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When they teach the children of grief, they explain sadness and tears and love that hits brick walls. Sometimes, you cannot follow. Sometimes, it just isn’t your time yet. It won’t be your time until Lady Death appears and tells you so. It’s not over until the mockingjay sings. She is silent. Her footsteps are drumbeats – the Witches’ Road is a circle. With Death, there is Life. There is growth. She is a symphony, if you would only bother to listen. (A witch with purple in her veins and a telltale lack of regret listened, and she was the first to do so.)
When they teach the children of grief – inevitable, inevitable grief – they do not speak of heaviness, of a sleep resistant fatigue, of shaking shoulders and bodies gone cold, gone stiff. They leave the children innocent, unmarked. Agatha Harkness sends her son out the door before she strikes, viper-like. Arguments are hushed, behind closed doors. They leave the children innocent – we all do.
Trees stand tall. Brothers and sisters and lovers are separated. Mothers hear their children’s screams and they gain miraculous strength. They did not call Wanda Maximoff, in all her glory, a miracle – no one in their right mind would. Trees are felled and burned. When you write on your clean, pressed paper, think of these things. Breathe in your clean, smokeless air and take your gifts with two, sticky hands. I do not choke on dust, and I hold such a thing, clench my hands around it, and believe myself lucky.
Maybe, if you’ve been following along, jumping on the stepping stones of the path I have laid out before you, you will know of my brother, my dear, dear brother. Pietro ran until he couldn’t, and his sister, left tragically behind by a boy too fast for his own good, didn’t drown but felt like she did. Trains run on the same tracks. The old are reborn new. Tommy ran until he couldn’t. His brother, left tragically behind by a boy too fast for his own good, didn’t drown but felt like he did.
He walked in circles, drove around the block, and didn’t run. Billy learned not to leave people behind, to hold onto the past and not let go. (Wanda learned the same twisted lesson, and they called her a terrorist, a monster, a murderer. They did not call her a mother, or a lover, or a sister. They did not call her a friend and they did not call her broken. Billy’s old babysitter taught him how to hide from them; his mother never finished her lessons).
Here is the moral of the story: Sometimes, boys die.
Let’s go back to my brother – he’ll die, one day, and either I’ll grieve him, or him, me. Sometimes, boys just die. A child fell victim to the waves and lost his last breath unable to see the sky. He was not Wanda Maximoff.
Who do you love? Do you have brothers, sons, nephews, cousins? Sisters, daughters, aunts, nieces, dear friends? Are there children playing hopscotch on the corner of your street? Did they dress up for Halloween, and did your heart ache for your own lost days?
Let’s draw lines in the sand, let’s do it now. Think of the one you love best, you love fiercest, you love dearest. I don’t always love my brother well, but I always try to. Think of tender, bubbling love, and then think of raging, righteous anger. Where are your lines? Where would you stop? What would you do?
There was a boy. He did not drown, and his name did not end in Maximoff. He liked to skip, sing, and dance in the sunshine. He connected the stars to form hearts and remembered to give his mother kisses. The pigeons were his greatest adversaries and he’d been making flower crowns longer than he’d had tangible memories. He had no brothers and no sisters, but he was not lonely.
This boy’s name was Nicholas. In the many years that followed, the scribes would erase that name, and the Harkness boy would live on through whispers and warning tales. He would serve as a reference point for absent fathers and hassled mothers. At least they hadn’t sold their baby off to the highest bidder – and the deals got more and more ludicrous each time. A baby for glory, for power, for forbidden spells, for purple turning darker and darker, closer and closer to black, for a kiss, for an eyeball of purity, for immortality, for a promise, for a whisper, for beauty, for a single woolly mammoth hair.
They swept Nicholas away from the story, but here is where it started. His mother loved him too much, and she was rather good at being selfish (we never learn – we’ve been here before).
Little Nicky learned to follow the deer, run fast, swim across rivers, balance on tree stumps, hide in the places people forgot to look, and protect what was his. He cawed back at the crows and danced beside fires. Nicholas Scratch’s existence was quiet but full of love – a rhythmic life that burned like the silent, blazing stars up above. He loved his mother most in the world.
Agatha taught her son, her boy, her baby, lessons about survival, and they wouldn’t matter. She studied and studied and absorbed power. They slept inside protection circles. Nicky never went anywhere without his pocket knife. Agatha kissed him when he bled and held him while he slept and tried not to think about the end that they were racing towards.
Agatha spun stories under golden skies. Nicky twisted her long hair into little braids that she would praise endlessly. Sometimes, her tales were overheard. The townspeople were eager to swallow sweet endings – later, Agatha would have a way of twisting the endings into the bitterest, least expected outcome. When Nicky grinned, lopsided and toothy, she allowed herself to be kind.
Agatha told bright stories in cold winters and gave Nicky a legacy beyond herself. The townsfolk would imagine Sir Nicholas as elderly, frail and silver spun. They thought that wisdom was collected with years given. Agatha Harkness knew that it was children that had the most wisdom of all.
So there it is. There is Nicholas Scratch’s story. It is golden and rain-washed and raw. It ended with a woman screaming to the heavens and started with her screaming in the rain. Lady Death did all she could, and it was not enough. The laws of nature bowed to Nicholas Scratch, but he was just a boy. All the boys die, eventually. Billy Maximoff won back his brother, but he would lose him again one day.
Nicky had done nothing to deserve his end, but Lady Death did not discriminate, and a visit from her was not earned. The only exception in history – and the Lady has existed for a very long time, remember – was Agatha Harkness. This boy had the good fortune to be that witch’s son – or perhaps the rotten luck, depending on how you tilted your head.
He had been a sweet child. The flowers that grew on his grave would be bright, but he wouldn’t be there to see them. There was kindness in his bones. His mother had knelt before him, once, and said “you are strong. You are kind. You are allowed to cry,” and he had lived by that rule his entire, short life. He knew many things, and none of them had saved him. They stripped his identity from him, but Agatha kept it memorised in the secretive shadows of her head.
Nicky died like those boys playing on your street corners will. Nicky died like you will, like I will. He died six years too late and far, far too soon. He had been an everyday tragedy.
Some of Agatha’s kindness was buried with him, but not quite so deep that it couldn’t resurface, years later. Someone had given Billy – kind, rain-washed Billy – a shovel and told him to get digging.
When Nicky and Agatha said goodnight, it wasn’t noteworthy. Treasure each of your goodbyes – you never know which is the last. The night came and left and it took the boy with it. The stars watched, but a sleeping mother did not. Protection circles did little against the Lady.
When Lady Death appeared, she was silent. She was here to collect the little songbird. He woke and listened, intently, to the mournful melody the Lady possessed that day. He gave his mother a final kiss that she would not remember, but he would, and so would the Lady. When he took her hand, a tense natural system sighed in relief. Rio Vidal did not feel unfamiliar to Nicholas Scratch – it was a little like coming home, and a little like hugging that favourite relative that you haven’t seen in so long.
Agatha Harkness did not fear Lady Death. This was her son. He was not afraid.
When the violet witch rose with the sun, her son’s corpse had gone cold, gone stiff. Her shoulders shook and the heaviness crashed down. The sun watched on.
She was too late.