Chapter Text
Rio Vidal was seated at a small wooden table, staring at the empty chair across from her. Her brow was furrowed, a curved knife in her hands, which she was using to carve absently into the wood.
The room was not overwhelmingly large, but what it lacked in space it made up for with furnishings. There were deep purple curtains spilling over the windows, darkening the apartment to a gloomy ambience. Lamps with exquisitely detailed lamp shades, boasting dangling beads and fabric and multicolored glass, were placed about the room. The bed was dressed in a black comforter, piled with large dark pillows. Mesh curtains swooped around the frame from the ceiling, creating a cocoon of purple silk around the slumber-er. The other furniture in the room consisted of a purple sofa, assorted ottomans, and a coffee table. The kitchen was small, tucked in a corner, where Rio sat at one of two chairs at the tiny table.
The minutes passed as Rio sat silently, her leg moving steadily under the table. It was a long while before there was sound outside the apartment door: a small, metallic click. A key. The black door swung open with a sigh, and there stood the apartment owner.
Rio shot to her feet, her hands braced on the table, her eyes flashing.
“Agatha,” she said quietly, but with venom.
The witch pressed her eyes closed, opened them again. “Rio-”
She was cut off.
“-I asked you not to go, Agatha.” Rio slammed a fist into the table, wood crunching from the impact. “I fucking begged you not to go on this fool’s errand,” she said, glaring.
“You know I had to go. You know I had to,” Agatha replied, her own anger simmering in the harsh edges of her words. She hadn’t moved from the doorway. Her voice was low, strained.
“That’s the thing! You didn’t have to.”
“We talked about this. This is how I get to where I need to be, power wise.”
“You don’t need to be anywhere. You’ve got the power of witch upon witch upon witch!”
“Rio-” Agatha was cut off by a burst of coughing. One hand was braced on the door frame, while the other clutched her side. She stumbled, falling forwards.
Despite her anger, Rio crossed the room in a few long strides. She knelt next to Agatha, searching her face. Her skin seemed a shade paler than normal.
“Agatha?”
The woman looked up, hair falling away from her face, and Rio saw that there was blood on her lips. Agatha didn’t answer, but clutched at the door frame weakly, trying to push herself upwards. She attempted to disguise her failure by smirking at Rio, waving her away with one hand. The other hand? It never left her side, clutching the fabric of her dress tightly to her.
“What? I’m okay.”
“Agatha, what the hell happened?” Rio’s voice was low, urgent.
“Nothing, christ. I’m okay.”
“You’re coughing up blood, Agatha! That’s not normal-”
“You don’t mind a little blood, do you?”
“I do if you can’t stand!” Rio tried to take the hand at Agatha’s side, but the purple witch moaned in pain at the touch.
“Agatha... what’s wrong with your side?”
“What - ah – what makes you think there’s something wrong with my – ah – side?”
Rio rolled her eyes at the predictable and shameless gaslighting. “Agatha...” she warned again.
“Aren’t you pissed at me? Just leave, I’ll be fine.” Agatha’s words were followed by another bout of coughing.
“Alright, that’s enough. We can bicker later.” Rio scooped the woman gently from the floor, cradling her to her chest. Agatha’s head settled against her shoulder, despite her mumbled protests. She groaned with the movement and Rio frowned, settling her on the bed.
She watched blood trickle from the corner of the woman’s mouth with a strange feeling in her stomach.
Rio drew Agatha’s arm away from her side ever so slowly, trembling as the fabric bunched there began to pull away to reveal a jagged tear in her gown. The wound wasn’t visible yet, but she could see the blood drenching the fabric and Agatha’s hand.
“Shit, Agatha.”
Her knife slashed at the fabric there, separating the top of the gown from the skirt to free Agatha’s torso.
“You lost a lot of blood. Why didn’t you heal yourself?” Rio asked urgently.
“Couldn’t,” Agatha spat, groaning.
Rio paused as she viewed the leering gash in Agatha’s side tiptoeing up her ribcage. The edges of the wound were faintly glowing...a luminescent green that seemed to have absorbed into the skin around the wound.
“How the hell did you get this?”
“I didn’t expect a delightfully poisoned knife," Agatha grunted. “Especially a poison not of this earth.”
“If you had just listened to me...” Rio began to bustle about the room from plant to plant, collecting.
“I’m fine!”
“This can kill witches, Agatha.”She plucked a few vines, moved onto the next plant.
“I mean, an hour later and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything. You’d be bright green right now.”
“I’d have had it- under – und-” her coughing started up again, more violently this time.
Rio cursed her heart for lurching in her chest. She was at Agatha’s side in a second, using her own sleeve to blot the blood from Agatha’s mouth.
“I don’t know about that, sweetheart,” she told her softly.
Agatha was unable to reply, out of breath from the coughing. Rio smoothed the waves of hair back from her forehead, damp with sweat. Agatha’s eyes fluttered, her face twisting left and right.
Rio frowned and placed the vines, leaves, and flowers she had collected on the bed. She squeezed nectar and pollen from a lilac flower onto the large leaf, then did the same with a pink flower. The vines were used to hold the leaf burrito together, to which she added several tiny orange flowers. Emerald green puffs of magic trickled from her palm and encircled the strange bundle, making it glow softly for a moment.
Rio scraped blood from Agatha’s palm onto the wrap, who barely seemed aware of her now, turning her head this way and that fitfully. Rio’s magic whisked the bundle to a grinder, where it quickly produced a murky paste. Agatha’s moans were low but pained. Rio began to apply the poultice to her wound, trying to put as little pressure on it as possible. Her efforts were in vain; Agatha’s screaming nerves sent her eyes rolling back into her head.
Rio kissed her forehead as unconsciousness overtook her. The healing would be taxing – she would need her rest. And Agatha was not known for her fondness for taking breaks. She couldn’t keep charging full steam ahead for days and days as Rio could – perks of being a cosmic entity. That didn’t stop the purple witch from unintentionally trying. The number of times that Agatha ran herself into the ground from a lack of necessities was quite frankly absurd. When this happened, on the run from sleep, food, and water, Agatha would promptly pass out. And, like a dark shadow, Rio was always there to catch her. She secretly like how peaceful Agatha looked, tumbling gently into her arms.
It intrigued her that such a powerful woman could be felled so easily. Agatha’s vulnerabilities, her hidden fragility, were the only human frailties she could abide. Weakness typically confused and disgusted her. But not Agatha’s. Not even as the blood trailed from her mouth, her hair damp and matted, and her side an open wound. Never Agatha.
That was why Rio was sure that Agatha was her heart.
She paced around the room as Agatha remained unconscious. Agatha lay still, her form serene. Rio rarely saw her like that – serene. Her purple witch always slept fitfully. She used her magic to lift Agatha to the center of the bed so as not to disturb her. She waited for the poultice to do its work, wrapping a white bandage around Agatha’s torso. She removed Agatha’s shoes and changed her bloody clothes with a snap of her fingers, a loose nightgown in deep violet shades now swaddling her unconscious form.
Then she continued pacing. She looked down at her hands. They were shaking. What the hell?
Was she...afraid? It was not an emotion she was familiar with. Pacing it away did not seem to be working. Agatha’s brush with death had shocked her. It was rare that the witch needed any help at all. And of the hundreds of thousands of meaningless deaths she had brought, this would be the only one that affected her.
Further proof that Rio could not give her heart to another if she tried. It belonged solely to Agatha Harkness.
Once she collected a soul for death, she sent them to the next life – a place she couldn’t visit. Sending Agatha away – that was something she could not do. The prospect had jarred her. She had been ready to be angry with Agatha; to berate her for her foolishness and audacity; to affirm the failure of the witch’s mission. Instead, she was met with a heavily injured witch. She tried not to consider the fact that if she hadn’t been waiting there, her employment would have summoned her there shortly.