rita-repulsa-ke

[rita-repulsa-ke]

not enough women stabbing each other to symbolize sex in the media actually

[rita-repulsa-ke]

boredom

Villanelle buys what she wants and doesn’t want it. Kills who she’s told to and yawns over the corpses. Takes people to bed and forgets their names.

“I will get bored of you,” she tells Eve.

“Sure,” Eve says. “You haven’t yet, though, so can we just enjoy our anniversary?

[rita-repulsa-ke]

they're taking persephone out of the public domain because every possible version of that story has already been told. you have to do a modern queer feminist retelling of the scorpion and the frog now.

[rita-repulsa-ke]

On First Dates

Lilia wants casual and fun—make her laugh and maybe she’ll do it again.

Jen expects you to try and impress her, even though you’ll fail.

Alice always does coffee, it’s the easiest to get out of if they’re a creep.

Billy has changed his shirt six times and gotten all the way back to his first selection.

Tommy will be shocked when he realizes that it was a date.

Nicky never got the chance.

Wanda’s making a prequel episode about hers, laugh track and all.

Natasha doesn’t really do dating.

Agatha thinks ‘dates’ are for losers, better to just go to bed.

Rio never forget theirs.

(…neither did Agatha)

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rot

You do not miss Eve. She is bad for you, bad like spoiled meat, you would die if you took too much of her in, breathed her scent and tasted her skin. So no, you don’t miss her, except the part of you that smells rot and feels at home.

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the sun

Grief swells Eve’s lungs like dirty river water, chokes her breathing, sickens her stomach and she doesn’t want to remember you like that, as if you were a bad pub meal she should expel. Better to stand in the sun and feel you as warmth on her skin she can never shove away.

[rita-repulsa-ke]

dinner plans

Peek at Eve trying on dresses from under your cap, then pretend—for once, just pretend—to shop, then steal another glance—

Only to find her staring back.

Protocol says now is when you retreat, only you’ve got a much better idea.

“Why don’t you get dinner with me, instead?”

[rita-repulsa-ke]

The Four Stages of Grief

She’s holding a body, a familiar body, still warm but not breathing, which is fine, because Rio often forgets to breathe. The problem is in every other detail, the way it doesn't move, the slackness of the skin, the way she—it—is dead weight in Agatha's arm

She's holding something impossible, something that cannot exist.

She's holding Rio's corpse.

This one is @dandelions4us' fault

Barring infancy, Agatha Harkness can remember almost every time she’s cried.

Not when they chained her to the stake.

Not when she killed them.

Not when Wanda made her forget who she was.

When her boy died. A few times after sex, which doesn’t count. Maybe once or twice when she was younger and more naive about how the world worked. Multiple times as a way to garner sympathy prior to committing murder, which also doesn't count.

In the time between Nicky's death and this present moment, she can’t remember the last time her eyes have so much as grown damp.

Even knowing it must be a dream, she’s crying now.

She’s holding a body, a familiar body, still warm but not breathing, which is fine, because Rio often forgets to breathe. The problem is in every other detail, the way it doesn't move, the slackness of the skin, the way she—it—is dead weight in Agatha's arm

She's holding something impossible, something that cannot exist.

She's holding Rio's corpse.

"You can't do this to me," she snarls into that blank face, her voice scratching the air like fingernails on dead skin. "You can't die!" She gives the body a few rough shakes, which is a terrible idea, the way the body ragdolls uselessly in her arms will stay with her forever. "It's one of your best features!"

This is a dream, she reminds herself. A stupid, ridiculous dream where Rio dies in her arms like some kind of tragic cliche, the kind of trope that makes her feel nauseous—or maybe that, too, is the crying, she hasn't done it in so long she's forgotten how physically unpleasant it is, how her head pounds and her cheeks ache and her stomach feels like someone's taken it for a boat ride on choppy water.

She just has to find out how to wake up.

She tries pinching herself, or rather, she tries pinching herself again, because her arm is a mess of inflamed red marks. This latest one she gets vicious, digs her nails in like she's got a grudge against her own body and maybe she can write these tears off to pain.

"Come on, come on," she says, but nothing's happening, she's still sitting on the floor of her living room in Westview holding the corpse of a woman she's sure can't die, except that Agatha saw her do it, a knock on her door and she'd opened it only to have Rio stumble into her arms, collapse like a scene from a movie she wouldn't have watched and mumble, "I love you, Ags," right before she did the one thing she absolutely, 100% could not do.

"Doesn't make any sense," Agatha murmurs to herself, and if she had any magic, any magic at all, she would be trying every spell in the book, but it's all gone, stolen by the Scarlet Witch. Still, there's always things she could try, manual spells that rely on ritual and components instead of innate magic, except that to do any of those, she'd have to let go of Rio's body and she can't actually seem to make herself do that. She's got it in her lap, the arm she's been pinching held under it, posed almost the same way Rio had fallen, keeping her propped up and hoping any minute she might jump up and yell 'Surprise!'.

Any minute now.

Minutes tick by and nothing happens, except Agatha's arm grows tired and her cheeks cold. She expects the crying to stop, but it doesn't, only turns pitiful and sniffly, the kind of sound she would have done a very funny mockery of, if it had come from anyone else.

"This is ridiculous," she scolds the corpse, trying not to look directly at it, not to see how empty it is, how its mouth won't curve to smile at her and its eyes won't light in her presence, how there's no semblance of her lover in the dead thing in her arms. "You're Death! You're immortal, you're a fundamental part of the balance, how can you possibly die?"

Agatha is intimately familiar with the stages of grief, she's cycled through them on repeat for centuries. This one's anger. The next—

"…Hey, Rio, look, I know we've…I know we've had our differences. You hunted me for centuries and I…I probably wasn't always that nice to you. Also hid from you with the Darkhold, which I do know you hated." Her free hand moves at an awkward angle, tries to pat down her former lover's hair in a way that only makes it worse. "I'm not sorry about most of that, honestly. But you know, you were right. I...ugh, I really did always still love you, all right?! I tried to stop, but I could never figure out how." And here it is, her desperate attempt at bargaining, at making a kind of peace between them she'd scorned when Rio was alive. "That's what you wanted to hear, isn't it? Isn't it?! So stop this! Wake up already. ...Just come back to me."

The corpse stares, sightless, up at her ceiling and she knows this next stage too, she's wallowed in it for years and years. She clutches Rio's corpse tighter to her body, rocks with it, back and forth and depression is too weak of a word for the swamp of emotion she's sinking into, muck rising above her head and taking the last of the light with it.

These are the stages of grief Agatha Harkness knows.

There's another one she's heard about, but never reached.

Other people might simply accept things. Their fate, the deaths of others, the universe acting on them instead of them acting upon the universe.

Those people were weak.

"No," she starts the cycle from the top, right back to denial. "This can't be real. It can't, it's impossible, she can't die." She finally lowers the corpse to the ground, onto an ugly throw rug Agnes must have chose, then reaches down to pluck a hair from Rio's head, oddly stiff in her fingers. She has bleach and cinnamon, there's a half-remembered bit of ritual she can try—

"Stop," someone says and Agatha's heart almost obeys, because that's a familiar voice, the familiar voice, the voice of a woman she knew couldn't be dead.

"I thought this is what you wanted," And there's a second speaker, unfortunate in its familiarity. Wanda, she thinks, Wanda and Rio together, and her thoughts are going in frantic circles that might be confusion or might be a literal loop, placed there by the most powerful witch in the world.

"It was. I don't want it anymore. Make it stop. Now," Rio says from somewhere, somewhere where she is alive and not the dead, empty thing on Agatha's floor.

"So long as you remember what you promised me," Wanda says, and then the world snaps in half like a—

Like a broom, like the one that's lying on her floor, a proper wooden kind with twisted bristles, the one she'd thrown in the back of a closet ages ago in case she needed a quick escape, the one made from a branch Rio had grown specifically for her—

The agonized, furious sound that escapes Agatha's torn up throat is enough to make even Death and the Scarlet Witch take a step away from her.

Death.

Despite a fury that will burn the world down to avenge the last hour of her life, she can't help but stare at Rio, at how her eyes have moved to avoid Agatha's, how her jaw is held tight and her forehead wrinkled with discomfort, how alive she is regardless of whether or not she's remembered to breathe.

Agatha steps up to her, almost chest to chest.

"Agatha, I'm…" Rio starts, and then the rest of a sentence that would only make her angrier is lost, because Agatha Harkness is kissing Death.

It's a good kiss, too, even if there's salt from her tears in it, a proper kiss like they haven't managed in centuries, a brand of ownership, a claim, a reminder of who Rio belongs to, but most importantly, a way to make absolutely certain that she is not dead weight in Agatha's arms, not slack skin and unblinking eyes, but as alive as Agatha has ever needed her to be.

When she steps back, Rio is reeling, shaking, clutching at her with hands Agatha shoves away.

"Don't," she snarls. "Get. Go. I can't stand to look at you."

"Beloved…" Rio says, caught between her eternal fury at rejection and something that might have been guilt.

"Rio," Agatha says, and the tone in her voice freezes the protests in Death's mouth. "I know what you're thinking. I said something you've always wanted to hear, didn't I, while I was being unknowingly manipulated." Rio's eyes gleam brighter, and Agatha is never going to hear the end of this, so many more centuries of 'I always knew you loved me' to look forward to.

And maybe she won't even hate that, if it means she gets to see Rio smiling and blinking and pursuing her across continents instead of limp and lifeless in her arms. But she isn't going to put up with it today, not after what's been done to her. She means it when she says, "If you want even a chance that what I said will remain true, get out of my sight right now."

Like a candle blown out or a life ended, Rio Vidal is gone.

Slightly reluctantly, Agatha makes herself turn to look at the other participant, the person responsible for making her put on a one-woman show.

"…So," she asks the Scarlet Witch. "Any other ways you'd like to torture me?"

Wanda looks back at her, something unnervingly hollow behind her eyes. "She made me a deal," she says, almost emotionless. "About my boys. This isn't personal, Agatha." That might even be true, but the way the other woman is looking at her now—maybe she should have kept Rio around for defense, except she really couldn't have stood it for a moment longer, her former lover looking at her with an ugly mix of pity, guilt and adoration.

Still, Agatha recognizes the way Wanda is looking at her, like Agatha were something unpleasant on the bottom of her shoe. Like she might do something nasty just because she can. Agatha has looked at lots of other people like that before.

"I'll go away," she promises. "Somewhere you never have to see me again."

"I doubt that," Wanda says, and Agatha has the passing suspicion that the Scarlet Witch has been sticking her nose into a book, the book, her beloved Darkhold. Wanda's sanity was questionable when she was running a prison disguised as a sitcom, but the dark circles under her eyes and the way she doesn't seem to have expressions anymore is concerning. "…Letting you go was part of her bargain, though. I wonder if she'll regret that. I could have made you anything she wanted you to be."

Concerning, but so not her problem. Let the so-called superheroes deal with whatever Wanda was turning into. "Right," Agatha says, edging toward the door, her hand on the knob. "Well. Always lovely to see you, Wanda. Let's never, ever do this again."

Now she has to open the door.

All she has to do is open the door and walk out to freedom. Or at least anywhere but this suffocating house she wants to see burnt to the ground, the one with a nightmare currently standing inside it, watching her with all the expression of a corpse.

Her hand is wrapped firmly around the knob and she can't turn it, because if she does, Rio will stumble through the door, Agatha will catch her and then Death will die in her arms all over aga—

The door blasts itself to pieces around her, the larger chunks of wood somehow flying harmlessly by, though she's covered in a thin layer of wood dust.

Both she and Wanda blink, then Agatha Harkness turns, swishes her coat around herself and strides out as though this is exactly what she intended all along. She keeps her head held high and her shoulders back, ignores how raw her throat is or the redness on her cheeks, a lingering trace of scrubbed away tears. She can't even remember the last time she cried. She certainly hadn't sobbed hysterically while clutching a broom pretending to be the body of the woman she loved as her ex and her greatest enemy looked on

But if that had happened, someone would have to pay.

[rita-repulsa-ke]

Famous Last Words

You step up next to Eve on the train. Her eyes widen as she takes you in. “That’s my scarf,” she says and her hair looks so pretty, her lips so soft—

That train of thought is derailed by the sudden knife pressing against your stomach. You roll your eyes.

“As if you could.”

[rita-repulsa-ke]

Dare I say

[rita-repulsa-ke]

best version (ke edition)

“Eve, do I make you the best version of yourself?”

“What? No. Nooooo.”

“…”

“Pretty much the opposite, really. Worst possible version.”

“…Oh. That is nice too.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Mmhmm. Now you ask me.”

“…Sure, all right. Do I make you the best version of yourself?”

“No. You make me very boring.”

“As if you were that exciting before.”

“Eve! I was very exciting. I was an international assassin. There was a whole division of MI6 dedicated to hunting me, did you know?”

“No, really?!”

“Mmhmm. Led by this very boring agent, I cannot even remember her name.”

“But she did catch you in the end.”

“Or maybe I caught her, did you think of that?”

“You know, I hadn’t. If you had caught her, what would you have done next?”

“Probably killed h—oh. You are flirting.”

“…yeah, but keep going. Tell me how you’d do it.”

“Oh. Okay. Maybe you should take your clothes off first?”

“…You know, I do think this is a pretty fantastic version of you.”

“Yes, because we are about to have sex.”

“Well, that, but also because it’s the one that’s in love with me.”

“You would be very sad if I was not.”

“I would. Also, probably dead.”

“Oh. Yes. Definitely dead. …I think this me is good too.”

“Because I’m in love with you?”

“No, Eve. Because I am glad you are not dead.”

[rita-repulsa-ke]

the best version

“Agatha, do I make you the best version of yourself? …….beloved, stop laughing.”

“S-sorry. Where did that come from?”

“…It’s romantic.”

“Romantic, sure. Do you know what would actually make me the best version of myself? There’s this book…”

“The book of the Damned. You’ve mentioned.”

“Mm. All that dark power, all those unmastered rituals…what is that expression? Rio, are you jealous of a book??”

“No.”

“You are. Hahahaha! You’re definitely jealous!”

“I wanted to make you the best—“

“You make me happy.”

“…What?”

“Hmm? Did I say something?”

“Agatha. Say it again.”

“Nope. Nuh-uh. …So do I make you? The best version of yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. This is the best of you, huh? Possessive, easily annoyed, quick with a knife…”

“…”

“…extremely sexy, magically impressive, sometimes funny, and most importantly of all, in love with me. Yeah, I agree. Can’t see how you could be better, really.”

“Mm. Well, maybe I could be more demanding. I could be less willing to give you everything you wanted and get so little in return.”

“…Hey , Rio…”

“Yes, love?”

“…you…you make me happy, alright? You make me…ugh…I…I don’t want to be any version of myself who doesn’t have you in my life.”

“…even if you had the book?”

“Can’t believe you’re jealous of a—yes, Rio, even if I had the book. I’d trade all of it, the power and dark magic and…and even the knowledge, for you.”

“Really?”

“Well, not if I didn’t absolutely have to. If there’s any way I can have both, I want that. And there is always a way. But—yes. You, first. Above all else. All right?”

“…I really do think this is the best version of you.”

“Heh. Just you watch. I’m only going to get better.”

“I can believe that. And I will watch, beloved. I’ll never, ever look away.”

Masterpost or random rec first cut

[rita-repulsa-ke]

Honest conversation

Eve is hung off a bus seat and if she doesn’t do something drastic, the worst will happen—she’ll have to have an honest conversation.

To prevent that, she’ll lock her lips tight against yours, so there’s no chance she can tell you all the things she wants to say.

[rita-repulsa-ke]

Flowers for Nicky

“Oh. It’s you.”

“It is. Hi, Ags.”

“Not sure what you’re doing here, since I’m not killing anyone at the moment.”

“I can see that. Wish you were. …Um. What are you doing?”

“…nothing.”

“It’s, um. Only. That those are plants. Well. They were plants. I’m not sure they count anymore.”

“…”

“I guess I’ve never actually seen you try to do green magic before. You’re normally really good at most kinds of ma—“

“Rio.”

“Yes, beloved?”

“What. Do. You. Want?”

“Well. Do you want me to help? I mean, whatever you’re trying to do, it clearly isn’t working.”

“No, of course I don’t want you to help. Because, as you’ll recall, I hate you.”

“Oh. …Then I guess I’ll just sit here and watch you try.”

“…”

“…are you going to…?”

“Fine, if I let you help, will you please go away??”

“For now. What are we growing?”

“What does it look like?!”

“Um. Like charred plant matter and magic.”

“…flowers.”

“For who?!”

“…”

“…oh. Right.”

“His favorites don’t grow around here anymore. So I thought—you do it all the time, produce flowers from nothing, not even seeds, I should be able to do the same. But I can’t get it to work!”

“I can—“

“No! Don’t you dare. You don’t have the right.”

“…beloved…”

“Just…make yourself useful. Tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

“Our magic doesn’t work the same way, but I can try…”

Several hours of magical experimentation later

“Agatha, you need to take a break. Drink, eat, sleep, all those things mortals have to do to survive.”

“Ugh!!! Why can’t I do this??”

“Maybe humans can’t? Other green witches normally start from something. I think.”

“I’m not other witches, green or not.”

“Mm. No, you aren’t. Here, drink. Eat.”

“When did you make food—“

“While you were screaming at a tree.”

“…that didn’t happen.”

“I think you really hurt its feelings.”

“I am going to master this, you know. I’m not going to be defeated by some stupid plants.”

“You can do anything you set your mind to, Ags. But you are still mortal. You have to sleep first.”

“…only for a little while. It’s his birthday tomorrow. I wanted to get him flowers.”

“He’d like that.”

“…”

“Heh. Passed out. She never knows her limits. …Don’t be angry at me, beloved, but I think even you are going to have trouble mastering all of green magic by tomorrow. …Especially at this rate. So here, as many flowers as you could want. I’ll tell him, too. How hard his mother tried and how she still remembers his favorites after so long. …Sleep well, beloved. We both miss you.”

Masterpost or completely random rec next time

[rita-repulsa-ke]

Final meal

There are so many ways to end a marriage. Eve does it by making his favorite meal, waiting for him to finish before she says, “I need to tell you something important,” though she would bet he’s figured it out already. Seems strychnine works even faster than she’d expected.

[rita-repulsa-ke]

just so you know i know this dynamic is toxic and i'm not romanticizing it :/ i'm actually sexualizing it

[rita-repulsa-ke]

hate hate hate when people write previously fucked up codependent weird relationships as mellowing out completely after a year or two of being together, or, even worse, after the first kiss. like who do you think you are to make them normal. theyre going to be even worse because now there's two of then and theyre working in tandem