Chapter Text
Agatha wakes up with a crick in her neck and her hair half-matted, partially trapped under her pillow and tangled beyond belief. Freeing it from where it’s pinned, she spreads it back over her pillow and lies flat on her back, closing her eyes and trying to trick herself into believing the weightlessness of it and the relief on her scalp are permanent. She imagines herself bald. She’d hate it, and she knows it. It’s true, though, that her hair, as much of a resistant act of self-love as it is, would be so much more convenient if she could just take it off whenever she felt like it.
She pictures herself free of it, and that train of thought inevitably reminds her of her last conversation with Evanora, two days before she passed, almost seven years ago.
“Your hair is getting so long again,” she’d said, running her fingers through to the ends and then curling them. Maybe she’d meant to pull it, but she’d been too weak by that point. “Too long.”
Agatha had pulled the bulk of it back, messily shoving it through the dirty elastic on her wrist, a leftover from her unpacking boxes at the shop earlier; felt the rubber yanking a few strands out of her scalp, her irritation level spiking astronomically. The room was suddenly too warm.
“It’s the prenatal vitamins,” was the bomb she had chosen to drop, instead of the bullet of a comment about her mother’s own hair that she’d really wanted to fire off. The sickness took her vanity by force, replacing it with an even stronger sense of jealousy.
She hadn’t waited for the response. The nurse came in asking about vitals, and Agatha made herself scarce for the short rest of Evanora’s life.
It was one day past the two-month pregnancy milestone when she had passed, those two days later. Agatha had woken up and thrown up so violently she thought it might kill her, but she still made her way back to the hospital that afternoon to visit Nicholas’ father. He’d looked even worse than she’d felt at the time, so she reminded him that he had to stick around for the birth or she wouldn’t forgive him. It had been one of the last times she’d been able to really talk to him, too. The nagging fear in the back of her mind that it was karma for how she’d treated her mother in the end stuck with her up until Nicky was born.
Now, she hears the sounds of her son getting up in the other room and forces herself to ground herself in the present.
She listens for him as he makes his way down the hall and flips up the toilet seat, peeing with the door open — a habit she needed to nip in the bud sooner rather than later — and then the scraping sound of his stepping stool being dragged over to the vanity sink so he can wash his hands at the too-tall counter sink. Tiny victories, she decides.
Pushing herself to sit up, she shuffles back against the headboard and hazards a glance at the clock, mentally mapping out how much spare time she has in this little oasis of comfort with him before the real world starts to crowd in on the two of them.
The water shuts off, and she hears him head back down the hall. She considers calling out for him when she hears him go back into his room, inviting him to come sleep in her bed until he has to get up to start the day properly, but she doesn’t get the chance before hearing him make his way back into the hall. Her own door opens further with a creak, and she turns to see him peering at her curiously from the door.
“You’re up,” he observes.
She snorts.
“Uh huh.” She notes the large human anatomy book tucked clumsily under one of his arms, a stuffed bear clutched in the other, and jerks her chin in gesture for him to join her. He flings both the bear and the book up onto her lap before clambering up onto her as well, losing his balance on her legs before collapsing on the empty side of her bed.
He positions himself neatly up against her side, cheek pressed to her ribs just above her heart, and reaches for his book. Flipping through a couple of pages, he seems to find his place and sighs far too wearily for a six-year-old as he focuses on the page. She doesn’t bother asking what he’s doing up, and he doesn’t volunteer any extra information, content to stare at the illustrations on each page and run his fingers over the outlines of muscle and sinew there thoughtfully.
She falls into the space between asleep and awake as she listens to his steady breathing and the distant, muffled clanging of a radiator pipe down the stairs in the living room, fully zoned out until he snaps her out of it.
“How do you say this?”
She glances down at his book and then defeatedly reaches for her glasses on the side table, shaking them open with one hand as he impatiently squirms closer.
“Brachioradialus.”
Nicky stares at the page, then looks up at her with a surprisingly concerned look.
“Like the dinosaur?”
“You’re thinking of brachiosaurus,” she guesses, fighting off her smile.
“Why do they sound the same?”
Surrendering herself to what appears to be an incoming ‘unending stream of questions’ sort of morning, Agatha slides a hand up the back of his soft, worn pajama shirt and rubs his back gently in hopes of subliminally lulling him into a less-inquisitive mood.
“Brachio is a root word, like, uh…” She trails off, scratching her cheek as she tries to think of an example he’ll be able to wrap his head around. “Like aqua. Aquatic, or… aquamarine, or -”
“Aquarium?” Nicky cuts her off. Agatha lights up, laughing in surprise.
“Exactly,” She replies, grabbing both his shoulders softly from behind and jostling him softly until he laughs and tries to elbow her away. “Have I ever told you how smart you are?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m telling you again.”
He wiggles forward to escape her harmless but annoying shoving and narrows his eyes at the book again.
“Well, then what does brachio mean?”
Agatha leans over his shoulder and points to the illustration. “Arm.”
Nicky whips her in the face with his hair when he turns to her again, looking both alarmed and irritated all at once.
“What does that have to do with a brachiosaurus?” He demands, as if this is her fault.
She gives him a bewildered shrug and reaches over to shut the book.
“I don’t know, buddy. Maybe when you grow up, you can be the genius paleontologist who changes the name to something better. Something to do with the neck.”
Nicky absentmindedly scratches at the raised dot of scar tissue on his own neck at the thought, and Agatha gently catches his hand to stop him wordlessly.
“C’mon, baby, time to get up.” She eases the book away from his hands and places it on the nightstand, then smirks mischievously as she drags him into her lap. He shrieks at the sudden, unexpected show of strength, and she forces herself to her feet before she can let her sleep-sore muscles catch up to her impulse.
“AHH!” Nicky barely gets the scream out before bursting into laughter when he’s hoisted messily over her shoulder, dangling down her back as she clutches him by the backs of the thighs and marches out into the hall. He whacks at her legs with the stuffed bear uselessly, laughing too hard to protest properly, even when she reaches his room and tosses him into the bed with a bounce.
He flings the stuffed bear at her as he gets his bearings, and she tosses it back at him with only half the strength as she turns to tug open his dresser drawers.
“Mama?”
Glancing wordlessly over her shoulder at the sudden shy tone her son’s voice has taken on, Agatha narrows her eyes curiously as he sits up on the edge of his bed, kicking his feet.
“...Yeah, buddy?”
“Can I come to work with you today?”
“No,” she dismisses, turning back to the drawers and tugging out a warm long-sleeved shirt for him. “You have school.”
“I’ve come with you before!” He protests.
“That’s when you were sick,” she replies — a half-truth. Explaining away all of his exhaustion and confusion post-hospital had been a lot easier with a blanket term he could understand, at the time. “Are you sick?”
He’s quiet until she turns around, and she has to tighten her jaw to keep from smiling at the nervous, thoughtful expression on his face. He’s slowly been developing a tendency to lie almost reflexively these days. Lucky for Agatha, he’s god awful at it.
“No,” he admits softly, a tiny smile pulling at his mouth when he drops her gaze and picks at a loose thread on his pajama pants. She hands him the shirt to keep his hands busy and turns to dig out a pair of blue jeans as he begins changing. He’s still tangled in the shirt when she finishes putting his clothes together, so she pelts him in the head harmlessly with a balled-up pair of socks and underwear.
Laughing and whining all at once, he shoos her out of the room with the insistence that he can do it himself, and she leaves him to it.
The moment alone is a blessing. The empty bottles from her and Billy’s conversation the night before are still on the edge of the kitchen sink, and her pants — which she’d abandoned in the dining room as soon as he’d left — are still in a heap on the floor by the table. Hastily tidying as she hears Nicky make his way to the bathroom, she rushes through the motions of putting his lunch together, not having had time the night before.
“Will you give this to Rio?” Nicky asks when he finally appears in the kitchen doorway, dragging his backpack in one hand and clutching a sheet of paper in the other. Dried toothpaste sticks to the side of his mouth and trails down to the collar of his shirt.
“Depends what it is,” Agatha says, wetting a paper towel and sinking to his level to dab at his shirt and mouth. “Is she being served?”
Nicky stares at her blankly, confused, and she sighs, nodding to it.
“Show me.”
He proudly turns the page around to show her his work — a bright, messy drawing of a massive Venus flytrap, with what appears to be a much smaller Nicky, Billy, and Agatha surrounding the plant. In the top corner, he’s written ‘For RIO’, her name taking up much more space than necessary.
“It’s to say ‘thank you’ for Seymour,” he explains. “So she knows we’re taking care of him.”
Dropping the paper towel to the floor, Agatha softly grabs either side of his head and pulls him in, meeting him halfway to press her lips firmly to his forehead. She closes her eyes and inhales the smell of his hair, the combination of soap and sleep and the remnants of fabric softener from his pillowcase.
“I’ll make sure she gets it,” she promises him, not letting herself think twice about what it’ll be like to run into Rio that day after the night they’d just had together.
Nicky assists her in picking out his lunch, and she takes it as a fair deal for her own poor planning to let him win the argument to take two different flavors of fruit snacks. Despite the relatively easy morning, he’s dragging his feet by the time she drops him off — she can’t tell if it’s maternal empathy that’s making her mirror his sudden clinginess or just the possible brewings of a near-hangover making her feel extra emotional, but when she arrives at the shop to get the doors open, she’s incredibly grateful to be alone with her own vulnerable thoughts.
She sets up her playlist and leaves off the majority of the lights, content to float about the shop space lit only by the glow from Lilia’s office at the back and her own station lamp. She dusts the framed art in the waiting area and rearranges the binders, charges the card reader and her own tablet, and has even moved on to refilling the cleaning supplies — usually a Billy task — by the time Alice makes her way in almost an hour later.
“Morning!” She calls out, considerably more cheerfully than she usually sounds when greeting Agatha. That new behaviour is explained when Agatha pokes her head around the corner of her station and Alice catches sight of her properly, and jumps in surprise. “Jesus. I thought you’d be Billy.”
“No,” Agatha sighs. “No, today I still woke up ‘me’. Better luck tomorrow.”
“No, I meant—” Alice groans, though it seems mostly at herself for even reflexively indulging the other woman’s sarcasm. “I thought Billy would be opening.”
“Schedule’s on the front desk,” Agatha grunts. “Hasn’t moved in years.”
“Thought you might’ve switched shifts.”
Pausing from where she’d been tucking back into her station, Agatha weighs the pros and cons of asking for an explanation before her curiosity gets the better of her.
“Why would we do that?”
Alice is quiet after that, waking up the sleeping computer at the front desk and taking her sweet time removing her backpack and jacket. Doubly-irritated, now, at both having decided she wanted the answer and now not receiving it, Agatha clears her throat in what she hopes is a threatening manner, then reaches over to pause the music on her phone, throwing the space into a stifling quiet.
“Your date!” Alice replies, almost a little frantic. “Obviously!”
Agatha’s enjoyment of how easily she can still back the younger woman into a corner with very little effort is cut short as her words sink in properly.
“That was last night. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about what they’re doing with time these days, but it’s pretty much linear.” Agatha lifts a hand and slides it outward. “One long line.”
Alice gives her an unamused look.
“Right, well, sometimes when women go on dates and make a good impression, the subject of their interest makes the mistake of taking them home.” She snaps open her bag and begins pulling out her supplies, glancing back at Agatha again with a much softer look, like she’s already regretting her choice of words and worried she’s hurt her feelings.
“No one said I didn’t get laid,” Agatha replies haughtily, both to soothe her own ego and, secretly, ease some of Alice’s obvious guilt.
Alice’s concerned expression morphs into a giddy one. Agatha regrets throwing her a bone.
“Did you really?” She asks, her voice barely above a whisper.
Turning her back to her, Agatha turns the music back on. Alice raises her voice to speak over it.
“Okay! I get it, no details! But come on, it’s just… I don’t know. A little unexpected. I know we were all giving you a hard time about her, but this is kind of a big deal, right?”
Sighing wearily, Agatha glances over her shoulder and then snorts at the sight of Alice standing in the middle of the space, hands wringing together nervously like she’s about to present her with a disappointing report card.
“Let’s make a deal,” she suggests. “I give you exactly zero details about my personal life, and you give me exactly zero indication about the conclusions you’re all coming to. Fair?”
“You know that’ll never happen,” Alice sighs, before her lips pull up into a tiny, mischievous smile, and she shrugs. “It’s four against one. Might as well face the inevitable: your friends are going to take an interest in your life.”
Grumbling at her choice of words, Agatha turns back to her own station, and Alice, for the time being, leaves her alone.
The bell on the door chimes again, much too soon, and Agatha doesn’t have to look up to know, based on the energy shift in the studio, that it’s Jen, though she does turn away from her work just to shoot the other woman a glare for letting the door clatter loudly shut behind herself when she makes her way inside.
“Good morning, Agatha. How was your adult-oriented queerplatonic evening with your hot client that’s desperately trying to fuck you?”
“We’re finally calling it a date,” Alice updates.
Jen sags theatrically in relief and then hands Alice a coffee from the tray in her hand.
“Finally. So? You want to get the details out now, or should we wait for Lilia?”
“She’s not budging,” Alice says, setting her coffee aside to cool as Jen sweeps across the room to hand Agatha one of the remaining three cups. “I give it until three before she finally caves. Earlier if Rio shows up.”
“Ooh,” Jen’s eyes sparkle at the thought as Agatha snatches the coffee wordlessly and glowers at them both. “That would be bold. But that sort of seems like her vibe. Or does it? She’s hard to read.”
Rolling her eyes, Agatha sips poutily at the americano in her hands and waits for the pair of them to stop talking as if she isn’t even there.
“I’m going to fake an injury and go home early if you don’t stop,” she threatens. “And you can do all the payday walk-ins yourselves.”
Heeding the warning, both Jen and Alice hold a coffeeless hand up in surrender and turn their attention to each other, instead, ranting back and forth about the previous night’s episode of whatever reality slop they’re both watching the current season of.
The phone rings just as Lilia bustles inside an hour later, bringing the cold morning air with her.
“Alice,” She says, pointing to the phone as she slides right by the desk and allows it to keep ringing. “For you.”
Confused, the youngest of the group makes her way over to the desk and picks up, frowning into the receiver.
“Coven Ink. Yes, this is she.” She gives both Jen and Agatha a perplexed look as they glance her way, shrugging. “Oh! Yeah, how’s it holding up? That wrap job still tight? Good, good.”
Lilia squeezes Agatha’s shoulder in passing, a silent ‘wait here’ gesture, before vanishing into her back office. Alice glances over as well, before saying into the receiver: “Agatha? Yeah, she’s around.”
Shooting her a look of betrayal, Agatha mouths a sharp ‘What the fuck?’ at her, which she politely ignores.
“For you, since I know you’ll be bored this weekend.” Lilia materializes at Agatha’s station like an apparition, handing off an unwieldy, hand-stretched canvas. Taking it carefully, Agatha flicks her gaze up to the older woman and narrows her eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been complaining about not having any time to paint. May as well take advantage.”
Confused, but not complaining, Agatha carefully tucks the canvas aside behind her tool cart and nods in thanks.
She had spent a lot of time complaining as of late about the lack of time or space to paint, and the environment of the convention did work well for her to flex some of her slower-paced creative muscles. Onlookers often got bored watching a visual art process that wasn’t on a blue light screen, which meant she was more likely to be left to her own devices for most of the time it took to finish any substantial amount of a new piece.
A regular of Jen’s arrives for a touch-up, though she’s in and out within an hour and does little to lift the energy in the shop above its quiet, sleepy rhythm. Agatha considers the havoc a second coffee will wreak on her empty stomach just as the start of Billy’s shift is signalled by him practically bouncing through the door.
“No, I’m seriously surprised you haven’t heard of it. It’s sort of like the first thing that pops up when you’re trying to stalk Zillow. The guy’s a total fucking dick, though. Still, month to month, can’t really be that picky.”
His voice carries across the waiting area of the shop and into the back, and before Agatha has the chance to turn and see who it is he’s rambling at, she senses her. It’s like every single tiny hair follicle lights up with electricity, the back of her neck suddenly prickling uncomfortably, and in a split second of clarity, Agatha realizes it’s the uncomfortable sensation of being watched that’s bothering her, not just Rio being in her space.
Hazarding the most minute side-eye glance possible, she notes that Rio is barely looking her way, instead watching Billy intently as he speaks while following him inside. The staring itch seems to be coming from Jen, eyes locked on Agatha from her perch at her own station.
“Look who I found,” Billy announces, smiling cheerfully until Agatha catches his eye and quickly sobering his expression.
He abandons Rio for the safety of his reception desk, rounding it quickly and shutting himself in.
“Hi, Rio,” Jen and Alice chime in unison. Agatha pictures banging their heads together like cymbals as she slowly wheels her seat out from her station to get a better look at the other woman.
That proves to be a colossal mistake. The Rio across from her is dressed comfortably: dark linen pants that make her legs look even longer by some miracle, and a silky button-up top with the sleeves rolled up to the crooks of her elbows. Her makeup is much more daytime-minimal than it had been the night before, her hair tucked up messily at the nape of her neck in a scrunchie that looks as though it’s seen better days. Agatha takes her in, but her eyes seem to miss the memo, causing heat to flash over her entire body so quickly that she swears she’s transported back in time, staring up at Rio’s face as she towers over her in the back seat of her car, long fingers buried to the hilt inside of her and drawing screams out of her throat she’d hopelessly wondered if she’d ever hear again before that night.
As if picking up on the image telepathically, Alice stands up abruptly, sending her wheeled stool rolling back away and bumping into the wall.
“I’m going to go smoke,” she insists. “Jen?”
Jen waves her off quickly and irritably, like she’s just interrupted her during a movie she’s never seen.
“Agatha,” Rio greets, like they’re the only two people in the shop. Her easy half-smile turns into a knowing smirk.
“Rio,” Agatha replies, carefully putting a slight husk into her voice that she’s well aware makes the other woman’s pupils dilate like clockwork. They do, then, and all of a sudden Agatha’s vision seems much clearer, like she’d suddenly found the right prescription eyeglasses.
Now, Rio’s confidence is completely transparent from where Agatha is sitting. Her attempt at ‘lounging’ against the side of the desk is too stiff, her hands in her pockets fidgeting visibly under the linen despite her obvious intent to hide the movement. Coming by was a bold move, sure, but Agatha can tell she’s holding her breath as she waits for the verdict on whether or not it was the right one.
Letting her squirm a moment longer, Agatha digs in her bag and pulls out her tablet, flipping open the case to pull out Nicky’s drawing tucked safely inside. She stands from her rolling stool and approaches Rio slowly, failing to bite back her smirk when the taller woman stands up straight immediately, eyes widening.
“This is for you,” she says, holding it out. Rio doesn’t take the paper for a beat, eyes fixated on Agatha’s, before she seems to actually hear what she’d said and drops her stare to the page.
All of the cautious curiosity is wiped off her face by the brilliant grin that splits across it as soon as she registers what she’s seeing.
“Did Nicky make this?”
“No, I did. Obviously,” Agatha replies, the sarcasm slipping out before she can help it.
Rio crinkles her nose, slapping her arm with the back of her hand without looking up from the picture.
“I love it,” she says, finally looking up. “It’ll need a frame before I can put it up at the shop, though. Humidity’ll ruin it otherwise.”
“I have something!” Lilia insists, startling both Agatha and Rio with her volume. She turns around and grabs Jen roughly by the forearm, dragging her back towards the office. “Help me look.”
“But I want to-” Jen tries to protest, trailing off as she’s pulled away.
Billy glances at them both and then pulls his headphones up from his neck and over his ears, turning away from the pair of them pointedly to pretend to focus on the schedule book splayed out on the opposite side of the desk.
“Y’know,” Rio turns her attention back to Agatha, and leans almost imperceptibly closer. “I would have just called. If you weren’t so hellbent on maintaining your mysteriousness and just gave me your number.”
“Called for what?” Agatha replies innocently, cocking her head to the side.
“It would have been the gentlemanly thing to do. After I made you mmph-!”
Agatha abruptly covers her mouth with one hand, eyes widening and shooting over to Lilia’s open office door at the back of the shop. Neither Jen nor Lilia is lurking in the doorway to eavesdrop, though, so she turns her gaze back onto the woman before her and glares warningly. The heat of it simmers off into shock when Rio’s tongue pushes out from behind her lips and swipes at the inside of her fingers before forcing itself between the crack of two of them and wriggling.
Yanking her hand back with a little gasp, Agatha wipes her hand on the leg of her pants.
“What is wrong with you?”
“I thought that was you asking for a recreation,” Rio replies sweetly.
“Why start reliving the night there? Maybe you should set a thirty-second timer and see if you can -”
Rio covers her mouth, this time, cheeks red and eyes wide in horror despite the telltale smile threatening to land on her lips.
“Point taken,” she says. “Truce.”
It’s unintentional, but Agatha knows she must be smiling when Rio pulls her hand away, because her eyes drop to her lips and she mirrors it.
“Is that all you came over for?”
“Actually,” Rio shuffles one foot against the floor and cocks her head. “I was going to ask for a ride to the convention tomorrow. Since you’re so insistent about it, usually.”
“Oh, those are time-sensitive offers,” Agatha tells her, forcing her smile into a smirk.
Rio sighs heavily, but doesn’t ask a second time, letting her request hang in the air until Agatha relents, rolling her eyes.
“Fine. But it’s the total opposite direction from my place, and I don’t want to go back and forth.” She snatches a pen from the top of her workstation and grabs Rio’s wrist, twisting her hand until it’s palm-up and uncapping the pen with her teeth. “Be ready to go by nine, or I’m leaving without you.”
Rio pulls her arm back almost reluctantly as Agatha lets her go, eyeing the address written in cramped capital letters on the palm of her hand. She opens her mouth to speak — most likely a sarcastic comment about still not having Agatha’s number, given the mischievous look on her face — but Lilia interrupts as she floats out of the back office, clutching an ornate-looking black picture frame.
“Here you are,” she announces, offering it to Rio with unnecessary flourish.
Jen strays a few steps behind, eyeing the pair of them like some kind of sexual-tension-detecting dog, and crosses her arms over her chest when Rio steps back, tucking both the frame and drawing to her chest.
“Thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, waving with her free hand before turning and making her way to the door.
Lilia and Jen both turn their questioning looks onto Agatha, who simply goes back to her station as if she hadn’t noticed their silent demands for an explanation.
“I can’t be the only one working today,” she huffs. “Don’t you have flash to be finishing?”
Her sudden interest in productivity seems to startle everyone back to their own business. Agatha’s gaze falls to the blank canvas once more, and she tugs her tablet closer to begin brainstorming ideas.
Agatha wakes before her alarm — a worryingly frequent occurrence — and decides to start getting ready for the day ahead instead of trying to fall back asleep. Nicky will be an impatient force of nature once he’s awake, and she knows that getting dressed and put together will be much easier without his hyperactive distractions.
By the time her alarm does go off and Nicky still hasn’t come to drag her out of bed, the smallest nagging hint of concern beginning to grow in the back of her mind, becoming more and more insistent as each minute ticks by, mirroring the increasingly heavy rain against the outside of the house that had only been a dusting mist when she’d first woken up.
The door to Nicky’s room is still cracked open from one of his several trips to the bathroom for water the night before, and when Agatha pushes it open, she sees a suspiciously Nicky-shaped lump in the middle of the bed beneath the covers.
It shifts, stiffening as the door creaks open, and Agatha has to bite back a smirk.
“Nicky. You awake?”
“Um. I don’t want to go today. I need a home-day,” the blanket-lump tells her.
The smirk on her face is quickly replaced with a frown as she approaches the bed in a few swift steps, sinking down onto the edge of it.
Nicky shifts, sinking further down into the sheets even as Agatha tries to peel them back to see him.
“What is it, buddy?” She asks, forcing the impatient edge out of her voice as best she can.
“I just don’t want to today.” He wrenches the sheet back from her and buries himself beneath it. Agatha blinks in surprise, rubbing his back softly through the thin material and trying to subtly feel out if he might have a fever brewing.
“Are you sick?” She asks. “Or just tired?”
“Neither,” He replies, muffled beneath the sheet.
Before she can ask a follow-up question, the doorbell echoes through the house, cutting through the soft sound of the rain outside.
“Shit,” Agatha whispers, slipping off of the bed and pulling the sheet off Nicky with more force. “Okay, kid, we gotta go. Come on.”
He looks almost on the verge of tears, and it hits Agatha so sharply in the chest that she feels physically wounded for a moment. Before she can even think to beg him for an explanation, a knock on the door follows and she groans, rushing out of the room and down the stairs.
Rio rocks on the balls of her feet as Agatha answers the door, one arm raised still from where she’d been admiring the wreath hanging there before Agatha had pulled it out of her hand.
“Morning,” She greets.
“Hey. Look, I’m sorry - Nicky’s… something. I don’t know. Sick, maybe. But you can take my car, just wait here, I’ll get you the keys.” Agatha turns to head back inside, hearing Rio follow behind her despite the lack of invitation. She grabs her bag from the banister railing and digs through its disorganized depths for her car keys, trying not to feel too insecure at the discrepancy between how put-together Rio is versus her own appearance.
“I don’t need to borrow the car,” Rio tells her, closing the front door behind herself. “I mean, shit happens. Probably be sort of weird hanging around there without you, anyway.”
Agatha pauses her search, glancing back over her shoulder at the other woman.
“You sure?”
Rio smiles, calm and open and a thousand percent less frazzled than Agatha feels.
“Yeah. Is Nicky alright?” Her eyes flick toward the stairs at the sound of a soft ‘thud’. Agatha follows her gaze, calling out to her son instead of answering Rio directly.
“You okay up there?”
“Who was at the door?” Nicky calls back, tossing a third unanswered question into the ring.
Rio catches sight of the small planter housing Seymour the venus fly trap on the dining room table and brushes past Agatha to head further into the house as if she’d been there a hundred times. Crouching a little, she gently touches one of the new sprouts in the soil and smiles.
“Looks better than it did in the shop. You’d think a florist’s would have better natural light,” She muses.
Agatha crosses her arms as she watches her, then nods to the planter.
“We had to move it down here because he was staying up late talking to it.”
“Well, there are studies that show that conversation helps them grow,” Rio agrees, standing up straight and turning to Agatha and adding on in a playfully serious tone, “It’s when you start hearing them talk back to you that there’s cause for concern.”
Agatha snorts, caught off guard by the joke, and forces herself to roll her eyes as if it hadn’t amused her.
“Corny,” she huffs. Rio grins, opening her mouth to speak, but Nicky interrupts, coming down the stairs two at a time. He freezes on the last step at the unexpected sight of Rio, then lights up when he realizes they must be admiring his meticulous care of the plant in the middle of the table.
“Hey,” Rio says, jerking her head toward the plant. “Seymour giving you any trouble?”
Nicky giggles at the absurdity of the question, responding with an exasperated, enthusiastic ‘No!’ as he makes his way into the dining room to join them.
He climbs up onto one of the dining room chairs and reaches across the table, tugging the planter a little closer.
"I've been watering him a little bit every day. But not too much."
"Right," Rio agrees, stepping a little closer still. "Wouldn't want to drown him."
Nicky stiffens and Agatha mirrors it, a knee-jerk sympathetic reaction to his sudden discomfort. He turns to Rio slowly, rigid with concern.
"What?"
The abrupt smallness in his voice makes the florist realize she must have somehow misstepped, and she glances at Agatha for help, confusion clear on her face.
For Nicky's sake, more than Rio's, Agatha clears her throat and forces a tiny smile at her son and shakes her head.
"No, it's just a figure of speech." She brushes past Rio and rests both hands on Nicky's small shoulders, squeezing them reassuringly. "Just because Seymour acts a little bit like an animal doesn't mean he is one. He can't feel anything, buddy. He's just a plant."
Part of her wonders if Rio will contest this idea; if her botany background will make her want to come to the defense of the non-sentient being in the small planter on the table, but she doesn't say a word. When Agatha glances back at her again, feeling Nicky relax under her hands, she catches the apologetic look on the other woman's face.
'Sorry', Rio mouths, even though it’s clear she's not totally sure what it is she's apologizing for.
"You seem like you're feeling a bit better," Agatha tells Nicky, turning her attention back to him. He stiffens again, though this time in preemptive protest, not fear.
"I... I still want a home-day," He insists, turning to look up at her with a devastatingly effective pout.
“You’re killing me, kid.”
Sensing the defeat in his mother’s tone, Nicky’s expression softens into something a little more self-satisfied, realizing he’s already gotten his way.
“Maybe Billy could come over,” he suggests, but Agatha shakes her head.
“He’s at the convention, too. I was gonna paint today. How are you supposed to entertain yourself, huh?” Agatha runs a hand slowly through his sleep-mussed hair and feels the defeat swell when Nicky’s eyes flick from her face to over her shoulder, where Rio is standing.
Catching the hint, Rio speaks up.
“I could… hang around. Here, I mean. So you can focus.” The offer hangs in the air between the three of them for a moment before she adds on: “I mean. Shop is closed up for the day, anyway. I didn’t have any other plans.”
Agatha finally turns to her, wincing when Nicky exclaims his agreement with the idea.
“You really don’t have to do that.”
Rio shrugs.
“You didn’t have to offer to give me a ride, either. It’s a win-win. I need a documentary-watching buddy; you need time to work on your art. I take payment in the form of going through your snacks, though. Didn’t get breakfast.”
Agatha snorts. The entire thing feels threateningly intimate - somehow more so than even sleeping together had - but Nicky is already rambling about everything he wants to do that day, sliding down from the dining room chair to grab Rio’s hand and pull her toward the kitchen.
“We have Pop-Tarts!” He tells her, hurrying her along, and graciously offering, “You can have the last blueberry one. They’re my favorite, but you’re the guest.”
“Ooh, I love Pop-Tarts,” Rio tells him, just as they round the island counter and vanish into the pantry.
Agatha’s gaze falls to the large, blank canvas propped up against the railing at the bottom of the stairs, then back towards the sounds of Rio and Nicky talking animatedly about something in the pantry. Lilia had been right; it would be a waste of an opportunity.
“I’ll be just down the hall!” She calls out, waiting for the dismissive response from the pair of them before picking up the canvas and making her way towards the ‘office’.
She drags her easel out of the corner and tries not to feel too guilty about the layer of dust that falls off of it as it skids and bumps across the worn wooden floor, and is just about to prop the canvas up when she hears Nicky shriek delightedly in the other room and almost drops it.
The shriek dissolves into laughter, and it’s followed by the pleasant low sound of Rio’s voice, though Agatha can’t quite make out what it is she’s saying. Nicky quiets down again, and the sound of their voices blends perfectly into the rhythm of the house itself: the rain on the windows, the creak of the floor, the ticking of the grandfather clock that’s been gaining a second every two minutes for so many years that it’s looped back around to being properly tuned, for the time being.
Agatha sinks onto her stool, boneless, and reaches for her toning brush, and for the first time in over a year, puts paint to canvas.
