Chapter Text
Agatha parks outside the Children’s Museum and realizes she forgot her umbrella.
The rain has started to come down a little harder, and she definitely didn’t dress Nicky for the unexpected weather when they’d been getting ready to leave the house that morning. They’d been running a little late, and it was endlessly annoying how the judgmental looks she got from the other parents and even teachers seemed considerably harsher when they landed on her than on the less ink-covered mothers who were equally as guilty of having an occasional off day.
She wipes as much of the rain from her own thick leather jacket as possible as she makes her way into the foyer of the near-empty building, shaking it out and folding it over her arm to lend to him for the run back to the car.
Agatha hears him before she sees him, rambling away about something he’d seen on TV the night before, and she inwardly winces. Part of the reason for their late start that morning had been that she’d let him stay up considerably later than usual, stretched out on the floor in front of the screen watching a deep-sea predators documentary while she was totally engrossed in finishing up a piece she’d been working on.
One of the museum volunteers rounds the corner with him just as Nicky’s voice grows exponentially in both speed and volume before stopping completely as he lights up at the sight of her. Rushing over, he slams himself into her legs, and she makes a mental note to book a massage on her next full day off. She grunts more dramatically than the action calls for, running a hand through his hair and then tugging at it gently to jostle his head back and forth until he laughs.
“Am I late?” She asks the volunteer, subtly giving her a sweeping look for a name tag to help her out.
“No, it was just him and one other today; you’re right on time.”
Agatha gives the woman a sympathetic look before she can help herself. Nicky on his own is ‘borderline hyperverbal’ - or at least that’s what his GP had called it while handing Agatha a business card to a specialist she had yet to bother phoning. Without a larger group of children at the Living History Club around as a distraction, he could talk to one person until they either asked him to stop or he literally rendered himself breathless.
“Alright, put this on.” She crouches down, knees popping, and pulls his arms through her jacket sleeves, then lifts the bulk of it up for him to hold over his head. He drowns in the weight of the worn leather, but grins up at her enthusiastically as she leads him to the door. It’s a struggle that she wasn’t expecting to get him into the car and into a seatbelt with the jacket on, and by the time she’s back in the driver’s seat and rubbing her hands together for warmth, she feels like a miserable, wet cat. Individual strands of her hair pull and prickle against her scalp as she tries to pull it back from her face with wet hands and then start the engine.
“Did you have fun?” She asks, keeping the edge out of her voice when addressing him. She glances up into the mirror to see him in the reflection, but his focus is outside of the rainy window, watching the familiar houses pass by.
“Uh-huh,” he replies. “We went to see the Willows before it started raining. Did you know they can grow up to fifty feet? That’s nine and a half of you.”
“Wow,” Agatha replies, drawing the word out in hopes that it’ll make her sound more impressed than her bored tone does.
“They let us go in the arcade since it was just two of us today,” he tacks on.
That part doesn’t sound particularly educational, but Agatha was well aware when she signed him up for the club that it was just a glorified after-school program. That, and she can’t really blame the volunteers for just wanting to hand a kid a stack of quarters and setting them loose in a dopamine factory to tire them out for a little while at the end of the day. She’d like to do that with a few of her colleagues most days.
“Did you win anything?”
He shakes his head, gaze still out the window.
“I brought the tickets back.”
Agatha snorts. He’s been saving his arcade tickets for months now. She’s almost a little impressed at his ingenuity for having an excuse to make her keep taking him back there periodically.
“Well, we can add them to the pile, then,” she sighs, fighting to keep the amused smile off her face as she pulls into their driveway and kills the engine.
She’s given up on trying to stay dry by the time she’s wrangling him out of the back seat and leading him up the walkway to the door, taking back her jacket once they’re inside and hanging it off of the banister railing instead of in the closet in hopes of giving it a better shot of being wearably dry the following morning. Nicky takes off with his backpack, launching up the stairs two at a time and vanishing down the hall to his room as Agatha fiddles with the thermostat and locks the door for the evening.
Preheating the oven before heading up to change into something warm, and dry, and lacking an underwire, she sinks down onto the edge of her own bed and exhales a sigh that takes every last bit of air out of her body and strength out of her muscles.
Across the hall, she hears Nicky shuffling around in his closet, likely adding his fresh arcade tickets to his stash. Forcing herself to her feet, she picks up her tablet from the side table and heads to his open door. She knocks on the frame, waiting for him to poke his head out of the closet at her.
“Hey. Spring rolls and rice sound okay?”
He lights up, clambering to his feet to follow her back downstairs, only making it halfway down the flight before he launches into a detailed explanation of how he nearly beat the arcade record for Whack-A-Mole. Agatha happens to know that the winning initials ‘AWG’ on the top of that leaderboard belong to local legend, her colleague, Alice. And Nicky would need a miracle to ever beat her score.
She expects him to veer right to the living room - and television - as they finally reach the first floor, but he follows her to the kitchen to continue talking.
“When I don’t have to use the step-stool anymore, I’m going to stay there all day until I beat it,” Nicky informs her, climbing precariously up onto one of the barstools at the island as Agatha rounds the counter and pulls open the freezer.
“Oh yeah?” She asks. “And who do you think is going to drive you and supervise you all day?”
“You,” Nicky replies, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“Ah.” She pulls out a box of frozen spring rolls and kicks the freezer closed, turning back to face him with a nod. “Right, of course.”
“Did you do any… new ink today?”
The question makes her laugh out loud before she can stop herself - something she tries not to do when he’s not intentionally making a joke. He’s sensitive, and the way he sometimes freezes up in reaction breaks her heart each time.
“ New ink?” She repeats, shooting him a grin so he knows he’s not being made fun of. “Who taught you that?”
He fiddles with her tablet half-interestedly but doesn’t turn it on, eyes flicking up to her face with a shy smile and a shrug.
“I did a new tattoo today, yes,” she says, pulling out a baking sheet from below the counter and going about spreading a few of the spring rolls onto its surface. “And finished another one.”
He finally goes quiet, and Agatha busies herself with pulling out a leftover carton of rice, portioning a little bit onto a plate and setting it into the microwave. She follows it up by sliding the sheet of spring rolls into the oven and turns to catch his contemplative look.
“What’s on your mind, buddy?”
Nicky picks at one of the stickers on the case for her tablet and purses his lips. Agatha braces herself - he’s only careful about choosing his words when its very, very serious.
“Maybe… we could revisit the pet conversation.”
She freezes, eyebrows shooting upward at both his choice of vocabulary and the suggestion.
“Who have you been talking to lately?” She asks, tackling the first conundrum first. He gives her that shrug again, picking at the sticker with a little more aggression as he focuses as hard as he can on not meeting her eye. Fine.
Turning to the fridge, she pulls a few loose sauce packets off the top shelf and makes a mental note to reorganize it whenever she has a spare hour. Tearing them open with her teeth, she squeezes them into a ramekin and looks back at Nicky still intentionally ignoring her. It lasts at least three minutes, a new record of quiet for him.
“You know what I think?” She asks, waiting for his attention. “I think next week, if it’s a really good week, we can revisit the conversation.”
He lights up, opening his mouth to respond, but she holds a hand up to stop him in his tracks.
“Just the conversation.”
He deflates slightly but not entirely - he knows her well enough and knows that this tiny crack in the armor is definitely his in. Agatha will be lucky if they make it to Christmas without some furry little nightmare scurrying around the house with Nicky in tow.
She pulls the spring rolls out and dumps a few onto the rice plate.
“Y’know what else I think?” She sucks some spilled sauce off of her finger and eyes the plate in front of her, eyes flicking between it and her son across from her. “This dinner could use at least one vegetable, probably.”
“No,” Nicky starts to whine, the sound of it growing louder when Agatha mockingly mimics it back at him and then turns away to snag the bag of baby carrots out of the fridge door that she spotted a few minutes earlier.
“Can’t take care of a pet if you’re dead from scurvy,” she tells him, tossing the bag onto the counter in front of him and smirking to herself as he begrudgingly pulls it open and begins snacking as he slips down from his seat and stomps off to the living room.
Retrieving napkins and tossing the remaining spring rolls onto a second plate, she follows after him and sets the plate down in front of him on the coffee table and snaps her fingers at him to drag his gaze away from the television to focus on eating first.
It’s mercifully quiet while he eats. The white noise of the Discovery channel in the background nearly makes Agatha want to curl up with her admittedly pathetic excuse for a dinner and fall asleep early, but she forces herself up to retrieve the tablet and get to work.
She looks up asters, and scrolls until she finds some that look comparable to the photos that Rio had shown her earlier. Blindly reaching back for her sketchbook, she wipes some crumbs on the arm of the couch and opens it against her knee, tugging the pencil free from its spine and sketching out a few loose shapes. It only takes a couple of petals for her hands to fall into the pattern of the flower, spitting out bloom after bloom until she runs out of space in the confines of the section of the page she’s given herself.
Huffing out a little breath of frustration at herself for zoning out, she sits upright and reaches for Nicky’s remaining abandoned carrots and crunches down on the end of one as she tries to remember the shape of the space Rio had been looking to get covered.
Setting aside the sketchbook, she taps the end of her stylus against her lips and then opens the search bar again, typing in ‘windflowers’.
Well, Rio had been right. In her defense, she’d been working off of a direct photo reference for that particular client and the name of the flower had never come up. The client was satisfied and that had been enough for Agatha.
Clearing the search, she brings up a fresh canvas and closes her eyes, trying to picture the space again. Six inches, maybe three wide at the top where the blooms would be. She couldn’t remember what the flowers closer to the top of her thigh had been - something with thorns, but not roses. Were there branches? The memory was unclear.
Opening her eyes and drawing out the initial shape of the clear space as best she can remember, she pulls her sketch closer and begins redrawing a couple of them, reshaping and resizing them as she goes.
Nicky gets up onto the couch when her hand begins to cramp, as if he can sense it, and messily crawls over her feet to peek over her knees at the screen. She pauses, raising an eyebrow at him and then looking over at his mostly empty plate scrutinizingly.
“Flowers?” He asks.
“Asters. Yeah.” She tucks the stylus into its holder, then stretches her fingers out uncomfortably a few times to try to relieve the tightness.
“Who are they for?” He asks, waiting until she’s closed the tablet altogether to climb clumsily into her lap.
“Someone new,” she replies, ignoring the way his spindly, bony little limbs dig into her in all the wrong places as he struggles to get comfortable. He’s starting to get too big for this. It’s a thought that puts a sharp, unrelenting ache in Agatha’s chest, so she ignores the frustration of taking an elbow to the ribs or a knee to the groin and patiently lets him get settled.
“What’s her name?”
“Why does it have to be a girl?” She questions in return. She’s too tired for a lesson in sexism, though, and it’s apparent in the lack of challenge in her tone. Nicky shrugs like he’s aware of this, so she moves on. “Her name is Rio.”
“That’s a place.”
“Yes, it is,” she hums, running a hand through his hair as he sits up a little and leans against her bent legs leisurely. “I haven’t drawn flowers in a while, you think you could help me out?”
He launches himself off of her so fast that she nearly falls off of the couch with him, chuckling as he impatiently holds his hands out for her sketchbook and pencil. She flips to a fresh page extra slowly, just to keep him in suspense as he bounces on the spot, and then hands it over. He sprawls out on the floor, television forgotten, which gives her a chance to switch it over to the evening news without risking boring him or listening to him whine about wanting to watch something more interesting.
Nicky draws until he falls asleep, and as much as Agatha would love to pick him up and carry him off to bed herself, her muscles scream in protest just from the action of her sinking down to the floor beside him to retrieve her sketchbook and wake him.
The ache still isn’t gone by the time she’s up in the morning, either. At the very least, Nicky is energetic and gives her no trouble throughout the process of getting dressed and dropped off.
The shop is predictably busy when she arrives, needing to shoulder past a few people lingering in the waiting area and lining up toward the till. Lilia is helping Billy man the desk, but the process is slow either way. Alice is seated on one of the leather loveseats with a young woman, talking her through pricing, and the concerningly gentle-sounding music pushing through the speakers tells Agatha that Jen is in the back at her own station and most likely having her already-limited patience tested by whoever was tossed randomly into her chair.
Agatha hates the payday crowd.
She’s done her fair share of spontaneous tattoos - hell, she had her fair share of spontaneous tattoos - but the specific attitude of a freshly-paid twenty-something wanting to get their idea down before they lost it is a special breed of awful. She understands it, really, especially given the economy. The money is burning a hole in their pocket, but being faced with really having to hand it over in exchange for an hour under the needle is a reality that turns even the most generous of potential clients into bartering, entitled jerkoffs.
“Agatha,” Lilia’s voice cuts through the chatter as she elbows her way between two men by the desk and into the slightly quieter comfort of the client-only area. “Walk-in.”
She gestures at the man at the front of the line. If Agatha had to guess, she’d say he was maybe thirty. Twenty-five, if he was a heavy drinker. She holds her bag up and rolls her eyes, turning to head back to her station to give herself just a moment of calm before starting her day. Shrugging off her jacket and dumping her bag onto the floor, she sinks down on her stool and plugs in her tablet, followed by her phone, and then pretends to be busy by rechecking all of her supplies in her cart with painstaking accuracy.
She knows she can’t really get out of it, so after triple-checking her gloves, she makes her way back to the desk, trying to look as flippant as possible.
“What’re we thinking?”
Lilia sidles between them to talk to the next person waiting, and Agatha resists the urge to elbow her in return.
“Dark. Days.” The man in front of her gestures across each of his knuckles.
Agatha sucks her teeth and inhales heavily, eyes dropping to his hands, which he seems to suddenly not know what to do with, first resting them on the counter and then balling them into fists again before dropping them completely out of her view.
“My minimum’s two hundred, and that’s the hourly. You want to tack something else on there?”
He balks a little and leans back from the counter a bit.
“Not particularly. How long would this take?”
She shrugs a little.
“Thirty, maybe thirty-five, give or take.”
“You can’t just go under?” He asks. She rolls her eyes in his face because it’s going to be an especially long day if she’s forced to become a customer service ambassador this early.
“No, the minimum is the minimum. I like expensive gloves. Free touch-ups for the year, though.”
He visibly reconsiders and she feels a smirk pulling at her lips. He probably didn’t even live in town - it was unlikely she’d ever be using up a second pair of expensive gloves on him or his predictable knuckle tattoos.
“I have to think about it,” He says after a beat, reaching aside to pluck one of Agatha’s business cards out of the holder on the other side of the desk. She pretends to be let down as he goes, turning to Lilia and shrugging as if to say ‘what can you do?’ and turning back to her station before anyone else can be sloughed off onto her from the waiting crowd.
She has the excuse of working on her piece for Rio’s upcoming appointment, and the crowd has mostly thinned out by the early afternoon, with a few stragglers being pawned off onto Jen and Alice when they suit the criteria. Agatha almost gets sucked into an appointment before discovering the client asking for a neck piece has no other tattoos whatsoever, and she steps away from her drawing just long enough to tear him a new one and send him on his way.
She takes her break after that, feeling guilty enough for her lack of clients to pick up lunch for the rest of the crew from the cafe around the corner and handing out coffees and sandwiches as she returns, slinking back into her corner to work. It’s a rare occasion for Lilia to fully close the doors, but clearly the collective exhaustion weighs on her enough to make an exception, and once the last client has left she hangs the ‘closed’ sign so the lot of them can eat together.
“I haven’t eaten in, like, five hours,” Billy says, finishing half of his sandwich in two bites and nearly choking as he tries to get it down.
“I remember being twenty,” Alice says wistfully, taking bites of her own between making notes in her planner. She’s pulled her stool closer to the center of the space, inspiring the others into a crooked circle of sorts - minus Agatha, content to sit on the outskirts.
“I keep telling you guys we need a mini-fridge,” Jen says, carefully picking the seeds off of the crust of her bread one by one. She doesn’t even mind them, she just won’t eat anything Agatha gives her without pettily making adjustments. The older artist has run out of energy to pretend to care enough to complain about it.
“Yeah, right,” Lilia scoffs. “Not after having to reprint everyone’s business cards last year. I don’t understand why you people can’t just stick to one phone number.”
“I literally had a stalker,” Jen snaps, finally seeming satisfied with the seed ratio on her bread and taking a bite and speaking through it. “If you want me to have to keep bringing the police around, by all means.”
“I take full responsibility for mine,” Alice admits. “I was giving that number out way too freely. Lesson learned.”
“I could get one,” Billy suggests. “After I’m done paying this off.”
He gestures to his calf, pant leg already rolled up with a slathering of numbing cream held on by a sheet of plastic wrap in preparation for his post-lunch session with Alice.
There’s a collective groan of protest and dismissal from everyone, Agatha included, and the conversation fizzles out as they dive back into their food. He’s already bought a multi-pack of slow-misting spray bottles for Lilia’s plants and an electric kettle for tea in the back office on especially cold days. Agatha tried to tell him early on not to spend money where he earned it, that the shop wasn’t going to offer him any payouts for his extracurricular investing, but he hadn’t been convinced.
The phone rings on the desk, cutting through the first moment of calm that they’re all enjoying, and Lilia rolls her stool back to grab it without getting up.
“Coven Ink… Agatha.”
She holds the phone up, sliding aside when Agatha pushes herself to her feet and abandons her sandwich, approaching tiredly.
“Agatha Harkness.”
“Agatha, hey.” The voice on the other end of the line is familiar, which makes her drop her reflexively defensive, irritated tone. “It’s Elijah - I need a huge favor.”
She scratches her neck, feeling the irritation returning immediately.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m getting married!”
“Congratulations,” she deadpans, though it is nice to hear.
“So I really need to get in and get that forearm piece finished ASAP. We’re eloping next week.”
Agatha hazards a glance at the calendar on the desk and then the clock on the computer screen.
“Can you fit me in?” Elijah asks when she goes a full few beats without responding to him.
“When?”
“... Today? Line work is already done, remember? I want to make sure I’m healed up and not wrapped up, y’know?” He laughs a little, and she can hear a nervous edge to it that she knows she’s wholly responsible for. She sighs, giving him a break.
“It’s nearly three,” she points out.
“I’m around the corner, seriously, I can be there in… ten minutes tops, if you need.”
She rubs her temple and squeezes her eyes shut against the sinus headache she can feel brewing in the distance.
“Make it thirty, I need to pick up my kid. And you’re paying cash.”
“Thank you!” Elijah’s volume makes her pull the phone away from her face in annoyance before she brings it back and reaches for a pen, drawing a line down the column below her name on the schedule, effectively blocking out the rest of the day.
She hangs up without another word, and then sidles past where Billy is helping Alice tidy her station so she can get started with working on him. Plucking her jacket up from the back of her seat, she shoves it back into her designated corner and digs through her bag for her wallet and keys, cramming them into her pockets messily.
“I’ll be back,” she announces, and it’s routine enough now that no one asks any questions as she makes her way to the door.
“You want to revisit the mini-fridge conversation when you’re back?” Billy asks her, the sudden familiarity causing her footsteps to slow to a pause. She whirls around and narrows her eyes, pointing a finger at him accusingly.
“You been talking to Nicky?”
“He mostly talks at me, to be fair…” Billy replies, causing her to roll her eyes and turn back to the door again. “Why?”
“Be a better influence!” She calls over her shoulder as she steps out into the street.
It’s warmer out than Agatha expected, so she shrugs off her jacket as she heads down the street to the corner and turns onto the residential road she’s parked on. Nicky’s school is much closer to the shop than it is to their house but she considers it a pro, not a con. It helps for needing to pick him up on short notice and keeps her from making them both late on the odd occasion that they have a late start.
If she weren’t in such a hurry to get back and meet Eliiah, she’d have walked to get Nicky and given herself a little extra time with him in the nice weather before subjecting him to sitting around while she worked.
She climbs into her car as she approaches, not bothering to brush any of the thick covering leaves off of the hood of the vehicle and letting the wind do the work as she pulls away from the curb and makes her way toward the school. She passes back by the shop on her way and slows down enough to see that it still looks quiet in her absence - the crowd really did die down, she notes with pleased surprise. The planters outside look a little brown, even for the weather, so she makes a mental note to put Nicky to work with the hose once they’re back.
Nicky drags his feet a little when she picks him up, as he does every Friday. It pulls at her heart a little - he has his friends and the history club, but she does worry that he’s lonely. Maybe the pet isn’t such a terrible idea. Once he hears that she’s taking him back to work for a last-minute client, there’s much more pep in his step, though. The shop is a second home to him nearly as much as it is to her - not that she’d ever admit as much - and the constant attention and adoration he gets to be on the receiving end of from the entire crew doesn’t hurt, either.
As they make their way up the block once more, Agatha slows to a near-crawl outside of the florist’s that she has grown accustomed to ignoring as background atmosphere just like everything else around the neighborhood over the years. It’s reasonably quiet most of the year, save for the bigger female-oriented holidays, and while today is no different, the presence of a familiar face in the window is.
Stretched out on her tiptoes, balancing precariously on a step-ladder to spritz some expensive-looking, brightly colored flowers in a gravity planter, is Rio. She’s clearly seen the background movement come to a stop in her peripherals because she chooses that moment to glance down and through the window, eyes flickering with recognition before a smirk tugs at her mouth and she gives Agatha a quick, two-finger wave.
Mildly dumbstruck, not expecting to see the other woman at all outside of their appointment that weekend, she waves back out of reflex and then hones in on the plant instead. A second jolt of familiarity shocks her and she tugs Nicky towards the door, pushing it open and poking her head inside.
“Hey,” Rio greets.
“What kind of flowers are those?” Agatha asks instead of responding to the greeting.
Rio blinks in confusion and then turns her gaze back to what she was doing. She fluffs one of the tiny blooms up a little, turning it in Agatha’s direction as if it had a face.
“Maule’s Quince.”
It’s a name that means nothing to Agatha, really. Knowing the species to the appearance really makes no difference to her. Rio seems to have the realization at the same time as Agatha does, though, and then clearly realizes how her train of thought led them to where they are.
Agatha’s eyes drift down to her leg - the one she’ll be tattooing in two days' time - even though she can’t see the other tattoos there through the other woman’s loose black pants. Rio shifts her weight on the stepladder as if she can physically feel the gaze through the clothing, but it’s Nicky tugging her hand for attention that snaps her out of it.
“Mom.”
She turns to him and then follows his arm to where he’s pointing to a small container of daisies on the shelf closest to the door.
“Can we get one?”
Rio steps down from the ladder and reaches into the container, plucking out the least pathetic-looking one and holding it out to him.
“On the house,” she says with a smile.
“You don’t have to do that,” Agatha tells her, already feeling incredibly stupid for stopping in in the first place when she really had no business being there.
“It’s fine. They’re all being composted tonight anyway,” she assures her before giving Nicky another little smile.
“Thank you,” he says. Agatha squeezes his hand, pleased he didn’t need to be reminded to say it for once.
“We need to get going,” she says, nudging Nicky toward the door and pushing against it for him knowing full well he doesn’t have the weight to do it without a dramatic struggle.
“Good seeing you, Agatha,” Rio says, already halfway up the ladder when Agatha turns around to see her again. The door shuts before she can reply, and the scent of flowers is replaced by a distant rumble and the smell of incoming rain.
