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Agatha can’t help but smile, watching as her son draws; his own body 10 feet away from the floating crayon and paper on the desk. The drawings are the expected quality of an eight year old, but not many eight year old’s can do what Nicholas can do. Agatha can tell, can sense the magic that flows through his veins. She sometimes questions if he will one day be more powerful than her…and she was shocked when she realised that she wouldn’t mind if he was.
She walks over to his small body. So young, so fragile, yet holding so much power. She kisses him gently atop his head, and the crayon falls to the ground, his concentration lost. He looks up at her with furrowed eyebrows, his face somehow becoming even sweeter in his anger.
“Hey!” He groans, crossing his arms, “I was doing good there.”
“I know you were, kiddo, you’re doing a great job. One day you’re gonna be even more powerful than your mother,”
“You think?”
Agatha nods her head, smoothing down his messy hair.
“Do you think one day I’ll be better than you ?” Nicholas continues, and Agatha huffs out a laugh.
“Doubt it, have you seen what I can do?” Agatha lies, face twisted up into a smile.
Nicholas smiles, his smile gummy from his recent lost front tooth.
“One day I will be, I’ll walk the Witches Road and beat you both,”
Agatha’s face falters, and her breath catches.
No, Nicholas did not know what the road was. She would never want that for him. He could lose too much. She could lose him .
Agatha opens her mouth to respond, feeling tears welling up in her eyes. She feels dizzy, or like someone had stabbed her in the heart and kept shoving until it came out the other side.
She hears the voice she recognises coming from behind her, but she can’t focus on it, everything sounds like a bomb had just gone off in her ear. Confused, she sees the figure in her peripheral vision. A woman, with dark hair and the same big brown eyes as her son. Their son? The woman is speaking, but Agatha can’t hear it at all. She tries to make out the words, Agnes? No, Agatha . Agatha. Agatha.
Agatha turns back to the boy, watching his toothy grin, before the room around them slowly starts fading inward. Agatha reaches out to her son, grasping air until she feels something solid.
Her eyes, somehow now closed, suddenly snap open as she gasps for air. Dazed, it takes her a second to make out her surroundings. It’s dark, and the ground beneath her is wooden, exactly the same as her son’s bedroom.
She follows the sight of her hand, realising she is still gripping something. Someone.
Rio is on her knees, her forearm in Agatha’s tight grasp as she looks down at the woman.
“Agatha,” Rio says, voice loud enough to echo slightly in the small room. Agatha feels like she’s going to be sick.
“Where?” she stutters, still out of it as she pushes herself up. She immediately falls back down, but Rio quickly helps her, lifting her slowly to a seated position. The hand on Agatha’s back is cold, yet somehow burns.
“Where is he?” Agatha continues, her voice husky and her throat dry.
“Agatha,” Rio repeats, and god why does she keep saying that? Why can’t she just tell Agatha where he is?
“Where is our son?” Agatha finally gets out, and she realises she’s sweating, a lot . She reaches up to touch her forehead to wipe some away, before feeling dry skin. It’s only when Rio reaches out to wipe at Agatha’s eye does she understand.
“Agatha,”
“Stop saying that!” Agatha yells, tearing herself away from Rio’s touch. Rio doesn’t flinch away, just stares at Agatha with a look of…pity.
“Think, Agatha. He is gone, you know this already,” Rio explains, voice calm. It’s not often that you ever hear Rio Vidal speak so carefully.
Agatha does know this already. But it feels like the first time she’s hearing it again, her heart aching with pain unlike any other.
Agatha holds back a sob, her hands shaking violently.
“I can’t- I just saw him, I was just – I was just with him,”
“No, you weren’t. You were dreaming, or hallucinating. Nicholas is gone.”
“I felt him, he was different, he was older,” Agatha practically begs, curling in on herself on the ground.
Rio moves forward, grabbing Agatha’s hand so she can’t cover herself with it. Her nails dig slightly into the flesh as she forces Agatha to look her in the eyes. Her eyes glow a slight amount of unnatural green, and Agatha finds herself unable to look away from Rio’s (quite literal) spell.
“Look at me. Nicholas is dead. He’s gone. He was taken away and you got the Darkhold in return. That is the price you paid, Agatha,” she pauses, taking a deep breath, “You were just dreaming.”
Each word is powerful, and it feels like they are drilling into Agatha’s head.
Unable to look away, Agatha feels the silent tears begin to crawl down her face as the understanding kicks in once again. They had been here before. Rio had done all this before. Nicholas was gone.
The green colouration from Rio’s eyes evaporates, as she expertly moves and wraps her arms around Agatha’s still body, holding her tight.
“I didn’t mean to,” Agatha whispers, voice shaky.
Rio’s grip tightens, “I know, darling…I know,”
After a few minutes, Agatha’s body calms and Rio slowly lets go of the hold on her wife.
“I’m sorry,” Agatha whispers, voice croaky from the tears.
“Don’t apologise. Not for this, and not for that . You didn’t know.”
“I should have known. I knew there was a price I should have known it would be him,”
“Agatha,” Rio says, her voice strong, but still a sense of sadness lingering, “enough,”
Agatha pauses, before finally nodding.
Rio stands, helping Agatha up off the ground and wiping at her tear stained face.
“You’re a mess,” Rio states, licking her thumb to clean a smudge on Agatha’s cheek.
“I don’t know how you never are,” Agatha responds, before snapping her fingers and the dust, grime and sadness is instantly removed from her clothes and face.
Rio smiles softly, but Agatha finds that she can’t look at it for too long, afraid that she’ll start to see the aspects of their son that the magic mixed together.
Agatha steps away, glancing around the room. Nicholas’ bedroom. Standing where she stood in her dream, but instead of seeing the small boy across from her, the Darkhold sits, pages open.
She hates that book. She hates that she thought she needed it. She hates that it’s made her fingers look different to the ones that last touched her boy’s hair; stained. She hates how badly she needs it. She hates how she can hear it, calling out to her. She hates its promises of bending reality, of fixing what is broken. She hates that it is her only hope at finding a way to bring him back.
“That book isn’t going to help you bring him back,” Rio states, as if reading Agatha’s thoughts, “Death doesn’t work like that.”
Agatha walks over to the book, slamming it shut and tucking it under her arm.
“You wouldn’t know. This book holds the power to the universe,”
“Exactly. And to earn that power you paid the biggest price,”
Agatha clenched her jaw, her grip on the Darkhold tightening.
“You don’t understand,” Agatha murmurs, and Rio shakes her head with a forced laugh.
“ I don’t understand? He didn’t belong to you Agatha. He was my son too,”
It is as if Agatha can feel the Darkhold seeping into her skin, burning into her veins.
“Really? Because it sure as hell doesn’t look like it. I’ve been trying to bring him back, I’ve been hurting, I’m doing whatever it takes and you do nothing !”
“Because I am not delusional, Agatha. What? Is the road going to give you something that powerful and take away something that means that much to you but also allow you to bring him back? Of course not!”
Rio pauses, her expression calm but fierce, “The Darkhold is manipulating you. You’re only losing yourself,”
Agatha feels the magic coursing at the edges of her fingertips.
“I am willing to become whatever this thing needs me to, if it means I get to see him again,”
“And what about me? Do I have to stand back and watch as I lose both of you?”
Agatha sighs, rubbing at the bridge of her nose with her free hand.
“I was going to suggest helping me. But it sounds like you have already made your choice,”
Without looking at her, Agatha turns and walks out of the room, Darkhold in hand.
She only gets to the living room before all of the doors and windows of the house slam shut with a loud bang, the essence of green magic floating around them.
“Agatha!” Rio shouts, frustrated now.
“Don’t do this, Vidal,” Agatha calls out, her skin itching for the pages of the Darkhold.
“I know how this ends, Agatha! You have paid the price, and you cannot get him back. Not even someone as powerful as you. It was his fate,” Rio argues.
Agatha freezes, turning to stare at the other witch.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Agatha,” Rio tries to amend.
“No, Rio. You know we don’t use those words freely, you meant something by that. What. Did. You. Mean?”
Rio pauses, considering her next words.
“There is a lot you don’t know,”
“So tell me,” Agatha demands.
“Some people are simply fated to-,”
Agatha’s had enough. Immediately cutting Rio off, she sends a burst of purple magic in her direction, hitting her square in the chest. She had just meant to throw her around a little, scare her, frustrate her, anything really. Instead, Rio catches herself, but something is immediately different. Agatha squints her eyes, and there, glowing in beautiful green lines, the shape of a skeleton appears over Rio’s entire body. Even her head gets covered, with the shape of a skeleton head seeming to glow off her body.
“Jesus christ, what the-,” Agatha starts, but then she remembers. She remembers a page in the Darkhold she had read. Death. The personification of Death.
“What is this?” Agatha questions, even though she thinks she already knows the answer.
Rio stares at her wife, watching as all the pieces inside the grieving witch’s head fall into place.
“I could never tell you. It is my duty,” She explains.
“Duty? What is your duty, Rio?”
Rio heaves a deep breath, “to keep balance. The living and the dead,”
“Fuck you,” Agatha immediately spits. Rio doesn’t flinch.
“You know I didn’t want to take him,” as soon as Rio says it, she regrets it. She realises that Agatha had not thought that far ahead.
“ You took him?” she says, voice barely audible.
“Agatha, I-,”
“You took my son,” Agatha states, it all dawning on her. She pauses, “did you know that would be the price? That he would?”
Rio remains silent.
Agatha takes that as an answer. She screams, and watches as Rio flies across the room, smashing into the furthest away wall.
“You lied to me!” Agatha screeches, hand outstretched as she flings a lamp in Rio’s direction, “and then you took him from me!”
She goes to hit her wife with another blast, but Rio is too quick, immediately defending herself as she floats herself into a standing position.
“Nobody can mess with fate, Agatha! I loved him too, just like I love you!”
“Bullshit!” Agatha screams, blasting Rio with all her power. The Darkhold lays on the floor behind her, dropped in the mess, but its pages magically sprawl open, flipping frantically back and forth.
When Agatha pauses for just the slightest second, Rio starts to charge forward, but she’s too slow as Agatha begins to float into the air, touching the roof of their living room.
“He was just a boy. You made me think it was all my fault. You could have done something!”
“But I was never going to, was I? That’s the thing with death and fate and prophecies Agatha, it always ends the same way,”
Agatha flips the coffee table with her mind, and it immediately crashes right into Rio, breaking around her as she remains standing.
“I love you, Agatha!” Rio calls out, and that’s when Agatha rushes forward in flight, gripping a hold of Rio’s neck and shoving her against the nearest wall.
“I hate you,” Agatha whispers, trying to ignore the recognisable feeling of her heart breaking in her own chest. She holds Rio there, choking until the other woman starts to pale slightly, and she can’t help but let her go with a groan.
“Hit me! Do something! Kill me if you must! If you had to take him then take me too!” Agatha screeches, landing on the ground next to her wife.
Unable to help herself, the feelings and fight of flight kicking in too deep, Rio shoots magic at Agatha, who screams but immediately begins taking the magic as her own. Rio stops before she knows any bad consequences can happen.
Groaning, Agatha grabs a nearby knife and shoves it into Rio’s hands, landing onto the ground beside her. She positions it in her hands so that it is aimed perfectly at Agatha’s heart.
“You’ve already broken it twice, why not do it once more for good measure?” Agatha spits.
Rio looks at her, her eyes almost softer than ever, despite the slight scarring on her face and bruises.
“I can’t,” Rio whispers.
“Yes you can!” Agatha yells, but Rio just shakes her head.
“Our marriage. I could choose one person I didn’t have to one day take. I chose you. I can never take you, Agatha,”
Agatha freezes, feeling even angrier now than she did a minute before.
Agatha breathes deeply through her nose. So close to Rio that the other witch can feel it against her collarbone.
“I never want to see you again,” Agatha whispers, voice stone cold.
“Agatha-,”
Agatha holds up her index finger in warning, and Rio falls silent.
“Never. Again.”
And with that, Agatha turns away, hearing the knife clatter to the floor. Using her magic, she opens the front door, storming out of it into the evening air, the Darkhold floating along behind her as she leaves her house, and Rio behind.
***
Agatha meditates, the Darkhold sitting in front of her in this small cave. Her hands now almost completely stained black from the darkness of the book. She’s tearing through the pages, still trying to find the answer. There will be a way. There has to be. It’s been years of searching for answers, with no luck. Nothing. She is tired at this moment, and that’s why she lets her concentration slip. She finds herself accidentally turning to the page about the personification of Death. She usually avoids it. Just like she continuously avoids Death herself. But today, she turns to that page without really thinking clearly. She is about to turn away, quickly cover up her tracks of memory, when she notices the opposing page of the Darkhold. An image of a floating woman, wearing a tiara. Intrigued, she reads the title of the page.
The Scarlet Witch.
Yes. That is what she needs.
Agatha Harkness will find the Scarlet Witch.