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medea

Summary:

They say Agatha Harkness is incapable of love. She does not correct them.

Agatha, through the years

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

They say Agatha Harkness once made a bargain with Death, long before she first tasted magic. They say she stood in a circle of bone-dust and moonlight, her hands shaking as she bled herself dry into the earth, whispering the names of the dead. They say Death answered, her cloak falling away to reveal a woman with a smile sharp as a sickle.

They say Death kissed her once and Agatha has never been able to wash the chill from her lips.


Agatha never tells anyone about the nights when the veil between them thins. She has always loved her secrets, tends to them like infants, but this secret is most precious of all. The first time it happens, she is a girl dying alone in a forest, her chest hollow from grief and her eyes raw with tears. Death comes to her then, her cloak trailing shadows, and lays a hand on Agatha’s cheek.

“Are you ready?” Death asks.

Agatha’s laugh is sharp and bitter.

“Not yet,” she says. “Not ever.”

Death smiles, and it is not unkind. “Then live, little witch. Live until you’re ready.”


Agatha always pours two cups of wine, though she drinks from neither. When the knock comes, soft and deliberate, she folds her lips over her teeth.

“You always come unbidden,” she says.

Death’s eyes fall to the wine, weighing the pretense.

“It’s vintage,” Agatha drops her voice, conspiratorial. “Older than me, even.”

Death does not respond. She steps closer, her shadow spilling over Agatha’s face like ink across a page. Agatha throws her arms out in mock surrender.

“Perhaps I am fond of your company,” she offers.

“Fondness? Is that what you call this?”

“Yes,” Agatha breathes. She reaches out, fingers stopping just shy of Death’s cloak, hovering on the edge of a boundary and itching to cross it.

Death, in her infinite patience, lets her.


Death is reverent and solemn when they fuck, as though it is something hallowed, each touch a benediction.

Agatha takes without thought, devouring.


Her son is born on a night when the wind howls like a wolf ravaged by hunger, clawing at trees that grow taller and older than trees are supposed to.

The birth is difficult; the child is too small, his cries too weak. Agatha braces against the gnarled trunk of an old oak tree, nails biting into bark until sap and blood mingle, her magic sparking wild and untamed. She pleads and barters and wails until Death relents and gives her more time. Agatha clutches the boy close to her chest as Death watches on with all the hesitation of someone unused to beginnings. He is frail, his breath shallow and fleeting, but Agatha does not care. She can feel his tiny heartbeat steady as a drum against her cheek.

He might be borrowed but he is hers.

(Sometimes, they say, when the moon hangs low, Death wears a tear on her cheek. A mark left by a witch who stole life from Death’s grasp.)


She names him Nicholas, though Death whispers another name in her dreams at night.

The boy refuses to nurse. He grows slowly, slower than a mortal child should. But by the time he is three his limbs are long and thin, his skin pale as milk, and he can walk the woods alone without fear, the shadows parting for him as if in deference. Sometimes, Agatha follows at a distance, watching as he tilts his head toward the rustle of leaves or the murmur of water, listening as if the forest whispers secrets meant only for him. His laughter, when it comes, is strange and lilting, and he never trips or stumbles, as if the earth itself tilts to his will.

Agatha does not teach him magic. She doesn’t need to.


Death visits from time to time, lingering at the corners of rooms or at the foot of billowing trees. She never touches him, only watches with penitence and longing.

“You shouldn’t hover,” Agatha says one night, her tone accusatory.

Death tilts her head, unbothered. “He is mine too, is he not?”

Agatha swallows, presses her tongue to her teeth.

“He is his own,” she lies.


It is said that Agatha screams for weeks. That she curses heaven and hell alike. It is said that the forest still carries the echoes of her grief.

Some say she spends years searching for her son. That she casts spells to pierce the veil, tears open doorways that were never meant to be opened. That she sings the ballad to summon him back until her voice is raw and her magic frayed at the edges.

Others say she traded him for the Darkhold, her hunger for power eclipsing even her love. They say she weeps not for what she has lost, but for what she cannot regain.

With time, they all start to call her a monster—perhaps it is Agatha who says it first.


Agatha cracks Death’s chest open with a rusty knife and sharp teeth. Death does not resist; she arches under Agatha’s touch and offers herself up like a sacrament. Her ribcage spreads open as though on command, creaking and groaning like the hull of a ship caught in a storm. Agatha’s hands are greedy and unyielding, prying ancient bones apart as she reaches for the thing that beats steady and slow just for her. It is cold, colder than ice, but it is wet and wanton and Agatha touches it as though it will burn her. Her lips twist into a smile that shatters into laughter, wild and guttural, as she lets her fingers close around the black, pulsing thing Death calls a heart and sinks her teeth into it.

Death watches her with something too close to love.


They say Agatha Harkness keeps a piece of her son’s soul in the heart of her grimoire. They say she keeps her own soul there, too. And they say, when the stars align just right, you can hear her singing to them both—low and soft, a melody older than the world itself.


The sea churns crimson beneath an iron sky. Agatha stands at the edge of a cliff, her robes drenched in salt and gore. Behind her, bodies lie strewn like broken porcelain dolls. She grips a blood-soaked athame, the blade glinting in the dying light.

“Was it worth it?” Death asks, tilting her head as though curious.

Agatha does not flinch.

“They took what was mine. I took it back.”

Death steps closer, her hand brushing Agatha’s cheek. “You are becoming something else, little witch.”


They say Salem turns its back on her, but she turns her back on Salem first.

"The fire cannot burn me," she tells them, standing tall in the shadow of the pyre.

And they say it didn’t—oh, the ropes scorch her wrists, and the flames lick her skirts, but when the smoke clears, it is the town that is left smoldering, not Agatha.

She is gone by then, of course. She has walked into the night, her eyes full of stars and her hands heavy with stolen power. "One day, the earth will wither and turn barren beneath your feet," she tells the town before she vanishes.

(It is said she left her curse in the roots of the oldest tree, where nothing grows even now.)


There is a box under Agatha’s bed, filled with things she cannot bear to throw away. A pair of tiny boots, scuffed and worn from too much running. A knitted blanket with a tear along one edge. A wooden horse, its paint chipped, the mane chewed on by small, impatient teeth.

She opens the box only once, on the anniversary of his death. She touches each item with hands that shake, her breath catching on memories that feel more like wounds. She closes the box quickly, lest she lose herself in it.

Death is there when she turns.

“I never meant to hurt you,” she says, and Agatha hates her more for the lie.


In the heart of a forest, a tree oozes dark sap, its bark carved with ancient symbols. Agatha presses a hand to it, feeling the magic pulse like a heartbeat. She knows she has marked this place, though she cannot recall when or why.


Years pass, the anger doesn’t—it festers like a tumor, malignant and lethal, metastasizing until it becomes as much a part of her as her spleen or her heart. She builds her power on it, forging her grief into magic so potent it reshapes the world around her.

“You will burn yourself alive,” Death says once, as Agatha draws symbols in the air that glow like molten gold.

“Good,” Agatha says, without looking up. “Maybe I’ll take you with me.”

(Agatha throws a glass vial at her and she is gone before it shatters.)


In a long-abandoned church, Agatha sits at a table laden with strange offerings—runes carved into bones, candles burning with black flames, chalices filled with viscous, dark liquid. Around her, spectral crows perch on shattered pews, their eyes gleaming like polished obsidian.

One by one, the spirits of witches she has slain rise from the shadows, their faces twisted in fury and sorrow. Agatha raises her cup in a mock toast.

“You seek power and riches,” she says, her voice lilting and cruel. “Did you think it would come without a cost?”

Death watches from the altar.

“You revel in your triumph, but what will you do when the table is bare?”

Agatha’s smile is toothy and hungry. “I’ll set another table.”


“You’ll never get him back this way,” the wind carries Death’s voice to her. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”

“Good,” Agatha tells the breeze. “That’s the point.”


Over the centuries, Agatha takes lovers like a thief in the night, slipping into their arms for warmth she never truly seeks. She prefers them golden-haired or umber-crowned, with eyes the color of the sea and sky. Their kisses are fleeting, their hands soft, and their devotion brittle. She leaves before they wake.

They say Agatha Harkness is incapable of love. She does not correct them.


No one knows this, for she would rip their throats out if they dared speak of it, but Agatha used to tend gardens when she was happy. Her hands would glide over blossoms and herbs, coaxing them to bloom with a whisper of magic. She cultivated rows of lavender, hemlock, and nightshade — a careful balance of beauty and danger. Petals unfurled at her touch, the air rich with a scent both sweet and sharp, and she would hum as she worked, the tune a soft thread of warmth rising like a breeze through the leaves.

Now, her garden is overrun with thorns and wilted stalks. The soil is barren, and what once bloomed has been replaced by dark powders staining mortars and pestles, ingredients that hiss and spit when dropped into a cauldron. The scent of crushed flowers has given way to the acrid tang of burning herbs, and the only thing she hums now are half-forgotten lullabies that break before the last note.


Oh, but she does sing. Over and over again until even silence has harmonies. Until it lures witches to her doorstep, until their power feeds her and their bodies feed the soil.


Agatha’s voice carves the night like a blade, each note vibrating with a yearning older than memory. The witches come in droves, drawn like moths to a flame, their magic sparking and fading under her touch. She doesn’t spare their faces a glance as she tears their power from the marrow of their bones, patching the hollow in her chest with their souls.

Death watches ever on from the shadows.

“Is it their power you crave, or is it the way you feel when they break?”

Agatha does not answer, but the way she throbs, brimming with conquest, betrays her all the same.


“You sing like the world is ending,” Death says once.

“Perhaps it is,” Agatha turns, her smile a jagged crescent, sharp and unrepentant. “Endings are your specialty, aren’t they? But I’ve held them in my hands, too.”

Death steps closer, her presence a shiver against Agatha’s skin. “And yet, you cannot escape mine.”


They say Death fell in love with a witch once, though no one can agree who seduced whom. Some say she wove her spells like spider’s silk, snaring her in her threads of moonlight and malice. Others insist Death courted her first, with shadows coiling at her feet and promises whispered in the language of endings.

What they all agree on is this: Death is a mistress of inevitability, and their son was hers from the moment he took his first breath.

Notes:

really didn’t think i would find this show as compelling as i did. kudos to my fiancée who selflessly read this over and over and actually made me finish it