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Chapter Text

Being not technically a human being leads to Rio getting yanked in and out of corporeal existence quite a bit. It’s not uncommon for her to be having a lovely evening watering her azaleas, and then suddenly she’s in Guyana dealing with some kind of massacre. Thanks, Jim Jones.

Anyway, it’s not abnormal. So when Rio feels a tug in her gut (though she doesn’t recognize it as such, not right away, a distinctly familiar purple electric tug that sets all of her nerve endings on fire), she goes. Zipping through non-space to her cosmic destination, settling her crown over her hair like clockwork.

She does not expect to be thrown to the ground by a warm, strong body the second she gets there.

The first thing she registers is the dirt and sticks digging into her back – forest – and the second thing she registers is that she can feel that because she’s wearing a ridiculous bright yellow crop top under a similarly cropped army-green jacket and, horrifyingly, a miniskirt. A miniskirt? A plaid miniskirt, a flash of her thigh as she struggles against the figure on top of her reveals, which is somehow worse. Who fucking dared to rip her out of her very tasteful Lady Death ensemble and toss her back into existence like something spit up from the throat of the God of 2010s Chick Flick Chic-

A very, very familiar voice grunts with the effort of keeping Rio, renowned wiggler, pinned. It makes her freeze immediately.

The person on top of her is wearing a shiny plastic red devil mask, a thick black jacket, and black sweatpants. They also have gloves and are wielding a knife. It’s very wannabe-murderer in a PG-13 horror movie, which is funny enough to make Rio want to laugh, but the person rips the mask off and it is indeed Agatha Harkness glaring down at her, spit beading at the corners of her mouth with how feral she’s growling, her long, sweet-smelling hair falling in Rio’s face and getting in her mouth.

Extra amounts of what-the-fuck.

“Caught you,” Agatha snarls. “Can’t run now, can you?”

“I don’t recall me doing the running,” Rio says – or tries to say, when Agatha’s got a meaty arm over her throat choking her windpipe. It’s funny, because she doesn’t usually need to breathe, but it feels like there’s some out-of-body instinct telling her to keep her lungs pumping. Like she’s heaving deep breaths for some kind of unseen audience.

“You said we were going to be forever,” Agatha spits, ignoring Rio completely. “You gave me a ring and told me you only loved me and then you flirted with that blonde skank at my funeral!”

Rio can’t decide which part of that sentence is more confusing, blonde skank or funeral. She’s never liked blondes. She’s never liked anyone but Agatha. “At your- Agatha, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“Is that her name?!” Agatha shrieks, and reels back with one open palm. When it comes down on the side of Rio’s cheek, stinging the skin, she shrinks back. She used to like when Agatha slapped her. Look what centuries of separation can do to a desperate sub, Rio thinks ruefully, then finally processes Agatha’s words.

“Whose name?”

“That sorority girl freak you had draped all over you while you were pretending to be sad that I was dead.”

“I am very lost, Agatha.”

“Stop saying her damn name!” Agatha is positioned over Rio’s pelvis, and she squeezes her thighs, putting pressure on the bones of her hips. “It’s Agnes, I’m Agnes, I’m your girlfriend and I love you and I’ve loved you forever and I’d kill for you, I’ve killed for you, Riley!”

Oh, what the fuck?

“Who the fuck is Riley?” Rio summons just a little bit of her supernatural strength to shove Agatha off of her, who rolls over like a ragdoll, flopping over into the dirt. She howls in pain, grabbing at her leg. Alarm bells are ringing in Rio’s brain like crazy. Agatha’s weakness, her own wardrobe change, this weird hallucinatory narrative… and she can taste magic at the back of her throat, chaos magic, sick and cloyingly sweet.

Just to check, Rio unfocuses her eyes. Red flickers at the edges of her vision. Fuck fuck fuck fuck-

“No one else is allowed to have you, Riley,” Agatha growls, crawling through the dirt towards where Rio has shoved herself up on her knees. “Only I’m allowed to have you.”

“Now, why does that sound familiar,” Rio grumbles, ducking a strike from the blunt end of Agatha’s knife, aimed at her temple. Louder, she protests, “if you love me, why are you trying to kill me?”

“It’s how I show affection!” Agatha shrieks. Rio pauses for a second, crouched in the dirt; she’s got a point. They do tend to get a lot of their mushy feelings out by throwing each other into trees and making each other bleed.

Still. It’s been… oh god, how long has it been? Years, certainly, perhaps decades since their last ill-fated reunion. Agatha had gotten power-hungry, Rio had gotten guilt-ridden, somewhere in there the Darkhold was involved. Same old story, and now Agatha’s caught up in a fucking Scarlet Witch spell, of all things, even though that wannabe enchantress got buried under ancient rock ages ago. And the red she-demon had her claws in pretty deep, it seems.

Rio’s vaguely familiar with the sitcom-based enchantment those mortal science-fiction freaks were calling the Westview Anomaly – it was honestly a creative piece of work, and if Wanda Maximoff wasn’t an unnatural mutant scourge on the witchood maybe Rio would have been more interested – but since the Scarlet Witch had kept everyone within the spell in a sort of stasis, she’d never gotten close enough to see it for herself. Never in a million years would she have expected her deranged ex-wife to end up entangled in it, still; or for such magic to be strong enough to absorb her ancient ass. Lady Death doesn’t do enchantments. And yet…

“Agnes,” Rio says patiently. The name feels strange in her mouth. But she needs to get the full picture of what she’s working with, here, and to do that she needs Agatha to remain calm. Calling her by her true name just seems to be pissing her off. “If you had a funeral… how are you here right now?”

Agatha laughs mirthlessly. “It was fake. It was all fake. I faked my own death to get Chase off my back. To stop calling me witch in my DMs, just because I accidentally ran his brother over by the reservoir last summer.” Rio cringes. This sounds like the plot of a bad CW show. This cannot be the kind of prestige television Wanda Maximoff was learning her English from.

“So you faked your own death because of… cyberbullying?” On second thought, that actually does sound like a very Agatha thing to do. The only thing that’s confusing Rio is why she’s getting stabbed about it. “I’m not Chase, am I?”

“Oh, did the blonde skank fuck you so good she messed up your brain?” Agatha rolls her eyes. “You’re Riley, and I’m Agnes, and you’re drum major for the marching band and I’m captain of the debate team. And after the funeral I was gonna find you and we were gonna graduate and leave this fucked up place behind until you cheated on me, you two-faced lying bitch-”

“We’re in high school?” This is more horrifying to Rio than anything else that’s been revealed so far. “Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Agatha makes another lunge for her, this one low in her center of gravity. She gets her around the knees – Rio’s weak spot, when she molded her physical body from scratch she forgot to make her lower joints strong, whoops – and they both fall back together in the dirt, Agatha on top of her, strangely cold and sticky like someone trapped in a bad dream. Not too far off from reality. Rio wrestles with Agatha to keep the point of the knife out of her face, even though she knows the worst it’ll do is leave some light scratches that’ll heal within the hour.

“I loved you,” Agatha growls, spits in Rio’s face, “and you betrayed me.”

And that’s when it clicks.

Rio knows hexes like the one Agatha is currently under. Hell, if Agatha was in her right mind, she’d be an expert on the subject. Reality-twisting hexes, meant to alter the mindscape – and in some cases, limited physical space; Rio thinks of her own transformation – can’t create story from scratch. Everything within the bounds of the hex is informed by something else, including history, including time, so… whatever Agnes the knife wielding debate team captain is angry at Riley about, Agatha’s angry at Rio for the exact same thing. Basically. In principle.

Betrayal. Like a shield of cracked ice around Rio’s lumpy black heart. A promise broken. A love lost.

Agatha’s processing the trauma of their relationship – all three hundred odd years of it – and she’s doing so via teen murder melodrama.

“This is a very interesting therapy session you’re having, Agatha,” Rio muses, attempting to gain the upper hand by kneeing Agatha in the groin. It does not work. Agatha shoves her ass-first back in the dirt until her back hits the bark of a sturdy tree. “I wonder if we could talk about it like civilized beings.”

“I don’t wanna talk to you,” Agatha grimaces. The tip of her knife digs into the soft space under Rio’s ribs where her shirt exposes her. It tickles. She frowns. “I wanna make you hurt like you made me hurt. I wanna keep everyone else away from you. Just mine. All mine.”

Rio wants to stand, but Agatha’s weight is pinning her down. She wants to scoot away and get her faculties back and run through everything she knows on hexes and chaos magic (why did it have to be Agatha getting caught up like this, she’s the one who understands all the bendy-wendy mind stuff) and then figure out a way to break her estranged ex-wife out of this spell. Unfortunately, her estranged ex-wife is blabbering about fake drama and digging a very real knife into her skin. It’s starting to be a little more than a tickle.

“Agatha, baby” Rio cautions, trying to lower the tension, but it has the exact opposite effect. She remembers a second too late.

“Stop saying that name!” Agatha roars, and lifts the knife over her head. The blunt end comes down right on the bridge of Rio’s nose – her vision goes red, then black. Then nothing.

Chapter Text

Rio wakes up in a lumpy bed with a killer headache.

“Finally, you’re up,” Agatha says, but she doesn’t sound like she did a few seconds ago – or however long ago it was that Rio passed out – and when she blinks open her eyes, Agatha is standing in front of her in a pantsuit, wavering in Rio’s blurry vision, utterly entranced by the cell phone she’s tapping away on.

“Aggie?” Rio slurs, because those are the most syllables she can get out right now. Agatha looks up and narrows her eyes. There is something very sharp in them. Rio does not like it.

“You’ve lost your power of speech,” Agatha says, clinically. “This is what you get for rollerblading around City Hall when you should be working.”

“…Huh?” The world still feels out of focus, but Rio’s pretty sure that’s not the reason Agatha’s words make no sense. She slowly registers the papery hospital gown she’s wearing and the sterile white room around her – okay, so it’s daytime now, and they’re in a different place. A different… show? And Agatha doesn’t seem to want to kill her anymore. That’s nice. Are they still playacting at- whatever it was? Rio can’t remember the names. She’s tired. She wants to crawl into Agatha’s arms and sleep for a thousand years. Is she concussed? Can she get concussed?

“You’re gonna make me believe I made the wrong choice,” Agatha says haughtily. She sits down in the chair beside Rio’s hospital bed, crossing her legs at the knee and folding her arms across her chest so her shoulder pads pop out. “You were the only person on that whole election team crazy enough to get fake married to fix a PR scandal, but the downside of that is that you’re crazy enough to do a whole bunch of other crap, too.” Agatha rolls her eyes. “If we ever decide to have sex, there are going to need to be a lot of rules.”

If they ever decide to- okay. Okay, that line was high on exposition, and Rio can see the plot barreling towards her like a train at the end of a tunnel. “Wha’s happening?” she mutters, but Agatha just cocks her head, looks at her softly. Not unlike a stern mother regarding their child’s stubborn pet. She clicks her tongue.

“Sleep off the brain damage, Ludgate, and we can talk about your punishment in the morning.”

Even as Rio’s drifting off to sleep on command, she still manages to blush crimson.

(She also manages to miss whatever Agatha’s called her in this go-round entirely.)

---

The next time Rio wakes up, it’s in a plush hotel bed surrounded by memory-foam pillows in, according to Agatha, “the only worthwhile hotel in this goat-sty Midwestern hellhole.” In other words, Rio has more exposition to sort through.

She spends a day and a half getting periodically checked in on by a very busy-seeming Agatha, who answers her cell phone with a sharp “Jen Barkley” and looks at Rio not unlike a misbehaving child kicking their feet in a plastic chair outside the principal’s office. Due to the aforementioned business, Rio is mostly left alone, so she putters around the room – she healed a lot quicker than Agatha expected, since she’s a primordial being and Agatha seems not to remember that – eats things out of the mini fridge, watches home renovation shows on the hotel TV, and snoops around Agatha’s stuff.

There’s an office memo – an office memo, that’s how Rio learns about her current existence – trapped between a makeup bag and an empty plastic case for a bullet vibrator in Agatha’s Prada bag which details the “campaign strategy,” quote unquote, of Jen Barkley, campaign manager extraordinaire, and April Ludgate (that must be Rio? supposedly?), youth outreach and director of new media, getting engaged to cover up some scandal or another where the deputy director of the Parks and Recreation department accidentally implied that two male penguins marrying each other was gross, or something – Rio loses track of what’s supposed to be happening by the third paragraph in the memo. She gets the gist of it. She’s engaged to Agatha – or Jen Barkley, or whatever. Agatha-slash-Jen-Barkley hates her. Or at least thinks her deeply backwater and incompetent.

Rio gets one look at her bangs in the mirror and is inclined to agree, if her choice in haircuts has anything to say about her general character.

After the second day – although Rio deduces this is Agatha’s hotel room, she has not come back to sleep in it since Rio has been here – Agatha comes to collect her and usher her back to the office. “The office” being the Parks and Recreation department, where Rio apparently works in addition to helping this incredibly excitable sugar-high blonde win a local election. She’s been told they’re close friends. She doesn’t see it. Leslie Knope is… peppy. Rio doesn’t do peppy. She prefers women whose souls are as dark as the blood that stains their hands in perpetuity, and all that dramatic stuff.

---

With limited options and all the time in the world – literally, Rio can’t age or die and was never really born and time is wiggly for her anyways – she settles into this strange existence. Turns out she lives with a guy named Andy, who is big and bear-like and nice enough, if Rio could tolerate men for longer than ten minutes at a time. They are roommates because they are both children incapable of being wise with money, if Agatha is to be believed. Rio makes up an excuse about having a super contagious skin disease that will infect anyone who shares fabric surfaces with her, which means she doesn’t have to set foot in that terrifying apartment ever again. She still doesn’t know why there was silly string all over everything, and she’s too afraid to ask.

Rio is also forced to spend time with Agatha. Well, that’s not quite true – Jen Barkley is forced to spend time with April Ludgate, who it seems she very much doesn’t particularly like, but tolerates, maybe. Rio is happy to gobble up and swallow down any time with Agatha she can get.

They end up eating lunch together every day. Actually, that might be a bit of an exaggeration. They eat lunch in the same conference room. Sometimes, they make bland conversation about the weather. Despite the fact that, if this façade keeps up, Agatha is eventually supposed to put a ring on Rio’s finger, she doesn’t seem interested in getting to know her at all.

On Rio’s fourth day in this weird alternate universe, Agatha slams a Ceasar salad down on the table in their co-opted conference room and says, eloquently, “I hate men.”

So it seems some things have remained the same under this spell. “I concur,” Rio says, shoveling french fries into her mouth. “Any in particular?”

“Oh, just all of them,” Agatha says breezily, waving her hand in the air. She eyes Rio’s fries with extreme jealousy, so Rio slides the greasy paper over to her and allows her to pick two up and put them in her mouth. Even as she chews, Agatha makes wary eyes at Rio, and she wonders if April Ludgate is maybe the kind of person to hoard her fries to herself, and she’s done some strange out-of-character action. Rio would normally hoard her fries, too, but never with Agatha.

“How… has your day been?” Agatha asks tepidly, shaking her Ceasar salad to mix the components. “Anything incredibly strange happen in this office today? It usually does.”

“Andy poured soda on his computer.” Rio shrugs. “Is that incredibly strange?”

“No, that’s incredibly normal.” Agatha rolls her eyes. “I swear to god, the longer I’m in this town, the more I’m going to absorb this empty-headed nonsense. You’re all a bunch of idiots.” Even though Rio has seen Agatha insult everyone she comes across, handily, for the past four days, after she says it, she seems to soften, glancing at Rio warily, as if she’s almost sorry for including Rio in that implied group of idiots.

“Why don’t you just leave?” Rio takes a healthy bite of her turkey club and shrugs. “I would if I could.” (Yes, she’s an all-powerful being with control over the sacred balance, but this glamour is tricky. She’s doing her best, okay?)

Agatha barks out a laugh, bordering on a snort. Damn, Rio has missed Agatha’s little snorts. “Nice joke. I have to finish the campaign. I owe a favor to the blonde sugar depository’s boytoy, you know. And they’re paying me big bucks for this. Not that the money matters, but let’s be real, the money matters.”

“Sure, okay.” Rio pushes the fries a little closer to Agatha. She takes another one, with a bit more confidence this time. "But after the campaign. What are you gonna do?”

“Go… uh.” Agatha’s eyes glass over a little. Her mouth goes slack, like sound is trying to escape, but there’s nothing but a creaky silence. Rio watches, inscrutable, as Agatha fights the boundaries of her own trap, her eyes glowing a fiercer and fiercer red the longer she pushes back.

And then, without much fanfare, the tension breaks. Agatha shakes her head roughly, her flawless hair bouncing, and smirks. “Run the next chump into the ground,” she says, and winks. Despite herself, Rio feels her cheeks flush. Why does this alternate personality have to be so damn hot?

---

After five days pretending to care about bureaucratic nonsense, Rio has had enough. Gently probing Agatha by teasing her hasn’t worked. Neither has blunt-force reminding her of reality, which she saw in the last go-round. She has to take a different tack.

Despite the red haze trapping her and everyone around her in some sort of pantomime playacting alternate reality, Rio’s magic is intact. This is good, both because if the entire concept of Death went offline for who knows how long it would have catastrophic consequences, and also, Rio relies on her magic somewhat like a safety blanket. She would be quite upset if it suddenly disappeared.

Also, she needs it to anti-brainwash her wife, or whatever.

She picks a “team strategy” meeting to enact her plan, hoping to catch Agatha off guard when she’s focused on something else. They’re gathered around a plastic folding table in the pathetic Parks and Recreation office, and the intrepid Leslie Knope is ranting about some weekly crisis or another. Rio is sitting next to Agatha, as they’ve taken to doing, because, you know, fake engagement. Casually, she swings an arm over Agatha’s shoulders.

Beneath her, Agatha tenses up.

“Aww,” Leslie pauses in her rambling to say. “Are you two actually getting along now?” she gestures at Agatha and Rio, which makes Agatha’s stoniness level increase from river rock to practically marble levels.

“You could call it that,” Agatha smiles stiffly. As soon as Leslie looks away, she leans over and whispers in Rio’s ear, “don’t test me, Ludgate.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rio says smugly, and uses her free right hand to doodle a drawing of Leslie in a baby diaper sucking on a lollipop. When she’s finished, she passes it along the table to Agatha, and while she’s distracted – snorting, Rio is quite proud of this – she takes the opportunity to wiggle her fingers and murmur a dispellment in Agatha’s ear.

Everyone at the table immediately freezes.

“April,” Leslie says in a warning tone, “what are you doing?”

Agatha is staring at her like she has two heads. Rio retracts her arm, suddenly nervous. It’s impossible to tell from the impassive look on Agatha’s face whether or not her spell actually worked. She snaps, and Agatha blinks, still stony. “Um,” she says, and Ron interrupts her-

“You started muttering ominously in Latin and waving your hands around Jen like you were casting a spell,” he says gruffly. “What did you think you were doing?”

Maybe if she can disrupt the logic of this enchantment, she can break it. Shoving down her embarrassment over not being as subtle as she thought she was, Rio clears her throat and plasters on her most unimpressed look.

“I’m a witch,” she says, and to her surprise, absolutely no one else is surprised.

“Okay, April,” Leslie sighs, and gets back to her debriefing. Agatha just blinks at her, momentarily pulled from whatever hairspray haze she’s been living in.

“Freak,” she whispers, sending Rio a private smirk.

For a second, just a second, she thinks the spell might have worked.

“I like a girl who can lie,” Agatha says, then, and Rio knows that it didn’t.

She slumps backwards in her plastic chair, arms folded across her chest, wondering if brooding office worker is the only thing certain in her future.

---

“Knock, knock.” Agatha appears in the doorway of the Parks office. Rio is the only one still there – she’s really trying to avoid Andy and that cesspool he calls an apartment – and she’s eating Chinese takeout at her desk, watching RuPaul’s Drag Race on the computer. All the technology here seems stuck in the late 2010s, but Rio spelled her Google to get the current version of YouTube Premium. “I have something for you.”

“You have something for me?” Rio says around a mouthful of lo mein. Agatha’s hair is loose and wavy, like she’s been running her hands through it, and her ever-present string of pearls is nowhere to be seen. She looks soft and approachable for the first time in days. Rio’s chest balloons with a warmth hundreds of years old, kindled in candlelit cabins in northern Massachusetts, when things between them were soft and loving instead of spiky and complicated.

“Yes, I do.” Agatha seems guarded, off – even from her Jen Barkley persona. She sits down in the chair across from Rio’s desk, her back ramrod straight.

“Me, your lowly fake-fiancée?”

“Yes, I do.” Agatha rolls her eyes. “Just take the present, April.” Rio does not miss that this is the first time Agatha has called her by her fake first name, and maybe she’s getting too into character but something in her softens to notice it. A napkin-wrapped something lands on her keyboard, sweet-smelling.

“It’s an almond pastry,” Agatha explains, and if Rio didn’t know better, she’d say she was fidgeting. “It’s from Starbucks. It was four dollars. It’s nothing special. I just wanted to- I don’t know.” She huffs out a sigh, wisps of hair blowing away from her face. “You’re not as bad as I once thought you were, you know. You’re… atypical.”

“Thank you,” Rio says, deadpan. “I try very hard to be not normal.”

“Well, you’re succeeding.” Agatha shivers in her structured blazer. It’s not remotely cold in this office. “Don’t get me wrong, I still plan on divorcing you after one year of marriage. The contract terms have not changed.” God. It’s so like Agatha to draw up a contract for her fake wedding scheme, Rio almost wants to break character and grin. “But I don’t think cohabitating with you will be as awful as I… once thought it would be.”

“High praise,” Rio says, and promptly shoves the whole almond pastry in her mouth.

Something feels… weird, immediately. The pastry tastes perfectly normal, but Rio’s having trouble swallowing. Her mouth feels dry, her throat full of chalk. For half a second, she wonders if Agatha poisoned the pastry, but that feels a little out of whack for a primetime network sitcom. Surely not. And even if it was poison, Rio is Death. Shouldn’t be a problem.

She’s having a distinct difficulty breathing, though.

“April?” Agatha asks with worry when she notices that Rio has started to choke. “Oh, god, are you allergic to nuts? I should have asked. Fuck, gone and killed my own fake fiancée, how typical-” It doesn’t sound like Jen Barkley saying it. It sounds like Agatha, which would be something to celebrate if Rio wasn’t currently asphyxiating. She’s relatively certain, even trapped within this hex, that she can’t die. This still isn’t a pleasant experience.

“S’okay,” she manages to rasp even as she can feel her face swelling. The room tilts and she slips from her rolling desk chair, and the last thing she sees before she passes out is Agatha crouched over her, blazer and button-up disheveled, clinging to her shoulders like Rio actually matters.

(How the fuck is she allergic to nuts just because of a stupid hex? Rio wants to kill the Scarlet Witch, resurrect her, and then kill her again.)

Chapter Text

The graveyard in which Rio wakes up for her third go-round of “Agatha’s Weirdly Television-Themed Traumatic Spell Breakdown” is cozy. All the graves have a good layer of moss and Rio finds herself propped up against age-softened limestone, playing with some flowers that some do-gooder left behind, waiting for Agatha to appear.

She had crawled out of a grave with her own name on it – Rio C. Vidal, she’s not sure what the C is supposed to stand for – which means at least Agatha knows Rio’s name in this version. Ideally her own, as well. That’ll make things easier.

About halfway through trying to recite Edgar Allen Poe’s entire oeuvre by memory (something Rio does when she’s bored) there’s a rustling in the distance, from the vague direction of civilization. The trees shake and part. Agatha emerges.

Wearing low-rise jeans and a sheer floral patterned shoulderless top, under a leather jacket. The peak of 90s fashion nonsense. At least Rio got a gray t-shirt and some loose denim jeans out of the deal. That she can work with.

Agatha has a wooden stake in hand, and, if Rio squints, a vial of holy water around her neck. Her eyes narrow upon seeing Rio and she freezes, stake-hand twitching by her side, as if she’s not sure what she’s supposed to do next. For a moment, Rio braces for a repeat of their fight from a few – days? hours? she’s not sure – ago, but Agatha’s stance seems to soften, and she runs a hand over her face.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says raggedly. Rio shrugs.

“I’m here anyway.”

“I told you to stay away from me.” It’s as honest and realistic a statement as Agatha’s made so far in this hallucinogenic mess, but it ends quickly. “When I left your stupid crypt basement, I told you to stay away from me and leave Westview alone.”

“Well, I didn’t listen,” Rio says, which is true enough. Agatha has told her to go, many times in the past three centuries, and she never listens. It’s sort of one of the hallmarks of her personality.

She expects Agatha to argue, to fight back. Instead, she just rolls her eyes. When Agatha slumps down to sit on some poor unsuspecting man’s grave, Rio leans casually back against her own, arms folded protectively over her chest. Seems like they’re finally going to have a conversation.

“There’s a dancing demon in the woods,” Agatha says grumpily. “Everyone he attacks, he makes them dance to death. It’s annoying.”

“Sounds like it.”

“I don’t know how to find him.” Agatha gnaws on her lip, refusing to make eye contact. “I could really use the help looking.”

Rio cocks her head. “I thought you never wanted to see me again.” God, she loves riling Agatha up. The way her brow furrows, her eyes darken, the corners of her lips draw back into a sneer. Even better, she never manages to notice that Rio’s doing it on purpose, just because she wants to see Agatha explode and swallow everything in her way.

It’s a little more dangerous to provoke her when Rio is the thing in her way, however.

“Don’t be a dummy,” Agatha sighs. Rio whistles under her breath.

“That’s a real PG-13 insult, Agatha. I think you can do better.”

Agatha opens her mouth like she’s going to retort with the filthiest stream of profanity Rio’s ever heard in her existence, but no sound comes out. Rio raises an eyebrow, about to say cat got your tongue? when Agatha’s brow furrows, in confusion this time. She opens her mouth again, her throat flexing like she’s trying to force air out, but still, silence.

Apparently, Rio has found a chink in Agatha’s sitcom armor. And knowing Rio, she’s going to messily dig her fingernails into it until it splinters and cracks and the real Agatha can slip out.

“What are you trying to say, Agatha?” She kicks off the gravestone and takes two confident strides to stand between Agatha’s spread legs, keeping careful distance. “Trying to cuss me out? Trying to be mean?” Agatha’s nose scrunches, and Rio notices the faintest of tears glistening in the corners of her eyes, as if the effort of trying to call Rio a gay slur, undoubtedly, is killing her. Rio takes pity, reaching up one hand and rubbing a thumb over Agatha’s cheek, and is surprised when Agatha lets her. “It’s okay, baby. I know you hate me.”

Agatha sniffs. It’s less haughty than she likely means it to sound, more wet and pathetic. Path-wet-ic, Rio thinks dumbly. “I do hate you.”

“I’m sure.” Rio nudges Agatha’s knees apart so she can get a little bit closer, and cups the other side of Agatha’s face with her free hand, holding her, feeling those delicate bones beneath her skin.

And you know what? If reasoning with her doesn’t work, if spells are useless… maybe a dose of Rio’s lips really is what Agatha needs to break out of this.

She’s totally not saying that because she misses her ex-wife really bad.

The last time Rio kissed Agatha was probably a couple of decades ago – before she obtained the Darkhold, certainly – but she still tastes exactly the same. Lavender lightning magic dancing on Rio’s tongue. Electricity and elderflower. Rio swallows it down like it’s her last meal, chasing Agatha’s breaths, inhaling the very scent of her. Even twisted, even in low-rise jeans, Agatha folds into her, looping her arms around Rio’s neck and letting herself swoon backwards like a Victorian woman waiting to be rescued by a dashing gentleman.

Rio’s teeth feel pointy. Oh, right, she’s seen this one before – vampires, she’s supposed to be a vampire. The inevitable bloodlust has been pretty much quenched by the Agatha-lust, like Rio’s managing to fill herself up on the idea of Agatha alone. Agatha holding her close in the middle of the night. Agatha bleeding into her mouth. Whoops, okay, that’s a little too in line with the plot there.

Agatha doesn’t seem to care. She keens and whines and twists her head so her neck is on display, pale and expansive, a heartbeat thumping underneath the fragile skin that echoes in Rio’s ears. She sighs, dreamily, a little lost in it all. Agatha seems to be, too. Losing herself, that is. Or maybe getting a little bit of herself back.

When Rio pulls away to kiss the shell of Agatha’s ear, she chuckles meanly. “You always do this.”

“Do what?” Rio mumbles, sincere and distracted by the taste of sweat on Agatha’s skin. Realer than she would have thought.

“Seduce me instead of talking to me,” Agatha protests, which is weird, because that’s actually usually her move. “You know how bad I want you even when I’m angry at you. Stop using it against me.”

Definitely sounds real when Agatha’s leaning into Rio’s touch, dragging her mouth back to hers. But as Agatha swallows her gasp, a bitter cold settles under Rio’s ribs. This still isn’t Agatha. She might have the same name, and she might look like her, but her mind is twisted, looked up behind red chaos magic bars, and Rio is taking advantage of the situation, whether she likes it or not.

If Agatha remembered everything that had happened between them – if it hadn’t been twisted to fit the plot of some teeny-bop 90s TV show about vampires – she wouldn’t be kissing Rio like this.

“Agatha, stop,” she tries to say against Agatha’s lips, but Agatha surges up against her. She groans.

“First you start this, then you tell me to stop?” She’s still trying to kiss Rio even as she talks, until Rio uses her considerable strength to shove backwards, stumbling a little in the grass. “You’re such a freak.”

“You used to like it,” Rio teases, even as Agatha crowds into her space, the stake suddenly raising between them. It’s a funny contrast, Agatha’s cheeks red and lips swollen but her eyes so full of fury. “You used to like me.”

“I never liked you. We had sex once and it was a mistake.” Once? Ew. If Rio did it right, it should not have been a mistake. “I hate you, I’m supposed to kill you, I’m supposed to rid the world of vampires but instead you’re trying to… to… love-trap me-”

“That’s rich, considering you said I love you first to me.”

“What?” Agatha snaps. “I’ve never said that to you. Never.”

Right. Because it is Agatha, but it isn’t. Rio’s tired of this already.

“Give me the stake,” she says, beckoning with her hand. Agatha huffs a laugh, rolling her eyes.

“Oh, you’re going to be all dramatic and self-sacrificing, aren’t you? That’s just like you. The vampire with a sense of humor, right?” Still, inexplicably, she hands over the stake. “Go ahead. Take it. Pull whatever stunt suits your fancy, big shot, so you can prove I care about you, or whatever.”

“I’m not proving you care about me.” Rio lines the stake up over her own heart, taking a gamble – a stupidly dangerous one, a less desperate Rio would probably point out – that her losing consciousness really is how this whole thing resets, and not just a lucky coincidence thus far. “I’m just… reconstructing the narrative.”

“God, can you stop talking like you were born into Spanish royalty for five seconds?” Agatha’s expression goes from peeved to alarmed when Rio pushes the stake into her skin, drawing blood. It burns.

The very point of it slips inside of her, and she already feels like she’s on fire. It hurts more than anything has ever hurt before, in Rio’s long existence – maybe it’s because she’s not usually a magically-glamoured vampire, or maybe it’s something else, something sinister and red, taking root inside of her. There is no tickle; there is a steady burn, and Rio’s chest gapes around the stake, slick black blood pours from inside of her, and she coughs. It’s wet. Red on the ground.

Agatha lunges forward. “Wait, Rio, no-”

It’s the last thing Rio hears. She’s comforted by the fact that, as her vision fades and she crumples to the ground with the stake sliding through her chest, Agatha looks so terrified – proof that she does, maybe, still love her.

Chapter Text

Rio’s eyes open, and she’s sitting at a wooden desk in an old classroom that looks straight out of a Catholic school nightmare. Sure enough, she’s also wearing a uniform.

At the front of the room, Agatha stands with her back to her, writing something in Latin on the chalkboard. Rio is too focused on Agatha’s ass and thighs in her burgundy slacks to pay attention to reading. When Agatha turns around, she’s spellbound by the tortoiseshell glasses poised low on her nose.

“And the proper conjugation would be…?” Agatha’s eyes scan the room, brushing over a handful of bored students (all of whom look age-appropriate for this strange situation) before landing solidly on Rio.

“Miss Vidal?”

Rio has heard of mortals who have nightmares about being called on in class when they don’t know the answer, as an interpretation of their own anxieties by their subconscious. She did not think such things were real. She is being schooled now, in more ways than one.

“Uh, I-”

Agatha barely gives her time to think. “Try to be a little less distracted next time, okay?” She lowers her glasses impossibly further and flashes Rio a wink and a private smile, all teeth. “Mr. Howard.”

Rio sinks lower into her chair, intent on hiding herself from perception until this horribleness ends, because she’s learned the hard way blunt-force magicking herself out of these situations will do jackshit. But she doesn’t have to wait long – there’s a massive clicking sound, like a huge light being turned off, and the room goes dark. When the lights come back on (studio lights, Rio realizes, glancing upward into not a ceiling but a massive black void) she and Agatha are the only ones in the room. Agatha has seemingly teleported from the chalkboard to her desk and is sorting through papers, angrily slashing with a red pen.

Rio glances outward and notices, for the first time, the yawning void beyond the right-hand wall as well. A soundstage, if she had to guess. The rules of reality muddled by this hex once again to produce, of all things, a cheesy titillating soap-opera plot.

“School’s out, Vidal,” Agatha says in a teasing voice, catching Rio’s attention. She lowers her glasses over the bump of her nose. “Wanna tell me what you’re still doing here?”

She says it like she knows the answer.

Internally, Rio facepalms. Apparently, she’s fucking her teacher.

(The emotional trajectory of the past few days is really catching up with her. First Agatha hates her. Then she hates her, but is attracted to her. Now she wants her but is only comfortable doing so in front of a live studio audience. What Rio wouldn’t give to see the inside of Agatha’s brain right- actually, that probably is what she’s doing, and it’s hell in here.)

“I wanted to see you,” she says, mustering as sexy of a voice as she can manage. Seduction seemed close to working last time. Maybe if she keeps trying at it- “I had to wait until everyone else was gone.”

Agatha gasps in mock surprise. It sounds so like her Rio almost wilts. “And why was that? You could’ve stopped by my classroom during office hours, like any other student.”

“I’m not any other student.”

“You sure aren’t.” The corner of Agatha’s mouth lifts in a smirk. “Tell me. What was so… urgent, Miss Vidal?”

Woof, maybe Rio needs to revisit her kinks – specifically roleplay – because the whole Catholic-schoolgirl-plaid-skirt combo is doing something for her. Or maybe it’s just Agatha being in charge, which she’s always had a certain weakness for. She swallows roughly as Agatha steps off the raised platform her desk and chalkboard are on and stalks towards a shivering Rio, her sensible heels clicking on the floor. When she reaches Rio’s desk, she perches on the edge, folding her arms across her chest just enough to accentuate her tits.

Well, she did say she was going for the seduction technique.

Rio launches out of her desk and into Agatha’s arms, swallowing her not-so-surprised chuckle whole. Agatha tastes like expensive lipstick but under that she’s still Agatha, spicy and mean, the same as she tasted a few minutes ago or however long it took Rio to reawaken in a different TV plot.

Agatha takes control of the kiss immediately, swinging Rio around to sit on the desk and parting her legs with a swift kick to her ankles. She steps in, hands framing Rio’s face, and sucks on her tongue. There’s no way this is PG enough for daytime TV, Rio thinks dazedly, as Agatha’s hands go to the buttons her stupid little Catholic school cardigan. (She’s wearing a headband, too, she thinks. Probably plaid. This is going to be mortifying later.) She swears she can hear a music swell somewhere in the distance. Agatha’s hands feel so good trying to pull her clothes off. None of this is real.

None of this is real.

“Remember the first time we kissed?” Rio murmurs against Agatha’s lips, trying to remind both of them at the same time. “In the-”

“In the chemistry lab,” Agatha finishes smartly, like she knows something Rio doesn’t. Rio shakes her head and disconnects their lips just long enough to frown at Agatha, who seems dazed, under a spell as much as she’s in control.

“Not in a chemistry lab. In the woods outside Salem. You had me up against a tree.”

Agatha’s hands falter against the smooth skin of Rio’s stomach, under her shirt. She shakes her head roughly. “I’ve always dreamed about taking you out in the open,” she says, like she’s trying to get back on script, and Rio takes advantage of her discombobulation to wriggle a little further away, even though the distance stings.

“We had sex for the first time in your mother’s bed because you wanted to get her angry,” Rio keeps on, even as Agatha’s reaching for her mouth, trying to pull her into submission, trying to get her to shut up.

“My mother’s dead.”

“A few days later, she was. You killed her.”

“I killed my mother?” Agatha looks somewhere between confused and cautiously hopeful, her lip trapped between her teeth in place of Rio’s own. “I didn’t kill my mother.”

Rio brushes an errant lock of hair out of Agatha’s face and straightens her stupid sexy glasses. “Yes, you did.”

“I- I don’t remember that.” An adorable frown takes over Agatha’s face, disquieted rather than forceful. Whatever crack there was, Rio has widened it enough for doubt to creep in. She pulls Agatha further into her arms.

“What are you thinking?”

“What are you saying?”

“Tell me,” Rio says, running her hands over Agatha’s back. “Tell me what you remember.”

It’s at that exact moment that the door to Agatha’s classroom blows in, and a dramatic cymbal crash accompanies three men in police uniforms bursting through, automatic rifles in hand.

“Oh, what the fuck,” Rio groans, suddenly thrown to the side as Agatha steps in front of her, hands raised. She lands hard on the linoleum tile. Her groan is muffled by her own discarded cardigan.

“Luigi,” Agatha says lowly, accompanied by a madwoman’s laugh. (Soap opera, Rio reminds herself forlornly.) “How did you find me?”

“You left a sloppy trail, Harkness.” The biggest man, who must be Luigi, steps forward. Rio scrambles to her feet, already gathering her magic to turn these fuckers to dust. Collateral damage or not, no one is hurting Agatha. Also, she was so close, and they’re seriously cucking her dispelling attempts.

She flicks her fingers towards the men, but rather than a satisfying burst of magic, a sharp-feeling trickle emerges from her and dissipates. Huh.

“The body count is high. We followed your dirty laundry all the way from Detroit to-”

Magic apparently not being an option, Rio cuts Luigi off with an exasperated groan. “Agatha, you’ve got to be kidding.” Agatha blinks emptily at her. “Money laundering? This is seriously what your subconscious comes up with? This is so dramatic.”

“What’s the kid doing here?” Luigi asks incredulously.

“I am older than the concept of time, bitch-”

“Leave her out of it,” Agatha says suddenly, snapping back to character. “This is between you and me, Luigi.”

“Bullshit. She probably works for you.” All of a sudden, three guns are trained on Rio’s chest. She rolls her eyes. Agatha, for her part, is a shade shy of genuinely scared, and Rio wonders if something about their previous conversation has actually gotten through to what she knows is true – Rio can’t die. That’s ridiculous. She can’t die any more than she can quit her stupid job and pamper Agatha for eternity-

“She’s not part of it,” Agatha says confidently, making desperate eyes at Rio, who can’t make heads or tails of what she might be thinking. “She’s nothing.”

I’m nothing?

Rio’s automatic reaction is to want to explode in rage, to hit something, to scream, to cry. Nothing nothing nothing, nothing she hasn’t heard before, just one of the many caustic knives in a shower of insults to Rio’s psyche in their long centuries apart. Just another way Agatha would try to get under her skin. Because she knew it worked; because Rio had become life for Agatha, and she hated the idea that Agatha wouldn’t care. Wouldn’t want her. Wounded to the core, a suffering little bird, a broken wing away from- nothing.

After all of it, everything, all the times she’s tried – and sure, Agatha might not remember, but some part of her has to subconsciously know how many times they’ve done this – she’s still not a part of it. Agatha’s grand design, her plan to conquer the universe. Rio used to be the ride-or-die. Now she’s just the tragic footnote, the heartbreaking backstory turned rumor that gives Agatha’s myth more power.

She’s been trying to claw back something that never wanted to be hers.

It all builds up inside her in a well of emotion that bursts outward in vitriol. Luigi, the fake-real guy with the fake-real gun, does not matter. The Catholic schoolgirl uniform does not matter. Nothing that this ridiculous spell can throw at her could matter. Nothing will stop Rio from feeling.

“Fuck you, Agatha.”

The words barely have time to leave Rio’s mouth before she’s being littered with bullets. Her first thought is ouch.

Agatha’s jaw hangs open loosely as Rio is jolted backward from the force of the hits. Tears begin to well in her eyes, too fast to be natural. It’s just the spell. Or maybe she cares and the spell is making it worse, more real. Rio doesn’t know, can’t decide, doesn’t care.

Her second thought is even in the depths of a chaos magic spell, she manages to break my heart.

Her third thought is is the world spinning or is that just me? Death can’t die, right?

Death can pass out from multiple gunshot wounds, though.

“Not again,” Rio says, and crumples to the ground.

Chapter Text

“Get me six units of blood and prep an epiglottal-” Rio promptly spits blood in this overreacting nurse’s face.

“I’m fine,” she rasps, but now another nurse is shouting into the hallway.

“Get Dr. Harkness!”

Shit.

Rio’s been conscious for all of five minutes and now she’s in a hospital. Her Catholic school uniform, which every so often is glitching with red electric energy (huh), is soaked in blood, but at least her stupid headband is gone. For a second, she had almost believed the story hadn’t changed – but then Agatha bustles in in a white coat and lavender scrubs, looking at Rio sympathetically, but unfamiliarly.

“Talk to me.”

“Gunshots to the chest and abdomen. Possible damage to lungs, stomach, liver, and ribcage. She’s lost a lot of blood.” Rio coughs up some more, just to prove it. It hits the nurse in the sleeve. He glares at her.

“That’s not a way to make friends,” Agatha counsels, sounding utterly detached and patient as she is handed a chart with, presumably, Rio’s vitals. “Boehner, go deal with Trauma 2. I’ve got this one.”

The nurse scurries out of the room, even as other purple-scrubbed individuals flit around Rio’s bedside, measuring various signs of life. She thinks she hears someone say intubation and can’t stop her arm from twitching in anxiety.

The thing is, none of this should be necessary. Rio, otherwise known as One Of The Primordial Forces Of The Universe, is perfectly capable of surviving bullet wounds. She has, many times. For a while there she took a great delight in being Agatha’s personal body shield, especially because sometimes Agatha would pluck the offensive items out with her teeth afterwards.

So why is she having trouble breathing, feeling like her lungs are full of fluid? Why does everything hurt and ache, and, when someone prods her, sting like something sharp? Why, in short, is she actually dying?

“This is wrong,” she says, trying to get Agatha’s attention by reaching up a blood-soaked hand and tugging on her white coat sleeve. “Ag-” the name dissolves on her tongue in another bloody coughing fit. “This is really wrong.”

Agatha hums, reaching forward to smooth the sweaty hair back from Rio’s forehead. “I know,” she says, “it’s really scary. But we’re going to take good care of you.”

For just a second, Rio can pretend Agatha knows who she is. Dr. Harkness has pretty good bedside manner.

Then, Agatha orders an IV of propofol, and Rio’s out like a light.

---

Thankfully, when she blinks open her eyes, the world hasn’t been changed around her. Rio is still in the hospital – in a clean dressing gown instead of her bloody clothes-slash-costume – and has an IV stuck in her arm that itches like hell. So does her throat, probably from all the bloody coughing. Her head pounds, every part of her body aches, and she really needs to pee.

In short, she feels uncomfortably, fallibly human.

The Boehner guy comes back in to check on Rio and helps her to the bathroom, which is pretty embarrassing. Then he says he’s going to call Dr. Harkness, which is even worse. Rio really can’t stand the thought of Agatha seeing her like this, weak and confusingly beat up. She reaches for her healing magic, but it’s just out of reach – like an electrical shock each time she tries to touch it. Like a red electrical shock.

Like the spell is seeping into her and swallowing her, too.

“So that’s why I’m dying,” she mutters out loud to herself, trying to use her diminished strength to stab the pudding cup Boehner left behind with a plastic spoon. She is failing.

A snort from the doorway. “You’ve solved the mystery of the multiple gunshot wounds?” Agatha says teasingly, strutting into the room with a clipboard under her arm. She kicks the door shut behind her. She hasn’t changed her clothes since Rio saw her last, she notes with a soft affection – there is still a bloody handprint on her right sleeve.

“I have,” she says solemnly. “Come on, Agatha, I mean, you know this is wrong.”

Agatha purses her lips. “I know you’re on a lot of pain meds, but I’d still prefer you call me Dr. Harkness. Or even just hey, lady.” She smirks. “Don’t abuse the blatant lack of anonymity they give me by making me wear my full name on my coat.”

“Fuuuck,” Rio groans, flopping back against her stacked pillows. She immediately regrets it when her ribs ring with pain. There’s no audible cracking sound, but Rio hears one inside her head anyway. “Oh, fuck!”

“I’d be careful, if I were you,” Agatha says, sitting on a rolling stool and edging it closer to the side of Rio’s hospital bed. “So, you’ve been through surgery. We were able to stop the internal bleeding, but we couldn’t remove two of the bullets. They’d lodged too close to significant organs. You’re not in immediate danger at the moment, but we are going to keep you in the ICU for monitoring, in case of infection or further complications from the surgery.”

“Clinical.” Rio narrows her eyes. “Only one problem.”

“Which is?”

“I kind of have a job.” Rio feels the urge to cough; when she does, her ribs rattle so hard that tears form in her eyes. She resolves not to do that again. “Said job is really impeded by me dying. So I’m not gonna do that.”

“That’s the goal,” Agatha hums, and Rio thinks she sees a fondness there in her eyes.

“I also can’t really do my job from the hospital,” Rio adds, waving her IV-laden arm around. It still itches. “And it’s not really the kind of job I can take time off from, if you catch my drift.” Given how it had gone after Rio tried to dispel Agatha, she doesn’t think coming right out and saying I am Death destroyer of worlds is going to go over well.

Agatha stands with her hands braced on her knees. She’s frowning, looks a little more stern than she did a minute ago. “Unless your job is President of the United States, given the injuries you’ve sustained – of a highly suspicious nature, by the way, you’re lucky that I’m not a police detective – I would say there’s no way your job is of more importance than your health at the moment, Ms. Harkness.”

Oh- what?

Rio blinks. “My- Ms. Harkness?”

“I know, right?” Agatha grins. “I guess I get why you don’t want to call me by my last name. Same as yours. Cool coincidence.”

“I’m not- that’s-” Rio’s rambling is interrupted by another cough, which her raw throat manages to swallow down. Before she can protest further, Agatha is across the room, filling a paper cup with tap water.

So, delirious and in pain, Rio gave Agatha’s last name to the doctors as her own. Because once upon a time, it had been. In a manner of speaking. Fucking brilliant.

“My name is Rio,” she says when Agatha hands her the cup of water, and then, a little desperately, “please call me Rio.”

“Okay,” Agatha says softly. “I’m going to come back to check on you for my evening rounds tonight, Rio. Try to sleep, if you can – you can call in a nurse for some meds if you think that would help. I’ve already authorized it.” Rio nods, because she really does feel like sleeping, and because for the time being, there’s nothing really left to say.

Agatha smiles at her again, softly, the skin by her eyes crinkling, and then she sweeps out the door. Rio misses the smell of her, acidic and medical as it is, the second she’s gone.

---

The sun has set by the time Agatha comes back. Rio managed to get a little sleep, but it wasn’t very restful. She’s still in pain, still absurdly out-of-reach of her magic. Prognostication: the longer Rio spends in this spell, the harder it will be for her to break out of it. Maybe she might end up with temporary memory loss and questionable TV acting skill. She shudders at the thought.

The world looks grim until Agatha comes back in, knocking gently at the door with a cup of chocolate ice cream in her hand. At least some part of her subconscious remembers that it’s Rio’s favorite.

(What she’s trying not to think about is that, if she had to build a future here, if she really was stuck in this spell for the rest of her eternity… maybe she could.)

“How are we feeling?” Agatha asks, picture perfect impersonation of a doctor. She sits by Rio’s side again, and reaches forward like she’s about to brush Rio’s hair out of her eyes – then stops. “Sorry,” she says, abruptly, and busies herself with her clipboard.

“No, it’s fine,” Rio swallows, but Agatha doesn’t look up. “Um, I’m feeling okay. Not really better.”

“That’s okay,” Agatha says. When she looks up again, that starting-to-be-familiar softness has bled from her, and she seems hardened again, distant. “We got back your blood tests, and they weren’t as good as we’d hoped. You didn’t react well to the numbing medication from the surgery. It’s faint, and we’re waiting on a second opinion, but it’s possible you have a rare blood infection. If that’s the case, you might start showing symptoms soon. If not, then we’ll be in the clear.”

As if on cue, Rio feels dizzy, a pounding heat taking up residence in her skull. “Uh, what are the symptoms?”

“Typically, you’d experience fever, chills, dizziness, heaviness in the limbs, and potential swelling in affected areas.” Agatha looks down at Rio nervously, already removing her stethoscope from around her neck. “Elevated heart rate would be very common.”

“Yeah, I’m kind of getting… all of that,” Rio says, weakly, as Agatha listens inside her chest. Her heartbeat is louder than it’s ever been before. It’s ominous – Rio doesn’t like its quick pulse at all.

“Fuck,” Agatha whispers quietly. A break in the façade. Rio would be proud if she wasn’t suddenly scared of herself, as an entity. (What exactly does the void look like from the other side? Does someone replace her if she ceases to exist? Was she a replacement? What is her- oh, this is way too existential for this hospital melodrama.) “Okay. I’m going to put some medicine in your IV that should put the infection to bed, okay? I’m going to stay here with you while it circulates.”

Agatha backs away from the bed, and Rio craves the heat of her immediately, her steady presence, her smell. She watches as Agatha hooks a bag of amber liquid up to her clear IV bag and it begins to flow down the tube into her arm. She feels a cold sensation, but nothing abates.

“Is it working?”

“Give it some time,” Agatha says. Rio has known her long enough to tell she’s hiding her own nervousness. “Why don’t you tell me some about yourself in the meantime, huh? What about that super important job?”

“It’s- uh-” the pain in Rio’s head is increasing, making it harder to think – “it’s kind of a secret thing. Like I can’t really talk about it.”

“Okay, big shot.” Agatha forces a chuckle. Rio doesn’t know if she should be comforted or scared that Agatha is also nervous about this. “What do you do for fun?”

“I… I like plants. And… going places. Traveling.”

“Those are good hobbies.” Agatha sits on the stool again, watching the medicine dispense from the IV bag. She even gives it a squeeze to move it along. Rio isn’t sure that’s how it’s supposed to work. “Anyone at home waiting for you? You didn’t have ID on you, but we’ve been working on reaching an emergency contact.”

“No emergency contact,” Rio sighs, looking right at her emergency contact. “No, um, no family.”

“No boy-” Rio shakes her head roughly. She would fake gag, but in her current state, that’s probably not a good idea. “No girlfriend? No wife?”

“Not… anymore.” Rio hums. Agatha raises an eyebrow. “Don’t bother. She won’t want to know about me. I don’t… I don’t think she’s reachable.” The pain is abating, but the dizziness is starting to take over. Just like Agatha predicted, her limbs feel heavy.

“That’s a shame.” Agatha seems to genuinely mean it. “Someone should be here with you through this.”

“You’re here.”

“That’s not the same.” It’s like she’s letting her down gently but doing a hell of a bad job at it. “Let me listen to your heart again, okay?” Agatha does – her hair brushes Rio’s chin and it feels like heaven. Everything is floaty. When Agatha sits back up, she’s frowning, but she doesn’t explain it. The machines to Rio’s side beep loudly, too loudly. “What happened to you and your ex?”

“Mm, irreconcilable differences,” Rio says, but the words come out slurred. “I loved her too hard and she got mad at me ‘cause of something I did. Didn’t want to. Cause of my job.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Agatha says, but she sounds distracted. “Rio, can you focus on this light for me?”

Something bright shines in Rio’s eyes, but it’s huge and floaty and seems to be in multiple places in once. There’s a sharp pinch to her arm that fades as soon as it registered. “Loss of neuron response,” Agatha mutters, and then yells, “nurse! Crash cart!”

Rio can still see the big light. Big, floaty light. She can hear Agatha walking around, dragging something to the edge of the bed. The big machines are beeping faster and faster. She can’t really feel anything except her chest, rising and falling, too fast, her heartbeat like A-gatha-A-gatha, over and over again.

Beeping and shouting and pressure on her chest. The medicine must not have done its job, Rio thinks lamely. This must be what it feels like to die.

It can’t be. It must be.

“Stick with me, Rio,” Agatha is saying, right in her ear. Someone else is pressing on her chest. She can’t see and sound is an illusion, like what she imagines to be the brush of lips against her ear. “I really wanted to get to know you better.”

Rio drifts away.

---

When they peel back the gown on the patient’s chest to place the EKGs, Dr. Harkness is stunned into silence for a brief moment. There is a mark over the patient’s left breast, above her heart, a purplish lighting-like mark, a bruise that never healed. It’s so familiar that Dr. Harkness almost forgets to clear the body by a millisecond and feels the barest shock of electricity when her gloved hand brushes against the patient’s fingers.

Chapter Text

Rio wakes with a dramatic gasp in a dark carriage rattling up a dirt road towards a well-lit manor house. She is wearing a corset. She did not miss corsets. Fucking hell.

Her awakening must have been loud enough to alert whatever anonymous creature is driving the carriage, because there’s a sharp rap on the wood behind Rio’s head and she hears a voice ask, “you all right, m’lady?”

“I’m fine,” she says, even though she has the vague sensation of seasickness that will not fade, and her limbs are prickly like they all fell asleep at once. Not to mention, it feels like two consciousnesses are crammed into her brain. Death, the pathetically lesbian cosmic entity who lacks social skills, and Lady Rio Vidal, a society patron who is attending a lavish party at the Harkness estate, hosted by the hopeful governor – oh what the fuck, the backstory is in her head now?

Rio can parse the layers apart just enough to tell whatever happened to her in the last episode – christ – broke her mind out of the spell just enough to return it to full power, but left a shell behind, a human body still susceptible to the Scarlet Witch’s hex. Likely the very same body that died in Agatha’s hospital, and has been reincarnated into this carriage to continue the plot.

Rio is not looking forward to building herself a body from scratch again. This one better still be useable when she gets out of here.

Gods, she was so close to cracking it. It would have taken a little more time, but Agatha – the Agatha who exists in the spell, at least – is so close to falling for her again, and Rio has somehow convinced herself that that’s all it will take to break the spell. Like the storybooks parents read to children. The princess kissed the frog and all was all right again.

Except she did kiss Agatha, and nothing happened. Nothing keeps happening.

The fizzy feeling in Rio’s limbs begins to recede, and with it, a steady pulsing takes up in her chest, just under her skin where her mark – the one Agatha left on her – lives.

She glances down. The wide, sweetheart neckline of her deep emerald gown is cut to reveal the only bruise her body bears.

The little scar – well, she’s always called it a scar, but it looks more like a deep bruise – appeared after her and Agatha’s handfasting ceremony, two summers after they met. Some might say it was fast. Rio would counter that she had never met a human being she even tolerated, before Agatha, and that was likely a sign from some universal force.

When they had awoke, naked, in a bed of moss and leaves and flowers in their favorite clearing below the waterfall, Rio’s chest had ached painfully. When she looked down, there was a mark beneath where Agatha’s hand has been resting all night – vaguely lighting shaped, purple and swollen, at the top of her left breast.

Agatha had blinked herself slowly awake, and upon seeing it, grinned like a tomcat. “Magic took its course,” she said smugly. Later that night, under the moonlight, Rio drew an identical mark into Agatha’s skin with her own magic – a green-tinged scar, the curve of which followed her signature knife. When they were close enough, chest to chest, Agatha’s heartbeat echoed in Rio’s own ribcage.

Now, the mark stung.

The carriage pulls to a stop in front of the house, already lively, spilling with visitors. Rio clambers down to the dirt road ungracefully and pushes through crowds of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, tugging on her magic to lead her to Agatha’s side, where she is always supposed to be.

She’s tired of waiting.

Inside, the party is in full swing – the music comes from a distant, unseen source, and alcohol and plates of food overflowed. Rio recognizes the mid 1850s antebellum period, mostly from the dress and manner of speech. The house seems familiar, too – she could swear she remembers visiting a reclusive poet here, centuries ago, before Agatha found her and railed her so hard out of jealousy that she feared ever setting foot on the property again. She’s not quite sure what prestige television genre Agatha is meant to be aping here, but she’s happy to go along – with everything but the corsets. Fuck corsets.

It is as she was adjusting her stays for the thousandth time that she sees her – Agatha. Across the room, sulking by the grand piano with a glass of something shimmery in her hands. Her perfect chocolate hair spills over her bare shoulders and her gown is the palest lavender and Rio is stuck between dropping to her knees and worshipping her or slapping her in the face (gently).

The Agatha before her is different. She looks younger – not in her face, which bears the same signs of age that still make Rio smile and sigh with fondness – but in the way she stands, hunched and protective, and in the curl of her lip towards anyone who gets close. She reminds Rio of the Agatha she’d met in the Salem forests oh-so-long ago, a desultory and frightened creature. She had been skittish and feral. Even now, long separated from the trauma of her youth, there are always times when Agatha slips into these moods, and it is always precipitated by a reminder of the same ominous figure.

The hopeful governor Harkness, the unwanted exposition machine in Rio’s brain supplies her. Her mother.

For the briefest of seconds, Rio contemplates pivoting, scouring the party to see if Evanora really is here, and draining her brain from between her ears just for fun. But Agatha seems lonely, so she decides against it.

Eviscerating her mother-in-law can wait until Rio breaks this ridiculous spell.

“Agatha,” she says on her approach, and Agatha looks up, startled, from her concentration spell on the textured carpet. “I’m-”

“The lady Rio Vidal.” Agatha smiles, a little guarded, and takes Rio’s offered hand. Neither of them wear gloves; the skin to skin contact threatens to drive Rio insane for no reason other than that she finds the courting rituals of this era remarkably hot. “I didn’t think you attended these kinds of parties.”

“I don’t, normally. But I heard there was a beautiful girl who might require my company.” Rio won’t lie, half the reason she is playing along is to see the pretty blush on Agatha’s cheeks, the same shade it had been when she was young and inexperienced with love. “I’ll tell you, I’ve heard the library in this house is just to die for. Would you mind giving me a tour?”

Agatha hesitates. “The library is closed,” she says in a small voice, “to the public. And to me. Mother doesn’t want me to break anything,” she adds, as if the explanation doesn’t make Rio even more incensed.

“Nonsense,” she says, holding out an arm. “I’ll be a perfect chaperone. If you lead the way, I promise not to tell.”

When their skin touches again, Agatha’s blush darkens, and it must be something in that which encourages her forward, down the hall and away from the party’s endless noise. The big double doors of the library yield at her hand, and then they are inside, in relative privacy.

“These are her special collections on Massachusetts history,” Agatha says, and although she said she was never in the library, the speech sounds almost rehearsed, like a tour guide at a museum. “And over in the corner is her globe. It’s from Europe and very expensive. Is there anything in particular you’d like to-”

Rio presses her palm to the wooden doors and verdant magic flickers around the frame, sealing them shut with an enchantment. Blocking out any noise, too. In case Agatha gets loud. Which she often does, in a multitude of situations.

“This has to stop, Agatha,” she says. Agatha blinks owlishly at her from across the room, silhouetted by the moonlight through the floor-to-ceiling windows. “We have to break this. We have to do something about this.”

“Break-” Agatha’s voice cracks. “We can’t break anything.” For a moment, Rio is expecting her to make a remark about her mother chastising her if anything in the house breaks, and she prepares to push further, to shatter the illusion, but Agatha swallows roughly and says, “It has to stay the way it is. This is the safest way.”

“Nothing about this is safe, Agatha,” Rio protests. Her black heart is fluttering – a chance, a crack. “I’ve died, like, five times.”

“You haven’t died.” Maybe Agatha doesn’t remember, or maybe she knows just enough to know the words Rio and dying don’t belong in the same sentence. “No, no, you’re right here. You’re safe, and you’re with me.” In two short bursts, she crosses the room and takes Rio’s hands in her own. They are warm and soft, the skin just slightly roughened from centuries of hard work that this version of Agatha has no memory of. “Please,” she says, and then she kisses Rio.

It's soft and quiet, the kind of kiss Agatha used to give her as they lay in bed in the early hours of the morning, the blankets tangled around their feet because they were warm enough just holding each other. Rio misses it so bad her whole heart aches. She wishes, not for the first time, that she could steal her siblings’ powers of fate and reality, rewind time and freeze it in the eternal, hopeful moment that her and Agatha decided they were going to be each other’s until the universe burned.

We could have it again, Rio thinks, humming into the kiss, tasting Agatha again and knowing that the world she dreamed of still exists, somewhere, in the many worlds among the stars. She could seduce this young woman away from her devil of a mother, spirit her into the city or to a far-away land, and fall in love with her all over again. They could always be this way. Before their own love became too much for them to handle.

For a moment, she really thinks about doing it.

When their lips part, Rio has to take a second to recenter herself. Her eyelids flutter; Agatha is close enough that her breath fans across Rio’s face, and it smells like sweet liquor and flowers. Carefully, oh-so-carefully, Rio settles her hands on Agatha’s hips, where they were made to rest.

“What do you know about me, right now?” she asks quietly. “What do you know about us?”

“I- I don’t know,” Agatha admits. She swallows, both of her hands resting possessively on Rio’s shoulders. Their foreheads press together. “I know that you are… a safe person to me. And when you said my name back there, it was the most familiar thing I had ever heard. But I’m confused. Something is missing from my mind. Something I need.”

Rio squeezes Agatha’s waist, just once. Agatha shudders a breath.

She was a foolish idiot to think that she could hide anything from this woman. That starting over would be anywhere near as good as tasting all of their story, swallowing the bitter parts, and letting the sweet sit in her stomach. There can be no erasure, no deception. Agatha needs it all. They need it all.

“It is,” Rio tells her, pulling back just enough to meet Agatha’s ocean-blue eyes. “I am.”

She takes one of Agatha’s warm hands in hers and pulls it to rest over her chest, over the mark Agatha had made so many centuries ago, and couldn’t remember now. Agatha’s eyes flick between her own hand – fingers splayed to show the purple bruise beneath them – and Rio’s face, as if recognition is slowly dawning. Rio’s entire being pulses with fear. With hope.

“You know me,” Rio says, and is distantly aware that she sounds like she’s pleading. “You know me better than anyone ever has; you made me. I was made to give you something to love and be loved by in return and I have done it harder than I ever thought possible. I loved you so hard we broke, and I broke with us.”

Gently, slowly – in case Agatha tells her to stop, in which case she will, no questions asked – Rio reaches for the more conservative neckline of Agatha’s dress and tugs it down just slightly. Until she can trace one fingernail over the curved scar over Agatha’s heart, feeling her own magic, nestled under Agatha’s skin, sing in response. The Darkhold took away a lot of things; it could never take away this. Internally, Rio’s a little smug.

“I know you,” Agatha repeats carefully. “You’re… I know you.” Her eyes dart upwards, in sudden realization. “Rio.”

“Agatha.”

“You’re-”

“Stupidly, ridiculously sorry,” Rio finishes for her, the corner of her mouth tugging upwards. Agatha’s eyes narrow, her brow furrowing. For a brief moment, Rio worries that she fucked up again, that Agatha’s going to cuss her out, or worse, remove her from the premises and forget all this progress and they’re going to have to do this all over again-

Agatha launches forward and kisses Rio so hard that she falls on her ass in her stupid corset.

Chapter Text

True to her heart, Agatha kisses Rio, kisses and kisses her, even as they both pull each other up off the ground, even as Agatha is shoving Rio against a set of rickety bookcases and doing her damnedest to get her out of her clothes. Their lips never separate for more than a few seconds. Let it not be said that Agatha Harkness can’t multitask.

“I feel so strange,” she mutters between kisses as deft fingers undo Rio’s stays, having never really forgotten the motions. “I know we’ve never done this before, and yet-”

“We’ve done it before,” Rio insists, as she’s pulling Agatha closer, slipping her thumbs under the neckline of her dress to feel the soft skin underneath. “You just don’t remember.”

“How many times?”

“Hundreds. Thousands, maybe.”

“Oh, my,” Agatha breathes, and Rio isn’t sure if it’s because the memories are coming back, or because she’s torn the bodice of Agatha’s dress to reach the corset underneath. “You do feel familiar,” she breathes as Rio’s fingers start to brush against her skin.

Rio hates corsets, but at least she’s good at corsets. Agatha’s upper half is bare before she knows it. She expects some sort of period-accurate expletive, but instead Agatha moans wantonly, turns around, and frantically pushes her chest into Rio’s eager hands.

“I feel like I might die if you don’t touch me,” Agatha sighs, and leans in to press her face into the juncture of Rio’s neck. Rio wonders if she can taste her sweat. “Harder,” Agatha hisses when Rio gently strums against her nipples, and that’s how she knows her Agatha is coming back.

So Rio touches her. If there’s one thing she was made to do – one thing she was made physical to do – it is this, bringing Agatha pleasure with her hands and her mouth. She ducks her head to wrap her mouth around a nipple, already hard and puckered from her ministrations. Agatha is desperate for her touch, keening and shivering and pushing herself even further into Rio’s body as if they might be able to meld together by sheer force.

“There’s something under my skin,” Agatha half-breathes, half-moans.

“Magic,” Rio says, mouth full of boob.

“Yes.” Agatha arches her back, pressing her chest closer to Rio’s face, and with the hand that isn’t ruining Rio’s ridiculous updo begins to shove her skirts over her hips. “Yes, I can feel it,” she hisses, fingers scratching at Rio’s scalp and leaving little lightning marks behind.

When Agatha’s chest is sufficiently spit-slick, Rio drops to her knees, ignoring the protesting of every bone in her body in this stupid dress, and drags Agatha’s fancy period-accurate underwear down her thighs, baring her finally. And when she presses a kiss to the swell of Agatha’s stomach and glances up, she sees nothing but unguarded affection in Agatha’s eyes. Something real and true and unclouded by red.

“Rio,” Agatha says, her voice a perfect rasp, “you fucking freak.”

Rio’s bottom lip drags against Agatha’s skin as she traces mindless kisses across her abdomen. She can’t stop touching her, not for a second. She thinks she manages to say something like it’s me, or maybe it’s you or even it’s us, but she isn’t processing sensory inputs on a functional level at the moment. Everything is Agatha, her wife, the only woman her black heart will ever have the audacity to love.

With the gentlest hands she can manage, Rio coaxes Agatha down to the ground, to lay on the scratchy nineteenth century carpet and spread her legs so Rio can fit between them. Easier access to the sweetest nectar she’s ever tasted, the flavor she’s been craving for- years? Centuries? She’s not sure it matters, now that she’s back home.

“God,” Agatha sighs as her hands come back to fist in Rio’s hair, as her hips push her cunt closer to Rio’s face so she can get a good mouthful. “You really fought for me, didn’t you?”

Rio looks up with inquisitive eyes, even though the lower half of her face is doing something much more akin to worship. She makes a “hrmm?” noise that she hopes Agatha interprets correctly.

Agatha just sighs, undulates her hips, and keeps talking, like Rio isn’t eating her out at all. Which is insufferable, but also very Agatha. “You chased me through all these asinine delusions just so you could get your hand down my pants.” As if to prove there are no pants or hands involved in the current situation, Rio tongues gently at Agatha’s clit and sucks it between her lips and her teeth. “That’s very romantic, you know,” Agatha half-moans as a little bit of wetness gushes from her, which Rio eagerly laps up.

Agatha must be very pent-up, because it only takes about a minute with Rio’s head between her legs for her thighs to squeeze shut around Rio’s ears, her whole body locking and then shaking apart in pleasure. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Agatha mutters, and Rio just pathetically humps at the ground, wondering if all the layers of her dress will give her enough friction, because she’s so turned on just from feeling Agatha come that it’s kind of unhealthy. Then again, it’s always been like that.

“You’re so beautiful,” Agatha sighs, and drags Rio back up her body to kiss her. Their wet mouths smear together. Rio sighs. There is nowhere else in the universe she would rather be, right now.

And then, Agatha throws her head back and groans, ear-splitting and glass-shattering, at the ceiling.

“What the fuck happened to me?” she demands, and before Rio can open her mouth to answer she continues, “when did I become this weak?” She raises a hand and flicks at the bookshelf across from them; the books fly off the shelves but luckily miss crashing into their prone bodies by inches. Rio burrows her face into Agatha’s neck and magicks away her evil, evil dress, because she thinks feeling Agatha’s skin on her own could fix her just about now.

“At least I have my power,” Agatha grumbles, while one hand combs through Rio’s mess of hair. Rio nods in assent and nips at the skin of her collarbone. “Nothing a good orgasm can’t fix, you know.”

“I just gave you a good orgasm.”

“I know, I’m saying you fixed me.” Warm lips landing on Rio’s forehead in a weirdly sweet kiss. “Thank you.”

Slowly, Rio pulls herself away from Agatha’s sweaty skin, looking up at her, into her blue eyes, her clear blue eyes, her too-good-to-be-true blue eyes. She frowns. “Agatha?”

“Yes, Rio?”

“Is it really you?”

Agatha’s perfect eyebrows constrict. Her face pinches up in that pissed-off-Agatha way. But instead of getting cold and hard, the corners of her lips turn down, and she sighs, and she says “yes, my love. It’s me.”

“You keep calling me pet names.” Agatha frowns, as if to say, is this not a thing I normally do? “You haven’t done that since… before. You know.”

Agatha hums. She brushes a stray curl away from Rio’s eyes, her fingertips like a kiss along her browbone. “How long have you been chasing me?” she asks instead of answering Rio’s unspoken question. “My memory is imperfect but I do seem to recall a fight in the woods.”

“That was the first one,” Rio affirms. “It was weird. There have been… a few since then. Delusions, like you said. At least four or five. It’s foggy, it feels all…”

“I thought the all-powerful Death was immune to reality-altering spells.”

“I’m not all-powerful,” Rio frowns pathetically. Agatha snorts. Pinches the skin of her forearm.

“I know.”

They fall silent after that, with Rio’s head pillowed on Agatha’s perfect chest (not to interrupt the sappy moment, but Agatha’s boobs are the eighth wonder of the world, after all) and Agatha’s long fingers running through her hair, which has collapsed from whatever style the Scarlet Witch’s magic had designed. The tips of Agatha’s fingers aren’t black with the stain of the Darkhold anymore, Rio notices. That means the Darkhold is somewhere else now, and damn, isn’t it going to be a bitch to track that thing down, but she’ll figure that out later. When she’s not in the midst of couples therapy or whatever.

“So many times,” Agatha says, startling Rio out of her fuzzy-headed reverie, and maybe possibly rubbing her cheek over Agatha’s nipple to feel it pebble under her skin again, “so many times I felt on the brink of getting it. Like the very edge of the cliff. There was an odd word or a missed detail and I would think, isn’t this supposed to be different? But then it disappeared before I could take hold of it.” She starts to sit up, dislodging Rio from her perch. “Intricate spellwork. Very good,” she mutters.

“No one else should be better at magic than you,” Rio agrees solemnly, and Agatha shoots her an odd look. She sits up, dislodging Rio from her chest.

“How are you so… okay?”

“Okay?”

“You’re not screaming or yelling or beating me with those great big fists of yours.” Agatha eyes Rio’s hands warily, as if they don’t primarily exist to give Agatha all the pleasure she wants. “You’re not angry with me.”

“I was, at first.” Rio shrugs. She watches forlornly as Agatha reaches for a blanket thrown over a nearby chair to cover herself with. “But I stopped being angry when I saw how lost you were. I… I find it very difficult to be angry with you most of the time, but especially when you’re hurting.”

This seems to short-circuit Agatha’s brain just slightly. She slumps on the floor with her arms braced between her spread legs like a child’s toy left abandoned on the floor. Her eyes are even like big teddy bear eyes, wide with wonder, regarding Rio like an angelic figure about to rescue her from a life of boredom. Something like that.

There are a lot of things Rio wants to say. We should talk about things, Agatha. I’m still in love with you and always will be, Agatha. Instead, she opens her mouth, and what comes out is “do you want to come home with me?”

Agatha’s mouth twists warily. “To the underworld?”

“For the last time, Agatha, I do not live in the underworld.” Rio picks at a loose loop in carpet. “I have a… cave. It’s a nice cave, though.”

“Is it a clean cave?” The look Agatha gives her could melt glass.

“Yes, it’s a very clean cave. There’s plumbing and everything. And it smells nice. And I… I have some of your old clothes. From before- I mean, from the other times.” The other ill-advised hookups over their three centuries of separation. Rio cringes, because she knows exactly what Agatha is going to say.

“Pervert.” Yep, there it is. “Will you make me soup and do my hair?”

Rio perks up like a fucking dog at that. “I get to do your hair?”

“As long as you have the proper oils and all-natural conditioner.”

“I can get whatever hair products you need.”

“Okay.” Agatha chews on her bottom lip, seeming to run a thousand things over in her brain at once. With finality, she nods, letting the blanket slip a little from her shoulders to expose mouthwateringly smooth freckled skin. “You can take me home, Rio.”

Endless millennia, countless orgasms, the conception of a child, one life-ruining morning by a lake, all of humanity passed through a veil: the strongest emotion Death has ever felt is when Agatha slips her hand between bony fingers and squeezes tight.

“Help me look presentable,” Agatha then insists, and though covering Agatha’s heavenly body is anathema to Rio’s very existence, she does her best. She puts her own clothes back on, too. As long as Agatha’s going to. Even though Rio prefers being naked to most other things.

Their bubble of peace does not last long past the library doors. Agatha, with a magicked-together version of her dress hastily draped over her body, murmurs “I wonder if the rest of these people are real, or a magical construction” as they sidestep party guests to reach the front door. As if summoned, a tall gray-haired figure blocks their path like the very definition of an eclipse.

“I think they’re ghosts,” Rio chokes, and shoves down her own hatred of ghosts (they make her a little sick to her cosmic stomach, actually, so sue her) to grip Agatha’s hand tighter in the face of the woman who tortured her for nineteen years and condemned her to death.

“What on Earth are you doing?” the image of Evanora Harkness spits. Rio decides in that moment that of all the torture inflicted upon Agatha since she tripped and fell into this spell, this is by far the worst. She decides this because Agatha has frozen beside her, stock-still, either terrified or moved to such extreme anger by Evanora’s visage or, likely, a combination of both. “Agatha Harkness, what on Earth has happened to your dress? Get to your room, this instant.” When Agatha doesn’t move, Evanora steps closer. Fuming. She smells rotten. “Agatha, I will not have you around proper society if this is how you choose to act.”

“She’s not doing anything wrong,” Rio insists. It’s the first word she’s ever spoken to any version of Evanora Harkness; the woman was just freshly dead when Rio met her prodigal daughter. “And we were just leaving.”

“Agatha, who is this?” Evanora bites. Her eyes bore Rio down. Good thing Rio isn’t scared of homophobic old women (just majorly pissed off by them).

“I’m her wife,” Rio says, and before Evanora can open her stupid ghostly mouth, she has the older woman’s (surprisingly solid) forearm twisted in her grip. Evanora lets out a little gasp of pain.

Rio glances up from Evanora’s rapidly-swelling elbow. Sees Agatha looking at her with an indescribable emotion on her face. Is it anger? No, probably not. Lust, definitely, but that’s sort of the Agatha-to-Rio default. There’s a little bit of apprehension but mostly…

Approval, Rio thinks, and rips Evanora’s arm clean off.

Perks of being Not A Human.

Evanora’s resulting shriek brings the party around them to a grinding halt. Literally. Every person in the room stops what they are doing and freezes in place with sickly inauthentic smiles. They must be ghosts, then. Rio senses a shift under her feet, like tectonic plates cracking upon impact, and then Agatha tugs on her sleeve – the arm that is still holding Evanora’s shattered bone and bleeding limb – and points.

“It’s breaking,” she says. It is indeed. The walls, that is. Reality, also.

“The spell is breaking,” Rio agrees, at the same time as Agatha says, “we should leave.”

“Yes. Leaving would be good.”

Evanora is still there wailing on the floor, clutching her empty arm socket, as Rio steps over her, chucking her arm on the ground in another room. It bonks against the back of a partygoer, who doesn’t react. In fact, all of the partygoers seem to be going slightly incorporeal, melting against the suddenly overheated room.

“I’m sorry I can’t kill her,” Rio says, and means it, as she watches Agatha regard her mother’s broken body.

“Don’t apologize,” Agatha shrugs. She crouches down to peer into her mother’s eyes. Rio isn’t sure what she’s looking for; she knows that she won’t find it. Evanora must have some life left in her; she reels back and spits in Agatha’s face. “Well, that was uncalled for.”

Agatha stands very calmly, raises her foot, and stomps on Evanora’s chest. There is a sickening crack sound, and as Agatha removes her leg and her skirts fall out of the way, Rio spots the edges of broken ribs protruding from the inside of Evanora’s corset. The old crone gasps, shudders, collapses. Agatha looks up at Rio with a quirked eyebrow – good enough? Rio nods back, firmly. Perfect, my love.

With that, Agatha steps over Evanora’s body and joins Rio at the front door. She reaches for the metal knob, but hisses and pulls her hand back. “It’s burning,” she says.

“Allow me.” Rio pulls open the door – the knob does register as a little warm, a little uncomfortable – to display an inky black nothingness. “Oh, that changes things.”

“Is there another way out?” Agatha glances around, but all the windows in the house have dripped down the walls and the space is slowly collapsing in on itself. There’s not much time left before this reality ceases to exist entirely.

Rio wishes she was a normal, put-together type of person, so she could say something confident like I don’t think so and step into the void while holding Agatha’s hand, taking a blind leap of faith that they will be delivered back to the material plane. Instead, she trips over her own feet, mutters “shitfuck,” and falls into whatever is waiting on the other side of that door.

“Rio, you idiot,” Agatha says, and it sounds fond, before she jumps in after her.

And then it’s black.

---

Rio wakes up on a hardwood floor.

The first thing she registers is that her normal clothes are back – well, if a robe and a bodice made of eversteel and a crown could be considered normal. The second thing she registers is that flakes of popcorn ceiling are falling into her mouth. The third thing she registers is that she is not alone.

Agatha is beside her. Naked Agatha, her ribs peeking out. An Agatha who looks sick and hungry and pale and tired and is still out of it, if the looseness of her body is any indication.

They’re lying together on the floor of a living room in what looks to be a typical suburban house. Two couches, floral wallpaper, a fireplace that desperately needs a chimney sweep. When Rio first opened her eyes, her head was pounding, but it lessens the longer she’s awake.

She blinks. She blinks again. She cannot parse any reality from the one she is currently in, no evil red pushing at the boundaries of her vision. Whatever fucking spell was laid over Agatha Harkness, it’s gone.

Agatha.

A soft groan from Rio’s side, and then a murmured, “no.”

“Mi amor. Mi amor, I’m right here. I’m here, Agatha. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Rio pulls at Agatha’s arm to get her to tuck into her lap. Fuck, she’s cold. She’s shivering. She’s broken.

And for the first time in centuries, Rio is there to take care of her.

“Stay right there, my love,” Rio cautions the slowly waking witch in her lap. “I’ll fetch you some clothes and a blanket and some soup. And those hair oils you wanted, yeah?”

“No,” Agatha insists, her hands clutching around Rio’s arms, her thighs, anywhere she can reach without opening her eyes. “Don’t leave me, not yet.”

Agatha hefts herself more into Rio’s lap, but the weight of her doesn’t feel like a burden. It feels like the first time Rio ever took a breath of fresh air.

“Not ever,” she promises, and wraps an arm around Agatha’s naked shoulders. And she stays.