Chapter Text
Rio wraps her arms around Agatha, pulling her close, skin upon skin. The scent of sex and candle wax lingers in the air.
“What’s it like?” She asks.
“Hm?” Agatha turns around, facing Rio. “What is what like?”
“Being human.”
Agatha exhales, fingers absently tracing patterns on Rio’s skin. She presses herself closer, clinging onto the cool sensation of Rio’s body.
“Being human,” she echoes, burying her face in Rio’s shoulder. “I don’t know. It’s just… living. You get up, you go to sleep, and everything else in between. You try to find things that make it worth it, I suppose.”
“And what makes it worth for you?”
“Knowing my bitch of a mother is dead but I’m still alive and thriving, if I have to choose.” She laughs a little at that–a small, bitter sound. She exhales, “It’s knowing you can break, and still living anyway.”
Rio doesn’t say anything. She nods, and Agatha feels her shift–the slow brush of her thumb against Agatha’s wrist, a gentle touch.
Agatha doesn’t think Rio really understands, not in the way that she does, the way mortal humans do. She lifts her head and cups Rio’s face in her hands. Brown eyes stare back into hers.
For all that Agatha doesn’t believe in fate (she believes in herself, in pushing hard enough to make the impossible possible), she feels like this is one of those moments–one of those rare ones where you’re supposed to say something real, something vulnerable.
“You make it worth it,” she breathes.
Agatha opens her eyes to absolutely nothing.
And by nothing, she means a kind of emptiness that roots itself deep within her bones and spreads itself across her veins. No heartbeat, no breath, no warmth.
Oh, also the darkness and silence that surrounds her–a silence so complete, it feels like her thoughts are about to be swallowed as well. That’s pretty empty too.
Billy must have fucked up big time.
Agatha floats (is she floating or standing on something, she can’t really tell) and looks around her.
Nothing.
Surprise, surprise. She’s in yet another tricky situation that might or might not have a way out of because of Billy Maximoff.
She raises her hands and summon her magick, but instead of the familiar purple hue, sparks of something else comes to life. It shifts, flickers, and finally bursts in green hues. She blinks in surprise.
The weight of her body feels wrong all of a sudden–too still, too foreign.
“What?”
She jumps. The sound is unfamiliar, the way her tongue curls around the word feels wrong.
This is not her voice. No, it’s the voice of someone she’s intimately familiar with, the voice of someone that she’ll never forget.
Rio.
Agatha looks at her hands and squints. Sure enough, these hands don’t belong to her. She’s familiar with them, of course, considering they belonged inside of her once. Had her crying and begging for more and all that, but she tries to not linger on those memories.
“God–”
She clamps her mouth shut. Hearing Rio’s voice instead of her own when they haven’t seen each other for however long it has been since the road (months, almost a whole year, in fact) is disorienting, to say the least.
Okay, deep breaths. Or not.
Agatha is beginning to doubt if this body can even breathe. Although she swears Rio has breathed before, especially since she’s fallen asleep to the sound for countless nights.
Do not continue down that lane of thought.
She turns, and turns, then turns again. She looks up, looks down, squints her eyes, sends balls of green magick flying into the space around her.
Conclusion, there’s nothing at all. She’s stuck in, quite literally, a dark space.
In Rio’s body.
Oh Goddess, she’s in Rio’s body.
Does that mean Rio is in hers?
She hopes Rio hasn’t killed Billy yet.
Time moves oddly here. She isn’t quite sure how long it’s been since she woke up in a body that’s not her own, and she’s lost count of the seconds passing by for at least three times now.
Her hands tangle with her hair, tugging lightly. She groans.
Knowing those other idiots at home, it might be faster for her to search for a way out on her own rather than lie around and wait.
So she moves.
She wanders throughout the space, going nowhere in particular. The darkness seems to stretch around her, encompassing her in its embrace. It’s endless, with nothing else in sight.
She keeps walking. It doesn’t change.
No shift in pressure, no flicker of movement, no hint of direction.
The realisation itches at the back of her mind–no matter how far she goes, she’s going nowhere.
She’s going to make Billy pay her therapy bills if she develops a fear of the dark after this experience.
In the end, she gives up, sinking to the ground.
Bullshit.
Agatha Harkness does not give up.
If this is some elaborate plan of Billy’s to get rid of her, then she’ll definitely show up in front of him again out of spite. And she’s going to buy a shit ton of ice cream with his money.
Agatha sits, legs crossed, and focuses.
She reaches inside of her–her soul, not Rio’s body because that'll be kinda weird–and pulls. It’s there, whatever is left of the soulbond between her and Rio. Weak, but there. Her hands begin to glow a green and purple hue, magick mixing together in a way that lights up the abyss surrounding her.
It fuels her body with a warmth she didn’t realise that she was missing.
“–Teenager, I’ll be sure to be quick.”
Rio.
Not exactly Rio. That’s Agatha’s voice, but it’s most definitely Rio speaking.
Agatha grasps onto the bond with her magick. The surrounding void seems to come to life at that moment, trembling and warping. Tendrils wrap around her, holding her down. It pushes back against her magick, attempting to put it out. She lets out a snarl–a sound that surprises herself–and hangs onto her magick with all her might.
All of a sudden, the magick explodes in blinding lights, crackling and thundering across the abyss.
“...Agatha?”
She opens her eyes and the first thing she sees is Billy. His mouth is wide open, eyes slightly watery as he stares at her like she’s the eight wonder of the world.
“Oh, it worked!” She huffs, flicking her hair over her shoulder. “I was gonna go insane over there.”
Billy wavers, and for a second Agatha thinks he’s going to collapse to the floor. But he crosses the distance in two long strides and falls promptly into her arms.
Warm.
His body is warm. A human sort of warmth that makes her feel alive.
“Aww,” she coos, “did you miss me that much?”
Billy shakes his head, then nods, then shakes his head again. She sighs and pats him on the back.
“What took you so long, Harkness?”
Agatha turns to the right and sees Jen standing there, hands stretched out in a position that makes her think Jen was just about to attack someone.
“It wasn’t exactly a holiday, Jenny.” Agatha rolls her eyes.
She removes Billy from her, taking in the rest of the coven. They’re all relieved to see her, that much is obvious–Alice exhales a sigh of relief, and Lilia sinks into the armchair she’s sitting in–and she must admit that it isn’t so bad to see them as well. Until she turns around and sees–
Herself.
Her own face, her own body.
Which is weird. Uncanny. Because she’s sure she’ll never look like that–eyes wide, lips trembling, body shaking, looking like she’s one minute away from suffocating to death.
A weird feeling grips her then.
It starts out in her chest, then spreads to the rest of her body. A light thumping sound can be heard if she really, really tries to listen–it’s a rhythm, a beat, a pulse. She opens her mouth and breathes. The air burns, and her lungs ache.
She inhales, gulps in a mouthful of air as she stares at Rio–at Agatha Harkness’s body.
Her knees buckle and she crashes to the ground, hand fisting her chest. It hurts, an ache that wraps itself around her heart. And fuck, everything seems so loud and so bright all of a sudden. She groans, squeezing her eyes shut.
The feeling is horrible, overwhelming, and Agatha thinks this might make it to the list of top ten worst things she’s ever experienced in her life.
A pair of arms wrap around her, pulls her close, and someone breathes against the skin on her neck. A whine escapes her lips before she can stop it, quiet and desperate. She doesn’t mean to cling, but she sinks into the embrace almost immediately–oddly familiar, even though she’s sure this particular person has never held her before, but Rio’s body clearly remembers the sensation and she instinctively leans in for more.
“I’ve got you, mi vida, I’ve got you…” Rio whispers, hands threading through Agatha’s hair as she tries to melt herself in Rio’s embrace. “It’s alright now, just breathe.”
Easy for Rio to say, considering that Agatha’s body breathes like any normal person does.
“Your body sucks,” she chokes out. “You need a trip to the hospital.”
“My body isn’t alive, Agatha.”
No, it’s not. That certainly explains the utter nothingness she feels in that weird void moments ago.
But now, she feels so alive she can barely breathe.
She remembers how she would fall asleep to the sound of Rio’s heartbeat, to the steady rise and fall of Rio’s chest, back before…all this.
“You’ve always felt alive to me,” Agatha says, a quiet confession.
Rio stiffens, and she pulls back slightly. Agatha whines again, missing the warmth of her body. It’s embarrassing, and she nearly cries out in relief when she looks up and sees that the rest of the coven are gone, leaving the space for the two of them.
“Come on, the floor isn’t comfortable.” Rio pulls Agatha up, stumbling slightly when Agatha drapes herself over Rio bonelessly. “Agatha,” she groans.
Agatha straightens herself slightly, clings onto Rio, manoeuvres them to the sofa, and trips. They tumble down, limbs tangling with each other. Agatha lies on top, pressing her ear to Rio’s–her own–chest. The sound is immediate, louder than she expects.
A steady thud, thud, thud.
“Your heart is beating real fast,” she murmurs.
“It’s your heart, Agatha,” Rio bites back.
She feels the corner of her lips lift into a smile at that. There’s a fluttery feeling in her gut–Rio’s gut–at the thought of Agatha’s own heart beating faster because of their proximity.
Agatha bites down on her lip lightly. She wonders if this is what Rio feels when they’re together. The way she went from an odd numbness, surrounded by endless darkness, to whatever this is. So, so human. Vulnerable, in many ways.
She barely noticed the absence of, well, everything in this body when she first woke in it. But now, after experiencing all of this, laying within the arms of her own body, the difference is palpable.
How can one return to living the emptiness after this?
“I’m used to it,” Rio answers the question as if she can hear Agatha's thoughts. After a beat, she adds, “I’ve watched you for long enough to know how you think.”
“And that’s not supposed to sound creepy at all.”
“Don’t act like you don’t enjoy the attention.” Rio pinches Agatha’s arm, and Agatha is surprised to feel that it barely hurts. “You’re an attention whore and we all know that.”
“Whore?” Agatha gasps dramatically. “How dare you.”
They both fall quiet, and Agatha begins to think Rio has fallen asleep once her breathing begins to even out. She startles slightly when Rio speaks.
“Do you still want to see me?”
Agatha’s breath hitches.
“I don’t ever want to see your face again.” She spits out, nails digging into the palm of her hands to ground herself.
Rio stares at her, unmoving. And then, quietly–
“But this is the face you fell in love with.”
Rio looks absolutely broken, and it takes everything in Agatha to stare into Rio’s gaze without wavering.
“And I don’t want to see it,” she forces out, chokes a little on the words. “Not any more.”
She can’t face Rio without remembering Nicky, without remembering what they had, or what she had turned Nicky’s memory into.
“It hurts when I saw you, when I saw my face.” Rio says, voice barely above a whisper. Her fingers drum against Agatha’s arm. “I felt like this heart inside my chest was shattering. I– I didn’t know you can experience something like that. I could barely breathe, Agatha. Your body could barely breathe when it sees my face.”
It’s complicated, to say the least. Agatha feels a lot when it comes to Rio–love, anger, grief. Mix them all together, blend them up in a mixer and let it marinate for a century or two and it becomes a plethora of emotions that intertwine with each other, unable to be separated.
”I felt a lot too, when I saw me in your body.” Agatha says instead of answering the question.
“What did you feel?”
A pause, then Agatha takes a deep breath. The air doesn’t burn her lungs any more. The realisation is loud in her head, the thought screaming and making its existence unavoidable amidst her thoughts:
“I felt alive.”
“Sooo,” Billy walks in, dragging the single syllable for way too long, “how’s it going for you and Rio?”
“Just peachy.”
“Oh come on,” he smirks, crossing his arms. “The both of you were literally asleep in each other’s arms when we went back in. Did you two make up?”
Agatha’s eyes narrow.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Teen. Sit,” she gestures to the pile of cushions he had gathered and shoved into a corner of her study a while ago. He doesn’t move at first, but she smacks a book onto his head (yes, she’s taking full advantage of the extra three centimetres of height that Rio’s body has) and he yelps.
“Ow– What the hell?”
“Sit,” she repeats, watching him rub his scalp with a scowl. “Don’t make me find a heavier book.”
“Alright, alright,” he raises his hands in mock surrender, and sinks into the pile of cushions bonelessly. He looks at her expectantly. “What did you want to talk about?”
“What were you thinking when you cast the spell?”
“What?”
His easy demeanour drops, brows furrowing.
“Magick takes the path of least resistance, I’ve taught you this.” Agatha sighs and rubs her forehead. “Your magick might go haywire, but it won’t go through all the trouble to switch souls between a cosmic entity and a mere human. As powerful as you are, that’s still no simple feat. So, I’m going to ask you again,” her voice takes a gentler tone, a kind patience that she rarely displays outwardly, “what were you thinking when you cast the spell?”
“I…” Billy twists his fingers into his shirt. “I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. Just– Ugh–” He shakes his head, as if shaking off whatever stress he’s feeling like a dog. “You were so depressed and always staring at those flowers outside and I… I wanted to make you happy. I wanted to see you, I don’t know, less depressed. And I thought you'll feel better if you and Rio settle all the stuff you have between each other and get back together, I guess."
Billy stares at his hands, knuckles tight. His shoulders are hunched, like a kid waiting to be scolded. He looks so much like the little kid in Wanda’s Hex at that moment.
Something in Agatha cracks.
She walks over to him, wrapping her arms around his frame, and pulls him close. He stiffens, and for a split second he tries to resist it. She will let go, if that’s what he wants, but he just stifles a sound that is most definitely a sob and buries his face in her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know–”
“Shh,” she hushes him gently, rubbing circles on his back. “I’m not blaming you, kid. No one was hurt, and the spell is temporary at best. It’ll be fine.”
He sniffs, shoulders shaking as his tears ruin Agatha’s shirt. And his snot.
Yeah, she’s definitely throwing this shirt out. But the body is Rio's, so whatever disgusting liquid that seeped through the fabric and stained the skin is not Agatha's problem.
“Alright,” she pats him again, then forces his face away from her. She cringes when she feels the wet spot on her shoulder. “It’s just one accident, no need to be a cry-baby about it.”
“But, you and Rio–”
“Rio and I are fine. It’s a bit weird to be in someone else’s body, sure, but we’re big girls. We can take care of ourselves.” She smacks her lips together. “Don’t you have some teenager stuff to do? Hanging out with friends, going out with your boy toy, scrolling through your TikTok. Stop hiding away in my house at every chance you get.”
“But I like it here.”
“Nope, nuh uh. Get out and have some fun.”
“You’re just kicking me out because you want to spend time with Rio alone.”
“Alright, that’s it.” She hauls him up. “Out. Go get some vitamin D or something.”
She drags him along, forcing him through the front door. He looks somewhat offended at that.
“Just don’t die and don’t do drugs,” she says and slams the door in his face.
Agatha rolls her shoulders, turning back into the house. She has stuff to do–not very legal stuff that might or might not involve theft–and she’ll prefer it if there are no teenagers in the house while she plans.
‘Spend time with Rio alone’? They still have way too many issues between them to solve, it’ll be nigh impossible for the both of them to be in a room alone without ending up with a broken furniture or two. So no, she’s not kicking Billy out because she wants to spend time with her estranged wife.
“‘Rio and I are fine’, huh?” Agatha jumps at the sound of her own voice appearing behind her. She turns around and sees Rio standing there, a scowl on her face. “I don’t remember me being fine all of a sudden.”
Agatha rolls her eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic. You and I both know that this–”, she points at Rio then at herself, “–will last another twenty-four hours at most.”
“And that’ll add up to a total of seventy-two hours that I haven’t been able to perform my duties, Agatha.” Rio hisses at her. “You know how important my job is.”
“Goddess, I’ll do your job if it makes you drop this.”
Rio looks at her and laughs. A ridiculous, depreciating kind of sound.
“All this–”, her hands flail through the air, “–for that Maximoff boy?”
Agatha frowns. “He’s not bad, Rio.”
“And he’s not your child, Agatha.” Rio grabs her by the shoulders, and Agatha is forced to stare into blue eyes. “He’s not ours.”
The words settle like lead in the air. Agatha stops breathing. A sharp and ugly feeling twists in her gut. It makes her want to throw up.
He’s not ours.
He’s not ours.
He’s not–
She shoves Rio off of her, hard. Rio stumbles slightly, her expression flickering for a moment before she smooths it into something unreadable.
Agatha knows that face. She’s the one who uses that face when she tries to hide the hurt, the inner turmoil of it all. It’s funny. You will think that you won’t really recognise the expressions you use, since you don’t see your face unless you look in a mirror. But Agatha sees it, recognition burning strong within her.
Rio takes a calming breath. “Agatha…”
“Is that what you think?” The heartbeat in her chest slows, a chill spreading from her fingertips. “That I would replace Nicky with someone else, replace you with someone else?”
Rio blinks. Then, her mouth twists into a sneer.
“Isn’t that what you’re doing? First, you play house with the Scarlet Witch, and now you’re getting all cosy with her son. I watched you, Agatha, as you get all handsy with her, calling her things like ‘darlin’ and ‘hun’. Did you fuck her, hm? Was she good? Is that why you’re so damn eager to treat her son like he’s yours now?”
No.
Agatha is not doing this today. She’s not doing this ever if she gets a choice.
Magick flares, space warps. In a blink of an eye–
She’s gone.