#the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic XI - 2020's (V)

Chapter Summary: No, Wanda Maximoff, much like magic itself, isn’t very subtle.

But Agatha knows magic.  Wanda?  She’s still trying to figure her out.

Hopefully, it won’t take her another three hundred years to do so.

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff Chapter Rating: M for dark themes and brief sexual content Fic Rating: M for dark themes and sexual content

AO3

previous chapter

In the morning, they fight.

If it can even still be called morning anymore, given just how long Wanda tries to sleep away what Agatha knows is a hangover.  Agatha doesn’t have one herself, but she’d placed a glass of water and some aspirin next to the bed when she left in the hope that Wanda would take care of herself before coming downstairs.

(In the hope that maybe Wanda would remember something of the night before.)

But Wanda doesn’t remember anything, doesn’t even remember that she’d made her shirt mimic Agatha’s herself, and from her reactions, she certainly doesn’t remember that Agatha is, well, Agatha.

It’s disappointing, to say the least.  Even more disappointing is that after all that effort Agatha put into teaching Wanda to trust her again yesterday, it suddenly doesn’t matter.  She sighs, grits her teeth, and this time, when Wanda snipes at her, she says, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice, “Wanda, dear, if I wanted to kill you, I would have done it by now.”  She gestures to the shirt with one hand.  “That was the point of the shirt, hon.”

The revelation of her magic for something so simple and mundane as—

It doesn’t matter if Wanda doesn’t remember.

But Wanda doesn’t take her medicine, even though she goes upstairs, and Wanda won’t eat any of Agatha’s food, even though she’s clearly hungry and food will help with her hangover, because Wanda apparently thinks that the witch who hasn’t killed her yet would have more fun poisoning her food than actually trying to help her.  The gall of it sits deep in Agatha’s stomach, churns there the same way she once would have churned milk into butter, turning what might once have been anxieties into frustrations instead.  Annoyances.  Her unsubtle attempts to kill Wanda in a subtle attempt to get Wanda to put up the protection spells that every witch should know how to make have had more of an effect then every other time Agatha could have killed Wanda and didn’t, more than Agatha even trying to point that out.

“I don’t want to hurt you, love.  You might not trust me enough to believe that, but—”  Agatha cuts herself off because Wanda huffs and crosses her arms and acts very much like she won’t believe that and not only won’t believe it but feels annoyed with Agatha for even suggesting it.  “Fine.”  She shoves the bowl of oatmeal she had been eating from into Wanda’s lap.  “Just take mine, hon.  I obviously didn’t poison that one.”

“You really think I’m going to—”

Agatha shoots her a look.  “I’m not going to jeopardize my life just to kill you, dear.  What kind of idiot do you take me for?”  She pushes herself up off the couch and shoves her hands into her pockets.  “You’re the superhero here.  Not me.”

But when Agatha stalks off into the kitchen, half-feigning anger (lies are always at their strongest when they are half full of truth), all she does is conjure up a second bowl of oatmeal to match the first and stands just inside the doorframe to stare at Wanda.  Her eyes narrow as the great prophesied Scarlet Witch struggles to eat, first staring at the bowl in her lap before tentatively lifting the spoon to her lips, then gagging on the bite before forcing it down.

But she gets it down.  She takes another bite.

That’s…something.

Agatha starts to stick her fingers into the magic surrounding both of them and then hesitates.  Even without calling it to her for greater understanding, she feels it swirling around her, wanting to help her, wanting to….

To what?

Best not to look.  For once in her life, after months of trying to quit cold turkey, Agatha can resist the impulse.  Best not to look.

Agatha waits until she sees Wanda taking a third bite, waits until Wanda seems to have calmed enough to continue eating without seeming to think too terribly much about it, and then returns to the couch, sitting in her same place and propping her heels up on her coffee table.  The first bite from her new bowl isn’t as good – for all that magic is magic, there’s still a difference between magically conjured food and what she spends time and effort crafting, even if that difference is all in her mind.

(It isn’t all in her mind; she’d run double blind experiments with Cian over the years, and the magically conjured food always ranked lower.  With the exception of their first use of the Time Stone, but given what they’d seen….

Well, no food would have tasted good.

Or so Agatha assumes.  It isn’t as though they’d ever explicitly told her what they’d seen.  She’d just had to guess at it through subtle implications here and there – and then, well.  They died.  Half of the universe’s population disappeared.  She has a good idea of what they’d seen now.)

Wanda barely glances up as Agatha enters.  She pauses with the spoon halfway to her mouth, swallows hard.  When Agatha raises an eyebrow, she furrows her brows and stares down at her bowl of oatmeal.  “What?”

“You don’t have to stop eating on account of me, hon.”  Agatha lifts her spoon and gestures to Wanda’s bowl.  “I’m not poisoning it with just my presence.”

Wanda’s fingers clench tighter along her bowl.  “You poison everything with your presence,” she mutters under her breath.  Then she gives a little shake of her head and forces herself to eat another bite.

This time, Agatha doesn’t say anything.  That would be stooping to whatever level Wanda has decided to be on today, which would be fun at any other time, but not right now, when Wanda is determined to hate her.  To hurt her.  When anything and everything she says will probably be taken in exactly the wrong way because Wanda wants to be an internet troll to any and every fact she might be given.

About halfway through, Wanda admits, softer than anything, so soft she probably doesn’t even mean for Agatha to hear it, “This is really good.”

Agatha snorts.  “Of course, it is, sugar cube.  I’ve had centuries to perfect it.  Everything I cook is good.  You’re just lucky enough to taste it.”  Spinning subtleties – age as authority, marking herself as good (this is a lie, it’s a lie), calling Wanda lucky.  Little bits and pieces of words that can sink into her mind, things Wanda won’t catch or know that she needs to catch.  Things that probably won’t even stick.  She sighs.  “Thank you,” she murmurs, much softer, “for the compliment.”

“You deserve it.”

The breath catches in Agatha’s throat, and she nearly chokes.  She coughs twice, spluttering, and then shoots Wanda a look when the other witch doesn’t do anything about it.  “Little help here?”

Wanda shakes her head.  “Like I care if you die.”

“Ouch.”  Agatha places a hand over her heart and feigns being hurt.  “You wound me.  You’re so cruel!”

At her words, Wanda flinches.  “I’m not cruel, Agatha.  You’re the one who tried to kill me.  You are the one who lured me to a location where I couldn’t use my magic—”

“—and you are the one who cursed me to be a sitcom character for all of eternity.  I’d call that one overkill, hon.”  Agatha places her now empty bowl on the coffee table and then leans back comfortably against the back of the couch once more.  “You want to talk, dear?  Well, let’s talk.”  She spreads her hands out in front of her.  “I’m an open book.  What do you want to know?”

Wanda follows Agatha’s lead and sets her own, half-eaten bowl of oatmeal to the side.  “When did you break my spell?” she asks immediately, and not in the conversational sort of tone Agatha would like, but one that’s much more frustrated.  “How did you change back?”

“You really think I’m going to tell you that?”  Agatha lets out a cackle, loud and bright.  “I’m not stupid, babe.  You’d just curse me again, and then where would I be?  Not having any of this, I’ll tell you that.”

“You told me how the protection spell works.”

“Because that was something you needed to know.”  Agatha gives Wanda a firm look and waits until the littlest witch meets her eyes, waits even longer to see if her gaze drops with shame.  “Every witch – not even the ones worth their salt, like you and I are – every witch learns that spell first.”  She points to the runes carved into her walls.  “Each of those runes protects you from harm, from magic turning its back on you and having its way with you, and you were a fool to try and craft your entire Hex without having that up to keep it from killing you.”

Wanda scoffs.  “I wouldn’t have died—”

Agatha chuckles, dark.  “Wanda, hon, your brain was so overloaded with all the spells you were maintaining – foolish, again, any witch who knows anything knows not to tie their spells to themselves in perpetuity, you make concrete changes, and you—”  She cuts herself off, trembles with her own frustration, and gives a little shake of her head.  “You saw the way the Hex glitched after you expanded it, but you couldn’t see how you were glitching.  From the very beginning, Wanda, you were glitching, and I had to step in and fix things so you wouldn’t consume yourself with your foolish—”

“You could change things?” Wanda interrupts.  Her eyes widen imperceptibly, and her head tilts to one side as she considers Agatha, as she considers what she’s just heard.  “You told me spells, once cast, couldn’t be altered.”

“I also pretended to try and kill you, Wanda.  Keep with the program.”  Agatha waves one hand dismissively.  “That isn’t the point, hon—”

“I could have kept my family?” Wanda hisses out, glaring at her.  “You could change my spells, and you didn’t change things so they could have lived?”

Agatha stares at the fury of a witch who cannot harm her.  She stares, and she doesn’t say anything at first, just lets Wanda’s face grow more and more red with her anger, and then finally, finally says, “You would have died, love.  It would have killed you.”

Wanda’s eyes grow dark.  “Then you should have let me die.”

“If you died, hon, they would have died, too.  That’s what casting a spell in perpetuity means.  They weren’t permanent creations; they were tied to you.  Sucking your magic.  Your life.  And you would have died trying to keep them alive, and then they would have died, and no good would have come out of it at all.”  Agatha reaches out and hesitantly places a hand over Wanda’s.  ‘There was no way I or you or any other lesser witch could have fixed those spells to keep them alive.  I didn’t lie to you when I said your spells were broken, hon.  They were.  I did what I could to save you, and that was hard enough.”

Agatha almost continues, almost suggests that she wouldn’t have saved them even if she could.  The boys, perhaps, deserved more than the few days of life they were given – even if those days made them look like they’d been given years, there would always be those gaps in their memories, those dynamics of family life that would have come from the time they’d lived together through those years that got skipped entirely – but from the way Wanda acted in the Hex itself, the way she’d kept Vision from her while everything fell apart, the way she’d come to Agatha herself for comfort instead of—

She’s lived with a broken family.  She’s been a broken family.

….

It doesn’t matter.  She couldn’t have saved them anyway.

“Why did you save me?” Wanda asks, not looking up.  “I’m the Scarlet Witch.  I’m destined to destroy the world.  It would have been better if I died.  You could have let me die.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”  Agatha lifts one shoulder half-heartedly.  “You didn’t deserve that.  Not then, and not now.”  She catches the frozen look on Wanda’s face, the way Wanda starts to look at her the way she did after realizing she loved her, like looking at something and examining her, like looking for flaws, and she immediately backpedals, immediately says something else to cover her words.  “Besides, the sex was good.  Didn’t really feel like letting you die after that.”

That’s easier than saying she hadn’t expected Wanda to accept the title of Scarlet Witch – any witch who knows anything would have known better than to do that, but then Wanda hadn’t known the most basic of protection spells, so why she thought she would know about her.  It’s also easier than getting into the other prophesies regarding the Scarlet Witch: clarifications, specifications, elaborations on things mentioned in the Darkhold, which is not the greatest source to begin with, which anyone who knew anything would know.

Agatha’s frustration towards Wanda’s severe lack of knowledge only grows, and it isn’t calmed by the look of shock and disgust that Wanda shoots in her direction at her words.  She just rolls her eyes.  “Don’t look at me like that, lover girl.  The sex was good, and you know it was good, which is why you came back.”  Not so subtle change of subject, but subtle enough that Wanda will probably fall for it.  “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?  You were all over me last night—”

“You started that.”

“—which is so much worse than it was before.”  Agatha doesn’t darken or harden.  She just pushes.  “At least in the Hex, you wouldn’t have used Agnes as your fuck puppet, but now that you’ve decided you don’t care about Agatha Harkness, it’s fine to use her to—”

“I didn’t.”  Wanda snaps, and she snaps the words out, and her fingertips dig into the cushions, scarlet magic swirling between her fingers.  She doesn’t even look up at Agatha, just tenses and stares out in front of her.  “I didn’t, and that’s not why I came, and I told you I didn’t, and I would never—”

“You almost did, hon.”

“But. I. didn’t.”

Wanda takes a deep breath, but she still can’t look up, and she still won’t look at Agatha, and she still refuses to meet her eyes.  She just stares out in front of her, unfocused, knuckles so tight they might as well be white, the magic threading between them looking for somewhere, anywhere to go, but unable to go after Agatha, even if they’re sent to her.  “You don’t….”  She starts to say it, swallows, and shakes her head.  “It doesn’t matter what you did, you don’t deserve that.”

“Means a lot coming from the woman who locked me in my own mind for daring to oppose her.”

“You tried to kill me.”

“I know, hon.”  Agatha lets out a stifled bark of a laugh, just one sharp cough.  “You thought I tried to kill you, so you did the worst thing you could think to do to me.  Then you left me here.  Alone.”  She stares forward, away from Wanda, and lets herself speak.  “Did you even think of what people would do to me?  What they could do to me?  Did you think enough to put any protections on—”  She cuts herself off with another coughed laugh.  “Of course, you didn’t.  You didn’t even know what a protection spell was.”

“Stop,” Wanda whispers.  “Please, stop.”

Agatha stops.  Nods once.  Then asks again, “Why are you here, Wanda?  Why did you come back to Westview?”

I want—

“I don’t know,” Wanda says instead, the thought still ringing in the air between them.  “I don’t know what I thought I’d find, but this….”  She lets out a long breath and laughs, a harsh, cruel thing.  “This isn’t it.”  Then she pushes herself up from the couch, walks through the living room, and out the front door, letting it click softly shut behind her.

Agatha sits on the couch and waits.  She stares at the closed door, waiting for Wanda to storm back in the same way she stormed off.  A part of her starts to reach out her mind as though to brush against the younger witch’s, but she recoils from that.  That’s not what she wants.  And when Wanda doesn’t return, she lets out a sigh, gathers their bowls, and takes them to the kitchen to clean.

The thing of it is this: Agatha Harkness doesn’t believe in miracles, and expecting Wanda to return for her, to stay here with her, to trust her would, right now, be a pretty big miracle.  She knows enough to be grateful the little witch who could didn’t try to overcome her spell, didn’t do more than just walk out.  If she’d take it, that would be a miracle, but she won’t.

Magic curves about her wrists, about her ankles, about her neck.  Sometimes, it feels like a chain, holding her here, to a life she doesn’t think she deserves.  More times than not, if she’s honest with herself.  Right now, it’s softer than that, gentler, and she doesn’t stop herself before she says, “I don’t know what you want from me.”

It’s the truth.

She’s never known what magic wants from her, if it wants anything at all.

Magic runs through her veins the same way it runs through the veins of all witches, living or dead, but trying to determine which came first is a chicken and the egg discussion.  Did magic fill them first?  Or did witches notice magic and try to bring it under their control first?  Did they feel it thrumming within them and wonder what else it touched?  Who can say?  Perhaps the reason magic lashes out at those trying to corral it so often is that this was never its intent.  It gave gifts, and humans used those gifts to try and overcome the giver.

Very few witches actually love magic.  They see it as a tool to use for their own purposes.  Under the influence of the Darkhold, Agatha did as well, telling herself that she still loved it the same as she always did.  But at one point, she did, and now again, she does.

Wanda, on the other hand….

A witch who has never been trained cannot truly know what magic is.  She does not know its language and so cannot speak to it, cannot love it.  Not for what it is.  She doesn’t even see it as a tool.

She doesn’t see it at all.

~

“Well,” Agatha speaks into the emptiness of her house as she finishes cleaning the dishes, as she sets them just to one side to dry, “it’s just you and me again, isn’t it?”

Magic might listen to her, but it never really responds.  That’s fine.  She’s certain that it doesn’t feel lonely, not the way she does, given how easily it connects with everything else in the cosmos, but she sense that it doesn’t feel particularly happy with this outcome.  Or maybe that’s her own unease coloring the whole.  She can’t know.  For all that she’s loved and studied magic, there are still things about it that she cannot understand – and perhaps never will.

Then soft, cool hands find their place at the small of Agatha’s waist, and she relaxes into them with a purr.  “Wondered when you would come back, hon.”

“Hush.”

Agatha ignores that.  “Did you find what you wanted out there, Wanda?  Did you figure out why it is you came back?”  She turns in her arms and leans against the kitchen counter.  The way this presses against her back should make her uncomfortable, but this time, it doesn’t.  Then she reaches out and asks without words, Or are you too afraid to ask?

Do you love me? Wanda thinks at the same moment that she asks, “Was any of it real?”  The words she says are so much softer, so much more intimate than her thoughts, which yowl as a kitten demanding attention.

“Oh, my dear girl,” Agatha chuckles, reaching up just enough to brush her fingertips through Wanda’s hair.  “I already told you.  I always wanted….”  Her gaze drops to Wanda’s lips.  “Everything that happened in the Hex was real.  All of it.  Vision was real.”  As she speaks, she feels Wanda flinch away from her.  “Your boys were real.”  She places her hand on Wanda’s waist, holding her there as she trembles.  “And me?  Hon.  You could never have created someone like me.”  Her eyes lift, peer into those emerald orbs, and holds their gaze.  When she speaks, her words come soft, softer even than Wanda’s were before: “Do you trust me?”

At first, Wanda doesn’t say anything.  Her gaze drops.  She bites her lower lip, head tilting ever so slightly to one side as she seems to examine Agatha, what she knows of her, what she’s said.  Then her fingers begin to slowly sweep along the curve of Agatha’s waist, thumb brushing up and down while she holds her in place.  “Why did you come to Westview, Agatha?  You must have wanted something.  Did you find it?”

Magic brought me here, Agatha wants to say.  The ripples of Wanda’s mistaken casting reached out to her where she’d mourned in New York – which isn’t so far, given that Westview is only in New Jersey, but Agatha believes those ripples would have found her wherever she was – and that’s the thing of it, isn’t it?  Magic brought her here because magic let those Wanda’s casting send off so many of her inner alarms that Agatha couldn’t not come because magic knew that Wanda needed—

That AGATHA needed—

Agatha catches it then, the threads of magic binding them hopelessly together, as though her eyes have been opened to something so subtle that she would never have been able to notice if it hadn’t been revealed to her by something so cheeky as magic itself.

And all she can do is laugh.

Wanda flinches again, her eyes widening.  “What?” she asks.  “What’s so funny?  I don’t—”

The hilarity of it all captures Agatha, and she quivers with it, leans forward and rests her head just above Wanda’s chest, laughing so hard that tears spring to her eyes.  “I’ve been such a fool,” she mutters between breaths as she finally calms.  “Such. a fool.”  She reaches her fingers into magic itself, thrills when it wraps itself around her, brushes against her, gentle as she’s always tried to be with it, when she’s been in her right mind.

Perhaps magic does speak, if she’s inclined to listen.

You love me.

You want—

Agatha stills herself.  She leans back to see Wanda’s confused expression and tries her best not to laugh.  “You wouldn’t get it, hon.”  She pats Wanda’s cheek.  “It’s a secret, meant only for me.”  Then she stretches up, brushes her nose against Wanda’s, and asks with a hum, “Would you still like me to catch you, dear?  Now that you’re falling?”

Wanda’s brows shoot up.  “Am I?” she asks, confused, even as her hands tighten their hold on Agatha’s waist, fingers digging into her skin.  “Am I still falling?”

Too subtle.

“Mmhm,” Agatha purrs.  She angles herself closer to Wanda.  “You’re falling for me.”  Her mouth presses against the spot where Wanda’s jaw and neck just meet.  Then she runs her tongue along the sensitive skin there, tugs it between her lips, and sucks gently.

Wanda gasps.  “Agatha.”  The word slips through her lips like air escaping boiling water.  “You…you can’t just—”

Agatha bites down.

A startled squeak.  Then Wanda tilts her head ever so gently to the side, a silent request for Agatha to continue, and when she does, she lets out the gentles of groans.  “This isn’t fair, you know,” she mutters.

“What was it you said last night?” Agatha purrs between nibbling kisses.  “All’s fair in love and—”  Her voice cuts off as Wanda lifts her onto the counter, and when she meets Wanda’s eyes, their pupils dark and hungry, she hums with pleasure.  “You want me, don’t you, hon?”

“As badly as you want me,” Wanda growls softly.  She spreads Agatha’s legs just enough to slot herself between them and lets out another little sound of approval as Agatha wraps her legs tight around her waist.  She pauses just long enough to search Agatha’s eyes.  “You’ll catch me,” she asks, hesitant, “when I fall?”

Agatha doesn’t answer with words.  She captures Wanda’s chin with both hands, lifts her head, and parts her lips against Wanda’s, hungrily drinking her in.  It’s only when Wanda melts against her, when she finally lets herself fall and the magic created between them overpowers all else, that Agatha opens her mind to her with a gentle, Of course, I will, love.

It’s what I was made to do.

~

No, Wanda Maximoff, much like magic itself, isn’t very subtle.

But Agatha knows magic.  Wanda?  She’s still trying to figure her out.

Hopefully, it won’t take her another three hundred years to do so.

#bandit fic #december banditnanza 2023 fic #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #mcu #wandavision #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness

[scarlet--wiccan]

Do you have your own pitch/idea/concept of a new Scarlet Witch villain?

This is not a new character, per se, but I have a lot of ideas for a revived or resurrected version of Hecate, who was killed by the Emerald Warlock in the 2016 Scarlet Witch series. A couple of years later, in Avengers: No Road Home, the gods of Olympus were slaughtered and eventually reborn in new forms. We haven't seen Hecate, but making it so that she was reborn alongside the other Greek gods would be the perfect way to soft-reboot the character with new powers, a design, and new motives.

Overall, I think Hecate has some interesting things in common with Wanda, in terms of her most recent experiences and trauma, and there's already a lot of connective story tissue between them. Hecate would also be the perfect character to do more worldbuilding for witches and witchcraft, and if you lean into the idea that Agatha might be from ancient Greece, you could also tie her into the the history of the Coven of Mount Wundagore. She's one of my favorite mythological figures, and I just really love digging into historical forms of magic and mysticism, so with the right amount research you could do a lot of cool stuff with her in comics-- and the Marvel character is such a blank slate at this point that the possibilities are kind of endless.

Herc #4

The goddess Hecate is sort of a d-list villain in the Marvel universe. All told, she only has eight appearances, but I think she's got a lot of potential. Her main storyline is that she was banished to Earth and robbed of her memories and powers; after being restored to her true self, she eventually settled down to live peacefully amongst mortals, but she was then murdered in cold blood by the Emerald Warlock, who stole her magic.

The basic premise would be for Hecate to come back looking revenge and seeking to reassert herself as the goddess of magic and queen of witches. I would have her begin by consolidating power on the Witches' Road, maybe even scheming to supplant the abstract entity of Witchcraft as the supreme goddess.

From the Witches' Road, she could summon all sorts of mythical creatures; I also really like the idea of her commanding a legion of lampades, which were chthonic nymphs that served her as torchbearers and handmaidens in Greek mythology-- I imagine her sending them out into the world to bring inexperienced or vulnerable magic users under her thrall, which would be great way to incorporate some of Wanda's students from Strange Academy.

I also have this idea that Hecate could be split into three separate aspects, or have the power to be in three places at once. You'll notice in the image above that she has three faces-- in classical sculpture, Hecate was often depicted in triplicate, with each form facing in a different direction, to represent her role as the goddess of crossroads. That's a great way to bring things back to the Witches' Road, and it's a fun way to ramp the story up to a bigger scale. In addition to her quest for revenge and power on Earth, she could also, simultaneously, make a move on Olympus. In GotG (2020), the Guardians of the Galaxy battled with the revived Olympians, several of whom were killed all over again, and eventually the mountain itself was sent through a black hole. Maybe Hecate wants to dig it out and bring Zeus under her heel; maybe she wants to orchestrate another resurrection so she can remake the Olympians in her image.

Herc #5

These are all ideas for, like, a big climactic storyline, at the end of which Hecate would have to be defeated, or maybe even healed, in a way that would probably take her back off the board. Alternatively, if you wanted her to be a more sustainable, recurring villain, I would retroactively make her a part of Agatha's backstory so that you can set her up as an even more cryptic, morally ambiguous rival for Agatha, who would then to be motivated to build a new Coven to oppose her. That's when Wanda would step in and say, "hey, me and my family will help you, but you're not calling the shots and you can't keep secrets from us." It would be a fun way to even the playing field between Wanda and Agatha and resolve some of their more recent beef.

#hecate #story pitch

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic X - 2020's (IV)

Chapter Summary: Wanda looks up when she enters, drink carefully held between her hands.  She leans against the wall the way awkward kids do in all those horrible eighties high school movies, but when she looks up and her emerald eyes find Agatha’s, she smiles.  None of the others can see the change then – Agatha’s fairly certain that Wanda doesn’t even notice it – but in that moment, Wanda starts to glow.

That is magic.

(It isn’t very subtle.  Not really.)

And drawn to magic like a moth to the flame, Agatha moves to Wanda, takes her drink, sips it, and sets it to one side with a raised brow.  “I think,” she says, “this party needs a dance floor.  What do you think, hon?”

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff Chapter Rating: M for sexual content Fic Rating: M for dark themes and sexual content

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

Most people don’t acknowledge that magic exists.

You may say that’s not true, but it is.  In everything, there’s a little bit of magic – how else could air pulled in through struggling lungs be turned into something that propels a huge body forward?  Food stripped down to pieces so small that it isn’t even really food anymore but becomes fuel.  You might call that science – most people might – but science is just a way of seeing magic and trying to logic through it.  Just because you understand the process of something doesn’t mean it isn’t magic.

If you ask Agatha Harkness, she would say that the way Wanda slowly opens up to the others over the course of a short party is nothing short of great magic, but of a sort that would be a true tragedy to try and force.  There’s something magical in the way that Wanda accepts Todd’s words with a quiet sort of nod, the way she chats with Harold over his cocktails, the way she sits next to Sharon but not so close that Sharon will bristle.  These are things Wanda does instinctively, navigating her own anxieties of being around these people and soothing their anxieties in so doing.  There’s nothing that the average person would call magic in that.

But Agatha sees it, and she knows it, and she calls it such.

Magic wraps itself around Wanda and fills her every movement, her every action, her every way of being.  Where Wanda steps, magic ripples around her and bends – not to her will, but to her, which is an entirely different thing – and Agatha sees it and doesn’t know not to thrum with an envious sort of approval.

An hour or so into the party, Sarah hooks her elbow through Agatha’s as though to lead her out onto the dance floor (that Agatha started, much to no one’s surprise) but instead drags her back to the bedroom.  She only releases her to shut the door behind them, and then turns to Agatha with narrowed eyes.  “Now—”

“Look, hon, if you wanted me all to yourself,” Agatha starts to say, then pauses just long enough to let her eyes sweep Sarah’s scrawny form, how appetizing she appears with her hair coiffed the way it is, with the pretty pink dress she’s wrapped herself in.

“Agnes.”  Sarah huffs and crosses her arms.

For all that it was a joke, Agatha offers her a smug grin.  “You look good, hon.  But I’m sure Harold has already told you that.”

Sarah’s gaze grows hard.  “I didn’t drag you back here to talk about me.  I want to know what was going on between you and Wanda.”

“Oh, well.”  Agatha turns toward the door.  “That’s really none of your business, dear, so if you don’t mind me.”  She places her hand on the doorknob, only for Sarah to grab her wrist, fingernails digging into her skin.  Her teeth grit together – she does not think of how her mother once punished her – and growls out, “I don’t think that was your best idea, hon.”

“Then quit trying to run from me.”

Agatha breathes in magic.  It fills her lungs, threads through her veins, sprouts sharp along her nails.  “Sarah Proctor,” she continues to growl, “I may not have seemed a witch to you, and I may have been gentler with you than Wanda was, but that does not mean I’m not still a witch, and if you do not let me go, hon, then I will be forced to—”

Sarah’s grip on her wrist tightens.  Odd, for someone who is so afraid of magic, to instinctively keep putting herself in its way.  “Agnes, she doesn’t know who you are.  She thinks you’re like we were.”

“And you know this,” Agatha says, finally turning to meet Sarah’s eyes with her own, knowing that there are spots of deep purple within them, “but haven’t pretended to ask her about me in the least, have you?”  She tears her wrist out of Sarah’s grip, feeling her skin tear, and pulls herself up to her full height.  “The entire town knows what she meant to do to me, knows that she left me as she once had you, but you wouldn’t fight her for me, would you?”

“Agnes, that’s not the same as—”

“Leave us be, Sarah Proctor.”  Agatha glares at her.  “We have danced this dance before, and Wanda cannot hurt me.”  She runs her fingers along her wrist, tucking into magic, and mutters under her breath as her skin stitches itself back together as whole and imperfect as it was before.

Sarah stares at Agatha’s wrist.  “What happened to you,” she says calmly, “in the Hex?”  Then she glances up and meets Agatha’s gaze, holding it with her own.  “Why can’t Wanda hurt you?”

And Sarah doesn’t say it, but Agatha hears it in her thoughts so loud that she doesn’t even need to reach far to find the words, And how can I get it for my daughter?

“Wanda did something else to me,” Agatha admits.  “Something she does not understand and which neither of us can give anyone else.”  This latter is not entirely true, but she considers it an essential lie.  Could Wanda make someone else impenetrable to her magic?  Yes.  Would she?  Not likely.  A child, perhaps, yes, but there is too much risk in that child growing up and seeking to harm her – with no way to protect herself, what would Wanda do then?  But then Wanda would never think of that.

(Wanda doesn’t even know what she did to Agatha, and she would hate herself if she did.  More than that, she would try to undo it.

But magic protects Agatha from Wanda now.  Not because it likes Agatha particularly.  But because that’s what Wanda’s spell did.)

Agatha is certain that if Wanda believed she could make everyone safe from herself, then she would, to her own detriment.  She would think that is something she could revoke at any time, cast a massive spell, and realize much later that all she has done is broken herself.  Someone would come to find her.  Someone would come to kill her.

And if she didn’t have any better reason to maintain her life, Wanda would let them.

No.  Best to tell Sarah that this is something that can’t be done again.  Better still to not let Wanda ever know that she did it in the first place.

Then Sarah takes Agatha’s hand in her own, gentle, and lifts it until her now healed wrist rests in the air between them.  “Could she hurt you the way I hurt you?”

“Of course, she can, super star, but only if I let her.”  Agatha gives Sarah a wink.  She nods to her wrist.  “Now, do you want to try that again, or am I free to go, hon?”

There’s an intentional underlying threat here.  If Sarah tries to keep her here, Agatha will not be the one hurting for it.  But she doesn’t want to say that out loud.  Sarah’s a nice gal.  She’s trying to have this conversation out of the goodness of her heart, which mostly makes her an even better gal.

But Sarah Proctor is in over her pretty little head.

Sarah steps forward and takes Agatha’s hand gently in her own.  “You are my friend, Agnes,” she says, firm, “and I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

Agatha snorts and takes her hand out from Sarah’s.  “Then don’t look.”  She turns and leaves the bedroom without another word.  When she returns to the living room, she scans the room and finds that their absence hasn’t entirely been noticed.  The others are still talking amongst themselves.  Harold seems to still be in the kitchen making cocktails, and Wanda….

Wanda looks up when she enters, drink carefully held between her hands.  She leans against the wall the way awkward kids do in all those horrible eighties high school movies, but when she looks up and her emerald eyes find Agatha’s, she smiles.  None of the others can see the change then – Agatha’s fairly certain that Wanda doesn’t even notice it – but in that moment, Wanda starts to glow.

That is magic.

(It isn’t very subtle.  Not really.)

And drawn to magic like a moth to the flame, Agatha moves to Wanda, takes her drink, sips it, and sets it to one side with a raised brow.  “I think,” she says, “this party needs a dance floor.  What do you think, hon?”

Wanda’s eyes widen.  “I don’t think that’s a good—”

But Agatha takes her hands in her own and tugs her out to the middle of the living room floor.  She places her hands at Wanda’s hips the way Wanda’s hands keep finding their way to hers and starts to sway.  “They’ll start the music when they’re ready to join us.”  As she’s speaking, someone starts an old crooner tune.  She leans forward and whispers in Wanda’s ear.  “See?  Told you.”

When she pulls back, Agatha catches the scarlet flush along Wanda’s cheeks hidden beneath that still gentle glow.  She glances over the side and catches Sarah staring at the both of them, her arms crossed, and she tilts her head to one side, gesturing for her to join them.

It takes a moment, but Sarah returns to the floor with her husband.  She nudges Agatha only once as they dance and gives her a look before Agatha can hear in her mind, clear as day, Be careful.  Don’t get yourself killed.

Agatha almost – almost – laughs.  Killed is the very least of her problems.

~

The thing Agatha learns very, very quickly is that her little Sokovian princess does not hold her liquor very well.  Honestly, she would have thought the opposite, given the little she knows of her upbringing, but now she suspects that Wanda didn’t drink much at all in Sokovia, or that when she did, she had her twin brother to keep an eye on her and make sure she would be safe.  (Agatha has a sneaky suspicion it’s that Wanda didn’t drink, that Wanda was the one who kept an eye on a twin brother who was much more likely to drink to excess.)  Or maybe that little terrorist organization they’d been part of hadn’t thought it a great idea to let their pet projects even potentially get drunk.

Whatever the case, Wanda Maximoff is a lightweight, and Agatha has had Harold give her cocktails with a wrong expectation of how well she would hold up, and when Sarah tells them it’s time to go, it has nothing to do with Agatha at all and everything to do with how absolutely sloppy Wanda is becoming.  She stumbles out of the front door, she stumbles down the sidewalk as they walk back to Agatha’s current house, and she stumbles up the stairs to Agatha’s front door.

Anyone else, any other time, Agatha would be much more likely to magic away the heels and replace them with something a little easier to walk in.  But even with Wanda as drunk as she is, she doesn’t want to take that chance.  If the littlest witch notices the change, her drunk reaction could be worse than her sober one.

Nuh-uh.  Bad idea.

So once they are inside, Agatha sits Wanda down on her couch, which is a much safer place than trying to get her upstairs to the spare bedroom.  She crouches down in front of her, places her hands on her knees, and meets Wanda’s dazed emerald eyes.  “Stay here while I get you some water, hon.”  Then she reaches out and just boops Wanda’s nose.  “Don’t try to follow me.”

Wanda breaks into giggles before batting at Agatha’s finger.  “Don’t tell me what to do, Harkness.”  Her giggling cuts off all at once, eyes wide, and she gasps.  “I…I mean Agnes.”  She says the name all in a hush, like it’s some sort of secret between them.

“I know what you mean, dear.”  Agatha brushes errant strands of Wanda’s hair back from her face and gently kisses her forehead as she stands.  “Stay here.”

Wanda nods and keeps nodding as Agatha leaves, but Agatha can hear the commotion she makes in the other room while she pours two glasses of water.  (She might not be drunk – she grew up in a time where beer was safer to drink than water and knows her limits well, which means she knows how to not pass them when she wants to make sure to keep an eye on her tongue, like she does now – but that doesn’t mean she won’t appreciate a glass for herself.)  Then there’s the sharp sound of glass shattering.

“Hon?” Agatha calls out.  “Everything okay in there?”

There’s no answer.

Agatha isn’t afraid for Wanda, for the Scarlet Witch herself.  Magic has chosen her for its own; it won’t let her be harmed too terribly by whatever glass she’s found in Agatha’s living room.  In fact, when Agatha returns, magic has changed her living room to mimic what Wanda imagined it would be – the antique cabinet from the Hex full of ancient teacups and new display on the other side of the fireplace, one that Wanda is standing in front of with a look of chagrin, one that is full of—

“I’m sorry, Nessie, I didn’t mean to—”

Nessie?

Agatha steps carefully across shards of a broken shot glass, sets the glasses of water on the fireplace mantle, but then hesitates before just touching Wanda’s hand.  “It’s fine, hon.  You’re a witch.  You can fix it, remember?”  Instead of looking at the display full of shot glasses (because apparently the new and improved Agnes also collects shot glasses), she looks at Wanda, at the look of embarrassment on her face.

“I’m a little….”  Wanda bites her lower lip.  “I’m a little drunk, Nessie.  I could hurt you.”  She doesn’t even pause before she says, voice low, “I already hurt you.”  Her gaze drops, and her fingers fidget together.  “I don’t want to hurt you.  I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Gently, gently, Agatha lifts Wanda’s chin.  “Look at me, love.”  She waits for Wanda to glance up then meets her eyes.  “You won’t hurt me.  You can’t.”

Wanda shakes her head.  “I already did.  You don’t know, and I already did.  You’re hurting now, and it’s all my fault, and it’s because you hurt me first, and I didn’t want to hurt you.”  Her gaze drops again, fixates on Agatha’s lips as she licks her own.  “I didn’t want to hurt you,” she repeats, slower, leaning forward.

Before she can say anything else – before she can do anything else – Agatha interlaces their fingers.  “Here,” she says, “let me help you.  With the shot glass.”

Wanda jumps away from her.  “Right.  The shot glass.  Right.  I need to fix it, I need to fix everything, I need to—”  She reaches out with her free hand, and the shards of glass stitch themselves back together like so many woven threads.  Then she catches it and holds it out to her.  “Here.  I fixed it.  I fixed something.”

“Good girl.”  Agatha takes the shot glass in her free hand, runs a thumb over the India etched on it in orange, and sets it on the display without looking to see if it fits in place.  “You said you were hurting me, hon?”  She turns to the glasses of water, pretending not to look at Wanda as she asks, “Do you think you could fix me, too?”

Magic ripples around her, and Wanda grows white, ashen.  She turns away from her, returns to the couch, and collapses onto it without saying anything else.  Whatever glow it’d given her at Sarah’s party is long gone; if anything, she’s sunken in on herself.  Chatty, sure, but not in a good way.

Agatha follows her with the glasses of water.  “You need to drink something, dear.”  She hands her the glass.  “Here.  Drink this.  It’ll help you feel better.”

Wanda nods.  Takes the glass.  Sips at it.  Glances around the room.  “We should make a pillow fort,” she says into the silence between them.  “We could make a really good fort in here.  Pietro and I used to make forts all the time, and my mama and papa, they would curl up in them for our shows.”  She bites her lower lip.  “I should have made one with my boys, before….”  Her voice trails off into nothing.

Without a second thought, Agatha pulls the pillow from behind her and throws it at Wanda.

It barely misses her, and Wanda stares at her, open-mouthed.  “I was having a moment!” she finally splutters out.

“You were getting depressed, love, and I will not abide a depressed drunk.”  Agatha takes another sip of her water and sets it to one side.  “Now—”

The pillow hits her square in the face just as she’s sitting back up.

Agatha catches it as it falls into her lap and stares at Wanda, who looks nonchalantly around the rest of the room.  She raises an eyebrow.  “What happened to making a fort, hon?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You just threw this pillow at me.”

“You threw it first.”

“I didn’t hit you.”

“You could have!”  Wanda stares at Agatha, wide-eyed.  “I was holding a glass!  It could have broken!  I could have been hurt—”

Agatha throws the pillow at her again and hits her square in the face.  When it drops into Wanda’s lap, she glares at Agatha.  “That’s not fair,” she says with a pout, crossing her arms.  “I wasn’t ready.  You’re supposed to wait until I’m ready.”

But Agatha just gives her a shrug.  “All’s fair in love and war, super star.  I think you—”

Wanda throws the pillow at her again, but this time, Agatha is ready.  She dodges it neatly and starts to grin up at Wanda, only to notice that the littlest witch isn’t on the other side of the couch anymore but has moved towards her instead.  There’s no time to react before Wanda brushes her fingers along the inside of her knee.

She squirms.  “That’s not a pillow fight—”  Laughter catches in her throat as Wanda continues to tickle her.  “You changed the game, dear—”

“All’s fair in love and war,” Wanda echoes as she leans forward, running her fingers along the small of Agatha’s waist.

Agatha’s breath catches in her throat.  This isn’t just tickling – there’s that, too, obviously – but there’s magic poised at the tip of Wanda’s fingers unbidden, and with every touch along her skin, there’s a double punch, one from Wanda herself, the other the shock of magic, pure and unadulterated, brushing gentle and loving against her.  She curls into the one but recoils from the other, breathless, and doesn’t even notice she’s tried to get Wanda back until both of her wrists are pinned above her head with one of Wanda’s hands.

She should be afraid.

Wanda can’t hurt her.

She’s still afraid.

Wanda can’t hurt her.

“Stop,” Agatha makes out between breaths, soft in her fear and powerlessness.

“Say uncle.”  Wanda’s eyes gleam with drunken amusement, lips curling back in a grin.

Agatha shakes her head.  “No.”

“Say it.”

“No.”

“Say it!”

Agatha squirms.  She looks back and forth, trying to come to her senses, to get that sudden fear under control.  Wanda isn’t trying to hurt her.  She’s just drunk.  She’s just playing.  But pinned and under someone else’s control – under Wanda’s control – sends her senses on high alert.  Normally, she would call on magic to help her, would mutter something under her breath between shaking gasps, would curve her fingertips into the closest threads and set a spell that would set her free.  She won’t do that with Wanda where she is, she won’t do that when she’s already afraid of a witch who isn’t intent on harming her because the moment she does that will change, she won’t make herself more vulnerable by drawing power to herself.

It isn’t instinct, it’s a primal desire to protect self when Agatha breaches the distance between them and kisses Wanda.

Wanda loosens her hold on Agatha’s wrists.  Her tickling fingers settle.  She parts from Agatha, searches her eyes.  “You changed the game,” she accuses.

“Sure did, hon.”  Agatha smirks, heart pounding within her.  “What are you going to do about it?”

The pause lasts less than a second, but it feels longer as Wanda stares down at her, as her pupils widen with an unspoken desire.  “I…I can’t,” she mumbles, hold loosening even further.  “I’ll hurt you—”

She could leave it here.

She could.  Whatever hold the Darkhold might have over her, Wanda is clearly resisting.  Very vocally resisting.  But the question here is how long she can hold out.  Wanda’s magic overcomes her when she’s at her most emotional.  This is not her most emotional.  Not even close.

Agatha leans up again.  “Don’t you remember, hon?”  She brushes her nose against Wanda’s.  “I told you.”  She kisses the curve of her jaw.  “I always wanted—”

Wanda breaks.

When she kisses Agatha, there’s nothing calm or gentle about it, only a sinking, desperate need.  The hand at her waist moves to the edge of her shirt and pushes beneath it as magic unties the ribbon around her; her fingers dig into Agatha’s skin, nails scratching hard enough to prick blood.  She bites Agatha’s tongue, tugs on her bottom lip, and then smiles when Agatha lets out a startled gasp of pain.  “This?” she murmurs, brushing her nose along Agatha’s neck.  “This is…what you wanted?”  She bites hard enough to bruise on Agatha’s pulse point.

And in all of this, magic.  It thrums along Agatha’s skin, stitches each and every wound back together the moment Wanda crafts them, healing every spot of pain while continuing to steadily disrobe her, removing the ribbon about her waist, undoing the clasp of her jeans—

Wanda moves the hand pinning Agatha’s wrists to press against the skin of her waist as her other hand rakes nails higher up Agatha’s skin, and Agatha grabs fistfuls of Wanda’s hair, drags her away from her neck and back up.  She kisses her, bruising Wanda’s lips the way hers have been bruised, magic angry and soothing between them, before she asks, a thought that she makes certain Wanda can hear, Is this what you want?

The other witch doesn’t even hesitate.

I want YOU.

The words roar into Agatha’s mind, and in the same moment she relaxes into the thrall of Wanda’s desperate need, Wanda stops, crumbles against her.  “No,” she murmurs, and again, “No,” and again, “No, no, no, no, no.”  She presses her forehead into Agatha’s clavicle and shakes her head against her skin.  “I can’t.  I can’t—”

Agatha doesn’t move.

“You weren’t supposed to be like this, you said you would catch me, and then you attacked me, and this isn’t you, and I can’t do this to you again.”

Agatha pauses, listens, waits, and then says into the quiet between them, “Do you think maybe this is what I deserve?”

And then that even clearer response, unspoken, No.

Wanda shivers against her, and Agatha wraps her arms around her, running her fingers through Wanda’s hair.  She could say a lot of things in this moment – there are a lot of things to say – but right now, the one that leaves her lips first is, “Thank you,” a pause, and then, “for stopping.”  She can’t be sure if Wanda heard her or if she even understood what she said, but the words rest there between them anyway, a soft and quiet thing.

~

Later, after Agatha has carefully settled Wanda in the spare bedroom, she steps outside with a mug of hot tea, one that near burns her fingers and certainly burns her tongue when she takes the first near boiling drink, burns all the way down her throat.  She needs it, the burn, and she stares up at the cloudless sky, at stars she once knew so well, at what is hidden by artificial lights but not made lesser.  A part of her aches for those months, so early on, after everything with her coven, when the boy she’d loved hid her on his ship and then held her in the crow’s nest while they stared up at a universe that had seemed so large and incomprehensible.  She’d needed someone to stitch her back together then, and she’d needed Cian later to stitch her back from an even further brokenness, one that would have left her dead without their intervention.

Agatha Harkness doesn’t believe in miracles, but she does believe in magic, that when it cares enough it can bend and twist itself to protect those it loves.  She’s just never believed that it could love her.  But in calling her to stitch together this broken witch, doesn’t that mean that those others, too, had been called in to stitch her together?  That, at those points and many others beside, magic was working to heal her, too?

That, maybe, this is what it has been doing all along?

She stares up into the night sky and she speaks to the magic all around her, the magic within her, the magic that throbs in her veins, “Do you love me?”

The stars shine bright about her.  The cool and cooling breeze eases her burnt tongue.  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath of magic.  Breathes it out the same as she always does.

Then stretches her aching back and returns to her aching witch.

~

Wanda isn’t quite asleep when Agatha returns to her room with another glass of water.  She looks up, near groggy, as Agatha places the cup on her bedside table, and asks, bleary, “What are you….”  She rubs her eyes and tries again.  “What are you doing here?”

“Couldn’t let you sleep in that dress, love.”  Without a second thought, Agatha waves her hand and the soft sweater dress and tights Wanda is wearing shift into a plain, oversized white shirt.  “There,” she murmurs.  “That’s better.”

Wanda blinks twice.  Her brow furrows.  “You…magic.”  She looks at the shirt, shakes her head, and then wiggles her own fingers, turning it into an exact copy of the Wicked Witch shirt Agatha is still wearing.  “There,” she says with a sad smile.  “We match.” She runs her fingers along the shirt.  “We’re both wicked.”

Agatha sits on the mattress next to her.  “No, love.”  She brushes strands of hair back out of Wanda’s face.  “We’re both witches.”

It takes a second for what Agatha has said to sink in with what Agatha has done, and once it does, Wanda turns and looks up at her.  “I didn’t hurt you?”

“No,” Agatha says with the same sad smile Wanda wore only moments earlier.  “You could never hurt me.”  Then the expression fades.  “Now scoot.  You’re drunk, and I’m drunk, and you spent a lot of time earlier using me as your Kleenex, so I think I’m allowed.”

Wanda stares at her, confused, and then scoots back.  “You don’t want to hurt me.”

“Never did.”

Wanda’s brow furrows again as Agatha settles beneath the sheets next to her.  “You called me love.”

Agatha sighs.  “Yes, love, it’s a pet name, one of many—”

“Do you love me?”

She doesn’t even hesitate as she wraps Wanda in her arms again, letting them rest easy just at her waist.  They fit there just as easily as Wanda’s hands fit on hers.  “Of course, I do, hon.  Surprised it took you so long to notice.”

Wanda curls against Agatha’s chest.  She hesitates and then asks, her voice even softer, “You’re in love with me, aren’t you, Agatha?”  She says it like a revelation, like she’s held the jewel of their relationship up under the starlight and seen its different facets and known it for what it is, known it for something she’s never seen before.

Instead of saying anything, Agatha shifts away just enough to kiss Wanda’s forehead.  In the morning, a sober Wanda will feel very differently about all of this, but for now – for now – Agatha will take this.  Magic stirs at their touch, a yawning, desperate thing, and for a moment, just a moment, Agatha sees once more the glow that captured Wanda earlier, returning just where her lips brush her skin.  Then she glances further down and meets Wanda’s tired, tired eyes.  “We should get some sleep, dear.”

By the time she finishes saying it, Agatha is certain Wanda has already dozed off.  She’s not sure how much of this Wanda will remember in the morning, but she doesn’t have to worry about it until then, doesn’t want to worry about it until then.  For now, this is all she wants.  Just to lay here, with Wanda in her arms, with magic curled and crafted between them.

#bandit fic #december banditnanza 2023 fic #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #mcu #wandavision #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic IX - 2020's (III)

Chapter Summary: When she was eighteen years older, much younger than Wanda is now, Agatha Harkness murdered her entire coven.  It might have been self-defense; it might have been unintentional.  These are things she’s told herself over the years to reassure herself, but that doesn’t change the fact that it happened, doesn’t change the fact that her own mother thought her magic so horrendous that she would rather kill her than let her live.

Sometimes, Agatha wants to tell Wanda, magic does horrible things.  Sometimes we do horrible things with it.  Even now, after centuries of study, that has never proven itself to her more than it has now.  A single word out of place, a rune miswritten – magic. is. dangerous.  That’s why the first runes learned are protection spells, that’s why they’re learned under the protection spell of one who already knows how to craft it – because even protection spells, improperly done, can blow up in the caster’s face.

It is right to have a natural fear of magic, but not so much as to avoid—

“You won’t hurt me, hon,” Agatha says, reaching out and placing one hand over Wanda’s, stilling her itching fingers.  “I trust you.”

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff Chapter Rating: T Fic Rating: M for dark themes and sexual content

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

The thing about parties – and the thing about Sarah Proctor – and the thing about Sarah Proctor’s parties is that there’s usually a certain standard of dress.  Agatha knows as she brings her that Wanda, in her certain attire, doesn’t meet that standard.  In fact, even more than that, she knows that Wanda probably did not expect to be seeing anyone other than Agnes in this outfit, because it’s not the sort of thing Wanda would leave the house in…or she would, perhaps, but it had been so long since—

The hoodie really isn’t that much of a problem.  It’s that stupid scarlet color that does her absolutely no favors – for all that Agatha intentionally does not pay attention to the superheroes of any age, she’s noticed how they all have their own unique color and tend to wear that exclusively, which really just makes them dang hard to hide in any situation, and it’s not like anyone thinks about whether those colors are appealing on them – and it’s a hoodie, but that could be played around with.  Lengthen it quite a few inches, and it becomes a hoodie dress, which is even better, particularly paired with leggings or heels or a few of the golden bracelets Agatha herself dangles about one wrist.

Really, it’s the sweatpants.  The ones that look like they haven’t been washed in days.  In fact, Agatha’s pretty sure that one of those stains is from milk, and she’s trying to pretend that there’s not a stench, but on top of all of that, Wanda’s hair is so greasy and dirty that she thinks maybe Wanda hasn’t been showering either.

Which, to be fair, Agatha has been there.  More than once.  Most recently when Cian died and she wasn’t there for it, but she’s not thinking about that.

(Sometimes, Agatha thinks she could have saved them.  It doesn’t matter how many times Cian said that she couldn’t, she still believes that she could have.  Most likely, she would have died, too, or be dragged out into more superhero shenanigans than she ever wanted part of, and really, this was Cian’s fault for knowing precisely how they would die and still going to the chopping block anyway.

But she isn’t thinking about any of that right now.)

No, Agatha’s thinking about the look Sarah gives her when she tells her to find something better for Wanda to wear, thinking about the scrunched upturn of her nose as she notes the same not great smell rising from a witch she knows to be so much more powerful than not showering, thinking about pulling Wanda aside to Sarah’s bedroom and—

Much kinder, gentler things than might be implied by that wording.

“Do you know magic?” Agatha asks in a feigned rushed sort of tone as she sits Wanda on Sarah’s white vanity’s accompanying white stool.  “You’re a witch, right?”  She meets Wanda’s emerald green eyes, searches them the way Agnes would, if she were as Wanda intended her to be.

Magic curls around Wanda as a shield as she refuses to repeat her truth, “Does that…does that matter?”

Agatha places her hands on Wanda’s knees, notes the way the girl flinches at her touch, and pretends that the smell isn’t worse crouching this close to her.  “You can do that clothes changing thing, right, hon?  I saw you do it – when you left.  At least, I…I thought I did….”  She lets her voice trail off, her gaze drop.

“I…I…yes, I can do that, but why does it—?”

“Can you read my mind?”

Wanda flinches.

Agatha gently squeezes Wanda’s knees, ignoring the slight crunch of the fabric beneath her hands.  She explains herself, slow, gentle, as Wanda’s eyes glaze over.  “For clothes, hon.  For something to wear.  You don’t have to go any further than that.  Trust me.”

“Trust you?” Wanda echoes.  Her eyes narrow, gaze hardening.  “Trust you?”

“Yes, hon.  Trust your best friend Agnes, who would never, ever do anything to hurt you.”  Agatha keeps her voice hushed, gentle, each word specific, enunciated.  Her instinct is to dip into magic, even the smallest bit, to reach out for Wanda’s mind to try and calm her thoughts, but she knows better.  No magic.  She lived without it for three months; she can handle this now.  (And still, she feels it around her, can see it thick and hard, conjured around Wanda as a living shield that she couldn’t penetrate even if she tried.)

Wanda hesitates.  Of course, she does; it’s only reasonable.  But she searches Agatha’s eyes, and as she does, she calms.  “I’ll…I’ll try, but Agnes, I can’t—”  She cuts herself off, voice fading.  “I can’t…,” she repeats, still without completing the sentence, lowering her head, gaze landing on her empty, fidgeting hands.

I can be good.

When she was eighteen years older, much younger than Wanda is now, Agatha Harkness murdered her entire coven.  It might have been self-defense; it might have been unintentional.  These are things she’s told herself over the years to reassure herself, but that doesn’t change the fact that it happened, doesn’t change the fact that her own mother thought her magic so horrendous that she would rather kill her than let her live.

Sometimes, Agatha wants to tell Wanda, magic does horrible things.  Sometimes we do horrible things with it.  Even now, after centuries of study, that has never proven itself to her more than it has now.  A single word out of place, a rune miswritten – magic. is. dangerous.  That’s why the first runes learned are protection spells, that’s why they’re learned under the protection spell of one who already knows how to craft it – because even protection spells, improperly done, can blow up in the caster’s face.

It is right to have a natural fear of magic, but not so much as to avoid—

“You won’t hurt me, hon,” Agatha says, reaching out and placing one hand over Wanda’s, stilling her itching fingers.  “I trust you.”

Wanda doesn’t look up.  “You shouldn’t.”

Magic parts for her, just as it had before, as Agatha leans up closer, cups Wanda’s cheek, and lifts her head.  She brushes her thumb along her cheek and meets her eyes, noting how Wanda still tries to avoid her gaze.  “I do.”

It isn’t immediate, but Agatha catches it – the way Wanda’s gaze flicks to her lips, how it lingers before she leans forward, letting her head rest against Agatha’s.  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.  Then her mind reaches out, feeble at first, uncertain, tentative, until she seems to find her way.  The touch grows stronger.

I want you.

Agatha nearly flinches.  Instead, she shifts, breaking their connection, dropping her hands to Wanda’s ankles, conjuring the image in her mind.  “Can you see it, hon?”

Wanda nods.  “I think so.”

“Good girl,” Agatha purrs.  Then she offers Wanda the easiest smile she can muster, the one Agnes would wear if she were real, even though she can’t see it.  “Only don’t go too far!  There’s some nasty things in there you won’t want to see.”

Wanda lets out a near breathless chuckle.  “Trust me,” she says without thinking, “I won’t.”

And true to her word, she doesn’t.  She doesn’t even try.

Agatha slowly runs her hands up Wanda’s legs, and as she does, Wanda, with her eyes closed, focused entirely on the image Agatha envisions, transforms her sweatpants into thinner caramel tights.  “Wow,” Agatha murmurs in just the tone an awe-struck Agnes would have.  “This is so cool.”  She lets out a low whistle.

Of course, as Wanda’s clothes shift and stretch and sketch themselves into something more in line with Agatha’s design, Agatha makes sure to scrub away any dirt or grime or odor that might linger along Wanda’s skin.  It’s one thing if Wanda doesn’t feel like bathing while she’s been wherever it is she’s been, but a simple change of clothes from something crusty and dirty to something fresh and clean isn’t going to cover everything else, too.  And with Wanda so focused on not delving too far into her mind and on maintaining the magic to make all of these changes, hopefully she won’t even notice.

For a moment, if she lets herself, Agatha notices the way magic plays beneath their combined fingertips, how it stretches as Wanda tugs it one way, how it soothes as she smooths it another.  She pauses, not even realizing that her hands rest a little too easy on Wanda’s waist, just to feel the sensation.  Magic comforts her, and she caresses it; this is less of the familial familiarity they’ve gained over the past three hundred years, less of the easy companionship she’d gained from it, and more the—

“Don’t stop,” Wanda hisses before Agatha can complete the thought.

“Yeah, yeah, right.”

But as she continues to run her fingers up Wanda’s body, as Wanda flinches beneath her, Agatha can’t stop thinking about it.  It’s like it’s on the tip of her tongue, what it was like, but she just can’t—

“There.”

Agatha realizes just how close she’s drawn to Wanda as the unflattering scarlet hoodie finishes shifting into the cream sweater dress she’d designed.  One corner of her lips curves upward.  “That’s finished, hon.  You can open your eyes.”

“Mmhm,” Wanda murmurs, but she doesn’t open her eyes.  Instead, she leans forward just the slightest bit so that her forehead rests against Agatha’s again.  She smiles, almost, and Agatha feels Wanda’s mind retreat, a great fog slowly pulling away from her own.  When she finally does look, her eyes don’t move to her new outfit.  Instead, she brushes strands of hair back from Agatha’s face, tucks them behind her ear, and lets her gaze linger on Agatha’s lips.

Agatha flinches back.

“Sorry,” Wanda starts immediately, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“Don’t worry about it, dear.  You’re fine.”  Agatha places her hands on Wanda’s knees and squeezes them gently again.  “Now, about your make-up—”

Wanda gives her a blank stare.  “I can do my own make-up, Agnes.”

“Of course you can, doll.”  Agatha meets her eyes with a mischievous grin.  “This is just more fun.”  Her brows raise.  “Do you trust me?”

There’s a flicker in Wanda’s eyes.  The same sort of hesitation on the tip of her tongue now as before.  Of course, there is.  It only makes sense.  Only a few seconds with Agnes giving her a great outfit – one she hasn’t even seen – can’t change that.

And yet.

“Yes,” Wanda says finally, voice soft, eyes falling to her hands as she tucks them beneath her sleeves.  “I…I trust you, Agnes.”  She glances up, hands spread out, palms open, and meets Agatha’s eyes.  “Do what you want with me.”

This time, when Agatha says, “Good girl,” she feels a shiver up her spine.

She blames it on magic.

~

It’s not as though Agatha hasn’t applied another person’s make-up before.  She’d grown up poor in Puritan Salem, where make-up was banned; the first time she’d even seen a woman wearing anything to change the natural look of her face, she’d been shocked, and the first time she’d seen it after leaving Salem, she’d been equally shocked, surprised that anyone but the sailors’ whores would wear something like that in the bright light of day.  When she admitted as much to her husband, he had the good grace not to laugh at her, but the smile about his lips showed his amusement.  She kissed it from him then, determined to ask one of the women in town to help her apply some of the stuff before his next return – as a joke, mostly, because they couldn’t afford her doing so more than the once, not with—

It hadn’t mattered.  The next time he returned, she wasn’t there waiting for him.

Cian finally taught Agatha the fine art of make-up, using their fingers to brush powders, rouges, everything along her face the way an artist painted a canvas.  She blushed profusely when she saw how beautiful they were able to make her look – not garish like the sailors’ whores had been, but in a way that only enhanced her natural beauty.  Now you can see yourself the way I see you, they’d said, and she’d blushed deeper.

She doesn’t blush now, painting Wanda’s face the same way that Cian once painted hers, using her fingers like a child with finger paint or like an artist trusting the touch of their skin over the unsteady bristles of a brush.

But Agatha Harkness has spent the past few months distancing herself from magic in a successful attempt to drag the Darkhold out of her, and fingers which were previously numbed and deadened have regained the full sensation they should have had the first time they touched the other witch’s skin.  As her fingertips brush along the slope of Wanda’s cheeks, gently setting various powders into place, they tingle with the same, now familiar breath of magic that she hadn’t felt since—

Well.

Stop it, Agatha thinks towards the magic that crawls along her spine.  She’s not supposed to know.  Stop it.

But even when magic pretends to listen to her, that doesn’t stop her from noticing how soft, how smooth, how cool Wanda’s skin is beneath her fingertips, doesn’t stop her from tugging her lower lip between her teeth to try and maintain her focus, doesn’t stop her eyes from wandering along the younger witch’s face for reasons that have nothing to do with the make-up she is applying.

And even then – magic doesn’t really listen because magic doesn’t cower before Agatha the way it cowers before Wanda.  It might refrain from sending sparks along her fingertips, the slightest of burning sensations (comforting in their familiarity) not quite like a livewire through her veins, but that doesn’t mean it leaves her entirely.  Magic curls about her boots, snakes up her legs, wraps itself around her waist as though to draw Wanda’s hands there, should she open her eyes before Agatha finishes, and then settles there, purring like a contented kitten.  If it were anyone – anything – else, Agatha could be convinced that it missed her.

But magic doesn’t miss anyone, and it certainly wouldn’t miss her.

When Agatha finishes, she pauses.  This would be the proper time to step back, to give Wanda one final look, to make sure that she looks just the way that she imagined her.  But instead, she notes the way Wanda’s lips are just slightly parted, the barest of shine drawing her eyes to them, and she leans forward to—

To what?

In this moment, what would Agnes do?

As if she knew what Agatha was thinking, Wanda says, very gently, “Agnes?”

Agatha swallows, brushes the pad of her thumb along Wanda’s lips one last time, and leans back.  “Keep your eyes closed, hon!  Here, hold onto me.”  She stands and helps Wanda to stand before leading her in front of Sarah’s tall mirror.  “Only you’ll have to do something with your hair, dear, because I…I couldn’t do anything about that.”

Not without you catching me out.

It’s the sharp intake of breath that gives Wanda away more than anything, the way her cheeks darken as she looks over herself, as she moves closer to the mirror, the breathless little way she murmurs, “Wow,” under her breath.  Her fingers run through her oily, stringy hair, cleansing it without a second thought, pulling it into much gentler waves.  She whispers it again, “Wow,” before turning to Agatha with wide emerald eyes.  “You made me beautiful.”

Now you see yourself the way I see you.

Agatha gives a little shake of her head.  “You’ve always been that, dear.  You just do a pretty good job of hiding it.”  She takes a deep breath, settling herself, and lets the moment fall just the slightest bit.  “Especially with all that red.  It’s nice, hon, but it does you no favors.”  When Wanda blushes that same scarlet, she chuckles and reaches up just to touch her cheeks.  “No favors, hon.”

This time, Wanda doesn’t flinch back.  Instead, she avoids Agatha’s eyes.  “Thank you,” she murmurs, “for fixing me, but I don’t think how I look will change how people feel about my being here.  I don’t want to ruin your party.”

“You aren’t going to ruin anything, hon.”  Agatha pats her cheek, and her expression softens as her hands move to still Wanda’s fidgeting fingers as they pull her sleeves down about her hands.  “We’re going to go out there and drink a lot and possibly get very drunk – and then Sarah will send us both back before we do ruin anything – but for once in your life, buttercup, you are going to have fun.”

Wanda nods slow once or twice.  Her lips press together, and her head tilts to the side in that familiar way it does as her hands move from Agatha’s to rest on either side of her waist, thumb brushing along the ribbon Agatha intentionally put there just for this occasion.  She wets her lips.  “We,” she whispers, correcting her, “are going to have fun.”

It’s a start.

Agatha reaches up, brushes her fingers light through Wanda’s hair, traces the shape of her face, and then lifts her chin so that their eyes meet.  “You got that right.”  Her gaze lowers—

She feels the sound outside, the rippling along magic of someone who isn’t casting, before she hears it, and she reaches out, brushing the mind of one of her new friends.  Sarah, intent on checking on them.  No harm, no foul.  But now is not the time for an interruption.

Wait.

Agatha sends the thought into Sarah’s mind just as Sarah raises her hand to the door.

Sarah stops, and there’s fear in her thoughts, sharp and cold and blinding, as she thinks, a few seconds past, Why?  What’s…what’s wrong?  Why are you talking to me like this, Agnes; I don’t like it.  Her tone tremors.

Nothing’s wrong, Agatha soothes.  We’ll be with you in a few moments, hon.  I’m almost done.

Of course, of course, but—

“Agnes?”

Agatha breaks her connection with Sarah as Wanda’s voice, however soft, breaks through, and her gaze lowers, focusing on Wanda’s lips.  “Hold on, hon, let me just fix something.” 

As her thumb brushes along Wanda’s lower lip, Wanda’s eyes just close.  Agatha leans up on her toes to brush the tip of her nose against Wanda’s and waits for her to flinch, for her to back away.  Wanda could be scared – scared that Agnes isn’t real, that Agatha has taken her rightful place as herself – but perhaps even more importantly, Wanda could be hesitant, not wanting to force a chained Agatha to live through whatever she might want to do with Agnes.  It’s not quite a test, but that doesn’t stop it from being one – from seeing what corruption the Darkhold has wrought in a young witch who previously had only mistakenly used an entire town to fulfill her desires.

Agatha isn’t sure why Wanda is here, why she came to her, but there’s a mixture within her of that doesn’t matter and it absolutely does.

Magic swirls within her, easy as her uneasy heart.

Wanda doesn’t flinch away.

Agatha crosses the distance between them and kisses her.

Magic sparks around her lips, floods her veins, hot along her skin.  It takes an unspoken second – one Agatha doesn’t even feel, though she notices it – before Wanda kisses her back, hands reflexively tightening on Agatha’s waist.  On instinct, Agatha shifts her hand through Wanda’s hair – magic is there, too, softer, but still humming along her fingertips, under her nails in a soothing manner.  She relaxes.

It’s easy.  It shouldn’t be.

Then Agatha steps back.  Brushes her nose against Wanda’s again.  “Sarah’s waiting for us downstairs, hon.”

“Let her wait.”  Wanda’s thumb presses into the ribbon about Agatha’s waist – gentle, but insistent.  “Or we could…we could leave.  We could go somewhere—”

“And miss the party?”  Agatha chuckles.  “No, no.  I’m not that easy.”  She steps back, out of Wanda’s hands, and reaches up just enough to boop the tip of Wanda’s nose.  “Party first, hon.  Then we can talk about—”

“You’re the one who kissed me—”

“And I’m saying we wait.”  Agatha runs a hand through Wanda’s hair again and smiles, soft up at her.  Then she catches a flash of color threaded through Wanda’s hair – a color that shouldn’t be there – and her eyes widen.  “Hold on, hon, I think I…I think I got some of your lipstick in your hair.  I guess I didn’t think that one through.”  She giggles – giggles like a little girl – and hates the sound of it.

Wanda turns to Sarah’s mirror, threads her hand through her hair, and notes the differences.  “I think you got a little on my nose, too.”  Then she snaps her fingers – just like that, once, a sharp crack of a sound, and they’re back the way they were just before Agatha kissed her, with Wanda’s hands on her waist and—

The door creaks open.

Wanda jumps back, away from Agatha, and hides her face under the swathes of fabric about her neck.

This doesn’t change the fact that the door shouldn’t be opening.  Agatha told Sarah they were almost done, she told her they would be down shortly, but here Sarah is, clearing her throat in a small, embarrassed sort of sound, eyes glaring daggers at Agatha.  She isn’t even supposed to be here.

How much did Wanda change?

Agatha tugs, harsh, on one of the threads of magic entangling her, and she almost hears it sniggering, the way it vibrates against her fingertips.  It isn’t funny, she thinks, wondering if it can hear her if she doesn’t speak aloud.  It isn’t funny at all.

When she clues back in, Sarah’s gaze has turned to Wanda and softened.  “Much better,” she murmurs.  Then she digs her fingers into Agatha’s shoulder – Ow, ow, ow – and drags her out of the room, crooking a finger towards Wanda.  “Come along.  The festivities will start any minute.”

Agatha barely catches Wanda squeaking out, “Festivities?” as Sarah continues to drag her away from the other witch.  She tries to wiggle her shoulder out from under Sarah’s grasp, almost succeeds when they make it to the living room, and finally does after Sarah drags her to a secluded corner.  “I don’t know what you think I did to deserve that, hon,” she starts to say, rubbing her shoulder and rotating it a bit to get the kinks out.

“Were you flirting with her?” Sarah hisses, eyes narrowing.

A normal person might quail under Sarah’s intense, angry gaze, but Agatha has lived through worse things than a suburban white mom’s anger.  Not many things, because those women can be fierce, but some things.  “Funny how you assume I was doing the flirting and not our dear, gentle—”

“Oh, hush, you flirted with her in the Hex, too; don’t lie to me.”

“Of course my flirting with Wanda is what got burned into your mind and not—”

“Quit trying to deflect, Agnes.”  Sarah doesn’t back down.  That’s admirable.  “What was going on in there—”

It doesn’t matter whatever Sarah is trying to say, because she’s cut off when Wanda runs.  By instinct, Agatha reaches out for magic, reaches out with her mind just enough to read the white hot panic filtering through her mind, but she doesn’t have time to make her way to her in an attempt to calm her before Todd Davis makes a stupid joke about Sarah having a witch problem, and then of course, Wanda is running, is out the door, and Sarah, instead of continuing to chide Agatha about something she doesn’t know anything about and wasn’t meant to see, decides to run after Wanda.

And Agatha lets her go.

Instead, Agatha makes her way over to Todd, whose face has grown ashen.  He’s taller than her – taller even than Cian was, though Agatha doesn’t need to think of them now – but she can still tell the difference between the way he hangs his head now and the way he might look down on her if he ever felt the need to do so.  Still, she ribs him just the same way he ribbed Wanda, “Nice joke you told there, hon.”

“I didn’t mean to scare her,” Todd says.  “She’s so powerful.  I never thought she would be afraid.”

Agatha snorts.  “Girl’s a bundle of rubber bands stretched too far.  Just because you can’t hurt her doesn’t mean you can’t hurt her.”  She glances out the window, to where Wanda has stopped, where chaos magic flicks about her fingers, drawn to her fear, and nods her head in her direction.  “Look.  You’re the least of her problems.”

Todd follows her gaze, and in that moment, Wanda glances up, catches them staring at her, and quickly looks away.  It’s possible he doesn’t even notice it, but Agatha does.  As she continues to stare down at her, he says, “I didn’t know she would be here.”

It sounds like an accusation.

“I didn’t know either.  She just showed up on my doorstep.”  Quite like a feral cat looking for a place to curl up and have its kittens, although Agatha won’t mention it that way.  “Sorry I didn’t warn you.”  She can’t keep the bite out of her voice, and maybe it’s because he made Wanda run, maybe it has to do with his reinforcing what Wanda was already afraid of: that everyone, everyone here hates her.  That Sarah’s only letting her join because Agatha – because Agnes – asked.

“You didn’t have to warn us.”  This a different voice – Harold, Sarah’s husband – standing just behind them.  Agatha doesn’t even look up.  He’s a thin waif of a guy with a moustache bigger than his entire frame.  “But you let Sarah go after her.  Alone.”

That sounds like an accusation, too.

A few months ago, Agatha would have responded with a threat.  Even now, she resists the urge to dig her fingers into magic and rip into him with her fingernails – without ever so much as physically lifting a finger against him.  That’s not a threat – that’s direct action that serves as a threat to everyone else around her.  But she lived with these people without magic, people who had every reason to be afraid of her as much as they were of Wanda, and instead, she says, gentle, “Wanda won’t hurt her, hon.”

“I saw that magic—”

Now Agatha looks up, sharp, and cuts him off without a word.  She’s a witch; he cowers beneath her gaze.  (She’s had time to perfect it, after all.)  “If you saw the magic,” she says anyway, tongue as sharp as her gaze, “then you also saw it leave.”  She turns back, staring at Wanda through the window.  The little witch has curled into herself as much as she can, keeps avoiding Sarah’s gaze, looks like the same cat searching for somewhere – anywhere – to run and hide.  “She won’t hurt anyone.”

Todd glances down on Agatha, but there’s no anger or spite in his gaze.  “Are you sure she won’t hurt you?”

Agatha smiles, a small thing, but doesn’t turn away from the window.  “Why would she hurt Agnes?  I’m her best friend, love.”

“Do you know why she’s here?” Sharon asks from where she sits on the couch, shrill voice not nearly as shrill when it’s quiet.  There’s a quiver in it, too; of their little grouping, she’s been the most hesitant to be here at all, to join them.  Cautious.  Uncertain.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Agatha lies, easy as anything, and easy as anything, they believe her.  She’s always been good at lying, and it’s always been easier when the lie is mixed with truth.  She knows that Wanda wants to talk to her.  She has a fairly good idea what Wanda wants to talk with her about.  But she strictly speaking doesn’t know what Wanda wants.

For all intents and purposes, Wanda could be here just to make sure that Agnes curse is still in place.  More to the point, she could be here for Agnes.  Not for Agatha, who isn’t even supposed to really exist as herself anymore, but for Agnes, the creation she thought she’d left in her place.  During the Hex, Wanda had been absolutely certain to make sure she wasn’t taking advantage of Agnes once she understood that she might be; here, now, in that bedroom upstairs, Wanda knew Agatha wasn’t in control and didn’t seem to care much about it in the slightest.

It’s concerning, to be sure.

“If you don’t know why she’s here,” Todd breaks through her thoughts, “then you don’t know she won’t hurt you.  Won’t hurt us.”  The last is tacked on, hurried as though to cover his bases, because Wanda is clearly too scared to intentionally hurt them.

But Agatha is still a threat, a loose end, a hole in her carefully crafted plot.

And she knows it.

Todd clasps her shoulder gingerly.  “You don’t have to say anything.  Just—”

“Be aware?”  Agatha looks up then with an easy smile.  “You don’t have to worry about me, hon.  I can take care of myself.”

When he steps away, Todd takes Harold with him, leaving Agatha to stare out through the window.  Maybe it would be more party conscious for Agatha to join them – or to join Sharon and pretend as though nothing weird is going on outside – or maybe it would be more comfortable for them if she went and joined Sarah, just as additional back-up, even though Wanda wouldn’t know to see it that way, even though Agatha wouldn’t throw herself onto the pyre just to save her new friends.  But she doesn’t do that, instead stares out as Sarah and Wanda’s conversation seems to end, as Wanda starts to follow Sarah back inside.

Wanda glances up, away from Sarah, and meets Agatha’s eyes.  She blushes when Agatha raises a hand and waggles a few fingers at her, and then she quickly looks away.  If it were anyone else, the lack of subtlety would be cute, but on a witch of Wanda’s scale?

It is nothing more than foolishness.

Good thing that Agatha Harkness knows a thing or two about fools.

#bandit fic #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #mcu #wandavision #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic VI - 2000′s

Chapter Summary: Agatha hides the boys in the basement.

She hides the boys in the basement, and she goes into the room that has been her base of operations for the past several decade-days (it is hard to tell how many days there have actually been in comparison to the much faster pace of the days that Wanda has created for her sitcom episodes, which feel like days but are always actually much shorter, multiple days potentially shoved into one twenty-four hour period), and she glances up where she has carved the two most basic of runes, the first two runes any baby witch learns to craft under the protection of their teacher’s own carving of those two most basic runes, and she sees how large they are, bigger than stoplights, bigger than stop signs, as big as billboards, with absolutely no subtlety because Wanda will not remember them if she tries to be subtle, and she takes a deep breath in.

“Please,” Agatha whispers under her breath, “let this be enough.”

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff Chapter Rating: T Fic Rating: M for dark themes and sexual content

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

Boys, I’ll be fine.  Just go with Agnes.

Agatha tries her best to keep her eyes wholly on Wanda, she does, but she catches it – the flickering in the background, the way the world that Wanda has created is shifting, fragmenting, breaking.  Perhaps if she hadn’t tried to expand the boundaries of her little world during the Halloween special, it might have lasted a little longer, but the broken spells aren’t meant to contain so much, and the threads Wanda used to twine things together are beginning to fray at the ends, the rubber band stretched near to the breaking—

When Agatha spent some time in the western states, as she does on occasion as she travels, she’d noticed the children – teenagers, mostly, but compared to her centuries, they’re children – with these spiffy little bracelets that they called VL bracelets.  Now, she didn’t much hold to their local traditions, but she did ask a few of the children where they’d come from, how they’d made them, and discovered, much to her surprise, that they were taking little plastic circles from inside the tops of plastic bottle caps, cutting around the inside rim, and then stretching them until they were big enough to slip onto their wrists, these tiny little circlets that barely fit over their fingers being stretched so carefully that they could fit over whole hands.  Of course, stretching the plastic in and of itself was hard, but even hard was cutting a near-perfect circle around the inner rim.  Any spot where the plastic was thinner was a breaking point, any spot that was off could snap so much more easily than the thicker spots next to it.

Wanda’s broken spells are full of breaking points, and the cording Agatha made many decade-days ago had at least kept them from overwhelming her and sending her into her own personal freeze again, but in expanding the boundaries of her world, she is stretching those already too thin points so much thinner that reality is trying to reassert itself, previous decades are trying to reassert themselves, and the whole is deteriorating much more rapidly than Agatha had hoped.

Wanda doesn’t need to look at any suspicious mole on Agatha’s back – she already knows quite intimately what her bare back looks like and hopefully knows that there is no mole – but it’s a reminder, small but certain, of what transpired between them, even if the boys can’t see it.

And an indicator, if Wanda will notice it, that—

Who is she kidding?  Wanda doesn’t notice subtleties because she doesn’t use subtleties.  Whatever indicator Agatha is trying to give her, she knows she won’t catch.  Not now, anyway.  She can’t be gentle with Wanda.  She has to be harsh.

Wanda only understands magic through pain.

~

It’s halfway through their sandwiches, while the odd cartoon plays in the background (Agatha has lived through every iteration of cartoon since the invention of the television, and this one – this one is weird), that she catches it happening again.  It isn’t a script; she hasn’t gotten one of those since Wanda sheltered her within her shield, although that’s a result of the shield itself or of Wanda no longer providing a script for her is up for debate; but it’s something similar, the slightest nudging of magic as the cameras turn to her.

(Earlier, she wondered if these fourth wall breaks let her speak directly to Wanda, wondered if these were moments where not just the world but Wanda herself was beginning to fray at the bits, wondered if she would get a moment to even check.  Then the camera turned on her at the house Maximoff, and she caught it – just caught it – that same frozen-eyed stare just out of sight. There are no feeds anymore – so there shouldn’t be cameras – but she’s caught it, in the occasional flicker of the world around them, in the taut of the strings that once were feeds, and gone to check.

This isn’t what you deserve, she’d murmured, brushing fingers along Wanda’s sweaty head as her emerald eyes shifted with no focus, as she shivered in place overwhelmed with spells.  This isn’t what you deserve.)

Magic tugs on her again, and without thinking, Agatha says it, staring directly into the camera, “But you try telling a ten-year-old that his mother is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” and she feels the reverberations, the flickering of something in the magic around her, something that tries to settle, tries to grab tighter.  But holding on tightly to a decaying spell doesn’t fix it.  There is no fixing it.

There’s only damage control…and collateral damage.

Agatha moves to return her pet to his cage and then pauses, places a hand on Billy’s shoulder, and gives him a little squeeze.  “Billy, dear,” she says, licking her dry lips once before continuing, “I’m quiet because I’m like you.”  Her brow furrows.  She kneels down in front of him, looks up at him, meets his wary eyes.  “You, and I, and your mom – we’re all very good at magic.” When he still looks scared, she reaches out, touches his mind, and thinks towards him, That means we’re witches.

Billy’s eyes widen.  Even me? he thinks at her, startled.  I thought only girls could be witches!

Oh, no, dear.  That’s not—  Agatha chuckles, and then everything around them flickers once. Both boys startle, and she reaches out to hold them steady.  “I’m telling you two this now,” she continues, gaze switching from Billy to Tommy and then back again, “because I need your help.  Your mom has been playing with some very strong magic, and it’s starting to hurt her.”

“So we have to stop it!” Tommy says, and Billy nods, clenching one hand into a fist.  “If it’s hurting Mom, then we have to stop it!”

Agatha nods slow.  “You know when you’re playing a game,” she says conspiratorially, leaning forward, voice a hush, “and you pretend to be hurt, but you’re not really hurt?”

Tommy nods eagerly, but Billy hesitates.  His brow furrows, finally, as he nods.

“Okay, good.”  Agatha searches their eyes.  “Let me tell you what I’m going to need you to do to help your mom, okay, kiddos?”

~

Agatha hides the boys in the basement.

She hides the boys in the basement, and she goes into the room that has been her base of operations for the past several decade-days (it is hard to tell how many days there have actually been in comparison to the much faster pace of the days that Wanda has created for her sitcom episodes, which feel like days but are always actually much shorter, multiple days potentially shoved into one twenty-four hour period), and she glances up where she has carved the two most basic of runes, the first two runes any baby witch learns to craft under the protection of their teacher’s own carving of those two most basic runes, and she sees how large they are, bigger than stoplights, bigger than stop signs, as big as billboards, with absolutely no subtlety because Wanda will not remember them if she tries to be subtle, and she takes a deep breath in.

“Please,” Agatha whispers under her breath, “let this be enough.”

~

Agatha directs Wanda into her house, one hand guiding gentle on the small of her back, and then stops just inside the entryway, letting the door click shut behind them.  She sees the spots of anger scarlet on Wanda’s cheeks, the attempt to release the tension by rolling her shoulders back and away, and notes this as the distraction it might be.  Wanda cannot focus on that agent – friend or not.  She has to focus on—

“Hon.”  Agatha takes Wanda’s wrists in her hands and brushes her thumbs over the pulse points found on each.  “Just breathe.  She’s not coming in here.  You’re safe. The boys are safe.  It’s—”

And then it happens again, just like it did before, Wanda’s eyes glazing over, pupils shifting back in forth in a scarlet haze, that glitching of a mind melting down from running too many things at once and not having the sheer energy to keep them all going any longer.

Agatha holds one hand to her forehead.  “Wanda, you have to wake up.”  There are no threads she can pull together or consolidate to help more than she already has. “You can’t stay like this.”  She grips her shoulders, shakes her.  “Wanda, hon.”

Nothing.

Agatha pulls on the threads, tries again to find whatever feed these cameras are directing into, but there’s nothing.  Nothing.  So she reaches directly into Wanda’s mind so that she can see whatever she is seeing—

Her eyes widen.  “Ah.” One corner of her lips curves upward. “You’re quite right, hon.  I don’t just bite children.”  Then she leans forward, parts her lips, and bites down, hard, on the side of Wanda’s neck.

For a moment, nothing happens.  Then Wanda’s heart beats rapidly under her tongue, and Agatha draws away just as Wanda takes in a sharp breath, picking up just where she left out.

“—okay, you’re going to be okay.”

“You bit me,” Wanda says, placing a hand on her neck, pulling it away, and staring at it.  “Just now. We were in your armchair, and you…you bit me.”

Agatha feigns confusion.  She blinks a few times, glances over to her armchair, licks her lips, and then turns back again.  “Wanda, dear, I don’t think that I—”  She pauses, licks her lips again, and then frowns.  “Funny.  It does taste like I just bit someone.”  She crosses her arms.  “Why did I bite you?”

“I don’t know!”  Wanda throws her hands up and breaks into a broken giggling.  “You were talking, and then all of a sudden we were in the chair, and you were kissing me again, and you bit me, and it was….”  She sighs.  “It was really nice, actually.  I didn’t really mind it all that much—”

“Good, good,” Agatha interrupts, a little more hasty than she should be, but her broken bird is shattering her own wings in front of her, and they only have so much time before she’s busted beyond repair, “I will keep that in mind for next time, bite Wanda more because she likes that sort of thing.”  She makes as though to write it down on her palm with an invisible pencil.  Then she raises her brows.  “Do continue.”

Wanda just glares at her.  “I’m serious, Agnes.  Look.”  She steps towards her, tilting her head to one side so that her neck is exposed.  “Do you see teeth marks?  Or a bruise maybe?”

Agatha sighs.  She pretends to examine Wanda’s neck because she knows that’s what Wanda wants, and then her gaze flicks to meet Wanda’s eyes as she places her hands on her hips. “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?”

“Mrs. Robinson,” Wanda mouths before glaring at her again, somehow much more intense this time.  “No, I’m not trying to seduce you,” she hisses.  “I think we had enough of that already, and my boys are—”

“Your boys are just fine.”  Agatha takes a deep breath in to calm herself because that’s only half-true; the boys are as safe as Wanda herself is, which is to say not at all, but they’re safe as far as Wanda’s concerned in this moment.  She reaches over and places a hand, gentle, on Wanda’s shoulder.  “You’re fine.  It’s fine. Everything is fine.”

It’s so much easier to lie when she knows that neither of them will believe it.

“Everything is not fine—”  Wanda clenches her hand into a fist and cuts herself off.  She glances out the nearby window, and Agatha follows her gaze, unable to see anything through the blur of the glass.  Then Wanda turns with a heavy sigh, leans forward, and rests her head on Agatha’s shoulder.  “I’m sorry, Agnes.  I’m sorry. It’s been a day and a half, and I just….”  She sighs again.  “I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” she finally admits.  “I’m so tired, all the time, and….”  Her voice trails off.

Agatha rubs a hand gentle along Wanda’s back, considering the current stakes. If Wanda had admitted this before leaving earlier, before the flickering started to run through the entire world and not just through her own mind, before waking to strings held taut for too long, then maybe…maybe it could have been salvaged.  But not now.  It’s too far gone.  She’ll just—

“If it’s all falling apart, hon, then let it.”  Agatha breathes the words out, hopes that they’re blunt enough that Wanda will listen.  “You were powerful enough to make it the first time, you can just remake it.  Stronger.  Better.”  She kisses the top of Wanda’s head, lingers, then brushes torn strands back and away. “Then you won’t have to worry about it breaking again, and if you do, then you just—”

“Try again,” Wanda finishes for her, voice soft.  “Until I get it right.  Until I get it perfect.”

Agatha nods, slow, and the endless curiosity in her rears its ugly head.  “You can do that, can’t you, doll?  It wouldn’t be too hard.”

Wanda shakes her head against Agatha’s chest.  “I don’t know how I did it the first time, so I don’t know how to do it again.”  She bites her lip, silent for a longer stretch than is comfortable, and then says, finally, “Vision would die again.  And my boys…my boys would die.”

“And then you would bring them back.  Just the same as they are,” Agatha continues, refusing to say that the boys are already a lost cause because that will do no one any good in this exact moment, speaking these words as a comfort for when they are gone.  “But in a better world.”

Wanda steps back, glances up, and meets Agatha’s eyes, searches them.  “Do you…do you want that, Agnes?”

“I just want what’s best for you, hon,” Agatha lies.  But as she pushes forward, her words become truth, “If it’s hurting you to keep all of this going, then you should stop.  Rest.”  She notes the tears in Wanda’s eyes, grows more determined.  “And when you’re ready…try again.”  She cups her cheek and brushes the tears away.  “You could even stay here, with me, so you don’t have to be alone.”

Wanda gazes away from Agatha, glancing over her shoulder, and seems to look for something that she doesn’t see.  Then she nods, and her gaze falls.  “What if I didn’t remake it?” she asks, voice so soft Agatha can barely hear it.  “I can’t keep it up.  I want to – I have to, or my family dies – but it will fall.  It will fall.  It’s all going to fall, and when it does, whenever that is, maybe….”  She hesitates.  Pauses. Sniffs once and rubs her nose with the back of her hand.  “I’m not making any sense.”

“You’re giving up?” Agatha asks, clarifying, needing to hear Wanda say it. “You’re the most powerful young woman I’ve ever met, and you’re giving up?”

Wanda shakes her head.  “No.” Her lips creep into a mirthless half-smile that drops as soon as it appears.  “I’m not giving up.  I’m…. I’m just tired.  And being able to rest….”  She shakes her head again and glances up, meeting Agatha’s eyes.  “If you would let me, I would….”  Her voice trails off, and her gaze drops again.  “Even if I knew how to remake it, I don’t know that I could.  It would…it would hurt too much.”  Her head tilts to one side, and she studies Agatha’s face.  “Does that make any sense, or do I sound crazy?”

Agatha brushes her thumb along the sharp of Wanda’s cheekbone.  That’s her answer, then.  That’s fine.  She can accept that.  Her lips press together, and she gives a little nod.  “No.  That sounds….”  She smiles fondly, sadly.  “That sounds wonderful, angel, if that’s what you want.”  Then she skims her hand gentle along Wanda’s skin to the nape of her neck, crosses the space between them, and kisses her.

It is, perhaps, the gentlest kiss they’ve ever had, made all the more harsher by what Agatha knows she is about to do.

Then Agatha pulls back, lets out a huff of a breath, and forces her smile to return, bright and cheery as she knows Wanda needs.  “My house is your house, dear.  You know that.”  She heads into the house, then pauses.  “Oh, here. Would you like a cup of tea, hon?”

~

After, when all is done, when Wanda is as she needs to be and the runes are in place where they need to be and Agatha lands, crumpled, on the ground with the weight of her necessary betrayal curled like a kitten, purring like magic, just in the center of her chest, she pushes her hair back out of her face, looks up, meets Wanda’s deep green eyes, and murmurs, clear as day, “Good girl.”

Then, as before, she waits.

#bandit fic #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #billy kaplan #tommy shepherd #mcu #wandavision #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic VIII - 2020's (II)

Chapter Summary: Agatha Harkness is a three hundred year old imbecile who is still in love with magic, who doesn't remember a time when she wasn't in love with magic, and that is what makes this next part so hard.

For three months, Agatha Harkness casts no spells, doesn't reach into the threads of magic to subtly twist them to her will, and purges herself of the darkness brought on by the book she no longer holds.

Agatha Harkness cuts herself off from magic to cut herself off from the Darkhold, and she shivers and wraps her arms around herself and sweats and screams into pillows she forces against her mouth to keep them from being heard.

(And even still, magic is with her; even still, she feels its gentle caress along her spine, soothing and calming her; even still, she curls into it and feels its kiss soft on the crown of her head as it finally, finally, finally forgives her.)

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff Chapter Rating: T Fic Rating: M for dark themes and sexual content

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

Agatha Harkness is a three hundred year old imbecile who has been in love with magic since she first felt its gentlest touch.

That’s the problem, isn’t it?

Agatha Harkness is in love with a force of nature who she knows can never love her back.  She’s dedicated herself to the careful study of it, the best ways to brush her fingers along it so that it purrs beneath her touch the same way she purrs under its caress, the intricate craft of runes and incantations – which languages flow best for her in terms of spells (surprisingly, it is not always Latin, although that is her mother tongue where magic is concerned, likely because it was what her own mother knew best), how to take different runes and weave them together for something stronger, the tricky weaving of the two together into something musical that magic will hear—

Agatha Harkness has spent centuries of a life that should have been cut short over three hundred years ago devoted to pursuing the magic she loves nearly to the exclusion of all else; in Cian, she thought she found a kindred spirit, someone who was as devoted to sorcery as she became to magic, and between the two of them, they could have found ways to twist and warp the very fabric of reality to their will, if they’d wanted.  Magic and sorcery intertwined—

It was a beautiful, wondrous thing.

Or…it would have been, if Cian hadn’t been so much more concerned with the sanctity of life and doing what they thought they needed to do to protect the world at large.  It wasn’t as though Agatha hadn’t cared about the rest of the world – she lived there, after all! – but Cian’s pursuit of knowledge burned them long before Agatha’s burned her.

Cian lived with a mark carved into their forehead, and Agatha lived with fingers burned to a crispy black, and—

Agatha Harkness is a three hundred year old imbecile who is still in love with magic, who doesn’t remember a time when she wasn’t in love with magic, and that is what makes this next part so hard.

For three months, Agatha Harkness casts no spells, doesn’t reach into the threads of magic to subtly twist them to her will, and purges herself of the darkness brought on by the book she no longer holds.

That’s the thing about the Darkhold – it yells at her, calls to her, demands her to pay attention to it at any and every moment that she even tries to reach out for magic – it was one thing when it was in her possession; she didn’t have to pay attention to it, but it knew that she was always there within its reach to corrupt and tempt and maim when she was at her weakest; but now that it was gone?  Even as it sinks its claws into fresh meat, it sings its siren song through subtle systems, signaling for its last master, its centuries old owner, to possess it once more.

Agatha Harkness cuts herself off from magic to cut herself off from the Darkhold, and she shivers and wraps her arms around herself and sweats and screams into pillows she forces against her mouth to keep them from being heard.

(And even still, magic is with her; even still, she feels its gentle caress along her spine, soothing and calming her; even still, she curls into it and feels its kiss soft on the crown of her head as it finally, finally, finally forgives her.)

~

The first month – the first day – the first second is unbearable.

The ones that follow aren’t any easier.

The feeling in Agatha’s fingers returns as the black scrubs itself from them: days of that burning sensation you get when you’ve been out in the cold too long and your fingers first begin to thaw slowly creeping up her skin, and where the burning sensation stops, pins and needles, and then finally that sweet relief of nothing after days of both at the same time, mixed in layers, unable to touch anything even if she wanted because her feeling rebels against her, because so much as brushing her fingers against the fabric curled around her aches.

On the worst of those days, she lies on her side in a fetal position, as close to the edge of her bed as she can, arms outstretched far enough that even when she passes out, her fingers won’t drag along the mattress, the sheets, the floor.  Agatha forces herself to drink because at least cups she can press between her palms, but trying to hold utensils that way?  She gives up on eating, thinks maybe she deserves this for ever playing with the book that tortures magic instead of walking alongside it and not delving into what she’d thought was its darkest secrets.  Magic should have been allowed to keep its secrets, and Agatha should never have sought out the Darkhold to learn them.

The Darkhold doesn’t hold secrets, so much as it holds pain.  Pain for the user; pain for magic itself.

And Agatha hasn’t wanted anything to do with it for a long while (and has had no way of removing it from herself without it tempting someone else).  Even divorced from magic as she currently is, she can feel the not-so-subtle shifts as the Scarlet Witch searches that abomination and tests its spells.  Alas.  Alas.

Sarah comes by exactly once during that first month – along with the woman once known as Mrs. Hart, who introduces herself as Mrs. Davis – but Agatha apologizes, sends her away, mumbles something about having the flu.  (Mrs. Davis says she’s never seen anyone with the flu near as bad as Agatha has it, and as they walk away, Sarah suggests that maybe Agatha has some sort of witch’s flu, which isn’t quite wrong.  More like witch’s lung cancer, being torn out of her one molecule at a time.)

So when the first month is through, when Agatha’s fingers feel and act like fingers again, when she’s given herself time to adjust and recover and breathe, when she is still keeping herself cut off from magic, Agatha invites the two of them over for lamb stew – along with Ralph, who noticed the lamb roasting on the spit outside before she’d cut it up for the stew and invited himself over.  Something about how she owed him.

Agatha Harkness owes no one, but if she’s going to settle in Westview, if she’s going to cut herself off from magic and try to actually befriend people while she does, then she won’t tell him no.

She will, however, slap his fingers away when he reaches for a still red hot iron pot, when he attempts to dip his unclean fingers into the broth for a taste.

“Ow!”  Ralph pulls his hand back, shakes it a few times, and then sticks his fingers in his mouth.  “You didn’t have to do that.”

Agatha smirks as she replaces the lid atop her pot.  “What did you say, dear?  You’re a little muffled.”

Ralph scowls at her, but he doesn’t try to say anything else, just leaves his fingers in his mouth and hunches over as he stalks into the living room.  He slouches onto the couch like a child sucking his thumb and pouts just as the doorbell rings.  Then he takes his fingers from his lips just long enough to ask, “You gonna get that?”

“Don’t worry that pretty little head of yours, doll.”  Agatha waves a hand at him nonchalantly.  “You don’t have to pretend to be my husband anymore.”

“Did I…ever do that?” Ralph asks, one brow raising before he sticks his sore fingers back in his mouth again.

Agatha ignores him as she goes to open the door.  Her eyes widen when she sees Sarah standing there – not because she’s surprised to see the woman herself, but because she is surprised to see the child – the little girl – in front of her.  “Um.”

Sarah squeezes the girl’s shoulders.  “This is Emily,” she says, eyes never leaving the girl in question.  “My daughter.”  It is only then that her eyes flick back up to meet Agatha’s – hardening in as much of a threat as the woman could ever give to the witch across from her – and then return back to the girl.  “She wanted to meet you.”

But Emily doesn’t look up at Agatha at all.  Instead, she stares down at her feet, running fingers through her straight brown hair, pulling some of it over and chewing on it.  She swallows hard.  “Hello.”

Agatha crouches down in front of her.  “Hiya, hon,” she says.  “I’m Agnes.”

“Mama says that you’re a witch,” Emily says before Agatha can say anything else.  She finally looks up and meets Agatha’s eyes with her own large brown ones.  “Does that mean you’re going to hurt us like the other scary witch lady did?”

“Oh, no, no, no, hon.”  Agatha reaches out as though to place both hands on Emily’s cheeks and stops herself before she does, instead taking Emily’s tiny hands in her own and giving them a little squeeze, rubbing her thumbs along the backs of them.  “Wanda never meant to—”  She stops herself when she sees Emily tense at Wanda’s name, and a soft, soft smile crosses her lips.  “No, hon,” she repeats.  “I’m not going to hurt you.”  She brushes a hand through Emily’s hair and tucks it back behind one ear.  “But I can tell you stories, if you want.  About other witches.  About magic.”  She hesitates, then continues.  “The good kind of magic.”

Emily’s eyes grow even wider.  “You mean like in fairytales?  With Snow White and the Little Mermaid?”

Agatha blinks twice.  “If I remember right, those both had bad witches in them.”  Her brows furrow.  “Most fairytales have bad magic.”

“Except for Peter Pan!” Emily exclaims suddenly, grinning.  “Tinker Bell has the best magic of all!  She can help you fly!”

And Tinker Bell is a fairy, not a witch, Agatha thinks but doesn’t say.  “I know a lot of better stories, dear,” she says instead.  “Stories about good witches and good magic, real stories, with real people in them.”

Emily’s brow furrows.  “You…you mean like Santa?” she asks finally.  “I already know about him.  And Mrs. Claus.  And the elves.”  She crosses her arms and meets Agatha’s eyes.  “There’s not any other good ones.”

“Agnes here is a good witch,” Sarah says, placing her hands on her daughter’s shoulders again, “so I’m sure there must be others, too.”

Internally, Agatha flinches at the comment – at the idea that she could be a good witch.  At the idea that she could be considered good at all.  Not after what she’d done to her coven, to her mother.  Not after what she’d used the Darkhold to do to magic itself. She isn’t good.  Not by a long shot.

And surely, if Sarah knew that, she wouldn’t use that word to describe her.

But Agatha doesn’t say that, doesn’t let that flinch show across her face, instead offers an easy smile to the child in front of her and says, “Why don’t you come inside, dear?  We’re just waiting on the others to show up.”  She meets Emily’s dark chocolate eyes again as she stands, props her hands on her waist.  “And if you want to ask me about anything—”

“How did you beat her?” Emily asks, before Agatha can even finish the sentence, her voice all a hush.  “How did you get the scary witch lady to leave?”

Again, before Agatha can say anything, Sarah gives a little laugh.  “Oh, dear, Emily, we don’t ask those kinds of questions.”  Her eyes meet Agatha’s and then quickly flinch away.  (Agatha wonders, briefly, if Sarah sees the flicker of panic that flashes through her eyes and hopes, for her own sake, that she didn’t.)  She pats her daughter’s back.  “Let’s go inside.”

Agatha scoots to one side, holding the door open as Sarah and her daughter walk inside, and as she shuts the door and follows them inside, she gives Ralph a sharp look.  His eyes widen, and she instantly regrets that she currently is choosing to live without reaching out with her own magic, because what she wants to do so much right now is to reach into his mind and give him a strict warning to Not Do Anything.  But for now, she can’t – won’t – do that.  Even with the Darkhold’s threads being finally forced out of her pores, she…doesn’t want to reach out again.

Magic isn’t mad at her.  It isn’t like that.  If it were mad at her, it wouldn’t have brought her here, wouldn’t have introduced her to the woman was able to reach for it in ways that Agatha can barely even imagine, the woman who was so full of magic that it poured out of her wherever they touched.

And it isn’t as though Agatha is mad at magic either.  That’s not the word she would use, anyway.  She’s not sure she could put a word on it.  She can, of course, still be in love with magic, still crave it, while living this way, but maybe, for once, she wants to see what it would be like to live just like everyone else.

Especially since that was how Wanda cursed her.

Bu when Ralph catches sight of the child, his lips spread into a grin.  “Emily!”  He pats the seat next to him.  “I haven’t seen you since—”  He cuts himself off, and his head tilts to one side, smile not flickering away.  “You’ve grown so much in the past few years.  I remember when you were this small.”  He holds his hands out only so far away from each other as Emily clambers onto the seat next to him, and then he ruffles her hair while she giggles.

That…is certainly not what Agatha was expecting.

Sarah notices her staring and bumps gently against her.  “We were good friends, the five of us, before the Snap.”  She nods to Ralph.  “He and I both disappeared from the same party and reappeared there five years later.  Confused.  Alone.  Quite horrible, really.”

Agatha does some quick mental math while she listens, and then her eyes narrow.  “Five of you?”

“Ralph’s daughter.  Christina.  Got taken by her mom’s side of the family when he disappeared, and they…haven’t been letting him see her.”  Sarah’s head tilts ever so slightly.  “She was about Billy and Tommy’s age, so she’d be a teenager now.  She might not want anything to do with him, but he won’t ever know that if they keep her away from him.”  She sighs, shrugs.  “I was lucky Harold stayed here in Westview and didn’t move away somewhere else.  A lot of people…weren’t.”

As Sarah speaks, Agatha gives Ralph a second look, notes how easily he talks with Emily – now nearly the same age his own daughter was when he disappeared, soon to enter the years that he’d lost – and her teeth grit together.  Ralph glances up just enough to catch her staring at him, catch the firm set of her jaw, and ignore what that might have meant for him.  In this case, it means nothing, and Agatha fights the urge to tuck her fingers into magic and pull on it to force his daughter to return here, to force the people keeping her from him to change their minds.  She knows nothing about their situation other than what she has been told.  More importantly, she isn’t using magic right now…and this isn’t her fight.

That’s another thing – using magic to fix your relational problems doesn’t actually fix the problem.  It only covers them over with a veil, forces people to act as you want, which, in the end, only causes more problems.

Something Wanda should know now – or would learn in the future, if she ever returned. Not that Agatha is as chained as she believes.

The comforting thing would be to say It wasn’t his fault or There wasn’t anything anyone could have done, but the truth of the matter is that it isn’t true.  A lot of people could have done a lot of things differently.  Agatha could have done things differently.  But that has never been the type of person she is.  Agatha focuses on survival first and foremost, and while she couldn’t have decided whether she disappeared in the Snap, she trusted enough in the magic she loved to protect her.  Not from that, necessarily, but from things like it.

And it had.  Even if she would never be its favorite.

Sarah turns to Agatha, then, and asks, as though she’s never considered it before, and maybe she never has, “Agnes, what happened to you?  During the Snap?”

Agatha listens for the accusation – If you protected us from the witch, if you freed us from the witch, surely you could have prevented this – but she doesn’t hear it.  Instinctively, she curls one finger but stops before she can go any farther, no matter how much she wants to hear what the young woman is thinking, no matter how much she wants that context.  Instead, she simply says, voice soft, “I disappeared.”

Which is the truth, even if it doesn’t mean what Sarah will take it for.

(For a moment, she remembers – remembers the way the woman across from her disintegrated into nothing, not even ash, just these dirt-colored fragments of nothing; remembers stumbling backward, shoving the metal chair back until it lands with a clang, wide eyes staring as more and more of the people around her disappear; remembers running backwards, afraid that it was something about where they were, something that would come after her next; remembers that no matter where she ran, everywhere, everywhere, people disappearing while she stayed solid.

She doesn’t like the next memory, although she doesn’t regret hiding herself away in that cabin in the middle of nowhere, far away from anyone and everyone who might expect a witch such as herself to help, not that anyone would know to ask.

Except for Wong.  Except for the brand spanking new Sorcerer Supreme, taking over from the arrogant prick who’d taken over from Cian.  Wong, who knew her well enough to ask, who told her that Cian would have helped people.

Of course, Cian would have helped people.  Cian always helped people.  Cian never stopped to ask whether or not people wanted to be helped.  (Neither did Agatha.  For exactly the opposite reason.))

Sarah takes a sharp breath in, but she doesn’t clench her teeth, doesn’t let her eyes widen, only lets the words come as they do, and accepts them for what she wants them to be.  She places a hand on Agatha’s shoulder and squeezes gently.  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Agatha gives a little nod.  “Me, too, hon.  Me, too.”

~

Dinner is simple by Agatha’s standards.  For all that she seems like the sort of person who shouldn’t be able to cook, she was a product of her times – a girl raised in Puritan New England to be able to cook and clean and maintain a family in the same way that every other young woman of her time was raised to do.  It hadn’t mattered that she or her sisters – or her mother – were witches or that they could use magic to do these for them if they so desired; there were things they needed to hide from the civilians who would have turned torches and pitchforks on them in the blink of an eye if they’d known otherwise.  Besides, you try being a merry little not-housewife in the fifties when you were expected to throw house parties and not know how to cook or have a recipe ready to hand to your actually merry little housewife neighbor so that she could try and reproduce it to get one over her mother-in-law.

Agatha Harkness knows how to cook.

Better than Little Miss Maximoff does, anyway.  Not that she’s around to compare.

Ralph mops his stew up with her own homemade bread as Mrs. Davis reaches across, taps Agatha’s shoulder, and says, “Agnes, I had no idea.  You simply must give me the recipe for this bread.  I’ve been trying to make something like this for ages, and I’ve just never been able to get it right!”

“I’ll get it to you,” Agatha hums in response, although she’s technically lying.  She’ll get her a recipe that will do well enough, but this particular one hasn’t ever been written down and she doesn’t intend to do that now.

Mrs. Davis smiles at her.  “Do you want me to rinse this off?” she asks, raising her now empty plate.  “Or do you want me to just leave it in the sink?”

“Sink’s fine, hon.”  Agatha offers her a smile in return and gives a little nod of her head as Mrs. Davis takes not just her own plate but also the empty plates of the others around her, including taking Ralph’s while he has his fingers in his mouth again.  (He tries to hold onto his plate, just like a child, much to the amusement of Emily, who sits next to him, and Mrs. Davis gives him a little look before it fades at Emily’s grin.)

Emily asks after dessert, bright eyes wide and innocent, and Agatha settles her down with a plate of bread pudding before she, Mrs. Davis, and Sarah Proctor move into the living room.  She can sense that there’s more the women want to ask her, noticed the way their eyes had occasionally averted from hers (and just as occasionally met with each other’s across the table), and when they’re set with their glasses of wine, Agatha says, “So, girls, what are you here for?”

Mrs. Davis’s eyes widen, and she glances over to Sarah, suddenly anxious.  “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Are you in contact with her?” Sarah asks suddenly, cutting Mrs. Davis off and leaning forward until her arms rest on her knees.  “With Wanda.  Can you….”  Her voice trails off, and she takes a breath in before forcing herself forward.  “Can you get in contact with her, Agnes?”

Agatha smiles.  She crosses one leg over the other, leans back into her high-backed chair, and begins to run a finger around the lip of her wine glass.  A high-pitched note whines from the glass, not quite so painful as it could be.  She glances at the two women to see their reactions; Mrs. Davis flinches at the sound, but Sarah continues to stare straight ahead, not at Agatha herself, but at her own hands.  “I would think, after everything, that you wouldn’t want anything to do with her, dear.”  She removes her finger from her glass, stopping the whine.  “Am I wrong?”  She waits to see their reactions.

One of them does not surprise her.

Mrs. Davis deflates.  She doesn’t hunch over, doesn’t shift, just fades.  Not relaxes, although it looks the same, but….  She glances over to Sarah, then back down to her hands, where she keeps them clasped in her lap.

Sarah, on the other hand, doesn’t change at all.  If anything, her gaze hardens as she looks up and finally meets Agatha’s.  “She’s in pain,” she says, voice as hard as her gaze, “and we want her to know—”  She stops, reaches over, and takes Mrs. Davis’s hand.  Mrs. Davis looks up and gives her a little nod.  Then Sarah continues, “We don’t hold any of it against her.”

Oh? Agatha thinks but does not say as she carefully examines the two women sitting in front of her.  Mrs. Davis looks afraid, nervous, anxious, and although she is clearly the older of the two, she quickly defers to Sarah, who looks up at Agatha with an intensity that….  Well, it certainly can be matched.  Agatha has lived for over three centuries; she has plenty of other intense gazes to which she can compare it, and Sarah Proctor has nothing on quite a few of them (Wanda’s notwithstanding).  But it’s cute that she tries.

“I’m glad you’ve told me that, hon,” Agatha says with the barest hint of a smile, “but unfortunately for all of us, I have no contact with Ms. Maximoff.”

Mrs. Davis lets out a sigh of immense relief, but Sarah just gives another nod of understanding.  “I remember the two of you were quite close,” she says slow.  “Is that not the case anymore?”

It’s needling, and Agatha appreciates the attempt, but she’s had these sort of angled questions from people with far greater skill than Sarah Proctor.  “I remember a lot of things happening in the Hex,” she replies, that hint of a smile not dropping from her lips.  “I believe I was not the only one close with Ms. Maximoff.”

Sarah’s face flushes a bright, frustrated red.  “I suppose you’re right.  We were, all of us, under her thrall.”

It isn’t true, but Agatha doesn’t take the time to correct her.  Instead, she pops her knuckles and presses her hands into her lap.  “Is that all, dear?”

Sarah opens her mouth as though to say something more, but this time, Mrs. Davis places a hand over hers.  She offers Agatha a smile of her own.  “I don’t think I need to hear anything else,” she says, standing and looking down at Sarah.  “We’re sorry for the affront on your time.”

Agatha keeps a steady gaze on Sarah, who glances up at Mrs. Davis, clearly flustered.  Then she, too, stands and gives Agatha a little bow.  “I have nothing else,” she says, choosing her words carefully.  “For now.”  And yet, as they pass back to the living room, she pauses.  “Wanda expects you to be someone else,” she says, her voice a hush.  “I thought maybe, if she believed you were cursed, then….”  Her voice trails off, and she gives a little shake of her head.  “What would she do to you?” she asks finally, glancing up and meeting Agatha’s eyes, searching them.  “If she found out you weren’t….”  Her lips press together, and she wets them before asking again, “What would she do?”

It would be easy to lie.  It would be even easier to dip her fingers into magic as the slightest thrill of fear crept up her spine.  It would be oh so easy to fall into bad habits – and it isn’t as though Agatha owes anything to the young woman across from her.  No, she doesn’t owe Sarah Proctor anything at all.

And yet, Agatha finds herself speaking a gentle, nonspecific truth: “I don’t know, hon.”  She bends forward with a conspiratorial look in her eye.  “Let’s hope that she doesn’t find out.”

~

It isn’t as though there aren’t other dinners.  Oddly enough, there are: Sarah invites her over again, now that Agatha appears to be over her witch’s flu, and even Mrs. Davis does, though it isn’t quite as comfortable that first time as dinner with Sarah is.  Agatha comes to find that certain aspects of Dottie’s personality must have been taken directly from Sarah’s, albeit changed to provide more of an antagonist for Wanda’s shenanigans.  Sarah isn’t petty by any means, but she does tend to be the head when it comes to organizing parties or bar stops or bowling for the little group they slowly gather.

At first, Agatha doesn’t see much that connects the group of them, but she notices it eventually – that somehow she has been included within the few people of Westview who don’t hold Wanda’s crimes against her.  Of course, she could have gone either way; it isn’t as though she holds sides here.  It’s just that Sarah got to her first…and that the people who hate Wanda are equally terrified of her and give her a wide berth, despite having reason to believe that she is just as cursed as they once were.  Then again, a good chunk of them move out of Westview entirely, too plagued by what happened to be able to stay there any longer, and eventually, it’s primarily the group she’s found herself part of and the newcomers who aren’t afraid of moving to a once cursed town.

What surprises Agatha most of all is the day Sarah calls her, frantic, because Ralph had something come up and can’t keep an eye on Emily like he normally does.

“You want me to babysit for you, hon?” Agatha clarifies as she cradles the phone between her ear and her shoulder, returning to her pot and giving it another stir.  “You sure you know what you’re asking?”

“It’s fine.  It’ll be fine.  You’re not going to hurt her.  I trust you.”

Agatha doesn’t say anything about the last time she babysat any children in Westview, doesn’t think bringing up Billy and Tommy and torturing Wanda would be a particularly good idea right now.  The thing is that as surprised as she is that Sarah asks, she’s more surprised that she agrees and even more surprised that what Emily wants more than anything is a story – any story – about good witches.

Most surprising of all is when Sarah calls her a few days later and says, finally, “I think I have a job for you,” and, when Agatha tries to back out, counters with, “Even witches need jobs, Agnes.”

Which, technically speaking, would be very, very wrong if Agatha wasn’t still trying not to reach out for the magic she so loved.

It’s still wrong, as far as Agatha is concerned.  She’s over three hundred years old.  She has plenty of money.

But Agnes wouldn’t know that.

Agatha finds herself teaching at the elementary school, taking over a teaching position from a teacher who had fled shortly after the Hex fell and which Westview Elementary had found great trouble in filling.  At first, she’s nothing more than a sub, a temporary teacher put into place until they find someone better, but then, well, there’s no one better.  She falls in love with the kids, begins teaching them Latin, chuckles as she hears them yell death and murder at each other during recess.

Being normal – being magicless – it isn’t all bad.  In fact, so much of it is good.

And yet.

Three months pass, and Agatha settles into Agnes’s normal life in Westview, and her fingers heal, and she heals, and one day, when she can stand it no longer, she reaches out for magic, tucks her fingers into the still present threads of it, and curls up in its warm embrace, finding that it has never really left her.  She takes a deep breath of magic in, and she settles, and she warms, and she lets a deep breath of magic out, and she can’t stop herself when she cries.

For the first time in a very, very long time, Agatha feels good.

~

Three days later, Agatha feels the ripples through the magic she has finally tuned back into, that loud impulsive groaning of a witch who knows nothing about being subtle and probably has no desire to learn.  She’s halfway through dressing for a party of Sarah’s, but she changes the design, shifts to something she knows Wanda will recognize, and when the littlest witch shows up on her doorstep slackjawed at her decision, Agatha scoops her into her arms the way Agnes would have, rests her head on her shoulder, and says, not quite sure if she’s lying, “I missed you.”

When Wanda buries her head into the curve of her neck and echoes her words, she can feel that, too – the uncertain, quaking truth of it.

Agatha takes a deep breath of the magic that encompasses Wanda and steps back with the barest hint of a smile.  She can almost taste it, can almost see it, the deeply scarlet sheen as it makes its way through and around her, and there’s a pain in that, too.  But that’s not why magic brings them together.  Not to cause her pain, but because there is no other witch who cares enough about it to help someone like Wanda without ulterior motives.

…not that Agatha is without ulterior motives.

She takes Wanda’s hands in her own with a bright smile, notes the way Wanda flinches, and squeezes them gently.  “I’m going to a party,” she says.  “Why don’t you come with me?”

#bandit fic #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #mcu #wandavision #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic III - 1980′s

Chapter Summary: “Agnes.”

The spell again, pressing, pressing, pressing.

Wanda pleads, and Agatha doesn’t have the strength to resist any longer.

Agnes surges forward, Agnes captures Wanda’s lips with hers, and Wanda melts.

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff Chapter Rating: M for dark themes. Fic Rating: M for dark themes and upcoming sexual content. TW: Mental coercion; dubious consent/non-con (no sex).

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

Agatha rouses with the dawn.

Of course, it is impossible to see the sunlight filtering through windows in the dank dark of the basement, though the thick vines turned roots still stretching out into Westview, still absorbing the minutest of pulses from the Hex itself and transferring, channeling that magic into Agatha’s own. It doesn’t fuel her, unfortunately, but it does help maintain the spells she set throughout the house she currently calls her own, helps protect her mind by fortifying the barrier she holds – thick, but flexible – against the other witch’s unwitting attempts at intrusion.

    Are they unwitting?

Agatha stretches, her body – her back – sore from the cold hard basement floor set beneath her feather soft mattress, conjured in an errant moment of weakness without thought to how she would wake. She unclenches her arms from the even softer pillow she’s wrapped herself around, then stops, holds it closer, burying her head into the top of it with a deep sigh.  Instinctively, she reaches out, lets her mind brush against magic in the purest form it can, the same as a needing child curls into its mother’s breast, and imagines she can feel it warm as a person, brushing the back of its hand comfortingly along her cheek.  Then it presses a kiss to her forehead in as gentle a manner as it can – magic recognizes those who love it, even if it does not truly love them back, only plays pretend, just as Agatha pretends that it is touching her when certainly it is doing no such thing – and Agatha tears herself away from its addicting presence, draws herself up into a sitting position with the pillow dropped to the mattress next to her, and drags a hand through her frazzled hair, shifting it into something much more befitting this new decade, all frizz and crinkles and tight spirals pushed back with a headband made of much softer fabric than truly accurate for the time period.

This does not matter, so long as it looks the part.  It isn’t like Wanda will notice, unless she runs her fingers across it, and though Agatha still feels compelled to kiss the other woman, she doubts that this new, young mother will find much appeal in her.  At least, not until she needs a worthy distraction from the encroaching miseries of her current home life.  It isn’t as though Agatha doesn’t remember other women with a much heartier countenance than Wanda drowning under her allure in their weaker moments.  The only question is whether seduction tactics will help her learn what she wants to learn; if so, Agatha will use them, but in all honesty, they may just be….

Well.

She steps from her basement sanctuary, reaches one finger out to grip the threads of the spell Wanda has woven and slowly unravels and thinks to herself – If Wanda didn’t know about her twins, what else doesn’t she know?

The twins’ yowling stings the moment Agatha starts up the stairs out of her cellar, and while she notes Wanda’s palpable discomfort from here (hears it in the show’s broadcast, feels it propelling her forward as the script indicates she wants – needs – someone to help her who knows what they are doing), she hesitates.  The last time she’d entered the Maximoff residence, Wanda kissed her.

The last time she’d left the Maximoff residence, Agatha’d wanted to kiss her back.

Agatha shakes that off.  Just a remnant of Maximoff’s own magic trying to exert itself over Agatha’s will.  She doesn’t actually want to kiss Wanda again.  Certainly not.  What she wants is to figure out what, exactly, the young witch is doing.  How she did it.

So that she can replicate it.

~

Agatha Harkness is over three hundred years old.  You would expect that she has learned the fine art of multitasking – how to keep her mind fully focused on multiple things at the same time – and yet, she has not.  She cannot pay attention to the conversation she has set Wanda to having with her husband and pay full attention to the twins in front of her at the same time, and so she only catches hints of their discussion, angry and hushed, while she focuses more completely on the babies.  While Wanda is distracted, she sprays them with lavender – and when Wanda notices, she comes up with some sort of lie that Wanda will believe because it comes from a woman who should be entirely under her control – and then scans them as the drops of barely tinted purple land on them, sink into their skin, and disappear.  One of her brows raises, and she reaches out for the spirals of magic constructing the babies in front of her, now tainted with that same soft color.

Then, with the glimmer of a smile, Agatha stares down at the children, gives them each a wink (ignoring the pang in her heart as she focuses on them, on those cheerful faces that smile back up at her, mimic her – it isn’t fair), and then snaps one single thread in all of the strands Wanda has wrapped around her littlest finger.  She glances to Wanda as she moves; Wanda doesn’t even notice.

Good.

Then she turns away from them, drawing Wanda’s attention as well – liquor can be a good way to get children to sleep, and while most people in the modern era would consider that shameful, in a sitcom in the eighties?  It would be a joke if she ever needed to get that far.  In truth, it is a lie and always has been.  Agatha’s heart aches from looking at twin boys that aren’t her own and yet look so much like them; she needs them to hurry and grow up so they look more like themselves, and less like Nathaniel, less like Nicholas, less like—

Agatha toasts to the silence first, to the boys who grow just enough to clamber out of their cradles where she left them, to the one who meets her eyes with a returning wink before they age themselves older than her boys had ever been.  That’s easier.  It still burns the same as the liquor poured down her throat, but it’s easier.

It’s only as Wanda stands still, letting everything else move about her – like Vision, leaving for work – that Agatha considers something else might be wrong.  The kids distracted them from their fight over Agatha, which was well enough, and Vision’s gaze drifts from his wife to Agatha as she hustles the children outside to play.  “I’ll take care of her, old chum,” she says with a bright smile, suspecting that Wanda can’t hear a thing she’s saying, frozen in the overwhelming draw of everything she’s doing.  Even when Agatha stands pointblank in front of her, one hand lifted to her forehead in the way a mother might to check their child’s temperature – checking not temperature but general mental state with a quick gesture of a spell.  “Hey, hot stuff.  What’s going on in that naughty little head of yours?”

Wanda’s mind is a computer running too many programs at once, glitching and freezing just before a meltdown, eyes glazed over, pupils shifting this way and that in a scarlet haze.

“You need to rest, my dear,” Agatha mumbles under her breath.  She settles her fingers into more threads of the magic cast about the Hex, and while she cannot change the spell in its entirety, she can rearrange things.  She takes strings and binds them together into thick cords, braids those cords together into ropes – snaps a few strings that are unneeded – compiling and scanning and, finally, with a little huff of a breath – steps back.

Give her a moment.  She’ll come back on line.

It’s as Agatha lifts her fake Jazzercise bag back to her shoulder that Wanda speaks – “Where’d everyone go  Wait. Where are you going?” – as though nothing had changed at all.

There’s no way of knowing what Wanda thinks just happened because the show feed shows absolutely nothing.  If anything, Agatha expects this moment to be filler; when she’s back in her stolen house, she can tug on the threads of magic to scan through the hacked feed, assuming these scenes are archived somewhere she can access.  (Wanda is not subtle; Agatha will find whatever she needs.)

Agatha prattles easy – Jazzercise, take advantage of your free time – and throws in a flirtatious pet name just to sweeten things, just because she knows – no matter how much Wanda might deny it (consciously or otherwise) – that she likes it.

Then the full force of Wanda��s desperate need sinks its claws into her.

Agatha barely has time to reinforce the spells protecting her mind before the other witch’s lips find her own.  She scrambles to resist the magic forced onto her, the script rewriting that Wanda directs into her mind as they kiss, but even with the wards to protect her mind, to keep her safe, to keep her separate, that desire – loud as anything – presses her forward.  Not that…not that she doesn’t like kissing Wanda; she does, although she can’t tell if that’s because she really does like kissing the younger witch or if that’s just her living script, just the magic Wanda instinctively casts on her to do her bidding regardless of whether that’s what Agatha wants or not.

It takes an eternity – a few seconds, in reality, but an eternity in practice – before Agatha forces herself to break away.  She raises her brows, meets Wanda’s eyes, searches them for any telltale signs of scarlet deep within them but finds nothing.  “It’s the hormones, isn’t it?” she asks, voice wary and uncertain as she reaches out to tug on lines of magic, to reinforce them again, to try and separate herself from who it is Wanda wants her to be, to try and tell the difference.  “When I was pregnant—”

But Wanda doesn’t give her enough time to even finish that sentence before she smothers her lips with her own once more.  She places a hand on the small of Agatha’s waist – where her hands have always been drawn to, where Agatha had encouraged them to touch – and tugs her forward before slipping beneath her skirt and cupping her ass.

Without thinking, Agatha kisses her back, pushes a hand through the other witch’s waves of hair, bites her lower lip until she hears the slightest note of encouragement—

Stop.  This is not what you—

Agatha breaks away, forces herself to take a deep breath, head pounding with too many things going on at once, with too much magic being forced on her, too much magic being used as a wall, heart beating like a train racing along tracks, like she’s standing right in front of it just about to be hit, and she says, near breathless, “Are you….”  She swallows, forces the words through, because maybe this will convince Wanda to actually think about what she is doing, realize that forcing this sort of thing is wrong.  “Are you sure this is what you want, hon?”  She searches Wanda’s eyes again, looking for the hint of something warm and compassionate beneath all those layers of need. “Because if Vis sees—”

“He won’t.”

She casts the spell with those words – Vis can’t come back, can’t see even if he wanted – and she breaks through the thickest of Agatha’s barriers in the same breath.

The script sets.

“He won’t,” Wanda repeats, meeting Agnes’s eyes, strengthening the spell with every syllable.  “Trust me.”

Agnes nods – Agatha yells within her, banging hands against a thin glass cage – but she’s Agnes, too; she’s both – and when she moves closer, brushing her nose against Wanda’s, gaze lowering to rest on her lips, her own desire rages strong within her, a desperate need nearly as loud as the other witch’s own. “This is what you want?” she struggles to say, trying to rein herself back in and failing.  “You won’t—”

“Agnes.”

The spell again, pressing, pressing, pressing.

Wanda pleads, and Agatha doesn’t have the strength to resist any longer.

Agnes surges forward, Agnes captures Wanda’s lips with hers, and Wanda melts.

~

I want you.

That singular thought throbs through Agatha’s mind.

No.  Not singular.

I want you.  You want me.  You want this.  I want you.

Magic, thrumming through her mind, under her skin, beating with her heart, flooding through her veins.  Fingertips skimming magic along her skin, cool as a fall breeze on a hot summer day, and she curves into it because she has always loved magic, always been in love with magic.

It betrays her now.

There are two minds in Agatha Harkness – the one succumbing to Wanda’s spell (intentional or not) and the one, much smaller, still trying desperately to resist.  She didn’t want this.  Doesn’t want this.  A part of her does – although whether that is wholly the new spell or some lingering after-effects of the last time Wanda cast her magic just for a tempting taste or something else entirely, Agatha cannot be sure – but even the part that she won’t deny does want Wanda doesn’t want it like this.

Doesn’t want it when she isn’t completely in control of herself, when magic rips tidal waves through her like waves of panicked dread again and again – doesn’t matter that it’s desire this time instead of panic, doesn’t matter that the sensation is oddly pleasurable – matters only that she is not choosing this in her right mind.

Some part of her, buried far, far in the back of her, screams and screams and screams, but even its resistance shrinks in the weight of the other witch’s magic casting touch.

I want you.

It isn’t that she wants to say no, it’s that she doesn’t want to say yes, but her lips are caught and torn and her body moves in ways that she wants but does not want, and everything feels wrong and everything feels right.

The Westview citizens, for all their lack of magic and protection, for all of their torture, are not laid bare like this.  Wanda didn’t fall for one of her puppets; she fell for the singular active human presence in the entire Hex and then forced her magic onto her as though she could make her a puppet, if she wanted.

It’s hard to resist – she tries – but her entire body thrums with—

I want you.

Except that she doesn’t.

Agatha might have wanted to kiss Wanda again, but she doesn’t want Wanda removing her clothes, she doesn’t want to be removing Wanda’s (not right now, anyway), and she doesn’t want to situate Wanda back against the couch just because her magic is forcing her to—

Wanda’s magic forces Agatha to want her, but Wanda doesn’t want her. She just wants.  Aimlessly. And Agatha – or Agnes, as far as Wanda is concerned – is simply the first person left alone with her long enough for her to do something about it. The first person she’s been left alone with that she wants to do something with.

It isn’t even about Agnes.

(At least, Wanda tells herself that.)

It is about being so horny Wanda would go to town on a hot dog if she’d been given the opportunity.

And here she has the opportunity with someone who hadn’t minded kissing her however many decade-days ago, and she is taking advantage.

Agatha doesn’t want to melt.  Agatha tries not to melt.  But Agnes melts, tugs not on Agatha’s memories or skill but on the script Wanda provides for her, on the skills that Wanda either expects Agnes to have or simply wants her to have because Wanda is a woman who, at least subconsciously, knows exactly what she wants someone to do to her and will easily and eagerly direct Agnes to doing it.

Wanda tastes good, but there’s no way of telling if Agatha actually thinks that or if Wanda expects Agnes to think that.

There are some thoughts where Agatha can’t tell if it’s her thought or Wanda thinking for her.

The vast majority of her does not care.

I WANT YOU.

“Enough.”

Agatha pauses.  She stills. Her eyes don’t feel quite focused, she doesn’t feel quite herself, like the stomach flu but not an entirely negative experience, like being sick, only not physically sick.  Some other kind of sick.  A soft, fuzzy disconnect.  She blinks twice, forces herself to stare into Wanda’s eyes, to search them for that glimmer of scarlet that says she’s casting some sort of spell.  Then she licks her lips, mouth suddenly dry, and says, “This is…what you want.”

For a moment, Wanda looks back at her.  She nods slow and leans up to capture Agatha’s lips with her own again; Agatha can’t stop the soft whine of pleasure when Wanda tugs on her bottom lip, and she wants to lean down to continue until Wanda says, clear, “I don’t know that it’s what you want.”

What does…what does she want?

Agatha’s brow furrows with confusion.  “I….”  She cups Wanda’s face, brushes her thumb along the younger witch’s sharp cheekbone, lets her nail catch on Wanda’s soft skin as a smile plays about her lips.  “I want what you want.”

I…want…you?

Fuzzy confusion.

I want you.

Enough.

Agnes follows the script, but the lines are slightly off.

Agatha regains herself.  When Wanda’s hand skims along her neck, when she kisses just next to her lips, Agatha shivers, but her body doesn’t quite respond.  As Wanda moves away from her, she tenses and untenses her fingers, tucks them around the strands of magic ever-present around her, and takes a deep, shuddering breath in, eyes pricking with tears.  When the waves come this time, it isn’t pleasure but panic, and despite what just happened, when she crumples, she does so against the witch who decided to change her mind.

“Is it me?” Agatha murmurs, asking it not of Wanda but of the magic she breathes in, the magic that surrounds her, the magic that even now curls comfortingly around her ankles, brushes against her wrists – only now it feels less like a familiar, purring kitten and more like shackles rubbing against her skin. “Did I do something wrong?”  She runs through her spells, runs through her studies, runs through centuries’ worth of searching out magic in a matter of seconds.  Her eyes scan the space in front of her – examining not Wanda, but magic itself. “Was I not good enough?”

Wanda tries to comfort her, but it doesn’t help.

Magic has betrayed her.

Magic has failed her.

And worst of all, Agatha still has that latent desire to kiss the other witch. To keep doing what they had been doing.  And that aching, lingering void hole of a feeling of being rejected and stopped by the person who literally started her in the first place.  It gnaws at her insides, and she hates it.

“Look at me,” Agatha forces herself to say, forces herself to chuckle as though this is a small thing when it isn’t, “crying like a virgin on her wedding night.  I’m no spring chicken—”  She cuts herself off, lets her words follow the script Wanda’s written out for her, while her mind directs itself to her own marriage, so many centuries ago, to the things she could do to Wanda if the witch hadn’t tried to exert magical control over her—

Raw.

Numb.

Some mix of the two – that’s all Agatha can feel as she strides around the room, finding her clothes where they’ve been discarded, dragging the striped dress back over her head, situating the band through her hair (and pinging herself with static when she does, all that tension threaded through her frizz), and slipping the bright blue shirt back on – the one that draws on the color of her eyes, although she sickens, thinking of that – before fiddling with the edges of it where it should just tie back into a normal knot.

It would be so easy to shut Wanda out.  To slam the door in her face.  But there’s—

If she had asked, would I have said no?

….

If she hadn’t cast the spell, would I have said no, or would I have—?

Agatha knows her answer, just like she knows that even now, if Wanda hadn’t—

“Would you tie this for me, hon?”

She says it so softly that Wanda probably wouldn’t hear it at all, if not for the spells she’s cast thrumming through and around everything, bringing every word, every movement directly to her attention, particularly if it goes counter to what she wants or expects.  For all that Agatha bends the script, she still follows what is expected of her.  She’s the nosy next door neighbor.  The kinky, weird best friend.  The second love interest, apparently, creating a love triangle that continues off-screen and without notice because these decades certainly aren’t going to broadcast a queer relationship when their main character already has a husband and children.

Ah.

Agatha catches magic’s joke then.

Homewrecker.  She’s the homewrecker.

When Wanda tightens the knot – when she pats it – when she blushes a bright, bright scarlet afterwards, Agatha finds fondness creeping alongside the futile void within her, a much more pleasant emotion than raw and numb. A corner of her lips lifts at the other witch’s awkwardness, and she runs a finger along Wanda’s jaw, tucks it beneath her chin, and lifts it gentle.  She searches Wanda’s deep green eyes for any suggestion of spells to be cast, and when she doesn’t find it, decides that, for once, she wants to kiss the witch because it’s what she wants, not because Wanda kisses her first.

Just as much a reminder to herself as a note to the other witch that maybe she doesn’t have to cast a spell on her to get what she wants.

Agatha kisses Wanda as herself, not as the script Wanda tries to force her into, but as an act of forgiveness, and when Wanda melts against her this time, when her hands reach out to just brush fingertips against the small of her waist before resting there, she feels….

Uncertain.

Wanda barely pulls away, nose still brushing against Agatha’s, eyes still drawn to her lips, and murmurs with lips so close they brush against Agatha’s when she speaks, “I thought we were stopping.”

“I’m stopping,” Agatha purrs before kissing her again, much more chastely this time.  She won’t lie to herself – she enjoys this.  When she has control, she enjoys this.

Whether that’s her own choice or more lingering effects from the spell, though—

Wanda rubs her finger in circles along Agatha’s waist.  “No,” she murmurs, looking down at her with large, green eyes, “you’re not.”  Her eyes spark scarlet, but nothing tugs on Agatha’s mind, nothing draws her lips against Wanda’s again.  At least, nothing that she can feel.

That’s more terrifying than when she could feel it.

Wanda Maximoff isn’t subtle, but that doesn’t mean she cannot learn subtlety, and Agatha cannot trust that the longing within her to curl the other witch’s curls around her finger, to make good on that taking advantage quip comes entirely from herself when Wanda’s eyes spark with magic.

The fingers of Agatha’s free hand curl into magic and cling to it, despite its earlier betrayal, because it is what she has done since she suckled at her mother’s breast, finding comfort in the very magic she breathes.  She clings to magic, and she steps away from the other caster. “I’m stopping.”

She says it, and she means it, and she does.

~

In the freedom of her own stolen house, Agatha steals shuddering breaths. She glares aimlessly at the walls, as if she could stare down magic itself, and says nothing to it, even as she continues to keep her fingers in its tapestry as a soothing form of self-comfort.  Then she stomps up to the second floor, thrusts open a door with a melted lock that she should not be able to open, and stares, still shuddering with determined fear, just stares down at a boy she’d intended to leave slumbering on while she dealt with the witch directly.

After today, Agatha doesn’t want to step into that house again, not if she will be alone with that witch while forced scripts continue to run, not if she can help it.

It will be much, much safer to send someone else in her stead.

Theoretically, anyway.

#bandit fic #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #mcu #wandavision #tw dubious consent #tw dubcon #tw noncon #noncon tw #dubcon tw #dubious consent tw

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic I - 1960′s

Summary: Being an accomplished witch is all about manipulation.

Or love.

But only a fool would fall in love with magic.

(Agatha Harkness is a three hundred year old imbecile who has been in love with magic since she first felt its gentlest touch and who has forgotten that some magic can be just as manipulative as the one who twisted it.)

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff

AO3

next chapter

The thing about magic is that it isn’t very subtle.  Not really.

Sure, if someone isn’t particularly magically inclined, they might not notice it as it washes over them – moment by moment, day by day – but for someone such as Agatha Harkness, who lives and breathes magic, who feels its throb constant in her veins, it is impossible to miss.  You should believe children when they say that magic is everywhere; it’s in the rays of the sun as they heat the earth’s crust, it is the heat itself, it is the shift of that warmth into something plants can feed on, it is the moon’s very presence causing the waves of the ocean, it’s the slow tilt of the earth, the slow spin, that keeps the winds from going where they want and instead flowing one way around the whole world.  They say that people are made of expired stardust, but Agatha says people are made of magic, holding all of that together.

Other people might call it a miracle.

Agatha doesn’t believe in miracles.

She does however believe in incantations, sigils, runes that give those such as her the ability to dip their fingers into magic, to twist its threads and weave it into whatsoever they desire, so long as they can reach in deep enough, pull hard enough.  This takes practice – building magical muscles to pull more and more threads taut, learning different structures, different designs to create the patterns that she wants without snapping them, without feeling the backlash that would consume her—

The threads – and the tatters of them – are how Agatha has found other witches throughout her centuries of life.  She reaches out a pinkie to twist something and finds someone else pulling it in the other direction.  Magic isn’t subtle, but witches often are.  They have to be, or risk having another witch catch them out at doing something they maybe shouldn’t be doing.  More importantly, magic doesn’t like being ripped from one direction and shoved into another; often that just ends with magic rebuking the person trying to tame it.  No, magic likes a gentle hand, a lover’s caress, someone who knows just how to talk sweetly to it to make it think it is the one choosing its new course.

Being an accomplished witch is all about manipulation.

Or love.

But only a fool would fall in love with magic.

(Agatha Harkness is a three hundred year old imbecile who has been in love with magic since she first felt its gentlest touch and who has forgotten that some magic can be just as manipulative as the one who twisted it.)

~

There is absolutely fucking nothing subtle about what will later be dubbed the Hex.  It is the stronghold of multiple layers of complicated spells woven together, laced and layered one on top of the other, thicker than the blood of the womb, perhaps even a new womb itself, and the stagnation of this one city made separate from the rest of the world sends ripples through magic itself, and for Agatha Harkness, who lives and breathes magic, it sends ripples under her skin, like the stomping of a tyrannosaurus rex, even at its quietest, sends ripples through water in an absentminded glass, like a perfect pitch rings with notes unplayed, echoed above and underneath the note itself.  It is brash and blunt and not because the magic responds to this straining carving of it like a dog showing its belly, like it is literally the bitch of the caster.

Magic has never shown its belly to her.

But it does acknowledge the existence of one of its lovers, and it does allow her to enter through the holes in the fabric this caster has woven, and it does allow her to shift and alter herself in a myriad of subtle ways to fit into this world where she perhaps was never meant to exist, to let her into a gap in the writing where a nosy neighbor such as herself would be.

Agnes is the nosy neighbor in the caster’s feigned television life because Agatha is the nosy neighbor in the caster’s casting.

It’s so much easier to play a part when it isn’t completely false.

~

And the thing about Wanda Maximoff?

She isn’t subtle either.

Agatha becomes accustomed to hands cinched at her waist.  She adorns herself with a thick enough ribbon to draw Wanda’s eyes, and when her eyes do not fall to it, her hands do.  Wanda places her hands where they fit; Agatha leans back into her touch and refuses to move, catches the way that Wanda’s face begins to color – it’s a darker ashen grey in all of this black and white, but Agatha can see through the magical layer to the scarlet blushing beneath.

She…enjoys this.

Perhaps a little too much.

Enjoys that the more time she spends in this little world Wanda has created, Wanda’s hands find her waist for other reasons that have nothing to do with trying to usher her out of the house.  Sometimes, Agatha is absolutely certain that she doesn’t need to be touching her at all – she could just say to hold still instead of placing her hands there and holding her in place, she could just ask for her to scootch a little to the left instead of placing her hands there and scootching her over, she could just ask her to leave instead of placing her hands there and guiding her towards the unlocked door.

But she doesn’t.

No, Wanda Maximoff isn’t subtle at all.  Not to Agatha.  Not to someone who can read the signs.

She crashes and fumbles her way into rewriting the rules of magic for her world the same way she crashes and fumbles her way into constantly touching Agnes, mooning after her in a very clear – to anyone who has eyes and isn’t stuck in the sixties – font of longing.  One that is always so carefully cut off by the appearance of her husband at just the right moment.

Until it isn’t.

~

Agatha feels it – the weight of Wanda’s gaze on her throughout the television show, coming and going, coming and going, lingering a little longer when she realizes that Agnes doesn’t seem to notice, her lips parting every so often, her glance flicking to her fidgeting fingertips, head tilting, tongue tucked between her lips until she tugs her lower one between her teeth – and she acts in accordance with what Wanda likely expects of someone seeing this particular episode for the first time (even though she has seen it multiple, multiple times).  Out of the corner of her eye, Agatha focuses on Wanda the same way that Wanda focuses on her and gives her exactly what she wants – more time to let her eyes linger, to let them move across her shape and take her in with unbroken pause.

For a little while at least.

Then, when she feels as though this has gone on quite long enough, Agatha glances over, catches Wanda’s eyes, and asks, “Wanda,” feigning hesitance, “why are you staring at me like that?”  She raises her hand, pats her cheek, her nose, runs a finger along the corners of her lips. “Is there something on my face?”

Wanda stutters, Wanda fidgets, Wanda retreats, and Agatha pursues – subtly, of course, the same as she tends to the magic thrumming within her – placing her hand on Wanda’s in a comforting, friendly bout of concern while at the same time angling herself closer, thigh brushing against Wanda’s.  She is rewarded by that instinctive motion – those hands at her waist – and even more so by the pause, because now Wanda’s hands linger the way that her eyes do, and her thumb wanders the way that her eyes do, and when her head tilts in that owlish way that it does, her nose brushes against hers, and Agatha waits.

Agatha is subtle when Wanda’s lips brush against hers, and it’s quite possible that the young witch doesn’t even realize the control she asserts over the situation.  All she needs to do is feed Wanda what she is being fed – gentleness, hesitancy – and relax in a subtle, subtle indicator that Wanda can – and should – do the same.  She pretends to let Wanda lead because to stomp her dinosaur claws all over the poor girl would break her, but she maintains awareness the entire time, never lets herself truly relax.

The thing about magic is that it’s not subtle, and Agatha can feel the threads of it woven all through Wanda, the casting the young witch is doing without even realizing it, the not-so-subtle hunger that Wanda has for her that could devour her if Agatha lets her guard down, if she is not constantly aware of what this witch is unknowingly trying to do to her, of the overwhelming want that pulses with the beat of her heart.

She feels it, though, like a spider’s web trying to snare her heart, the magical draw to give in to this young woman.

When their lips part, when Wanda rests her forehead against hers, Agatha fights the urge to chase her, and she does not know if that is her own desire or something that Wanda is trying, unsubtly, to craft into whoever she thinks Agnes is, into this role that, to the other witch, is nebulous and open to being whatever she subconsciously believes the script should be.

Agatha bends forward, and the door creaks open, and Wanda shoves her away.

Whatever spell shifts the magic around her slowly draws its claws back as Wanda attempts to apologize, but Agatha does not quite relax, searches herself to find that desire doesn’t leave when the attempted spell does.  How interesting.  She smiles, and perhaps it seems off to Wanda because it doesn’t hold the cheer that it normally does, and when she speaks, she does not wink the way that, perhaps, she is expected to do.

Agatha covers her lips with one finger, and she breathes in the last remnants of Wanda’s magic, and she considers.

#bandit fic #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness #wandavision #mcu

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic II - 1970′s

Chapter Summary: Wanda is just another witch messing with magic too big for her to actually get a handle on, and now magic is snapping back at her by filling her belly with more living undead.  She should be glad that she isn’t getting devoured whole.

The worst of all of this – the actual worst of it – is sitting in her sanctuary, free from the influence of Wanda’s spells, still finding herself thinking about that kiss, gentle as it was, still hungry with a desire to pursue a woman who literally shoved her away and literally tried to cast a spell on her to make Agatha want to kiss her, to shift a spell she thought Agatha was already under to coerce her into kissing her back.

If Wanda really is the sort of person who sees someone she wants and enchants them to fulfill her desires, then perhaps it is a good thing that Agatha is here, stepping into a role that might have otherwise been occupied by someone who couldn’t keep a clear head under Wanda’s thrall.

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff Chapter Rating: T. Fic Rating: M for upcoming sexual content. TW: Mention of miscarriages/stillbirth and mental coercion.

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

The thread tugging the world towards black and white snaps, and the shock of it quivers the magic around it, alerts Agatha to the change before color spreads to the world around her, its edge, just where technicolor touches monochrome, glimmering a muted shade of red.  It marks a difference, an intent, and that more than the twins now growing in Wanda’s belly suggests that the city of Westview will shift into yet another decade overnight.  It might be the sixties now, but when the sun – or what appears to be it – crests the horizon tomorrow morning, it will be the seventies, all bell bottoms, floral patterns, ponchos, and tie-dye. Honestly, if Wanda is going to have twins, Agatha could use a good poncho, but you didn’t hear that from her.

It’s the twins – and, yes, Agatha feels the double life of them the moment Wanda notices her stomach swollen with potential – that intrigue her more than the return of color.  The color is just a return to life as normal, which isn’t nearly as hard as stripping it away was to begin with, and it’s less about color and more about what the color means in terms of the magic Wanda is producing.  (And what it means when they bleed red in a monochrome world.)

But the twins—

Thoughts whir, unimpeded, as Agatha edges up the stairs in the house magic directed her to commandeer the moment she slipped through the holes Wanda left in her Hex.  She opens a door she doesn’t need to keep locked, glances in on the boy – and Ralph is a boy to someone as old as she is – who lies perfectly still in a bed that honestly might not even be his.  Dark hair.  Pale skin.  In living, breathing, magical technicolor, his room seems…not much different, not that he’ll get to see it.  Not unless she has a use for him.

Tomorrow, maybe, Agatha will rouse him just long enough to make sure he has eaten something, but if Wanda can keep her cast pared down despite the hundreds of people she is not using, if those on the outskirts are still somehow able to survive without eating, without moving, then it’s likely Ralph here doesn’t actually need food.  Wanda certainly hasn’t thought of an on-screen role for him, and Agatha’s comments about him allow for a quite inconspicuous absence.  In a real show, Ralph would never have been cast in the first place – maybe he would have voiceover work, yelling at Agnes to get back for—

An episode in a later season might have shown him, once Agnes and Wanda were friends, because Wanda might have invited them both over for dinner the same way that dear old Vision had invited the Harts over.  Wanda would have thrown a get-together for her neighbors, a block party (much more likely in the upcoming decade than the current one), and Ralph would finally have made an on-screen appearance.  But the thing about characters like Ralph is that they are so much more entertaining for the audience if they never show up in the first place.

Ralph will never show, if Agatha has anything to say about it, but if she grows desperate enough….

The color hasn’t woken him in the same way the change in decades hasn’t woken him (yet), which means Wanda hasn’t considered him and hasn’t attempted to tamper with the spell Agatha has cast on him to keep him frozen in place.  Well enough.  Agatha shuts the door, dips her littlest finger into the magic that thrums through everything, and melts the lock within.  Just in case.

As she makes her way to the basement, to the one place she can truly be herself in this whole hexed up place, Agatha’s mind continues to take the problem of the twins the way a jeweler might take a newly discovered jewel, turning it this way and that, examining every facet of it for any potential flaws.

Agatha has never been one to follow the so-called “superheroes” who have cropped up over the past several years.  She’s known too many over the centuries – many sorcerers, sure, but others as well, who have lived and died just like every other human being lived and died (even Cian, in the end, had died), some even still living who would be classified as such if they ever felt the need to get involved (she falls into this category; she has never felt the need to get involved).  The only difference between now and then is the speed at which information can get to your average, everyday person.  Even looking at the ancient civilizations – what, Thor apparently exists, but at the time his stories were first being recorded, he was much more locally known, as opposed to, say, Hercules, Achilles, Helen, or Cassandra – Medusa, even – who were originally confined to an entire other part of the world.  To think that there are only new superheroes is to deny the legends.

So, no, Agatha doesn’t know anything about these Avengers beyond what other people have forced her to learn. Every now and again she’s felt ripples of what she can now guess was Wanda threading magic and twisting it to her will one way or the other, but those moments had been so fleeting that she couldn’t get a good enough grasp on them before they flickered out of existence, magic snapping like a rubber band back to its original shape.  She knew that Vision was dead just like she knew that the ruler of Wakanda had been snapped out of existence just like she knew that some alien named Thanos made half of everything disappear; she knows these things, but they’ve never been particularly important to her.

Wanda had been a blip on the radar for years even before the whole Snap thing.  The news cycles would occasionally bring her up along with others who were renegades for whatever reason (she did not care), but it’s not like Agatha would have ever guessed the little witch and the android were shacking up, and if she’d had kids—

Well, if she had kids, they must have died the same way that Vision did.  Agatha can’t imagine Wanda being so cruel as to ripping her children from wherever they’ve been for the past five years and forcing them back inside her body only to give birth to them again.  That would be horribly traumatic.

Miscarriage, probably, Agatha considers as she walks down the last few steps to her basement sanctuary.  Stillborn. Potentially lost when she was snapped; maybe the universe didn’t know to bring them back and now Wanda is correcting that flaw in the reverse snap that one egotistical billionaire did to bring everyone back.  Only, in this case, maybe not everyone.

Something tickles the back of Agatha’s mind, and she turns to the Darkhold. It glooms in the darkness. Staring at it causes her now-blackened fingers to twitch, to ache with what is often otherwise deadened sensation. She doesn’t need to open it again, doesn’t need to pour over the dark text to find the chapter already brought to mind, to remember the earliest lines in the chapter – capable of spontaneous creation.

No.

Wanda can’t be the Scarlet Witch.  She’s not even real, just a story that witches tell to their children to get them to behave, like the bogeyman or the monster that lives under the bed (or in the closet), like the witches in so many other mortal fairytales before they realized that their older audiences identified so much more with the villains in the pieces than the heroes and so started recreating the stories with those roles reversed.  Of course, the Scarlet Witch is mentioned in the Darkhold, but that doesn’t mean she has to be real.  She’s just a myth.  A legend.

Like all of those ancient superheroes.

Agatha shudders.

No, Wanda is just another witch messing with magic too big for her to actually get a handle on, and now magic is snapping back at her by filling her belly with more living undead.  She should be glad that she isn’t getting devoured whole.

The worst of all of this – the actual worst of it – is sitting in her sanctuary, free from the influence of Wanda’s spells, still finding herself thinking about that kiss, gentle as it was, still hungry with a desire to pursue a woman who literally shoved her away and literally tried to cast a spell on her to make Agatha want to kiss her, to shift a spell she thought Agatha was already under to coerce her into kissing her back.

If Wanda really is the sort of person who sees someone she wants and enchants them to fulfill her desires, then perhaps it is a good thing that Agatha is here, stepping into a role that might have otherwise been occupied by someone who couldn’t keep a clear head under Wanda’s thrall.

Agatha lets out a huff of a breath, touches her lips with her bare fingers, and then sits on the cold stone floor, crossing her legs beneath her, and closes her eyes, not to think about Wanda or the gentleness with which she kissed her but to reach out and study the twists and pixelations Wanda has set within her hex, to see if in examining them she might just grasp how Wanda was able to do what she did.

~

The decade shifts over as Agatha sits and mediates, and Wanda’s pregnancy becomes the whole show.

Even in the smallest moments, Wanda’s not-so-subtle weaving of magical threads, running on autopilot as she speaks no incantations, twists no gestures, direct Agatha to where the caster expects her to be.  She follows those directions by choice, not by compulsion, passing cast members given no such thought.  A few, frozen, stare wide-eyed at her as she walks by, and once – just once – she pauses, stands in front of one woman, and meets her eyes, engaging her in a staring contest.  She stares at the other woman until her eyes water, finally blinking away unshed tears. When she wipes her eyes and looks back, she notes the same tears – not the same; actual tears – welling up in the woman’s eyes and slowly, so slowly starting to spill over.

Agatha reaches over just long enough to brush those tears away, to slowly shut the woman’s lids before the magic snaps them back open.  “I would do more, hon,” she murmurs to the woman whose name she does not care to know, “but if I were you, I would want to see what’s coming.”  Then she brushes a hand light through the other woman’s hair and offers her a wry, lopsided smile.  “It could be worse, doll.  At least there’s color.”

A groan of a sound makes its way through the woman’s lips, and Agatha places one slim finger on them to stop her.  “Oh, I know.  I know, dear. She is being excessively cruel.  But I can’t fight her right now.  She’d win, and then where would we be? No better.”  She pats the woman’s cheek.  “I’ll free you when I can.  Don’t wait up for me.”

Halfway down the street, Agatha turns back and, with a chillingly delightful front, says, “Or do, dear!  I could always use another friend!”

But for the most part, Agatha doesn’t interact with the bodies set as window dressings around the world.  It’s different when she’s in a scene – those puppets at least have speaking roles, and she’s expected to act and interact with them – but walking through emptiness, drawn through it by magic to the spot she is meant to be (a spot that, left vacant, would cause its caster to question why she hadn’t arrived – if the magic didn’t leave another hole for her to flit through, wrapping itself protectively around her to excuse her absence the same way a mother might to protect from a violent intruder), she tends to ignore the others.  It makes everything easier, and there are so few easy things about living in this magically crafted wonderland with Wanda.

Wanda’s stomach shifts as necessary for her scenes.  They’re little clips of things – and Agatha sees them all, filtered through the threads she keeps constantly running through her mind the way that you might leave a show on as background noise while focusing on other things – compiled in random moments, interspersed and spliced together to create a montage for the theme song.

But in some cases, the scenes these moments are drawn from are actually quite longer.  Vision creating so many hamburgers happens momentarily in the foreground while Agatha herself suggests that there is no way they will ever be able to make enough for the Fourth of July party on such short notice, apologizing profusely for being unable to rope Ralph into helping them cook, since he’d already gotten too day drunk to—

Wanda’s eyes narrow as Agatha spins her yarn, and the very instant Agatha suggests something not particularly in keeping with the times, the camera shifts to Vision, fixing the problem without even breaking a sweat.  When the hamburgers are done, she only needs to say, “Golly gee, what a vision!” in Agnes’s chipper tone of voice before the scene cuts itself off, before magic whisks her away somewhere else.

They’re small.  Insignificant.  There not for plot but for aesthetic.

However.

However.

Wanda’s magic draws Agatha to Westview’s admittedly small shopping district.  She sees Wanda before the much younger witch sees her and pauses at noticing there is no one else around her.  Well.  Not no one, but no one in an active speaking role. Wanda stands there alone, Visionless, brushing her flat hair back out of her face before placing a hand on her stomach, lowering her head, and murmuring something that Agatha chooses to not make out, beyond noting it to be in Sokovian.  Then she glances up, catches Agatha’s eye, and waves her over, scarlet lips pulled wide in an engaging smile.  “Agnes! Isn’t it the most beautiful day?”

“Sure is, hon!”  Agatha crosses the distance between them, kitten heels clicking along the sidewalk. “And aren’t you just the most darling thing?  Why, I’d say you’re glowing!”  Her eyes drop to Wanda’s swollen belly.  “How’s the baby doing?”

Simple.  Baby.  Singular.  Wait to see if Wanda corrects her, the jewel of the twins diamond sharp in her mind.

“Oh, he’s doing just fine!”  Wanda’s smile drops a few watts, brow furrowing.  “Or she.  We haven’t checked.”  She rubs her hand over her belly and glances down at it, smile returning to the way it was. “He started kicking this—” Her eyes widen, and she grabs Agatha’s wrist.  “Here, you can feel him!”

Agatha gingerly places her hand over Wanda’s protruding stomach.  She takes a deep breath in.  Waits.  When nothing happens at first, she rubs a thumb along her stomach, barely wrinkling her clothes.  “He must not like me very much, hon.”

“Shush.”  Wanda places her hand just next to Agatha’s, fingers almost touching, almost fitting in the empty spaces between them.  “It’s just Agnes,” she whispers to her stomach, green eyes focused entirely on it, on the baby she conceptualizes within.  “You can trust her.  She’s a very good….”  She hesitates, glances up, meets Agatha’s eyes, searches them as though deciding something.

The kiss flickers through Agatha’s mind, and she’s unsure if that’s because she is thinking of it or if Wanda is.

Perhaps both.

“…friend,” Wanda says finally before tugging on her lower lip, trying to smile up at her.  Within the center of her eyes, Agatha makes out a small glimmer of deepest red, just as she feels something unbidden try to—

All at once, as though they have been waiting for their mother to decide one way or the other, Agatha feels the smallest kick against her still waiting hand. Her eyes widen.  “I – I feel him!” she stutters out, breaking eye contact and glancing down to Wanda’s stomach, as would be expected of her.  “What a strong little fellow you have there!”  Her eyes return to Wanda’s.  “Or little lady,” she confides with a sly smile.

Whatever magic Wanda is casting pulls back, tendrils recoiling all at once. She beams at her, smile bright.  “Isn’t he just?”  Then she takes Agatha’s hand in her own, interlacing their fingers and giving her hand a gentle squeeze.  “You’ll come shopping with me, won’t you?  You talk about your boys all the time, and I thought—”

Buzzing fills Agatha’s ears, thick, loud, impenetrable.  Wanda’s lips are still moving, and there must be some sound coming out through them, but she can’t hear it.  Her eyes remain focused on the younger witch.  She nods where she thinks she is expected to nod.  Internally, however, she reaches out, one pinky finger twisting until it finds magic where it bends under her grasp.

Wanda shouldn’t know.

She can’t get into her mind; there is no way she should—

Ah.

Ah.

Agatha Harkness lives and breathes magic.  It knows one who caresses it so gently, and it hums gently within her veins, a comforting assurance like the purr of a slumbering kitten.  Surely it would never betray her so completely.  Wanda simply expects her best friend – who knows so much about the inner workings of the town, who offered advice on how to deal with Dottie, who allowed the newlyweds to borrow her prized pet rabbit, trusting them to take care of him – why wouldn’t Agnes know more about children than she does?

The magic speaks through Wanda, gently telling her of her own twins before Wanda even realizes it.  That is all. No harm, no foul.  It glances up, rubs its back against Agatha’s ankles, purrs again.  Gentle, gentle, gentle.

Agatha relaxes into her own smile.  “Sure thing, hon!”  She hates the way she speaks with exclamation points when all she wants is to shove her hands into fists, wrap magic through her fingers, and stalk off until she can get this bubbling rage out of her system.  It’s a different sort of exclamation, and she holds it deeply to her chest.  Her gaze flicks down to Wanda’s stomach one more time, remembering how her own had swollen much like the one across from her, and she swallows past a growing lump in her throat.  “Why don’t we get started?  You’ll have to excuse me; my boys were born so long ago.”

Wanda takes Agatha’s hands in her own – both of them – and pulls them up close to her chest.  “You’re the absolute best, Agnes.  I couldn’t have trusted anyone else; Vis’s got his head in all of those baby books, but they can’t tell you anything about clothes and shoes and what to buy.  I’m sure you know more than those old things.”

“I sure do, dear.”

It’s an instinct, something growing angrily in her, something that wants the unsubtle witch who doesn’t realize what she’s saying to feel something of the same pain that Agatha currently feels, that causes her to lean across and press a lingering kiss to Wanda’s cheek.  There’s no camera’s just yet – Agatha knows when she’s in filler territory, and this is all filler – so there’s no harm in the brush of her lips against the other woman’s skin, even less in the way the woman’s cheek suddenly blazes red hot beneath her touch.

Quickly, Agatha kisses Wanda’s other cheek and pulls away, forcing the cheery smile back onto her lips.  “You know, they do that all the time in other countries! I can’t imagine why we haven’t picked it up here!”  She sashays past Wanda to the door of the first store, pauses, and looks back, catches Wanda still frozen in place, one hand almost to her cheek.  “Wanda, hon, aren’t you coming?”

“Yes!” Wanda squeaks out, followed by a softer echo of it, “Yes.”  She smooths her clothes and turns to Agatha, still blushing.  “Thanks, Agnes.  I need all the help I can get.”

Agatha just grins wanly.  “Sure you do, kiddo.  Someone’s got to teach you the basics.  Might as well be me.”

~

The cameras arrive for a few seconds of film time.  Between them, Agatha keeps a cautious and wary eye on the other witch, gauging her responses to anything she says – nothing of important – and waiting for any attempts to overcome her with another spell.  There’s nothing.  Only the occasional distracted glance of a woman who is unsure of what she wants – no, who certainly knows exactly what she wants but is unsure how to go about obtaining it.

Of course, as the episode finally begins, Agatha finds other ways to interact with the lovely couple without having to be around Wanda’s pregnancy again. She doesn’t want the ache that fills her own womb, though she cannot stop it, and she doesn’t want to play midwife yet again to another witch with no knowledge of what they are asking of her.

When the expulsion of the actual midwife from Westview sends ripples through Wanda’s spell, Agatha takes it to heart, files it away, and for the first time, Agatha conjures a mattress into her basement and curls up there, where she needs not worry about any witchcraft Wanda might be causing outside of it.  She will be required to see the twins soon enough, to see the damage in the spell, should any of it still exist.

It does not need to be now.

She does not want it to be now.

#bandit fic #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #wandavision #mcu

[aparticularbandit]

The First Snowfall

Summary: Wanda loses Agatha and finds her outside in the snow.

Set within The Thrall of Decades universe.

TW for discussion of suicide attempt.

word count: 1206

By the time Wanda returns to Westview, the winter weather has come and gone. She moves in with Agatha during one of the rainiest springs she has ever seen, which is just fine for her.  It gives her more time inside, away from their neighbors’ prying, judgmental eyes; gives her more time to learn intricate theorems of magic from the only teacher she has ever had, the only magic crafter who has ever cared enough to teach her the craft; gives her more time to curl up lazily in bed and explore another human body with quivering lips, sharp teeth, and aching fingers, drawing the softest sounds from the older witch that she can.  It should be surprising to her how easily her life clicks into place here, how easily she finds herself curling up on Agatha’s – their – couch with a hot cup of chamomile tea and a book, how easily she leans down to kiss Agatha’s cheek when she finds the other woman doing the same.

This isn’t to say, of course, that everything is rainbows and unicorns all of the time.  There is so much Wanda doesn’t know about the older witch, and more frequently than she would like to admit, she stumbles onto something that triggers an emotional response of some sort from her – whether that’s closing up and refusing to say anything or storming off with gritted teeth or a blast of frenetic violet energy that narrowly misses her every time, not because Wanda dodges, but because Agatha’s aim is significantly better than hers is.  If Wanda tried that sort of thing, she would risk hitting Agatha – or need to avoid her by a large enough margin that the older witch would laugh at her.

No.  Not laugh. Cackle.

Agatha always apologizes afterwards.  Sometimes she explains the issue, but the harder things often get left unsaid.  As time passes, there are less and less of the more violent outbursts – often prompted by Wanda trying to press for information that she eventually decides it’s better not to ask for – and more direct communication, more of an acknowledgment that something said or done has brought up horrible past memories.  Wanda takes advantage of this, trying to speak when chaos magic crackles untamed about her fingers, when her emotions seem so loud that they threaten to overwhelm her again.

They grow better.  They grow together.

And this is good preparation for when winter finally arrives once more.

~

Wanda wakes the morning of the first snowfall to find the bed empty of its other occupant.  She reaches over idly, runs her fingers along the dent in the mattress where Agatha normally sleeps, expecting it to still be warm from her recent presence and finding it chilly instead.

Odd.

On a normal day, Agatha doesn’t wake until much later, clinging sleepily to Wanda whenever the younger witch tries to slip out of bed and dragging her back beneath the covers to her side.  More often than she’d like to admit, Wanda allows this; Agatha is so much warmer than she is, and cuddling with a partner who comforts her physically instead of unintentionally cooling her off is a new and beautiful wonder. (She had curled up with Pietro often when it was just the two of them, but that was an entirely different experience than curling up with Agatha is, as it should be.)  To find the bed empty this early suggests that something is wrong.  Very wrong.

Wanda anticipates a fight as she creeps down the stairs, and that anxious thought only grows stronger as she searches through the house and finds Agatha nowhere inside, the only light that filtering in through the windows and the still steadily falling snow.  Frequently, when Agatha doesn’t want to be found, she hides in her basement, no longer full of thick, magically pulsing vines or skulls with thick horns or the trappings of horror movie witchery but still crafted a bit like a dungeon with those same runes carved into its molding, without any added to allow for Wanda to use hers.  At first, this had bothered her, but she soon came to understand that Agatha, like Wanda herself, needed a space where she could feel safe in her vulnerabilities. It still gives Wanda the creeps, even now, and she’s grateful that she doesn’t find Agatha there.

Instead, Wanda finally finds Agatha sitting outside, dressed in nothing more than a thin t-shirt and even thinner pants, bare feet pressed into the cold porch, toes curled under, fingers gripping the edge of her metal chair, breath coming out in thick white clouds that quickly dissipate, lips turning a distinct shade of blue.  She places a hand on her back, finds that her warm lover is freezing cold, and rubs her hand along her back, rumpling the shirt, still feeling those thick, unexplained scars beneath the fabric.  “Inside,” she says, puffs of air coming as she speaks.  “Now.”

But Agatha doesn’t move.  “I love to see the snow fall,” she murmurs, and the instant she says it, Wanda knows it for a lie.

“Inside,” Wanda repeats, firmer this time.  “Now.”  She clenches her fingers on Agatha’s shirt, tugs upward.  “You are a much better girlfriend than you are a popsicle.”

Agatha glances up.  She opens her mouth as though to respond with a witty retort, but then closes it, says nothing, nods once, and pushes herself up from the chair, shivering only once as she walks back inside.

~

“I almost died once,” Agatha says later, when they’re curled up in bed together, her head resting easy on Wanda’s chest.

Wanda glances down, raises an eyebrow.  “Only once?” she jests.

But Agatha doesn’t look up, doesn’t take the bait.  “After my mother died, after my sister found me, after my boys….” Her voice trails off into words unspoken.  Agatha doesn’t mention her boys often and has never explained anything about them; Agnes mentioned them once or twice, and Wanda always thought it was part of the role until Agatha mentioned them idly once – not idly.  Every time she mentions them, it’s laden with a weight that Wanda can’t pierce through and has stopped trying (most of the violent outbursts were a result of them.)  “I wanted to die, hon,” she says finally.  “You know what that’s like.”

Wanda doesn’t have to say that she does, only nods once.

“It was so cold then,” Agatha murmurs.  “Walking through the snow.  The water, too.  So cold.”

“But you didn’t die,” Wanda says, brushing Agatha’s hair back from her face. “You’re still here.”

Agatha nods.  “Someone found me, dear.  I didn’t want them to save me, but they did.  And for many, many days after.”  She sighs, nudges Wanda’s neck with her nose.  “Sometimes, when it snows, I want to forget, and I end up out there, just like before.”  She glances up, out the window, where the snow continues to fall.  “It isn’t you.”

“I’ll just have to be more careful,” Wanda says.  She traces a finger beneath Agatha’s chin, guides her head up to meet her eyes.  “I wouldn’t want to lose you again.”

But when she leans down to kiss her, Wanda finds that Agatha’s lips are still shot through with cold.

#bandit fic #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #holiday fics 2022 #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #mcu #wandavision #tw suicidal thoughts #suicidal thoughts tw

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic VII - 2020‘s (I)

Chapter Summary: Sometimes it feels like magic is a noose about her throat, manacles about her wrists and ankles, a knife through her back.

She shouldn’t even be alive, and yet magic refuses to let her die.

Agatha still hasn’t determined if that is a good thing or a bad one.

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff Chapter Rating: T Fic Rating: M for dark themes and sexual content

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

Magic rolls over her like a wave.

~

Magic rolls over her like a wave, and Agatha sits as though on the shore at riptide, waiting for it to pull her out far, far from shore.

~

Agatha closes her eyes, and Agatha waits, and magic rolls over her and surrounds her, and magic protects her from magic, magic as a shield about her, magic to hold her afloat instead of being drawn down and under, magic allowing her to tread water as the riptide comes, magic the tide and magic the shield and magic in and on and through and around her.

Agatha takes a deep breath in, and she breathes in magic, and she lets a deep breath out, and she breathes out magic, and Wanda casts her spell and it does not touch her because Wanda cast her spell and Agatha Harkness is immune.

Her clothes change and magic provides Wanda with an illusion that she wants to see and Agatha stares up and speaks words without thinking and she breathes in and she breathes out and Wanda does not notice because she only ever sees what she wants to see, and so when Agatha wrapped in Agnes feigns the Agnes she has been feigning from the beginning, how could she ever notice?

Wanda hadn’t known to look before, didn’t think to look now, and sees nothing.

She’s never been very good at noticing subtleties.

(Not that the brooch unmarked, unchanged, and still glistening at Agatha’s throat is subtle.)

~

The Hex falls, and it peels away from the skies, from the world surrounding them, from a Westview whose residents were already freed of their torture, so why does it now need to fall, except that it’s breaking Wanda, except that she cannot keep it going without destroying herself, except that she won’t be destroyed by its falling anymore, except that without draining her these broken spells cannot continue, except that, except that, except that—

The Hex falls, and Wanda leaves, and Agatha stands in the empty framing of a house that never really existed, except that it did, briefly, for a few weeks, under the spell of a witch who did not know what she was and still does not know who she is, and the only thing she regrets is that she allowed that little witch to take the Darkhold with her.

The only thing she lets herself regret, anyway.

(There was no way to prevent Wanda from taking the Darkhold once she’d used it as an example, not without Wanda realizing that Agatha was still Agatha, not without Wanda realizing that Agatha was immune to her casting, not without Wanda realizing that Agatha—)

She will not lie to herself.

Agatha cannot stand in the clothes of the Agnes that Wanda crafted for her in the absence of the house that Wanda once crafted for herself and not think of the witch who left her here, alone.

Not without a useful distraction, at least.

“I did what you wanted, love.”

The words growl hushed through Agatha’s lips as she curls fingers into magic’s fur, tightens them to soothe herself with its softness, with its comfort. “I did what you wanted,” she repeats, softer somehow.  “I taught your girl how to save herself, and she tried to kill me for it – kill me – and you would have let her—”

Except that it didn’t.  Hadn’t.

Agatha presses her lips together and stares into the empty dirt in front of her. “Now what?” she whispers.  “Your girl saved herself, and now she’s gone. Left me here.  I don’t know what you want from me—”

“Hey.”

Agatha startles as someone she hadn’t noticed knocks into her – and that’s a shock in itself, that she hadn’t noticed the other person’s approach, that she’d been so stuck on herself that someone could get this close without her so much as feeling the vibrations of their frustrating thoughts – and she shuffles away, stares up, sees none other than Ralph standing next to her.  She blinks up at him.  “What do you want?”

“Nothing.”  Ralph holds his hands up in a defensive position and steps back from her, adding to the distance between them.  “You just seemed, uh, I don’t know.”  He has glasses now.  Thick GI glasses, thick and black and oddly adorable.  But in the same way that puppies are adorable, not actually cute or anything like that.  He’s too much of a boy.  He blinks behind the glasses, pulls them off, wipes them clean with the corner of his shirt, and puts them back on.  “Lost.”

Well, that’s more true than Agatha would like to admit.  “Why do you care, hon?” she asks.  “I hexed you for quite a few days there.  You should hate me.”

Ralph chuckles.  “Way I hear it, if it weren’t you, it would’ve been the other missus, and she brought nightmares.”  He shudders.  “Got enough of those on my own without having to know hers, too, you know? Way I see it, you did me a favor.”  On a second thought, he reaches up, rubs the back of his neck where a bruise is just beginning to appear.  “Mostly.”

“That’s a funny way of looking at it.”

“I guess.”  Ralph looks her over, and his brows knit together.  “Surprised you didn’t leave with that other witch.  As I remember it, the two of you were pretty—”

“Don’t.”  Agatha shoots him a look.  Scans him for a few seconds.  One brow raises.  “How would you even know what we were like, dear?  As I recall, you weren’t around the two of us at the same time.”

Ralph shrugs.  “Just a feeling.”  He glances over to his house – to the place where she had lived for the past several….  Well, she doesn’t know how long it’s been, so she can’t say how long she was living there.  “Do you, uh.” He winces and then turns back to her. “You’re not planning on moving in again, are you?  You weren’t a horrible roommate, but I, uh.” He rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. “I’d rather not have to worry about being spelled or—”

“I’m not going to hex you again, dear.”  Agatha sighs.  She reaches down to shove her hands in her pockets only to find that the black slacks Wanda’s attempted to curse Agnes into wearing are the sort with the fake pockets. Her teeth grind against each other. “I don’t really have a use for you anymore.”

“Well, that’s a right shame,” Ralph says, glancing up at the sky, able to shove his hands in his very real pockets.  “I kind of enjoyed having that super speed.  Could use having it again.”

Agatha’s brow raises again.  “Even if it’s not fully under your control?”

Ralph gives a half-hearted shrug.  “I mean, you could hex me into having it and not, uh, all that control stuff, right?”  He tries to meet her eyes with a boyish smile, and if she didn’t know better, Agatha would think it was an attempt at something more.  But, no, he’s just giving her a grin and hopeful eyes, and even now, his expression is faltering, falling.  “Nah, don’t worry about it,” he says before she can answer, placing a hand on her shoulder as easy as anything.  “I’d need goggles or something.  Besides, not sure I want to get roped into all that superhero stuff. Just got out, you know?  And they’d find a way to rope me back in.”

They never found a way to rope me in, Agatha thinks but does not say, and she thinks of Cian, and her fingers clench instinctively.  Magic swirls around her, through her, and in her, comforting, assuring. Still, her teeth grind against each other; still, she forces that feeling down.  Again, she repeats, “What do you want, dear?  Don’t tell me you stopped here to chat with a witch for the lulz.”  She shrugs her shoulder out from under his touch and glances up just enough to meet his eyes through his thick lenses.  “I’m not going to hex you – good or evil – and I’m not moving in with you.  So.  What do you want?”

“Are you planning to stay?”  Ralph holds her gaze with all the intensity of someone who knows he’s out of his league but has the assurance that he won’t be cursed for having courage and questioning the person with greater power.  “In…in Westview, I mean.”  His gaze drops as his words falter, and he rubs the back of his neck again.  “Are you staying?”

Agatha stares at the boy, at his awkward stance, one hand still in his back pocket and the other on the back of his neck, half-hunched over just to avoid her eyes.  “Wanda left me here for a reason, hon—”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything.”  Ralph’s dark gaze flicks up to meet hers again, briefly, and then fades away again, examining the empty space where the Maximoff household once was.  “You don’t have to stay here for her.  It’s not like she’s ever gonna come back for you.  You could just leave.”

                   “If I do, I know where to find you.”

Something in the center of Agatha clenches just as much as her fingers did at the thought of Cian – more, if she’s honest with herself – that if lingering in the back of her head, reverberating with the knowledge that Ralph is absolutely right.  She could leave.  It would serve Wanda right, for leaving her here, for constantly overdoing things with her spells and not checking to make sure they did what she wanted with no side-effects whatsoever, for refusing to be subtle.  For refusing to learn anything about magic, about what it likes, about what it wants, about what it does. It would serve her right, to come back and find that Agatha had broken free of her spell (this isn’t the case; the spell never landed; but Wanda wouldn’t understand that) and disappeared entirely.

Except….

Agatha’s left hand curls, twists, calls magic to thread through her fingers the way someone else might pull a coin, back and forth and back and forth. She takes a deep breath in. (Ralph’s eyes focus on the thin strings of ebony-tinted violet, wide but unafraid.)  “I’ll give her a chance to change her mind, hon,” she murmurs, twisting her hand once more, fingers tightening into a fist around the magic that dissipates as soon as it notices the constraint.  “You never know.”

Ralph shrugs, shoves his hand back into his other pocket, and scuffs his shoe along the ground.  “You should stay in the other house.”

“What other—”

“The one on the other side.”  Ralph tilts his head to the left, to the house that had been Dottie’s, when Wanda ran Westview.  “No one lives there, and if she ever comes back looking—”

“She’ll come here,” Agatha completes for him, near breathless.  She looks up at him.  “Smart move, brother.”

Ralph shrugs again and doesn’t meet her eyes.  “Just a thought.”  He almost grins.  “Didn’t survive the past decade without picking up a few things, even if I am a little hard-headed.”  He knocks his knuckles against his head and chuckles lightly.

“We’re all a little hard-headed anymore, hon.”  Agatha leans up on her tiptoes and kisses his cheek. “Thank you.” Then, noting his sudden blush, she comments, “I’m not interested, love.”

“I, uh, didn’t think you were.”

“Just clearing it up,” Agatha says as she turns away from Ralph and starts to the vacant house that will now become her own.  She waves at him.  “Good seeing you, neighbor.”

“Wait!” Ralph calls after her.  “What do I call you?”

The question honestly shouldn’t cause Agatha to pause.  There’s only one answer that would be right to give.  And yet, still, she stops, hesitates just in front of the door of the abandoned house that she is now about to inhabit, and, as she tucks her fingers into magic, subtly indicating that it should unlock the door for her, considers.  Not that there’s anything to consider.  She doesn’t look up, just focuses on the doorknob, presses her fingers gently against it, turns, and nearly smiles.  “Agnes,” she says, voice soft, as soft as she can, but making sure that the word travels across the threads of magic in and around and through everything straight into Ralph’s ears.  “Call me Agnes.”

~

The thing about houses in suburbs such as the one where Vision bought his little plot of land is that most of their floorplans are nearly identical, other than being flipped one way or the other so that they look just slightly different from the house next to them, other than the decorations or styles or colors used on their exteriors to make them seem something other than exactly the same.  If Wanda had played happy housewife in the house that was meant to be built here, she likely would have found herself in a house copy-and-paste like Agnes’s – like Ralph’s – or like Dottie’s (Sarah’s), if she’d ever gone inside it.  But Wanda’s imagination built her house the way she wanted it, not as the foundation implied it should be, and while Agatha’s imagination – and her subtle casting sending quivers along magic’s design – could do the same with the house she now inhabited, she had little desire to waste her time doing so.

It’s a house.  Sure, it looks like the other houses, but it’s not somewhere she’s planning on staying forever, so what’s the point in forcing it to look nice?  Besides, Agatha has lived in so many different kinds of houses throughout the centuries that she doesn’t really care about how this one is structured, so long as the foundation is good (it is) and she doesn’t have to worry about it falling in on her (she doesn’t).  It just needs to do what she needs it to do.

Inside, the house looks nearly dilapidated.  Dust covers the floor, the windowsills, the mantle above the fireplace; swirls in the air wherever she steps, dancing with magic as it pushes out before her; shadows the places her footprints left behind.  Sure, sure, Agatha could snap her fingers and convince magic to clean this place out for her, but while she’s often been one to avoid hard work when she can, she rarely forces magic to do it for her.  There’s something normal about cleaning, something calming.

Now, yes, she does need to transfigure a broom out of a speck of dust, but that’s not so bad.  Magic appreciates when Agatha does things herself.

At least, Agatha likes to think it does.

(Magic couldn’t care in the slightest one way or the other.  It simply is.  That’s what Agatha knows, what she’s been taught, what she’s read in a hundred thousand books on the subject – including the Darkhold, which is how she equally knows that assumption is wrong.  The Darkhold teaches magic in a way that it should be forced into submission, torn and ripped from one place to another, shredded apart so that one can use it to walk in places where they were never meant to be.

In short, the Darkhold lies.

Agatha has known magic for hundreds of years, has studied it out, has breathed it in and lived with it as a constant companion, has stroked its threads for comfort on her most terrifying times, has felt its desperation when her own nearly destroyed her, when it summoned a sorcerer who couldn’t even summon it to bring her back.  It pretends not to care, but it does, on some level.  She knows this from experience.

That doesn’t mean she can predict it one way or the other.)

Agatha shifts her clothes into something more fitting a cleaning woman, untying the threads of Wanda’s magic maintaining the Agnes illusion and retying them in different, better, stronger ways.  She’d always liked those old World War II propaganda posters – Rosie the Riveter in her denim and handkerchief – and she changes her outfit into something closer to that, only in the softest shade of lavender with a violet and ebony handkerchief. Purple is her theme color, after all, so why not maintain her theme, even if she’s the only one to see it. For all that she’s a witch with a broom, she’d never actually ridden one of the things, but holding one, she must seem the perfect image of a witch to someone who didn’t know any better.

But sweeping – and dusting – and checking the pipes (and fixing the leaks that she finds) – and catching spiders in her bare hands before setting them gently outside – takes a great deal of time.  And all of that time, Agatha spends thinking.

Right now, Agatha is certain of two things – three, if she lets herself consider it:

     1) Wanda Maximoff is the long-awaited Scarlet Witch.      2) Magic brought her – Agatha Harkness – here to save her.      3) She, Agatha Harkness, has developed feelings for the Scarlet Witch.

And a fourth to all of that – right now, there is no one in the world who hates her so much as Wanda Maximoff.

Which really puts a damper on that last one, not that Agatha is thinking about that.  To be honest, it kind of puts a damper on the second one, too, because if magic insisted on bringing them together, it doesn’t quite matter if Wanda hates her or not, it will bring them together again. That’s the thing about magic – no matter how powerful (or not) its users might be, magic is more powerful than them all, and it does what it wants with whoever it wants.

Even Wanda Maximoff.

Even the Scarlet Witch.

And – to be fair – it’s that second one that most wants to draw Agatha’s focus, demands to be considered, but before she can even get to that, she has to address the first one.  Because the thing of it is this – Wanda isn’t the only person who could have been the Scarlet Witch.  She’s just the first person to accept the title and step into the role.

Agatha pauses in front of the fireplace after sweeping out soot and ash, cheeks tinted with darkness like blush, and considers, not for the first time, that she hadn’t known what she’d been refusing.  Her mother and her first coven mentioned the Scarlet Witch in hushed, terrified tones on the odd occasion, but they’d never told her what the term meant.  She wasn’t old enough – nothing about station because even the lowest witches in the hierarchy knew the title, if they were past a certain age – and when Cian brought her with them to the London Sanctum, they’d whispered it about her, accusing her of being something she did not know or understand.  Perhaps that was the way of it, that a witch could only accept and ascend with the bare minimum of knowledge, that once they knew enough to understand the weight of what they were taking on, magic ripped it away from them entirely.

She’d had a chance, once, to be magic’s favorite.

She hadn’t known.

That’s the real difference between Agatha and Wanda, wasn’t it?  That Agatha chose fear and Wanda chose acceptance.

Agatha rubs her nose with the back of her hand and doesn’t notice how she blackens it.

It isn’t as though Agatha hadn’t wanted to reclaim the title later, but the thing of it was that she’d already denied it.  Maybe that was why magic really brought her here, not to save Wanda, but to show her what would come of someone who accepted the role of the Scarlet Witch.  Maybe that’s why it let Wanda shield her so completely, why it took her desire and protected Agatha, so that she would always be aware, always know, and…and what?

Sometimes it feels like magic is a noose about her throat, manacles about her wrists and ankles, a knife through her back.

She shouldn’t even be alive, and yet magic refuses to let her die.

Agatha still hasn’t determined if that is a good thing or a bad one.

If Agatha hadn’t been here, Wanda – most likely – would have died.  She knows that.  The magic Wanda tried to wrap around her little finger would have snapped it clean off, would have overwhelmed her just as those darling twins of hers drew their first not newborn breaths, would have consumed her alive while she tried to maintain spells too broken to maintain themselves without drawing their power from her.  She knows that.

The question is why magic would have wanted to draw Agatha here in the first place, why magic should care so much for this war-torn child as to fill her with this power that she can’t control, and on which no one – no one – seems to care to train her.  Why magic chose someone as ignorant as Wanda Maximoff to channel it at its greatest, why it would let her take a title she didn’t deserve.

As if anyone deserved any gifts that magic deigned to give them.

The Infinity Stone was a red herring.  It only gave Wanda a vision (hah!) of the future, of what would be possible for her if she survived long enough to grasp it.  The magic was always there, waiting for her to reach out for it again, but Wanda’d forgotten what she’d done as a child and hadn’t been in dire enough straits to need to click into that power as she had when she was younger.  But that child casting a hex without thinking, without words, without runes or incantations – Wanda had always had the potential to become the Scarlet Witch.  She just hadn’t known what it was or what she was.

And as soon as Wanda accepted one, she accepted the other, as though they were both one and the same thing.

And Agatha had pushed her into that, into accepting something that Agatha wanted most for herself.  Probably not the best of her ideas.  But if this was who magic wanted to choose – and if this was who magic had sent her to help choose – then….

Agatha takes a deep breath in, wipes the sweat from her brow, and stands in the empty living room.  It looks better.  Much better.  She rests her wrist on her hip, rag dangling from her fingertips, and nearly smiles.  Almost time to add her own personal flare.

Almost.

~

There are – and always have been – and always will be things that Agatha does not understand.  She knows that.  She accepts that.  She just regrets that for all she loves magic, it doesn’t reveal itself to her more completely.  It isn’t that she’s not content; she is.  But she’s not satisfied either, and that’s harder to grapple with.

Agatha has lived a long time.  Seen a lot of things.  Learned a lot of things – as much as she can – and yet…unsatisfied.  She feels it as certain as she feels magic coursing through her veins.  When she was younger, she was confused and thought that meant magic was not satisfied with her, but as she got older, as she did everything she could to try and appease magic enough that it wasn’t dissatisfied with her anymore, she realized it wasn’t magic at all.  It was her.

What is so wrong with her that she could have escaped the punishment of her coven, that she could have been kept alive by a sorcerer who didn’t know well enough to let her die, that she could have her life lengthened by magic itself, that she could have all of this time to study and fall deeper in love with what she has always loved – and still be unsatisfied?  What else does she want?  Magic even allowed her to see – and have a hand in – the ascension of the woman it most infused with its power!  What more could she ask for?

Perhaps she simply doesn’t want to be alone.

~

It is as Agatha sets the last throw pillow into place on her bed – who is she kidding, Agatha doesn’t believe in throw pillows, but she does believe in having as many pillows as she wants available in case she wants something softer for her back, on the days where she lessens the sorcery to use it for something else (very rarely, but it still happens, on occasion) – that she hears the doorbell ring.  She straightens up, presses her hands into the small of her back, and then makes her way down the stairs to the front door.  Her eyes widen as she looks through the peephole, and her brows raise as she opens the door.  She knows the name of the spindly blonde woman standing in front of her – knows the name Wanda gave her (Dottie) and knows her real name (Sarah) – but she doesn’t know why she should be standing there in the first place.

“Ralph told me I could find you here,” Sarah says after a few moments of silence.  She doesn’t smile; if anything, she appear so nervous that she could be covered with sweat without it looking out of place.  Her hands wring together in front of her.  “He said you were…you were staying?  Here?  With us?”

Agatha paints on her best Agnes smile and gives a little nod.  “Sure thing, hon.  Don’t know what I’d do without Westview!”  She forces her eyes to light up, which isn’t hard, given how comforted she is with what she has done inside her new house.  “Can I help you with something?”

Sarah’s dark eyes widen the smallest bit, and on an instinct, she reaches out, places a hand on Agatha’s, and whispers in a hush, “I saw what Wanda did to you.  I’ve been there.  If there’s anything I can do to—”

“You don’t need to worry about me, dear.”  Agatha turns her hand under Sarah’s and bids the smallest thread of violet magic to course through the fingers of her other hand.  “I’m very well protected.”  She glances up again and meets Sarah’s eyes.

“Oh.”  Sarah’s eyes narrow, but she doesn’t rip her hand away.  “If that’s…if that’s true, then why stay here with us?  Don’t you want to leave?”

Agatha chuckles.  “No, dear, I don’t want to leave.”  Her head tilts to the side in a way not quite like her but quite like the other witch who left them all behind.  “Maybe I want to stay and see how everything is rebuilt.”

Sarah stares at her curiously.  Then her eyes widen, and she steps back, taking her hand from Agatha’s but without any malice.  “Oh, forgive me, I completely forgot!”  She holds her hand out again in the most oddly formal gesture, given the circumstances, and says, “I’m Sarah. Sarah Proctor.  It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, given the circumstances.”

Something in Agatha sharpens at Sarah’s phrasing, but then she settles comfortably and takes Sarah’s hand in her own.  “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, too, dear.”  She hesitates, then says, “I think it would be best if you continued to call me Agnes.  Just in case Wanda ever gets wind of—”

“Oh, of course, of course!”  Sarah glances over her shoulder as though Wanda could show up at any moment.  Then she sighs and turns back, gives Agatha a careful examination, and then says, “Say, would you like to come over for dinner? It would be nice to know you apart from all of that—”  She waves one hand in the air, fingers waggling.

Agatha’s first instinct is to say no.  She doesn’t need to spend time with other people, especially if she leaves, as she eventually will do.  She’s never been particularly good at staying in one place for very long; even her apartment next door to the New York Sanctum was empty as often as it was occupied, despite Cian living at the sanctum for over a hundred years.  If they hadn’t been able to keep her pinned down in one place, to get her to stay, then this suburban housewife and her family probably wouldn’t either.

But that doesn’t mean she can’t enjoy her time while she’s here.

So despite her instincts, Agatha forces herself to settle.  One corner of her lips curves upwards, and she says, “Why, sure, hon.  That would be swell!”  She pats Sarah’s arm, perhaps more familiar than they should be, but after everything, there’s a commonality there.  They’d lived through the Hex.  That had to count for something.  “Just let me get cleaned up, and I’ll be right over!”

Sarah eases herself into a comfortable smile.  “Why don’t I wait here?” she asks.  “Wanda had me here for the longest time; I don’t want you to get lost trying to find me.”

Without hesitation, Agatha holds her door open wide and gestures with one arm. “Wait inside a spell, dear.  I wouldn’t want to cause anything else to happen to you, not so soon after…well.”  Her smile fades the slightest bit.  “We don’t have to talk about that.”

And – unsurprisingly – they don’t.

#bandit fic #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #mcu #wandavision #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic V - Time Unmeasured

Chapter Summary: Wanda didn’t know what she was doing.  It seems impossible – how could a witch, any witch, cast spells of such complicated magnitude and not know they’d done it, not know their effects, not realize—

Well, and that’s the thing of it, too, isn’t it?  Something within Wanda had realized.  The realization – the fear of what she might be possibly doing to Agnes – made her check.  Made her make sure.  Which suggests that if Agatha hadn’t been here at all, hadn’t allowed the little witch to place her hands on the small of her waist, hadn’t leaned in to her lack of subtlety, Wanda would never have noticed at all.  And, in truth, she still hasn’t fully realized the extent of what she’s doing.  She knew she might be hurting Agnes, and that’s…that’s it.

This isn’t how magic works.

Nothing. adds. up.

This isn’t magic, this is wish fulfillment, and magic doesn’t give anyone wish fulfillment; it certainly never has for Agatha, not in the centuries she’s spent dedicated to it, checking every cost and every spell before casting it, and when she used magic she didn’t know, it didn’t come with a world full of everything she ever wanted but with a world devoid of it.

It isn’t—

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff Chapter Rating: M for sexual content Fic Rating: M for dark themes and sexual content

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

She doesn’t want to stop kissing Wanda’s skin.

It’s a small thing, really, not entirely divorced from the way magic ripples through her, aftershocks of what they have done quivering, throbbing through her, and yet still vibrating against Agatha’s lips as they press against the younger witch’s skin.  But it’s more than that: you see, Agatha knows a thing or two about scars and the insecurity of having them, of having other people see them, and she kisses gentle along each that she finds.

(She could never have kept Wanda’s fingers from brushing against her own, not with the intimacy of the past several moments, but she could have kept her from seeing them, could have kept the shirt on the entire time, could have kept the lights out, could have kept herself hidden, other than the sharp hisses of pain whenever she just touched them.  Wanda has not kissed her scars, has not even tried, but this fact does not bother her.  She’d rather Wanda didn’t touch them at all.)

Wanda laughs when Agatha’s lips find the stretchmarks newly etched into her skin, and her laughter makes her belly shake, and the shaking causes Agatha to grin against one mark before kissing another again.  Then she curves upwards, brushes her lips along the curves of Wanda’s ribs, and Wanda laughs again, twists beneath her.  “Stop!”

Agatha does as requested and scoots up, crosses her arms on Wanda’s stomach, and rests her chin atop them.  “You’re ticklish.”  A wry grin spreads across her lips.

“No—”

But before Wanda can even finish speaking, Agatha traces her fingertips along her skin, that barest sort of touch that tickles more than any wiggling fingers can, and when Wanda starts to writhe beneath her, she begins to kiss around her bellybutton, edging her way up past the curve of her breasts, fingers skimming along her ribs to her hips so that she can angle herself up, kiss further up Wanda’s neck, and then catch her lips just as she gasps.  Wanda’s fingers interlace with hers and drag her hand back to her waist as she curves into her; Agatha circles her thumb on her skin, and Wanda gasps again against her lips.

I love you.

The thought flickers in and out of her mind so quickly that Agatha could be convinced that she never thought it at all, but she won’t lie to herself like that. It means nothing.  Her love is cheap, provided she isn’t speaking of magic itself, and the thought has often flickered through her mind with other, equally lesser people – women, men, both and neither together; she stopped being particularly picky sometime in the 17th century.  There is always something about someone else to love; it comes to no surprise that she should think it now, with Wanda.

“Agnes?” Wanda whispers the name against her lips, brushes her nose against hers, wraps one leg around hers.  “Don’t stop.”  She shifts, nibbles on her earlobe.  “I don’t want you to stop.”  Her lips find the sensitive skin just next to her ear, and she draws it between her teeth, starts to suck on it gently.

Agatha’s eyes flutter closed.  She lets out a low moan as Wanda sucks harder, as Wanda’s fingers push through her hair, as her lips trail down Agatha’s neck along the same path Agatha’s just traced up hers.  Wanda squeezes her hand before releasing it, before placing her other hand on Agatha’s hip and pressing, gently guiding her to twist, to shift, so that when Wanda bites on her collarbone, she lies atop Agatha, not the other way around.

“Wanda, hon—” Agatha starts to say, a hiss seeping through her lips as she presses too hard against her back, as she shifts to relieve it. “Don’t—”  She hesitates, then strokes her forefinger gentle up and down Wanda’s spine.  “Please, dear.”  Her hand curls at the nape of Wanda’s neck and gently guides her up.  Then she locks eyes with her, catches the gentle curve of Wanda’s lips, and offers her a small smile of her own.  “Please.”

At her words, Wanda stops, collapses almost atop her, resting her head on her chest.  She runs one finger in circles on Agatha’s skin.  “I just want to stay like this,” she murmurs, unable to lift her eyes. “That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? To stay here, like this, with you?”

There is no longer any script, so Agatha cannot guess at the answer that Wanda truly desires.  Left to her own devices, she would assume the little witch wants her to say no, it wouldn’t be so bad, and that they can stay like this for as long as she needs. That would be the easiest answer to give.

But that isn’t what she says.

“Is that truly what you want, dear?” Agatha asks, still slowly stroking her finger up and down Wanda’s spine.  “No husband, no kids, just you and me and the whole wide world?”

Wanda doesn’t say anything at first, only curls closer against Agatha’s chest.  She wraps her arms around her waist, where they’re always meant to be, and draws herself tighter against her.  “I don’t know,” she whispers finally, so soft that Agatha isn’t sure she’s heard her at all. “I don’t know what I want.”  Her brow furrows.  “That’s what makes everything so hard.”  She licks her lips, presses them together, and then asks, glancing up at Agatha, “What do you want, Agnes?”

For a moment, Agatha is silent because, for once, that near constant thrum of I want you that she’s found lingers even without Wanda’s casting has grown quiet.  She can examine that thought in the light of truly having Wanda – in one form, anyway, although the little witch herself has suggested in so many words that she could have her in others as well – and finds that desire hasn’t changed, hasn’t lessened by being appeased.

There’s no taming this—

She’s not thinking about that, no matter how true it might be.

If anything, Agatha needs to compare that desire with the reason she came here in the first place – to figure out how Wanda cast these spells, how she is maintaining them, how she didn’t immediately crumple under the immense pressure of it all – combined, now, with the question of how Wanda could craft such an intricate protection spell as the one she cast over Agatha without every putting words to it.  She wants to know the spells used and how they are used in conjunction so that she can craft them herself; she can stare at the tapestry of them woven together as much as she wants, but that doesn’t mean she has the words – the incantations – to recreate them.  Even if she did, what Wanda has done is so broken that she can’t mimic it precisely.  No, she would have to go through each spell and search it for what the other witch did wrong so that she can fix it—

“I want to go home,” Agatha says finally, as she strokes idly through Wanda’s hair.  “I want to go home, and I want to take you with me, dear.”  One corner of her lips crooks upward as she glances, near fond, down at the little witch.  “If that wouldn’t bother you too much.”

Wanda glances up, meets Agatha’s eyes, and then relaxes, smiles.  “That sounds nice.”  But almost as soon as the words pass through her lips, her brow furrows, and she tenses up again.  “But I can’t…I can’t do that.”  She tucks strands of hair back behind her ear, dropping her gaze.  “I could let you out, though,” she murmurs.  “I could…I could do that.  If you really want to leave.”

As she speaks, Agatha bends down and kisses her forehead, silencing her. When Wanda glances up, she meets her eyes, lets her search hers.  “I’m staying right here, hon.  I’m not going anywhere.”

~

Wanda traces careful between the scars lining Agatha’s back, and Agatha does her best not to flinch when she draws too close to nerves that have been raw for over three hundred years, severed by punishments that were nothing but common at the time and which didn’t always have the same startling effect they had on her, all thick and ragged and debilitating.  The minor spells help; they don’t help much.  More like a band-aid to ebb a staunchly bleeding wound, as opposed to the sorcery that would make it as though they are not there at all.  But she can’t – won’t – ask Wanda to stop running her fingers up and down her back, not when she’s being so intentional to not touch the scars at all.  She’s making an effort, and in the future – with the spells intact – it won’t matter at all.

“Thank you, dear,” Agatha murmurs anyway, curving just enough to kiss Wanda’s cheek, “for being gentle with me.”

At her words, Wanda pauses, fingers stilling at a particularly uncomfortable spot, though Agatha refuses to address it, to shift beneath the discomfort. “Was I?” she asks, and one finger moves to run along her collarbone and just under it, where bruised bite marks remain.

“Gentle as a kitten.”

This time, when Agatha tries to meet her eyes, Wanda averts her gaze, brow furrowing, lips pursing together.  Agatha follows her dropped gaze to the wedding ring still shining bright around her finger.  “Hon—”

“I…I think I’m going to make some tea.”  Wanda shifts away from Agatha but doesn’t move far, stopping herself just on the edge of the mattress.  Her ankles cross together, and the sheets crumple under her clenched hands.  “Do you want anything?”

It’s an instinct, the purest form of it, when Agatha curls against her again and wraps her arms gentle around the small of Wanda’s waist.  “It’s okay, hon,” she says.  “You don’t have to—”

“Do you want anything?” Wanda repeats, voice hushed through gritted teeth.  Her knuckles grow white.

It would be improper to reply with you, although the thought flicker brief through Agatha’s mind before being squashed.  Instead, she curves up, kisses the crest of Wanda’s left shoulder blade, and murmurs, “I’ll take whatever you’re having, dear.”

“Okay.”

The sheets drop from around Wanda as she stands, and Agatha’s eyes linger on the elegant slope of her spine, on the thin whispering of white lines here and there, on the scars she barely felt and has yet to kiss.  She aches to step closer and draw the girl back into her arms, to hold her still, here, where she can be comforted.  But she doesn’t do that, and when Wanda picks up her shirt off the floor and mentions how it’s still warm, she says, easy as anything, “Put it on, dear.  You’re shivering.”

                    Would you light my candle?

Wanda tugs the shirt over her head and wraps her arms around herself.  From here, Agatha can finally read the top line about the wicked witch of the west, and she would roll her eyes at the blatant prodding magic made, as always, dropping signs and notes that should make things obvious to anyone who pays attention, except that no one pays attention to the signs it leaves behind, and if she rolls her eyes now, Wanda will think it’s about her, when it’s not.

Mostly.

“Thank you,” Wanda says with a final shiver.  She rubs her arms, and the glint of her wedding ring catches fire in the bald light.  “I’ll, um. I’ll be right back.”

Agatha stares after her, nods, and then says, “I’ll be right here, doll. Waiting for your return.”

Once Wanda is gone, though, Agatha stretches back on her bed, mussing her hair, and stares up at the ceiling.  Out of habit or instinct or some combination thereof, she reaches out for the threads of magic that run through everything; checks in on the video feeds and finds them full of nothing but static, which should make her smile but only draws her concern; and then strokes one finger along what magic allows her to touch, only smiling when it quivers beneath her.  What was that, hm? she asks, as if it would ever deign to answer her.  What was that?

Magic doesn’t answer.  It never does, not in so many words.  If her heart was full of anger, it would attempt to soothe, and if she was panicking, it would attempt to calm, and if she was sad, it would attempt to comfort, but her emotions are not so straightforward right now.  She’s content, and there’s no way of magic to respond, other than to curl up, safe, like a kitten, just on the center of her chest, warm and purring, as she continues to stroke its unmarred back.

~

For all intents and purposes, this is how Agatha should stay while Wanda makes tea, or she should use this free time separated from her to place the sorcerous spells back at their full strength so that her scars no longer hurt her, but she does neither of these things.  The spells take longer to prepare than the time spent on making tea, first of all, and the other is—

Well.  Wanda takes longer to make tea than she should, and eventually, curious as she always is, Agatha creeps out of bed, wrapped in her sheets, and makes her way to the stairwell.  From the top of the stairs, she can hear the silence spiked through with the sound of rushing water.  One brow raises.  It takes until she is just outside the kitchen before she catches sight of Wanda inside, standing in front of the sink, calmly washing her dishes.  Now both brows shoot up, but she doesn’t say anything.  Just stares for a few moments and then just as quietly makes her way back upstairs.

Agatha collapses back onto the bed, sheets splayed out around her, and curls a ragged wave of hair around one finger as she considers what she’s learned and its implications.

Wanda didn’t know what she was doing.  It seems impossible – how could a witch, any witch, cast spells of such complicated magnitude and not know they’d done it, not know their effects, not realize—

Well, and that’s the thing of it, too, isn’t it?  Something within Wanda had realized.  The realization – the fear of what she might be possibly doing to Agnes – made her check.  Made her make sure.  Which suggests that if Agatha hadn’t been here at all, hadn’t allowed the little witch to place her hands on the small of her waist, hadn’t leaned in to her lack of subtlety, Wanda would never have noticed at all.  And, in truth, she still hasn’t fully realized the extent of what she’s doing.  She knew she might be hurting Agnes, and that’s…that’s it.

This isn’t how magic works.

Nothing. adds. up.

This isn’t magic, this is wish fulfillment, and magic doesn’t give anyone wish fulfillment; it certainly never has for Agatha, not in the centuries she’s spent dedicated to it, checking every cost and every spell before casting it, and when she used magic she didn’t know, it didn’t come with a world full of everything she ever wanted but with a world devoid of it.

It isn’t—

Wanda creeps inside the door to her room, and Agatha stares at her, and she feels something within her shift.  Her eyes graze the words she’d worn only a few hours before – I’m the wicked witch of everything – and she wonders if that message was really meant for Wanda or if it was meant for her.  She glances at the mug held warm between Wanda’s hands as the little witch brings it to her lips and says, voice devoid of something but unsure what, “I believe that’s mine, angel.”

One of Wanda’s brows raises, and her lips curl with mischief.  “Why don’t you come and get it?”

~

After Wanda leaves, after Agatha is once again alone in the house that is not her home, she snaps her fingers like the sitcom witch she isn’t and conjures a soft, fluffy lavender robe to curve about herself as she walks back to the basement.  There are enough runes now scattered about the house that she doesn’t, strictly speaking, need to go to the basement, but she doesn’t feel anything compelling her to stay above ground.  A woman as ancient as her should be long dead and buried, after all, and the chill of her little dungeon soothes her. She crosses her legs beneath her as she sits on the mattress she’s kept in the very center of her most easily protected space, stares up at the thin runes etched like chicken scratch around its perimeter, takes a sip of the tea she’d rewarmed with the touch of her hand, and sighs.

                   The Scarlet Witch is not born; she is forged.                    She has no coven, no need for incantation.                    Her power exceeds that of the Sorcerer Supreme.                    She can rewrite reality as she chooses.                    It is her destiny to destroy the world.

Or rule it.

When she was younger, Agatha spent many years with the Masters of the Mystic Arts – with Cian, before their passage – and while the Darkhold was the primary source for all things Scarlet Witch, the being was mentioned in multiple other texts as well.  The Darkhold liked to focus on the negative aspects of her power simply because it liked to deal with the negative aspects of everything; even now, it calls to her to pick it up, to reread the text about the legendary witch herself instead of drawing on her own memory, and as it calls, her stained fingers ache with deadened sensation to brush against its pages once more.

Ironically enough, resisting the siren’s call of the Darkhold feels quite like resisting doing what Wanda wants her to do.  But it isn’t the same, not really, not quite.  Darkness belies the Darkhold’s call; nothing like that underlies Wanda’s.  Hers is a singular, insistent want, a thrumming desire, and fulfilling it – being with Wanda – brings the thrum of magic along her veins.  Quite the opposite of the Darkhold, actually.

Which returns to the other texts that discussed the Scarlet Witch, the ones that mentioned a being infused with magic itself, able to control it without the slightest thought, a being to whom magic submitted itself, who was not magic but was so filled to the brim with it that—

Agatha Harkness sits on her mattress, and she remember her discussions with her old Master, and she glances at the runes barely readable above her, glances at the mattress beneath her, stretches her arms over her head, and mutters to herself, “Well, love, if this is why I’m here, then we have got work to do.”

#bandit fic #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #mcu #wandavision #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff

[aparticularbandit]

The Thrall of Magic IV - 1990′s

Chapter Summary: Agatha stretches her left hand up until the tip of her middle finger – the longest of them – just touches the globe of a spell.  It ripples like a steadily beating heart, pulsing in time with the twisting of a lighthouse, a signal in the darkness, a beacon, calling, calling, calling.  The ship is lost in the calm at the eye of the storm, believing it will be safe there so long as it stays put, but eventually the storm will find and desiccate it, will dash it against the rocks before it even catches a glimpse of the light.

But to Agatha, to one who lives and breathes magic, to the woman who fell in love with it centuries before Wanda Maximoff was even a glimmer in her parents’ eyes, the thrumming stills in her veins, calming her still rapidly beating heart.

Magic didn’t bring her here for her; it brought her here for her.

Always the most faithful of its servants, even if never the most loved.  Not good enough for her mother, and not good enough for her lover either.  And yet, she is the one who is still here.

Agatha takes a deep breath in and lets herself fall.

In the flickering moments of darkness, she looks like a shooting star.

companion piece to Kisses Through The Decades

Agatha Harkness/Wanda Maximoff Chapter Rating: T Fic Rating: M for dark themes and sexual content

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

Each episode of WandaVision takes place over an indistinct matter of time.  Some episodes cover a single day, while other episodes cover weeks, and on the odd occasion, Wanda downloads things that happened before into the minds of every citizen in Westview, such that they don’t really have to live through weeks of backstory before getting to the scenes that she wants to play.

At least, this was the case before the twins showed up.

The twins resist Wanda’s magic, even as they are built and sustained by it. If she tries to skip a day, they notice; if she tries to change the day they are in to an entire other day, they notice.  Before their birth, Wanda could play fast and loose with dates and times, but now….

Now, if she wants it to be Halloween, Wanda has to speed-run through other days to get there, forcing weeks of time into what is properly something much shorter, just to get to the holiday special she most wants.  Not that any of those episodes are shown. They simply exist.

And Agnes does not exist within them.

Instead, Agatha curls up on the mattress she’d conjured into the basement, head pounding with the aftereffects of magic, and closes her eyes for an eternity that passes through weeks of show time as the boys adjust to the appearance of their “uncle”.  Every now and again, magic tugs on her, trying to direct her to the places in the script where Wanda calls for her, but Agatha ignores this, hiding away from them as completely as she can.

Wanda only stutters once, when the boys question why Agnes isn’t around nearly as often as she was before.  Her brow furrows in confusion, but she covers quickly enough.  “It’s your uncle, boys.  Agnes and Pietro don’t get along very well.  You’ll probably see her again later.”

Tragic, for all of this to happen just as Agnes gets officially added to the theme song – not just the glimpse of her in one scene or other interacting with Wanda, but standing with the boys with her name in the title and everything.  It says something about how Wanda views her in relation to everyone else, as does the gem-crusted naughty emblazoned across her ass.

As if all of that had been her—

Agatha wakes, presses her fingertips to bruised lips, and then closes her eyes again, fingers shoved into magic without caressing it first, so that she can scroll through the new feeds, sift through any changes in the spells cast, see through the eyes of the boy she’d sent waltzing into that lion’s den as a spy for the other side that should never have worked, except that Wanda….

Wanda doesn’t have a subtle bone in her body, and her insecurity in pursuing Agnes – in believing that Agnes would ever willingly choose her without a script to tell her to do so – communicates a much deeper insecurity about herself, one that Agatha takes advantage of solely because she doesn’t trust Wanda to be gentle with her any longer.  Not after—

Well.

Agatha hides safely in her basement while the boy does her bidding and waits for the sun to set and the world of Westview to fall into its brief slumber.

~

The sky inside the Hex shifts from shining sun to studded with stars in the space of a few moments so that Wanda can set a final scene while she tucks the twins into bed, while she curls up with her metallic synthezoid ghost of a being, and Agatha takes advantage of the spare moments while they slumber to slip from her stolen house and lift herself into the sky, as high as she can go before the top of the Hex begins to press down static against her wavy hair. Wavy now, because when the decade shifted, so did her hair, and all that natural corkscrew frizz disappeared to waves and – honestly, if she played into what Wanda wanted more, her hair would be straight because that fits the style of the year better.

But Agatha Harkness isn’t playing into what Wanda wants anymore.  She’s been too distracted by that, too distracted by a woman who can’t put anything into words, too distracted by thinking she could convince another witch – even a not-so-subtle dinosaur child like Wanda Maximoff – to spill her secrets. A good witch doesn’t share that sort of thing; she’s been misguided if she thought Wanda was even remotely a good witch.

Agatha scans the pixelated edges of the Hex – not edges, this thing is a snowglobe, and they’re all just the picturesque setting that Wanda picks up and shakes to cover with falling snow – and finds them to be as empty as the Maximoff household is.

No runes.

Not even the most basic of protection spells.

Nothing to keep Wanda’s fragile mind from getting overwhelmed with the magic she’s running in the background, to keep the mental glitches and shifting eyes from occurring, to protect her if – when? – if she ever decides to let this creation of hers fall.

That’s the problem with self-taught magic: most witches only think of the things it can do for them and never realize the implicit dangers of stretching a rubber band until it snaps.  And what happens when magic on this level snaps?  Agatha wouldn’t need to take Wanda’s magic; magic itself will tear itself from her and whip back on her without a second thought.

No runes.

No protection spells.

Nothing.

Agatha stretches her left hand up until the tip of her middle finger – the longest of them – just touches the globe of a spell.  It ripples like a steadily beating heart, pulsing in time with the twisting of a lighthouse, a signal in the darkness, a beacon, calling, calling, calling.  The ship is lost in the calm at the eye of the storm, believing it will be safe there so long as it stays put, but eventually the storm will find and desiccate it, will dash it against the rocks before it even catches a glimpse of the light.

But to Agatha, to one who lives and breathes magic, to the woman who fell in love with it centuries before Wanda Maximoff was even a glimmer in her parents’ eyes, the thrumming stills in her veins, calming her still rapidly beating heart.

Magic didn’t bring her here for her; it brought her here for her.

Always the most faithful of its servants, even if never the most loved. Not good enough for her mother, and not good enough for her lover either.  And yet, she is the one who is still here.

Agatha takes a deep breath in and lets herself fall.

In the flickering moments of darkness, she looks like a shooting star.

~

The harvest moon rises, and the harvest moon wanes, and Wanda Maximoff decides that on Halloween – which is not truly Halloween anywhere else but in the hellscape she has created – the still conscious members of Westview (of which Ralph is not part, not that the little witch notices) must dress as their truest selves, in the superhero costumes they should have worn.  It’s as if she’s saying this is a moment when they can really, truly be themselves, when no one looking at them will care because everyone is dressed up in such a manner—

Agatha wraps herself in darkness like a cloak, sharpens it into a cone atop her head, and makes sure to drive off before the family Maximoff steps outside of their house, before the little witch who could considers that she’s still at her house, considers that her beloved Agnes might possibly want to join her happy little family on their first Halloween—

—particularly given that her husband is nowhere in sight.

Even driving, the show feed flickers through Agatha’s mind, keeping her updated on their goings on, and every now and again, she runs strings of magic beneath her thumbnail in a self-soothing gesture.  She hates herself for doing it.  But despite the betrayal of yesteryear (only days, it has only been days), magic acts as though nothing has changed – because it hasn’t.  It isn’t as though magic should owe anything to her.

When the ghost of a Vision finds Agatha in her car, when he reaches into her mind and touches nothing (but she pretends as though he has, crafts a careful illusion so that he thinks he has), when she speaks to him, Agatha tries her hardest to wake him up so that he can wake Wanda up – it might not be consciously, but at least subconsciously Wanda has to be hearing everything that this false creature of hers hears.  Consciously, Wanda’s preoccupied with the conversation she is having with that Fake Pietro – Fietro – Ralph – who speaks with the blunt sass that Agnes cannot, another harsher prodding for her to wake up because if she doesn’t soon, then magic is going to snap back and—

Agatha feels it, driving back to the house she’d stolen.

The stretching of magic near to its breaking point.

She suppresses a shudder.

~

Sitting in her basement, alone, Agatha scans through old feeds, replaying her scenes with the little witch, seeking the recordings that were spliced together for the different theme songs and stretching them out, and focusing on the moments where the witch is alone.  She seeks out the moments where her eyes flare scarlet – few and far between; even in their scenes, the moments where Agatha remembers the shift aren’t caught on camera, which either means she’s been seeing things (not likely) or Wanda has been covering her casting (nonsensical – it isn’t as though she needs to hide her actions from anyone, isn’t as though there’s another witch with their fingers in the magic feed, isn’t as though she’s aware Agatha is scanning them in the first place).  All of which leaves Agatha with more questions and no answers.

Who are the show feeds for?

Does Wanda know what she’s doing?

How is she doing all of this?

Her own experiences have shown Agatha part of the last answer – not in technical prowess, but in consequences – whatever spell Wanda cast draws entirely on her to keep it going.  She’s put the whole of herself into maintaining the spell; it draws on her, freezes her, takes more power than she should ever be willingly giving it.  It will kill her, eventually.

This, at least, Agatha can address.  Even the simplest of protection spells will save her when it all falls apart (and it will all fall apart; there are too many broken, twisted, unruly spells meshed together; at some point, the script will fail to run), so as long as she can convince Wanda to set one, she’ll be fine.  The question then is this: is Wanda worth saving?

It isn’t Agatha’s job to save every foolhardy witch who throws magic against the wall and plays around with whatever sticks.  She hasn’t been paid to come here; she wants to know the technical answer to how Wanda set this mess up; she didn’t come to babysit a witch who honestly should know better than to try something on this scale and who should never have been able to accomplish it in the first place without intricate knowledge of magic that Agatha has never seen.

But that’s the problem of the whole thing, isn’t it?  That if Wanda needed such an intricate knowledge of magic to pull this off, then she had to know exactly what she was doing and exactly how she was hurting each and every resident in Westview, had to know exactly what she’d been doing to Agatha when she’d tried to enforce that script onto her—

If Wanda knows all of that, if Wanda is continuing to intentionally subject each and every person here to this apparently not unimaginable torture, then no, she absolutely is not worth saving.

                   How’d you even do this?

                   I don’t know how I did it.  I only remember feeling                    completely alone.  Empty.  Just endless…nothingness.

Agatha stares at the feed.  It’s different than trying to see things through Fietro’s eyes; this is edited, cropped, exactly the way that Wanda intends for it to be seen.  Her expression isn’t any different, but staring at her….

Here, in the comfort of her basement, covered with her own protection spells (much more thorough than the simple basic one she’d learned as her first spell), away from Wanda’s insidious influence, Agatha almost – almost – believes her.

But not quite.

~

Agatha stands in her kitchen, waiting on a brewing pot of tea, when magic alerts her to the presence of the other witch crossing into her lawn.  It isn’t as though magic particularly cares for her, but it betrays its younger master when it starts shifting the house in which Agatha currently lives.  Of course, everything has already shifted to fit with the newest decade, but now it shifts to match with Wanda’s imagination of how Agnes’s house would look, as though before she’d only given it a precursory background thought, but now that she’s actively thinking about it – or, perhaps, not even actively thinking about it, but being curious about it – the house shifts and stretches like putty to match her expectations.  Or to match the story that would best fit or conflict with her expectations – Agatha can’t say which; she doesn’t know what Wanda’s expectations of Agnes’s house are.

Of course, Agatha could stay and catalogue the differences as they appear, but she is much more concerned with locking the door to Ralph’s room (not that he’s returned since Wanda blasted him into the piles of hay at the center of town, not that Agatha wants her failed puppet to return, especially not right now), with setting runes as carefully as she can into the room she has on occasion used as her own (when she hasn’t hidden in the basement, which is more often than not these days, but if Wanda Maximoff comes over expecting to enter Agnes’s bedroom, then Agatha wants a bedroom protected against her magic so that she can regain herself, should worse come to worse), and—

Agatha draws in a sharp breath as magic tingles across her skin, the stretching sketching of Wanda’s expectations tugging on the threads of her clothes and recoiling from the protection she has cast about herself, and for a moment – just a moment – she hesitates.  Then she loosens the spell in the same instant as she loosens her breath, curious as to how the little witch wants her to be dressed.

Or not dressed, as the case turns out to be.

Agatha could make do with the change of her shirt – and magic, cheeky as ever, blazing a dark witch against an orange moon and scrawling I’m the Wicked Witch of EVERYTHING underneath it (and probably something else above that Agatha can’t make out) – but losing her shoes, her socks, her pants discomforts her.  After everything Wanda tried with her, being so bare makes her feel vulnerable in a way that she doesn’t like.  It would be a simple spell to change everything back.  She knows that it would.  In fact, the spell springs to her mind without ever making it to her lips; there are protection spells in place, should that happen again, and Agatha will be…safe.  Quite safe.

She lies to herself the same way she lies about Wanda doing all of this intentionally, but she’s always been better at believing her lies than anyone else’s.  She’s had three hundred years to fine tune them, after all.

The knock comes, so quiet she shouldn’t be able to hear it, and Agatha’s stomach clenches as she reaches out, fingers brushing the doorknob once, hesitant, before gripping it firmly and creaking it open.

Wanda stands before her in half of her Halloween costume – all blaring red leotard clashing with hot pink tights clashing with blaring red boots, the one sharp point of comforting contrast the navy blue mug cupped between both of her hands, steam like a haze to shelter her face.  Her eyes flick across Agatha’s lack of apparel as though it were a choice Agatha made and not one she’d forced on her (although, truly, it is a choice Agatha has made, a choice to keep that which was forced on her, a choice to allow the little witch in front of her to make some sort of headway, though Wanda might never consciously know that), and one corner of her lips curves upward in a small sort of approval before she bites her lower lip.

As though Agatha’s lack of clothes is somehow more attractive than Wanda’s form-fitting ones.

“Wanda?” she asks, feigning a yawn.  “Is something wrong?”  She yawns again, covering her mouth with the crook of her elbow, then pushes her hand through her hair.  “Sorry, I was just about to go to bed when you—”  She yawns again before stepping back, stomach clenching even tighter as she holds the door open and gestures with her free arm.  “Come in, hon.  Come in.”

~

The cameras aren’t rolling, but the script stays – a mixture of what Wanda expects Agnes to say and what magic crafts for Agatha to shift and change – and Agatha takes the barest bit of a breath in the kitchen as she pours herself a cup of tea spiked with nothing as opposed to the whiskey with which she’d spiked the other witch’s tea.  As much as she’d like to drink in this situation, she can’t; she needs to make sure she keeps her head on as straight as possible, in case Wanda sends spells slinging her way.

In case, as though the entirety of Wanda being here so late, on her own, with Agnes dressed like this doesn’t say a thousand words of what she wants and intends.

Half of the words Agatha speaks are her own and half are those Wanda crafts for her; there’s no need to deviate from the script right now, and she would much rather focus on the witch herself, on her subtleties or lack thereof. Wanda lets silence linger, eventually, and when she does, Agatha finds the script, inwardly quails at it, but says anyway with a note of familiarity, “You stole my tights.”

And when, only a matter of moments later, the script – and Wanda herself – bids Agnes to move closer, and when Agatha does, feeling the pull of magic drawing her there, knowing the draw but not yet quite fighting it—

Wanda places her fingertips on Agatha’s temples; the panic sinks deep within her, and she startles, starts to pull away but doesn’t have time before—

She feels the spell, feels it stretch and sketch and bubble around her, around her mind, around her skin, around her everything, and she breathes in quick and fast and shallow as she finishes pulling back and away and searches, scans, not looking at Wanda, looking away and inward, feeling that sharp stinging betrayal of magic before—

Nothing.

“It’s okay,” Wanda speaks into the silence.  She places a hand on Agatha’s, but Agatha flinches away, gaze barely taking in how the little witch’s fingers curl under.  “You’re…you’re okay,” she murmurs, voice quieting but there’s this pleading whine to it, this desperation.  “I didn’t…I didn’t mean to.  It was an accident, and I didn’t want to hurt you anymore, and you’re….”

Agatha’s eyes narrow, considering the words, listening as Wanda elaborates – “I didn’t want to put you through that anymore, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—” – and then reaches out, places a finger over Wanda’s lips, and meets her eyes as firm as she knows how.  She bites her lower lip, searches the little witch’s eyes, and then murmurs, soft, “Just give me a minute, okay, hon?  I need to process a few things.”

When Wanda gives a little nod, Agatha brushes her thumb across her lips then removes her hand, turns away, and curves into herself as much as she feels comfortable doing with the other witch still sitting next to her.  It’s fortunate that Wanda allows her this, that she keeps quiet and gives her space, because Agatha needs the time to do an internal sweep, a testing, a finding of whatever the fuck it is that Wanda just cast over her.  She takes a few stilling breaths in, forcing her rapidly beating heart to relax, and then curves her fingers into the threads of magic, closes her eyes, and sets out and back.

It isn’t impossible to get enough distance to have a third person view of herself, provided magic allows her to take it. Cian was always better at this – at astral projection – which makes sense, because it’s more of a sorcery feat than a witchcraft one.  Agatha drops the sorcerous spells she keeps constantly cast on herself to accomplish it, and as she does, her back aches, scars sore and tight and swollen, causing her to instinctively hiss with the pain.  As she does, her physical hands clench tight into the cushion beneath her, knuckles turning a soft white with the force of it.

Then Agatha is out and staring at threads of magic interwoven in and on and around her.

Most of this does not frighten her.  Magic is a part of every living thing; it crafts, it constructs, it destroys, so of course, it would be woven into her, just like it is woven into everything else in this world, in this cosmos. The question isn’t whether or not she has magic within her, but what the magic is and what it is intended to do, and what Agatha sees now is a new thread in the tapestry of magic she is accustomed to seeing, woven around her like a shield, so that where the other threads try to pierce her skin, they hit that new, multi-corded thread and are diverted if not torn entirely.

Agatha moves closer, runs her fingers along the thread, the strands, the thick cord surrounding her, reading it the way a master composer might read a new sheaf of music, and hums, vibrates with an emotion she couldn’t name if she tried.  What Wanda has crafted – permanently, not in perpetuity – is the most intricate form of protection spell she has ever seen, specifically tuned to the magic of the caster. Whereas the basic protection spell Agatha uses as a base is meant to protect its caster from harm – either from a misstep in their spell or an attack from another caster – this spell protects the person within it from any and all spells the original caster uses against them, whether they intend harm or otherwise.

Wanda has, in effect, cast a spell over Agatha to make her immune to Wanda’s own spells.

Permanently.

Agatha scans the threads, reads them, and stares in wonder because there is no way the little witch intended to do such a thing.  Even for the people Agatha has loved – and they have existed throughout the centuries; it would be impossible to say they didn’t – she has never attempted such a spell as this.  It’s reckless.  She wouldn’t use a spell like this; it prevents good magic meant to benefit her just as much as it prevents magic meant to harm her; Wanda might want to use a spell to heal her scars, and right now, she would not be able to do so.

And the only person who could unravel this particular spell would be Agatha herself.

Wanda couldn’t.  She would have to cast another spell to undo it, and Wanda has made her immune to her spells.

Agatha chuckles, pushes a hand through her hair, stares at the thing, shakes her head, and then gently, gently, gently returns to her body, sets the spells back along her scars not fully because that would require gestures that she cannot – will not – make around Wanda at this particular moment – but places them enough that the pain subsides as much as it can.  Then her head tilts to one side, and she stares at Wanda, examining her with self finally free of any lingering magic the other witch might have cast on her, perhaps seeing her fully in her right mind for the first time.

She tries not to smile.

“So.”

                   Do you even know what you did? What you’ve done?

Wanda’s eyes search hers, and she shifts into a position that mimics Agatha’s. Her gaze drops.  “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve said that, dear.”  Agatha’s gaze drops, and she gently, gently, gently shifts her hand over until she can reach out and hook her pinky around Wanda’s.  Just a simple touch.  A comfort, while she continues to process.  At least, when she speaks, she knows her words are true and unscripted, “I don’t hate you.”

“That makes one of us.”  Wanda gently hooks her pinky around Agatha’s like clinging to a lifeline, and her lips curl upward when Agatha gives it an encouraging squeeze.  “Was it…was it really horrible, living like that?”

Agatha’s gaze flicks away.  She presses her lips together, and her head tilts again as she considers her words. She hasn’t been one of the meat puppets, so she cannot speak for their experiences, only her own.  But the thing of it was, truthfully, “Most of the time I wanted to do what you wanted.”

I want you.

The memory of the moment sends shivers down her spine, a cold sweat, and in that moment, Agatha is terrified again.  But she doesn’t know how to speak to that fear, doesn’t know that she can say the other citizens have felt anything quite like it.  They’ve been stripped of their autonomy more than Agatha was, but their experience wasn’t…wasn’t that. And she can’t speak to them.  She cannot speak to what she does not know. Her eyes narrow, and she glances over to Wanda again, brow furrowing.  “That probably sounds crazy.”  And it does, even to her, because it’s…it’s complicated.

Stuck under Wanda’s thrall, she’d wanted to do what Wanda wanted her to do, and she’d struggled to not do what Wanda wanted her to do, but she’d so strongly wanted to do it that it was almost like she wanted to do it – and she did want to do it, just not then and not like that, which is so very different from not wanting to do it at all.  Even now, staring at Wanda, unimpeded by her magic, Agatha wants to kiss her.

She does not know why.

“You…you know what I mean, right, hon?”

Wanda shakes her head, wets her lips, shakes her head again before finally saying, “No, I…I don’t…I don’t know what....”  She wets her lips again, refuses to meet Agatha’s eyes.  “No.”

She’s crying.  Agatha can just make out the glint of light off the sharp of her cheek, and she reaches out, unthinking, and brushes a finger along Wanda’s skin, wiping it away. Wanda curves into her touch so much that Agatha thinks she will kiss her palm, so she curves her towards her, so that they’re facing each other, so that she can search her eyes with curiosity. For a moment, the briefest of moments, she feels that thrum of magic within her, knows that it is not Wanda’s, and yet hears it all the same.

I want you.

Then she bends down, brushes her nose against hers, and kisses her.

Immediately, magic thrums along her skin, a soothing, searching sensation, spreading from where her fingertips still just brush Wanda’s skin, up her arm, a sort of calming desperate need.  She gasps, breath hitching, and stops, searching the other witch’s eyes with confusion.

There is no more script, and Agatha stills before she finds herself saying, “That’s what I mean, angel.  I always wanted that.”  Her hand moves easy along Wanda’s skin, pushes back through her hair, as she repeats, encouraging, “Always.”

Wanda’s lips move against hers, puff of hot air releasing her own repetition of that word, though softer, that always lingering in the air between them before she leans forward and kisses her back.

Again, the magic like sparks along her skin, like touching a livewire and finding her fingers closing around it as her muscles convulse, like the instant atoms find the exact arrangement to shoot plasma from the clouds down to earth as though to smite it, starting fires in the depths of forests that have needed its cleansing purification for centuries, warmth and breath and right, and she curls desperate against her, into her, wanting more and taking whatever she is given.  Her hand moves on instinct to Wanda’s thigh and begins to slowly move up those horrid pink tights to the edge of the even more horrid red leotard, humming with need as she does so.

I want—

Wanda gasps at her touch, and she murmurs, “I don’t….”  Her breath catches again, a little mewling thing, and she tries again, “I don’t even know who you are.”

“Do you really need to, sweet cheeks?” Agatha murmurs as her hand shifts in Wanda’s hair, as her lips move to the curve of her jaw.  “Out of everyone in this town, you chose me to be your neighbor.  That’s got to count for something.”

It’s a lie.  She speaks a lie into the moment before trying to nibble her neck, and Wanda freezes and pulls back.  “You just…you just lived here,” she whispers, searching Agatha’s eyes.  “This was just a happy accident.  I didn’t—”

Agatha hears no lie in Wanda’s voice, and so she chuckles, spins her own lie instead.  “Oh, honey, I don’t live here.  Ralph does.”  Which, to be fair, is not actually a lie.  This is Ralph’s house, and she doesn’t live here.  But to continue the lie means to delve further into what Wanda does and does not know, what she is and is not aware of - to test those limits of intentional control that the other witch has, unfortunately, revealed she does, on some level, have.  Otherwise, how would she know to cast a protection spell over Agatha, how would she know to apologize for the control she’d exercised over her, how would she know to be sorry?

Something doesn’t add up.

Not that Agatha particularly wants to continue this right now instead of what they were doing, but if Wanda insists, then she doesn’t quite have the choice, now, does she?

Unfortunately for her, Wanda does insist.  She puts her hands up and scoots back.  “Who are you?”  Her brow furrows with confusion before she meets Agatha’s eyes. “I…I forgot about Ralph.  You’re still…still married to him, aren’t you?”

As her gaze drops to check Agatha’s fingers for a ring that isn’t there, Agatha rolls her eyes.  “Oh, no, hon. Ralph and I aren’t married.”  Not even a little bit.  She pauses, searches Wanda��s expression for something that suggests she might be willing to drop this, but when she finds nothing, she sighs.  “We’re really going to do this, huh?”  Her brows raise, and she scoots to the other side of the couch, using the time to craft a story that builds off of the one Wanda had already scripted for her – one that doesn’t involve being married to Ralph, but does still use the excuse of a grandmother that neither of them have to explain away all of the décor that Wanda had so specifically put there and that hadn’t disappeared just because she’d put a protective shield on Agatha, just like the shirt hadn’t disappeared.

Protecting Agatha from future spells doesn’t mean the shifting and crafting Wanda had done before didn’t still have its effect; it isn’t the same sort of lingering effect Agatha worried about with regards to emotional manipulation – that would be a spell in perpetuity, broken by the shield – but clothes are more of a permanent spell, unchanged by the shield unless Agatha herself were to change them. And it isn’t like the shield was meant to cover the house.

As Agatha explains – as she lies – as she feeds Wanda the story Wanda wants to hear, Agatha gauges her expressions, catches the flinch when she mentions the Snap, and then grins, easy, when Wanda asks, hesitantly, “So you’re…you’re not married?” as though that is the only part of the story that really matters.

Agatha’s brows raise, and she drags her gaze up Wanda’s body appreciatively – knowing this is what the other witch wants, not denying that, honestly, it’s something that she – in and of herself, with no pressing spells or witchcraft – also wants.  “No,” she says, still grinning up until the moment she asks, feigning the fade, “But you still are, aren’t you?  To Vision.” She lets her brow furrow with confusion. “They told us he was dead.  How did you bring him back?”

Wanda’s gaze drops immediately.  “I don’t know.”  Then she continues, just as quickly, “Can we not talk about that?  About him?”

“Sure thing, hon,” Agatha says, as though she isn’t frustrated by still not knowing, at still not having it explained.  Then she stands, presses her hands into the small of her back, and stretches, trying to pull on the ache lingering from her scars, stretching them until she feels a sharp spike of something, and then relaxing.

As she starts to move away, Wanda asks, confused, “Did I say something wrong?”

“No, nothing at all.”  Agatha runs her fingers along the back of the couch, tiptoes them up Wanda’s shoulder, and then kisses her cheek.  “Why don’t you come with me, sweet cheeks?” she asks, magic wrapping its way around her throat like a boa, whispering in her ear.  “I want to show you something.”

~

This bedroom has never quite existed before this precise moment. Agatha took inventory of every room in this house when she first commandeered it, many decade-days ago, cataloguing every bedroom, every bathroom, every office and second kitchen (there wasn’t one and still isn’t), making sure to have exact, precise knowledge of her location before she shifted bits and pieces of it to fit what she wanted and needed.  (In some cases, this was so she could change it back later once she was done with the place; she certainly doesn’t intend to leave the basement of Ralph’s house with her runes and her stretching roots tearing through the magic of the place.  He would have no use for any of that.  Besides, it would be reckless, and Agatha Harkness is not reckless.)

So when she steps inside the room that should not exist where magic has indicated she should go, Agatha’s eyes widen.  She knows the bed, knows the room, knows the intricate carvings decorating it, and inwardly, she glares at magic, fingers tucking into its threads and giving a frustrated yank.  But magic ignores her, forces her to explain the bed they have found.  She lies as she has lied before, refusing to reveal to the little witch that this bed was once her own, centuries ago, when Cian had first given her a place to live, and yet she still speaks to its age – three hundred centuries – in the same manner that Wanda had spoken to her of twins that once existed but she had never met.

“It’s beautiful,” Wanda murmurs, running her fingers along the carvings, pressing fingertips into the mattress that Agatha knows from experience is feather soft.  She bites her lower lip as she turns to Agatha, carefully meeting her eyes.  “We should....  We should break it in, don’t you think?  If no one’s ever used it.  Doesn’t really seem fair to the bed.”

Magic preens and looks up at Agatha like a lover introducing her to its lover in hopes that—

“You don’t want to use my room, hon?” Agatha asks, one brow raising. “It’ll feel left out if you don’t.”

Wanda hesitates, bites her lower lip again, but holds Agatha’s gaze. “Maybe….”  She swallows, forces the words out again.  “Maybe we’ll have time for both.”

“Both,” Agatha echoes, and her grin creeps easy across her lips as she steps forward again, easily crossing the distance between them.  Her gaze wants to shift to the bed behind her, but it stays on Wanda, on the girl who wants her and who she finds, in spite of herself, that she also wants, and lingers on the frightful combination of blaring red and hot pink.  “As long as I can get you out of that outfit, because Wanda, hon.  That thing is horrible.”

Wanda pouts as she considers her costume.  “I thought it was cute.”

“You’re cute.  That costume is not.”  Agatha brushes her fingertips along Wanda’s jaw, tilts her chin, and meets her eyes with a wry sort of smile.

“You really think—”

It doesn’t matter what I think; it matters what I know.

Agatha cuts her off with a kiss, and it’s there again, just as before, the thrum of magic as their lips meet, and she leans into it, desperate for it, parting her lips against Wanda’s as though she could drink it in as her hand snakes through her hair, holding her gentle in place.  Wanda breaks away just enough to mumble something about how yes, Agatha is entirely correct, the horrific costume should come off, and Agatha chuckles deep at how easily the little witch shows belly to her, nearly as easy as magic shows its to Wanda herself, and she kisses her again, tastes magic on her skin, aches with it when Wanda sucks on her neck, when her hands find their spot on the small of Agatha’s waist – palms tucked beneath her shirt and gentle on her bare skin – where they have always wanted to be, wanting nothing more than this, this, because this isn’t magic betraying her, it’s magic making something new and filling her with itself in a way it has never done before.

Agatha has long trained to be a lover of magic, but never once has she thought that magic might be a lover of hers.

(It is not as though Wanda is magic itself, because she is not, or that taking Wanda as a lover means taking magic as one, but that there is something so intrinsically magical about Wanda herself and how magic fills her that it is nearly the same thing.

Late, Agatha will look back on this and theorize, but in this moment – in this exact, present moment – she does not think beyond three simple words:

I want you.)

~

After – not completely after, but between, when they lay curled beneath the soft sheets covering the softest of antique beds, Agatha asks, quiet, soft, knowing she will be heard and choosing the right moment to ask, “Did you know?” She tucks strands of frizzled hair back behind Wanda’s ear and kisses the skin just beneath her lobe.  “What you were doing to me, did you know?”

“No,” Wanda says, and No, Wanda thinks, so loud that Agatha can hear it, and a pause before, “Yes,” Wanda says, and No, Wanda thinks, and then she lowers her head as Agatha kisses her neck, and she murmurs, “I didn’t know, but Vis thought, and I didn’t, but I was scared because what if I was, and what if I was hurting you, and I didn’t – I couldn’t take that chance – and I didn’t know—”

“How,” Agatha asks, breath hot on Wanda’s skin, “did you do all of this?”

Wanda threads her hand through Agatha’s hair.  “I don’t....”  She swallows hard, hums.  “I don’t know, I don’t....”  She bites her lower lip.  “It’s kind of hard to think when you’re doing that.”  Her lips curl with a gentle smile.

That’s the point, though Agatha doesn’t say it.  To ask now, when Wanda doesn’t have the wherewithal to think straight, means that her thoughts, unprotected, give the clearest answers, and right now, they affirm her clear lack of knowledge.  She didn’t know until she’d cast the spell on Agatha and, in her mind, broken her of the Agnes curse; she didn’t know how all of this happened, only that it had.

Well enough.

Not intentional.

She’s worth saving.

Good.  Agatha was starting to want to save her regardless.

”Hey,” Wanda murmurs, slowly tilting Agatha’s head up.  “Weren’t we going to move to your bed?”

~

They were, and they do, and Agatha loses herself enough in the thrall of magic that she asks, without thinking, “Do you think this is what we deserve?” somewhere in the midst of everything, and it startles Wanda enough that she pauses, and that settles uncomfortably in Agatha’s chest, so that she takes stock of where she is and what she said.

“What…what do you mean?” Wanda asks, propping herself up on her elbows, searching Agatha’s eyes.  “You say that like this is…like it’s a bad thing.”

Agatha didn’t mean it like a bad thing in the slightest.  She’d meant it like something good, despite the pain straining from her back through her lips, like maybe, in the end, they deserve the rush of magic surrounding and building between them, that after all of her study, she is finally being rewarded by magic itself, not that Wanda is a gift to her, but that this between them – this whatever it is – is the gift.  That Wanda, in her lack of knowledge, unknowingly cried out for help, and what better teacher than Agatha Harkness, who lives and breathes the very magic that thrums through Wanda’s very being in such a powerful, present way?

How can she put that into words?

Like this, here like this, she can’t.

So she rests her head against Wanda’s shoulder, takes a deep breath to still and to settle herself, and then glances up to meet Wanda’s eyes.  “Don’t worry about it, hon.  It’s nothing.”

That’s a lie.

It isn’t nothing.

But Agatha falls back onto deception when she cannot put her whole self into words.  It’s easier that way.  She cannot speak her mind so bluntly, so rashly.

She will not.

#bandit fic #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #the thrall of magic with agatha and wanda #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #mcu #wandavision

[aparticularbandit]

the great thing about not describing wanda's outfit in this scene in kisses is that now i can describe it in thrall and let me tell you wanda is not doing great here and just didn't bring it up at all.

#musings #bandit writes fic #wagatha five times kissed #i call thrall a companion piece to kisses and this is true #but i have more fun letting myself not feel like i have to keep /exactly/ to the events in kisses #like there's an additional chapter in thrall that doesn't exist in kisses #like agatha gets to see and do stuff wanda doesn't #sometimes the dialogue is different; sometimes the /actions/ are different #wanda and agatha maybe remember or live through things differently #i know that there's a scene coming up that not only is NOT in kisses but wanda DOES NOT REMEMBER HAPPENING #(you'll know it when you get there) #i think that'll be at the end of this chapter #and like - wanda gets the party over two chapters but agatha's getting this in one #i'm not going to show you all of their dialogue that was in kisses because those events aren't important to agatha #the clothes change at the party? YEP. #wanda and sarah having the confrontation in the lawn - agatha isn't part of that; she's inside talking with Davis #like...this is why i like writing this! #i like seeing the different things from agatha's perspective! #and also agatha's very clear love for and knowledge of /magic/ that wanda just /does not have/ #talking about agatha and magic is just #i love talking about their relationship #her relationship with magic #ugh #ANYWAY

[aparticularbandit]

Westview Holidays

Summary: Wanda and Agatha exert a great deal of magic for a Westview celebration, and Wanda has an idea on how to cool down afterwards.

Part of The Thrall of Decades collection.

Rating: T.

AO3

“You’re such a baby.”

“Excuse you, hon, I lived through events you can’t even imagine—”

“—and you’re still a baby.”  Wanda looks over just long enough to catch Agatha’s expression – a moment of feigned hurt that pulls at her heart (unfortunately) before Agatha sticks her tongue out at her.

That was what she waiting for.

With a swipe of one hand, Wanda crafts a small metal pole out of thin air just where Agatha’s tongue ends.  Agatha tries to pull her tongue back in, but now, in the cold air, the pole sticks to her tongue and thwacks hard against her lips.

It’s a small thing – conjuring a metal pole – but it’s more complicated to craft it within the scope of their present world, to have it at the right properties related to the cold air around them to get it stuck to Agatha’s tongue in the first place instead of it being created in a more neutral state of being.  It’s tricky to do what Wanda’s just done, and Agatha’s eyes light with approval.  She clicks her tongue, making a sound much more like the snapping of her fingertips, and the pole vanishes.  “Good girl,” she purrs.

Wanda preens, smug.

“You can flirt when you’re done with the decorations,” Sarah calls from her perch near the front of the crowd, hands cupped around her mouth.  Her husband nudges her with one elbow, and she continues.  “No one wants to see that!”  When Agatha shoots her a look, Sarah gives her a lopsided grin.

It’s more progress than Wanda thought was possible when she chose to stay in Westview, not that she’d been quite thinking about that when she decided to stay, and it’s more care than she’d thought anyone who’d undergone her unintentional abuse of the little town might ever even consider giving her, let alone actually give.  To be forgiven and seen—

It’s a small miracle.

Agatha would call it magic.

~

Nearly a year has passed since Wanda returned to Westview for Agatha, since Agatha tested her little witch until she was convinced she was safe, since magic revealed to her the threads it used in tying them both together, threads Wanda hadn’t noticed (or, if she did, didn’t acknowledge) and Agatha hadn’t so much as attempted to untangle.  Lover of magic she may be and still is, but even she can’t undo what magic wants, when it’s adamant about it.  (It isn’t subtle, remember, and it is far more powerful than either witch alone, than even their powers combined, because all of that rests on the gift of magic in the first place.  It would laugh.)

In that year, Wanda allowed Agatha to put constraints on her powers – constraints she could, of course, easily undo without even the wave of her hand.  But Agatha said they were necessary.  Then, when Wanda raised an eyebrow at her words, admitted that, strictly speaking, they weren’t technically necessary but elaborated that the constraint on her power would force her to learn true witchcraft, just as other witches throughout the centuries had.  And while Wanda certainly didn’t need runes or incantations or anything as trivial as that, understanding the theory behind everything, the way magic felt within the hands of even the smallest user, would make her own, much more unwieldy crafting that much stronger.

And, more than strength, it would make it reliable.

Give her greater control.

For a witch who had struggled to understand and control her magic since she’d first gained it, even before she’d known it was magic in the truest sense of the word, Wanda yearned for that sense of control.  So she agreed to the constraints, trusting Agatha in a way she would never have trusted her before.

(Not never would have trusted anyone because she would have trusted Vision, if she truly believed he knew what he was doing.  Would have trusted her brother, if he’d thought she was more of a danger than she was a help.  Had trusted Vision, for a while, when he’d kept her in the complex, away from everything and everyone else.  But his form of constraint hadn’t taught her anything, had been purely reactive.

Agatha’s constraints were there to teach.)

For the past year, Agatha trained Wanda, teaching her the theory of magic, the subtle ways magic liked better than her blatant dinosaur clomping around, how to best protect herself when casting so that magic doesn’t become a drain on her, so that she ties it into something else as a source.  And as Wanda grew, Agatha modified the restraints, shifting them so that Wanda could expand, stretch her wings—

Not fly.  Not yet.  But maybe something close to it.

~

Of course, this wasn’t the only thing that happened in the past year.

Agatha took Wanda out.  In part to show the town that she wasn’t as dangerous as she once was and in part because she wanted to take her out.  For dates, for movies (which they only paid attention to half of the time), for walks around the town for her their mental health.  It was gentle.  Soft.  Nice.

They’d spent time with the new citizens who’d moved into Westview when those who wanted nothing to do with the city where they were so traumatized left, and while some of them were apprehensive of Wanda, most were pleased to meet a former Avenger.  (Former because Wanda refused to use the term; former because while her magic was restrained, she didn’t feel comfortable trying to take on more powerful foes.  Fortunately for them, no one came to call.  Not in that year.)  A few of the townspeople who’d originally decided to stay left once they realized Wanda, too, was staying; not all of them, which led to some dirty looks in the marketplace, even now, even a year out, but they know who they are, they know to stay away.

And, of course, they’d spent time with the handful who knew, who lived through it all, and who still cared about Wanda.  Eventually, even Sarah’s daughter, Emily, met Wanda.  They were friends now, or at least as close as they could be, considering.

Wanda hadn’t picked up a job, since she’d been focused entirely on her own studies, but Agatha continued to teach her kids and, on occasion, brought Wanda in to tell them stories.  At first, she’d been apprehensive and quiet and uneasy.  The first day she’d come in, all she did was sit and listen, and she’d been set to do so the second day, until one of the kids came up and asked for her help.  It’d taken the kids warming up to her to get her to talk at all.

That was the thing people found they loved about the witches most: not their power, but their stories.

Stories made them human, made others human: Agatha’s of the ancient past and people to whom history gave only a sanitized view and Wanda’s of the recent past and people to whom media gave only a superheroic view.  They took people down from their pedestal and made them real.

Westview thrived on that.

~

Now, though, today, with Wanda’s restraints half gone, the two witches are putting on a sort of public display for the whole town to enjoy.  Even though a select few of the townspeople groaned about it, and even though an even more select few refused to attend outright simply due to Wanda’s involvement, most of them are there, front and center, as the two craft holiday decorations.

They started with the tree – Wanda breaking apart the ground in the center of town so that Agatha could cause a tree to sprout from soil beneath.  (Symbolism.  They practiced this.)  Then Agatha covered the tree with small candles ignited with smaller, flickering flames, leaving them for a few moments before Wanda captured the flames in little glass bulbs and left them strung around the tree as its new lights.  As soon as she finishes, the streetlamps around the town flash and flicker before changing into the same fire encased in clear bulbs as the tinier lights on the tree, each with a bright ribbon tying itself out of the air in different colors – red, green, blue, white, yellow – one after another, spreading out from the town center where they wait.

It’s at this point that Wanda sticks Agatha with the metal pole, when Sarah shouts out at both of them, when Wanda glances down and sees Emily standing next to her, eyes lit with wonder.

And hears Agatha’s voice gentle in her mind, This is why we do this.  She lets that rest for a few moments before continuing with the barest hint of spite, But if you pull that shit again, hon, I will end this thing so fast—

Wanda ignores her.  More to the point, Wanda does not believe her because Agatha loves the children around them just as much as Wanda does.  Wanda would never take this from them, and so she knows that Agatha never would either.

It helps that she can already feel the strain.  She has to focus.  Deep breath in.  Deep breath out.

Don’t focus on how the cold has turned Agatha’s nose an adorable red.  Don’t focus on how the slight breeze pushes her curly, frizzy hair out behind her and exposes her very kissable neck.  Don’t focus on the soft purple glow magic cradles her in, or the way it lights up her eyes just as surely as Wanda’s own must be lighting with scarlet, or the purple covering the tips of her fingers turning the same red as her nose from the cold.

Don’t focus on all of these things and call her a baby again because she’s her baby.

Save that for later.

Later.

Wanda tears her eyes away from Agatha, licks her lips, tugs the bottom one between her teeth, and pretends that she doesn’t feel Agatha’s control of magic tangling with her own or the threads of magic her fingers are dipped into rippling against those Agatha’s are or the briefest of moments when their fingers brush against each other as they manipulate the same thread.  It’s an entirely different feel in magical space instead of in physical, and the thrill of it that shoots through her is different and indescribable and it is absolutely unfair how Agatha doesn’t react to it at all.

Stop. Looking. At. Agatha.

At least Sarah isn’t yelling about what she doesn’t notice.

Wanda takes a deep breath in.  She focuses.  Sets her menorah where she wants it, where it can – and will – be seen.  Smiles when she hears one of the children in the crowd gasp and comment and turns just enough to see them pointing at it with excitement.  Reaches out to entangle her mind with Agatha’s again, murmurs, This is why we do this, and lets her smug joy mix with Agatha’s.

Notes the bright and thriving neon blue coloring everything in Agatha’s mind and chuckles.

~

They don’t need to make any excuse to leave after their holiday extravaganza; Wanda is completely honest when she says that she is exhausted, although Agatha is less than honest when she says she needs to take care of her student.  Sarah shoots them a look for that, one brow raising, but Agatha just meets her gaze and raises both brows twice with a snide smirk lifting one corner of her lips.  Wanda pretends to ignore all of this, but she sees it.  Holds it with the smallest of warmths in the center of her chest.  And expects Agatha to wait only just long enough for Wanda to close the door before—

Well.

Wanda decides to take things into her own hands.  She pretends that her exhaustion is significantly more than it is, so that Agatha opens the door with the smallest of magic and shuts it with the same, only for Wanda to press her against the door and smother her with a kiss.  She feels Agatha sigh against her and takes that as encouragement to rest her hands on Agatha’s hips, on the small curves of her waist, and to pull her tighter to her.  It’s when she moves her lips and begins to kiss along Agatha’s jaw that she hears it—

Not a sigh of approval or requited longing, but of frustration and gentle disapproval.

Wanda ignores this and keeps kissing her anyway, brushing her nose against that sensitive spot on the curve of Agatha’s chin.  “Is something wrong?”

“Hon,” Agatha says with a third, more annoyed sigh, “you know I love when you do this, but—”  She cuts off with a sharp gasp as Wanda bites, hard, on that sensitive spot.  “Dear,” she lets out in a breathy hum, “you aren’t listening.”

“Mmm…no,” Wanda agrees and disagrees.  “You’re talking too much.”  She resumes her nibbling along Agatha’s neck.

Agatha snakes a hand through Wanda’s hair, wraps her fingers through far too many locks, and then grips tightly before tugging Wanda’s head up with a sharp shock of pain.  “We’ve talked about this, love.  Using so much magic all at once can give you a high, especially in tandem with a partner, especially with someone that you already—”

“Too much talking.”  Wanda presses her lips to Agatha’s again, takes her lower lip between her teeth and tugs in the way that she knows Agatha likes.

Wanda.  Agatha’s voice thrums loud in her mind in the same instant that she lets out an audible groan of pleasure.  You’re still not—

If you really wanted me to stop, you’d tell me to stop.  Wanda presses her against the door again, causing Agatha’s shirt to lift just enough for her to brush her fingers against her skin.  She rubs her thumbs in circles just above Agatha’s hip bones, lets the tip of her right thumbnail just sink into Agatha’s skin, grins at another audible groan as it releases into her mouth.  Clearly, you don’t want that.

It takes a moment for Agatha to get herself together enough to respond, and in that moment, she turns the tide, places her hand on Wanda’s throat, and pushes her back until she bumps against the nearest wall.  Wanda wants to melt into her, and half does.  But now Agatha has enough of an upper hand to pull her lips from Wanda’s and meet her eyes with a firm stare, broken only slightly in efficiency due to how wide her pupils have grown.  “I’m suffering from the same after-effects you are, hon,” she says, breath ragged between words.  “I—”  She cuts herself off, eyes falling to Wanda’s lips, and then forces herself to take a deep breath, drawing her eyes back up to meet Wanda’s instead of letting them fall farther.  “We need to rest before—”

“This is rest—”

“No, it’s physical exertion that leaves you even more exhausted than you already are.”  Agatha’s gaze drops again, lower, and traces its way up Wanda’s body in a way that makes Wanda shiver, especially when Agatha tugs her own swollen, split lower lip between her teeth.  Then she lets out another sigh.  “It’s a nice form of exhaustion, sure, love, but.”  She cups Wanda’s face and brushes her thumb along her cheek.  “We’re already exhausted.  You’re already exhausted.  And magic will take advantage of that.”  She leans across and gives Wanda a chaste kiss.  “Not right now.”

Wanda pouts.  “You’re just too old for this shit.”

Agatha chuckles.  “You want to learn from your mistakes, that’s all well and good, but don’t drag me down with you, hon.”  She wraps a lock of Wanda’s hair around her finger.  “Been there, done that.”

“So what,” Wanda says, pouting, “would you have me do instead?”

“I believe, in the business you want, it would be called aftercare.”

~

Which is how, not fifteen minutes later, the two witches end up in bed together, draped in their matching wicked witch oversized shirts, with a television turned on right across from them.  Wanda rests her head on Agatha’s shoulder, close enough to brush her nose against her partner’s neck.  “I get to pick the show,” she murmurs.  “If I don’t pick the show, I might—”

Agatha flattens Wanda’s hand where it has already started to move up her thigh.  “Whatever show you want, super star.”  She flicks through channels until Wanda places her other hand on hers.  Her brows raise.  “This one?”

“Mmmm.”  Wanda nuzzles against her neck, curls closer, and rests her head on Agatha’s chest.  “This one’s good.”  She settles against her partner with a hum of contentment.  It’s an episode she’s seen a million and one times before, which means technically she doesn’t have to pay any attention at all, if she doesn’t want that.  She leans up and kisses Agatha’s jaw.

“Be good, hon.”  Agatha strokes one finger along Wanda’s spine.  Up and down, up and down, like a spell she casts solely to soothe.

“I’m being good.”

“Of course, you are.”

Wanda leans up and meets Agatha’s eyes.  “I’m always being good.”

Agatha raises an eyebrow again.  “Is that so?”  She leans forward as though to give Wanda a kiss but instead reaches up and presses that kiss to her forehead instead.  “Maybe,” she whispers, running a finger along Wanda’s jaw, “if you are good enough, I’ll see fit to give you a reward.”

“A reward?” Wanda echoes, her eyes lighting up.  Her lips spread in a smug grin.  “What kind of reward?”

Agatha’s gaze flits away.  “Maybe tomorrow, if you aren’t too tired, we can play with magical after-effects.”  She meets Wanda’s eyes again.  “Nothing as strong as today, but enough testing that—”

“—that next time, I get what I want,” Wanda completes for her.

“What we both want,” Agatha corrects.  She runs her finger gently along Wanda’s jaw again and lets out another sigh – this one the sigh of yearning that Wanda most associates with her.  “It will be exhausting, hon.  But I’m sure you’ll be up for the challenge.”

Wanda leans forward, brushing her nose against Agatha’s.  “I’m sure I will.”

When Agatha kisses her this time, there’s just enough fire to it that Wanda thinks maybe – maybe – she’ll give in.  But then Agatha settles back against her pillow, turned to the television, and runs her fingers along Wanda’s back again.

Tomorrow, Wanda hears, clear, in her mind.  Tomorrow.

Even as that electric blue throbs all around them.

#bandit fic #december banditnanza 2023 fic #kisses through the decades with wanda and agatha #agatha harkness #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #mcu #wandavision #wagatha #wandagatha #harximoff #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness

[aparticularbandit]

#musings #bandit polls #bandit does a poll #whatever my tags were for polls idk