#hex girls fantasy | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sundrop-writes · 2 months ago

Text

The Restricted Section

Hermione Granger x Fem!Gryffindor!Reader x Harry Potter

Summary:

Harry wishes that Hermione would just relax. Just because he doesn't know the exact source of a hand-written spell in an old textbook doesn't mean that it's completely evil.

Intent to prove her wrong, he dawns his Invisibility Cloak and sneaks off to the Restricted Section of the library, looking for a more solid source of that spell - and he completely forgets everything that he set out to do when he finds Hermione along the way, doing something (or rather, someone) in a secluded corner of the library that is definitely not studying. (Something that he'll never be able to get out of his mind ever again.)

Hermione Granger x Fem!Gryffindor!Reader x Harry Potter. Accidental Voyeurism upon an Established Relationship. Smut/PWP. Set during Half-Blood Prince.

Word Count: 4,400

Harry Potter Masterlist | AO3 Link

Full list of warnings and author's notes below the cut.

Warnings: this fic is primarily smut focused; there is some very vague plot - Harry and Hermione have an argument because Hermione doesn't like the Half-Blood Prince's book and wants Harry to get rid of it (and they are still not on good terms when the smutty stuff comes up); passing mention of a hex that gives you boils that never heal; the primary pairing in this fic is between Hermione and the reader, and Harry spies on them having sex using his Invisibility Cloak - that does mean that this fic has dubious consent and dubious morality, because Harry never asks for their permission to watch and never reveals himself to them, and during the course of this fic they also don't find out that he's there (if this is the kind of thing that makes you uncomfortable, then I would recommend moving on to one of my other fics); the reader has a vagina and uses she/her pronouns; the reader's looks - including race, hair colour, skin tone, etc. are not described in anyway; there is use of Y/N in this fic; the reader is a Gryffindor in this fic (I wanted her to be closer with Hermione, sharing a dorm with her, and be closer to the trio in general); Harry has had a crush on the reader for a while before this, but this is the first time he views Hermione sexually past his platonic friendship feelings for her; accidental voyeurism - Harry does not intend to spy on the girls, but once he discovers them, he doesn't stop watching; semi-public sex - Hermione and the reader are fucking in the library, but they are fucking in a much more secluded part of the library where Hermione knows that someone is less likely to discover them; there is some sub/dom dynamics - Hermione and the reader having a pre-existing sub/dom relationship where Hermione is very dominant and the reader is submissive, and Harry is understanding those dynamics as he observes them; Hermione calls the reader: little girl (not as indication of her size, but as a form of degradation and condescension), little bitch, little whore, slutty, brat, darling,; Hermione demands to be called 'Mistress'; Harry is a switch - he imagines himself as both dominant and submissive in his fantasies; (Harry as a 'sir' kink in his fantasies); mentions of creampie kink (one of Harry's fantasies); Hermione is very mean and condescending toward the reader; brat taming/punishment and reward - the reader has 'misbehaved' and Hermione seeks to correct it; degradation kink (towards the reader); Hermione fingers the reader; Hermione uses the reader's tie like a leash; lots of dirty talk (from Hermione); Harry considers masturbating but does not (because he fears getting caught) (and there is a mention of him masturbating to thoughts of what happened in a more private space afterwards); pussy spanking/clit spanking (from Hermione towards reader) and ass spanking (towards reader - just once) (no severe pain kink); orgasm denial (towards the reader); I believe that's it.

A/N: This was such a random idea that zapped into my head that demanded to be written. People were asking for Hermione x Fem!Reader smut and it was something I really wanted to do, but I only really felt inspired to do it when it occurred to me to write Hermione through Harry's eyes. To talk about her going from this very non-sexual being to someone so sexually powerful in his eyes - it was something really fun. And I am so glad I actually managed to squeeze this one in and finish it before the poll for the other fic finished up. I feel like this is such a fun, Harry Potter based idea that uses themes and elements unique to the series. And it's wonderful, filthy horny smut. So I hope that you guys enjoy!!

...

Harry really didn’t understand Hermione sometimes.

She was an amazing friend, someone that he wouldn’t trade for the world - someone so wonderfully loyal, smart, and fun to be around during the times when she let herself actually relax and untense. But during the times when she had that intensely large stick up her arse, she could be the biggest pain in the world. Sometimes, it was like she stayed up late in her dormitory, just thinking of ways to drive Harry and Ron utterly mad.

Yes, Harry knew that his particular fascination with the Half-Blood Prince’s book was not exactly… normal. But Hermione’s attachment to a lot of her books was never normal either. And just because the book was old didn’t mean that it was bad. Just because Harry was fascinated by it didn’t mean that there would be negative consequences.

There was no reason for her to go off on a long tangent about ‘dark magic’ and ‘the Latin origins of spells’ when he had asked her about a hand-written spell that was in the book. Something that spiralled into a huge argument between the two of them when he refused to hand over the Prince’s book once she had asked him where he had gotten the spell. To her, it was something that sounded very dangerous, and she complained that therefore, the whole book was dangerous. He complained that she had a knot in her knickers because he had just been asking if she knew what the spell was or not, if she had heard of it before - it’s not like he had any intentions of actually using it.

And then Hermione had warned him that he should simply throw the book away and he told her that she was just jealous that he was actually getting better grades than her in a class for once, and the night ended with her huffing off to bed and stomping up the stairs - and the two of them hadn’t spoken in over a day because of it. Ron was nagging both of them to make-up - but Harry was chuffed, honestly. For once, Ron knew what it felt like to be between two feuding friends, trying to mend the fences.

Harry wasn’t going to apologise.

Hermione wasn’t the queen of everything. She couldn’t just demand things from him and expect him to follow suit. He had his own brain, despite what she thought, and he could make his own judgements. Harry had no plans to use the spell if Hermione thought it was dangerous, and he had just been asking about it out of curiosity. But he was more peeved that it led to her demanding that he throw the book away or destroy it, like she held some authority over him, like she was his damn mother or something.

This left Harry stewing in his annoyance as he made his way to the Restricted Section of the library the next night. He was still curious if the spell had any other known origins - another spell book, some kind of book about dark magic. Hell, he would revert to a Latin textbook if he was desperate, just to get a leg-up without directly asking Hermione. But he was headed to the Restricted Section first - because as much as she was annoying, Hermione usually was right.

He was feeling confident and perhaps a bit cocky to find the source of the spell and wield some more knowledge over her that she didn’t have. For once.

Harry had dawned his Invisibility Cloak for this task, of course. It wasn’t past curfew yet, but the library was about ten minutes from closing, and he knew that it would be easier to sneak in before Madame Pince locked up and stay there well after dark, taking his time in order to find what he needed. And any trip to the Restricted Section without a note from a professor giving permission required such a disguise.

The library was practically deserted due to the late hour - most students having wandered off to bed like good rule followers. Harry wasn’t surprised when he heard a particular, familiar voice coming from an isolated area of small desks study carols back between a few towering book cases. Of course, she would think that this would be the perfect place to get her work done, undisturbed. He couldn’t hold back from rolling his eyes when he heard that voice taking on her usual scolding, bossy tone.

“I am not at all pleased with you, you know that?”

It was Hermione.

Harry knew for a fact that Ron was in a corner of the Gryffindor common room, his face unpleasantly glued to Lavender’s once again, so he wasn’t the one in the path of Hermione’s wrath this time. Harry had to wonder who exactly had come on the other end of her up-tight, nosy fortitude.

He had seen Hermione usher you off to the library after class earlier that afternoon, saying something about the mark on your last Transfiguration essay being ‘far below your usual standard’, and talking about how you ‘needed to follow her study schedule more closely’ - and Harry had felt sorry for you at the time, if anything. The fact that you would have Hermione hovering over your shoulder, bothering you all afternoon, marking all your work and making you redo it to her incredibly high standards.

Sometimes, he felt sorry for the fact that you had to share a dorm with her. That you couldn’t escape Hermione even for a peaceful night of slumber.

But surely the two of you hadn’t spent this long in the library together. Even you wouldn’t take three or four hours to do your homework up to Hermione’s standards. She would have freed you by now - and with any luck, you would be off somewhere, snogging some lucky bloke - (Harry couldn’t let that particular train of jealous thought get to him right now).

“Little girl, am I going to have to get mean with you?”

Hermione’s voice came again, just as bitter as usual, and then it clicked with Harry.

No, it wasn’t you, perhaps Hermione was taking out her anger on a couple of First Years for not doing their homework, getting on the wrong end of Hermione’s ill-guided Prefect power that she wielded like a presidency. Harry held back a scoff of laughter, and he couldn’t help the urge to move toward the sound of her voice, eager to see what exactly was going on.

“Stop being such a whiny little bitch - you asked for this. Now shut up and take it like a good little whore.”

Those words - those words in Hermione’s voice - immediately smacked Harry in the face harder than any stunning curse ever could have. He craned his neck around the bookcase in front of him so hard to see what was happening that he harshly smacked one of his shoulders, nearly giving himself away with the noise and having to strangle down his cry of pain in order not to be caught.

However, after a moment, he came around the corner completely and rested against the bookcase comfortably as his eyes took in the utterly unbelievable sight at the other end of the aisle.

Holy fuck.

Holy… fuck.

It was you.

You and Hermione. Hermione and you.

You and Hermione looking like some sort of unbelievable pornographic dream.

Hermione had you pressed up against a desk, your legs spread wide for her with your arse just balanced on the edge of the table while she stood between them - it took Harry’s very stunned brain a moment to process it, but he realised that her arm working furiously between your thighs like that, pistoning back and forth while you spread your legs wider and leaned into the touch could only mean one thing.

She was finger-fucking your pussy.

Harry had no clue how he hadn’t picked up on the other sounds previously, especially not in the dead quiet of the library. But it was blatantly fucking clear to his ears now. The sound of your wetness sliding against her fingers, so beautifully sloppy - he could only imagine how slick you were, how pretty your cunt looked around her fingers, which were usually only meant for gripping quills or turning the pages in her next book. Along with your repressed moans, barely caught in your chest where you were biting your lip raw, clearly trying your best to stay quiet - the sounds coming out, as Hermione had described them: whines, as though you were a needy bitch in heat.

Harry was in utter shock.

Never, in a thousand years, would ever have imagined Hermione Granger looking at you with crazed heat in her eyes, her stern brow and disappointed frown somehow so perfectly fitting for the situation. Scolding you in her bossy voice while she held on tight to your Gryffindor tie like a leash, keeping your posture tight and straight as she finger-fucked you in the most rough, harsh way that Harry could have ever pictured.

Hermione - uptight, bookish, rule-bound Hermione - fucking you in the library where anybody could have caught the two of you. It seemed so wildly unimaginable, and yet - when more scolding words came out of her lips in that bossy tone, it seemed… so terribly fitting for her.

“You’ve been such a naughty girl, haven’t you?” Hermione breathed hotly, giving another harsh tug on your tie that made you whine deeply in the back of your throat.

Harry swore the sound of her fingers jabbing between your legs became even wetter, sloppier sounding. So you liked being called naughty.

“Yes, I have-” You whined out, and Hermione tugged the tie again, cutting off anything further that you had to say with a harsh jolt.

Harry’s cock snapped to attention at an alarmingly fast rate, the blood rushing into his prick so quickly that it almost made him dizzy. The moral contention of watching two of his good friends go at it didn’t really cross his mind at all (perhaps his morality was going a bit too grey, using an old marked up book to ‘cheat’ in his classes these days). But he knew that wanking would be a bad idea simply based on the fact that he would have a difficult time staying quiet. So he reached down and squeezed the bulge in his trousers, gaining little relief from this as he looked on. He likely wouldn’t have been able to pull his eyes away if Voldemort himself showed up and demanded it.

“Such a naughty little bitch - you can’t even go one afternoon without having your slutty cunt filled, can you?” Hermione demanded, her words seemingly growing filthier by the second.

“I need it.” You moaned, arching into her further, as though you were possessed.

Harry would have wondered if she had been replaced by someone else, or bewitched - but you seemed to love it, loved everything she was saying. She seemed to be playing into a knowledge of your kinks, things that she knew would make you weaker and more lustful in her hands. Which was so Hermione that it was painful. Studying for something, keeping a backlog of useful knowledge.

Harry just never would have guessed that she would have used her big brain for this.

What made matters even more dizzying and shocking - this was Hermione and you. A pair he never would have thought up that also somehow made so much sense. Now, every single time the two of you snuck off giggling and Harry thought that it was just something girlish that he didn’t understand - he had to wonder what the two of you had been doing.

The fact that Hermione had been Viktor Krum’s date to the Yule Ball and you had been Harry’s, but you and Hermione had been glued to each other all night made a lot more sense. Every single time the two of you walked to class together holding hands, every single time you showed up to the Gryffindor table with some kind of glaring love mark on your neck and Ginny or someone else asked you about it and Hermione had laughed when you named off a different boy from a different house - it all made strange sense in Harry’s eyes.

This was you - one of the hottest, most sought-after girls at Hogwarts. The star of every single one of Harry’s wanking fantasies since you had given him a pity kiss under some mistletoe after a DA meeting. (He had a feeling that Hermione would be sneaking into those fantasies too, now, as much as he had tried to keep her out on the grounds that it would be rude to wank to his best friend). You, someone who was so gorgeous and so desirable and somehow never seemed to have a long-term boyfriend, as often as guys asked you on dates, and as often as you claimed to like certain boys and even flirted with them.

Apparently Hermione had been keeping you on a leash this whole time. A tight leash - just like the way she was holding your tie, keeping you close, keeping you waiting with baited breath for her next move.

“Mione-” You breathed out in return, a slight begging in your voice that had Harry light-headed in seconds.

This was better than any fantasy he could have dreamt up.

“Ah-ah. Hush, little girl.” Hermione fired back, that bossy condescending she always used somehow sounding all the more perfect in this context. “You’ve been such a proper brat all day, and you’re going to take what I give you, understand?”

You nodded your head (as much as you could with the hold she had on you) and made a noise of affirmation. But Hermione gave another sharp tug on your tie, clearly displeased with this.

“Come on, use your words now. Be a good girl.” She ordered sharply, the only thing giving away what must have been her own arousal being a slight hint of breath on her voice. Otherwise, she was entirely proper - not a single wrinkle in her impeccable uniform, her face entirely straight and firm as she stared you down with sharp eyes.

“Yes, Mione-”

“No, darling. Wrong again.”

Hermione hauled her hand back, creating another loud wet sound as she hauled her fingers out of your pussy entirely. Harry harshly craned his neck again, and it was only then that it truly occurred to him, between his dizzy head, his cement legs and his hard cock painful against his pelvis, protesting wildly against his zipper, that he could actually move closer to get a better look. With his Cloak guarding him, he would not be seen.

He tried his best not to rush, not to make too much noise especially as he got closer, and he almost scolded himself when he nearly missed out on it - the wet smack as Hermione brought her hand down between your thighs. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he never would have guessed that she had so boldly laid two rapid spanks right across your swollen, needy clit. Your skirt flipped up out of the way, no panties in sight, and giving her all the room in the world to do so.

You harshly bit down on your own lip again, worrying the skin to the point where it was swollen and looked like it might even bruise, dampening down harsh cries from deep within your chest. Before Harry could worry that the tears pooling in your eyes had meant that Hermione had truly hurt you, you spread your legs wider and canted your hips more toward her, offering your body up for more.

And then, you opened your lips again, seemingly to obey whatever implicit command she had given you with the spanks.

“Yes, Mistress.” You choked out, putting stress on the title, as if correcting your earlier self. “Yes, I understand.”

“Good girl.” Hermione replied, more breath this time as she used your tie to pull you into a heated kiss, and then shoved three firm fingers back into your waiting, leaking cunt.

Harry’s head was spinning.

He had never seen anything more beautiful and erotic in his life (not even when Fred and George had shown him and Ron those Wonder Witch magazines - no, this was much hotter and more perfect because it was so real).

His mind was spinning with a unique kind of jealousy, something that told him that he was sure if he wanted to steal you away from Hermione because he thought he could - because he now knew all of your sexual preferences and he would use that information to play you, to do everything she was doing to you and more. He would make you the perfect horny little puppet on his painful, throbbing cock (he gave himself another squeeze through his trousers, suppressing a moan of his own). He would have you calling him ‘Sir’ and begging for his cock in no time, because you needed it - you needed to have your holes filled and you would fucking love it.

Or if he wanted Hermione playing him like this - tugging on his hair, guiding him around by his tie like he was nothing more than a wretched dog, needing to be tamed. Wanted her using that bossy voice of hers to give him completely different kinds of orders - forcing him onto his knees to eat her cunt until she was satisfied, and - knowing her - she never would be.

Harry’s mind flashed with an image of him on his knees before you, his head so perfectly framed by your plush thighs, with Hermione behind him, barking orders in his ear, a tight grip on his hair as she shoved him tighter into your perfect, messy, wet pussy. He decided that was it - that was exactly what he wanted. That would be the vision that haunted his dreams from now on.

It was something that had him leaking enough precum to stain through to the outside of his pants, especially by the time your voice warbled out brokenly against Hermione’s chin, your thighs starting to shake, and Harry was sure that he would get the treat of seeing you cum on her fingers.

He was sorely disappointed by what happened next.

Hermione pulled back from you completely, creating another deadly wet sound as she pulled her fingers from your cunt once again - something that was almost drowned out by the pitched, disappointed whine that you let out.

“Mione-!” You complained sharply, the nickname almost coming out as a sob from the back of your throat.

You sat frozen on the edge of the desk, your legs spread wide as you stared Hermione down with glassy, disappointed eyes while she stepped back and grabbed a handkerchief from her bag that was sitting on a table opposite and used it to wipe off her glistening fingers.

Harry rushed to get a better look at your cunt before you closed your legs, and Merlin - it was magnificent. Swollen and puffed from Hermione’s efforts, coated in your wetness, your clit stuck out from the hood and standing at attention, so damn needy, begging to be touched, your hole slightly gaped from where Hermione’s fingers had been.

(Harry couldn’t help but to imagine how stretched you would be left by the thickness of his cock, how good you would look leaking with his cum…)

“What did you expect?” Hermione said sharply, the edge of a sarcastic laugh on her voice. She was firm, not giving in to the pout that you were giving her.

“You’ve been bratting up all day - I could have excused you flirting with Malfoy all through potions class-” She continued.

Harry had noticed that too. He had simply thought that Malfoy would be your next conquest, not a simple flirtation to get on Hermione’s nerves.

“If not for the fact that you didn’t finish any of your homework and you then decided to distract me from doing mine all afternoon.”

Of course. Hermione doling out sexual punishments for not doing homework.

Some things are just nature.

Though, Harry knew, if there was one thing that would motivate him to do his essays - it would be the idea of getting to cum.

“Of course you don’t get to cum, you stupid whore.” Hermione said these words how she said many things - as a final, finite declaration that was law.

Hearing her speak such filthy words in such an authoritative (and nearly emotionless) voice almost caused Harry to cum in his pants on the spot. Almost.

You let out a sigh of defeat and finally closed your legs, hopping off the desk and pulling down your skirt. Obviously, you hadn’t been wearing panties at all that day (which was another thought that would haunt Harry’s wet dreams) because you made no move to find a pair and put them back on. Instead, you simply turned around and gathered some of your books that were farther back on the desk.

“How long?” You asked Hermione tentatively, glancing over your shoulder at her.

Perhaps meaning - how long would she be angry with you? How long until she would finally allow you to cum?

Harry’s stomach lurched - he imagined himself finding you in the hallway and pinning you against the wall, flipping up your skirt and finding your still wet, bare cunt, teasing you with his fingers and promising to give you everything that you needed as long as you surrendered yourself to him. He would let you cum - he would make you cum so many times that you would cry and beg for him to stop. And he would leave you tired, satisfied and gaped with his cum dripping from all your pretty holes.

Perhaps it would be rude and underhanded to go after you simply based on a void that Hermione had left in you - but Harry was still feeling a bit of a petty sting from their argument the night before.

Hermione stepped toward you again - careful, calculated, like a predator observing its prey. She put her hands on either side of your waist, and leaned forward to whisper something in your ear that Harry barely caught.

“For as long as I want, naughty girl.” She told you. “You’ll take what you get, and you’ll like it, you understand me?”

“Yes, Mistress.” You sighed loyally in return. Though your face was knit with a unique displeasure - clearly, you were still aching to cum.

“And if I think for a moment that you have been touching your little whore cunt without my permission, I will spank you until every single person in Hogwarts hears you scream my name - understood?”

She topped this off with a sharp spank across your ass, using her free hand to hold the fabric of your skirt out of the way to make sure it was nothing but free, burning, skin on skin. You sucked in a sharp breath, and began nodding furiously.

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Good.” Hermione told you. “Now, off to bed.”

You began to walk off, but you hesitantly looked back over your shoulder, as if waiting for her to follow.

“I’ll be along in a few minutes. I have to sort out some more books for tomorrow. Since I now have so much to catch up on.” She added the last part with a bit of snark, and you rolled your eyes, turning around and walking.

Unfortunately, you abruptly headed in Harry’s direction and his stomach tightly clenched - he moved to press himself tightly into the bookcase, praying that you wouldn’t bump into him.

Perhaps you felt him move, or you simply felt something… off, but you paused for a moment, and stared harshly at the space where Harry was standing. His heart began to beat hard inside of his throat, and he wondered how fast he would be able to run with his cock so uncomfortably stiff inside of his pants. You kept staring, as though you were expecting something to materialise out of thin air.

“Y/N, go.” Hermione snapped. “Go on, it’s almost curfew.”

“Yes, Miss Prefect, I’m going.” You sighed sarcastically in return, and walked off.

Harry had a hard time not loudly gulping in air - not realising how harshly he had been holding his breath.

He stayed there for a few more minutes and continued to watch Hermione.

Jarringly, she was still so much of the usual Hermione. She was still absolutely someone that he knew so well, despite the secret sex persona that she had been hiding. Still biting at the skin around her nails as she concentrated on a thought, still fussing over which books to take, and still leaving the library with more of an armful than she could comfortably carry. Still somehow forgetting that she could just use magic to lug all the books to the Gryffindor common room instead of tiring out her arms - and Harry only fitfully realised now that this was only half her arm workout, and fucking your cunt raw must have been the other half.

The whole time he stood there, Harry had considered revealing himself to her.

He thought about begging to be let in on what the two of you had, even if he had to do something horrible to earn it first, to be worthy in her eyes - something like licking her shoes or wanking in front of her just to be ‘even’. But he knew that she would see the spying (even if unintentional) as a violation of trust, as something too creepy to be redeemed. She would probably hex him to hell and back, make him grow boils that would break open and bleed and never properly heal for the rest of his life - just for thinking about spying on her like that.

So Harry knew that he had to keep this whole thing a secret, keep it close to his chest. He could never, ever speak about it to anyone.

Harry forgot all about the book he had wanted. And, instead of going back to the Gryffindor common room behind Hermione, he took his aching cock to the Prefect’s Bathroom in an attempt to clear his mind. After making himself cum not once, but three different times, he finally settled into the hot water for a nice, long soak. He thought about it, and he realised that he was properly fucked - because he would never be able to look at you or Hermione in the same way again.

...

A/N: This is a oneshot, and at this current time, there is not going to be a continuation or a 'Part 2'. I might be open to writing a second part to this, but I don't have any current plans to do so and right now, it is not on my schedule. For now, if you are going to leave a comment on this fic, please leave a comment about the body of work that has been written instead of asking for more. If you want to see more Harry Potter fics that I have written, definitely check out my Harry Potter masterlist.

#sundrop writes #harry potter fanfiction #hermione granger x reader #hermione granger smut #hermione granger x fem!reader #hermione granger x you #hermione granger x y/n #hermione granger fanfiction #harry james potter x reader #harry james potter smut #harry potter x reader #hjp x reader

383 notes · View notes

blushingteddy · 14 days ago

Text

Precious Things: Chapter 2

Plot: Rio visits Westview after The Hex comes down and finds Agnes O'Conner in Agatha's stead. She must team up with an unlikely ally to help get her wife back and confront the past to make sense of the future ahead. (Agathario x Rio/Mrs Hart unlikely friendship)

---

The Hex had fallen a little over three weeks ago. Rio knew the proximate location without knowing the details, felt Agatha pulsate through the veil like the dull throb of a burning wick. Again, without knowing the details, Rio knew perfectly well she had lost the Darkhold—must have lost it along with her mind, Rio thought. Three weeks and no attempt at one of her swift, Agatha Harkness’ exits.

Perhaps she really was ready this time.

Rio couldn’t allow herself the grace of such a naive fantasy.

It would be short-lived, of course. Fantasies always were when they involved Agatha.

The doorbell rings. The footsteps land steady, quick and unhesitant. Then, for the first time in over sixty years, they’re eye to eye. Rio loses her breath, then sees Agatha’s lips betray herself into a smile. A real smile. Resisting every urge, Rio doesn’t trace a finger down her cheek, doesn’t step close and bury her nose into the nook of her neck, begging wordless for something un-nameable, to be neither absolved nor forgiven but some concoction of the two.

“Have we met before?” Agatha narrows her eyes.

“How very coy of you, my darling.”

“What’s a bad girl like you doing in a nice place like this?”

Rio’s eyes flicker.

Agatha is still smiling wide, her sparkling blue eyes firmly locked, but there’s nothing behind the waxy, frozen expression. No grief, no hatred, no self-loathing, not a single feeling detectably her own. Agatha glances down at the hand gently turning her elbow, another woman’s thumb gliding idly along a thick raised scar underneath the hem of her short lilac sweater sleeve. She observes it with strangeness, her brow furrowing at the touch, but she doesn’t pull away, and Rio feels a chill run through her.

“Either I’m about to walk into a trap or you already have.”

Rio waits for a response, waits and waits and waits. Agatha just stands there on the porch with vague conflict in her eyes, until Rio brings her hand away from the scar on her elbow, and then she smiles again.

“I have the strangest feeling we’ve met before, haven’t we?”

The windows shatter suddenly, the curtains blow inward, the lights flicker and the rage of the last two centuries exudes from Rio’s palms in graceful sheets of pearlescent black. She slams Agatha back into the house and across the living room with a flick of the finger. In her arrogance, perhaps Agatha hadn’t expected her arrival so quickly after the Hex fell, had answered the door with all the pomp and circumstance of a suburban housewife in the nice part of town because it was all a rouse—a play at the Achille’s heel. Rio strode through the guts of the living room, eyes scanning across the upheaval, searching for her wife.

She had missed Agatha.

She needed Agatha to have missed her too.

The house sat torn apart and disembowelled from the single pulse of turbulence, the cupboards and kitchen drawers and all of their contents strewn everywhere. A glint of metal catches Rio’s eye. The cutlery and utensils. Another flick of her finger, Rio instantly sends a dozen steak knives into the fortified coffee table slumped on it’s side—where Agatha was laying in wait, no doubt. They struck the wood like darts flying at a board.

Rio waits for the parlay, for the response, for purple to ricochet around the room like a bleeding mortal wound and squeeze her so achingly tight she might never breathe again.

Nothing happens.

In her ecstasy and rash excitement, cackling and screeching in delight, Rio shatters every lightbulb with a gesture, the sparks and glass flying like glinting crystal at every available surface. Rio waits on baited breath, still nothing happens.

In the deep lightless dark, a terrified muffled whimper punctures the silence.

“Agatha?” Rio calls out tentatively.

Perhaps it’s a trick.

Of course it’s a trick.

Agatha always plays dirty, Rio reminds herself.

There in the corner, Agatha Harkness sits balled-up with knees pulled into her chest. She whimpers with her scarred elbow tucked around her face. There’s a cut on her head, it’s not severe, but she touches the blood and there’s unmistakable horror in her eyes.

“You’re…scared?” Rio takes a step back. “Why? Why are you frightened of me…”

“Please don’t hurt me,” Agatha hyperventilates.

Definitely a trick.

“You know it’s your time.”

“You can take anything you want…” Rio watches her insurmountable, great proud harbinger crawl on her shaking hands and knees to a leather purse by the stairs. She digs inside of it, looking for something, and Rio looks away in abject horror at the sight of her so human and vulnerable. “My. My husband Ralph. His car is in the garage…”

“It better fucking not be!”

“Please don’t hurt me”—Agatha turns back with paperclips strung together—“Here, take his keys. You know how to drive stick right? Most women can’t. He says that. I-I wouldn’t know…”

“Agatha it’s me.”

“I don’t know who you are!” Fear bursts through her voice.

Wounded and staggered, Rio steps back like a bleeding stag caught off-guard. Agatha scuttles back like a rabbit until her back strikes the wall. She looks twenty-five again, wide-eyed and human, true palpable terror exuding from her like liquorice Rio can taste in the air. Two centuries ago it aroused her. Now she prays for a trick.

“I’m frightened,” Agatha begins to cry. “I want Wanda.”

“Sweetheart, it’s me.” Rio croaks, a flood of tears sting her eyes, the balls of her knees land on the wood and she touches Agatha’s shaking hands. “Agatha what has she done to you?”

Agatha flinches back.

“I can handle you hating me for taking Nicky away from you.” Rio grasps her chin harder than she means, forcing Agatha to meet her eyes. “I can handle not being your wife. I can handle us doing this—the fighting—until the very end. I cannot handle you looking at me like you have no idea who I am. So please, Agatha, drop the other shoe!”

Rio watches her brow furrow in distress and confusion.

“Who is Nicky?”

Engulfed in a sudden hug, Agatha puts up no resistance. A husk. A shell of a woman. Rio tempts the idea of smothering her gently. She doesn’t have the heart, perhaps she never had it to begin with. Rio does the only thing she can. Her fingers strewn in Agatha’s long dark hair, she nuzzles her neck and holds her closer than she’s been allowed in centuries.

Rio feels tears dribble on her skin.

They aren’t her own.

“Nicky,” Agatha’s breath warms her shoulder. “Why does that name hurt so much?”

“Because he was your son.”

“Was?”

“Yeah,” Rio swipes her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Forget what I said. You can forget me, okay? But don’t let her take your boy, Agatha. You made him from scratch, remember?”

“My name is Agnes.” Agatha stood, her voice devoid of warmth or emotion. “You have me confused with somebody else.”

Rio laughs bitterly, “Clearly.”

And then, she hung her head and cried.

***

Perched on grey blocks, Rio sat and watched from the adjacent lot. The curtains finally twitched open, Agatha yawned and stretched as the morning sunlight touched her sparkling blue eyes. She looked happy—happier than Rio had seen in a while.

She took it as a symptom Agatha remembered nothing strange from the night before.

The house had been left pristine and exact, better than it had been found, accounting for the azaleas and vibrant flowers trailing up and around the brickwork. Rio’s lips fidgeted, unsure of what do with herself now. She hoped she would look up and find Agatha staring down, some sense of familiarity etched in her eyes, as though the sight of Rio alone would be enough to reach through the curse the Scarlet Witch had placed over her tormented mind.

Rio glanced up at her window again and found nobody there.

She willed herself to be seen.

“So who exactly are you with, huh?” A surly older woman appeared from nowhere. “The Post? The Eastview Journal? TokTok?”

She was short and imposing, with rosy cheeks and a neat blonde bob underneath her straw gardening hat. Rio watched the woman remove her gloves one at a time, tugging at them with a frustrated snap, as though she might wrap one across Rio’s cheek like a Victorian insult. Then others came, tentatively at first, a neighbour from across the street in his cycling helmet and shorts, another two from the same front door across the road—wearing matching pyjamas. The street seemed to accumulate in dribs and drabs. Rio watched as the residents stood firm behind this small, angry woman making daggers beneath her sun hat.

“I really cannot stand you people!” The woman yapped and stomped her boat shoe. “Hand it over right now, give me the camera!” Her hand shot outward.

“The what?”

“The camera, now.” She grabbed Rio by the arm. “You journalists really cheese me, you know that. You are not welcome in our neighbourhood and you certainly will not bother Agnes on our watch. What does the sign say, bitch?” Her finger flew at one of the many red posters hung to lampposts and walls:

No loitering.

No photos.

No interviews.

No bothering Mrs. O'Conner

—Thank you, the HOA.

“Sharon you gotta cool it mama, you keep putting hands on photographers”—a larger man pulls her floral-printed shoulder gently—“Jed will have to book you overnight, you remember him saying that, right?” His voice lowered.

“Yeah yeah,” Sharon shirked him off, straightening herself neatly. “Well, what are we going to do with her?”

“Uh-oh and what do we have here!” A familiar voice boomed loudly from behind the small gathering of neighbours. Rio would recognise it anywhere, apparently the neighbours did too if their grimaces and tight expressions were any indication. “Mrs Hart, is this lady bothering you?” Agatha slipped a protective arm around the short blonde woman.

“It’s Mrs Davis, honey. You can call me Sharon or Mrs Davis.”

“Mhm. Whose our friend, Mrs Hart?” Agatha glanced Rio up and down. “Is this the big-shot journalist from the city who knows nothing about Christmas cheer despite being born in this little humdrum town?”

Rio felt the ghost of a smile tug up her cheeks.

The man sighed, exasperated, glancing to the other neighbours. “We’re going to do the Hallmark movie bit again? Really?” The others looked at him in commiseration, nobody challenging the order of things. “Fine. I’ll put the decorations up but I am not—I repeat not—wearing a Christmas sweater in July.” He trudged back up the street to his home.

Rio realised Agatha was still staring.

“So, what’s your name?”

“Rio.”

“I’m Agnes.” The grip of her firm hand felt the same. “Agnes O’Conner.”

“Well Agnes, aren’t you just the prettiest girl in town.” She shook her wife’s hand under Sharon’s hawk-eyed stare. “And, I guess, I’m a handsome journalist here to report on this little humdrum town I haven’t been back to since my parents divorced. Where everyday is Christmas and there is inevitably some kind of financial issue within local government?”

“So you heard. That the town might go bankrupt this year and have to cancel the Christmas barn buster.” Agatha nodded seriously. “Unless we put on the best talent show this town has ever seen, that is.”

Perhaps this was a trick.

Rio narrowed her eyes and nodded along.

“Are we sure the mayor hasn’t been embezzling—”

Sharon interjected with disapproval, “Don’t spoil the ending for her.”

“Well alright.” At a loss, Rio followed them back toward Agnes O’Conner’s make-believe home. “So she’s always like this or do you get the impression it’s…some kind of long-con?”

“A con?” Sharon’s head shook side to side as though she couldn’t imagine something further from the truth. “Agnes saved us from Wanda. And I’m-I’m so sick of everybody complaining! Like celebrating Christmas in July is such a…and cover your ears because I’m about to use some really foul language…god damn’ tragedy. Well, it isn’t.”

“Oh, cool.” Rio nodded and followed them inside. “So the HOA has assumed guardianship over Agatha Harkness, last of the Salemites. Yeah that’s cool, I guess.”

***

Rio grew awkward and uncomfortable as a wooden spoon was thrusted into her hand to stir bubbling molasses and ginger. Agnes breezed out of the kitchen, a navy blue Christmas sweater pushed up her forearms, cranking the radio as she went by. The Phil Spector Christmas album looped for the third time.

“Uh, I love the Ronettes,” Mrs Davis approved.

“What are we doing here, exactly?” Rio murmured to the neighbour.

Mrs Davis—Sharon, she insisted—rummaged on her hands and knees in the back of the bottom cupboard. She emerged triumphant, two extra aprons in her hand, then blew a piece of blonde hair out of her eyes and looked Rio up and down.

She said nothing, shrugging awkwardly.

“Nice, well that’s helpful.” Rio grimaced.

“It’s not that hard.” Mrs Davis pushed up on to her feet and handed her an apron. “She gives you context clues.”

“For who she thinks you are?”

“No, for the recipes.” Mrs Davis rolled up her sleeves. “I think we’re making spiced cinnamon cookies. Have you made them before? You’re letting the molasses burn. Clearly not…” She rose to the challenge and took the spoon from Rio’s hand.

“And you just let her do this to you?”

“Invite me over to make Christmas cookies?” Mrs Davis balked as though it were a strange thing to get worked up about. “So, what’s your real name anyway?”

I don’t have one, Rio wanted to reply.

“Rio,” she said.

“Lucky you.” Mrs Davis rolled her eyes. “You never did say which newspaper you were with, by the way.”

“I’m not with a newspaper.”

“Seems like you know a lot about Agnes…”

“I’m her wife.”

Rio needed to admit it to somebody—anybody. She watched as Agnes came back in the room, all smiles and Christmas cheer, her heart aching indescribably at the pathetic sight. There was nothing remotely familiar about Agnes, nothing that felt dangerous at least, which inherently left Rio out of her skin and unsafe. A firm grip tightened around her bicep. Rio glanced down and saw Mrs Davis’ face etched with sympathy.

Rio pulled her arm away, “We were already separated.”

“Are you ladies ready for my famous barn-buster winning pistachio butterscotch eggnog,” Agnes tilted a dusted bottle of Vodka from side to side. “It was grandma’s family recipe.”

Rio laughed at the absurdity.

Mrs Davis took down three glasses from the cupboard, “Sure Agnes, I think we could all use a drink right about now.” She turned back to the stove and stirred the bubbling sugar. “So, the talent show. Are we thinking Dottie’s backyard or mine this time? Herb says he can hardwire the Jack Frost decorations if this is going to become a regular thing…”

“We should probably call Wanda - see what her and Vision think,” Agnes nodded slowly as though it were a wise thing to say. “She had some great ideas for last year’s Christmas barn buster. If it wasn’t for Wanda, this town probably would have gone under years ago…” Agatha knocked back a healthy pour.

The molasses bubbled and burned in the undisturbed silence.

Rio glanced and saw Mrs Davis’ white-knuckled grip tight on the wooden spoon.

“Wanda doesn’t live here anymore, Agnes,” Mrs Davis said softly through gritted molars with far-away eyes. “You were the hero of the story, remember? You saved us from Wanda.”

“Saved everybody from Wanda’s best-attempt at chocolate mint liqueur egg nog, maybe! Poor thing left the heat too high and let the eggs congeal!” Agatha cackled boisterously. “Nearly served scrambled egg to half the town!”

Sharon slumped in defeat and said nothing, Rio watched Agnes finish the drink and go back to the coffee table - a half-wrapped garden hose reel still dripping on the paper. She shook her and turned back to Sharon.

“Is she ever lucid?”

“Not in the ways that count.” Mrs Davis reached for the bottle and grimaced into a sip. She offered the bottle, gesturing it toward Rio. “Every day is Christmas and Wanda is always the best neighbour around.”

“Cool, well that’s settled then.”

“What is?”

Rio finished a third of the bottle and placed it gently back on the counter. She didn’t experience alcohol—couldn’t articulate a notion of what it must feel like to be out of control, subdued and numb. She felt all things, all of time, existed in all moments and found the grandeur completely exhausting more often than not, but the vodka tasted sharp and bitter and burned the entire way down. Rio enjoyed the burning sensation inside her body.

“Oh.” Rio glanced and saw Mrs Davis staring expectantly, waiting for an answer, which Rio had assumed was self-explanatory. “We’re going to break this curse and then kick the piss out of Wanda Maximoff. Your molasses is burning, by the way. Agatha go get your Santa suit, sweetheart, we’re going for a ride!” Rio strode into the living room.***

Salem, while not a model of neatness, was a miracle of supply. The car idled in the parking lot of a strip mall on the outskirt of town with high beam lights staring into the windows of a gutted discount clothing store.

In the back, Agnes sat like a pre-occupied child, a garbage bag of half-wrapped utensils and homeware sprawling into the footwell. Presents for the needy, she had kept saying for miles until she had slowly stopped saying things at all. Now sat silently, her eyes were fixed out of the window staring at nothing like an imitation of deep, monastic thought.

Rio made a mental note of the correlation between Westview and the curse.

Perhaps proximity effected the state of things.

Privately, Rio found this ordeal eery. The absence of Agatha’s soul. The uncertainty whether it was buried deep within or cast far, far away in some distant crevice unknowable to even Death herself. Wanda would have answers if required, Rio reassured herself.

She hoped she wouldn’t require them.

“You know it’s really past my bedtime,” Mrs Davis yawned at the steering wheel. “What are we waiting for exactly?”

“Those witches.” Rio nodded at the group of reprobates.

“Oh, honestly, I blame the parents!”

Rio glanced in the rearview mirror at her stalled, silent harbinger. “Me too,” she said.

“Still I loved Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched. Nicole Kidman was great, a little hammy, but remakes always are…”

“Mhm. Wait here, Mrs Davis, if this works I’ll see you in ten, maybe fifteen years. If it doesn’t we’ll take a ride back to Westview plus a better plan if you have one laying around…”

“You can call me Sharon—”

“Mrs Davis works fine,” Rio closed the door.

The witches were young, Rio noticed, and a pang of guilt went through her. She was out of better options and the scales tipped in neither direction as the decision set it’s teeth into the permanent fabric of time. She interpreted the lack of sway on the balance within herself as neutral, unbiased approval. That, or perhaps she had already been here, had already made this decision, and the balance was no longer aggrieved by the insult.

Just a few miles further up the road, covens would be dense and easy to come by, each group practically within earshot deep into the woods or dotted along some tiny, untouched wild—the cove, Highland park, the forest conservation, the light of distant row boats sparkling on the water, because perhaps The Road would open in a swirling riptide of magic. A deep blood red moon sat above the clearing, then a faint mist of clouds parting to reveal its entirety. Blood moons had always brought out the optimism in witches. And Salem, while not a model of neatness, was a miracle of supply.

Too young to know better, selected for their otherwise lacking experience and numbers, three noviciate witches sat under a corrugated plastic awning passing a blunt between themselves. Rio heard their quiet laughter from a distance. She felt the sense of sisterhood, saw the colours of their aura, wondered briefly on their reasons, because the reasons that led witches to attempt opening The Road were always sad. Rio hesitated as she opened the rear passenger door, then decided her reasons were sadder and more important.

“Hey neighbour.” Rio unbuckled Agatha out of the car. “Wanna sing a Christmas carol and give one of your really special gifts to those poor witches in need? For old time’s sake, call it work and play in fluctuating balances…” She hoisted Agatha upright.

Agatha said nothing, simply obeyed Rio’s direction, allowing herself to be handled and guided to her feet. She walked as Rio led, staggering and mindless, a protective arm slipping firmer around her spine.

Agatha smelled the same, Rio felt her heart ache over it as she caught it on her collar. The soft plaid shirt lingered with Agatha’s indescribably Agatha scent. She hated how lovers described one another in this way. The idea somebody could smell of vanilla, or petrichor, or warm spring cotton, or whatever other deeply personal experiences could be extrapolated from nothing, except Agatha did smell like a deeply personal experience that needed to be extrapolated and bottled.

Something Rio did not realise she had forgotten to miss until it was there, achingly missed, faintly on Agatha’s neck. The smell of personality and skin and clean, floral soap. Rio turned toward it, resisting the urge to press her nose on her wife’s collarbone, and then looked back to the witches beneath the awning.

They walked further toward them.

“Marching ever forward ‘neath the wooden shrine,” Rio hummed loudly. “I stray not from the path, I hold Death’s hand in mine…”

“Ah, fellow sisters of the craft?” A young, vaguely stoned butch with sand blonde hair looked at them curiously. “Well you’re shit out of luck, I’m afraid. We’re already up a green witch and that one…” She pointed at Agatha, her brow furrowing oddly. “That one doesn’t have an aura…why doesn’t she have an aura? Weird.”

“No, no, she totally does.” Rio patted Agatha’s belly. “She’s just, you know, shy.”

“Shy?”

“A grower not a shower.”

“Cute,” the butch laughed, inhaling a hard pull, then passed the blunt to her coven sister. “Take it you’re trying to open The Road? Shit’s a bust, man. Either that or you’re looking for somewhere safe to lay? We can help the the latter, but like I said…” She raised her hands. “We’re up a green witch.”

Rio looked at their faces, really looked, and saw wide eyes and hollow thin cheeks. A girl sat with her back pressed to an old laundromat door had a sleeping bag beneath her. The other in shorts and scarlet red lipstick, dark black eyeliner swiped in thick batwing lines, a crescent shaped bruise on her forearm, thigh-high patent leather boots with mended high heels.

“So, you’re the green witch?” Rio nodded.

“Mhm. We hold dominion over the cycles of life and death, you know…”

“You hold dominion over nothing.”

“Ouch.” She laughed. “I’m Theo, that’s Frieda Kahlo, and that right there”—Eyeliner gave a scowling wave—“Is Pliers.”

“Pliers?” Rio raised a brow.

Pliers shrugged, “If it can take a prick it can break a prick…”

“Aw.” Rio nodded, unbothered. “Well, I guess we solved the mystery of the protection witch. I’m Rio—Green. This is Agatha she’s…” Rio hesitated, unsure of how to categorise her swaying shell of a wife. “Seen better days,” she said. “Anyway whose ready to open The Road? Wow. I know I am. All our hopes and dreams are about to be fulfilled. Are you excited?” She forced a grimacing smile and pumped Agatha’s wrist in the air. “We’re going on The Road and nobody’s going to die!” She sing-songed.

Agatha always made this look so easy.

“Cute. You’re not just any green witch though, are you?” Theo stared acutely. “And if I didn’t know any better? I would say your roommate there looks a whole lot like fabled Persephone from your grimoire…”

Rio liked that.

That made her smile.

“Look at you with all the hot takes.” Rio tilted her head and dropped Agatha’s hand. “What gave it away?”

“Your face.” Theo took the blunt from Pliers. “Shit, I mean, my friends can’t see you but me?” She inhaled and held it. “Big fan of your work.”

Rio understood perfectly well there was only one way a person saw through her skin.

“We’ve met before.”

“Two years ago. Called on you for help. I would say you never showed but, you did, you just didn’t help how I wanted you too…” Rio’s face softened as she glanced at the silvery scars on Theo’s wrists. “Now you remember me,” Theo puffed.

“Hm, interesting.” Rio observed the stilled, perfectly balanced scales within herself and realised now why they were not fluctuating—this one was already on borrowed time. “I hate to drop in unannounced, believe it or not, I do have a soft spot for my own kin…”

“But you have need of me?”

Rio nodded her head. “Will your friends cause trouble?”

She glanced, expecting wide-eyed horrified looks, or perhaps the protection witch had already started drawing some analogue mortal conjuring to expel her. They always tried their tricks. She was greeted by the sight of two frozen, dull-eyed statues stuck in sleeping delirium—the lights were on but nobody was home. Accounting for Agatha’s condition, it left only two of them to tango.

“Datura.” Theo lifted the joint, then rolled her hand to reveal the laced joint she had switched-out behind her palm. “I always keep one up my sleeve. Better to need it and not have it than…well, you’re the green witch. I’m preaching to the gospels. Mean ol’ hangover when they come around but they will come around, right?”

Rio nodded at that.

She was not wasteful with life.

“Glad we’re on the same page. Will this hurt?” Theo boldly pushed up on to her feet.

“Yeah, this is going to suck. I need you to blast her.”

“Do something for me?”

“You had two years, I already did.”

“Okay do something else for me, anyway?”

Rio paused. “Name it.”

“My friends,” Theo glanced. “Says in the Book of Stones you’re not the only immortal—says you have sisters.”

“Brothers, actually.”

“You still count Creation on your Christmas card list?”

Rio glanced at Agatha, the irony never going amiss, then looked at Theo with a fixed expression. “Kid, if you knew the day I was having…” she sighed. “Let me guess you want fresh, clean, happy little new lives for the Olsen twins over there?” She pointed at the stoned zombies.

Theo folded her arms. “Something like that, sure.”

“Fine, whatever. I’ll do it.”

Theo nodded and narrowed her eyes at Agatha, “You’re sure this will work? I could kill her, you know…”

“Be just great if you could. I’ve been trying for two-hundred and sixty years…”

Two jolts of light pale yellow shot out from Theo’s palms and struck Agatha’s chest like sparks to a dead battery. She moaned in pain, face contorting, and then Rio saw the flicker of her aura. The most beautiful, lilac shocks of her essence exuding from her in iridescent waves. In the absence of herself, Agatha’s body knew what to do. Her feet slowly rose from the ground as her purple latched and pulled Theo’s pale yellow magic back into herself. Rio watched on baited breath, hoping for bursting shocks of laughter and swirls of unpredictable purple and chaos, she would settle for just a glimmer in her wife’s sparkling blue eyes…

And as Theo died.

Agatha rewarded her.

Her purple drained the very last drop of Theo’s magic and slowly Agatha came back to the ground with large, hyperventilating gasps of air. Rio knew better than to touch her—fuss over her. She tilted her chin, poised and manicured and ready for a fight. Hoped for one, desperately. She swirled her fingers and conjured a pulse of black, beautiful pearlescent death in her hand like a toy to play with—ready for the worse if it came to a quick draw.

Agatha stared with those beautiful, sparkling blue—bent over and out of breath—licking her cerise lips like a viper filled on live bait and blood. Rio saw the flicker of recognition, the grief, hatred and self-loathing in her eyes. It was beautiful, she thought, and with that she snuffed the little death in her fingers and took a step closer.

“I have missed you.”

Agatha began to blink and stumble.

“I hate you…” she quietly hissed.

Then Rio watched her collapse backward to the floor.

***

Salem, while not a model of neatness, was a miracle of supply. Beyond townships the population dwindled away to the rare, odd passing carriage out in the wilds and thickets. An unsustainable diet for a creature of constant consumption. A maiden defined by her hunger.

Salem sat like a sentinel against the vast emptiness of the world. In Salem covens brushed shoulders in their dozens every day—locals, travelling groups, those covenless few, the rara avis, seeking safe refuge on their journeys like foraging rabbits awaiting some great predator—and if one wanted to spend money, the witches market in Salem sold everything from sundries to sundresses to wizardbane to scented parchments and papers.

“People buy this nonsense?” She stands loftily, lifting a sample of jasmine scented parchment from the wicker basket, amusement and disapproval etched across her face. “And for such a pretty penny too! Oh dear, where are my manners. I don’t mean to…” A cawing laugh escaped her. “Well, I suppose I am making a mockery of you.”

The stall owner, an elderly woman with clouded eyes and sallow skin, pulled her face into an offended snarl. A response sits on the brink of her lips but it never comes. The light blue in her eyes grew wide, the air leaving her all at once in a stalled slow exhale, she stared straight ahead—through Agatha, through everything and everyone.

The woman wept beneath her breath, “I imagined you so differently.”

“Most do,” the witch-killer confirmed suspicions only she had assumed.

An inexplicable feeling came over Agatha, one which followed her entire life up to this moment, and she understood perfectly well her reputation preceded her in this instance.

The sensation of beating August sunlight disappearing behind thick impenetrable February clouds fell upon her cool, prickling skin. The taste of copper formed on the back of her tongue as though some unsourced part of her mouth were bleeding. Her tongue touched the backs of her teeth, gently prodding for the taste of blood, but she half-expected already there was no wound. Agatha shook her head, the feeling faded.

Then the cloyingly sweet smell of black cherry filled her nose and Agatha closed her eyes. Some said corpses smelled like sweet cherries and almonds when turning toward decay. Agatha inhaled regardless, though she knew perfectly well this woman wasn’t long for the grave, she figured cherries smelled simply of cherries—enjoyed the smell, either way.

The woman collapsed backward into her table, quills and stationary knocking outward in every direction, ink sent up into the air from mixing bowls in a collision of black and emerald green dyes against the flutter of parchments, then they floated to the ground like feathers. A crowd drew to the scene, but the elderly woman’s eyes remained fixed despite the chaos all around. Agatha looked in the same direction.

And Agatha saw her.

There behind the crowds, a woman with a bright green lantern stood completely still and flat.

It was as though somebody had gone to the effort of painting her across the fabric of reality, etching every fine feature on to the tapestry of existence like a drawing without dimension. Agatha blinked, eyes narrowing, unsure of the sudden anxiety knotting her stomach with dread, she realised quickly she couldn’t account for perception, distance or dimension.

The woman was closer than she appeared, or perhaps further still, like an apparition assimilating around physical laws that were unnatural and not her own. An aura of omnipotence vibrated from her slight thin figure, cloaked in garnet and emerald, the woman appeared unassuming though she wasn’t a witch nor a woman, Agatha recognised this instantly. She was a manifestation of elemental power.

A temporal embodiment.

Entropy. Eternity. Infinity. Creation. Death. The five inextricable brothers to never be seen, heard or witnessed. Agatha bowed her head, a rose by any other name, to look upon Death was to surely die, and Agatha wondered if she had stared too long. She feared Death had caught her eyes and was now looking upon her curiously in return.

Death gently brushed past her shoulder with a perceptive smile, some inextricable part of Agatha’s soul responsively yearned and keened toward the apparition, drawn to her magnetism, and she exhaled all the air in her chest. Death stopped in stride, their shoulders still touching, then Agatha felt fear anew. A kind of fear that overwhelmed and overtook every fibre of her being.

“It’s not my time.”

Death said nothing.

Death was surprised to be seen, Agatha realised quickly.

“Oh…You are not used to being caught off-guard.” Agatha’s voice hung as a sharp, jovial whisper. “Tell me, have you ever felt it before? It kind of tickles, doesn’t it?”

A beautiful smile broke across Death’s pale face—the most beautiful smile Agatha thought she might have ever seen. The crowd, now in a fluster over the ailing woman, noticed nothing strange or unusual about the scene. There was only panic, chaos, upheaval and aid. The four mortal elements in times of strife.

Wordless, Death turned and made her way to reap and extinguish. Her distance could be felt in Agatha’s chest, her restless soul had pressed on her ribcage, now it quietened into calm. Agatha watched as Death’s long black fingertips stroked the elderly woman’s cheek softly. She was there for only a moment, then…

“She’s gone.” A coven elder shook her head gravely, fingers firm against the deceased’s pulse points. “Send for the black mistresses, for the horseman, send word to her kin…”

In shock, Agatha simply stood with her feet rooted to the ground. She became a fixed object, processing and ordering the event in her mind, until hours passed, sunlight sinking behind the treeline, and the horsemen came and eventually left, carting the elderly woman’s body away. Agatha stood there still, until her thought processes finally felt linear and whole, until she no longer wished to stand there anymore. Agatha had no remaining questions save for one.

Did she taste as she had always smelled—were her lips cloyingly sweet and bitter like fresh cherries?

Agatha pushed the strangeness of the day aside and pulled her hood over her nape. It was time to move forward, move away, move quickly at that. Salem was overrated. A slough of mediocre bottom barrel witches and overpriced talismans, trinkets and scented parchment. No, Salem would never do.

Not for what Agatha Harkness had planned.

***

The loudness of New Orleans hummed constant in the air, a battle between French, Creole and newly forming Verlan, distinct to the avenues where old French dialects melted against one another into new parlance. An entire city in harmony, conversations carried across streets from neighbours on their doorsteps and Agatha, most days, felt as though she were ducking beneath it all. A woman out of place. A woman without roots of her own.

A hand shot out from a dimly lit alley and grabbed her wrist as she passed. Agatha froze, understanding perfectly well that to glance in the woman’s direction was to certainly go blind, she was without permission to look upon consecrated conjure doctors. Untrusted and unknown. This made working with the kanzos difficult.

The Mambo all but impossible.

For months, Agatha persevered. She wanted a second meeting with Death. She knew the Hodou leaders could grant her this, and perhaps only them.

“Your request has been denied,” a voice whispered sternly. “Whoever you are—whatever you are—the spirit warns you are the unquenchable thirst drying witches like summer riverbeds in your wake, that to commune with you is to surely die. Go from this place by midnight, by order of the Mambo, and if you refuse or ever return to New Orleans you will die on the thirtieth beat of your heart, Agatha Harkness.”

“Lets say, hypothetically, I stood on the border of the territory with one foot in and one foot out.” Agatha felt her eyes begin to wander toward the woman, she stopped suddenly and remembered herself, then clenched them closed. “Is it thirty beats like a warning to leave or thirty beats like a countdown that cannot be reset?”

The grip receded from her wrist without another word, Agatha drew her hand back to her body and rubbed the tender bones beneath her gold bracelet and purple sleeve. She inhaled and nodded, then continued walking along main street.

She had her meeting.

The afternoon whittled into early evening, Agatha camped by the border in woodlands that were obscured by thickets and rows. With her back against the bark of a proud water oak, Agatha read the Epic of Gilgamesh, sipping occasionally at her green tea, her toes pressed into the raw damp soil. She would miss New Orleans. She had become accustomed to the noise and bustle, intrigued by the magicks and works brought to this place from the distant corners of the world yet unexplored, then a flock of roseate spoonbills flew overhead in bolts of white and pink feathers, and Agatha decided she would miss that too.

Agatha winced and placed her cup, sensing she had bitten the inside of her cheek too deeply. Then the heat of sunlight disappeared from her skin and the taste of bitter cherries swelled on her tongue. Agatha sighed and lowered her book to her chest. There in the unaccountable distance, perhaps within reach or thirty feet away, Death stood with a dark linen shroud obscuring her lovely face.

“There’s my girl,” Agatha muttered and pulled herself up from her bed roll. “You’re earlier than I thought you would be?”

With the lightest flick of her finger, a powerful wind swung forward and hooked around the back of Agatha’s knees—yanking her forward on to her palms and shins like a noviciate at worship.

“Okay you don’t like over-familiar types,” Agatha bristled.

Still, Death said nothing in response.

Then Agatha felt something prod lightly against her chest bone. She glanced down, saw a paper plane skewered and trapped in the edge of her bodice, when she looked up again the sight sent her skittering back into the bark of the water oak like a rabbit startled by a predator. There in the unaccountable distance, Death stood as a deity, her visage milk pale and rotting like a corpse, her jawbone and teeth defined in calcified bone.

“Got your nose.” Agatha pushed her thumb between her fingers, shaking her hand slightly in the air, doing her best to bring her heart rate down and simmer the tension. “This for me?” She reached to her bodice and plucked the paper plane.

Death’s hollow visage tilts to the side.

As though to say…

Who else?

And then she leaves with incorporeal flare that sets Agatha’s teeth on edge with fright. Death was not ten or fifteen paces away as Agatha anticipated, she was much closer, close enough to faintly smell of figs and persimmons as her fingers swung a blade millimetres in front of Agatha’s nose. It sliced the air into wefts of fabric. Death cut a bleeding wound in the surface of reality. It was like watching someone step through a strand of hair—disappear into broad daylight before her very eyes.

Curiously, Agatha touched the two edges of reality with the tips of her finger and drew them back like a stage curtain. Beyond the gaping wound, Agatha observed thick sage-coloured mist and the smell of wet rotting leaves and foliage. Then Death appeared, her features marked with abject offence, she wagged her finger and Agatha nervously scrambled back into the tree bark, stayed there entirely frozen as the wound knitted itself back together on a swipe of Death’s finger. A moment passed, Agatha blinked and remembered the paper plane.

She opened it and found the territory map of Louisiana. The borders of New Orleans drawn fine and sharp. Death had marked the boundaries cleanly, crossed Agatha’s current position, which Agatha had determined based on distance as the crow flies from the centre of civilisation, but Death accounted for variables in a way that required no further conversation to extenuate her position.

Agatha’s math was off by two and a half miles.

And Death did not want to deal with her tonight.

***

Agatha finished her dirty work and snapped the girl’s neck with a stream of purple, grimacing in pain as she removed the poisoned knife lodged in her gut. Word of her power was spreading quickly, and news of Agatha’s movements and reasons—her movements, mostly—seemed to reach covens days before she did. The jagged wound felt wet beneath her fingertips, she glanced down and saw it leaking in spurts and pulses. An arterial bleed.

She coaxes her purple into a concentrated stream, hoping to draw the last dregs of regenerative power from the bodies littered around the camp ground, but the bodies are precisely that—drained of life and magic.

Agatha Harkness, all alone and bleeding in the woods.

She laughs quietly.

Of course this proposal would have to be so…

High stakes.

“New plan. Here’s what I’m thinking!” Agatha remarks into empty quiet nothing, taking a rag along the blade to clean it off. “Dinner, tonight. You’re allowed a night off right?” Self-assured she isn’t alone, Agatha gestures at the slumped bodies lying at her feet. “There could be more bodies if it would…sway you.” Agatha grimaces awkwardly. “How big of a pile do you need?”

“Cute.”

Death leans against the trunk of an old oak tree, her hood shrouding her unmistakable features. Agatha nods, smiling slightly. Death returns the gesture.

“Hello,” Agatha whispers.

“Hello again.”

“I just…” Agatha stops and looks around at her dirty work. “I just wanted to tell you that you’re beautiful, that’s all.”

“I know,” her voice is tentative and light. She glances oddly. “You’re very persistent, do you know that?”

Agatha grins. “I’ve been called worse, sure. I think I…imagined you differently?”

“Oh, you did? Never heard that before…”

Suddenly, Death became decidedly death-like. It’s petulant. A rebuttal. Her sparkling dark brown eyes recede, her beautiful smile melts into milk bone teeth and an ivory-coloured chiselled jaw. She’s trying to scare her, Agatha realises, but it doesn’t work. Agatha laughs as though it’s cute. She is suddenly taken with Death. Taken with her rum-coloured skin and dark, deep brown eyes. Taken with her black linen shrouds, chaos and upheaval.

Her heart in a flutter, Agatha stood poised and manicured - determined to be alluring too.

Then, Agatha’s eyes wander. For some reason, despite the skeletal visage, Death’s figure is still…

Death’s mask tilts in confusion. “Are you staring at my breasts?”

“Well, you look beautiful.” Agatha shrugs, guilty of the charge. “I mean an entity of abject cosmic horror, sure, but your breasts are…” She wisely stops. “You look lovely, I mean. And, I think you’re fond of me too.”

“Ah.” Death finally notices the blade. “So you got hurt this time too?”

“I suppose I wanted to look my best for you.” Agatha lifts her cupped palm to reveal the drooling wound. “Of course, you could always change me out of this old thing. You’re the original green witch, right? You could…fix me up before dinner?”

“You know I can’t do that, Agatha.”

“Why? Have you lost your touch?”

Death leans forward, all sparkling brown eyes and obsidian smile again. “No, it would simply be against the rules.” She inhales and sweeps her hands along Agatha’s biceps. “I know it must be hard for you to envision rules and boundaries, Agatha, but there are laws even you must observe. Mine, mostly. I’m sorry.”

“Big talk.” Agatha lifts her chin. “I think you’re scared you’ve lost your touch.”

“I haven’t lost my touch.”

“You’re sure?”

“Quite.”

“Prove it.”

“Agatha,” Death grins weakly. “I see what you’re doing. You are such a beautiful woman, and truly I’m flattered, but intervening in matters of life and death is against the rule of balance. Perhaps in another life?”

“Oh fuck the rules!” Agatha challenges boldly as her legs start to wobble. “I-I. I kill eleven witches just to ask you for dinner and you’re telling me you. You…” A pained expression - then Agatha collapses backward.

“I told you, Agatha, I am flattered…”

The stars are clear enough through branches to make out the constellations. Orion’s belt. Cassiopeia. Ursa Major. Agatha blinks and feels her sweat run cool. Death comes into focus above her, but Death’s face is still a face, and Agatha takes it as progress she might make it out of this thing alive.

Might.

Death seems to be considering her options.

“You should break the rules,” Agatha whispers. “You. You should…” She draws a breath and feels her heart slowing. Agatha blinks and nods, knowing she is dying. “You should consider it.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Agatha furrows her brow as though it’s ridiculous. “How could you possibly bear it if you didn’t break the rules? You’re Death. They’re your rules.”

Death likes that.

That makes her smile.

She crouches down, her fingers feel cool and gentle either side of Agatha’s jawline and temples. Death hesitates with a certain look in her eyes that lingers.

“You’re beautiful when you’re dying, Agatha. Maybe I prefer you like this?”

“Oh, honey.” Agatha trails her fingertips along Death’s shin, resting them on the ball of her knee. “You should see how often I come close to dying. This doesn’t have to be a one time thing. You’ll see, baby.”

“Alright, Agatha.” Death cranes her neck, unbuttoning Agatha’s blouse. “You get one dinner.” Her brown eyes sparkle.

“What’s your name?”

“I have many.”

“I have time - I could learn?”

“You’re so cock sure of that?” Death stares.

Agatha grins exuberantly, bare chested and bleeding with her blouse undone. “Yeah baby, I’m so sure.”

Death pauses in consideration, her cold fingers resting on warm wet ribs, then she shakes her head in exasperation and sucks the wound.

“Ah, so you’re a power bottom.” Agatha observes - more relieved than she wanted to let on. “Love that for me. You and I are going to be thick as thieves…”

***

Sharon finally grabbed the cassette tape that had been alluding her for the last five minutes, hidden beneath her car seat out of reach, she sprung up and exhaled a sigh of relief, then fed it into the player. A moment later, The Ronettes.

She turned and then looked again as Agnes and her special friend trudged back over to the car. Agnes was walking by herself unaided this time, smiling that lovely friendly smile, waving excitedly as though they hadn’t seen one another in days—if not weeks.

Her special friend looked as though she had been crying.

“Did it work?” Sharon asked as the car door opened.

“Nope,” Rio replied, bundling Agatha into the back a little rough. “Can you, er…take her back to Westview? Just some loose ends I need to tie up. I’ll be around. Can you keep her safe for me until I’m back, Mrs Davis? In fact, forget the safe part. Just keep her in Westview?”

Sharon thought that was a strange thing to say.

“Mrs Hart!” Agnes wailed in exuberant delight—her blue eyes growing wide and pleased. “Where have you been! And what is with all this garbage in the back of your car…” she murmured, examining a half-wrapped garden hose handle.

Sharon bit her tongue, hating that name.

“Those are Christmas presents, Agnes,” she said diplomatically.

Agnes turned indiscreetly as Rio buckled her in the seat, “Gee willickers, I sure would hate to be on Mrs Hart’s naughty list this year. Am I right, sister?” She lightly elbowed.

“Fuck off,” Rio whispered under her breath and fussed over the straps. “Whole thing was a fucking disaster, Mrs Davis.”

“Well she doesn’t think it’s Christmas anymore,” Sharon reasoned.

Rio paused and glanced oddly.

“You’re right,” she observed. “Maybe not an entire disaster, then.”

#agathario #Agatha x rio #Agatha and rio #Agatha all along #agatha harkness #rio vidal #agathario fic #agathario fanfic #agathario smut #agathario eventual smut #Agathario story #lesbian agathario #lesbian story #agathario romance #agathario edit

26 notes · View notes

shutupineedtothink · 1 month ago

Text

Post Ep 6 Theory: Billy Is Casting Agatha as the Villain

Well I really have no business writing theories at this point since I’ve been wrong multiple times but like maybe I really got something this time, you know? Isn’t that the point? Can’t I be right one time?? My Capricorn stellium is raging at having all these theories disproved. And I love it at the same time. 😅

Whatever. Potential spoilers under the cut.

So I’m fully on the “Billy magicked the Road” theory, he is Wanda’s son after all and tbh there’s just too much evidence to ignore it at this point. I won’t go into all of it, House of R pod does a great breakdown in their episode 6 review, check that out if you’re interested. The basic points are: Billy created the Road probably subconsciously, Agatha knows it, she’s trying to figure out how he did it and what his goal is, and also get her power back and not die from the Seven. Cool.

My theory is an offshoot of the Billy theory, and speaks to where he and Agatha are going to end this season (aka coven two). Ready? Ok.

Soooo if we take as fact that Billy conjured the Road, because he can’t control his magick and more broadly because he has some shit to work through (again, same as Wanda) then how do we explain Agatha’s trial within that framework.

Why was the trial to “punish Agatha?” If Billy, subconsciously or not, is in control of everything that happens on the Road, why do that?

Well, subconsciously, he’s angry at Agatha. Whether he’s actually angry at her specifically or just angry about what happened with the hex, it doesn’t really matter. He has a lot of suppressed anger that needs somewhere to go. And who’s the closest available probably evil witch? Ya girl, Agatha Harkness.

Someone he saw as his friend, possibly, in the hex. Someone who fought his mom and tried to take her power. And someone who ultimately, by disrupting the status quo, led to his literal world being destroyed. By that logic, I’d want to punish her too.

Billy, in his (probably subconscious) magic-fueled rage, grief, and sadness over what happened to him, his family, and his life, took all of that and blamed it on Agatha. In his fantasy of his own hero’s journey on the Road to find his brother, to get his family back, he has (spell)casted Agatha as the villain.

So when Agatha “can’t control” her power in episode 5, siphoning Alice, it’s not because she has issues with her own control of her powers. It’s because Billy was making her do it (again, probably subconsciously). She essentially blacked out at that moment, and turned into the evil witch Agatha Harkness. And when she comes to, she seemingly has no idea what she’s done.

So when she says she couldn’t control it, she’s not lying. But it’s not because she’s never been able to control her powers. She’s probably had control of them for centuries. It’s because in that moment, Billy was writing the narrative, not her. And then he confirms it to her face — you’re lying, you want power, that’s all you’ve ever wanted. Essentially saying, you’re the villain here not me not my mom.

And then it clicks for her, what he’s doing, subconsciously or not. And she turns on the evil villain persona herself to take back the narrative from him. And we get, you’re so much like your mother. Creating the Road, creating this whole story to serve yourself and the narrative you want to believe. Making me the bad guy. Undertones of fuck you.

Okay great, so where does this leave us now and how does this play into the show as a whole? I think the question the show is asking, as it relates to Agatha’s character, is who really is Agatha Harkness? Is she the villain? Is she the hero? Is she both, or neither? Is she her reputation, as Lilia reads in ep 2, or is she more than that? Can she be more than that? Can she be good?

Now here’s where it gets real juicy y’all, because as much as Billy has made Agatha the villain in his hero's journey, he's also made her the Guide.

He goes to her to lead him down the Road. He's constantly asking her questions and trying to learn from her. On some level, maybe a more conscious level, he does idolize her. He wants to see her as a witch to look up to. He even wants her love. Just look at his crestfallen face when she says she didn't put the sigil on him in ep 4.

She's the Yoda to his Luke, the Dumbledore to his Harry, the Moiraine to his Rand. And once again, subconsciously he knows it. And he wants it.

He says in ep 6, I don't know if I ever needed you (a mouthy teen if I ever heard one), but then his power immediately fizzles out. She calls him out on it, all that power and no access without a temper tantrum. He needs her. He needs to learn. Again, in this version, she has control over her powers normally, just not in her trial. So she can provide that knowledge.

He went to her to lead him down the Road. And she's been subtly teaching him this whole time. (Once vengeance is unleashed, you can't reel it back in. It's about selflessness, Teen.)

Now for her part, I don't know if she realizes she's mentoring him. But she definitely cares about him, as we saw at the end of ep 4. Again, partly a reaction fueled by Nicky, but I think she's been at least 80% sure it was Billy this whole time. So she genuinely cares for him too.

If I had to bet, I'd say Agatha very much knows the different parts she's playing, the villain evil witch, the guide, and somewhere under even that, the real Agatha.

She's just playing along, some times more willingly than others, because she needs to see where this goes. And she doesn't necessarily want to break his baby brain in the process.

It's almost the more subtle version of her leading Wanda through her memories in WandaVision. She's guiding him along the Road, partly to see what he can do and get her powers back if possible, but also for his own good.

So prediction time, where does this leave us in the finale.

I won't speak to the remaining trials, but I'm thinking there has to be a big showdown between Agatha, Billy, and Rio.

If we're going for Agatha becoming her most true self, and Billy seeing her for who she actually is, my money is on a reversal of the Agatha stealing Alice's power scene.

Rio's going go to after Billy, and Agatha, to save him, is going to start siphoning his power. It's going to look like she's killing him, being the evil witch of her reputation. But then she's going to stop (because she's been capable of control this whole time), taking just enough power to get her purple back. He has more than enough to spare.

Also fun fact, Wanda's power (red) -> Billy's power (blue) -> Agatha's power (purple). Do I want this to happen just because the colors make sense... maybe.

Ultimately, Agatha and Billy become a team, a coven two, a master and apprentice. They both see each other for who they are, imperfect, powerful, but capable of good. Rio is fended off/bargained with somehow. Maybe Agatha offers up her own soul in his place but Rio can't do it. Idk that's all wild speculation.

Point being, this is all about self-discovery, self-actualization, and deconstructing false narratives you have around others, and in Billy's case, around his own life. Dealing with your trauma to become a more whole version of yourself.

And as with WandaVision, dealing with grief and loss, but in this case, also finding a companion, a familiar, a family you never expected beside you All Along. 👀

What do you think? Can you believe I wrote this the day before ep 7 drops?? 😂

#agatha all along #agatha harkness #billy maximoff #theory #fan theory #meta #familiar by thy side #agathario #yes there's an AgathaRio kiss in there somewhere come on #and some flashbacks of Agatha's trauma #it's a broad sketch here #but i'd love to see it

20 notes · View notes