Archive of Our Own

The Sokovian Mountains look beautiful in the winter.

Agatha has thought this for as long as she’s known them, longer than there even was a Sokovia for the mountains to be situated in.  She’d once walked a surprisingly vast distance to reach them; hiked paths that, in all honesty, she should not have been able to hike given her health at the time; and finally laid herself out in a frigid lake under thick frozen branches and stars that felt as though they were holes in the sky for the light to burst through.  The Sokovian Mountains were beautiful, and they were a beautiful place to die.

Not that she died, of course, but that wasn’t her fault.

Cian always had poked their nose into things where it didn’t belong.  She’d gotten that from them, after all.

It isn’t always winter when Agatha returns to the little cabin in the mountains – not that it’s a little cabin anymore, after all of the expanding and changing and shifting that Wanda’s done to it – but often enough it is.  There’s something about winter in Sokovia that keeps drawing her back, despite her wanderlust, like being pulled toward her own grave.  She spends too much time out on the front porch in those moments, letting the cool air wash over her, freezing her wet hair against the nape of her neck, a mug of iced coffee in one hand.

When Agatha returns this time, winter melts into a warm spring, the apple trees just starting to blossom, a few of their petals filtering through on the soft spring breeze.  One lands in her open palm, and she lifts it just so she can scent it.  Soft.  Light.  Not anything like her earliest homes, but a lot like her most recent one.  She still hesitates to refer to this cabin, now that it’s Wanda’s, as home.  It’s certainly a nice place to stay, but she isn’t certain that she’s home.

Billy spots her in the orchard before anyone else does, and she hears him call out, “Auntie Ata!” before a zooming presence speeds through the trees, stirring up the fallen petals into tiny twisters behind him.  Tommy tackles her with the full force of his stopping as he wraps his arms around her in as big of a hug as he can muster, and she lets out a little ooph, stepping back to keep herself upright, before she tousles his long hair.  “Hey, kiddo.”

“You were gone forever this time,” Tommy mumbles into her chest.  He’s had a growth spurt while she was gone; he’d been barely up to her belly-button the last time she was here, and now he’s so tall.  The worst is knowing that he’ll be getting even taller, too; he’ll probably end up taller than her, if his parents are anything to go by – and Agatha wouldn’t call herself short!  He pulls back just enough to look up at her with big, round eyes.  “Did you bring me anything?”

Agatha shifts the little pack she’s strapped to her back.  “You weren’t supposed to get any taller,” she says, feigning a scowl.  “If you can promise me you won’t grow again—”

“Don’t give him anything!”  Billy rushes up to them and then bends over, hands on his knees, breathing heavy.  He glares at his brother.  “You left me—”

“It’s not my fault you’re so slow.”  Tommy sticks his tongue out and blows a raspberry at his brother.

Billy glances up at Agatha as he straightens; he, at least, hasn’t had the same growth spurt that Tommy has.  “Tell him he has to wait for me!”

Agatha meets his eyes levelly.  “You’ve got magic, hon.  If I told Tommy to wait for you, that wouldn’t be very fair.”  She slowly disentangles herself from the slightly older twin and starts forward to Billy, but when she reaches out to tousle his darker hair, he flinches away from her, glare turning to her instead.  But she takes that in stride.  “Tommy, dear?” she asks, not glancing away from Billy.  “Do be a good boy and run on home.  I need to teach your brother a lesson.”

Tommy sniggers.  “You’re in trouble,” he says in a sing-song voice.

“Shut up!” Billy grumbles back at him.  He turns as though to give his brother a shove, but in the second he does, Tommy speeds off.

In that same instant, Agatha snaps her fingers, and a violet cloud spirals around Billy, instantly whisking him away.  She barely hears him yell “Hey!” before another cloud encircles her, transporting them both to the cabin’s front porch.  Agatha situates herself easily enough at the rickety old table Wanda has settled outside (that she has told her multiple times to fix and yet the younger witch absolutely refuses, as though she doesn’t have the ability to do it whenever she wants) and places Billy just so that he can stand in place atop the porch for a mere second before Tommy topples into him.

“See?” Agatha says as the boys glare at each other.  “Magic is faster even than your brother.  You just have to know how to use it—”

A hand lands on Agatha’s shoulder, cutting her off with a not-so-gentle squeeze.  “Agatha,” Wanda says in a definitely low-key threatening tone, “why are my children in a heap?”

“Tommy pushed me!”

“Billy got in my way!”

Agatha glances up at Wanda and gives her a sheepish grin.  “I definitely had absolutely nothing to do with any of this, I assure you.  They were just in such a hurry to see me, dear.”  She ignores the now claw-like grip on her shoulder and starts to pull her pack off the other side.  “Boys, I brought presents for you.”

Billy’s eyes light up, and Tommy nudges him with his elbow.  “See?” he hisses.  “I told you.  She always brings us presents!”

It’s the voice in Agatha’s head that is more important than anything else the boys say as they untangle themselves from each other.  Agatha Harkness, if you have brought anything for them to fight over—

Agatha doesn’t even spare Wanda a look.  I’ve seen what happens to people who hurt your boys, hon.  Lived it.  Don’t particularly want to do it again.

Even if it did—

No.

That’s…not worth thinking about.

It’s while they’re eating that it comes up, and Agatha isn’t sure exactly what prompts it – probably nothing, probably something that stirred within the minds of the children themselves that she hadn’t thought to track, hadn’t even considered a distant possibility, likely because she doesn’t spend much time with children anymore.  At least, not on a timescale where one of them might ask about this.

“Mama says her parents died during the war,” Tommy says, and Agatha only has enough time to try and pool together all of her historical knowledge of the wars she has intentionally not been in before he asks, “What happened to yours?”

Oh.

Agatha’s breath catches in her throat, and she chokes on her strawberry lemonade, coughing and spluttering all at once.  She swallows what she can, takes in a deep breath, coughs again, and when she catches Wanda’s scared eyes, she tells her, much more easily than trying to speak it, I’m fine, sugar cube.  Don’t get your panties in a wad.  She clenches one hand into a fist, holds it against her chest, and draws another deep, shuddering breath in before she says, finally, “Died,” in a rasping voice.  “Dead, gone, very dead, not a pretty story, hon, not an interesting story,” she lies as soon as she catches the bright glimmer of interest in Tommy’s eyes, “no blood, no guts, no glory, just dead.”

“Well, what were they like?” Billy asks then, with an interest less ravenous than his brother’s but still with an intense curiosity.  “Were they witches, too?

“Mama was,” Agatha says hesitantly, gaze dropping to her plate of half-eaten food, not really seeing it.  She can hear the question Wanda shoots into her mind, but she ignores it.  “Papa was a whaler – he hunted whales – and he was gone….”  Her eyes scan the absence in front of her, and then she gives a little shake of her head.  “He would carve bone when he was bored.  That’s where this—”  She raises one hand and just touches the brooch she still wears around her neck.  “—came from.”

Billy’s eyes widen.  “Can I – we – I touch it?”

Agatha flinches.

“Boys, I think that’s enough questioning,” Wanda intervenes, and as the boys groan and whine and complain, she reaches over and just touches Agatha’s hand, causing her to flinch again, to startle.  Are you okay?

It isn’t a rhetorical question, but it might as well have been one.

Sure, dear, Agatha lies, knowing that Wanda won’t believe her even as she thinks it.  I’m fine.  Just fine.  She pushes a hand through her hair, and as Wanda corrals the boys elsewhere, she stands from the table, doesn’t even take her plates to the sink (although she normally does, she normally helps Wanda clean up afterwards (or, in all honesty, sits at the table and drinks a mug of tea and gives her general update on the goings-on in the world while Wanda cleans)), and makes her way not upstairs, to the room that they normally share when she visits, but to the suite that was once hers, when the Scarlet Witch had felt she deserved nothing more than to be locked up.

Agatha lies, curled up on her side, her brooch in one hand, idly stroking it with the other, when Wanda finds her.  She barely moves as Wanda settles onto the bed next to her, only closes her hand over her brooch and holds it tightly to herself.  “I told you I was fine, hon.”

“If you were fine, hon, you wouldn’t be in here.”  Wanda curls against her back and tucks her hands under Agatha’s shirt, pressing her ice cold fingers against Agatha’s much warmer skin.  “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”  Agatha squirms as Wanda’s fingers trace along her skin.  It isn’t quite a lie, but it isn’t quite not a lie either.  She simply doesn’t know how to talk about it and has never really felt the need to do so.  Cian had known as much as she could tell them, and they’d never pressed her to say anything at all, had only been there to listen if – and when – she felt the need.

Wanda runs a finger – by memory, not by sight – along one of the long, thin white stripes where the thick rippling scars used to be.  “You said your mother gave you these.”  She waits, as though expecting Agatha to say something or elaborate, but when she doesn’t, she continues, “Whatever you might have done, you didn’t deserve them.”

Agatha snorts.  “Whipping was a fairly typical punishment back then, dear.  You might consider it abuse now, but then….”  She sighs.  “I wasn’t the only one scarred, hon.  Just one of the few who scarred like that.”  She smirks without mirth, though the other witch can’t see it, when she says, “Just another indicator that I was born evil.  Unnatural.”

Her hand tightens on the brooch so hard that she can feel it near to cutting into the flesh of her palm.

“That doesn’t mean—”

“It’s nice that you’re trying, hon.  Sure means a lot coming from you.”

The words are out of her lips before Agatha even thinks about them, and she regrets them as soon as they’re said, but she doesn’t take them back.  Instead, she forces her death grip on her brooch to relax and says, “I told you I didn’t want to talk about it.”

Wanda doesn’t say anything.  She just wraps her arms around the small of Agatha’s waist, draws as close to her as she can, and buries her face just between her shoulder blades.  There are no apologies between them anymore, not ever, because if either one started to apologize, it feels like maybe they would never stop – or they would grow so defensive of what they’d done, the apology would be eaten up with bitterness.  The words as an act of appeasement with no true meaning behind them, even if they meant them.

Agatha doesn’t apologize for her biting remark, and Wanda doesn’t apologize for pushing, and neither of them feels awkward for not doing so.

In the morning, Agatha wakes with the sunrise, not that she’d really been able to fall asleep.  Every time she tried, she dreamed, and every dream was a nightmare – fire and death and ice.  She never made it to the angel, isn’t sure it would actually have made the dreams better at this point.  These dreams leave her breathless; those would rouse her with tears.  Neither is particularly helpful.

Agatha slips out of Wanda’s arms easily enough.  She expects the younger witch to mumble something under her breath and hold her tighter, the same way Agatha herself usually does in the mornings when Wanda wakes up first (as is typical), but it’s like she doesn’t even notice.  Then she brews herself a cup of lemon-ginger tea, shifts a hand through the oats she’d left in her suite, and then crafts the same batch of oatmeal she makes most mornings out of the year.

Wanda stirs just as the oatmeal finishes then rubs the tip of her nose with the back of one hand, turns under the still warm blankets, and pulls them over her head.  On a normal day – no, on an abnormal day, because it is so rare for Agatha to wake up first at all – she would stop by the bed, would brush strands of the other witch’s hair back out of her face, would leave a kiss on her forehead.  On a day like today, she might even curl back up in bed, the same way Wanda often does, before the boys wake, so that Wanda can rest her head on her lap, so that she can thread one hand through her hair as she eats, as she recreates a book and reads.

But she doesn’t do any of that.

Instead, Agatha takes her now second cup of lemon-ginger tea and her large bowl of oatmeal and makes her way out to the barn.

Wanda finds her there much later – after settling the boys down to their own breakfast, after placing a hand on Tommy’s back and catching the briefest glimpse of Agatha through the rarely open barn door, after telling them to wait there for her and enjoy their food before slipping through the back door and heading out after her.  She catches Agatha among the ewes, a newborn lamb cradled in her arms, as she carefully stands the lamb on shaky feet and angles its head toward its mother’s teat.

“Here you go.”  Agatha runs a hand gentle along the lamb’s head.  “Hungry little fella, aren’t ya, hon?”  She doesn’t need to turn to feel Wanda’s presence behind her; she’s let her mind stretch out so that she can just touch that of the animals surrounding her, so she can soothe them, so she can sense if there is anything the magic she’s left around them has left unfulfilled.  When Wanda enters, she feels her mind brush against hers, and she does not recoil.

Wanda’s mind becomes awash with colors – waves of lavender and rose in the softest of sunsets, a thin strand of grey running like a ribbon through the whole, stretching and expanding and shrinking back over again, and just beyond all of that, in what might be the horizon, if there could even be one at all, the palest of pastel pinks in the barest of outlines.  She’s never been able to pin down what the colors mean; some of them, she’s been able to guess at, given how frequently she’d seen them in certain other situations, but these….

For all that she’s seen the grey over and over and over again, Wanda has still never been able to put a word to what, exactly, that emotion must be.  She’s at least guessed that they’re emotions; she’s fairly certain of that.  But what these are….

“I always liked looking after the sheep,” Agatha murmurs, just loud enough that Wanda can overhear her.  “Charity was always with Mama, learning how to run the coven, and Prudence was always with that boy of hers, and when the youngest of us died—”

A sudden sharp spike of red and grey mingled together before they fade under the ever-growing lavender, and an image – quick – of an Agatha much younger than Wanda has ever seen her, holding a steadily bluing baby in her arms, flashes through her mind.  This time, Wanda wants to recoil, but she doesn’t.  Instead, she steps into the barn, still listening.

“Nathaniel was never very good with the sheep, but they loved me.”  Agatha glances at her hands, nearly smiles, and then gives a little shake. In the same moment, her mind shuts itself off entirely.

I killed him.

Agatha reaches her arms above her head, grabs her wrist, and stretches back until her spine just pops.  “Look after your kids, doll,” she says, meeting Wanda’s eyes.  “I’m not even here.”

“But you are here,” Wanda says, crossing the distance between them so that she can just place a hand on her shoulder.  She searches her eyes as gently as she can.  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Agatha moves out from under Wanda’s touch and walks past her, back to the house.  “No, dear,” she says.  “There’s nothing.”

There are exactly four full bathrooms in Wanda’s expanse of a house: one in the expansive cellar, one for the boys to share upstairs (and that is often also shared by America and Wendy, when they come to visit), one in Agatha’s suite on the first floor (which is often stolen by America and Wendy if Agatha isn’t there when they visit), and one in Wanda’s suite upstairs.  This time, when Agatha hides, she curls up in the largest bathroom in the entire house – Wanda’s – and sinks beneath water so hot that it makes her lightheaded, would make her so lightheaded she would heave if she got out of it too quickly.  The brooch sits easy enough on the sink, far enough away from the tub and its drain that she doesn’t need to worry (and wouldn’t need to worry anyway; the drain isn’t that big); her clothes are tossed about in one big lump to one side.  The thing about magic is that she never really needs to wash them, if she doesn’t want, but she always does.  When she’s here, Wanda does, collecting her discarded things and clumping them together with hers – never with the boys’, although Agatha knows Wanda doesn’t mind mixing the boys’ things with her own.

Beneath the water, Agatha lets out her breath.  Slow.  Slowly.  Slower.  Her body screams for her to take another breath in, but for a brief, blissful moment, she can imagine what it might be like to sleep beneath it.  Not beneath the waves, since there are none of those in a bathtub, and certainly she would much rather this be ice cold if she were going to sleep in such a way instead of boiling hot – her pale skin has already turned a bright red shade, not that she minds; she might as well be sunburned, but that sort of thing leaves barely noticeable freckles all over, not this.

She could cast a spell to let her keep breathing underwater.

She won’t.

Agatha leans up just enough for her lips to breach the water’s surface.  She takes another breath in and sinks down again.

A mind reaches out, brushes against hers.

Nathaniel always wanted to be a sailor, just like Papa.  He said he was going to find him.  Nicholas – my Nicholas – searched for him instead, assured me he would do what Nathaniel couldn’t.

She hesitates.

You are not the only one who lost twins, Wanda, not the only one who had to bury—

She stops.

Well, I suppose you never had to bury them, did you, hon?

The presence flinches away.

Agatha closes her eyes – fire and death and ice – and reminds herself that drowning is one of the worst ways she could die.  All that water filling up her lungs, bursting them.  It would be painful.  Unpleasant.  That’s why she’d wanted to freeze, after all.  So cold, then that false warmth, and then nothing.

If only her angel had let her die.

It’s while she’s toweling off that she hears it.

Agatha doesn’t know how she hears it at all, because she’s got the towel held up to her ear, rubbing at it, at her hair, ruffling her already frizzy waves, and it isn’t like the twins are being louder than normal, it isn’t like she’s actively listening for them, it isn’t like they’re trying to speak directly into her mind – not that she would let them, if they tried.  There’s too much in there she doesn’t want them to reach, doesn’t want them to read, and although hearing them doesn’t mean they can hear her—

“You shouldn’t have asked her that!” Billy hisses.  He shoves his brother with the softest of magic, and it still pushes him into the wall.  “Now she’s mad at us!  And hiding!”

Tommy shoots his brother a glare.  “Hey!  Mama said no pushing!”

“I didn’t push you—”

“Magic counts!”  Tommy shoves his brother back.  “And it’s your fault!  She was upset, and you asked again anyway!”  He holds his brother against the opposite wall.  “You can’t just ask to touch—”

“Boys!”

She stops listening then.  Picks the brooch.  Runs her thumb along the whale bone embossed in the very center.  She doesn’t know how much her papa knew when he made it, and she always imagined that the three witches in the center were her family.  When she’d first seen it, she’d thought it was meant to be her older sisters and herself, playing together, but as she’d grown—

Her papa brought it back shortly after she’d been born.  One of her earliest memories was reaching up to it around her mama’s neck, of taking it in her mouth and biting on it.  If she looks hard enough at it now, she can almost see the imprints of baby teeth here and there.  But her papa – he couldn’t have known that she would be there when he returned.  His whaling trips had sometimes taken years at a time; he wouldn’t have even known her mama was pregnant when he left.

The three witches – she couldn’t be one of them.

Her thumbnail scratches along the witch in the middle.  Probably her mama.  She bites her lower lip.

Her papa loved her.  She knows her papa loved her.

But this…this isn’t—

Agatha doesn’t leave the bathroom until she hears the gentlest shifting of the mattress outside, until she can reach out, tuck her fingers around the threads of magic in and surrounding her, and touch the quivering left behind by the movement of the Scarlet Witch.  Trails of chaos in her wake, even when they aren’t intended.  Just like Agatha herself breeds that same dream over and over – fire and ice and death.

She tucks herself small against the other witch, nuzzles against her neck, and lets herself be held.

This time, Wanda doesn’t ask, doesn’t press.

My mama loved me, Agatha whimpers soft.  She didn’t like me, but she loved me.

Still, Wanda doesn’t say anything.  The silence speaks louder than anything she could possibly say.

Agatha can’t even bring herself to cry.

If she were alone, Agatha would spend the entire next day in bed, unmoving, staring at the brooch, barely getting up for necessities (or food).

But she isn’t alone.

She’s still uncertain if that helps or not.

The boys are already awake when Agatha slips into their room.  She’s felt it, the reaching out of Billy’s mind in her direction, although she’s slammed the shield up as high and hard as she can.  There’s no subtlety in his reaching, just this sort of understanding that he can and should and does.  Tommy likely doesn’t feel it at all, given his lack of magic, but for Agatha, it feels like a hammer reaching out where a tickling feather should.  She wonders, idly, how much of that Wanda feels or if Billy has ever felt the need to reach out to his mom the same way he just reached out to her.  Likely not – Wanda seems like the sort of mother who would leave a portion of her mind open to her magical son so that she could keep an eye on him, so that he could reach out for comfort if he needs it.

Besides, considering Wendy, it’s possible that Wanda also lets her mind linger out like a fog on a constant basis.  If she does, she’s left Agatha alone for nearly as long as she’s known her, at first unknowingly and then perhaps intentionally, not wanting to see things that could potentially scar her.

Or, honestly, not caring.

Tommy snaps up immediately as Agatha shuts the door behind her, but Billy rolls over in his bed, pulls his comforter over his head, and murmurs, “Go away.  You’re just gonna be mad at us.”

“You don’t know!” Tommy snaps.  He reaches across the space between their beds and slaps at his younger brother twice, batting at him almost like a cat.

Now, Billy shifts, ignoring Agatha just to glare at his brother.  “Mom was mad at us!  Aunty Ata’s gonna be madder! You don’t—” His voice squeaks, and he buries his head under the covers again with a groan.

Before Tommy can say anything (or even laugh, as he is wont to do in these sorts of situations), Agatha kneels down on the shag rug between their beds.  “Come, boys,” she says, patting the rug next to her.  “Come sit with me.”

Tommy speeds out of bed and sits cross-legged on the floor in front of her, but it takes Billy longer.  He peeks an eye out from under the covers, looks at Agatha as though gauging her, and then reaches out with his mind again, hits the barrier, and then frowns before he slips out of his bed, pulling his blanket around him, barely poking his head out from them.  His eyes are rid-rimmed; whether that’s bleary from sleeping or something else, Agatha can’t—

No, she can tell.

“I’m not mad at you, kiddo,” Agatha says, meeting Billy’s eyes.  She takes their hands in her own, reaching a little further for Billy’s.  “Neither of you did anything wrong.”  She gives their hands a little squeeze.  “You asked very good questions. It’s….”  Her eyes drop again as she releases them.  “It’s my fault that I couldn’t answer them.”

“It’s not your—”

Billy nudges his brother this time.  “Hush.”

Agatha takes a deep breath.  “My mama wasn’t like yours,” she says, voice soft.  “She loved me just as much, but she was….”  Her eyes narrow, unfocused.  “Very busy.  It broke my heart when she died.”  This isn’t a lie, even if it won’t carry the same weight for the boys that it does for her – or for Wanda, who saw enough of it to guess.  “I still don’t know what happened to my papa.  He went away on a ship and just…never came back.”  She presses her lips together.  “This,” she says, holding the brooch out in her bare hand, “is the last thing I have of them.”  A hesitation, then, “The last thing I have of any of my family.”

“You have us,” Billy answers immediately.

As he speaks, Tommy takes Agatha’s free hand in his own and squeezes it just like she’d squeezed theirs.  He doesn’t say anything, but he listens, eyes searching Agatha’s.  When she doesn’t continue, his voice is soft, “We…we don’t know what happened to our daddy either.”  He bites his lower lip.  “He was fighting someone, and Mama went to help him, and then….”  His voice trails off, and he sniffles.  Billy reaches over and wipes a tear away easy, like this is something he’s done a thousand times before, because he probably has.

Agatha waits.  Swallows.  Holds the brooch out.  “Here.”

Billy flinches.  “You don’t have to—”

But Tommy doesn’t have to wait for another invitation.  He reaches out and snatches the brooch up before Agatha can even breathe, and she flinches again with the speed of it.  “Oh, this is cool.”  With a sudden motion, he flips it up into the air.

“Hey!” Billy exclaims as Agatha’s eyes widen.  “Be careful!”  He sends out a spark of magic, holds the brooch aloft in the air, and then carries it gentle over to him.  Then he cradles it in his hands like a baby bird, runs his thumb along it as though smoothing ruffled feathers.  His eyes light up as he meets Agatha’s eyes again.  “Wow.”

Agatha resists the urge to snatch the brooch back out of his hands, but Billy hands it over to her, gentle as anything.  “It’s…it’s really pretty.”  He nudges his brother.  “Don’t you think it’s pretty?”

Tommy nods.  “Yeah.  It’s cool, I guess.”  His gaze shifts away.  “You didn’t…you didn’t know your dad very well, then?”

It takes a second before Agatha realizes he’s even asked the question, too focused on slowing her heartrate now that the brooch is back in her hands.  “No,” she says finally.  “He…he wasn’t around very often.”  Her lips lift in a small smile.  “But he always brought back things he’d found on his journeys.  Things he carved.  Things we could keep.”  She tucks strands of hair back out of her face.  “They’re probably still out there somewhere.  I just haven’t found them.”  She stands then, holding the brooch against her chest.  “Your mom will be up soon, kiddos.  You should get ready.”

As she turns away, as she opens the door, Agatha hears Billy ask, his voice soft, “We can talk about this again, right?  Later?”

Agatha pauses, bites her lower lip, holds the brooch so tight that it cuts into the palm of her hand, and then turns to the boys with a fierce, but broken, grin.  “Sure, hon,” she says.  “Whenever you want.”

When Agatha returns to the suite she often shares with Wanda, she finds the other witch sitting up, knees drawn halfway up, arms wrapped around them, hair tumbling down her back, and glancing outside to the orchard.  Her instinct is to reach out, to sit on the bed next to her, to run a hand along her back in comfort, but she doesn’t do anything like that.  Instead, she asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Wanda shakes her head.  But she asks anyway, “You had twins?”

“Nicholas and Nathaniel,” Agatha whispers, not letting her gaze drop from the young woman.  “Nicholas, for my husband.  Nathaniel, for my brother.”  Then she glances down, to her hands, to her brooch.  “Nathaniel died within a few months.  Babies didn’t always make it back then.  And Nicholas….”

Fire and death and ice.

She takes a sharp breath.  “My sister burned him alive.”  She licks her lips.  “For what I did to our coven.”  She swallows.  “Our mother.”  She laughs then, a soft, dark sort of chuckle.  “I killed her for that.  The first person I ever meant to kill.”

And then I went to the Sokovian Mountains, before that was even their name—

This, she doesn’t say aloud, but she leaves it open, if Wanda wants to hear it.

“You never told me,” Wanda murmurs, but it isn’t an accusation.

Now, Agatha does move over to her, does sit next to her.  “There wasn’t anything to tell, dear.  It happened so long ago.”  She leans forward and rests her head against Wanda’s back.

Wanda glances back to her, finally.  “Is that why you wanted me?  Why you had the Darkhold?”

Agatha doesn’t answer.  She can’t, really.  The reasons for going after Wanda – for going after the Scarlet Witch – are far more varied and complicated.  And her family was gone long before she even knew of the Darkhold’s existence.  She can’t say what she would have done with the power if she had it – no matter what the Agatha who had broken into their universe had done, that one wasn’t her.  Out of all the Agathas across the multiverse who had succeeded where she failed – or, in retrospect, failed where she had succeeded – only one had followed them here.  Maybe others had followed other variations on this same Wanda.  And maybe others—

“In Neverland, Pixie said she was Agatha Stephen Harkness, the tenth of her name,” Agatha mutters.  “There are other worlds where one – or both – of my sons survived.  That’s…enough.  It…it has to be.”

Wanda snorts.  “It wasn’t enough for me.”

“You had options, hon.”  Agatha smiles, brushes back strands of Wanda’s hair, and presses a kiss to the nape of her neck.  “Some of us had to learn to survive with the loss of our children.  Our families.”  She lets out a sigh.  “Some of us made new families.”

It’s easy, then, when Wanda turns around to face her, to meet her eyes.  “I made a new family,” she says, voice soft, “and you—”

“That was America’s idea, hon,” Agatha corrects.  “Don’t put that one on me.  I just helped her fine tune a few things.”  She wiggles her fingers in the air a few times.  “She brought your twins back to you, babe.  Not me.”

“Not what I meant.”  Wanda runs her fingers gentle along Agatha’s jaw, rests her thumb just on the edge of her chin.  She leans forward, brushes her nose against Agatha’s, and then tugs on her chin, parting her lips, before kissing her.

Agatha cups Wanda’s face gentle before pulling away.  “Go take care of your boys, hon.”  She offers her the smallest of smiles, brushing a finger across her lips.  “I’ll still be here when you’re done.”

“No,” Wanda says, laying a hand over Agatha’s free one and interlacing their fingers.  “They’re your family, too.  You’re coming with me.”  She squeezes her hand gentle.  “This is your home, too.  Please don’t hide from us.”

Home.  Agatha tastes the word on the tip of her tongue before swallowing it whole with the slightest of nods.  “Okay,” she agrees, barely able to hear herself.  “I’m home.”