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Death is an inescapable principle of the universe. Everything expires eventually. Death herself always knew this. She had seen more people die than you could ever even imagine beginning to calculate. She has been there for deaths of countless lives, leading their souls into the afterlife; wherever that might be for them.
Death was never born, or created, she just always was . She is a part of the universe that has always existed, and as long as there is life, she will always remain.
Across ages, people have created myths and stories about her. No matter if they tried to create stories of mercy and peace, deep down they are always scared of her. Still, Death never faltered.
Wait.
Please.
Time.
No.
Death spent millenniums without fault, and she would spend millenniums more.
She never flinches, not at the sight of cruelty, not at the sight of mourning, not even when she has to take a child.
You were made from-
Death never flinches.
She used to have fun with it, terrifying souls with her face, making jokes out of the situation, otherwise doing it 120 times a minute would just get devastatingly boring. Now, she doesn’t see the fun in it as often. Mortals are boring, blank creatures with uninteresting experiences. They lived short, insignificant lives, hoping to leave a mark on the universe. But if even Death didn’t remember them, who would?
My love.
My scar.
Death doesn’t remember any of them.
One day, Death feels the loss of another soul. It feels…different than usual. But she doesn’t have the motivation to question it, not anymore. She pulls out her knife, twisting it once before stabbing the air in front of her, cutting open the barriers of the universe to help the lost soul find its way. She appears in a lounge room, two figures of an elderly man before her. One, sitting on the couch, his eyes closed and his face pale. Standing in front of the couch, is the same man, staring down at his own corpse.
“It’s time to go,” Death states, it is her classic line straight to the point. Her voice is deep, almost monster-ish, there was nothing human about it.
Slowly, the man turns to face her. Even in death, he is still old, and so it meant he had to take little steps in order to rotate, but when his eyes finally met Death’s face, he gasps. It isn’t an unusual reaction. The body of a woman, the face of a skeleton, rows of teeth forming across her face, a hole for a nose in the centre of her face.
She couldn’t be bothered to tease him for his reaction. Not anymore.
“Yes you’re dead, yes I am Death, yes you’re going to the afterlife,” she answers for him. The expected answers for the expected questions. She then gestures to the door, where a cut in the matter of the universe was, awaiting the man to enter and find, whatever it is he desired to find.
She expects him to walk through, maybe ask questions about his loved ones, she has seen a lot of people do different things. What she doesn’t expect however, is for him to utter a single word.
“Rio?”
Death freezes.
Time goes by so fast for an entity like death, a century feels like a second. But here, now? It feels like time elongates tenfold. As Death stares into the old man’s brown eyes. There is something mildly familiar about them.
No.
Death doesn’t remember any of them.
“Rio,” he repeats, not a question this time, more just a calm realisation. An understanding.
Instinctively, Death’s mind delves into his soul. Her mind gets quickly clouded. Two souls interlinked. William. William and…
Death doesn’t remember any of them.
“Billy,” she whispers, so quiet that if this were any old man he wouldn’t have heard it, but somehow Billy does.
The man smiles at the recognition.
“It’s really you, I knew it probably would come to this, but I never imagined it properly,”
His voice is old and used. He’s lived a life, a long and full life.
Has it really been that long since she last saw him?
She began to think back to where she last saw him, but immediately tears herself out of those thoughts. Rio’s thoughts. She isn’t Rio anymore. Rio hated him. Death doesn’t hate anyone, no one is worth the time.
“Don’t call me that,” she suddenly says, and he almost flinches. Death can see the power in him, still. The son of the Scarlet Witch, strong enough to break the rules of the universe.
But not strong enough to pay the price for it.
Billy pauses, before his face seems to gain some understanding. His gaze turns to pity. Death wants to kill him again for the sake of it.
“It’s time to go,” Rio repeats, more forceful this time. Her voice still has the demonic tone.
“Is this how hastily it always goes?” He questions, and Death feels a surge of annoyance through her body.
That, however, causes her a quick pause. She feels . She isn’t supposed to feel anymore. Death doesn’t remember, Death doesn’t live, and Death doesn’t feel.
“I am Death, your time has come to go. This normally goes a lot faster when the corpse is less stubborn,”
Billy doesn’t laugh.
“You really always take this Death stuff so seriously, don’t you? Are you saying that you’re not Rio anymore?”
“That form has been retired,” she replies, coldly.
He looks her up and down, taking in her skeletal form. Why is she letting this elderly man get under her skin so much? He means nothing to her.
“Did you collect Teddy too?” He finally asks, and now Death can actually answer the questions she expects. She has no idea who Teddy is, and she doesn’t think Rio did either. Good.
“If a soul dies, I take them,” she pauses, but is strangely unable to stop herself from continuing, “most of the time,”
Billy nods, comprehending, “you’re still mad about that. It isn’t like I meant to take William’s body, I was a child,”
“A child too powerful to exist. A child too stubborn to surrender himself.”
Death doesn’t know what is coming over her. She had spent so long shoving these feelings away, disassociating herself from the lives of these mortals, but then one former teenager dies and it all begins to unravel.
“I’m here now, aren’t I?”
Death feels the need to argue, a tension rising through her. Anger, hurt. All that she’s ever tried to block out. She closes her eyes for a second longer than necessary, she doesn’t usually need to blink in this form.
As if reading her mind, Billy speaks again.
“It’s not my fault she took my place,”
Death’s eyes burst open, as she reaches for the knife on her belt as if on instinct.
“Don’t.” She spits out, furious.
Billy’s elderly eyes widen, but he doesn’t take a step back. Death supposes he spent most of his life in front of danger, the hero types always tried to act strong even in death. Yet if it weren’t for them, she would never have had as many souls to collect on a day to day basis.
It takes Death a few seconds, however, to realise that she had not spoken the word in her usual voice. No, instead it came out like the one she wasn’t anymore. It sounded like Rio.
“Rio,” Billy repeats, voice softening, “I’m sorry,”
“No you’re not,” Death responds… Rio responds.
“Agatha saved my life,”
Agatha.
Death remembers her.
Rio could never forget her.
The name hangs in the air like an unwelcome echo, and Death’s mental barricade falters, her mind suddenly rushing through centuries of memories that she had buried for decades. Agatha’s voice, her smile, all of it comes rushing back like a river that Death is unable to prevent. The hollow void in Rio’s chest aches, a pain where there should be emptiness. Agatha , who was once everything.
Agatha , who was once hers.
Rio just stares at him. Billy Maximoff, in old age. The boy who got to live, and die in old age, because Agatha saw something in him that wasn’t there. He doesn’t look anything like him. He could never be him.
My mother needs me home.
“You didn’t deserve her sacrifice,” Rio practically hisses, her grip on the knife on her hip tightening, “I was there for you . You should have been the one who died. People can’t just trade bodies whenever they want. What you did was disgusting, and you deserved to pay,”
Billy tenses, as if knowing this was coming, “I know, and…and, I’m sorry. I regret what happened, but I was just a kid, and I didn’t want to die. And then she tricked me, and I said that stuff to her, and I didn’t mean to make her react so suddenly-,” Billy explains, before trailing off. Despite his old age, he still speaks with the same tone and emotion as he did when he was a teenager.
Death pauses, confused. She didn’t understand what he meant. That stuff? From her memory…no, she didn’t have any memory of that day, of any deaths. Except yes, she does remember, and Billy never spoke to Agatha after she turned him in. Agatha had been dumb and turned on her heel, saving a boy simply because she reminded him of another. Billy never spoke to Agatha.
Billy, somehow seems to sense her confusion despite her skeletal expression, and he looks down at the ground in an apparent shame.
“What did you say to her?” Rio whispers, voice taut.
Billy shakes his head, muttering usual old-man mumbles.
“ What did you say to her!?” She yells, her voice reverting to her low, Green Witch voice.
“I- I-,” Billy stutters, “I just asked her how Nicholas died,”
Rio goes utterly still, the grip on her knife loosening slightly. The words pierce through her like an invisible blade. Nicky.
“You what?” Rio questions. Her voice is only in a whisper, but the fury in it is clear. A slight black fog begins to swarm around behind her, reminding Billy who he is dealing with. His wrinkled face grows pale, and he avoids eye contact.
“I was scared, when she…she betrayed me like that. I thought maybe it might make her want to discuss more, come to an agreement or a solution or-,”
“You thought Agatha Harkness would want to discuss an agreement with you?”
“I-, I don’t know. It’s been a long time, I can’t remember as much as I used to,”
Rio takes in a shaky breath, unnecessary for her, but it still feels necessary to do now.
“She saved your life on that road. Multiple times . She begged me not to take you after you got a tiny scratch. And you had the audacity to make her relive the very thing that nearly destroyed her the first time?” Rio’s gaze is sharp as steel, her thoughts and memories subconsciously falling back into place after trying so hard to push them away for so many years.
“I know I can’t change what happened, I do regret what happened. I didn’t mean to create the road, I didn’t mean for Sharon, Alice, Lilia and Agatha to die. I know that you’re fine with people dying, except when it comes to Agatha I guess, but I do regret it.” He pauses, leaving Rio to just icily stare at him for a few moments.
“But Agatha saved me, and she helped me save Tommy in that final trial. She saw something in me, worth saving. And maybe I didn’t deserve it, but somehow for some reason, Agatha believed in me,”
“She didn’t believe in you.” Rio snaps suddenly, “You just reminded her of him,”
The memories pour over Rio, burning and stinging. Agatha’s cries when Rio showed up the first time. Agatha’s furious sobs when she faced Rio for the first time after she did what she had to.
I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
Rio had thought she was doing the right thing…taking him at night.
And now she stands in front of Billy, the same boy who somehow convinced Agatha that he was similar to Nicky. The boy who came knocking on Agatha’s door wanting to find a road that doesn’t exist and then put her through hell the entire journey and let her die because he was too weak to pay the price for his destruction . Rio could never see Nicholas in that boy. He was nothing like their son.
Billy opens his mouth, before closing it again. He looks away, shoulders slumping as he looks down at his physical body in the physical world. He sighs.
“Maybe,” he murmurs, “maybe I was just a stand in for Nicholas. Someone to save because she couldn’t save him,”
At this, Rio cuts him off.
“Do not talk to me about him.” Rio spits, voice wavering for the first time since her final fight with Agatha, all those years ago. She knows she was the one who brought him up, but the mention of his name coming from the figure of Billy, who lived a long life and died of old age, makes her furious. She finds herself almost forgetting where they are, the in-between. She should be throwing him into whatever afterlife he ends up in, but she’s more Rio than Death now, and so instead she stands tall.
“It’s not my fault that you had to take Nicholas from her. It’s not my fault he couldn’t do what I did.” Billy hastily responds, as if he had been thinking it this whole time but been too terrified to say it.
Rio almost snarls like an animal, despite the fact she already looks like she’s snarling from her bared teeth.
Rio hates how much Billy had clearly considered this. He somehow knows that that’s what made Rio hate him from the second she appeared on that godforsaken road. He stole a body, and then stole another for his brother, and yet Death herself hadn’t found a way to give Nicky more than six years with his mother .
I will hate you forever.
Rio had nodded. She knew Agatha would keep her word.
Rio’s hands clench into fists, the dark smoke behind her growing to surround her more than previously. Billy’s eyes seem to follow it, but there’s no clear reaction on his end.
“You got a choice. He didn’t . He was innocent, unlike you, or me, or Agatha ,”
“I know. I’ve already told you, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, Rio. There’s nothing I can do about it now,” Billy explains, and Rio takes a step closer, as if she were analysing him.
She gets into the old man’s personal space, looking over him, trying to compare him to the teenager she had known for only a day, so long ago, yet who had ruined everything. The boy who had stirred emotions in Agatha that were previously buried by her own heartache.
He was still in there, but yet, for the first time, Rio can see just how tired he is, how worn down he’s become.
“Do you think you can just regret it all away?” Rio hisses, close to his ear, causing him to flinch. “You sacrificed the only person who saw something in you,” she pauses, “do you understand what you did?”
Billy swallows, looking down at the ground, before nodding slowly as if accepting an approaching sentence.
“I know I can’t regret it all away,” he whispers, “but it’s the only thing I have left to offer you. I’m already dead, aren’t I?” he shrugs, before continuing, “and you’re right, Agatha saw something in me. She saw past my mixture of souls and the lack of control I had over my magic, and she might have just seen me as a stand-in for her – your – son, but she accepted me, and she told me to never be ashamed.”
Rio stiffens at his words, taking a slow and casual step out of his personal space.
“She didn’t care about the harm I caused…” he pauses, clearly considering his next words carefully, before finally deciding he has nothing else to lose “just like how she never seemed to care about the harm Death herself brings,”
Rio swallows, fidgeting with the blade hilt on her hip.
“She somehow saw the beauty in us,” Billy continues, after Rio didn’t immediately destroy his soul in the previous sentence. Then he lets out a dry, breathless laugh, “funny to think that I’d get all that from the infamous Witch Killer,”
Rio just stares at him, wordlessly. His words hang in the air, and Rio’s memory flickers through the times when Agatha had held her so gently, when Agatha had never once flinched away from her. From their very first meeting, Agatha wasn’t just unafraid of Death, but she loved her. And then she loved Death’s child with her whole heart and soul.
Billy’s voice is what pulls Rio out of her memories, “and I’m sorry to say I didn’t see the same in her, at the time. In either of you. But I see it now. It might’ve taken me 80 years, but she was just a grieving mother. And you are just…you just do your job. And you both love each other, right? I didn’t mean to come between you both. I never meant for any of it to end the way it did.”
“ Loves. You’re a little late with that one. I’ve already told you that I’m Lady Death, and Agatha…she wouldn’t -- not anymore,” Rio pauses, shaking herself out of it, “not that that is at all relevant to your demise,”
Billy ignores the final sentence, furrowing his bushy white eyebrows, “what do you mean? The last time I saw you both she kissed you. She could have surrendered in any way, but she chose to do that. I mean, if I was the one dying I would not have kissed you, sorry to say. That has to mean something? Unless something has changed with your meetings in the…afterlife?”
Rio’s non-existent chest tightens. She feels the sting of her last memory, before her form was retired. Agatha’s lips against her own, so determined, and passionate. The gentle finger ran along Rio’s cheek to wipe away her tears as her soul floated upwards. Rio shudders, thinking of what she lost, how much she tried to forget and bury deep beneath the billions of souls she’s had to lead to the afterlife.
The sensation is too raw, almost too much. She has spent so long controlling all of her thoughts, but now it is as if she can physically feel Agatha’s warm hand against her cheek, where it so often ended up. She hadn’t realised it before, at least not fully comprehending it, but that was the last time she felt a mortal’s touch. It felt fitting, while also bringing forth an undeniable ache.
Billy looks at Death’s face, before breathing in a sharp breath and blinking a few times.
Rio is confused, glancing around in her periphery before she realises. She brings a hand to her face, and instead of bone, she feels the soft skin of the woman she once was. She looks into a nearby mirror on the wall, for the first time in decades, seeing the form that Agatha had fallen in love with. Her finger grazes her own cheek, right where Agatha’s last graze had touched.
“You haven’t seen her, have you?” Billy whispers, somehow once again understanding before Rio can express any of it, not that she would.
I don’t want to see your face.
Rio doesn’t respond for a moment, still shocked by her own appearance. So familiar, and so foreign all at once. Finally, still looking at her reflection, she watches herself shake her head.
“I made her a deal,” she explains, “I get a body, and she never has to see my face ever again.”
“You made a deal when she was mad at you, and have kept that promise for decades?” Billy asks, in disbelief.
Rio clenches her jaw, turning to face him once more.
“I couldn’t keep my other promises. Not about Nicky. Not about staying away from her after his death. She probably doesn’t even think I kept…the promises in my vows,” Rio says, voice lowering to a whisper on the last part of the sentence, “so yes, I keep this one.”
“And you really think she meant it? When she said that?”
“I know Agatha. She meant it.”
I will hate you forever.
Billy shakes his head, “you’re wrong. Anyone with eyes could tell she loved you, Rio. She can be hurt, and still love you. And you loved her, and it’s clear you still do,”
Rio’s fingers twitch. She has spent so long hiding behind her identity of Death. She isn’t sure that what Billy’s saying is true anymore. She isn’t Rio, not anymore.
“I am not the person she loves anymore. She died with her.”
Billy sighs, before gesturing to the mirror.
“I think it’s clear you are still her,”
She finds herself looking in the mirror again, and instead of seeing Death, or Rio…she sees Nicky. The features of Rio that were reflected in their son. She tears her eyes away.
“I think it’s time for you to go,” she states.
Billy doesn’t seem surprised by the shift, just takes a deep breath and nods.
Billy takes a few steps towards the universal cut in the middle of the room, before turning once back at his corpse. He offers himself a small smile, before turning to Rio.
“Agatha loves you. I think she even loved you before you were Rio. I’m sure she misses you,” he pauses, “I’m sure they both do,”
Rio feels a slight flicker of warmth, foreign in comparison to the years of cold and silence. Agatha had once said to Billy, never be ashamed . What Billy didn’t know was that Agatha had said that to Rio a century before. The first time was after the first time Agatha had touched Death so softly that she flinched. The second time was when Rio had just found out Agatha was pregnant. She was scared that a child of Death would destroy everything, in some sense it did, but seeing Agatha with their son for those six years…Rio would never change it for the world if it meant Nicky never existed. Agatha had grabbed her by the wrist, and held her so gently as she stared into her eyes.
Never be ashamed.
I love you.
“I never got to say goodbye, not really,” Rio suddenly says, the same words Agatha had said to Rio all those centuries ago. Rio didn’t mean to say it. She didn’t intend to speak, but they spill from her, and she can’t take them back. Not now. Not when they’ve already filled the space between her and Billy, between her and everything she’s been running from for so long.
Billy looks at her, expression clearly empathetic.
“You should know better than anyone that Death doesn’t mean the end. You never had to say goodbye, because you were always going to see each other again,”
Rio scoffs at the cheesiness, but deep down she still feels that warmth.
She wants to dismiss it, but Billy’s words cling to her, stirring a…hope…that she had thought disappeared when Nicholas died, and later been buried alongside Agatha.
Finally, Billy nods slowly, tilting his head towards his future eternity.
Rio nods, and as they walk towards it, Rio turns one final time to face Billy.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “if she had to die for anyone, I suppose she could have picked a worse kid,”
Billy lets out a breathless laugh, smiling.
“If she could have loved anyone, she could have picked a worse cosmic entity,”
Before stepping into the almost portal-like hole in the universe, Billy looks over once at Rio. So many people liked to spare one last glance at her, so the last thing they remember is a figure, a real entity, but the way Billy looks at her, is full of understanding. She still doesn’t see how he reminded Agatha of Nicky, but the look he gives her is one of quiet understanding. It’s different, and unfamiliar, but Rio lets herself appreciate it for what it is.
Death might not feel anything, but Rio does. And in this moment, she feels the weight of everything she’s carried for so long begin to wear away. Just slowly. She knows it will take time after millenia of acting only as Death, and the decades of time since Agatha died, and the ache of all that she has lost is still present, but now it’s guiding her, as if pulling her towards somewhere – someone – she has been avoiding for so long. As Rio leads Billy into the unknown, toward his peace, she thinks that maybe, just maybe she’ll find hers one day soon too.