Chapter Text
“NO!”
A muffled scream escapes your lips as you lose your connection to the ground and fall. Deep.
Panicking, you try to hold on to branches passing by, anxiously fighting for you life. A loose root wraps around your arm and you reach for it, grab it, cutting your soft skin open in the process. It stops you for a moment, but you continue to fall.
You feel like an eternity has passed - yet your fall was short, only interrupted by the root. The adrenaline must have kicked in, making you lose reality. Screaming again, you finally hit the floor with a thud.
You don’t know how much time has passed when you finally wake up. Your eyes dart around and you wince in pain as you try to steady yourself on your hands. Shocked, you eye your right palm and frown deeply as you see the leafs stickig to it, covered in dark, glistening blood.
Carefully taking them off, you examine your arm and caress the wound, before you look around and take your surroundings in for the first time. Behind you, a small cliff towers, warning you not to turn back around.
You sigh deeply and bring your hand up to your aching head, forgetting about the blood for a moment, which is now sticking to your hair.
“Fuck!”
You curse yourself and the situation you are in, desperately trying to remember what has happened to you. Your body hurts, everything hurts, scraped knees and a hand that you can barely move are adding up to the throbbing pain in your head.
Leaning back against the cliff, you try to sit up again, more comfortable this time - to steady your breath. Still shaking, you bring your left hand up to your lips, a thin line of blood escaping from them. Slowly, you look down at your hand and smudge the blood between your fingers before you finally lick your lips to clean them.
Scrunching your face in disgust upon the taste, you close your eyes tight and stop moving and examining yourself, eager to remember what had happened.
Suddenly, it hits you. Like lightning crashing into a tree, your memory comes back and takes you down again. You see men. Pain. Kidnapping. Attempts to escape that must have finally worked, leading you here.
Letting out a long breath, you finally steady yourself.
“I made it…” a whisper that means so much, yet appears to be so small in the endless void of this god forsaken forest.
You are sure the men are long gone, they should’ve found you by now, but looking back up at the cliff, they simply must have not looked for you down here.
Arms and legs still hurting, you slowly decide to get up, your knees weak and shaky. Even though you are sure no one is after you anymore, you can feel the anxiety cripple up your back yet again. Achingly, a trail of goosebumps forms on your spine and fear travels along it until it reaches your neck. Eyes wide open, you decide to go on and dry wood cracks under your feet as you run through the night.
A full moon shines down on you, dipping the scenery in eerie tones, allowing you to avert crashing into the nearby trees as you make your way to nowhere.
You are panting, aching, and blood is dripping from your scraped knees as you lean against a nearby tree, thinking about how you want to proceed.
Suddenly, the silent night is disturbed by a howl. It cuts through the thick, foggy air like a knife and makes you jolt upright.
Animals!
You haven’t even thought about that yet! Of course you are an easy target now - Wounded. In Pain. Slow. Bloody.
Panicking, you look around again, suddenly hyper-aware of all the sounds surrounding you. In the last few hours, the forest seemed calm and quiet, even though you have found yourself in great distress. But now, the forest is dark, angry, and unwelcoming and draws you in with dark claws that cut through you and leave marks on your soul.
You close your eyes again to refocus and strengthen your senses and shudder as you realize the howling seems to be getting closer.
As your will to live finally kicks in again and you come to the conclusion that, to survive, you need shelter for the night, you let go of the tree and move on.
Unnoticed by you, you have been bleeding more than you thought. The blood on your hair is not just from your hands as you must have hit your head during your fall. Maybe the wound was there before. However, your unawareness prompts you to overwork yourself and so you barely manage to take a few steps before you finally collapse onto the floor, making yourself a bed in muddy, cold leaves.
———
A young brunette witch looks up at the moon. She sits on a broad tree branch and her feet are loosely dangling back and forth, giving her an almost child-like appearance. Her name is Agatha Harkness and she is as beautiful as she is strong. Being the youngest of her coven, she yet, somehow, has more power within her than most of her sisters.
What Agatha doesn’t know is how to theoretically use her power. All she has ever done was summoning and using her magic by feeling. Intuition. Emotion. Agatha has never touched a proper spell book, and on nights like this, she sits in the dark, thinking about who she could be, if only someone would look after her.
Her train of thought gets interrupted as the atmosphere in the forest shifts. The young witch’s ears perk up and she looks around. Almost frantically, she lets her power spread through the woods, sensing a weak sign of life that does not belong to the night in between all the animals.
Closing her crystal clear blue eyes to focus, she tries to locate the figure and looks up and lets her gaze wander as the sounds around her increase. Suddenly, Agatha jumps down from her branch and hurries through the forest, making her way towards where she expects the soul to be.
It is way past midnight, when Agatha finally sees you. You must have tried to hold on to a nearby tree when you fell, considering the angle that your arm is in. Agatha steps closer to you, reaches out, and immediately retracts her hand as she touches the blood in your hair. Eyes widened, she kneels down.
Her long hair falls over her shoulder and she pushes a loose strand behind her ear in a failed attempt to tame her mane. Her face gets elevated by the moonlight and her features soften as she buries her hands in cold, sticky mud, trying to turn you around, unsure of what to expect.
When she lays eyes on your face, Agatha gasps and her lips part. You are beautiful. Beyond that. Slowly, she raises her hand and pushes your hair out of your face, leaving a dark, muddy mark on your cheek.
For a moment, time stands still and Agatha forgets about the weak state you seem to be in, but when a far away wolf howls again, she jumps back into action.
Scared to use her magic in plain sight, she collects all her strength to pick you up and carry you home without her powers, as the purple waves would give her away to any nearby witch hunters and she is not going to risk that tonight.
The young witch makes her way back through the woods in no time and finally reaches a spot in between trees and bushes, unnoticed by anyone passing by, and closes her eyes before she takes her next step.
Opening them again, she finds herself in front of a rather big wooden house that she calls her own. Protected by a shield and visual spell, Agatha spends most of her days alone in here whenever she needs time away from her coven. Sometimes it feels like no one there really likes her, but she is learning to accept that and stays mostly to herself whenever she can.
As soon as she enters the visual shield guard of the house, purple dust appears around her and within a second, she teleports you with her into a small bedroom. She places you down onto the small frame and softly caresses your face before she starts examining your body.
The state you are in is horrible and she could swear you were dead, wasn’t it for the subtle rising and sinking of your chest. She watches you for a moment before she gets to work, cleaning you with soft movements, slowly maneuvering her hands over your body.
You groan in your slumber as she touches your wounds.
“Sssssssh,” Agatha’s voice cuts through the night, silently shushing you as she places a soft hand on your head. “I’ll fix you. Don’t worry.”
She looks at you with a faint smile and makes sure you are asleep, before she continues putting her hands all over you, trying to heal you with good intentions.
You don’t wake up.
For the next two days, Agatha uses all her strength and tries out multiple spells and summonings to heal your wounds. Your broken wrist takes a while, the cuts, scrapes and bruises are long gone as the bones finally snap back into place.
Smiling, the brunette steps back and admires her work. It’s been a little over two days since she has found you and you have mostly been sleeping, have you not winced in pain. She tried to be as careful with you as possible, yet, she couldn’t fully take your pain away.
Spreading her senses again, she lets her magic roam over you, making sure she healed whatever she could. Agatha is in the middle of her work, deeply concentrated, as your eyes fling open. You take in the surrounding, the young brunette towering over you, her hands spread, illuminated in purple magic. Your head is still throbbing and, no matter how hard you try, you can’t remember how you got from your safe home to this dark, cold place. Playing tricks on you, your mind fills in faint memories with lies until you are convinced Agatha kidnapped you in the first place, took you away in the middle of the night, kept you locked away in a wet basement. Memories of your injuries come back, all the pain you were in, until suddenly, you jolt up and jump off the bed.
Hitting the floor with a thud due to your weak muscles, you groan loudly, before you frantically try to get up, desperate to escape. Agatha has snapped out of her concentration and is reaching for your hand.
“What are you doing?!” Her eyes are concerned and she is about to reach out as you harshly push her away.
“WITCH. Don’t fucking touch me!” You look at her in horror. “I will…. I will tell everyone who you are! What you did! You will pay for all of this…. They-They will kill you.”
Enraged, you look at her, burying your eyes deep into hers, not thinking about what this statement could cause you. You huff and try to push past her, until you walk into an invisible wall. Agatha reaches for you with one arm, purple eluding from her, her eyes filled with anger.
“No.” Her voice is a whisper but it sounds so strong that it sends an uncomfortable shiver down your spine. “You won’t.”
She speaks with a harsh tone and her eyes are piercing through you as she puts you back onto the bed, securing your hands with rope to each side of it.
“Please,” you beg, “no… not again.”
Tears stream down your face as you desperately try to fight her. In one last attempt, you collect all your breath and scream for help. Louder than ever before. Longer than ever before.
Agatha gets up from where she is seated on the side of the bed and runs out of the house. Moments later, she appears back inside. “Scream however much you want. It’s sound proof. No one will ever hear you.”
You let your head sink against the backrest, your hands tied, no way to get out. You close your eyes as the pain slowly flows back into your body. Unbothered, Agatha looks at you one last time, making you a hostage of her eyes, before she slams the door behind her.