Chapter Text
Agatha dreams about the house.
She’s hyper-aware of the fact that it’s a dream as soon as she recognizes her surroundings, and for once in her life she’s curious enough not to utilize her lucidity to manipulate her surroundings into something more R-rated. She can’t possibly know what the inside of the house ever looked like but her subconscious builds it up for her anyway; winding hallways and too-steep staircases that stretch as she climbs and force her to clamber up them on all fours like a child, doorways nearly so narrow they’re almost impassable that seem to disappear behind her entirely once she gets through.
There’s an odd, melancholy nostalgia thickening the air as she explores, growing more and more cloying as she tries to find her way to the window she’d been so focused on during the tattoo. It reminds her of childhood - her body feels younger, too; lighter, catching air in her footsteps when she speeds up her pace. All of her dreams that don’t have Nicky in them - as few and far between as they are - feel like this, but she stopped letting herself feel guilty over it years ago.
She rounds the next corner at random into the next room and there it is, appearing right when she was about to grow frustrated enough to give up. She makes her way across the worn floor, the wood soft and uneven beneath her feet, and peers out of the dusty, scratched glass. She can see the apple tree from where she stands - the single red apple sticking out among the grey and black leaves. She feels the presence of someone else behind her before she hears the floor creak, and whips her head back around only to be brought face to face with the window again, this time on the opposite wall of the room. It’s an impossibility that her subconscious immediately dismisses in order to keep her asleep. That, and there are much more pressing things to focus on, like the sight of her mother blocking her view.
Agatha exhales shortly. Her breath is suddenly cold. Her mother stares back at her, expression colder. The lines in her face are deep and harsh - she looks so much older than she’d ever been; she hadn’t even looked this old when she died.
The two of them stare at one another, and then Evanora opens her mouth. Too wide - something out of a horror movie. It’s like she’s about to let out an ungodly, haunting wail, but the sound that comes out is much more jarring: a long, loud rattling buzz. It lasts for a few terrifying seconds and then she closes her mouth, silencing it. Before Agatha can speak, she opens her mouth again and it repeats. Wincing away, unable to look at her contorted maw any longer, she feels the sudden weight of her body again, acutely aware of the stress-induced sweat that dampens her entire form.
She sits up in the morning light of her own bedroom and breathes heavily, eyes struggling to adjust to the sudden change before she realizes what woke her in the first place.
The buzz starts again, not nearly as scary now but equally as grating, and she snatches her phone off her wooden side table that it’s threatening to vibrate off the edge of.
WORK - DO NOT ANSWER flashes on the screen. She jams her thumb against the ‘accept call’ button.
“What?” she snaps.
“Agatha,” Billy sounds out of breath, as if he’s just woken up from the same dream that she has. He’s almost drowned out by the background noise of the shop behind him; Saturdays off are a privilege that Agatha wouldn’t exchange for anything. “Hi, sorry to bother you.”
“Not sorry enough not to do it,” she grumbles, pushing herself up onto one arm and leaning her weight into one hip.
“Your appointment tomorrow morning - Rio - she wanted to talk to you about the design. Something about…” He pauses, audibly shuffling some papers. “Something about half of the flower bulbs being closed? I don’t know, she was insistent on talking to you about it, not me.”
Agatha shakes her hair back from her face and tucks the phone into her shoulder to free up her other hand and use it to throw the sheet back from her body. Her assumption that Rio wasn’t going to be a problem is slowly being proven wrong.
“Can I pass your number along?” Billy asks.
Agatha sits upright and drops the phone to the bed, staring at it as if it burned her. Picking it up, she holds it up between two fingers as if it’s contaminated and snaps, “Obviously fucking not.”
“Well, I don’t know what to do. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow if you need to do another whole consultation.”
“I’ll come in,” Agatha tells him defeatedly, hearing the hint of an unfortunately pathetic whine cutting into her complaint.
“What?”
“I’ll come in and call her from the shop.” The last thing she wants is to spend her entire Sunday reconceptualizing and redrawing the full tattoo before hunching over the table for several hours.
The continual background noise of the shop is the only proof that Billy hasn’t completely hung up on her, shocked into silence on the other end. She waits another beat to see if he’s going to say anything, and then simply hangs up on him, instead. Dropping the phone onto the bed, she retrieves her sweatpants from the night before and tugs them on, yawning as she makes her way out into the hall and towards the bathroom.
She brushes her teeth and ties her hair up into a messy knot at the back of her head, splashing cold water into her face before making her way to Nicky’s room and leaning against the open doorway to watch him sleep for a few quiet moments. He’s sprawled out like he’s trying to sweat out a fever, sideways on the too-big-for-him bed with a limb stretched out to each corner of it atop all of the sheets. It would be concerning if it wasn’t his usual. A children’s illustrated encyclopedia lays splayed open on the floor near the foot of the bed, likely having fallen off in the night after he passed out mid-read.
Stepping into the room and climbing up slowly onto the bed beside him, she eases his arms and legs together; he’s pliant to her adjusting him, slipping into her lap and curling up against her chest without fully waking up. He’s like a heated, weighted blanket, lulling her back into an immediate sense of unproductive laziness. She considers calling Billy back and changing her mind again - what’s a few extra hours on a Sunday with a difficult client? This feels like a fair trade-off. She knows she’ll regret it, though, and after a few moments, she rubs his back to try to ease him awake.
He stirs, fingers curling against her collarbone.
“Morning,” he greets, eyes still closed.
“Morning,” she whispers back, pressing a kiss to his temple. “Time to get up.”
“Is it?” He rubs one of his eyes with his fist and slowly blinks them open, peering up at her with a furrowed brow.
“Uh-huh, I have to run an errand, and then when I get back we can spend all day together.”
He turns to tuck his face back into her neck, a futile attempt to have just a few more minutes of sleepy quiet. She can’t say she blames him.
“What errand?”
Agatha doesn’t answer that, shifting him away from her to get his legs under him and set him down off of the edge of the bed on his feet. He sways on the spot tiredly for a moment before getting his bearings and heading to his dresser, nearly tripping over the abandoned book on his way.
She helps him with picking out an outfit and brushing his teeth, getting him comfortable in the car with a freshly-toasted Poptart and then taking him to the drop-in program near their house. He doesn’t go often, but he still rushes off away from her once the sugar hits to play with the freshly updated shelf of toys across the room, giving her a bit of relief from her guilt at leaving him alone on what is usually their full day together.
When she arrives at the shop she makes her way wordlessly around the reception counter and grabs the back of Billy’s chair, wheeling him away from the computer while he’s midsentence trying to explain availability to the client in front of him.
“Agatha -” he protests, but she cuts him off.
“Pretend I’m not here,” she says as if it’s just the distraction of her mere presence that’s causing the issue. She clicks around to pull up Rio’s file and reaches for the phone, dialing the number that she’s left with them and waiting impatiently for her to pick up.
Billy scoots his chair back around her to get to the computer and she mercifully steps aside enough for him to get back to the client. Rio picks up on the third ring, her voice far too chipper for what Agatha would consider too early of an hour to be so.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” Agatha scratches at her brow, dropping her bag onto the desk and digging around in it with her free hand for her tablet. “I was told you wanted to talk about your tattoo for tomorrow.”
“Oh. Agatha.”
“Yeah. Me.” She flips open the case and swipes past her lock screen, tapping through the various pages until she can pull up the asters she’s been working on for the woman on the other end of the line. “Half closed, you said?”
“Yeah,” Rio replies. “I can send some photos, but your email wasn’t on your card.”
Agatha uses one knuckle to circle a few of the flowers on a new layer of her drawing, picturing the balance of having them take up less space than their fully bloomed counterparts.
“How many of them?” Agatha asks, instead of responding to her offer/hint.
“Pardon?”
“Did you want some of them half-closed? Or half of them fully closed? Our apprentice isn’t exactly adept at asking the correct questions.” She kicks the wheel of Billy’s chair and he shoots her a glare that she pretends to ignore.
“Oh, uh…”
She rolls her eyes, sighing directly into the receiver before she can help herself. Rio chuckles, clearly not too offended by her unfiltered reaction.
“Sorry,” She starts to explain, but Rio cuts her off.
“Are you at the shop? I can come by; make this easier,” she offers. “I’m just at work, I could be there in a few minutes.”
Agatha takes in the cacophony of the busy parlor and tenses uncomfortably at the idea of trying to have a meaningful consultation in the midst of it.
“I’ll come to you,” she says, flipping the case on the tablet closed again and shoving it haphazardly into her bag once more.
“Oh,” Rio sounds pleasantly surprised. “Yeah, alright. I’ll see you soon.”
Agatha hangs up without another word and pushes past Billy to head to the door again, sighing in relief once she’s back outside on the street and away from the noise. It’s not late enough in the day yet for the sun to bring on much warmth, and she has just enough time to start regretting leaving her jacket at home when she arrives at the flower shop. Eyeballing the planters hanging in the window, she notes that they’ve already been changed out since the last time she had been by; she’s still looking at them as she pulls the door and steps inside.
“One second!” Rio calls to her from behind the counter. She waves a hand dismissively, not even looking over as she comes closer to peer into the window display and reaches up to touch one of the vines hanging from the closest of the plants. Her eyes flick from the leaves to the price tag on the underside of the planter and she quickly lets go of it, stepping back for good measure and nearly backing into the other woman who she hadn’t even realized was behind her.
“ Scindapsus ,” Rio says, eyes on the plant, not Agatha. She nods to the planter, then catches her eye, smiling softly.
“Gesundheit.”
Rio snorts, dropping her gaze as it turns into a giggle, which is when Agatha notices the sheet of paper and flowers she’s holding.
“Shall we?” She asks, nodding to the door and sliding past her to tape the sign to the inside of the window. Agatha notes the sharpie bleeding through and reads the backward writing: back in ten , and a phone number.
Rio pushes the door open once the note is secured, and nods in gesture for Agatha to step out - which she does without thinking.
“What’re we doing?” She asks, turning to see Rio follow her out and then turn to lock the door behind them.
“Getting coffee. No offense, you look like you could really use it. I accept that that’s probably my fault, though - your apprentice said it was your day off.”
Agatha’s skin prickles unpleasantly at the notion that Billy is mentioning anything to her clients outside of direct details about their appointments, but aside from this small transgression, Rio seems disarmingly harmless.
She holds the flowers out for Agatha - two white asters, one open and one closed. She reaches out and takes them, reflexively bringing them up to smell. They’re devoid of much scent except the generic, light smell of freshness, but that alone is enough to awaken her senses a little.
“Where are we going?” She asks.
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Rio replies. “I still don’t know the area that well, I was kind of hoping I could charm you into giving up the real locals-only diamond.”
Agatha scoffs softly but does turn to head back down the street, Rio following suit.
“I don’t know if I should put you onto the best spot before you’ve paid your dues, but you are letting me jab you with needles and paying me for it, so I can make an exception this once.”
They pass by two separate tourist-trap-themed cafes on their walk, both of which Rio slows down questioningly at before being directed by Agatha to keep walking. She takes her instead around the next corner to her go-to sandwich shop, stepping inside to almost-too-loud jazz music on the speakers and not a single other customer in sight.
Even the exhausted-looking twenty-something behind the till doesn’t acknowledge them as they enter, but Rio slips past Agatha toward the counter, unconcerned.
“Sit,” Rio insists, her hand sliding across Agatha’s back as she heads to the counter, “I’ll get it.”
She does, shivering off the last of the cool autumn air and making her way over to the low table closest to the front window. Sinking into the taller of the two mismatched chairs, she drops the flowers onto the table and fiddles with the (likely expired) shaker of powdered coffee creamer. Rolling her shoulders, she lets her eyes drift around the space before they land on Rio again.
She’s pretty sure she’s never seen that particular barista crack so much as a smile in all the years that she’s worked there, but whatever Rio’s saying to her has her fully giggling, biting her lip and tapping her nails on the edge of the POS system screen and looking like she’s about to launch herself over the till at the older woman. Agatha finds herself staring unintentionally, fixated curiously on the way Rio goes to hand her a folded bill and then pulls it back slightly, head tilted as she tries to convince the other woman of something. It’s a tactic that pays off because when she returns to the table, she’s got two empty ceramic mugs dangling by the handles off of one finger, and a full fresh pot of coffee in the other.
She hands the mugs off and then forms a makeshift pot holder from a handful of napkins, setting the coffee down before sinking into the opposite chair.
Agatha takes it upon herself to fill the mugs, then takes a sip from her own before pulling her tablet out. Rio sits up a little straighter, peering over curiously as she picks up her own mug in both hands, her lips resting against the rim of it.
“So,” Agatha turns the screen around, reaching down to pinch the drawing and zoom out for Rio to take a look. “If you want them fully closed, like this,” she taps the end of her stylus against the unbloomed of the two flowers Rio had given her, “We could do these.”
She hesitates, struggling to see her layers upside down, but then selects a few to bring up a few messily-drawn circles around a few of the flowers on the screen.
“Asymmetrical,’ Rio observes. “I like it.”
Agatha sags in relief, pleased to not have to do too much more refiguring. She pulls the tablet back and immediately gets to work on the new additions, eyes flicking over to the closed flower on the table, just a rough sketch to make sure they’re on the same page.
“I appreciate this a lot,” Rio tells her, still holding her mug to her lips. “I was just… staring at asters all night and they started looking too…”
“Uniform,” Agatha finishes for her, thinking back to her initial rough sketch, and how easy it it had been to get carried away in the repetitive shapes.
“Yeah,” Rio breathes. Agatha’s eyes flick up to her face for a moment, spotting the hint of a smile on her face before going back to her screen. She locks her gaze on the flower again instead, blindly trying to let it take form through her hand.
“I want to take an outline of the space, too,” she says.
Rio finally sets down her mug, reaching for the pot again to refill it.
“I can do that back at the shop - I don’t think I should ruin my first impression here by taking off my pants.”
Agatha’s hand stills and her eyes flick up to the other woman’s face.
“Somehow, I don’t think you’d hear much protest,” she says, glancing over at the barista who has taken to cleaning the pastry display case with a pair of wired headphones dangling from her ears. Rio doesn’t follow her gaze, but it’s clear from the slow-spreading smug expression on her face that she understands the implication being made.
“Alright, you caught me. I’m just shy.”
Agatha snorts. She’s gone through bouts of insomnia that have lasted longer than she’s known the woman sitting in front of her, but she’d bet money on ‘shy’ being somewhere near the bottom of acceptable adjectives to describe her.
Rio tops up Agatha’s coffee without being asked, then rests her chin in her hand to watch her work for a moment in silence.
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Tattooing?” Agatha clarifies, moving on to another flower. “You’ll be my first.”
Rio laughs outright at that; Agatha’s beginning to understand the poor, unsuspecting barista who’s been swindled out of her entire fresh pot of coffee. It’s unnecessarily flirty-sounding, without any of that skin-crawling girlishness that she usually observes in women trying to get their way.
“Twenty-five years,” She says after a beat when Rio doesn’t ask again. She whistles lowly, nodding and tapping the tips of her fingers against her mug.
“Did you always want to do it?”
“Did you always want to be a florist?” Agatha asks instead. She’s not particularly interested in the truth, but her focus stays a lot sharper when Rio’s the one doing the talking instead of trying to bounce her brain between her drawing and her answers.
“Um, maybe,” Rio says, her tone lifting up an octave. Agatha’s stylus stills, her eyes narrowing when she realizes that she’s hearing something she rarely does from a client - a lie.
Pausing her efforts on the drawing, she flips the stylus between her fingers and taps the dull end of it on the edge of her tablet case, looking up and across at the other woman more seriously.
“What did you actually want to do?” She asks, cutting through any chances she has of dancing around the real story.
Rio surprises her by avoiding her eye, shrugging minutely. Agatha waits a beat, then sighs when she realizes the answer isn’t coming. She’s not interested in pushing her for an answer she didn’t care about in the first place, so she turns her attention back to the drawing. It’s becoming a lot more detailed than she intended for their consultation, but she’s not prepared to abandon their coffee, and being in an environment other than her house does help with her productivity.
“What’s your boy’s name?”
The stylus slips from her hand and clatters to the table, rolling right off of the edge and stopping at their feet.
They stare at each other for a beat, before Rio leans back and dips under the table to retrieve it for her.
“What?” Agatha asks, hearing how dumb her tone sounds when Rio returns the stylus to her and sits upright in her seat once more.
“I mean - I just assumed,” she says, a new, careful edge in her tone that would normally give the artist a little bit of her power back, but it doesn’t this time.
She keeps her tone clipped, not even meeting her eye in hopes of not inviting further questions.
“Nicky.”
Rio seems to know better than to push it any further, which Agatha is silently grateful for.
“I wanted to be a doctor,” she says; Agatha recognizes it as less of a peace offering for her accidental overstep and more of a gift, evening the scales out between them so they can return to their comfortable back-and-forth. It almost pulls a thankful half-smile out of her, but the coffee hasn’t quite kicked in enough for her to have the energy to muster one. As if sensing it, Rio tops her mug up one more time.
“So how’d you end up with a flower shop?”
“My uncle left it for me,” she replies easily. “I majored in botany, he must have thought it was a good enough overlap. Plus, he didn’t have his own kids, so…” She trails off, tapping her fingers on her mug again. She almost looks sheepish for a moment, like all of that information just spilled out of her before she realized it was happening.
Silence stretches between them for a moment, but it’s not nearly as uncomfortable for Agatha as she can tell that it is for Rio. She turns the tablet around again - the drawing is nearly perfectly clean, now, but she’ll go over it one more time before bed that evening.
Rio admires it, pointing out one of the new additions specifically.
“This is exactly what I was picturing,” she says, reaching over and blindly brushing her cold fingers against Agatha’s arm in her quest to pick up the flower. She pulls it into her view and finally looks away from the screen to give it a comparative look.
“Is there a secret meaning behind the flower choice?” Agatha asks, putting a playfully accusing edge in her tone to distract from her now-genuine interest. She takes a few generous sips of her rapidly cooling coffee, nearly finishing it. “I’m not secretly engaging in gang-affiliation, right?”
Rio shakes her head, letting out an exhale of a chuckle as she leans back in her seat and pushes the flower back across the table.
“I just think they’re pretty. They symbolize love. Or knowledge, or valor. Or royalty. Depends on the color, or how in-bloom they are.” Rio runs one fingernail around the rim of her mostly empty mug. “I guess these’ll be off-white.”
“Which one is that?”
“Innocence,” she replies, looking up to meet her eye again. She reaches across the table and takes Agatha’s mug, putting both of theirs together in one hand again to pick up the empty pot.
“And the half-blooms?” Agatha presses.
Rio shrugs.
“Not that innocent.”
She turns on her heel to make her way back over to the counter. Agatha watches the barista see her approach and scramble back behind the counter, standing up extra straight and beaming as she takes back the empty dishes.
She packs her bag and meets Rio at the door, the pair of them pausing awkwardly as they step out onto the street and realize how much easier it’ll be to return to their respective jobs if they head off in different directions.
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Rio says, fiddling with the flowers in her hand before handing them off to Agatha. She takes them reflexively, then drops her gaze to them questioningly like she’s not entirely sure how they ended up in her hands. Rio cocks her head to the side. “Keep them. They attract bugs when they’re fresh, but if you crush them up and boil them it’ll make your entire place smell like a Christmas tree farm.”
Agatha’s eyebrow ticks upward at the unexpected piece of trivia, and she tucks it away for later to share with Nicky.
“Thanks.” The breeze picks up a little, and she hunches her shoulders a little. Sensing the discomfort, Rio begins to step away, backing across the curb toward the road.
“Later, Agatha.”
Agatha turns to head off down the road toward the tattoo parlor, in a hurry to get out of the cold air, though not enough of a hurry not to hazard one more glance back at the other woman as she rounds the corner on the opposite side of the street and vanishes.
Nicky lets Agatha make it up to him with a trip to the Pirate Museum, even though she knows deep down he doesn’t really need any sort of penance for forgiveness from her. He’d had the unexpected chance to see some of his drop-in daycare friends that he didn’t have the chance to play with often, and the in-house snack options he’d been provided with had been so riddled with processed sugar that it was a miracle Agatha managed to get him into the car without him vibrating off the edge of the seat.
He’s been to the museum twice that year already, but he still slows down at every single plaque, though Agatha thinks that’s more of a mimicry of politeness than an actual interest in rereading any of the information. She holds his hand tightly each time he tries to dart off ahead of her, keeping him close by her side and out of the thick Saturday crowds. Running off is for tourists, she once told him. He’s not totally sure why that’s a bad thing, but seemed to recognize from her tone that it was a class of people that they were not.
They take the guided tour with a group of a few other families, even though Nicky has most of the story memorized, and it satisfies him enough to be patient in their impromptu grocery store stop on the way home. He doesn’t even whine when she says no to his unenthusiastic but habitual ask to go down the candy aisle; from the way he’s squirming around uncomfortably, she deduces that he’s regretting loading up on so much junk food throughout the day.
He’s cranky by the time they finally make it through the front door, so Agatha parks him in front of the television under a heavy blanket to rush through unpacking the groceries and putting a pot of chicken soup on the stove.
As she’s boiling the broth, she remembers the flowers - the ones sitting in the back seat of her car - and makes a mental note to retrieve them before they end up rotting in her back seat.
The early dinner and cozy environment after a cold day make it mercifully easy to get Nicky down for bed at a reasonable hour, and Agatha follows suit without meaning to.
She dreams of the house again, at least briefly. A glance up at the window she’d been so curious to peer out of before looms over her in the distance, but the idea of finding Evanora there again turns her off of the idea of further exploration. She squeezes her eyes shut, digs her nails into her palms, and wakes up with a start in her own bed. 4 AM. Fucking wonderful.
Her heart pounds and Agatha realizes there’s no way she’s going to fall back into any meaningful sort of sleep. Resigning herself to another early evening, she climbs out of bed and checks on Nicky before heading downstairs to the cold, dark kitchen.
She leaves the lights off and lets the glow of the open refrigerator guide her to the counter after she retrieves her bottle of cold brew concentrate. The door shuts slowly on its own and throws her back into darkness just as she pulls a cup down as quietly as possible from the counter and fills it halfway with cold water from the tap.
As soon as Nicky hears her awake, he’ll be awake, and she needs a few moments to herself before she has to deal with his energy until she drops him off with the Kaplans.
She drinks her coffee in the quiet dark of the kitchen, the only sounds being the liquid sloshing in the cup with each sip and the soft creaking of the house under the autumn wind. A tree branch outside the living room door to the back yard slaps quietly against the house siding - a reminder to get the landscaper to come by one last time before it becomes too cold out.
Agatha’s hands grow restless, tapping against her glass and making her regret leaving her tablet upstairs next to her bed. She could be using this time to double-check her drawing for Rio’s tattoo one last time before heading in - but instead she moves from the kitchen to the living room and settles for her sketchbook that sits abandoned on the side table by the couch in the corner of her eye.
Flipping to a fresh page, she redraws the shop from memory. It’s probably her thousandth interior portrait she’s done of it, every single corner and area mapped out over and over again without much more to add, but she dives in anyway. The waiting area forms on the page as soon as she sets down a few perspective lines, the pencil loose in her fingers and barely grazing the page. She tightens her grip to focus on the softness of the couches, deliberate, rounded shapes taking on the lumpy, mismatched surface of the old leather.
It contrasts sharply from the corner of the coffee table; she hones in on perfecting the knotted wood more than a simple practice sketch deserves, so she forces herself to move on, marking out a set of long, slender legs dangling from the edge of the recliner, one crossed languidly over the other, ankle to knee.
Wait .
She’s all the way up to the hips of the seated figure when she tosses the pencil down and pushes the sketchbook off of her lap irritably. Absolutely not.
Pursing her lips, she watches the pencil roll to the edge of the coffee table and off of the opposite side of it, vanishing out of her sight. Before she has enough time to properly settle in to mentally berate herself for letting her mind wander like that, Nicky’s voice behind her startles her out of it.
“Mama?”
Her eyes flick over to the clock below the television in alarm, wondering if she’d lost track of time, but there’s still plenty of time for her to take care of Nicky and get to the shop. Sitting up to look over the back of the couch, she watches him round the corner from the stairs and pad through the kitchen sleepily, one pant leg of his pajamas pushed all the way up past his knee, the too-big shirt hanging off of one of his shoulders. It had clearly been a heavy sleep.
“Hey, buddy,” she replies, wincing when her voice cracks from underuse. She beckons him over to the couch, smiling softly when he climbs up beside her and carding her fingers into his hair.
“I had a nightmare,” he tells her, flopping roughly against her side and nearly knocking the wind out of her briefly. She inhales shakily, ribs immediately sore, before responding.
“Yeah? What about?”
He sighs heavily like he’s trying to release the weight of the world off of his tiny shoulders.
“There were pirates, and they were making us walk the plank.”
Agatha bites back a snort.
“Oh yeah? For what crimes?”
Nicky frowns up at her for a moment, like he can sense her amusement and lack of concern for this very serious trauma that he’s relaying to her. Her expression softens a little as she looks at him, continuing to card her fingers through his impossibly soft hair. She gives him a small nudge of encouragement, and he continues.
“Scurvy.”
She hums and nods like this is all very logical.
“Well, good news. Because scurvy is a disease, not a crime.”
“But you said that’s what happens if I don’t eat my vegetables,” he points out, confusion knitting his brows together.
Damn, she thinks. Maybe if he’d led with that she could have worked with it.
“Well, yes…” She shifts a little, letting him lean against her a little more comfortably as she settles in for her explanation, “But that’s something that happens to you, not something you do. It… makes you cranky, and then -”
She doesn’t get to describe any more symptoms before Nicky cuts her off.
“Not eating my veggies makes you cranky, not me,” he informs her. Her jaw drops, eyes sparkling, and his entire expression lights up in nervous giddiness, realizing he’s stumbled onto something unintentionally funny.
“It also makes your teeth fall out, and then you have to eat soup forever, for every meal,” she pokes at him warningly but one sharp reflexive kick to her knee with a tiny, but deceptively powerful foot makes her change her mind about the idea of tickling him and risking further injury.
“I don’t like soup,” he whines, as if there’s any real danger of him developing scurvy.
“Then I guess you’re stuck eating veggies forever, kid,” she tells him, sighing. “Them’s the breaks.”
He settles against her side again, sighing defeatedly.
“You were trying to save me, but they captured you and tied you to the mast.” He continues to explain the narrative of his bad dream, though he does sound a little less concerned now. Agatha nods slowly, her hand returning to his hair. Being trussed up by a bunch of villainous pirates would be about the most action she’s gotten in a year.
“Maybe we should think twice about going back to the pirate museum if you’re having all these bad dreams, huh?”
“No!” Nicky sits up and spins around in alarm, eyes wild.
She puts both hands up in surrender, pretending to be shocked by his refusal.
“I mean, I just worry about your sleep schedule. You’re going to get your growth stunted and then you’ll never be tall enough to use the waterslide, and then -”
Nicky pounces on her, squealing when she catches him by the arms and tosses him fully onto the other side of the couch. It takes about all of her strength now that he’s getting bigger, and she knows she’ll regret the exertion in a few hours when she’s hunched over her tattoo bed, but her son’s hysterical laughter as he jumps back up and leaps at her again makes it briefly worth it. She tosses him one more time and then stands up before he can get his bearings and come barrelling back in for a third try, and offers him her hands to help him down from the couch.
“Go get dressed,” she tells him, “We need to get ready to go.”
He takes off for the stairs, clearly no longer worried about the nightmare, and Agatha takes a moment to recenter herself for the day ahead. Retrieving her sketchbook and pencil, she deposits both back into their spot on the side table and heads back to the kitchen to put something together quickly for the two of them before they head out for their day. It’s nearly 6:30, and once she takes Nicky to the Kaplan’s, it will be a more reasonable hour for her to finally head into the shop.
She makes them toast, melting together some butter and cinnamon in the microwave for Nicky’s as she listens to him root around in his room upstairs, and pours herself a second cold coffee, hoping that it’ll pay off in the form of productivity over anxiousness.
Once he’s fed, Agatha makes her way to the Kaplan’s place, ignoring the early morning chill putting a fresh ache in her bones that will surely bother her for the entire day.
“Agatha - you’re early.” Rebecca answers the door looking more haggard than Agatha feels, which is nice until she realizes that it’s because she’s caught her mid-workout. Her skin glows as she dabs at her neck with the towel hanging loosely from it, and despite her heavy breathing, she smiles brightly at the sight of both of them.
“I can come back,” she offers, gesturing back behind herself at her car parked on the curb. It’s not a genuine offer, so she’s pleased when the other woman waves a hand dismissively and ushers Nicky inside.
“No, no, this is great, I’d love some company. Billy’s still asleep - did you want me to…?” She gestures back into the house again and Agatha shakes her head. Not only does his shift not start for another two hours, but she doesn’t want to be suckered into giving him a ride and having to endure any chipper, early morning conversation.
“No, let him rest. I’ll see him later.” She nods to Nicky, already sitting in the foyer to pull off his shoes. “He’s eaten already. No shows about pirates, please, he’s been having nightmares.”
Rebecca nods seriously, and both women ignore Nicky’s whine of protest.
Crouching down for a kiss and hug goodbye, Agatha reminds him to behave, then heads back to the car to make her way to the parlor.
She’s always liked their street in the early morning, especially with the colored leaves littering the road before having the chance to be swept away by the bustle of the day. She finds herself peering into the dark windows of Rio’s shop as she passes, disappointed to see that the lights are off before remembering that it’s her day off, hence the tattoo appointment.
The quiet of the tattoo parlor is almost unsettling, so after dumping her purse in her corner Agatha connects to the wireless speakers and scrolls through her phone to find some music to fill the space. Landing on something ambient and dark, with a steady beat, she gets to work going through the motions of organizing herself. It’s too early to set up, but she cleans anyway, then takes it upon herself to let herself into the back office and retrieve the watering can tucked underneath Lilia’s desk. She fills it in the utility sink by the bathroom, making her way back outside to water the nearly-dead flowers in the planters that line the large windows of the parlor.
It’s getting too cold to bother replacing them - in a few months, they’ll be dead beneath piles of snow, anyway, but tending to them as she listens to the wind hitting the old buildings that line the block is meditative and pleasant, and it takes some of the caffeine-induced shake out of her hands.
She’s in such a deep state of relaxation when she returns inside that the sound of the phone ringing causes her to literally throw the nearly-empty water can up in the air, watching helplessly as it lands and splashes its remaining contents across the foyer. Grumbling to herself, she rounds the desk and snatches the phone from its cradle.
“What?” She starts with, before amending, “Coven Ink.”
One of Alice’s regulars on the other end asks about making time for an appointment for a touch-up, and Agatha tries not to swear at her in frustration when the first pen she manages to grab to jot down a message is one of Lilia’s, complete with the assistive attachment. It has the opposite effect on Agatha’s writing, nothing on the Post-it note resembling English by the time she puts the phone back. She doesn’t bother making it any more legible as she slaps it onto Alice’s station and heads back to the bathroom for the wet floor warning sign.
The bell rings above the door to signal Billy’s arrival, and Agatha snaps at him with one hand up.
“Watch it.”
He freezes, mouth open in what was likely about to be a chipper greeting, and glances down at the puddle. Sidestepping it, he makes his way to the desk and sloughs off his sweater.
“I didn’t think you’d be here already,” he says, instead of whatever his original greeting was about to be.
“Thought I just abandoned Nicky?” She asks, her tone rough with frustration as she returns with a dry mop and the sign. She shoves them both at him wordlessly, pleased that he takes them unquestioningly and begins to clean up her mess.
“You could have gone back home to bed,” he says, though they both know that hell would probably freeze over before she ever would.
He passes her as she leans against the reception counter, watching him unhelpfully, putting the mop away and vanishing into the back office.
“What time is Rio coming in?” He calls, his voice carrying through the empty space and over the sounds of the music.
Agatha glances at her watch, shaking her sleeve back.
“About an hour, maybe a little less.” She watches as he returns to the desk with the cashier drawer balanced in both hands, stepping aside to give him room to get through. He settles in on his seat to count, expression neutral and well-rested in a way that only someone as young as him could possibly be at the hour.
“You must be looking forward to it,” Billy says, his focus elsewhere. She bristles.
“Why would you say that?”
He continues counting, lips miming the numbers as he mentally does the math, and then sets aside a small pile of wrinkled bills. It’s like he doesn’t even realize her question is serious, glancing up and doing a double-take when he sees that she’s still watching him.
“Oh, I don’t know. You haven’t done anything floral in a while, it might be a nice change of pace.”
His answer seems honest enough, but it doesn’t change the fact that she feels on edge now. Her eyes flicker over to the waiting area and then narrow, thinking back to her near-unconscious sketch that morning. Glaring at the empty couch as if it personally offended her, she spins on her heel and is about to head back to the office to give herself a few moments alone when the bell above the door rings once more.
Agatha turns back to the door and freezes at the sight of Rio; a version of her she hasn’t seen before. Her hair is knotted loosely at the nape of her neck, reading glasses perched on her nose and nearly slipping off entirely as she leans down to wipe off a couple of dried leaves stuck to her sweatpants.
“Morning,” she says, sounding a little out of breath. Her cheeks are tinged pink from the cold but the warmth of the shop inspires her to shrug off her coat, leaving her standing in the entryway in nothing but a tight, ribbed black tank.
“Morning!” Billy chirps back. Agatha tries not to sneer.
“You’re early,” she says instead. Rio nods, turning to the coat rack and hanging her jacket.
“I know, but I saw the light on when I was passing and thought I’d see if you were in.” Billy hands her a waiver on a clipboard and she takes it upon herself to reach over the desk for a pen confidently. “I can go and come back, I just thought if it worked out that you were ready…”
She is ready, at least in terms of having nothing else to do before Rio’s actual appointment time, but seeing her there before she was expecting has left her feeling unmoored, like the floor is uneven beneath her feet.
“I mean, I… have to set up,” she hears a stutter in her voice and almost physically recoils from disgust at herself.
“Okay,” Rio replies lightly, eyes flicking up from the clipboard. She catches Agatha’s eye and smiles, like she hasn’t just completely thrown a wrench in her whole day.
She turns back to her station, leaving Billy and Rio to go through the new-client onboarding process. She’s about halfway through filling her ink caps when Rio approaches, wandering closer and coming to a stop about a foot away from where Agatha’s poring over her tablet and trying to get it to connect to the shop’s spotty wifi.
Her eyes lift from the pair of sneakers visible below her tablet screen, freezing when they land on the small sliver of the other woman’s torso that’s visible where her sweatpants have slung too low on her hips. She stares a beat too long, then tilts her head back to meet the other woman’s (infuriatingly, ridiculously) knowing gaze.
“Where do you want me?”
Agatha opens her mouth, which has gone embarrassingly dry, but the stencil printer beside her grunts to life and startles her out of her response.
She turns away abruptly and snatches the pages that it spits out, spinning back around in her chair in time to see the other woman toe off her shoes and then smoothly hook her fingers into the waistband of the sweatpants, shoving them down into a pile at her feet.
It shouldn’t shock her; she’s tattooed someone’s entire penis, once. Still, the sight of Rio standing calmly and confidently before her in biker shorts that ride so high it might have been just as easy to forgo them for a pair of regular underwear instead knocks the wind out of her for a moment.
She brandishes a disposable razor, rolling closer to the other woman, and stops when her hand shoots out to touch her shoulder and stop her in her tracks.
“Laser hair removal. Should be good.”
Agatha turns her head away so she doesn’t see her wet her lips at the unfortunately clear image that those few words have conjured. She tosses the razor back onto her cart and grabs her transfer cream instead. Using the backs of her fingers, she applies it carefully to what seems to be the last untattooed space on the other woman’s thigh, her free hand gently cupping the back of her knee to turn her a little to reach the back.
This close, she can see the way her skin jumps almost imperceptibly at each brush. Rio couldn’t have told her in plain English any more clearly where she’s sensitive, what’s going to hurt the most or leave the clearest bruises. Her skin answers it for her, even without Agatha having to ask as she presses the stencil carefully into place and smooths her fingers over the edges lightly.
Rio jumps a little when she lifts one hand and waves it at the spot, hoping to speed up the drying process - a stark contrast of suddenly cool air after just growing used to the sensation of her much warmer-by-comparison hands.
Agatha peels back the paper and then slides her seat back to scrutinize the placement for almost an entire minute in silence. Rio shifts, like suddenly the gaze is making her feel uneasy, and she cranes her head to take a look herself.
“You want my opinion, too, or…?” She asks, her tone playful even though Agatha can hear the telltale tremor of insecurity creeping in at the edges. She gestures to the full-length mirror propped against the wall between her station and the unused one beside it, and Rio slides past her wordlessly to take a look herself.
“Looks good,” she says decisively.
“I have a perfect track record of zero people-pleasers, so take a better look,” Agatha demands. The look of surprise on Rio’s face is worth losing control of her tone for, shooting a little tinge of smugness into her stomach.
“I really like it,” she says, not even looking back at her reflection again. The gaze she levels on Agatha is nearly challenging. She sighs - it is a perfect placement, but Rio outmatching her confidence is misplaced for their current power dynamic. It unsettles the artist just a little further than her disregard for the set appointment does.
She directs her onto her stomach on the table, letting her lay there in silence as she finishes the last of her preparation and then wheels herself closer. Adjusting the light, she pulls on a pair of gloves and eyes the purple lines filling the once-empty space on Rio’s skin.
“You ready?” She asks, eyes flicking up to the other woman’s face. She picks up the machine, revving it a little in what she won’t admit is a last-ditch attempt to regain a little bit of her threatening aura.
“Uh-huh,” Rio replies, tucking her arms under her head and having the nerve to close her eyes as if she’s preparing to catch a little more sleep while Agatha works.
She chuckles, the sound a little darker than she intended, and then lowers the needle to her leg.
