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When Rio begins to hear the rumors, she laughs them off. Agatha Harkness, pregnant? As if she’d ever let a man close enough to her to create life. Really, these days, as much as both of them would like to deny it, they rarely sought out company of any kind beyond each other’s.
But the rumors keep coming. Whispers on the wind, and a growing feeling in Rio’s gut that something is changing. She thinks about her last few meetings with Agatha, her lust for power as strong as ever but something else lurking in her eyes. Rio asked her, once, what she was thinking about, but Agatha’s only reaction was to pounce on her and drive every thought from Rio’s head but pleasure and pain and Agatha’s name.
Could it be, then, that Agatha had been thinking of this? Having a child, passing on her legacy and magical bloodline? Being better than her mother? Not that it would be difficult, Rio allows herself to think. Being a worse mother than Evanora Harkness would be the real challenge.
Agatha wouldn’t be like that. Sure, Agatha is callous and power-hungry, selfish and often actively villainous, but Rio knows the other side of her, the one so few get to see. Agatha has so much love to give, and her drive for knowledge has never been selfish—she’s always been willing to teach, even if she delivers her lectures with an eyeroll when she thinks her student isn’t paying enough attention. If she wanted to, she could be an excellent mother. The best mother, even, protective and caring and encouraging to a young blood witch.
Rio blinks away the strange feeling building in her eyes. It’s too windy where she is right now, ferrying a criminal who met an unlucky end across the veil. As soon as she finishes with him, she’ll just have to take a break. Go see what Agatha’s up to, if there’s any truth to the rumors or if she’s just running some ridiculous long con.
Rio takes the long way to Agatha’s little cottage in the woods, the one they share when Rio has the time and is in her wife’s good graces for long enough to settle. She breathes in the scents of the forest surrounding her, the trees and blooming flowers and looming mists. It soothes her, brings her back into herself, the witch more than the spirit. The lower half of her face returns, and she lowers her hood. Agatha likes the other form, she knows, but it hardly seems appropriate for this meeting.
When she approaches the house, Agatha is outside taking cuttings from Rio’s garden, the one she’s charmed to keep flowering throughout all seasons, even if she neglects it for days or weeks or months at a time. She looks beautiful, long hair tied back and a softness to her features as she kneels amongst Rio’s creations. The plants block any view of her body, though, and Rio lets herself picture a soft swell to her stomach, an emphasis of the curves Rio loves so much.
Is it wrong that she’s started hoping?
“Working on a potion, sweetheart?” She finally calls, relishing in the little jump Agatha gives and the momentary spark of purple magic. The wards around the property don’t work on Rio for more reasons than one—she helped craft them and, well, no one can keep her out of anywhere for long. Death always arrives, no matter what traps mortals try to set.
Agatha finally stands with slight difficulty, and Rio is startled to see that her wife is further along in this venture than she’d expected. Her stomach is round with growing life, so much so that Rio begins to count the months it has been since they last saw each other. She supposes she has been busy lately, with wars and disease and the utter foolishness of human greed.
“Guess the secret’s out,” Agatha remarks wryly, glancing down at herself and then at Rio. She’s tense, almost challenging, as if waiting for Rio to laugh at her, or to ask a thousand questions, or to—reject her. That’s what it is. She’s waiting for Rio to walk away.
Instead, she steps forward, pulling a sprig of mint off a plant as she passes, just to have something to do with her hands. “What were you working on, then?”
Four days pass in the little cottage, time slow and sweet like the best moments between this ancient being and her wife. Rio begins to draw out the story from Agatha, but she isn’t sure she’ll ever get all the details—nor does she really care. She does learn this was a mostly solitary project, loosening a tightness in her chest. Whatever Agatha did, she did it alone, with just a little help from a potions witch who works as a midwife. Agatha clearly hates this Jen, but hardly in the way she hates Rio, so that’s fine. Rio can always drop by to scare her later if she has to.
Most of the time, though, they catch up like always, admittedly with less physical sparring, to respect the growing life within Agatha. A life that seems eager to make an appearance, and it does, on the morning of their fifth day together.
He does. A boy, tiny and precious, with dark hair already crowning his head. Rio helps Agatha through the delivery, knowing, if nothing else, her wife trusts her more than any other soul to be with her through this. It isn’t easy, and Rio gets called some incredibly creative names, but it is safe. Agatha and the boy are both fine.
Rio, however, is not.
She feels it as she holds him for the first time. A tiny, fragile thread of life, shining gold in a path only she can see. As she hands the boy to Agatha, she follows it with an unblinking gaze.
She sees Nicholas, as he’ll be called, growing quickly. She sees his magic emerging early, just like Agatha’s did so very long ago. She sees his dark brown curls falling into his face as he runs, sees him playing in the garden and befriending rabbits.
He’s beautiful.
Then, she sees the end of the thread. It’s much shorter than it should be. Much shorter than Agatha’s, than most witches’, than most mortals’, even. It is the length of a tragedy.
Rio knows, with unerring certainty, that Nicholas will be taken from his mother’s arms before he leaves childhood behind. Just as she knows she will be the one to do it.
She snaps back to the current moment to see Agatha watching her. “Everything okay?”
“Job’s calling, but I’ll put it off as long as I can,” Rio offers the truth from this morning, avoiding where she went just now. “Let that old fucker hold on for a few more days.”
Agatha laughs weakly, before looking back down at the baby’s round face. “I was thinking of calling him Nicholas,” she admits. “Nicholas Scratch.”
“Like the devil?” Rio grins, brushing a finger down Nicholas’s nose and humming to herself. A tiny protection spell, just for now. She can’t keep it up forever, but she can give them a few good years. “It’s perfect. Nicholas Scratch, son of a witch.”
Agatha inhales, like she’s going to say something, but it never leaves her lips, and before long, she’s falling into an exhausted sleep.
Rio puts off the job as much as she can, but eventually, she feels a pull too strong. She has to leave. “I wish I could stay, sweetheart,” she offers, already halfway out the door. The longer she stays, the more she feels the urge to say something to Agatha, to break her heart.
Her heartbreak is inevitable, and Rio’s own threatens her every time she looks at the baby’s face. She thinks she can see where Agatha’s features have passed on to him, how he’ll become the sweet boy that she’ll have to take long before he deserves it. He would never deserve it, a traitorous part of her hisses, but she does her best to ignore it. Rio has already done Agatha Harkness too many favors, and there are rules even Death must follow, lest the very structure of reality crumble.
Agatha scoffs from where she watches Rio leave, clad in a robe and tiredness in her eyes. Rio can’t quite tell if the tiredness is from the new arrival or her actions. “I knew this would be temporary. Go get your bodies, Vidal,” she orders. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
Rio intends to obey that, and in a way, she does. The next few years fly by, between the bodies and their souls and her frequent trips back to the little cottage. Many times, she avoids letting Agatha see her, because she’s terrified of what she’ll have to say. Instead, she watches as a little boy grows, as he finds a deep green magic, as Agatha puts off giving him haircuts and calls him Nicky.
Sometimes, she stops by, fighting with Agatha and loving her in equal measure. She tries to avoid Nicky’s line of sight, offers weak excuses about the rules and revealing herself to those without the connection Agatha relishes in. Maybe one day, she offers, hating herself for it. She knows when she’ll first speak to Nicky. She’s always known.
The boy plays in the garden and befriends rabbits. Then, something happens, something so terrible she hates to think of it, doesn’t want to look it in the eye. Rio is in Salem when she feels the call, feels the end of that tiny golden thread.
When she arrives, Agatha is already sobbing, already pleading. “You can’t do this!”
Rio meets her gaze head-on, letting the bottom half of her face fall away. “You know I have to.” She watches as Agatha pulls Nicky impossibly closer, and she feels her hand drifting towards the knife at her side. “Please, don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
She makes it harder than it has to be. Of course she does, she’s Agatha Harkness. But Death wins, as she always does, and she takes little Nicholas Scratch by the hand.
As they walk into the dark, surrounded by the trees and blooming flowers and looming mists, Nicky isn’t afraid. He just looks up at Rio with the biggest, bluest eyes she’s ever seen, and trusts her to keep him safe. “Mama told me stories about you,” is what he offers when asked. “She said you’d always take care of me.”
For all she tried to avoid it, Death’s heart breaks.