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Assistant: Title: creator, you destroy me
        Author: velvetprayer velvetprayer 
        Chapter: 1/1 
        Summary: Time, suddenly, means the moments in between her.
        Contents: Summary:
            
              Time, suddenly, means the moments in between her.
            
        

        
  Notes:





    
      i listened to "creator, destroyer" by angel olsen on repeat while writing this... i think that tells you all you need to know.
    

    (See the end of the work for more notes.)



  





    
        
          The moment she saw her face, everything changed.Death had seen destruction, utter chaos and misery. She’d been burdened to bear it since the beginning of time. It all felt the same, now. Just a job. Her purpose. To usher to the other side.The familiar, instinctual tug, and there she was. Splitting between the layers of time and reality. A calling. A handful of souls, needing her guidance.Flame shadows flickered on darkened woods, the snapping of kindling and the hushed sound of leaves rustling in the wind. This is when she saw her.A pale, cherubic face, nestled in a crooked elbow. Death felt another sort of tug, then, something sharper, less logged down with pain and sick rot. It was… pleasant, almost. She took in the slope of the girl’s nose, the wisps of her eyelashes on reddened cheeks, slick with tears.Something drew her in, so she’d crept closer on her dark shroud, legs half-formed, took her hood down as she leant in for a better look.Leaves crunched under her bare feet, and the shuttered eyes before her blunk open; Death got a single look into the bluest of blue she’d ever seen, before slipping away, back between planes, half false heaven and earth. -✰- Time was not a concept that Death could easily comprehend.It was working, and the in-between, the dull empty. It wasn’t that she enjoyed her job, necessarily. The ached cries of mothers, the confused whining of children, it was not something she took pleasure in. But it was all she knew. There’d been no before this.Something fluttered in the back of her head, something tickling. With a single blink, she emerged into a shuddering forest, sliding easily from the trunk of a massive tree.Just one body lay before her on the soft floor, withered like a shrunken skull in a cloak and dress, hands crumpled, clutching at nothing. Death approached, slowly, kneeling on the decay of plant matter below, and moved to brush the woman’s cheek lightly, ready to take her.“It’s you.”Death was not easily shaken. She didn’t think she had the ability to be shocked, or surprised, but a thrill ran through her nonetheless. Nobody saw her, usually. At times, she liked to exist between the layers, staring at her company before they fully came to her, attempting something like comfort. But not the living, never the living.She turned, and considered herself fully startled now. It was the girl from before. She looked a bit older, now, her face sharper, lines starting to form beside her blue, blue eyes.Death wondered how long it’d been. She tries to call on the human concept of time, the amount of souls she’d guided between the then and now, and wagers it’s maybe been a handful of years. Whatever that means.She opens her mouth to speak, but-“I knew I’d seen you,” the girl speaks. She doesn’t seem angry, Death thinks. Or scared. Just insistent, almost… accusatory.“You aren’t meant to,” Death says, reminding herself to keep her voice light, humanoid. It’s so rare that she gets to speak.“Well, I  did. I saw you that night, watching me sleep.”Death’s mind cannot work fast enough. Her face scrunches as she wonders, what’s different about this human? She reaches out, gentle but probing, feeling the spark in the air, radiating, crackling. Power. This must be the most powerful human being she’s ever encountered. She can almost taste the magick.“I have been looking for you,” the girl says. Shy, almost. The words send that warm pull through Death again. Something flutters deep inside her.“Well, here I am. I do have a job to do, though. And you cannot be here when I do.”She smiles, cloying, and nods knowingly. She slinks back into the treeline, and Death sits down, feeling the buzz below her. Radiating from the earth, the swirling balance of cosmic decay and rebirth. For once, she feels confused, left to wrestle with the manic thundering, brand new in her once hollowed chest. -✰- Time, suddenly, means the moments in between her.  -✰- Agatha, Death learns. She’s tethered and tugged back to her more often than any other. Death comes to witness, stuck half in between her worlds, shimmering in the middle, watching.She’s like a machine, the woman, the witch, churning out kill after kill. It should be offensive, but somehow, it’s not. The widened, snarled grin, hair wild and hands like claws as she pulls her purple from the unwitting, her power flaring and strengthening with every life she snuffs out. It’s like a show, just for her, it’s like a flirtation. She isn’t sure what to make of it, exactly.Something blooms within her each time, and Death finds herself waiting. -✰- Lingering isn’t against any sort of astral rule, per say.But she’d never had a reason, before.After, always after, Agatha will slip from the shadows of wherever she’s gone to hide, grin curled around her pretty mouth. Taunting, almost. Something warm unfurls in Death’s middle. What’s your name? Agatha had asked.
   You know it. 
Of course she did. But she’d huffed, shooting Death a sidelong glance, making her chest clench. Rio. Death had said, for the first time in all her eons of existence. No one had ever asked before. Rio…  She’d said it like she was tasting it, trying it on for size. Then, she grinned, blue eyes glittering.  Suits you.  -✰- It’s the other woman that touches her first. Fingers, gentle and soft, tentative, skirting along the edge of her cheekbone. It sets a wild blaze in Rio’s chest, an inferno of incomprehensible measure.
   I didn’t know I could feel like this. 
Eyes soften, Agatha’s cheeks pinken, her mouth sweetening on a tiny smile.
   Neither did I. 
When their mouths meet, Rio wonders how she’d gone the whole of eternity without it. -✰- Rio learns impatience. Every call to the earthly realm without her presence feels like a waste of precious, human time.So, she starts venturing more frequently to wherever her witch is, even without a single soul to collect.She learns the warm comfort of a bed, a crackling fireplace, the way Agatha twitches in her sleep. She’s woken her from a fair share of nightmares, wiping her sticky cheeks clean and holding her tight until she falls back to sleep peacefully.Agatha in the yellow light of morning is her favorite. Her face warm and open, soft and sweet, like Rio still being there is a pleasant surprise. Rio wants to tell her, she’d never leave her side if she didn’t have to.Instead, she accepts her witch’s slick tongue in her mouth, sucking on the muscle, pressing the feelings into her mouth. -✰- In between again; a period of weeks without her. Every second is a lurching agony, Rio can feel her pull, insistent and needy, begging. But work commands her, there’d been a natural disaster on another continent, and the souls were restless, relentless.When she finally erupts from the soft mulch in the yard of the cottage her witch is inside of, the air pr@ckles around her, setting her on edge.“Haven’t you felt my calling?”Agatha stands amidst waist high grasses, legs disappeared under the skirts of a dress. Her hands writhe at her sides, flickering with her purple. Her witch, ever for the theatrics.“Of course, my love. But you know my work keeps me busy.”Her woman seems to bristle with the words, her eyebrows pulling tight. She tosses her wild hair over a shoulder, and grins, something slinky and evil.It’s sudden, the shock of Agatha’s power flattening her back to the ground with a grunt.“What in the-” Rio grits out, the magick sending a pulsation throughout her entire being like lightning. She’s utterly taken aback by the display, Agatha has never tried to hurt her before. Could she really be so angry? The thought makes something sour curl inside of Rio, her newfound heart thundering like something akin to a prey animal, tortured with fear.Rio has just barely sat up, palms pressed into the smashed grass behind her, when Agatha draws nearer, palms still sparking. The look on her face is half anger, half satisfaction, with a layer of something Rio cannot quite read underneath. Then, a feeling of recognition slices through her.“Did somebody miss me?” She teases, tilting her head at Agatha, grinning.Agatha looks like she wants to snarl, her hands shoot forward and flatten Rio back to the earth, and suddenly she’s straddling Rio’s hips, her skirt bunched all around them. A hand clutches at Rio’s jaw, keeping her head to the harsh, buzzing ground.When her witch takes her mouth, she can feel the desperate longing pulsating on her tongue. She presses back, licking against teeth, every motion a promise to always return home. -✰- Rio drinks it all in. The syrupy sweet feeling, every moment with Agatha turning her emptied chest fuller and fuller, pounding with pleasure and pain. It’s overwhelming, finally feeling. Sometimes she thinks she doesn’t care for it much.But then, Agatha’s vulnerable, human body, curled around her like moss to a stone while she sleeps on and on; Rio takes her wild, dark hair, braiding it, twirling it around a finger, inhaling the violet scent of it.Agatha teases her, calls her names when she wakes and feels Rio’s dark, searching eyes upon her. But Rio can tell she likes it, the feeling of being looked after.Sometimes, her witch will break from her slumber, weeping like a child would, her hands shaking. She doesn’t say much, muttering about her mother under her breath, caught and pinned halfway between the earth and a dream, and Rio will soothe her; a hand on her cheek, against her quivering ribs.Rio doesn’t understand this pain, and it gouges her, the inability to relate. But she’d seen mothers, weeping over their children’s bodies, begging the skies for more time, for a second chance, cursing Death’s name. She tries to imagine, this extension of yourself, a primal sort of care.She imagines Agatha’s mother, uncaring, d@mning her flesh to die, unflinching.She thinks of the sort of pulsing, pained connection she feels for Agatha, the thought of losing her, how it must be a sliver of what it would feel to lose a child, and she decides she hates her witch’s mother. -✰- It’s a soft and wet spring morning. Rio has been ticking the boxes of time with the turning of the seasons, with the way Agatha’s face collects more sweet lines and freckles along her hands. She knew her witch was special from the beginning, but the fact was proven further by her slowed aging. She wasn’t like the rest of them, humans. Rio didn’t know who to thank, for the spare time, for the length in which she gets to love her.Agatha kneels in a plush bed of grass, covered with dew. Fresh off a killing, drunk on the slaughter, power tickling at her fingers. She grins up at Rio, standing above her, having just finished ushering the few newly dead witches to the other side.Rio sinks to her knees as well, their legs pressed together, and Agatha takes her hands, clutching at them, sending a gentle spark of purple up through Rio’s flesh, tickling her.“Can’t I see your face, my love?” She’s sweet, her tone soft.Rio huffs a bit, moving to extract herself from the grip of her witch. Agatha holds fast, fingers tightening, tugging on her.“Please?”Rio doesn’t like this question. She prefers to be flesh and blood, muscle and meat around her woman. She’s seen the stricken looks of fear, littered upon face after face over the eons. This is why she’d adopted a face at all, so as not to scare the undeserving. She doesn’t understand why Agatha would want to see her like that, her form, true and real.But when she meets the big, blue eyes, boring into her, something twists in her gut. She’d do anything this woman asked of her, she realizes. Anything at all, she’d bend the world, snap it in half, as far as she could will it.So, she ducks her chin, reaching at her shoulders to tug the green hood of her cloak up to rest on her head. Her eyes pinch shut, and she allows her form to shift, flesh melting away into plain, aged bone.Agatha tips her chin up with two fingers. Rio looks away, off and over her shoulder into the green, endless woods surrounding them. She expects a gasp, something horrified and aghast.But the noise never comes. She steels herself, and forces her gaze back to meet Agatha’s. There is no fear, no disgust on the face before her. Agatha’s face is open, a smile gracing her pink mouth.“Beautiful,” she says, grinning even wider. Both of her hands come up, tracing all over the lower half of Rio’s face, nothing but tender. Rio is enraptured. Her heart swells in its cavity, hammering, aching. She can’t help the tears that spring to her eyes.Agatha notices immediately, her smile turning into something different, the admiration splintering into something like understanding. She dips forward, and plants a singular, chaste kiss on the rows of exposed teeth.Rio makes a tiny, wounded noise, unable to keep it lodged in her throat, and pitches herself forward, into Agatha’s warm, waiting embrace. -✰- Summer is just splitting open when Agatha calls on her. There’s a pinkened, strawberry full-moon, rising high in the purple evening sky.She’d been away, for a week or so, dealing with the aftermath of some war she didn’t care to understand.There was another cottage, in a different clearing of land, something Agatha had claimed as her own, for the time being, at least. The windows shone with warm, yellow firelight as Rio approached, her fingers trailing along the tall grasses surrounding her, wildflowers blooming with every step she took.Agatha appeared in the door just ahead of her, and the sight stole Rio’s breath away. Her hair was loose, wild around her and brushing at her waist, save for a smattering of tiny braids. She was wearing the most beautiful dress, white and billowing, stitched with tiny purple flowers along each hem.Her cheeks were pink, and she waved at Rio, a tiny motion of her fingers, and she seemed shy, almost. It made her heart swelter with warmth, it ached her. Her witch.“You look heavenly, my sweet,” she called out, a smile twitching around the words. She giggled as Agatha dipped down in a shoddy attempt at a curtsy.Agatha shut the door behind her, and approached slowly, eyes darting anywhere but Rio’s gaze. She came to a stop about three feet ahead of Rio, shifting on her feet, and she cleared her throat.“I have a proposition,” she said, hands fluttering aimlessly in front of her body.“Oh? What would it be, Agatha?” Rio asked, walking slowly, closer to her witch. She took pleasure in this, Agatha off balance around her, filled with nerves. She loved to tease her, then coax her back, comforting.“It’s a full moon tonight…” she trailed off, barely looking up to lock eyes with Rio before looking away again.“Oh, is it? I hadn’t noticed,” Rio teased, prodding at her, as she gestured to the vast, glittering moon, just beyond them in the sky.Agatha huffed and rolled her eyes. She wrung her hands in front of herself, wrestling with something, it seemed.“Have you heard of the handfasting ceremony?” She rushes the words out, blue eyes wide with something like fear, and Rio knows she is simmering with anticipated rejection, just underneath that cultivated hard exterior.Then, the realization hits Rio like a ton of bricks piled upon her. Handfasting. The witch’s way of marriage. It guts her, something so hot it hurts, strangling her throat. Her eyes pr@ckle, and she wonders, how many times will this witch of hers drive her to tears?“I have.” It’s all she says, eyebrows raising, shifting as she tries to make Agatha look her in the eye.Agatha takes a deep, steadying breath, her cheeks flushed bright red, her soft skin prettily freckled. She pinches her eyes shut, and produces from somewhere inside her dress, a long ribbon. It’s a fine fabric, rich purple and a dark, emerald green, braided together.She holds it limp in both hands, palms flat, like an offering, and opens her eyes again. She gazes at Rio with such an intensity, it makes her falter, mouth hanging open.“Agatha…” she finally speaks, voice so low she can barely hear herself.Her witch’s fingers clutch around the ribbon, hands dropping.“If-,” Her face pinches, seemingly gathering her words, she takes another breath. “If this isn’t something…”She stops speaking, but Rio can read it all over her sweet, beautiful face. If this isn’t something she wants, if it isn’t something she’s capable of. Death, giving herself over, mind, body, soul. It wasn’t something she’d ever considered. Death, even having a soul to give over.Now, it seems the most obvious thing in the entire universe. Agatha, the only reason she has a soul. Of course she’d give it. How could she not?She rushes forward, the need to comfort her witch so overwhelming, it hurts. She clutches Agatha by the wrists, drawing her nearer. Those blue eyes snap up, something pleading there.“Agatha,” she sighs out, her name tasting divine as it always has. “I’d do anything. My soul is already yours. It always has been.”A wave of emotion seems to flash through Agatha like a flood. Her mouth splits on a wide, raptured grin, her eyes sparkling with glittery tears. She seems giddy, suddenly, all of her fear shoved away. When she leans forward for a kiss, Rio dips back.“Isn’t that for after the ceremony?” she tuts, tongue clicking against teeth teasingly. “Patience, beloved.”Agatha grumbles, muttering under her breath, something about wanting to strangle Rio, who giggles, pleased by how easily she riles her witch up.Agatha steps back a bit, starting to loop the ribbon around her right wrist, before joining both hands with Rio, letting her purple do the rest of the work. The ribbon is soft around them, looping both of them together, but not tying.“Okay…” Agatha sighs, settled with how their hands are entwined. She looks up at Rio, her eyes sparkling wet. She smiles, wide and so filled with tender love, it makes Rio’s entire body ache. She smiles back, and their hands squeeze together once, twice.“Heart to thee,” her witch starts, voice reedy and sweet, trembling with emotion. Rio squeezes her hands again, encouraging. “Body to thee… these are the hands that will passionately love you, and with the slightest touch, will comfort you like no other. These are the hands that will hold you when fear or grief fills your mind. These are the hands that will countless times wipe the tears from your eyes; tears of sorrow, tears of joy. These are the hands that even when wrinkled and aged, will still be reaching for yours, still giving you the same unspoken tenderness with just a touch.”Warm tears collect on her lashes as she finishes speaking, and Rio longs to wipe them away, to whisper her undying adoration into her mouth. Agatha finishes the ceremony with a flourish of her purple, the ribbon tying their hands together swiftly. She rushes forward, wrists pinned between their bodies, and captures Rio’s mouth with a hunger that could only be described as ravenous.Her tongue splits Rio’s lips open, and she whimpers into her witch’s, her wife’s mouth. Suddenly her wrists are free, and she feels the sensation of dandelion seedlings tickling against her skin, fluttering all around them. When she breaks apart from Agatha, ignoring her whine, she sees the ribbon is gone, transformed.With their newfound freedom, she buries her hands in Agatha’s wild hair, tugging their mouths back together, teeth clicking against each other as she presses her tongue past lips. Her cheeks smeared with wetness, she realizes they’re both crying. She gasps a little with overwhelm, the feelings cresting in her cavernous chest making her limbs shake.When Agatha starts walking backward, she doesn’t resist, stumbling after her wife. Willing to follow her anywhere.She presses Agatha up against her front door, mouthing on her neck, sucking bruises into her tender flesh, the other witch heaving gasping breaths into her ear.“Take your skirt up,” she murmurs against skin, pressing kisses against the hammering arteries beneath it.Agatha obeys, gathering her skirts in her hands, shaking. Rio takes her there, against the door, feeling the hot, slick flesh between her thighs, dismantling her into a whining, tender mess, begging for release.Rio gives it to her, again and again, the sunrise melting into darkness, the full moon beating down all the while. -✰- When Agatha wakes the next morning, tangled between sheets and Rio’s bare flesh, she peers up at her with the most open, loving look Rio had ever seen in all her eternity. It makes her heart heave, stricken.“I have a gift for you,” Agatha says, voice still thick with sleep, hoarse from the overuse the night before.“A wedding present?” Rio asks, just to see her smile. And smile she does, big and wide, apples of her cheeks going bright, pretty pink.“Mhmm, something very special for my wife.” Rio cannot contain her own grin, she draws her limbs up, arms curling around her legs as Agatha gets out of bed. Her unashamed nature never fails to fl@ster, Death brought to her knees by the beautiful, female form of Agatha Harkness. She has to dig her face into her skin, the curve of her witch’s bare waist, her soft, pale skin, hair so long it brushes against her tailbone, acting like a shroud, a cloak all on its own. It’s all too much. And suddenly, all hers.Agatha perches back on the edge of the bed, now covered by a billowing white nightgown, much to Rio’s discontent. She made her feelings known with a pained groan, plucking the hem of the gown with a pinch.“Behave,” Agatha warned, making Rio giggle.In her hands, she holds an object wrapped in green paper. The sight settles Rio down, and she stills, folding her hands in her lap.Agatha takes a quick breath, and hands the gift to Rio. She unwraps it slowly, so as not to tear the paper, and when she gets to the object, she stops. She sets the paper down on the bed, and lifts up a long, heavy and curved dagger.It’s made of a heavy, dark and fine metal, the handle wrapped with an ornate design. It feels good in her hands, balances perfectly in her grip. Still, she’s confused. She quirks an eyebrow at Agatha, questioning.Agatha simply gestures to the open air around them, her hand moving up and down. So, Rio lifts the dagger, slices it through the air, and it’s all at once that she feels the buzzing inside it, the undeniable presence of magick, stinging at her palm in an almost ticklish fashion, all Agatha. The air parts for her, the blackness of her realm beyond, twinkling for her. She gasps out, waving a hand, shuttering the gap in reality, sewn back shut.“For easier travels, my love,” Agatha says, and when Rio meets her eyes, there’s a sweet scrunch to them. “You can come find me, with one swing of your knife.”Rio nearly swoons, setting the knife between their bodies on the bed, and presses forward to plant a kiss on her wife’s waiting mouth.“I would find you anywhere, anyway,” she murmurs between soft kisses, pecking over and over and over. -✰- The knife comes into play far more often than Rio expected it to.Yes, for an easier, satisfying means of travel. But Agatha begins begging for it, the caress of the sharp edge of it, followed by Rio’s soft, warm tongue, capturing her beaded blood, her saliva healing every nick the dagger leaves in its wake.Sometimes, Agatha will ask her to leave the wounds. At first, Rio protested, understanding that her wife enjoys a little pain with her pleasure, but not liking the thought of leaving her with cuts that will scar. That’s before she sees the dark, pleading look in Agatha’s eyes.Of course, she concedes, ever-willing to her witch’s every whim.Rio can’t decide which she likes better; fighting Agatha until one of them is pinned, caught, left to the other’s mercy, or their more tender nights, soft and sweet and safe. She thinks of it as she does the cycle of life and death. Both necessary to keep a sort of balance.She wouldn’t want it any other way. And she knows Agatha wouldn’t, either. -✰- The night it happened, nothing seemed different at first. Nothing out of place, no cosmic scale out of balance.It happens, nonetheless.She is knelt between Agatha’s pliant, open legs, littering kisses all along wet flesh, murmuring love confessions in every language she knows.Agatha sighs the words back to her, her purple flickering outward to skate along Rio’s naked back. It feels as if they’ve melted together, their connection shimmering, the walls of the cottage bathed with electric light.Agatha’s body pulls taut as she gasps upon her release, her body shaking apart on the bed. As she settles, something prickles inside of Rio, the hair at the nape of her neck standing on end. She stands, her limbs still shaking, and her hand is drawn toward her wife, hovering over her middle.This is when she feels it, the little flickering light, coming from the womb inside her lover. Another presence between them, another soul. A gasp is wrenched out of her, and she stumbles backward, mind reeling.“My love?” Agatha calls out, voice still wrecked, words coated with confusion. “What is it?” “No, it can’t…” Rio is murmuring, pacing back and forth, raking a hand through her hair. How could it be? Certainly, she would’ve felt the presence, tugging at her, pinching at her, if it had been there before. She doesn’t understand.“Rio!” Agatha is suddenly before her, her hands coming to clutch at Rio’s arms, stilling her.  “What?” Her voice is pleading, eyes wide with confusion.“Don’t you feel it?” Rio asks, finally, after a beat of everlasting silence.“Feel-,” Agatha starts to demand, before a little gasp erupts from her. Her face scrunches with confusion, she rests a palm against her soft stomach. The look she gives Rio is pure, unfettered awe. “I didn’t…”A sinking feeling overtakes Rio’s chest, like she’s swallowed a heavy, cold stone. She steps away from Agatha, entirely consumed by a blinding fear. There’s an itching in the back of her head, buried deep in her skull. This is wrong. This should never have happened.The joy upon her wife’s face only makes the feeling sharper, blistering inside of her.“I have to…” she trails off, stepping further back, summoning her clothes to her body with a green flourish. She reaches for the sheathed knife at her hip, and Agatha makes a pained noise beside her.“Surely you aren’t leaving,” she murmurs, and Rio can hear the shake to her voice. It makes her want to vomit, black bile from a nonexistent stomach.Rio slices her dagger through the air, the blackened beyond rippling open, and steps through. -✰- The guilt is all consuming. It’s a feeling like no other, something she’s not experienced in her eternity. But it rages inside of her, swallowing her whole, making her despise herself.Rio attempts to bury herself in her job. Finding every soul, smattered along the astral plane, guiding them. In the in-between, all she can do is ache. How is she to return to her beloved, after leaving in such a rush, at such a moment?How is she to return, knowing she’s to deliver the news that the soul inside of her wife is an anomaly, an accident, against all things natural?She wants to claw herself apart. This, this is why Death could never have a warm, beating heart. It just wasn’t right. -✰- When she finally returns, after a matter of agonizingly long weeks, she brings her wife a handful of stargazer lilies. She knows this isn’t enough.Twilight is twinkling in the sky as she meets Agatha’s doorstep. The purple hue of it reminds her of their wedding night, and something lurches inside of her.She decides to knock on her lover’s door. She’ll leave, if Agatha wishes.When the door opens, Rio can’t stop the prick of tears in her eyes. She attempts to blink them away, now isn’t the time. Agatha looks beautiful, luminescent, glowing from the inside. She’s backlit by a crackling fire, in a soft lavender nightgown, her hair braided.“Those for me, you @ssh@l@?” she demands, gesturing at the bouquet Rio has in hand.Rio’s mouth opens and shuts a few times, before she simply nods, thrusting the flowers forward. Agatha accepts them, a sour look on her face, and steps aside, allowing Rio space to slip through the doorway.“Agatha, I-” Rio starts, before she’s cut off by the slamming of the door.Her wife looks entirely unimpressed with her. Which is fair. Rio wants to flay herself alive for what she did. She would, if she could.“I am so sorry,” she starts, trying to keep her voice steady. Her heart stands before her, twirling the flowers between her hands. She stares at the floor. “I wish I hadn’t gone.”“Why did you?” Agatha murmurs, all the vitriol stripped from her tone, sounding wounded, small, like a child. It wrenches Rio’s heart, flopping, agonized in her chest. She takes a breath.“I was… scared. Something I am usually not. I do not know what to make of this, my love. I am terrified of what may come.”She speaks softly, eyeing Agatha as she absorbs the words. Her wife sighs, and moves further into the little cottage, setting the bunch of pink flowers on the table next to her.“Sweetheart, I-” Agatha takes a deep breath, cutting her words off. She seems to fight with herself inside, something pained contorting her face. “Sit with me?”Rio nods, immediately, the tone of her wife’s voice and the word she’d used acting as a balm, soothing her frayed nerves. She moves quickly, perching on the edge of their shared bed.Agatha sits beside her, their knees barely brushing, Rio’s covered by her long skirts, Agatha’s bare, vulnerable. Rio resists the urge to press her palm to it, wrings her hands together instead.“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Agatha starts to explain, softly, and when Rio opens her mouth, she shoots her a cutting glare. Rio promptly snaps her mouth back shut.“I’ve read about this, heard of it from my mother. But I didn’t think it could happen like that, without the intention behind it…” she trails off, her words strained. “I’m sorry I scared you, Rio.”Her head dips down a bit, chin tucked to her chest. She starts to pick at a thread on the hem of her nightgown. Rio’s brows furrow, utterly confused. Did Agatha think she’d done this on her own? A tiny seed of hope is sown, deep in her chest. Maybe she had.She failed to consider the fact that many powerful witches had been conjuring up souls for centuries, complicated spells involving weeks spent in caves, in the woods, summoning their children from nothing but flowers and spells and incantation.How foolish of her, to think her witch not powerful enough to do it from sheer nothing. She was the most powerful witch she’d ever met, after all.The shame covering Agatha’s face makes Rio ache.She stops fighting the urge, and rests her cool palm on Agatha’s bare knee. Her wife looks up at her, eyes wet. “You didn’t scare me at all, Agatha,” Rio says, insistent, so Agatha feels it, knows it’s the truth. “I thought… I thought maybe I’d helped, in this little… creation, of yours.”She cringes at her own words, feeling like she can’t possibly say the right thing. But Agatha grins at her, and Rio can feel the impending tease.“Oh, you think highly of those skills of yours, do you?” She laughed as she said it, and Rio heaves a sigh of relief. She had worried they’d never be the same, when she’d left. She lets Agatha take the win, not firing anything back as she smiles, shrugs nonchalantly.Still, something needled at the back of her mind. The worry wasn’t completely soothed. The what if lingered in the air. She felt compelled to speak, hoping Agatha would have something else to say, something to make her relax.“I worry, is all. I do not think Death can, or should, have children. I do not see any good coming of that,” she murmurs, attempting to tread lightly.Agatha settles down, her smile fading a bit. It’s as if she can feel Rio’s fear, radiating off of her in waves. She smooths a hand over Rio’s head, caressing her hair, rubbing against her jaw.“You deal in all things living, my love. I don’t see how anything you touch could be bad. It is only necessary, neutral. A fact of life.”It soothes something, she always does. The words make her eyes burn, her throat constrict. She can only nod, letting the meaning behind it soak in, trying to will it to be true. -✰- Months pass, and for the first time in their long history together, Rio makes it home to her bride every night. It is no longer an option, staying away while Agatha sleeps by herself. The fear is still somewhere, residing deep in her bones. A gut feeling, almost. She’d rip the soul from her wife’s womb before it could do anything to hurt her. She knows this to be true. She cannot imagine the world without Agatha. She sees no point.She attempts to be hopeful, but it feels naive, futile. She tries anyway. -✰- “Can you tell, yet?” Agatha whispers, down to Rio who is on her knees. Agatha is sat on the bed, palms pressing into the sheets, anxiously wriggling one of her legs. Rio stills the movement with a steady palm, and continues her work, eyes shut, she reaches and reaches for that tiny little soul tug inside her wife’s belly, now slightly swollen.Her eyes shoot open, a grin slides over her face.“A boy,” she says.Agatha shrieks a bit, a hand coming to cover her mouth.“A  boy. Hm.”“Oh, don’t be too disappointed, my love. With you as his mother, I’m sure he’ll turn out perfect.”She means it. If he makes it. She prays to every force in the entire universe he does.Agatha swats at her shoulder, a grin taking over her beautiful, glowing face.“I’m not!” she insists, giggling. “And with you  as his  father, I’m sure of that, too.”She’s joking, Rio knows she is. But it lands wrong, and she feels the grief slide over her face before she can contain it.“Rio.” Agatha sounds exasperated.“I know, I’m sorry,” she sighs, eyes pinching. She slides to sit fully on the floor now. There’s a scratchy, straw rug beneath her, and she tries to focus on the feeling of it.“I am certain he’s made only from me. But, I would hope you’d stick around, either way? I know you’d make a wonderful mother. Better than me, anyway.”The words tug at Rio painfully. It’s framed as a lighthearted jest, but she can feel all of the wounds pulsating in it. It's begging, really, a pleading question. Of course, she’d stick around. She prickles at the implication that Agatha wouldn’t make a good mother.“I will stay by your side, and his, for as long as we all exist on this plane together. I would not leave, unless you begged me to. Even then, I’m unsure that I could,” Rio murmurs, looking at the floor as she speaks.She feels a hand in her hair, guiding her head. When she looks up, her chin now resting on Agatha’s upturned knee, her wife’s eyes are watering, a wobbly grin on her face. Those baby nerves have wreaked havoc on her poor witch. Her heart flops uselessly in her chest at the sight.Quickly, she turns her teeth to the skin below her, nipping just once, harsh but fast. Agatha gasps, affronted, an annoyed look passing over her face. “That is for insinuating you wouldn’t be a good mother,” Rio explains, glaring up at her wife.Agatha just laughs, a bit breathlessly, and flops back onto the mattress. Rio stares up at the bump protruding from her abdomen, and begs the world. -✰- The months pass quicker than Rio would prefer.Funny, how little she used to consider time. Now she has a waking reminder by her side, almost constantly. She simply cannot forget.The winter thaws out, leaving the forest surrounding their home a bright, lush green. Rio grows flowers all over the yard outside. Hyacinth, lavender, roses, anything she can think of to bring any sort of good omen to the spring season.Of course, there is only so much she can do.Agatha’s stomach grows rapidly, now, straining against all of her nightgowns and dresses. She’s uncomfortable, Rio can tell. She does everything she can to soothe her wife, sending tiny pulses of her power through aching muscles, stiff joints, concocting tinctures and teas for her lover.Rio grows a black cherry tree outside, conjured up from just a sapling, until it's large enough. Then, with a motion of her hand, she sends the whole trunk of it to the grass below. The breaking of the wood sends a deafening, splintering sound, echoing throughout their little clearing. Only the stump remains, and Rio gets to work, molding the barely alive hunks of wood into the gift she plans to present to Agatha.A tiny, tiny cradle, polished with beeswax till it shone. She carved two runes into either side of it with her dagger, one prosperity, one protection. She took up the skirts of the dress she wore, shredding the bottom of it, and fitted it as a little cushion in the bottom of the cradle.Her eyes stung with tears throughout the whole affair, the birds chittering in the nearby woods, the warm sun beating down atop her head, it all felt like a mockery. With a twist of her hand, her magick ensnared the little cradle in its grasp, and she walked with it trailing just behind. She opened the door to their cottage, quietly, trying not to wake her wife who was deep asleep, a midafternoon nap.Rio settled the cradle in a corner of the room, and sighed, brushing her palms along her now shorn short dress. She took a moment to stare at her lover, her witch. So soft and vulnerable with sleep, her cheeks ruddy, hair stuck to her sweating forehead.It ached Rio, a solid pulsation through her entire being. She grit her teeth against the sensation.Not for the first time, she reached out, gently calling for the little soul inside of her wife. There he was, still happy as ever, alive.Rio could barely dare to hope. The sense of impending doom was too great, like a sword swinging over her head. She wanted to hate the child growing inside of Agatha. The gaping, gnawing fear that dragged through her whenever she thought about what may come.But she couldn’t. She’d seen Agatha, how she caressed her belly tenderly, a private, sweet smile on her face. Rio knew what it meant to her wife, the ability to be a mother, to do it right. She only wished she’d receive the chance she deserved.Agatha stirred in bed, grunting uncomfortably as she adjusted her body on the mattress. In a flash, Rio held a rag in hand, and sliced through time and space to reach a tiny, trickling creek nearby their cottage. She soaked the rag in the cool water, and in an instant, she was back in their home, settled on the mattress and pressing the rag to her wife’s warm head.“Hello, my sweet,” she murmured, gently coaxing Agatha from sleep.The woman writhed beneath her, groaning, but her eyes flickered open and there was already a smile in them. She rested a hand on her swollen stomach contentedly.“Good morning,” she muttered groggily.“You mean afternoon, dearest.”“Whichever.”Rio giggled, dragging the cloth from Agatha’s forehead to her neck, for which her bride whined with gratification.“I’ve made you something,” Rio says, softly.Agatha perks up at the mention of a gift, and Rio snorts.“What is it?” Agatha demands, sitting up against the pillows behind her.Rio gestures to the corner, where the cradle sits, and Agatha gasps.“Oh, Rio…” She sits up further, gently reaching out with her purple to wrap around a leg of the furniture, dragging it closer slowly till it reaches the edge of the bed. She takes in the whole thing, the reddish color of the wood, the runes, the green fabric in the bottom.“It’s beautiful,” she murmurs, her voice high and thin, her lower lip wobbling.“Oh, honey,” Rio smiles, swallowing around the lump in her throat. She pets Agatha’s damp hair, caresses her warm cheek.“This pregnancy,” she whines, covering her wet eyes with the heels of her hands. “I need this d@mned baby out of me.”It makes Rio’s breath catch in her throat. Damned baby. Damned. It rings in her ears, but she just smiles, needlessly, because Agatha’s eyes are still covered.She strokes down Agatha’s back, rubbing soothing circles on her spine.“Soon. I can feel it.”She only wishes it weren’t true. -✰- It happens when Rio has been called away.Knowing how near to giving birth Agatha is, she puts it off as long as she can. She feels the tether yanking at her, a soul to collect somewhere nearby, and she ignores it until it hurts.Agatha picks up on this, because of course she does. She insists that she’s fine, she doesn’t think the baby is coming anytime soon.So, Rio goes. As fast as she can, flitting between time and space to do her job.Of course, as soon as she arrives, she feels Agatha, she feels the pain radiating through her body, can feel her witch’s trembling heart, calling out for her.The soul gives her the hardest time, and each second is lurching, like crawling through mud, until Rio has to use what Agatha teasingly calls her demon voice to send the person cowering through to the other side.She doesn’t like having to do that, but Agatha has taken top priority. It’s been this way since she first laid eyes on her, and Rio thinks it will remain so until time itself ends.As soon as she’s near, she feels her so intensely, like a punch to the stomach, the wind knocked out of her. The agonized cries echo between trees, sending birds scattered through the sky, the air prickling.What she cannot feel, is the tiny, sparkling soul inside of her lover. Her eyes slam shut, and she sucks in a shaky breath, bent over with the pain of it. How could any force in the universe be so cruel, making a woman suffer through endless months of discomfort, only to deliver a corpse?She’s seen it many times before, but never so intimately. Never with a soul that was to be partly hers. It aches like she’s never felt before. It scorches through her, burning her up from the inside out.As Agatha cries out again, something close to a howl, Rio sniffles once, and wipes at her damp eyes with the hem of her cloak. She walks toward where she can feel her lover, rested against a tree, because she knows Rio can feel her more clearly there, pressed up against a part of nature.She cannot bring herself to run, or to split through the seams of space to get there in an instant, as much as she wants to comfort her wife. She knows the news she carries in her heart will bring nothing but despair.Rio finds her, back pressed against the trunk of a staggeringly massive tree. There’s blood streaked down her pale thigh, and her head is tipped back, crying out into the open air of the forest, wailing.Then, Agatha’s head snaps up. A tentative smile just begins to quirk on her mouth, but then, it’s as if she can read Rio’s mind. “No. It cannot be.” The words are so infused with a new sense of agony, Rio knows she’ll remember this until the end of time. She is filled with a seething, hot rage, that this is happening to her, happening to Agatha, to them.“It must be.” She hopes her wife can feel the regret, the sorrow in her words.“If you do this, I will hate you forever.” It sends a sharp drag through Rio’s sternum. She wishes she didn’t know it to be true. She only nods, softly.Agatha seems to feel the way her words landed. Her face contorts.“Please, let him live. Please, my love, please!” She shouts, the last words of her pleading broken off into another pained wail.Rio closes her eyes, swallows. She bargains with herself, her rational mind warring with the side of her that aches to do anything her lover wishes. She knows she is only extending the inevitable. She is Death herself, and it is impossible to give her bride what she wants. Who’s to say it wouldn’t make things worse, dragging out the process, making a sick child suffer? She cannot will the child to be healthy, he will always be living on borrowed time. She cannot will the family they deserve.“I can offer only time…” she calls out, the words slipping from her mouth without thinking. She rages at herself, but she simply can’t stay angry at her weakness. How could she, when it comes in the form of her heart, personified, beating right before her eyes?“How much time? How much?” Agatha whines back to her, dazedly.With that, Rio is gone. -✰- She couldn’t stomach the pain, the potential false hope she’d given her wife. If that made her something of a coward, so be it.Shortly after her departure, she feels him. Another tug, just like his mother. A tether, direct to Rio’s quickly withering heart. It felt like some sort of cosmic joke, maybe to serve as a reminder that she’d neglected her job, cheated herself, and one day the tie would be severed.She felt the desperate flood of relief, raging wildly inside her bride immediately following the new presence. Maybe that was all that mattered. -✰- Rio allowed herself several days in her dark realm. She kept tabs on her witch, of course she did. It was as if she could feel the thrum of Agatha’s heart echoing in her own chest. It soothed the ache, a bit, knowing she was alive, if not alright.On the third restless, itching day, Rio takes her dagger, the magic in it an evil, simmering reminder of their wedding night. Rio knew with a sick, solid certainty, that it could never be like that again.Still, she sliced through the black, the edges shimmering and giving way to show the front stoop of their cottage. She stepped through, and turned the door handle.Their home was empty, untouched seemingly. The bed was empty, the sheets twisted up, a rusty red stain in the middle of the mattress. In the corner, the cradle sat, untouched. She felt that tug, and knew Agatha and her son were somewhere far from here.Rio turned on a heel, and stepped back through her little sliver of space. When she was there, simmering with agony among the void, she let out a singular hoarse scream, and listened to the echo bounce around for what felt like an eternity. -✰- It doesn’t take long for her witch to start killing again. Of course it doesn’t.She’d taken quite a long break while being pregnant, unwilling to risk it. And before, there was hardly a need to. She already held Death at her beck and call. All she needed to do was ask.What’s different, though, is the fact that she no longer lingers, waiting for her lover in the liquidy shadows. The first time Rio comes across a semi-circle of corpses, the smell of her wife’s magick in the air, she can already sense that Agatha is far from here.It burns, bristles, and she channels the anger and pain towards her job, snapping at the souls she collects, telling them if they hadn’t been so stupid, maybe they would’ve survived.She can’t tell if she’s really talking to them, or to herself. -✰- Death is not dull. She knows Agatha is distracting her on purpose, leading her on some sort of wild goose chase. It aches her, knowing her wife thinks so little of her, thinks that she’d come sn@tch her son from under her unsuspecting nose.She does her job anyway, of course. She wishes she could tell Agatha, you don’t have to do this. Not yet, anyway. The boy has at least a few years.But Rio knew if Agatha wanted to see her, she’d stay behind, or call out for her. So, she doesn’t go to find her. As bad as it burns her up inside. -✰- It’s been about a year, Rio supposes, based on the seasons. The snow had melted away a while ago, flowers shooting up from the ground, birds singing once more.She’s bored. Death isn’t supposed to be bored, and she seethes a bit, knowing this woman ruined her. Broke her. Shredded her apart.She’s playing with her knife, the tip of her finger pressing into its point, drawing up a single black bead of blood that quickly dries up, the wound healing itself. She thinks about all the times over the years this exact knife bore down into the flesh of her beloved, the way her gasped moans of pleasure-pain rang through Rio’s ears. She sighs longingly, filled with a steeped, pointless rage.Then, it happens. That clutch in her chest. She gasps out loud, her hands stilling in midair. She wonders if she’s imagined it, if she’s gone so insane that she’s conjuring up nonexistent sensations, when it happens again.This time, it’s unmistakable, because it’s the both of them. Her wife, and her wife’s son, tugging at her, calling for her.She moves quickly, smearing at the dark makeup she’s taken to layering her eyes with, dramatically. Rio splits the seam, feeling out into the universe, divining exactly where her witch is.What she sees makes her ache even further, a shallow stab to her ribcage. The view the split allows her is a view from directly above.Her wife is asleep on a bed of her own cloak, her arm crooked and cradling her baby. Agatha twitches restlessly, whining high in the back of her throat, and Rio immediately knows she’s having a nightmare.Oh, how she aches to wake her, to whisper soothing words into her hairline, to press a kiss to her sleep-warm cheek. Her eyes burn with it.She shifts her gaze over to the baby, who she expects to be asleep right next to his mother. Instead, she’s greeted with the widest brown eyes she’s ever seen. A gasp lurches from her throat. She’d expected that deep, bright blue she’s come to know so well. Instead, it’s like looking into her own eyes. The shock that runs through her is absurd, jolting her entire body and wrenching a tiny, pained noise from her throat.Agatha stirs with the sound, and Rio is quick about sealing up the seam she’s looking through.Her heart pounds away in her chest so violently, she can hear it in her eardrums, feel it in her jaw.She’d been right, she knows with startling clarity. He was hers, too. -✰- Time passes unhurriedly, every second grating on Rio’s being, every second agony.Selfishly, she’s been sneaking glances here and there at the child. Each time, she feels utterly destroyed, this perfect being, parts of the both of them strung together to create him. She wonders if Agatha knows, but shakes the thought away. She must. It doesn’t matter anyway.She lives vicariously through the two of them. Mother and son. Something she could never touch. She was incapable of being a mother, and she’d never been a child in the first place.She watches as Agatha bathes their son in shallow creeks, dries their clothing on sunbaked rocks. She watches as she sings him to sleep, soft hushed lullabies, stroking his chubby cheek, smoothing his fine, brown hair back. She learns Nicky’s name entirely by accident, Agatha shouting it on a bubbled over giggle as he stuffed a dead leaf into his mouth.Agatha continues her killings. Rio wishes she could ask her about it. Is it a result of her desperate need for power, or just a distraction? Does she imagine she could fight off Death, if she grew strong enough? Does she wish to?She cleans up her witch’s messes as her heart calcifies in her chest.She wonders when Agatha stopped wanting her to be their son’s mother, too. -✰- Rio thinks the kid must be nearly four, when Agatha calls her back, with intention this time.Rio learned the difference over the years, Agatha yearning for her in a dream state, it wasn’t as strong of a tug.It’s the dead middle of wintertime when she feels her, wakeful, and begging now.Rio’s long dead heart clutches in her chest, and she curses it, willing the feeling away.When she steps through her seam, she’s shocked to find herself back on that porch, standing in front of their old home. It feels like centuries ago.She steps through the door with a singular, steadying breath.The sight before her makes her feel ill, almost, makes her stomach curl sourly. Agatha is sitting on the bed, their son in her arms. Her cheeks are pink, and wet. Her nose is running.“Hello, Agatha.”It’s all she can muster, and Rio feels proud of herself for keeping her voice flat, steady. She may be angry, seething even. But she longs to understand how Agatha must feel, if she’s kept her  away for this long.“Did you do this?” the woman before her demands, her voice filled with venom. It hits Rio like a slap to the face, leaves her ears ringing.“Do what?”  It’s pleading. She can’t keep the pain out, this time.Agatha snarls at her, rolling her eyes as she gestures down to a sleeping Nicky. Rio eyes him, and notes his pale, sallow skin. His breath rattles a little in his slumber, a little clicking noise emerging from his tiny, open mouth.“He’s sick?” Rio asks, stricken. Of course, she knew this would come. How could it not? She’d offered her witch only time, after all. “Yes,”  Agatha grinds out, her teeth grit together, eyebrows pinched.She looks more tired, more aged than she had in all their years together combined. Rio’s heart cries out, pitifully.“Did you do this? Please. It can’t be-. I need more time, please,” her voice breaks as she continues, smoothing a hand over the child’s pallid forehead. “He’s only three.”Rio settles gently onto her knees, unable to resist as she edges closer to the pair on the bed. There’s a flash of something like fear on Agatha’s face, and she stops. She cannot hide the pained look that passes over her face.“I have no control over this,” she says, trying to be gentle, but her voice is thin. “It was always going to happen, Agatha. You knew this.”Agatha lets out a broken cry, her face crumbling as the child stirs a little in her arms. She soothes him, bounces him in her arms a bit and shushes him until he settles.“Can you… can you tell how much longer?” she asks, looking up at Rio with a desperate, pleading look. Those eyes, Death had never been able to resist.She sighs a bit, and reaches out, assessing the feel of his lifeforce. She smiles a little.“He’s strong. Like you,” she says, her hand fluttering a bit in front of herself, longing to touch the child, or Agatha, or the both of them. She drops them, instead. “He has more time. There are things you can do, tinctures, poultices. But… a few more years, I’d say. At best.”Agatha lets out another shattered whine, and Rio tries not to let herself become outwardly exasperated. This is good news, how does she not get that? Something, as opposed to nothing at all. Doesn’t she understand what Rio has done for her? Something she’s never done for anybody, something she’s promised herself she’d never do again. She can feel his soul, how it aches to come home with her. Borrowed time. It throws off the balance of all things.But, then. She sees Agatha’s face. The pure, saturated love there. The way she used to look at Rio herself. She knows the feeling well. No wonder she’s in agony. She knows the time is borrowed.“I’m sorry,” Rio murmurs, staring at Agatha’s bare knees.“I know.” -✰- She calls on Rio more frequently, after that. Not daily, as she used to. But it’s something. Rio wonders if she feels guilty for keeping their son from her, for what little time he has in this realm.At first, Rio mostly watches the two of them. They play together, little games Rio doesn’t understand, Agatha hiding behind her hands and then dramatically dropping them, the child falling apart in a cacophony of tittering giggles.Agatha knows she’s there, now, and allows her to watch for however long she pleases.One night, laying down on the bed in the cottage, Nicky curled beside her, Agatha zeroes in on Rio, melted in the shadowed dark of the corner. She crooks her finger, beckoning. Death feels her heart lurch into her throat.When she reaches the edge of the bed, Agatha gestures for her to sit. She does so gingerly, moving as slow as she can so as not to wake the sleeping child. When she looks at Agatha again, there’s a delicate smile on her face.Rio peers down at the child, his face so angelic, it steals her breath. His hair is dark, and coming in thicker with age. He has his mother’s wispy, delicate eyelashes. Suddenly, something wet hits her nose, and Rio realizes with a start that she’s crying.It’d been a while, tears.Agatha makes a little noise, and touches her cheek, like it’s nothing, like Rio hadn’t been aching for it for what felt like a millenia. Rio makes a pained sound, deep in her chest, her eyes flashing.The witch draws her hand back, something sad in her eyes, just for a second.Rio stays like that, watching the child, their child, as he twitches in his sleep, just like his mother. -✰- The next morning, Rio doesn’t realize how high the sun had gotten in the sky until it’s too late.Agatha lays fast asleep, the sheets pulled up around her face. Frost paints the corners of the window, and the fire is on its last legs in the hearth.“Who are you?”The voice makes Rio jump. Her mouth falls open, and she’s dumbfounded. She has absolutely no idea what to say. She doesn’t know what she’d expected, staying here so late into the morning. Of course the child would wake up.“I…” she trails off. She can’t tell him, she has no idea how.Nicky sits up, his soft hair falling around his cheeks, those startling, dark eyes boring into her soul. He rubs at his face with a chubby little hand.“Agatha,” Rio says, reaching over to touch the shoulder of the sleeping woman. She hates to wake her, but she’s stricken with panic. What is she to do with a child?Agatha makes a little huffing noise, and sits up. She seems taken aback by the sight in front of her. Rio in what was once their bed, their child between them.“Oh,” she says simply. “Good morning, my love.”It’s said to the child, but it makes Rio’s chest ache all the same. It burns.“This is Rio,” she says next, simply. “Say hello.”“Hello, Rio!” The child chirps it, grinning at her.Rio practically launches herself from the bed, it’s all too much. She can’t. She can’t. She ignores Agatha calling after her, and rips out the front door, barely making it two feet onto the lawn before bursting into wracking sobs. She splits her seam open, and steps through, away from what should have, could have, been her family. -✰- Nicky’s fourth birthday comes and goes. Rio gives him a leatherbound book and a box of charcoal to draw with.His cough worsens with every passing day, despite all of the healing that Agatha attempts.Rio warms up to him, is able to calm her feelings into something manageable, only ever bursting into tears when she’s by herself again.The kid is smart. Incredibly so, which shouldn’t be surprising considering the woman who’s raised him thus far. He’s funny too, making Rio snort with laughter whenever they spend time together.She pretends she can’t feel Agatha’s burning gaze, watching the two of them interact. She pretends she doesn’t feel exactly how her ex-lover’s heart wrenches and twists at the sight. -✰- It’s a midsummer evening, and Nicky is asleep in the cottage. Agatha gestures for Rio to follow her outside, so she does, of course she does.She sits down on the porch, pats the spot next to her. Although it hurts, a sick lurch inside her, Rio obeys. She ignores how the fabric of their dresses brush together, how their skin only almost touches.“I want to tell him.”It’s from out of nowhere, and it guts Rio instantly.“No,” she says, immediately. She knows exactly what Agatha must mean.“Rio…” “No. Agatha, no! He has a mother. It would only confuse him.”She doesn’t know why she’s so resistant to the idea. The sense of responsibility it brings, the acknowledgement of her part in this. The questions that would be asked. The fact that their relationship lies dead at Rio’s feet, like everything else always has, always will.“He deserves to know, Rio. I think you know that. He’d be thrilled, he loves you!”She can feel Agatha growing irritated with her, how they’ve skirted around the topic for months now. But she shakes her head anyway, adamant.Then, Agatha, wicked as she is, rests a hand solidly on Rio’s shoulder, the tips of her fingers just barely touching the skin of her exposed collarbone. And those eyes, damn those eyes, and damn the woman who knows exactly how to use them. They plead her, the endless blue of them, begging.“How do you propose we explain it to him, huh, Agatha?” Rio asks, her voice broken, resolve crumbling with every second they touch.“We just say it. You’re his other mother. It’s true, isn’t it?” She shrugs as she speaks, the question rhetorical, thankfully, because Rio couldn’t respond if she tried. Simple as that. Then, she takes her hand away, and Rio’s heart with it.They tell him the next morning. Agatha was right, of course. He’s overjoyed. The pretty, twin smiles on both of her beloved’s faces almost makes the horrible, sinking feeling inside of Rio dissipate. Almost. -✰- The summer dwindles back into a bone-chilling winter, and then comes spring, again. Time moves too quickly, like liquid through fingers, sand through an hourglass. Borrowed time. It rings through her head every second they spend together.Nicky’s fifth birthday.Summer again, then fall.Cleaning up the bodies, coming home to them.Being a mother isn’t as hard as she imagined, but she knows that when she has to stop, that will be the biggest ache of her entire eternity. -✰- She startles one night, her eyes having slipped shut, not sleeping, never sleeping, just soaking it in. The feeling of the three of them, existing in the same delicate, sweet bubble. Agatha is gripping her wrist, shaking her free from her reverie.“What-”Agatha drags her up from the bed, pulls her outside into the night, the stars glimmering, winking up all around them.Her witch’s hands are on her hips, and Rio falters, wondering if somehow, she’s finally fallen asleep for the first time in her existence, if she’s dreaming now.“Agatha?” She can’t keep the confusion from her voice. Agatha stares at her, blue eyes boring into her soul, into her heart, clawing marks all throughout her being.“I miss you,” is all she says, before she dips forward, pressing her mouth to Rio’s.The feeling is that of incomparable relief. She cannot begin to explain it. She sighs into the kiss, savoring the taste of Agatha as her tongue splits her mouth open, familiarly, licking into her, tasting her right back.Rio is crying again, she can’t stop it. The sobs wrack her body, every feeling she’s felt since that day in the woods, Agatha giving birth, the last day she’d touched her like this, they overwhelm her, threatening to consume. She aches to split the earth apart with it, aches to keep this moment from ending. Her calcified heart cracks right back in two, the wet, pulsating muscle of it spilling endless, undying love.Agatha has her hands in Rio’s hair, gently petting, swallowing her cries right down. When Rio opens her eyes, she realizes Agatha is crying, too.“My love,” she murmurs, choked and broken. My wife, my heart, she doesn’t say. -✰- It’s a chilled, early winter morning. The three of them are outside, laying on a fine sheet of powder fresh snow. She’s teaching Nicky how to make snow angels.His giggles are one of the sweetest sounds she’s ever heard, Rio thinks. She glances over to her wife, who’s watching on with the rawest look of adoration on her face. Then, the laughter dissolves into a hacking fit. Rio sits up swiftly, helping him sit up as well, rubbing a soothing palm over his shaking spine. The coughing fit isn’t new. What is, is the bright red blood in his palm when he uncovers his mouth. Rio’s mouth drops open, unsure of what to say when he looks up at her, fear flickering in his big brown eyes.She turns to Agatha, her lover already on her feet, and she draws Nicky to his, rubbing his shoulders.“It’s okay, you’re alright, my sweet. You’re okay.” She’s looking over him as she murmurs the words into the top of his head, eyes boring right into Rio’s. She says it like a prayer, and Rio knows she’s begging her, specifically.Her chest clenches, and she stands, brushing the snow from her skirt and walking off toward the treeline, unable to squash down the tears that well in her eyes, running cold down her cheeks. -✰- “How much. Tell me.” Agatha is shouting at her, screaming in the clearing.It’s been weeks, and nothing is helping him. She knows Agatha could use a boost of power, something to strengthen every incantation she mutters over his head while he sleeps, every whispered prayer to the medicinal herbs she plies him with.She needs to go out, to find a coven, to strengthen herself. Rio knows this. But she also knows they’d agreed Agatha would no longer do that in front of Nicky. And she knows Agatha won’t leave him with her, not when he’s this sick. The distrust makes Rio feel ill, makes her want to scream and cry and shake Agatha by her shoulders.“I…” she stutters out, not wanting to answer. She worries she knows how this will go. But something flashes in her wife’s eyes. She already knows. There’s no use pretending. “Maybe a few months,” she admits, voice small.“F@ck@ng, why?  Why can’t you give me more time?” Agatha demands, voice shaking with agony.It hits Rio hard, the singularity in it. Me. Just her. No  us. “You know I have no choice, Agatha. I want him here just as much as you do,” she mutters it, attempting to keep her anger at bay.When her wife simply scoffs, she breaks.“I love him, too. You know that. You know that. That’s why I’m here, that’s why-”Her voice fails her, although her mind rattles on and on.  That’s why we are what we are, that’s why you brought me back here, why you made me be a mother. She cannot comprehend why Agatha won’t let them grieve this together. It makes a cavern of her chest, inky black and aching.It’s like Agatha can read her mind. She’s always had that ability, her quick, sharp wife. It’s their greatest weakness, Rio thinks. Her inability to hide away her most vulnerable parts, and Agatha always choosing to take that swing.“A real mother would never take him.”She processes the words for a moment, then feels them slice throughout her deeper than anything ever has. All she can do is let the mask fall back over her face, calling upon her oldest survival skills, that cold and unflinching armor.“I told you, Death could never be a mother. That’s all I am, right?”Rio doesn’t wait around to see if the words affected her lover at all. She simply turns away, cuts between time and space, and leaves her family behind, again. -✰- It aches, leaving them behind. It always aches. She tries to remember what it felt like before, feeling maybe a bit restless, but that was all. She’d been an entirely neutral entity before Agatha Harkness.Rio can’t make sense of it, that mortal being, leading her so far off her intended path that now she has such human insides. A beating, aching heart, a lover, l@st, a family. It makes her flinch.She feels Nicky tugging for her, all the time after she’s gone. If she tries hard enough, she can hear him crying. It wears on her. As hard as she tries, she can’t bring herself to regret him. And as angry as she is, livid, rage-filled, she can’t find it in herself to regret her, either. -✰- She knows without checking that the cottage is empty. Both because of the bodies piling up again, all over the place, her two, twin hearts traveling around, and because no matter how hard she tries to shake it away, she can feel their old home, empty and aching, just as she is. -✰- It’s time, she thinks, with a cold finality. She wishes it wasn’t.But she can feel his soul, yanking on her harder than ever before. It’s time for him to come home. -✰- She appears, slinky between the dark shadows of the trees. She holds a green torch, because she can’t let him be scared. She lets her hood down so he knows it’s her.When he wakes up, he wriggles around the makeshift bed on the forest floor for a second. Agatha sleeps beside him.He spots her quickly, though Rio wishes he hadn’t.He deserves more time. They all did. She waves anyway, then crooks a finger at him, the borrowed time his soul was existing on finally expiring, the seconds ticking down, coming to a slow stop.When he stands, excited to see her, a pleased look on his face, she points down to Agatha without thinking. It was something she’d done all the time, back at the cottage, whenever she’d take him into the woods to teach him about the plants there, to point out sniffling rabbits creeping along, hiding in the brush. Bunnies were his favorite.He leans down and kisses his mother’s cheek, then trots over to Rio like it’s nothing. When she takes his hand, she feels his tether on her heart, the sense of complete relaxation radiating from him. She thanks whatever forces, maybe thanks herself, glad he isn’t scared. She hates how her own fingers shake in his.When she walks him to the other side, she presses a kiss to the soft mop of hair on his head, caresses his cheek, and meets his gaze.“Be good, okay?” Her voice trembles, just barely. She squeezes his skin between her fingers.“I will, Mom.”With that, he steps away from her, and Rio collapses, pitching the torch away from herself, cries shaking out of her so loudly, birds flutter from their branches. Her heart lurches in her chest, once again, and she clings to the feeling of him, desperate, until it flickers out, and fades into nothingness. -✰- She understands them, the mothers weeping and cursing her name.She curses herself, over and over, screams at the universe that gave her this title, this path. She cannot comprehend it. She can’t make sense of it. Why would she receive this heart, just for it to be ground to a pulp, over and over again?She screams until her throat is raw, until her cold tears dry up on her cheeks.When Agatha wakes, and she feels her lover crying out in pain, she starts to weep all over again. She hates herself for allowing this to happen. She hates, she hates, until the sick, deep dark feeling takes hold of her heart, allowing it to finally still. -✰- The slaughtered covens continue on, Agatha is a force of nature. She follows her witch around, picking up the littered souls she leaves in her wake.She wants to loathe this connection, being forced to exist in Agatha’s aftermath. But she can’t.She wonders if Agatha means anything by it, if the deaths exist as a reminder of her, as if Rio could ever forget.She thinks Agatha is just trying to fill the void their dead son has left behind. Rio understands that. -✰- It’s been an odd hundred years or so, when Rio returns to the cottage. She’d decided she was done with the inky, black nothing. She can do her job from anywhere, really, so why not.She wants to exist between the reminders of them, her family. The ceremony on the grass, the love made in the bed. The pictures Nicky made still tacked up on the walls.When she arrives, she falls to her knees in front of the cradle she’d built, back when she was a different person. When she was loved, and able to love. She runs her fingers along the dusty wood, along the carved runes, and laughs mirthlessly. How useful her magic had been. -✰- As time passes, Rio finds more and more to occupy her time with. She decorates the cabin, berating herself for becoming so human, even still. Who could blame her, eons of nothing she called her home. What’s wrong with a little life?Plants fill nooks and crannies, she gets a record player. She aches to know what Agatha is doing, she has some vague idea, the bodies she leaves behind like little clues.She thinks fondly of the Titanic. So many souls. She wonders if it was a coincidence, the date coinciding with their marriage month, two hundred years ago. Rio doesn’t allow herself to think about it too much.She’s listening to music, staring off blankly into space as the sun melts into the sky, oranges and pinks streaked across the whole thing. Then, a soul calls to her. There’s always so many, every second, but Rio likes to let them pile up, turns it into a game, flittering around as fast as she can, collecting them all.She can’t care much about each one, anymore.But this one, something tickles at her, and she feels the need to go. So, she does.Much to her surprise, she erupts from the shadows of a nightclub. Somewhere not far from home, still on the east coast. Music rattles so loudly around her, it makes her eardrums ache in protest.She slinks between people, remaining unseen, until she finds what she’s looking for. A single soul, in the bathroom, wedged in a stall. She makes quick work of it, wondering why she’d felt the urge to take this soul, right now, when she feels her.Agatha.She can’t be far, Rio realizes with a start. Her breath starts coming faster, little pants. Her heart lurches. She might even be in the building.Rio had built up a resolve over the decades, forcing herself to numb out the pull toward her witch. She wasn’t wanted. She could not show up.But now, here, Rio simply can’t resist. She needs to see her, at the very least.She leaves the bathroom, remaining shuttered in the shadows, as she surveys each and every body in the vast room. There’s hoards of people, writhing together, dancing drunkenly. There’s people lined against walls, nursing drinks, smoking cigarettes. Rio wrinkles her nose. These people wanted her to show up for them, and soon, she thought. How odd.As she scans the people at the bar, leaning up to order drinks, her chest bottoms out. There she is. Her girl, pressed against the edge of the counter.She doesn’t look much older, Rio thinks, shockingly. And her hair is short. Just brushing at her shoulders, still wavy and wild. She’s wearing a leather jacket, a revealing, lacy sort of white blouse underneath, a rosary around her neck. Her fingers are covered in rings, her nails short, polished with black. Rio cannot stop looking for the life of her.Agatha is holding onto a glass, head tipped back, nodding along to the oppressive music.And then, something slides over her face. She looks concerned momentarily, then mildly p@ss@d off. Those blue eyes bore right into her. Rio knows it’s impossible, she can’t be seen, not till she decides.That pretty, red painted mouth curls, splits on an evil grin. And she makes the decision for Rio, like she always has. Death slides into view, her cloak falling away, all the drunken people surrounding her not noticing a thing. She decides her clothes are appropriate, currently.It was about the sixties when she decided she needed a new look, switching her big, flowing skirts for black pants and a slightly revealing black bodysuit.“Well, don’t you look different?” Agatha sneers at her, once she’s in earshot.“I could say the same, couldn’t I?”F@ck, how weird. The first time they’ve spoken in centuries, and Agatha is teasing her. It’s different now, though. Rio knows this.Agatha shrugs, seemingly showing off her form, stretching out further on the bar. She’s different, too. Rio can almost taste it, the bitterness flowing off of her former wife, it’s acrid where it used to be sweet.“What brings you here, Grim Reaper?”Rio heaves a sigh as she sidles up to the bar herself. She stays a good foot away from her witch.“Overdose.” It’s plain, how she says it. It doesn’t matter to her. Never did, really, but even less now.“Wow, when’d you become so callous?” Rio wonders if she’s drunk.“You know when,” she grinds out, aiming to hurt, to sting. Agatha only hums.“Well. Nice seeing you, Vidal.” The words drip with sarcasm. God, she hates how it makes her ache.“That’s it?” she demands, bordering on a cry. Her voice betrays her, over and over.Agatha doesn’t look at her again. She takes her cue. -✰- It takes another few decades for them to cross paths again. It is utterly intentional this time, and not on Rio’s part. She swore she’d never choose to subject herself to that. Last time left her a mess for a year, that pounding in her chest she’d worked tirelessly to shove away, it became a livewire again, flickering and pulsating every second.Her mind reeled constantly, wondering what she was doing, who she was with. She could feel it, when Agatha was with another woman. The same spark flickered in her as when she killed, only there were no souls to collect afterward. It made Rio shake with rage. She wondered if Agatha knew what she was doing to her.Rio’s just finished cleaning up what must be Agatha’s mess when she hears a throat clear behind her.She’s leaning against a tree, like it’s nothing. How unfair it is, these disgusting, sloppy feelings she’s bestowed upon Death herself, while she gets to exist, just fine.“Great,” she mutters under her breath.“What? Not happy to see me, hon?” It’s condescending, it makes Rio thrum with anger, her power flickering at her fingertips, itching to hurt.“Don’t, don’t start that,” she grits. Begging.Agatha rolls her eyes, pushes herself from the tree. Under the white glow of the moon, Rio takes her in. She has no choice.Her hair is long again, fluttering around her ribs. She’s toned down the biker dyk@ vibe. She’s wearing jeans. “I can’t do this with you,” Rio says before Agatha gets a chance to speak. She watches her face shift, takes pleasure in the way her eyes flash.“You think this is easy for me?” she demands, snarking. But there’s a hidden layer of pain there, deep underneath. Rio knows her well enough to see it. She scoffs anyway, hoping to press on the wound, hoping to make Agatha bleed for her.“I have a question.” It’s an empty, blank statement. Rio blinks, then the anger stokes higher in her, flames licking up into her throat.“Of course you do, Agatha. Why else would you be here?”Agatha rolls her eyes, but Rio can’t not notice the tiny, almost imperceptible wince there.“What do you know about the Darkhold?”Rio’s jaw drops, hanging wide open. Is she serious? The look on her ex-wife’s face confirms it, stoic, waiting.“I know it’s the book of the damned,” Rio says, shrugging one shoulder, feigning carelessness. “I don’t think you need a book to secure your place in hell, sweetheart.”She relishes in the look that passes over Agatha’s face, dark and stony.“You and I both know there is no hell, but you’re cute,” she snaps, approaching Rio rapidly. Rio can’t help but shrink back, not out of fear of the woman before her, but out of agony, their proximity too much.Agatha, uncaring as always, crowds Rio up against a tree. She can feel her breath fanning across her face, the smell of her is too much. Rio shuts her eyes, tries to ward off the shudder that threatens to overtake her frame.“Tell me what you know,” she demands again, her purple flicking out from her fingers.“I know nothing, to tell you the truth. Can’t you f@ck off?” She doesn’t mean it, never means it, she realizes with a start, and god, it aches endlessly. This woman, her heart that she invented, forever ensnared by her.Rio forces Agatha backward with a tiny pulse of her green magick, making the woman stumble. Good. She hopes she’s embarrassed. But Agatha only snickers, then rears back up, her purple coming in full force, yanking Rio to the tree, her limbs stuck to it.She could break free, easily, in thirty different ways. They both know she could overpower Agatha. She’s done it countless times before, knocking her witch down a peg, both of them getting off on it.This isn’t that. It’s not even the opposite, Rio letting her win, letting her pin her down and take her apart, ravishing her until she screamed. But, it feels enough like it, and it feels good to pretend.The look on Agatha’s face tells her she’s thinking the same thing, and she edges closer, brings a forearm up to rest against Rio’s collarbone, pushing her, the bark of the tree grating against her exposed flesh.“You have to know something,” Agatha sighs out, sweet, as she grins. God, not this. She knows what she’s doing, and it’s so f@ck@ng unfair. It’s a mockery, really. Death herself, whipped for this mortal witch woman.“If you want to drive yourself insane, splinter your soul apart into a million, irreparable pieces, I’m not gonna help you with that, Agatha.” She’s proud of herself for holding onto her rapidly fading resolve, until it backfires, blowing up in her face.“Aw, honey, are you still sweet on me?” Agatha’s smile turns wicked as she speaks, batting those stupid f@ck@ng eyelashes, an exact replica of their dead son’s.Rio sighs.“You make me f@ck@ng crazy.” She breaks free from Agatha’s restraints easily, shoving her away.Agatha sways on her feet, bringing her hands together in front of herself, fluttering. It takes Rio right back to the clearing, Agatha in her pretty dress, asking Rio to marry her. She swallows.“It’s the least you could do, really.” Agatha’s eyes are wild, dangerous. The insinuation punches in Rio’s stomach.“The least I could do,” she mutters, laughing to herself. “The least I could do? What about six years? Was that nothing?”It’s a split second later when she’s pressed up against the tree again, her skull thudding against it, leaving a pounding pain in its wake. Good, she thinks. “You didn’t lose anything,” Agatha snarls, an inch away from her face.It settles inside of Rio, once again, a heavy stone sinking down into her stomach. Not for the first time, she wonders, can the knife understand the sharp slice of a cut?Can Death understand grief, really?She’d hoped, uselessly, needlessly, for the centuries since his death, that Agatha’s words had been grief driven, meaningless. She hoped Agatha knew deep down that Rio was his mother, too. She hoped she would come to understand, those years were a gift, a present never bestowed to anyone else, past, present or future.“I know that’s what you think,” she mutters, shoving away once more. Tears burn in her eyes, and that p@ss@s her off more than anything else. She wants to be done crying over this woman. She can’t take it anymore.She unsheaths her dagger at her side, and from the corner of her eye, she sees Agatha’s slight intake of breath at the sight.She splits her seam, choosing instead of the normal front porch entrance, the clearing. Agatha knowing she still lives in that cottage, among the ghosts that haunt it, it’s too much vulnerability for one night. Rio is sapped dry.“Go ahead, leave. Like always. Once I get my hands on that book, which I will, you’ll never find me again. We’ll be done.”Agatha acknowledging the connection between them, the tug, the tie, for the first time in centuries upon centuries, it’s too much. Rio doesn’t doubt it. She will find that book. She does anything, everything she sets her mind to. Everything except that one, horrendous mistake between them. Their boy.Rio doesn’t doubt that this will be the last time, in a long time, if not forever, that she’ll see Agatha Harkness. She can’t wrestle with that, not right now. When she’s home, maybe. Maybe in another decade or two.She decides then, she can risk being vulnerable if it will stick her ex-wife’s heart with one last sick, poisoned barb. She easily shifts the reality before her, rippling at the seam, and settles it on their old front door. “Te veo,”  she tosses over her shoulder as she steps through.  I see you. She does.She tries not to look at Agatha’s shimmering face, between the void where she stands amongst the trees, as she always did. Rio fails of course, and sees the broken, wounded look on her witch’s face. Unable to contain it.She only feels the slightest twinge of regret, and she pulls the portal closed, sewn back shut. -✰- True to her word, it’s only a couple years later that Agatha finds the book. Rio can tell, sitting still atop their old bed, the centuries old blood stain still glinting up at her in the center of it, faded with age, when she feels it. The same as when Nicky went, the steady thrum of the tether, flickering to a stop, to complete nothingness.For the first time in over three hundred years, her heart is still. The feeling is so foreign, although she’d lived several lifetimes over without a heart at all. Now, it’s gone again, and she can’t help but shudder out a single, pained sigh.Her witch, her wife. Gone, lost, whatever you’d call it. Both, she supposes. She wonders if she’ll ever see her again. -✰- Rio’s focus is pulled, drawn in by a force, something unprecedented happening, the harrowing, delicious thrum of energetic chaos magick. It startles her when it erupts, seemingly out of nothing. It prickles along her skin.The Scarlet Witch, she thinks. Must be. Finally. -✰- She lazes about for a while, tying up various loose ends, waiting for the force to collapse. It can’t contain itself for very long, she can sense how chaotic it is, how frantically the magick reacts.She won’t be able to retrieve the souls inside until the walls are down, she doesn’t think. The whole thing screams no visitors, so she waits.That is, until there’s a falter. Something, somebody passing through.Interest caught, she tears her hole in space and time, and finds herself in New Jersey, of all places.She titters around for a while, waiting for something to happen. What, she isn’t quite sure. Over the last century or so, she’s been thrilled by chaos, by pain, by suffering. She didn’t used to be interested, not even a bit. It’s like she’d said, she was entirely neutral.That is, until she became violently restless. Her heart lurched, ever-aching. She found slight solace in the entertaining ways of human beings, how careless they were with each other. She found it fascinating.She finds a little basecamp, right outside the glowing, red walls. She slinks between shadows, lurking, listening curiously.Wanda Maximoff, the name on everybody’s lips. She’d been an Avenger, she hears. At first, they were worried she’d been captured, that she herself was stuck in this so-called  hex. But Rio knew, instantaneously, it was all her. What a show.When she finds the brunette woman, sitting in a desk chair, crunching away on a bag of chips, she’s at first annoyed. Who in the world could find time to sit around and snack when something this huge was happening, less than a mile from here?Then, she heard the voice. F@ck, it was unmistakable, even with that false, plasticky pretense. It was her. Agatha.She peers over the woman’s shoulder, ignoring the way she shudders and looks right through her. That happens, usually, Death can conceal her visual presence, but her existing anywhere gave humans the chills. It was funny, sometimes, but she was preoccupied.Her witch, laughing on screen, in black and white, hair curling around her chin, on this little outdated television. Rio was astounded.She couldn’t tell if Agatha was under a spell, like the rest of them, because she couldn’t feel her. The reminder ached her. She had a feeling it was a ploy, it usually was, Agatha always hungry for power, for the next big thing.When Agatha entered the kitchen, big skirt flouncing around her, letting this random f@ck@ng woman grip her waist, talking into her ear, Rio saw red. She couldn’t help it. She could lay no claim to her witch any longer, but still. She had a possessive streak. Who wouldn’t? Good girl! Oh, it rang in her ears, stinging her.Rio had to look away. She couldn’t do this. No matter how good it felt, seeing her again, hearing her voice, she couldn’t stomach whatever that was, the unmistakable flirting.No. She’d come back when she could collect the bodies. Her heart needed a break, desperately. She could not keep letting this woman crack it wide open, over and over and over again. -✰- It was a mere few days later when she felt the force start to collapse in on itself.Heaving a sigh, she hoped her witch would get out before she had to see her again, as much as it hurt to think. She really could not keep doing this, seeing her sweet face, getting hammered over the head with all the memories. It all felt like yesterday, like seconds ago, but at the same time, so far out of reach, like it never even happened.She wonders what Agatha thinks about it, if she thinks of it at all. She wonders if her mind has been completely shattered by that book she has.Rio forces herself to stop, the wounds she keeps pressing on threatening to split wide, bl@@dy and raw.She draws her dagger near and closes her eyes, divining exactly where the weak spots in the spell existed, and steps through. -✰- Rio definitely should’ve known better.Agatha was far too smart, too capable and clever to let her mind be flayed apart by a book, much less a witch’s weak, accidental spell.It just so happens, the split, her grand entrance into the hostage town of Westview, led her directly into the slippery, dark shadows of Agatha’s basement. Great.She watched her ex-wife, her grand entrance as dramatic as ever. She was holding a rabbit, soft and white with smatterings of orangey-brown fur. She stroked it, and Rio’s heart gave one wet, thick thump in her chest.Oh, how their son had loved bunnies. She wished it didn’t hurt as much as it did. She let the pain stoke into rage, watching her wife shamelessly tease and flirt with the redheaded witch she had bound by quivering ropes of purple.When Agatha got up in her face, Rio thought she might be sick. But Agatha simply plucked a single strand from atop Wanda’s head, and backed away.This was all she could take. She slipped back, letting herself melt from this house to the next that urged for her presence. There were bordering on a hundred souls here, needing her guidance. She wondered if Wanda even knew.She’d recognized the girl, or woman rather. She’d taken from her a handful of times. She felt a singular pang of guilt, and moved forward. -✰- Agatha had put up a solid fight.But, nobody, except perhaps Death herself, in another sort of way, was any match for the Scarlet Witch. She was the second person in all these hundreds of centuries that Agatha couldn’t take the power of. No wonder she wanted her so badly. Rio almost understood.Something snagged at her, at the end.One soul, calling out for her, a boy. Of which there were supposed to be two. She bristled. Rio hated being cheated. The extra sting of it being a boy, a child, was like a slap to the face. But she’d deal with that later.As the hex collapsed around the town, Rio once again emerged in Agatha’s basement. The bunny rabbit was still down there, hopping around aimlessly. Rio leant down and scratched between his ears, gently, the pang of agony she’d worked so hard to numb into nothingness rearing up, but she ignored it.Agatha needed her. She could feel her powers had been stripped, she realized with a satisfying shock. She could feel her, again.The Darkhold had been taken, Rio realized. She almost felt bad for her witch, wondering what horrors she’d gone through to get it, only to have it taken away a handful of years later.Too bad. Rio wanted to gloat, a smile splitting on her mouth for the first time in ages. Agatha had been wrong. It was never over, could never be over, as long as they both roamed this earth.They would always find a way, back together, somehow. -✰- Agnes was intolerable.She grated on every single one of Rio’s frayed nerves. But she couldn’t find it in herself to stop coming back, chipping away at the walls of Wanda’s spell, slowly.She endured Anges’ endless flirting, taking it all in stride, laughing it off.As tempting as it was, her witch’s face, and eyes, and voice, she couldn’t do anything about it. It wasn’t really her. She knew deep down, buried below layers of flurried, chaotic magick, Agatha was inside there, screaming with rage. -✰- Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the layers peeled back and devolved into a mess of a woman.It got exponentially worse when Wanda “died”. Rio couldn’t believe it for a second, although she’d ushered the pleading soul of that stupid redhead. She was happy to do it, but there was no finality. She knew Wanda could come back, if she wanted to. She suspected that once she found out her son’s soul had gotten sucked up into some random body, she would.It made Rio seethe with a hot, jealous rage.But, she was preoccupied, Agnes freaking out, playing detective in her house, talking to the walls. It worried Rio, if only slightly, but she knew one day soon, her witch would emerge.She helped in any way she could, prodding at her, asking her all the right questions to make her twitch out of it, if only for a second.She was so close, one night, Agnes handing her a mug of tap water that she called beer, wearing an absurd family reunion shirt that Agatha would die before putting on. She’d been right on the precipice, Rio could feel it.Then, that stupid f@ck@ng kid, distracting her, sucking her right back in.She could’ve killed him, if that was allowed. She’d settle for hurting him, but she didn’t get the chance.Rio was loath to admit that the kid helped, just a little. He seemed to want Agatha out, too, though Rio couldn’t fathom why. He peeled back a layer or two, helping her out. Then, he mentioned the road, and her heart clenched desperately.That song, all it had come to mean over the years. She could be sick, once again. She wanted the grief to end already. But she knew it never would.She stood in Agnes’, Agatha’s, whoevers living room. She was right there, just underneath. Rio could feel it.
   You know her name. So, what’s yours? 
She kept her tone insistent, strong. Commanding.
   Is it… are you hot? 

   Yes. Claw your way out. 
And claw, she did. She bore no shame as she shed layer after layer of clothing, muttering to herself, admiring her varying looks in the nearby mirror. Rio grew impatient, but she had to admit, she had quite the soft spot for that velour tracksuit, the strip of flesh along her lower back it exposed,  Naughty printed along the back, glimmering with rhinestones. That sounds about right.When she began unbuttoning that dress, her skin flickering between black and white and full saturation, Rio only allowed herself a second to drink in the bare skin she was exposing. As much as she wanted it, her witch was no longer hers to look at.She wanted to stay, she did. But she slipped away, a plan formulating in her head.She’d make Agatha beg for her help. That sounded nice. It could be fun. -✰- The fight does not play out exactly how Rio imagined.It was satisfying, yes, blasting the door to bits and pieces, both of their hands finding a home on each other’s throats. Slamming Agatha into a china cabinet. Agatha on her knees, pouting up at her, flashing her big blue eyes.The slick, oily feeling of Agatha saying it.  I hate you.  Rio wished she hadn’t known it to be true. With her witch’s blood covering her teeth, the metallic of it spread all over her tongue, she tosses it over her shoulder again.  Te veo. 
   I see you, I see you, I do. 
 -✰- Rio does not, in fact, inform the Salem Seven about Agatha’s whereabouts. She knows they’ll find her, anyway. All she wants is her question, that pleading beg for help.It never comes, because Agatha is stubborn. She should’ve known, but she hurts anyway. -✰- She becomes obsessive once more, over the tether, back home in her chest. She feels it all the time, lurching, feeling Agatha’s anger, her fear, her impatience.She tends to the feeling, letting it blossom in her chest like a rose bush, thorns pricking against her nonexistent guts. -✰- The road is real, suddenly.She feels the warbling magick of it, unstable, and she knows with certainty, in only a way Death could, that the kid holds the soul of Wanda Maximoff’s boy, the death cheater.When Agatha begs her with a single word, tears making her wild hair stick to her cheeks, Rio sucks on her teeth angrily, pained. This will not go well. She knows it.She also knows it isn’t the boy's time, not just yet. His soul isn’t withered, waiting for her. He is still filled with thrumming life. She seethes with anger, toward that dead witch, his mother, herself, Agatha.She twirls the flower in her fingers, watching as the potions witch works her practical magick.It’s unsurprising that Agatha sits at the boy’s side until he wakes. Her poor, poor witch. She knows her tender heart.What does come as a shock, is Agatha scooping up her flower, sitting down on the dead log next to her. She shares a story about the scar along her elbow, and Rio laughs knowingly, she’d been the one to pick up the souls, she’d felt the hot stinging pain of that needle just as Agatha did.It’s almost subconscious, when she starts to speak about the metaphorical scar on her fake, calcified heart. She couldn’t care less about any of these witches, and she could sense that some were nearing their expiry date. It was all for her, showing her soft, tender underbelly, hoping it would mean something to her witch beside her.When Agatha walks off, Rio isn’t surprised. She rolls her eyes, huffing as she stands to follow, and shakes the older witch’s hand off of her, gnashing her jaws as she walks past. She doesn’t give two sh@ts if the woman wouldn’t forget their conversation in the sound booth. It was all the better, really.As Rio approaches, she feels Agatha’s heart, sickly pounding, waiting for her. She simply does what she always used to, starts softly twisting the soft ends of the wild curtain of hair before her. Agatha makes a little noise, and Rio lurches inside. Always, always.Her witch turns, and the look on her face is ancient, a mirror image of her wife, the woman that no longer exists on any plane. The only soul that’s ever died without Rio taking it.When she leans in to kiss her, Rio is so caught up in the feeling, the old cosmic wounds, she almost doesn’t stop her. She wishes more than anything that she didn’t have to. That boy isn’t yours,  and she knows Agatha knows.  Isn’t ours, she’d wanted to say. She knows her witch is aware that the road they stand upon is a concoction, a hoax. When Agatha smiles at her, broken, soft, it tugs on her. Her eyes fall closed as Agatha walks away, Rio’s heart on a string, trailing just behind her. -✰- The trials are so absurd, a fiction from a teen boy’s mind, it’s impossible not to have fun. He’s good, she has to admit, when Agatha’s trial is that of a motherly possession.She hurts for her, for how many deep, long covered wounds this digs up for her witch. She remembers every nightmare, every trembling cry. Rio simultaneously wishes that Agatha had gotten the loving, unconditional care from her mother that she deserved, at the same time as feels a selfish pulse of gratefulness. Without her, Rio wonders if they’d ever have met.She wants to follow behind as Agatha leaves, and she hopes the look in her eye conveys as much. But she must stay. They both know it, it’s always been this way. -✰- They remain apart for a while, Rio skipping along the road, waiting for that old witch to die. She remembers now, her face, aghast with horror, as Rio took her whole family. She’d felt bad for the child, leaving her all alone. Now, she feels nothing.When Agatha emerges, covered in grime, Rio pulls herself from the dirt she’d found herself in, brushing herself off.Their fight is bitter. Bile fills Rio’s throat with the statement she’d only ever taken from her wife. Six years, she wants to spit. Six years, hand delivered with a f@ck@ng bow. Supposedly, it was nothing. Agatha may hate her, but she knows that at least isn’t true.Rio concedes to her wife’s terms, knowing that once again, she will be breaking the rules for this one, human witch of a woman. She can’t even be angry about it. Her beck and call, always. Agatha knows that Death would do anything for her, anything she could, at least.Bend any rule, shatter any boundary she could, put off the piles and piles of bodies just to watch her sleep. She wondered what Agatha would do for her, if anything. -✰- Rio becomes impatient.She’d willed that singular dandelion seed into her witch’s brooch, where she knew she kept a lock of their son’s hair. She could only hope she was smart enough to catch it in time.Death riles up the sky, screaming into false heavens and beyond, wind whipping her hair, her cloak, lightning crackling and making her hair stand on end as she sits on Agatha’s roof.She feels Agatha, in her basement-turned-trial, feels her misery, her defeat. Then, pride, fear, begging. She wills tons of earth to collapse, her unwillingness to sit still getting the best of her.Agatha rushes from the basement, a heaving, dirty mess. A sight for sore eyes, Rio swoons internally.  My love.  She can’t help herself from saying it, just as she used to. She’d never escape, she thinks, her mind driven rabid with excitement. She was going to get that boy’s soul. She could feel it. She just needed to coax her witch along.Her witch, her ex-wife, her beautiful beloved, roars indelicately at the sky, demanding her prize from the road which she knows does not exist.Rio allows herself to tease, to cackle maniacally, her heart pounding with the chaos.The blood erupting all over her lover’s skin from the glimmering chunks of glass, she longs to lick each wound clean, just as she used to.Agatha dodges the sink Rio throws her way, muttering to herself, practicing analog magick, and Rio’s ears prick. Evil?
   I am the natural order of all things, baby. And you love me! 
It’s insistent, and maybe whiny. And, pathetically, she shrieks a wounded, Why don’t you want me?! that she knows she’ll be kicking herself for when this is all over.Her writhing vines pin Agatha to a piece of yard art, or something. Rio doesn’t really process it, all she can feel is their crackling symbiotic hearts, writhing against one another; Agatha’s fear, her arousal, her blistering, white-hot pain. She knows Agatha can feel it all in her, too, she can see it in her eyes. They bounce off of one another, endlessly, the cycle repeating, over and over and over, just as Death herself.When the kid pops up, Rio isn’t surprised. She lurches down from the rooftop, approaching her witch slowly, the wind whipping around her something violent.When the kid throws her, she seethes with rage. Stupid f@ck in that corny Halloween costume. Then, she feels it, the siphoning. Agatha’s veins crackling with power for the first time in years, the longest she’s gone without her purple in all her centuries here on earth. It must feel like a junkie getting a hit, Rio imagines.And god, she looks divine, overtaken, deliciously powerful, just as Rio likes it.She tosses the kid aside like a ragdoll, his body crashing through the glass roof of the greenhouse. Power looks good on you, she flirts, grinning at her witch, syrupy sweet. Her green flickers in her hands, all throughout the air as they fight against one another, that push and pull she’d missed so much. Honey, everything looks good on me, Agatha’d replied, grinning right back, wild and wicked, her hair tangling and fluttering in the wind.Rio laughed, because it was true.It felt so good, her match made in nonexistent heaven, finally on even ground. Like old times. Oh, how she missed it. She’d give anything to go back.Her power rocks through her witch, her wife, her teeth stained bright, metallic red as the kid approaches.She thinks it’s over, when Agatha tells her to take him. She simmers with love, with lust and happiness as Agatha walks behind her, Rio already thinking of how beautiful she’d make Agatha’s yard again when this ended.It happens so, so slowly. But then, all at once.A twist of affection, right behind her. It is nearly identical to the phantom sensation she’d experience whenever Agatha was with their son.Then, those hands on her.Their mouths collided, and Rio couldn’t believe it. She wondered briefly, if that pulse of love was for her, her eyes still open as their mouths melted together for the first time in centuries. Then, she shut them, forcing herself to take it all in, the taste of her, glimmering magick and earth. The tiny noises against her lips, little whimpers pulled from the both of them as Agatha’s tongue prodded into her mouth. She whined against it all, heart so far in her throat, she’d wondered if Agatha could taste it.She thinks she must’ve.There’s tears on her wife’s face as she slips away, and then Rio realizes all at once what’s happened.The kiss of Death.Right.Her whole body aches, and a tear slips from her eye, cooling instantly on her cheek.Her heart, in front of her. Gone. The whole world must’ve lurched to a dead stop. That’s how it felt, at least. The tether severed, her other half emptied, depleted.Rio wanted to sob, but forced herself to hold it together in front of the kid. F@ck@ng Agatha, her sweet, tender spot toward young boys, seeing only what could’ve been. She wonders briefly, if Wanda had any influence on her decision. If there was a sweet spot there, too. Whether it be deeper feelings lurking underneath, or just the fact that her son was born with a chance, Rio didn’t know.Her lover’s withered body laid before her, and it was all she could do to curl her arms around her empty chest, conjuring soft earth to cover her up, laid to rest, purple flowers littering her burial site. It burned inside of Rio, and she knew she needed to shift out of her human form, it was all too much. The mask slid into place, skin and muscle melting away. She wanted the last thing her skin touched to be Agatha’s lips, the skin her witch had fallen in love with.She glares at the kid, her eyes shimmering, as he picks up the brooch laying on the fresh, new earth. Rio wants to demand it from him, to rip his hands off for even touching it, because it’s her son’s hair in there, too. Her wife’s gift left behind. But something stops her. Maybe he needs it.Rio walks away, feet pattering over the soft grass.There is no soul to usher, because that was the deal.No spirit to coax, no last words exchanged between them.This was it. -✰- The record in her player clicks, over and over, Rio making no move to flip it over.She stares up at the ceiling of the cottage, the soft wood of it, wincing with age.The rabbit twitches on her stomach, his ears shifted as he napped.Rio had gone back for him after remembering his existence with a fond pang.  Señor Scratchy, Agnes had told her once, nearly driving her to tears right there.Their boy, made from scratch, Agatha would say.She smoothes the fur on his back, and continues staring. The souls pile up, awaiting her, but she lets them stew, rattling around in purgatory.She’s missed being in this bed, comforting a being more alive than she ever will be.Her eyes burn, and she’s rocked by the memories, relentless in the havoc they wreak upon her. She’d been so naive, loving as recklessly as she had. No matter how deep she searches within herself, she can’t find a single reason to think she shouldn’t have. -✰- She’s out in the garden one afternoon, years after her wife’s death. Although she isn’t buried here, this is the place Rio likes to imagine her soul laid to rest. She has little headstones for the both of them, right next to each other, swathes of flowers decorating the grass beneath them.Azaleas, lilies, roses, Rio tends to them constantly. She has nothing else to do with her hands.This is where she is, when it happens. A random summer day. Watering the flowers with a manual gardening can, of all things, as if she couldn’t conjure up a rain cloud with a flick of her wrist.There’s a snort from behind her, and Rio chills to the bone instantly. She wonders if she’s finally gone completely insane.“Been awhile, huh, hon?”She whips around, water sloshing all over her bare feet.And there she is, like nothing ever happened. Wearing a long purple skirt, a white button up. Her hair is almost the same, wild and dark and whipping around her in the delicate breeze, save for a single, platinum white streak running from root to end, right at her temple.“You have something of mine,” she says, ridiculously. The rabbit, she knows, and Rio flounders, mouth gaping. Agatha only laughs.“I hate ghosts…” Rio says, attempting a joke, testing the waters, once again pondering her mental state.“Good thing I’m all flesh and blood, baby.” She grins, the same way she always has, blue eyes glinting.“How?” It’s all she can ask, utterly dumbfounded.“Long story,” is all Agatha offers, waving her hand.Suddenly, Rio can’t help it, she rushes forward, almost toppling her witch over with the force of her embrace. Agatha grunts, but her arms don’t falter, they wrap around Rio with an intensity that makes tears spring to her eyes. She inhales, unashamed, breathing in the violet scent of her, gasping into her shoulder.“You’re ruining my shirt there, doll,” Agatha murmurs, but makes no move to get away. Rio remembers the makeup she’s been plastering on since their first breakup, the heavy smokey eye, the burgundy lip. She pulls back a bit, and laughs at the smears she’s left all over Agatha’s previously pristine shirt, now wet with tears and smudged with color.“Sorry,” she says, half heartedly, one shoulder shrugging before she buries her face in the warm, miraculously alive skin of her wife’s neck.They break apart after endless minutes, but Rio keeps her fingers around her wrist, still in disbelief, as Agatha steps forward.“Well, that’s dark,” Agatha says, her voice thick with emotion as she attempts to joke, gesturing to her own grave, and Rio remembers the headstones before them. She feels an impossible flush creep over her, and she reaches out, brushing a finger along Nicky’s.“He needed one,” she says, small, soft.“He did.” -✰- That night, in bed, they lay fully bare, limbs intertwined, chests heaving in tandem. Rio cannot stop staring at the woman in her bed.“Creep,” Agatha murmurs, one blue eye cracking open.Rio jams her fingers into her ribs, knowing just where to press to make her witch shriek, dissolving into a fit of giggles.It makes her wonder if heaven is real, after all. She wonders if, unknowingly, she’d been retired as Death, and now she got to live in her dream, Agatha at her side, forever.“I am real, if that’s what you’re wondering.”Rio groans, ever-annoyed with Agatha’s ability to see her, entirely.“Your mind is so loud, I can’t help it,” her witch sighs out, tipping her face to line up with Rio’s, nearly nose to nose.Rio traces along the curves of her perfect, wonderful face. That nose, the first thing she’d ever noticed about her. Her lashes, long and wisping, making Agatha flinch on a tickle before laughing.“I thought you hated me,” she admits. Her voice is shaking, and she can’t help it, never could. She’s turned into a trembling, wet pile of feelings anytime Agatha is near. Even when she isn’t.Agatha softens visibly. Her eyes rim with glittering tears.“I thought I might, too. For a long time. But I don’t think I ever could, really.”The words send such an intense flood of relief throughout Rio, she has to bury her face into Agatha’s exposed shoulder, nosing at it.Her witch settles a hand against her head, scratching at her scalp lightly.“We have a lot to discuss, don’t we, my love?”Her voice is so gentle, it sends Rio reeling through the most intense wave of deja vu she’s ever experienced. Their bed, their cottage, the cradle gathering dust in the corner. Their son, fast asleep between them. The way the sky turns velveteen purple outside the window, the color of their wedding night. It splits Rio down the middle, and finally, she relishes the feeling. She’d missed this. Missed her.“Tomorrow?” she asks, voice thin with her tears, threatening to fall.She looks to Agatha with wide eyes, and her wife presses a kiss to her mouth, gently.“Tomorrow.”And for once, the floral, sweetened blossoming of hope inside of Rio doesn’t feel like a threat. She no longer thrashes against it.She can only wish with every desperate thought, please let it be forever this time. -✰-'
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