Archive of Our Own ^beta

As for Death

Author’s Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.

Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Marvel Comics.

Pairing: Canon Agatha x Rio.

Summary:

And as for Death, my love cannot be turned.

Esse viridis no est facile.

It’s not easy being green.

“Your time together is short.”

“That’s all he gets, my love.”

“Agatha. That boy isn’t yours.”

She workshopped what to say to Agatha in her head. To deliver the sad news.

Agatha created her son using magic. What every mother does, in a manner of speaking.

Witches don’t need men. Their babies are born, and in the same vein, Agatha conjured hers inside of herself without male contribution, willing Nicky into existence purely from scratch.

Not from nothing, mind you. She didn’t have powers of spontaneous creation. Ingredients were necessary.

After the trial she survived…After the persecution by her own sister witches and her own mother trying to have her executed…Did even the wicked not deserve a seed of happiness?

Rio thought so, but it wasn’t up to her.

Agatha was an abomination to them, but to the debt collector who travelled to stand over the Salemites’ corpses, she was a purple flower in an ocean of mud. All space and all history, and it was on this small blue planet her black heart beat for someone.

Mors monstrum innaturale.

Death to the unnatural monster.

They summoned Death to take Agatha, and Death is who answered. They risked everything, only to have their judgment redirected and Death come for them instead.

The unnatural monster…and the natural monster.

That was the night Death first began really watching Agatha, just as closely as Agatha watched everyone else.

You didn’t have to wipe out half the universe with a snap to impress Death. Sometimes, a small gesture of seven bitches and one old crone neatly laid out in a circle for convenient pick up is enough.

Honestly, if you try to court Death by gathering the Infinity Stones, she might get the idea you’re a bit of a stalker. Her taste in dance partners was more refined. She desired fun as a counterbalance to her grim, monotonous job of maintaining the sacred balance. Not a shameless suck-up.

Agatha offered her a good time. And not merely the horizontal variety.

However, you don’t need to be psychic to see the writing on the wall: Have a child with the personification of death, and awful tragedy awaits.

After all, the river of life is also the river of death. It flows toward certain doom, immutable and permanent.

In the end, all roads lead to her.

Coming from a tradition of women with extended lifespans, even without considering the additional years she tacked on by draining the covens she stumbled across…Maybe Agatha thought she could break the rules. Maybe she thought that because she flirted with Death and lived, putting so many in the grave for her over the course of their relationship, Death would give her special treatment.

Ultimately, Rio chose to simply appear in the forest, though the last of the options she’d recycle centuries later, when she and Agatha were on The Road, and she had to wean Agatha off her pet/familiar.

“Agatha. That boy isn’t yours.”

By then, they were on antagonistic terms.

Rio pursued Agatha Harkness like the toxic ex she was, making Agatha’s life hell. It was fanciful to fantasize if Agatha hadn’t gaslit Rio and turned Rio’s special treatment around into something to blame her for, they’d be tourists on vacation during the Hindenburg disaster and the sinking of the Titanic (Agatha there with Death, along for the ride), rather than Agatha fleeing Death’s embrace on such occasions.

Fleeing to the Darkhold for camouflage, tainting her repute all the more.

Gone were such joys as “Rio! I’m pregnant, my love!” In their place were trysts of sociopathic, dagger-exchanging foreplay. “Do you remember pain? It kinda tickles, doesn’t it?”

It was the nature of the original Green Witch’s profession to grow a little jaded. Yet this could have all been avoided had Agatha accepted the order of all things and just let Nicky go, when his time was up.

Rio never wanted for Nicky to be born dead. He was hers too. But she had a greater duty to the cosmos, and the omniscience to know the struggles ahead.

So when Agatha told Rio they were having a baby, she wasn’t surprised. She knew their son was on the way, the same way she knew down to the precise second when Nicky wouldn’t make it.

She didn’t have to like it though. She absolutely didn’t, though she couldn’t stop his eventual demise.

That knowledge filled Death with grief and sorrow.

Her brother Eternity would have a child in the future, and yet Death as the embodiment of decay couldn’t celebrate her own flesh and blood’s new life before taking it away.

She’d caved to Agatha’s pleading and done what she shouldn’t have, reaping the windfall. Agatha to this day still hated her with every fibre of herself.

So when Agatha tells Rio she doesn’t want to see her face in her darkest hour, Rio cannot help but shed a tear.

Agatha would rather run from her and from the truth.

She’d run to her fake coven. The Goofballs.

The son of the Scarlet Witch.

Sharon Davis, the “gardening lady” who only wanted to go to a party.

Alice Wu-Gulliver, the Protection Witch who went from being fired to wielding brave fire. Lifting the generational curse that’d weighed down her shoulders, discovering the hidden magic of her mother’s version of the “Ballad of the Witches’ Road”.

Lilia Calderu, the Divination Witch whose path wound out of time. Who’d take the Salem Seven with her in destruction and sudden upheaval. Like the Tower, upright!

Jennifer Kale, the Potions Witch whose last name is a vegetable.

Divas down. Three of them.

Not Agatha.

Not yet.

Rio wasn’t (back) there in the cycle.

She came to claim Nicky. Shared custody.

Rio points back twice, to remind him to kiss his mama, once for himself and once for the mysterious visitor carrying the glowing green torch.

“Who are you?”

“Your other mom.”

“Where are we going?” Nicholas wasn’t afraid.

“On a long journey.”

One door closes, and another opens.

“Walk, walk, I walk the road. I walk the windy road.”