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Wanda spends most of her days curled up in her bed, eyes closed, back turned to the door.
Agatha knows this because she spends half of her days leaning against the door frame, arms crossed, glaring at the younger witch, waiting on her to move, to say anything, to at least realize that she has left her back wide open to attack. Just because she doesn’t have her magic available to her doesn’t mean she can’t find a way to rip through her spine with her bare hands. She won’t because that’s more blood than she wants to deal with….
…and also because she doesn’t know what will happen when this new Hex comes crashing down.
The first morning Agatha woke in this…wherever they are, she’d gasped, felt air filling her lungs for the first time in years, and blinked, exhilarated with the control she had over her own eyelids. She sat up, pushed a hand through her frizzy dark hair, and drew her knees up enough that she could rest her arms on them, lean forward with a surprised huff of air. If not for the state of the room she was in, she could almost convince herself that the past two years had been nothing but a bad dream, but given that….
Well, perhaps this was the dream. Not a bad one, necessarily, but enough unreality to think her mind had finally snapped. After two years of struggling to maintain herself, she wouldn’t be surprised. She’s known better people who wouldn’t have been able to survive.
Agatha has always been so good at surviving.
The room – she hesitated to call it a bedroom, even if it does have a bed in it (just as she hesitated to call it her bedroom, even though she was in its bed) – was blank. Bare. Empty of anything resembling life at all, like a college dorm room before anyone moves in, only less so because at least dorm rooms usually included desks or dressers (and occasionally a mini-fridge, if someone paid for it). This was just a room with a bed.
Even the bed didn’t give her any indication of real or not. The comforter held the color of bruise purple, so dark as to almost be black, with a mottled blue undertone, and the sheets, surprisingly soft, were a deep blue black. It made her pale skin appear almost corpselike. It wasn’t like she didn’t know how to use blacks and purples and blues in an attractive manner, but this? She looked like death warmed over.
Maybe because she was.
The idea made her shiver.
But Agatha found her legs still functioned – she’d bent her knees, after all, hadn’t she? And she could wiggle her toes under her blankets if she wanted, couldn’t she? – and pushed herself out of the bed. Whoever dressed her decided to put her in a nearly translucent lavender gown with frills about her neck and at the ends of each sleeve, but at least they’d left her brooch intact right above the hollow of her throat. She ran her fingers along it in a comforting gesture as she walked, barefoot, to the singular door and pressed on it.
The door swung open easily enough, which meant whoever brought her here hadn’t wanted her to be a prisoner, but the fact that Agatha couldn’t reach out and wrap her pinky finger around the threads of magic she should feel ever-present around her, couldn’t even feel magic at all crackling and spitting (as it had in the Hex, vibrating with the pixelated form that Wanda forced it into), meant that prisoner or not, locked in one room or not, she still wasn’t really welcome here. Or appreciated.
She might not appear a prisoner, but they’d handcuffed her all the same.
Agatha walked into a hallway, found another door near her own, and pressed on it instead of taking a chance on yet another hallway.
And found Wanda slumbering inside.
“You can’t play Sleeping Beauty forever, sweetheart.”
Nothing.
Agatha rolls her eyes, steps through a barrier so thick anyone could feel it whether they were magically inclined or not, and waits for Wanda to react. That should tell her she stepped through. She should be afraid. Worried. Concerned, at least.
But Wanda doesn’t move.
If Agatha couldn’t see her breathing, she would be convinced that the girl was dead. But no – there it is again, that slight expansion of her chest, sharp, and then that slow, slow, slow release. “You know, doll, true love’s kiss is what woke Sleeping Beauty.” She moves closer. “If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re going to be waiting forever. Unless….” She runs one finger along the slope of Wanda’s shoulder.
No reaction. Not even the slightest of shudders. As if….
As if Agatha could do anything and Wanda won’t care.
She sighs.
“I hate it here.”
Okay, so, technically, it isn’t another Hex.
It isn’t even another Westview, as far as Agatha’s concerned, because it’s nowhere near that big or that complicated. Wanda’s little sleeping habit can’t be because she’d wiped herself out. It’s just laziness. Or something else, but Agatha refuses to consider that.
Agatha walks the ground floor of the mall for the thousandth time. She’s still barefoot, as she always is, because when she can’t sense magic, everything feels off. Feels wrong. Barefoot at least lets her feel the ground again, however far it is beneath the cold white tiled floor of this far too small mall.
The first day here, she’d gone through the different stores and snatched anything she’d felt like snatching. At first, she’d just grabbed different clothes – a sweater, a nice pair of jeans that emphasize her ass (not that anyone’s looking, other than Agatha herself), a violet ribbon to tie her hair back out of her eyes – but once she’d changed, once she’d affixed her brooch just in the same place on the new indigo sweater, she’d started taking different things. Books. Cards. Stuffed animals. Cutlery. Once, she’d even taken a sharp butcher knife to one of those fluffed out squashmallow plushies, ripped out all its stuffing, and scattered it about the mall, trailing it behind her like vicious carnage.
Within moments, the store looked as though nothing had happened, and as soon as she turned around, the stricken stuffing disappeared.
At least her clothes don’t disappear. That would be awkward.
…or not, considering the only other person here is Wanda herself, and she’s not awake the vast majority of the time, which means that Agatha can do whatsoever she wants.
Which, honestly, takes half the fun away. What’s the point in walking around naked as a jay bird if there’s no one around to frustrate? This isn’t as much torture as being Agnes was – not by a long shot – but she had to hand it to the young witch: this is definitely getting under her skin.
Agatha tests the mall doors again for equally the thousandth time and finds that they will not move. Again. And again.
Today, as much as she feels like it, she doesn’t shake or rattle the doors or yell at them or the world or precious Sleeping Beauty herself. She just stares out the glass doors at nothing, sighs with a numbed acceptance, and turns back again.
The first time Agatha wandered the mall, she’d found more than reconstructed clothing and toy stores. Just outside of the hallway which ended in their bedrooms, an expansive food court stretched out. Three varieties of burger joint, the chicken restaurant that seemed to be in every mall everywhere, the Chinese restaurant that seemed to be in every mall everywhere, a place that sold gyros, a pizza place, an ice cream shoppe (spelled exactly that way, as though it would make the ice cream taste better), two different pretzel places (again, unique to malls, as though Wanda couldn’t figure out how to choose which one to have), and…far too many others. It was like a candle store, but all of the smells were food. Still equally overwhelming.
Agatha paused in front of one of the restaurants, noted that she could smell something cooking but couldn’t see anyone else behind the counter – whether to take her order or to actually cook the food, it didn’t matter; there wasn’t anyone there. And yet, as she stood there, a platter of food – basil seasoned potato wedges, a thick burger covered with mushrooms but without cheese – and a mug full of what she guessed was lemon-ginger tea appeared before her. She raised an eyebrow. “Take requests, super star, or is it just whatever you feel like giving?”
But as Agatha passed that store by, the platter disappeared again, and as she stopped in front of another, different store, yet another platter appeared – the Chinese restaurant, and a plate full of fried rice alongside beef and broccoli with an old nineties paper cup with some unidentified soda within. Equally suspicious. Eventually, she stopped in front of one of the pretzel stores, took two large pretzels (one covered with cinnamon sugar) and a cup of what she found out was strawberry lemonade, and carried them with her as she continued to explore.
The pretzels didn’t have the aftertaste of magic the way so much of the food in Westview had, but they might have just been because she was still cut off from its presence.
Still. They tasted fine. Not the best ever, but what could she expect from mallrat food?
Sometimes, when Agatha is trying to sleep, she hears soft guitar music, the lightest of strummings – finger-picking, mostly, with the occasional chord.
It’s…oddly soothing.
She very rarely stays awake long enough to listen, because it always comes when she is at her most exhausted, as though the player knew that if she plays at this exact moment, it would strum Agatha into sleep instead of awareness, almost as though there is a spell in the song, even if that isn’t usually the other witch’s style.
Once, just once, when Agatha insists on staying awake, on forcing herself to stay awake for the playing as long as she can, she hears the younger witch begin to sing – a soft, soft crooning, humming sort of sound. And once, in her sleep, she catches a rasping wordlessness, that sound of air passing through lips moving but unable to make sound.
Despite everything, despite the crushing bone-weariness through her entire body, Agatha forces herself to open her eyes, bleary though they are, and out of her room, across the hallway, where she, for the first time, finds the younger witch awake. There are tears in her eyes, and she’s almost certain that if Wanda hadn’t made it so she was the only other person here, she wouldn’t know it was her. She certainly can’t recognize her like this.
But Agatha slowly reaches out, traces her jaw, tilts her head back, and whispers, I understand.
Wanda stares at her with cold green eyes unseeing, listens to her with pierced ears unhearing, and says nothing with a voice that likely couldn’t make sound right now even if she wanted. Agatha brushes the tears from under her eyes and leaves without another word.