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“Why won’t you just die?!”
“Because I can’t face him!”
Agatha surged forward without any conscious thought, Billy’s mouth falling open as he took a step back, and Agatha registered her own words at the same moment she registered a blinding flash of blue.
Then she was suddenly alone in some kind of clearing, surrounded by trees, and she bit back her frustrated scream.
“Oh, come on!”
Her first instincts told her that she recognized this place, but it was hard to say given how many forests she’d passed through in her time, and also given that they tended to look the same. It was a forest. There were trees.
She kicked a foot out, scuffing her toes against the dirt and feeling next to nothing as her ghostly hem moved with the motion but nothing else did. She kicked at the ground a few more times anyways.
Why did this place feel familiar?
Ugh. She had had quite enough of these Maximoffs and their proclivities for messing with her plans. All things considered, she had a great grasp on reality, thank you very much. And while she was quite good at navigating these ridiculous scenarios, she really didn’t appreciate the repeated opportunities to practice.
“Billy, we’ve had quite enough of your constructed realities, don’t you think?” she hollered into the air. “If you don’t get me out of here right now-”
“Mama?”
She froze.
The clearing was still the same, but now standing a few feet in front of her, right at the edge of the tree line, was Nicky.
Her son.
Her son.
This Nicky in front of her wasn’t a ghost. Or if he was, it wasn’t in the same way that she was. He looked exactly like her last memory of him did, same clothes and cap and gentle eyes, and Agatha forced herself to focus, squinting at him. She was no fool, and she wouldn’t let herself be tricked by some half-bit illusion.
It really did look like him, though. Maybe a little brighter around the edges. A little fuller. He did seem to be properly corporeal, casting a shadow on the ground and blades of grass bending beneath his feet.
“Why are you mad?”
His voice sounded the same, too. Memory was a fickle thing, of course, and could easily become skewed over time, but she had held every bit of it as close to herself as she could, and this is what it sounded like. She was sure of it.
“Mama? Mama, why are you mad?”
The words finally registered, and she snapped out of her inspection with a gasp, her sweet boy sounding so sad that she forgot all about scrutinizing him.
“Oh, honey, I’m not mad at you, I -”
“You’re not supposed to be mad, I kissed you goodbye and everything!”
"“You…” Agatha faltered, thrown by the shift in topic. “What?”
“Rio came to get me, and she made sure I kissed you goodbye when we left. One from me, and one for good luck.”
“For good luck?” Agatha barely stopped the incredulous laugh from leaving her lips, completely off-balance and feeling a welling of manic energy at the unexpected mention of Rio. “Nicky, I don’t-”
Nicky shrugged. “That’s what she always said. And she couldn’t give it to you herself, so I always did it for her.”
What she always said. Agatha blinked, and blinked again. Always did it for her. This had been a consistent thing? A repeated thing?
She made sure he kissed her goodbye?
“…Why?” she asked, helpless and small.
“Because she knew we would be gone for a long time, and you would miss us.”
“She-” Agatha broke off, feeling the pressure of tears beginning to well up in her eyes, which was weird given that she no longer had a physical form.
This couldn’t be true. This couldn’t be real, because that would mean that Rio…
“I had to go, Mama,” he shook his head, giving her a small smile that had her reaching out for him instinctively, needing to gather him up in her arms and hold him. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just time for me to go.”
“Nicky…”
He smiled just a little bit bigger, simultaneously the most comforting and heartbreaking thing she had ever seen, and then he began stepping backwards towards the trees, one small hand lifted in a wave. Panic gripped her so fiercely she swore she was about to unravel, because she was about to lose him again, she wasted all her time with him, she just wants more time-
The green woods were gone in an instant, reality tunneling into her and transforming back into the Westview basement, and she abruptly found herself face to face with Billy Maximoff again, his mouth still hanging open and sparks of blue fading around his hands.
Gritting her teeth, she immediately raised both arms and whirled around to vanish before he could get a word in. She wasn’t aiming for any specific place apart from away, but still scowled when she reappeared and found herself on the roof of the house instead, gazing down at the bed of flowers Rio had grown out of her body in the backyard.
That couldn’t have been real. It was just that thrice-damned chaos magic that was projecting the subconscious of a teenage boy who was far too soft for his own good.
It had to be.
Agatha found herself gasping for air, a confusing sensation given she didn’t need to breathe.
…Because what if it wasn’t?
Nicky had certainly felt real enough, given the circumstances, which was a horrible metric because that was exactly what reality-warping powers did - they made things feel real.
Scowling harder, Agatha rearranged herself and tried to shake the panic from her limbs, tried to calm her racing mind so she could think this through properly.
If he hadn’t been real, which was the most likely scenario here - Agatha had dedicated lifetimes to searching for a way to retrieve someone from Death, with zero success - had the projection of him still been speaking true?
There were specifics that Billy couldn’t have known, about him and about her and about them, but it was possible that it had drawn off of her own memories or subconscious instead.
Agatha was going to scream, because she knew there was only one way to verify the truth of his words, and that was ask the only other being who had been present.
Ask Rio.
She inhaled deeply, and then let out one single screech, hands clawing at the open air in front of her before she exhaled harshly and smoothed down her mostly-transparent hair, collecting herself.
Fine. So she would ask Rio.
Agatha groaned. Could ghosts find Death, if they wanted to? Her impression from Rio’s muttered complaints was that they were tricky to keep track of, but most ghosts were actively avoiding her.
She pondered it for about a second, scrunching up her face, and then shrugged and decided to simply try willing it into being. She was a fast learner, and every magical endeavour had to start somewhere.
So… Rio.
The world flickered and flashed around her, and suddenly Rio was there. Or rather, Agatha was suddenly where Rio had been, because this was most certainly not the backyard anymore.
Oh.
Was that really how it worked? Maybe all those other ghosts were just a bunch of wimps. There were endless haunting possibilities if this was all run by sheer willpower. Agatha was, generally speaking, exceptional.
Then again, Rio was most definitely warded against any and all intrusions, so perhaps there were other factors in the mix here.
Hm. Inconclusive.
A deep rumbling sound came from Rio, a threatening growl that any being living or dead would know instinctively to fear, and Agatha held back a wince as she took in her dark-shrouded widow’s garb, the woman edged in darkness and less corporeal than usual. Shadows were twisting and wrapping and tearing at her form, but Rio stayed still as a stone.
“I’m not here to fight,” Agatha started, holding up both hands.
Rio’s face remained impassive, more skeletal than human as her eyes stayed fixed on Agatha.
“I had a run-in with Billy,” she said evenly, hoping to get her words out before she embarrassed herself, or Rio tried to kill her again. “His magic can mess with ghosts too, go figure.”
Still, Rio watched her with no outward reaction.
“I saw… Nicky. Maybe. Or not. Not sure. But - well, I need to know if -”
She gritted her teeth and curled her hands into fists, deliberately glaring over Rio’s shoulder instead of at her.
“I don’t know if what he said is true. I am here to verify if it is, or if it’s yet another altered fabrication where Billy was projecting his subconscious onto my perceived reality.”
Rio raised a single eyebrow and still didn’t say anything in response. Maybe Agatha would prefer it if she did try to kill her, actually.
“Okay, well. Nicky -” her voice broke, and she cleared her throat and shuffled her skirts in a way that she hoped was covered up by her ghostly self. “He-”
As she tried to find the words, Rio’s body was slowly shifting back towards the form that Agatha was used to seeing. It was an unconscious reaction, Agatha knew. Rio could change her form at will, deciding how much of Lady Death was perceivable at all times, but it wasn’t this gradual. Rio didn’t like dragging it out, preferred making it instantaneous and revealing the full effect at once.
She had wrinkled her nose and complained that it was itchy to shift so slowly, the one time Agatha had asked about it. She had still done it to demonstrate, but had gone on the entire time about how Death was everlasting and immortal and wasn’t meant to wrangle a physical form at speeds perceivable to mortal eyes.
Agatha wondered what Nicky had seen of her, the night he died.
She didn’t really know how she had always pictured Rio swooping in to snatch her son in the middle of the night. Grabbing him in the darkness without warning? Stealing him away? Ripping him screaming and crying out of her arms, and forcibly throwing him across the barrier?
Maybe the more straightforward approach, the way she’d seen her collect souls before. Never callous and never cruel, not for the innocents, but mostly detached in a way that was almost a mercy for those at the end.
And of course, Agatha also knew that she never believed that at all, not even a little bit.
Rio would have been gentle. Rio would have been kind, something that Agatha, lost in her anger and grief, would have died a thousand times over rather than admit.
“How did - how did…”
Rio stayed silent, and Agatha was still so in love with her.
“When you came for Nicky,” Agatha forced the words out, keeping them as steady as she could, “How did it go?”
She didn’t know what kind of answer she was hoping for.
She knew the truth deep down, she always had, but did that make it any better? Why did it still hurt so much?
She should really apologize, one of these days. Rio deserved that.
Rio’s face continued losing its skeletal quality, returning to the one Agatha knew better than anyone else’s, and eventually she shrugged, a quick motion that jerked her whole body with it.
“We went into the woods, followed the path,” Rio intoned, voice gradually losing the timeless-echo-in-your-bones element of it until it was back in the standard human vocal range. “I showed him the way.”
“Nicky… said that you - you made sure he… kissed me goodbye.”
The words were strangled, but they would do. Agatha tried to keep going, to ask if it was true that she had sent him back to kiss her goodbye, if she had always done it, like her son said. If there had been multiple visits, where Rio spent time with Nicky and then returned him to her, safe and whole and alive. Where she made sure he kissed her twice, once for him and once for Rio.
The words wouldn’t come.
There was only so much growth a dead witch could manage in a day, after all.
Rio had her lips pressed together, brow pinched just the slightest amount as the space around them almost seemed to flicker, an ancient power beginning to pressurize, Death’s magic leaking out of her in a way Agatha had only seen twice in her life. It reeked of danger, never failing to activate every self-preservation instinct within range, but this time Agatha didn’t even bother looking around, not caring about anything except her response.
What did it matter if Rio lost control around her? Agatha was already dead.
But as quickly as it has begun, the pressure disappeared, Rio wrestling it back under her control, and then… she nodded.
Rio nodded, and Agatha almost crumpled right there.
"He wasn’t scared," Rio offered, the words tentative in a way that would have broken Agatha’s heart, if she still had one intact. Agatha recognized it for the reassurance it was, and something splintered inside of her all the same.
After all this time, after all that had happened, Rio was still trying so hard to be kind.
“And he knew you,” Agatha whispered, knowing it wasn’t really a question but needing to hear the confirmation anyways. “He recognized you, and he went with you willingly. You held hands along the way?”
Rio nodded again, still not really moving, but the shadows around her had mostly receded.
I hold Death’s hand in mine.
Was that line a part of their ballad when Nicky had been alive? God, Agatha wasn’t sure.
“He knew you.” Suddenly desperate, the emotions rose up in her and threatened to choke whatever life was left. “He knew you. You held hands, so he knew you, because otherwise - because if he hadn't-”
“Of course he did,” Rio finally interrupted, her eyes sad but her shoulders finally soft, arms coming up to wrap around herself in a motion that was devastatingly human. The shadows were gone. She was clutching a flower in her hand.
“He always knew me, Agatha. No matter how much you wished otherwise.”
Rio had made sure her son was okay. At the end of his time, when Agatha had not been able to, she had been there.
Of course she had.
… Of course she had.
Rio was still watching her, eyes wide and deep and endless, cutting right through her in a way that had nothing to do with her newly-transparent state of being.
Agatha, for the first time in centuries, let herself look back.
Rio extended her hand, palm up, and offered her the flower.