Chapter Text
Rio tells herself, with great conviction, that she is handling this like an adult.
She does not think about the on-call room. She does not think about the specific sound Agatha made against her collarbone, or the way her hand had come up to cradle Rio's face for exactly four seconds before catching herself and turning it into something else. She does not think about any of it, in the same dedicated, disciplined way a person doesn't think about a broken tooth, by prodding it constantly, gently, to confirm it's still there.
She throws herself into work instead, which is, if nothing else, an excellent hospital tradition. She reorganizes the neuro department's on-call schedule. She sits in on four separate resident evaluations. She has lunch with Jen Kale, who spends the entire meal watching her with the specific narrow-eyed suspicion of a woman who has clearly heard something through the hospital grapevine and is choosing, for now, not to ask.
"You seem tense," Jen says, over a sandwich that has been sitting untouched between them for ten minutes.
"I'm always tense. It's a personality trait."
"Mm. Anything I should know about?"
"Nothing operational," Rio says, which is technically true, and watches Jen decide, visibly, not to push.
She almost makes it a full week without seeing Agatha outside of a professional context. Almost.
It falls apart on a Thursday, in the hospital parking garage, at nine at night, both of them leaving at the same unfortunate hour after two entirely unrelated emergencies. Rio's car is four spots down from Agatha's, she's noticed, with the specific detail-oriented dread of someone actively trying not to know things about another person, that Agatha's motorcyle is parked in the same spot every single day, angled the exact same arrogant way, and there's no way to avoid the encounter without visibly sprinting, which she has some dignity left, barely.
"Working late," Agatha observes, pulling off her scrub cap, hair falling loose in a way that Rio's traitorous body notices immediately and unhelpfully.
"So are you."
"I always work late. It's part of my brand." Agatha leans against her motorcycle, studying Rio with an expression that's trying very hard to be casual and mostly succeeding, except for the specific tightness around her eyes that Rio recognizes from a decade of marriage as deliberately not saying something.
"You're doing the thing," Rio says.
"What thing."
"The thing where you look like you want to say something and then don't."
"I have no idea what you're referring to." Agatha examines her nails with theatrical disinterest. "I'm merely standing here. Existing. In a parking garage. Innocently."
"Agatha."
"Fine." Agatha's chin comes up, defensive, the particular posture she takes right before she says something she doesn't want to admit is true. "I keep thinking about it. The on-call room. Which is deeply inconvenient, because I have a department to run and a reputation for ruthless professionalism to maintain, and instead I've spent the better part of a week distracted by the memory of you biting my collarbone like some kind of feral animal."
Rio's face goes hot. "I did not—"
"You absolutely did, and frankly, I respected it." Agatha pushes off the motorcycle, takes a step closer. "The point is. I have been attempting, with great discipline, to categorize what happened as a lapse in judgment, born of stress and proximity and six years of unresolved sexual tension, and then filed away, never to be repeated."
"That was my plan too."
"And how's that going for you?"
"Terribly," Rio admits.
"Good," Agatha says, with a flash of something fierce and satisfied. "Misery loves company."
They stand there, three feet apart, the specific charged distance of two people who both know exactly what's about to happen and are simply enjoying, for a moment, the anticipation of it.
"This is a terrible idea," Rio says.
"The worst," Agatha agrees.
"We work together now. This complicates literally everything."
"Catastrophically."
"We're still..." Rio gestures vaguely, unable to finish the sentence, and Agatha's eyes flick, involuntarily, to Rio's left hand, then away, quick enough that Rio almost misses the flicker of something raw underneath the bravado.
"Married," Agatha finishes, flat. "Yes. I'm aware. Believe it or not, I have not forgotten the small legal detail of our continued matrimony, despite six years of extremely aggressive avoidance on both our parts."
"We should get divorced," Rio says, and hates how much it costs her to say it.
"We should," Agatha agrees, and hates it just as visibly. "We absolutely should. Any reasonable person would have filed years ago."
Neither of them moves toward doing anything about it. The silence stretches, thick with everything they're both refusing to say, and then Agatha, in a swift and characteristic pivot, changes the entire tenor of the conversation by stepping close enough that Rio can smell her perfume again, that same maddening, expensive, familiar scent.
"For the record," Agatha murmurs, "I am not suggesting we repeat our earlier lapse in judgment."
"Of course not."
"I would never suggest something so reckless and unprofessional."
"Never," Rio agrees, and finds her hand has already come up to rest against Agatha's hip, an old habit reasserting itself without permission.
"If, hypothetically," Agatha continues, voice gone low, "we were to find ourselves in a similarly compromising situation again, it would purely be for the purposes of, ah, professional stress relief. Nothing more."
"Purely clinical," Rio agrees, and closes the last of the distance between them.
They don't make it to an on-call room this time. They make it exactly as far as the back seat of Agatha's ancient, absurdly impractical vintage car, parked, conveniently, two spots down from her motorcycle, and apparently kept, Rio will learn later, specifically for occasions requiring more legroom than a motorcycle can offer, though neither of them examines that particular detail too closely in the moment.
It is, if anything, more reckless than the first time. Less fight-fueled, more simply, achingly hungry, the specific desperation of two people who spent a week trying to convince themselves the first time was an aberration and have just discovered, conclusively, that it wasn't.
Afterward, wedged together in the back seat in a position that will leave Rio's neck sore for two days, Agatha laughs, a real laugh, surprised out of her, the kind Rio hasn't heard in six years and had genuinely forgotten the sound of.
"We are going to get arrested," Agatha says. "In a hospital parking garage. On camera, presumably. I can already see the headline."
"There are no cameras back here. I checked."
"You checked?" Agatha's delight is immediate and enormous. "When?"
"Before. When I was still pretending this wasn't going to happen."
"Rio Vidal, forward planning her own indiscretions. I've never been prouder." Agatha settles back against the seat, still catching her breath, and for a moment neither of them says anything, the quiet comfortable in a way that terrifies Rio slightly, given how quickly it arrived.
"This isn't a thing," Rio says eventually, mostly to reassure herself.
"Obviously not."
"We're not... doing this. Repeatedly. As a pattern."
"God, no," Agatha agrees, entirely too fast. "One more time, at most. For closure."
"For closure," Rio echoes, and knows, even as she says it, that it's a lie both of them have already agreed to keep telling.
⟡˙⋆ ⚠︎ ⋆˙⟡
The next month becomes an exercise in creative self-deception. There is always a reason, always a fight that runs too hot, a case that ends in a shared victory too electric to simply walk away from, a late night that turns, with an inevitability neither of them will name out loud, into something else. They are careful. They are, they tell each other, being professional about it, no repeats in the same location twice, no lingering afterward, no conversations that stray anywhere near the actual state of their marriage.
They are, in short, doing an excellent job of failing to have the one conversation that would actually help either of them.
Monica Rambeau notices first, she notices everything, it's part of why Agatha keeps her on staff despite what Agatha calls, with clear affection, her insubordinate mouth, catching the specific new energy between the department heads during a joint case conference, the way Rio's eyes track Agatha across a room a half-second longer than professional interest requires, the way Agatha's sarcasm toward Rio has developed a warmth underneath it that wasn't there a month ago.
"You two are doing something," Monica says to Agatha, cornering her in the surgeons' lounge with the fearlessness of someone who has survived four years under Agatha Harkness's command and long since stopped being intimidated by it.
"We are doing many things. We're both surgeons. We do surgery constantly."
"That's not what I mean and you know it."
"I genuinely have no idea what you're implying," Agatha says, examining her nails with sudden fascination.
"You have a hickey," Monica says flatly. "On your neck. Right now. I can see it from here."
Agatha's hand flies to her collar with a speed that fully undermines every previous denial. "That is an old scar."
"It's purple, Agatha."
"Scars can be purple. Healing is a complex biological process."
Monica just looks at her, unimpressed, arms crossed. "You're going to break your own heart again," she says, quieter now, some of the teasing dropping away. "You know that, right? Whatever this is."
Something in Agatha's face shifts, fast, there and gone, the mask slipping just enough for Monica to catch a glimpse of the woman underneath all the armour. "It's not my heart I'm worried about breaking," Agatha says, and doesn't elaborate, and walks away before Monica can ask what she means.
Monica watches her go and thinks, not for the first time, that whatever history exists between Agatha Harkness and Rio Vidal is a lot more complicated, and a lot more fragile, than either of them is willing to let anyone see.
She's right about that too. She's going to be right about a lot of things, before this is all over.