor at her feet, a suspiciously answering-machine-shaped dent in his head. The phone, which Agatha has in her other hand, is spattered with blood and clumps of hair.
Rio stares at the dead body. “Dude, what the fuck?”
A torturous beat. Rio is expecting an explanation, or a cleanup request, or something. What she isn’t expecting is for Agatha to launch herself at Rio with a primal scream, bloody phone aimed right for her head.
“Whoa-ho-ho!” Rio raises a hand to block the blow, ends up slipping in the pooling blood on the floor – fuck you, corporeal body – and landing on her ass. Agatha falls between her spread legs, pinning Rio to the ground with her weight, one forearm braced on Rio’s windpipe, which would be a good move if, you know, Death needed to breathe. Her other arm brandishes the answering machine as a clobbering device. She’s feral, teeth bared. Rio raises an eyebrow when Agatha goes to spit in her face. “Hey, now. We haven’t done that in a couple years.”
“I didn’t want you here.” Agatha shoves harder on Rio’s throat, lifting weight off her pelvis, which gives them the leverage to flip over and roll out from underneath Agatha. Rio’s knit hat and scarf get pulled off in the tangle, leaving her hair mussed and frizzing into her eyes. She blows it out of the way dramatically.
Gesturing to the dead body on the ground, she argues, “you should have thought about that before committing manslaughter again.”
Agatha just rolls her eyes and scrambles to her feet. “You know damn well you don’t have to show up every time. Let him haunt the house a little, Jesus.”
She goes for Rio’s legs with a feral little kick, and Rio hops out of the way again, accidentally knocking the body over. It hits the floor with a dull thump. Distantly, she hears the poor man’s soul screaming. Damn. She was really enjoying her break.
“I don’t want to be here, either,” Rio tries to say, but Agatha’s on her again, one hand pushing her back against her sternum until she hits the kitchen counter with both hips. The other forms a fist, Agatha’s signature purple crackling like lightning from her knuckles.
“For once,” Agatha bites, hissing in Rio’s face, and sure, they’re fighting and all, but god she’s missed her smell and her stupid sexy angry voice, “I just wanted to murder someone in peace. For once.”
“Shouldn’t have married Death, then.”
“I signed the divorce papers!” Agatha practically roars, shoving down at Rio so her back bends practically in half – and not in the fun way – her head cracking against the kitchen backsplash. The position’s a little uncomfortable, and Rio’s getting pissed, now, so she stops humoring Agatha, shimmers out of existence and reappears sitting on top of the fridge, legs swinging back and forth. The unhinged noise Agatha makes in response would be hilarious under any normal circumstances.
“So why’d you kill this guy? He piss you off? He follow you home from work? He have a supposedly powerful magical item in his house that you need for a specific spell and you didn’t feel like being sneaky to obtain it?” Rio cocks her head in consideration. The look Agatha gives her is murderous. A long beat.
“Yes,” she says finally. “How did you pull that out of thin air?”
Rio wiggles her eyebrows. “I’m super smart, baby.” She looks down at the body, narrowing her eyes. There’s something there. A wiggle, a protest. Something is wrenched out of her chest. The man on the floor gasps, loudly, and jolts upright. He screams something in… Dutch? Rio can’t keep track of all the human languages. English and Spanish and Latin and Eldritch Horror (Simplified) are enough.
“You didn’t actually kill him,” she notes. Agatha glowers. She would look a lot more intimidating if there wasn’t already a bruise forming on her temple from where Rio landed a blow earlier.
“Yeah, I’m getting that.”
“Guess I’m not needed here anymore.” Honestly, it’s a relief. Rio still has a bowl of popcorn to finish, after all. “Te veo and all that.”
As she slips back home through the astral plane, she hears Agatha holler, “you weren’t invited anyway!”
---
At 7:24 PM on the same day, Rio’s landline rings. She hadn’t been entirely sure she had a landline until now, but that’s magick, or whatever. Lazy and always taking the easy way out.
“Death’s house, Death speaking,” she answers cheerily, tearing a strand of Twizzler off with her teeth. Die Hard 2 is on TV. She’s snacking and multitasking, reading a dusty old book about the history of ancient Sumerian funeral rituals. She chews loudly into the receiver pointedly to annoy whoever is on the other end.
The voice coming through sounds muffled. Kind of like a thick, viscous substance – blood, perhaps – is coating the microphone. “He died this time.”
Rio narrows her eyes at nothing in particular. “Agatha, how did you get this number?”
“Magic, bitch.” Rio scoffs despite herself. She can see the exact face Agatha is making, one of her stupid pouty I-figured-something-out-that-you-couldn’t faces. “He’s actually dead now.”
“Thanks for the house call,” Rio deadpans, “or lack of one.”
“Come pick the corpse up, Rio.”
Rio hums. Pretends to think on it. “No.” The noise Agatha makes on the other line is somewhere between a growl and a curse word in a language so dead Rio’s reaped its soul ten times over. “You could at least ask nicely, you know.”
“Pretty please with a cherry on top, come collect this dead body and carry it to whatever anti-physical realm you dump all your little playthings in.”
“You’re intimately familiar with the sub-dimension in which my playthings reside, Agatha.” Rio can swear she hears the sweet twinkle of Agatha blushing across the distance between them. “Shall I remind you?”
“Fine,” Agatha bites, fighting through Rio’s truly tempting attempts at getting her horizontal. Or at least in the same room. “I’m gonna leave the body in neutral ground, all right? In a dumpster on Newbury Ave. Across from a chick in a green bomber jacket that’s always drumming on a weird abandoned oven.”
“Does this exchange require me leaving my house?” Rio grumbles, already turning the TV off and reaching for her scarf-and-hat combo.
Agatha snorts. “You’re a big girl. Figure it out.” There’s the definitive click of the call ending. Rio, for good measure, hurls the phone across the room and leaves a satisfyingly sickening dent in the wall.
In some random dude’s house in Albany, fridge magnets rearrange themselves, spelling out C-U-N-T in colorful block letters. Agatha folds her arms and raises a stupidly arched judgmental eyebrow.
“Real mature, love.”
Back in Delaware, Rio cackles. She picks up the body on Newbury Ave anyway. And gives the junkie across the street some flowers, just to make Agatha jealous.
---
It happens again.
The basement apartment is damp and nasty and quintessential New York, even if it seems like it hasn’t been updated since the 60s. A kitchenette with a rattly gas stove. A single-knob shower out in the open, partially privatized by a moldering curtain. A sagging couch bathed in grainy yellow light from a secondhand lamp, upon which the corpse of a young man has been laid out. He’s wearing a black leather trench coat and a cowboy hat. That’s a tad ridiculous, Rio thinks.
“You live in this dump?” She quirks an eyebrow in Agatha’s direction. Agatha, who is pilfering through an overflowing bookcase, tossing old magazines and a truly outrageous number of chess sets to the side to find something specific.
“No,” Agatha hisses over her shoulder. She’s clearly getting impatient with Rio, who has perched cross-legged on the sticky kitchen countertop and is busying herself carving hieroglyphic symbols into the Formica. “I’m a very powerful witch, Rio.”
“Powerful witches can still be broke.”
Agatha sputters, but a clever response does not come to her lips in time. “Fuck you,” she says, in lieu of anything else, and Rio cackles.
“You know,” she hums, when Agatha has returned to her work for long enough that distracting her again will provoke a satisfactory response, “I don’t want this to be happening either.”
Agatha does not turn around. She lifts an ornate wooden box from the shelf, triumphantly, and shakes it like a kid with a present on Christmas morning. “I have it on good authority that you don’t need to show up every time somebody dies.”
“That’s true.” Rio hops off the counter, peering over Agatha’s shoulder, getting just close enough to feel the heat of her through their clothes, delicious and a little too tempting (because Rio frequently has to remind herself that she hates Agatha, most of the time). “What have you got there?”
Agatha turns, and it has the fortunate-unfortunate effect of pushing them closer together so Agatha’s breath fans over Rio’s face, eyes meeting lips for only a second before remembering they know better. “You first. Why do you keep dropping in on me?”
“You should know. You’re the one doing the summoning spells.” Rio shrugs.
The box hits the ground with a dramatic clatter. Agatha’s mouth opens, her eyes narrowing, a characteristic Agatha-rage face coming on. Rio quirks an eyebrow, instinctively leans in when Agatha’s hands start to spark, violet, violent.
“You all right there, Agatha?”
“I am not,” Agatha growls, doing a very good impression of Rio herself, “summoning you.”
Rio gestures to the space around them. The runes drawn painstakingly on the cement floors. The dead body on the couch. The smell of sage and incense in the air. “You’re summoning something, babe.”
With a decisive flick of her hair, Agatha picks up a discarded spell book from the ground and shoves it in Rio’s face. “I’m summoning that,” she says, like she wants nothing less than to tell Rio the truth, but oh, they’ve been here before. She busies herself tidying up the spilled bookshelf while Rio reads.
“Azazel.” She glances up. “Oh, I met this guy once. He sucks.” Agatha scoffs. “Can be summoned with the tethering of a soul piece to the mortal plane- oh, that’s just tacky. Seriously, Agatha?”
Agatha sniffs imperiously, pulling her already-pretty-tight sweatshirt even tighter around herself. It rides up a little above her low-rise jeans and Rio does her best to ignore this. “I want a familiar.”
“You had a familiar,” Rio says, pointing to herself. They both give a beat to let that ridiculous notion sink in. “Okay, well, you get my point.”
Agatha snatches the spellbook back, rifling through the pages to make sure Rio didn’t slip any poison into it or something – which really shouldn’t be put past her – before she sticks it roughly in her back pocket. “Listen. What I do with my free time is none of your business. It’s not my fault Azazel and you have… really similar summoning rituals.”
Rio folds her arms across her chest. “How do you fuck up the runes for fallen angel and Death?”
A wry smirk occupies the lower half of Agatha’s face. “Well, you are my fallen angel.”
“Flirting will get you nowhere, Harkness.” Rio blips to the other side of the room – a nervous tick, actually, because it looked like Agatha was about to reach out and touch her and she wants none of that today, thank you – and takes in the dead body. “Who is this guy?”
“He had one of the pieces of Azazel’s soul. Or at least, I thought he did.” Agatha shrugs, waving her stupid little box around. “Not a genuine artifact, I guess.”
“So he’s just some burnout?”
“Chess grandmaster.”
“Same difference.” She pokes at him. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t spontaneously come back to life this time, either. “Okay, well, I have a job to do, and your precious demon isn’t here.” And then, because she can’t resist teasing Agatha on a good day, she winks: “See you at the next failed summoning.”
Agatha shoots a tiny little bolt of magic, barely more than a tickle, at Rio’s chest before she leaves. “Toodaloo, darling,” she giggles, swishing up the staircase and out the door with a grin.
If Rio chuckles fondly after Agatha leaves the room, that’s no one’s business but her own.
---
(Azazel lives in a Winnebago trailer in the middle of a Florida swamp. Rio pays him a little visit.
Her pounding on the door yields no response – seriously, what does this motherfucker have to be doing in the middle of the day that’s more important than entertaining Death – so she shouts through the cracked-open window. “Stop being a little bitch and just show up for her little spell so my damned vacation can stop getting interrupted!”
And then: “Or don’t show up, actually! I don’t care what happens to her!”
And then: “She doesn’t even like men, anyway, you know!”
The Winnebago door wrenches open. An amorphous black fog cloud with two tiny pinpricks of light where eyes should be growls at Rio. It curses in a language no human being should ever have the horror of hearing. “Please leave me out of your relationship drama.”
The door slams in her face. A beat. “Don’t blame me, blame her, asshole!”
She goes back home.)
---
The third time – okay, clearly Azazel is avoiding Agatha for a reason, and Rio doesn’t really blame it, but this is getting a little annoying, isn’t it? The third time, she’s in the middle of making a quesadilla, which is definitely gonna burn now. Great.
When Rio shows up, wearing Halloween bat pajama pants – again, they were making a quesadilla – Agatha quite literally throws her hands up in the air and groans. “Please know I triple-checked the spell this time.”
“It’s fine,” Rio says, not sounding quite as derisive and pissed as she had meant to, “I think it’s less you and more your demon buddy not wanting to get off his ass.”
Agatha’s latest victim is an old Southern gentleman, sitting in front of what appears to be a birthday cake. Rio takes a seat against the wall, waiting; the victim is bleeding out long and slow, consciousness gone but lifeforce taking slightly longer to fade. Agatha is still holding the serving fork she used to stab him. She drops it with a clatter.
To Rio’s great surprise – and she’s really not complaining about it – Agatha sits down on the floor next to her. Their thighs close enough to touch.
“Sorry,” she says after a long silence, Rio just basking in the closeness Agatha is affording her after so many years apart.
“What for?”
“Pulling you out of…” Agatha gestures uselessly with her hands, unable to find the words. “Retirement.”
Rio snorts. “Death can’t retire. It can just take a day off.” A beat. “Or a month. Or a couple years.”
“That bad, huh?” Rio hadn’t expected Agatha’s voice to be that soft, that sweet. When she looks over, Agatha is watching her through hooded lids, her hair falling in her face in a way that makes Rio long to push it away with her fingers. Agatha has bangs now. What the fuck is up with that?
She sighs, feeling the air punch out of her chest with more force that is strictly necessary. “Not that bad. Just bored. And lonely.”
“You should get a familiar.” Agatha’s eyebrows wag.
“I’ve pissed off every demon from here to Hell and the ones I haven’t have pissed me off,” Rio points out. Agatha hums, and they lapse back into silence. Comfortable silence.
Rio’s fingers crawl across the carpet towards Agatha. Their hands meet in the middle, fingers intertwining like they’ve done this a million times, because they have. Rio notes, with a little thrill of delight, that Agatha’s left ring finger still has a small indentation around the knuckle. Where her wedding ring dug in and left its mark.
Agatha gasps, openmouthed. And then Rio realizes that she’s feeling the moments out of time, and she’s already in Agatha’s lap, hips grinding down, biting at the thin skin of her neck just above her heartbeat.
“Oh,” Agatha moans, broken and bruised, softer than Rio’s gotten to see her in decades, and she relishes in it. Tangles her hands in Agatha’s wild hair and feels for the knots she knows are always there, because Agatha hates brushing her hair, hates especially to do it when Rio isn’t there watching her in the mirror with hungry eyes. Agatha’s hands encircle her waist, holding Rio in place, stilling her hips, and it’s so frustratingly dominant and Agatha that she groans, pulling away with a nip to Agatha’s lower jaw.
“Incorrigible,” Agatha says, but it carries less bite when she’s arching her back into Rio’s touch, fingernails skittering against her waist. Rio takes her tits in both hands and squeezes.
“Don’t pretend you don’t love it.”
“I hate you,” Agatha says, and doesn’t mean it. Rio knows when people are lying to her.
She’s just getting to the good part – the good part being kneading at Agatha’s chest under her silken purple blouse – when she feels an insistent tickling in the back of her consciousness, a poke that refuses to go away. She whips around to hiss at the dead body sitting at the table still.
It does nothing in return. It’s still a dead body.
“Work?” Rio had hoped Agatha would sound breathless, affected at all by her ministrations, but if anything, she just sounds indifferent. When she looks down beneath her, Agatha’s eyes are empty of all feeling. Resigned, even.
“Yes,” Rio says simply, and extricates herself from Agatha’s touch.
“Te ve-” Agatha starts, almost mocking, and Rio’s face falls. An imperceptible amount, a twitching in her jaw, but Agatha still notices.
“What,” Rio asks, masking as usual, “we’re not gonna finish what we started?”
Agatha smiles a sad, sad smile. “Maybe another time.”
---
At 11:56 PM on November 28, 2003, Agatha Harkness knocks on Death’s door.
It opens as soon as her knuckles brush the wood, as if it was waiting for her.
Rio waits on the couch. A fire crackles in the hearth, a documentary about the Jonestown massacre plays on the TV, and she even made cookies. Snickerdoodles with extra cinnamon, exactly the way Agatha likes them.
“You left me a calling card.” Agatha holds a blood-red lily between her thumb and forefinger as if touching it will give her some unholy disease. Honestly, she’s lucky. There are any number of pollens Rio could have drenched that thing in, but no, it’s just a lily.
“I did.” She’s aware her grin probably looks a little feral. “I have a present for you.”
Agatha arches an eyebrow, crossing her arms defensively over her chest. “Is it poisonous, bleeding, or related to sex?”
“Those aren’t the only gifts I know how to give.” Agatha’s eyebrow goes even higher. “Hush, sweetheart. It’s a very wholesome gift.”
From a pocket dimension, Rio produces the cage. Medium sized, with a little purple water bottle zip-tied to the side and a matching purple dish of food resting in the bedding. She’s woven small vines and flowers through its bars, although the little bastard residing inside has nibbled on most of them already.
The bunny’s nose twitches. Agatha melts.
“Oh, you little angel,” she coos, launching herself at the cage – resting on the coffee table, at Rio’s knees – with abandon. She pokes a finger through the bars and lets the bunny nibble on it with delight plain on her features. Rio, despite generally considering herself a reasonable and not terribly sentimental creature, is blushing.
“You wanted a familiar,” Rio shrugs, trying to shake away the pulsing warmth in her chest from her ex-wife playing with a rabbit, of all things. “Asshole – sorry, Azazel couldn’t be convinced, so I tried my hand at a lesser eldritch horror.”
Agatha looks back over her shoulder. Slowly, Rio eases herself to the ground, sitting beside Agatha and offering a hand to the bunny. He sniffs, shakes his little bunny head, and returns to Agatha. Rio sighs. Worth a shot.
“Rio?” Agatha’s voice has a warning tone. “Is this rabbit a demon?”
Rio nods, gnawing on her lower lip. “His name is Seir.” The bunny, upon hearing its name, looks up. Rio can practically hear it cussing her out in her mind. If you didn’t want this form, she thinks back at it viciously, you shouldn’t have been such a little bitch in the third century. “I’ve been calling him Señor, though."
"That’s cute,” Agatha hums. She unlatches the cage and lifts Señor into her arms, making little clicking noises with her mouth. The bunny purrs, or makes whatever pleased sound a bunny makes, and nuzzles into Agatha’s breast. Rio knows that feeling. It’s a delightful feeling. She’s not gonna take that away from Señor.
Agatha kisses Señor on the top of the head, and fine, okay, Rio’s jealous of a rabbit.
“This is sweet,” she says, fingers knotting in his fur. “He’s powerful, I can feel it. He’ll be a… good familiar.” She looks up at Rio, eyes suspiciously wet and watery, but Rio doesn’t point it out. “Fine. Maybe I don’t hate you one hundred percent.”
“It doesn’t replace anything,” Rio says quietly. Maybe she’s talking about Azazel. Maybe she’s talking about someone else.
“No,” Agatha smiles, bittersweet, “it doesn’t.”
But she sits on Rio’s living room floor for the rest of the night anyway, snuggling her rabbit and singing him lullabies. And when Rio shows them out, gifting Agatha with an extra few bags of rabbit food on the house, she gets a small smile, a brush of the hand, a whispered goodbye. And that’s good enough for now.
But if Agatha ever interrupts a Saturday Night Live marathon again it’s going to be her head on a plate.