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Everything heaven sent
Must burn out in the end
I promised you
— “Goodbye, Evergreen” by Sufjan Stevens
⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆
“You do this, and I will hate you forever.”
Never has the voice of a mortal so echoed in Death’s head.
And never has she more considered herself Rio, one who takes a human form, dresses in their clothes, and speaks their language, than when she is with Agatha Harkness.
When Death comes to collect, she keeps some distance; there’s no need to grow too close, so even as she may take a hand, ferry a soul across the veil, she doesn’t allow herself to grow attached.
With Agatha, of course, this rule has been broken a thousand times, and will be broken a thousand more. There is attachment there, love; there was never any other option.
“Please let him live. Please, my love!”
Rio sees herself in the gentle slope of Nicky’s nose. In the joining of his cheek and chin; the way his small lips meet, the way he smiles but also the way he frowns.
Rio watches him; she watches them both. As mother and son wander these old forests, moving up and down, across the seaboard and into the mountainous territory that marks the borders of this New World’s depths, Death trails them. Agatha is beautiful, alive; the radiating power that had first attracted Rio to her remains and yet it is joined by a maternal love that Rio has never seen before. She’s beautiful, and her son is beautiful — their son is beautiful.
How could Rio stay away?
"I can offer only time."
A year, perhaps, she had thought. She’d allow Agatha time to hold him, to nurse him. To give him shelter with her body in the wind and rain. It would be a good year, though it would also be one out of sync with the natural order of things. Nicky throws the balances off, Rio can feel it already, seeding into the loam, and yet, a year is what she will give.
And then the boy pushes himself up on his little legs, waddles about in forest clearings, and Agatha’s magic surrounds him, protects him — from all things but Death. And Rio thinks: perhaps two years is better.
No more than three. Allow him to grow his small vocabulary, to move from Mama to trees to apple, forming a world around him with language. He places together sentences and Agatha cheers him on, and Rio smiles from above. She hovers in the veil, unable to be seen or sensed by either (though Agatha’s head occasionally tilts; her eyes scrape the surface of the air around her, searching as if she can sense… and yet, it’s impossible). Rio watches as her little boy, something crafted out of death, birth, and that most vulnerable thing, the human body, begins to make for himself a life. Something he was never supposed to have.
The song that Agatha hummed to help him sleep in his infancy begins to grow along with him, sprouting words and a melody, their voices mingling as he makes it past three, into four, and Rio knows she’s running out of time, that the cosmic order of things is being displaced by this child. He is not right; he should not be. He draws in breaths, his feet hit the earth, he learns to climb trees and to balance on his mother’s shoulders. When he laughs, it dances through the veil.
Perhaps it is the parts of herself that Rio sees in him that keep him alive for so long. He is the essence of her: vibrant and alive, the cycles of the earth. She may be thought of as death, but Rio has always considered herself to be its opposite, and this boy proves it. Rio is amazed by him, finding that she cannot look away, cannot stray too far from these two.
Her family.
She even finds herself, on occasion, humming their tune.
“Walk, walk, walk the road
We walk the winding road”
When Nicky is just barely four, he is bitten by a snake. Rio doesn’t see it happen, but when she comes to check on them that evening, Nicky is distressed.
“Mama, it can’t hurt me now, right?” he asks in a trembling child voice. Rio moves closer than she usually dares herself to, and Agatha’s eyes meet hers for only the briefest of moments as she searches the trees. But Agatha blinks and looks back to her son, and Rio stays where she is, frozen, invisible.
“That’s right. I sucked the venom.” Agatha makes a sucking noise with her mouth, then mimes spitting on the ground. “It’s all gone, Nicky.” She rubs a hand across his hair, pushes him gently down into the blankets.
“Use your purple?” he asks.
Agatha hesitates for a moment, but lifts her hands, pulls the swirling purple magic from her palms, and presses her fingers to the wound for a quiet moment before pulling his pant leg down over it. “All better. Sleep now, my Nicky.”
Rio’s black heart beats, and she waits. Is this the moment? All of the time she can give?
Agatha sings their son to sleep and he crumples against her side. She draws her arm around him, allows her own head to rest against the earth. She knows that if this bite is to kill him, there is nothing her magic can do to stop it from happening. Rio watches the calculations move through her mind, flicking across her face.
She whispers into Nicky’s hair, her lips pressed to his scalp. “Not yet. Please, my love. Not now.” She is speaking to Rio: begging her. And Rio wants badly to appear, to crouch next to them and lay down on their blankets, to smell them and wrap her arms around them.
Instead, she waits. Agatha doesn’t want to see her, would only grow more scared. And Rio has a decision to make. Is this truly Nicky’s time to die? Already?
She waits until Agatha moves into an unsettled sleep, and for a being that has existed so long, the moments feel as though they tick by slower than ever before.
Night settles in thick and the woods are more silent than they should be; the animals, insects, even the wind can sense that Rio is here, waiting, and they all skirt the clearing. Rio dares to move closer.
Is this it?
She doesn’t touch him, not right away. She just gets close enough that she can see him, truly see him, and the venom that still circulates through his veins. Agatha may have thought she’d saved him, but she has left some of the venom still in his body. After all, as nature plods forward, there is nothing even a witch so powerful as Agatha can do to stop it. Rio knows that it won’t be long before it sickens him, and that if she were to leave, come back in just a few hours, maybe a day, it would be time to take him.
And wouldn’t it be nice? To have Nicky for herself now. All these years of watching him with Agatha as she gets to hold him, teach him, share with him, laugh with him. Sing with him. And Rio, for whom loneliness never meant anything before, forced to remain on the sidelines. Tucked away. She could wake him gently now, take his hand. He would come with her and be done with all of this.
But Rio’s gaze lingers then on Agatha’s face. So concerned in sleep; twisted, her eyebrows furrowed. And Rio closes her eyes against the sight.
Her fingers come to hover just above Nicky’s chest, rising and falling lightly in the sleep of a child. If she were to wake him and bring him away with her, where he could be hers forever, Agatha would wake to a cold body. Her Nicky, gone.
What has nature ever cared about fairness before?
Rio breathes in the crisp air of the forest. Breathes out decay. There is a natural order of all things. And there is Agatha Harkness.
Instead of touching Nicky, Rio moves to bend over the leg with the bite. She takes in a breath, her lips just above the bite mark which she can see through his pant leg, drawn down over it to cover him, protect him from the cool of night.
Rio pulls the poison into herself, drawing it out from his body, his veins. The only one who can save him is the one who is supposed to take him.
She feels it within herself, holds it there; when she is sure that it’s all gone from him, she raises back up and, just as Agatha had done hours earlier, she spits: the venom flies to the ground, dissolving as it goes.
And Rio disappears.
“To all that's foul and fair”
Nicky grows from there like they say weeds do — quickly. Rio loves those things that people call weeds — the unsightly tangles, the toadstools, all of the flora of the forest floor, and while many of the people in these new colonies are ascetic, don’t understand the magic that’s around them, in fact seem to try all they can to supplant it, Agatha and Nicky are not like them.
Rio trails them to collect the bodies. As she comes across yet another coven of witches, all drained of their magic, hollowed-out on the ground like things long since dead, she wonders if these are gifts from her beloved.
Or, more likely, they are offerings: if you take these, will you leave me him? She can feel Agatha’s heart in the air, asking for more time, more time, and she knows that she is the thing that haunts her. When Agatha is afraid, it’s Death she’s afraid of.
Not Rio; not the one she fell in love with, loves still.
But Death.
Nicky turns five and begins to desire independence. He loves Agatha, clings to her more often than not, and yet he also wants to roam free. Freer than Agatha would have him — she keeps him close by, always watches him, knows that the thing that haunts her stalks him.
But he does find his ways of defying her, as all children do with their mothers. Though she is a witch, he is a little boy, and he can be sneaky.
He flits off in town one day while Agatha is arguing with a landlord over the price for a week’s stay. It’s a bitterly cold winter and Agatha cannot keep her son warm without four walls to contain a fire’s heat, though she is, as always, antsy about remaining in one place. She runs not just from the witches but from Death. She will keep running as long as she can.
Rio is not there; she is far away, dragging a soul from its bed in Spain. But she hears something sharp shatter the veil: a child’s scream.
She is with him at once. Nicky. He’s on the road out of town, a gruff man holding him by the arm and dragging him toward a wagon, saying that he earns a fortune for every little orphan he finds.
Nicky is so little, he cannot think of words to deny this, to say that his mother is not far. He just screams, trying to pull free of the man’s grasp, but the hand that holds him is large and strong, muscles wrapping down his forearms.
If Agatha were here, she could kill him with a blast. Rio could come and collect the body. But Agatha is not here. For all her powerful ways, she is not here.
And Rio is.
She has only a moment to think of what to do, and hasn’t fully thought it through before she appears on the road in front of the man, cloaked in black as she has taken to doing these days, holding a hand out, signalling for him to stop. “Leave him,” she warns, and yet she begs him not to — wants him to defy her.
He does. “What would you do about it?” He continues to haul Nicky by the arm, and Nicky’s feet scrabble for purchase in the dirt. His face is turned away, so that he is still looking behind them, back down the road, toward the town, toward Agatha. His mama, his north star.
“Well,” Rio says with a shrug, “I suppose you give me no choice.” And with hardly a move of her hand, just a slight wave, as if shooing away a fly, she snaps the man’s neck.
He crumples onto the ground and Nicky pulls free, turning finally to face Rio.
And they are face to face: looking at each other, her eyes into his, his into hers.
And they are so, so like hers.
Before she can move or speak, she forces herself to disappear.
"I can offer only time."
Months pass and that bitter winter gives way to spring. The rivers flood as rain falls across the fertile ground, their snakes’ bellies swelling.
Rio hears Agatha warn Nicky many times to stay away from the riverbanks.
Rio spends her spring in this part of the world saving children. Those whose mothers have also warned them to stay away, but who don’t listen. Those who believe themselves immortal, as children do. Rio tires of dragging sopping souls from the rivers, and yet, it is the job. One by one by one, she dives in to reap them, to bring them to their reward — or not. She smiles when they ask where they’re going. She is perfectly kind and good. She is something nearing maternal.
And then it’s Nicky. Soul still within his body. She arrives immediately: he has slipped down a wet bank, she can see the marks where his feet dragged through the mud on the way down, and she knows that Agatha has taught him to swim, but in his panic, he forgets how to keep his head above water.
And in her panic, she forgets her job.
Rio materializes in the air, uses the body that Agatha loves, the one from which Nicky has been crafted, and dives into the water. Nicky screams, thrashes, and Rio goes to him, wraps her arms around his midsection. He gasps and spits water, all panic, and she holds him. His body is wet, wiggly. He is like a fish. He doesn’t want to be held onto, and Rio finds herself jealous: Agatha holds him each night, sleeps wrapped around him. He jumps into her arms, sits atop her shoulders. But from Rio’s grasp, he is trying to get away, even as she has saved him.
He spits out more water and manages, “Who are you?”
“Shhh.” Rio pushes wet hair from his face with a careful finger. “You’re safe.”
“Mama said not to talk to—”
“I’m not a stranger,” Rio replies with anger that surprises her. I’ve known you your whole life. I loved you at your birth. I gave you everything.
Nicky thrashes even still, and Rio swims to the bank, holding him afloat, doing it the manual way so as not to scare him even more. She could easily magic him to land, could dry his clothes off — but she doesn’t. She does it like this, slow and plodding. She moves through the water with the boy.
When they reach the river’s edge, he grasps onto a branch and pulls himself up on the bank. He looks back at her, there in the water, with uncertainty, fear in his gaze.
“I’m a friend,” Rio says, treading water needlessly. But she does her best to appear human, to be human, for a moment. To understand his fear and to allow it.
“Mama will—”
Rio raises a finger to her lips. “Shhh. I wouldn’t tell, if I were you.” If Agatha knew… Rio can feel the edges and pricks of her anger, theoretical as it is.
Nicky nods slowly, waits a beat, and then turns and runs, fast as he can, dodging trees and roots expertly, back to safety.
“All that’s bad is good”
It haunts her. The way that he looked at her. The way he fought to be released from her arms.
Nicky is hers, too, not just Agatha’s, and jealousy pushes her: she should take him now, to show that Agatha cannot have him alone, cannot keep him only for herself. And yet, as the sun moves across the sky again and again, as Nicky and Agatha’s lives go on and Nicky keeps the drowning and the woman who’d saved him to himself, she begins to circle his fear from a different angle in her mind.
She will have to take this boy. She has always been certain that she would shepherd him to the next place and there, he would be hers, and he’d come to know her, to love her.
But now — she is haunted in turn by him, by his fear of her.
She doesn’t think of it beforehand so much as it simply happens. He is restless tonight in the turn from spring to summer. The grass is still dewed in the mornings, but his days are heat, and his body retains the sun’s energy. He sleeps far from Agatha tonight, thrashing against some child’s nightmare, and Rio kneels next to him. Her fingers caress his cheek, thinking she may calm him before Agatha wakes and can do it herself; but his eyes fly open at the touch and lock to hers.
“Shhh.” Rio raises a finger to her lips, signaling his quiet.
Nicky is in that space between sleep and wake where he is not entirely startled; in that dawn, anything could happen. He looks at her with a mixture of his old fear and a new thing: curiosity.
“It’s you,” he says in his small voice, and Rio reflexively pushes a sweeter, deeper dream toward her beloved, who lays curled upon herself just feet away, at the other end of the blanket. Agatha’s fingers twitch but she does not wake.
“It’s me,” Rio replies, this voice rough from misuse. “You remember me.”
“You saved me.” Nicky sits up slowly, pushing himself away from the earth.
Rio nods. “What were you dreaming about?” The wet of the grass seeps into the fabric of her skirt. All so physical; so human.
Nicky frowns, screws up his face as if thinking. “I dreamed… I had to leave.” It seems to dawn on him as he speaks, the dream coming back. “I had to leave my Mama. She was sad.” He looks at Agatha, and Rio cannot follow his gaze, cannot look at the face she loves so well.
“That will happen,” Rio replies.
“Why?” Nicky’s gaze still rests upon the mother he knows.
“It has to happen.” Rio’s fingers lower, pluck a small purple flower from the earth. It seems to glow blue in the moonlight.
“Why?” Nicky has been all this lately: why, how, when? Agatha’s patience has been tested by his questions, Rio has been able to tell, and yet she has answered every one of them with care.
Rio attempts to do the same; to follow suit. “Because it happens to everyone. We all have to leave the people we love.”
“Mama says someone is coming for me,” Nicky says, his eyes finally finding Rio’s again. Does he see the familiarity in hers? Is he comforted at all by it?
“Yes, someone is,” Rio says, and she holds up the flower. “Do you see this?”
Nicky nods, his eyes big, curious.
“This grows in the soil, which is made from dead things.” Rio’s other hand scoops into the dirt and brings up a handful of it. “Everything needs to die in order for everything else to live.” She allows the dirt in her palm to dissolve, to disappear, and the flower clasped between her fingers begins to wilt. “See what happens when the balance is not right? Without death, there is no life.”
Nicky is smart. Agatha has taught him about so many of the things around him, and yet Rio knows this is a lesson she has withheld from her son. He reaches for the flower and takes it, dead thing, in his small hand.
“Do you have the purple too?” he asks, and Rio knows that he hasn’t missed the point, he’ll let it absorb.
“Sort of,” Rio replies. “Nicky, do you understand what I’m saying?”
Nicky thinks for a moment and then hands the dead flower back. “Yes. Things die so other things can live.”
“Smart boy.” Rio surprises herself then by pressing a kiss to his temple. The only other person she’s ever allowed such softness for is Agatha, but of course, this makes sense.
Nicky is half of them both, even if he doesn’t know it.
“Will you come back?” Nicky asks then. “Teach me more?”
Rio knows that the next time she sees him, it should be to walk him through the veil. And yet, she finds herself saying, “Yes. I will teach you more.”
“Darkest hour, wake thy power,
Earthly and divine”
She comes to him only a few times. Does not allow herself more than that. And yet she is so desperate to see his fear of her diminish, and she cannot help herself. She appears to him and he stands, taking her hand. They move into the woods together, Agatha’s sleep deepened by Rio’s magic, and Rio teaches Nicky about the cycles of life. She teaches him about the living things on the earth, some of which he already knows about, some of which are new.
He tells her about his mother, about her purple, which he whispers that he should not share. Rio assures him that he can trust her, and he can. She listens to the way the boy describes Agatha: it is both like and unlike her. He sees her from below. To him, she soars as tall as the trees. She is as powerful as the earth itself, which Rio teaches him to dig his fingers through, searching for the roots of flowers.
Agatha, to hear her son tell of it, is beautiful. Rio cannot disagree, and she wishes that she could wake her love, that the three of them could spend these enchanted nights together beneath the moon’s light. Agatha could lie in her lap and Rio could braid her hair as Nicky digs for worms in the soil. They could watch his latest tricks — his powerless hands curling together, as if he supports a ball of magic between them that no one can see yet, that has yet to emerge but that will.
He teaches her the games that he and Agatha play, most of which Rio already knows from her observations. She darts around trees as he chases her, hides from her, and his laughter is perfect in the night. And he teaches her their song, too. She pretends to learn these things from him, listens as he tells her that it isn’t real, the witches’ road.
“Why does Mama kill the other witches?” he asks her one night, and her fingers pause; she is braiding grass into his hair as if this could fool the world into thinking that he is something that should be alive.
“Your Mama does what she has to,” Rio says, thinking of the bodies, the offerings, the gifts. In these years of Nicky’s life, the bodies are the only things that she and Agatha have shared. Agatha, to take their power; Rio, to take their souls.
She knows that when she comes for him that final time, he will come with her easily. He will not be afraid; he’ll think it’s another of their moonlit hours together, speaking about cycles and life. It will be easier for him; easier for Agatha. Easier, too, for Rio. Better.
In the dawn, when Rio returns him to his mother, she tells him to give her two kisses: “One from you, and one from me.”
“It was my job.”
When the earth around him begins to smell of rot, she knows it’s time.
It’s as if the atoms of his body, which should have been returned to the earth years ago, long to find their way home.
There are no outward changes; Nicky appears just as bright and lively as ever. And yet, Rio knows. Things that should not be cannot be. It is Rio’s job, her duty, her responsibility, to make sure that all things are perfectly balanced.
“You do this, and I will hate you forever.”
She hears it in each moment; Agatha’s voice, in pain and fear, slices through Rio’s being. How does she manage it? How can she be so sharp? How does she pierce without aiming at all?
Rio avoids the two for some time. Though she misses them, she cannot bear to see them. To smell what she knows is true: that Nicky’s body leans toward decay. As she moves through the world elsewhere, giving her loves a wide berth, she can still feel that something is wrong. The air is not right. The tilt of the earth. Or perhaps it’s just her: is she the rot in all things?
As a dawn, one of so many, breaks over their world, their woods, Rio hears it: the cough echoes through everything. Blades of grass bend away from it. Flowers want to wilt. The trees brush the wind, leaning against the sound, the feeling. Disharmony.
She will give them a day. This day.
And she will watch. Though she doesn’t want to, though she has never done something like this, it’s the end of a line of new things.
Never again will she make an exception; never again will she allow such mercy. And she knows that never again will anyone get close enough to ask for it.
“You do this, and I will hate you forever.”
Agatha’s face. On that final day. Rio watches it and wonders if she knows. If she, too, can smell it. If her own body is, like the other living things, disgusted by his in some small way. If the atoms of her know that he isn’t right.
Or if perhaps she has always felt this; that it has been with her from the start, the close awareness, and that it is only just now that the rest of the world has begun to catch on.
“How much time?”
Rio hadn’t known. She’d thought a year. She’d thought two. Now she knows: six is all she can give her.
“I wish I could give you more,” she whispers into the air around Agatha as they stand in the hall where Nicky stands, so full of life, atop a table. He sings their song, which will soon be a funerary dirge, and Agatha claps along, smiling, laughing as she always does in this play.
“I would do anything to give you more.” Rio circles her body, traces a finger just above her jawline, doesn’t touch her, doesn’t dare. One so powerful as Agatha: Rio cannot hide herself for so long.
“Please understand this. I did as much as I could.” Rio turns, stands shoulder to shoulder with her beloved, as they both watch Nicky’s song, his smile, his hat pulled tight over his head as if it could keep out the cold.
Rio has never hated so much the darkening of the day. Never so wished she could press her palms to the sun and stop its movement through the sky.
And yet dusk always comes. The sun, she knows, must always set.
“My mother needs me home.”