Chapter Text
Agatha wriggles her toes deeper into the sand absentmindedly, settling further into her beach chair once her feet find a cooler layer to rest in. Beside her, Wanda is talking. Telling a story, maybe, about something that she has going on at work or something entirely out of pocket that Sharon had said while she waves her sunscreen-slathered arm in the air. Either way, Agatha isn’t listening.
Her eyes are fixed firmly on the blue-grey water, watching Rio’s arms flex and stretch as she rotates like a crane in a half circle over and over again, lifting Nicky and the twins one by one and tossing them into the water. It’s a calm day with waves that break in a murmur rather than a roar but still Rio watches them all with a casually careful eye, keeping the boys safe while they have their fun.
The view shimmers slightly, glimmering with an unnatural sheen of joy. Agatha knows, then, that she’s dreaming. Even more so, she knows this is a memory. Each beat plays out as it should– Wanda catches on, laughing at her blatant ogling and hitting Vision’s arm to point it out to him. Rio drags the boys and herself out of the water, and when Agatha sees the sun hit her skin and the water running in rivulets down the planes of her stomach, the heat that she feels has nothing to do with her slow blooming sunburn. Rio walks back up to their chairs and finds Agatha still staring, lets that cocky smirk grace her lips before she leans in to whisper–
A soft sigh reaches her ears and the memory/dream comes to a halt. Agatha is awake and deeply, annoyingly aware of the sunlight breaking through the blinds. Aware of a body, solid and warm, tucked against her front. When she opens her eyes she receives visual confirmation that she is, in fact, the big spoon and Rio is sleeping peacefully in her arms.
Agatha lazily studies Rio’s face, unguarded in sleep. She looks younger here, more trusting. Agatha is reminded of the Rio who would fall asleep curled up on the floor of their study room during finals week and of the Rio who never made it all the way through a movie without passing out.
Versions of Rio that Agatha hadn't taken her knife to, she thinks. Something hard and unpleasant settles in her chest, a voice that slithers in from the back of her mind with a reminder that she does not, as it stands, deserve nice things. A reminder that not all has been forgiven.
Agatha stews in the feeling, her breathing picking up to match pace with the rush of her thoughts. She’s considering pulling away when she feels a hand cover the back of her own, locking their fingers together over Rio’s bare stomach and holding fast. Agatha’s breath catches in the quiet of the room.
“Good morning,” Rio rasps in her gravelly, sleep-thick voice. Had she been standing, Agatha would have fallen to her knees at the sound.
It’s absurd, really, how love floods the system after the dam holding it back finally breaks.
“Hi.”
For a moment, that’s all there is. Agatha waits while Rio finishes waking up fully, stretching languidly before turning in the cradle of Agatha’s arms so that their noses are nearly brushing. The smile she offers is small but real as she tangles their feet together beneath the blankets.
“I’m glad you’re still here,” she whispers. Honest. Unguarded.
Agatha swallows past the lump in her throat. “Me too.”
“I do, unfortunately, have work today though,” Rio says with a grimace. Agatha closes her eyes with a groan, realizing that it’s still a normal Wednesday and that the world has not stopped spinning. She had meant to handle some things yesterday evening after the deposition, but that clearly had not gone to plan.
Agatha cracks her eyes back open with a look that can only be described as mournful. “Me too.”
Rio bites her lip to stifle her laugh before finally detangling herself from their nest, stretching one last time before pulling herself from the bed.
“I’m gonna hop in the shower,” she says, absently tapping her phone on the nightstand to check the time. Agatha nods, watching as Rio rounds the bed. The scene is at once familiar and foreign, like Agatha could recite this script from memory but the stage dressing has come from a different play entirely. Rio hesitates for a half second before leaning down and pressing a soft, chaste kiss to Agatha’s lips. Agatha feels the balloon of tension in her chest deflate slightly, some of the pressure lifted from her rib cage.
She watches Rio disappear and hears the door down the hall open and shut, followed by the telltale sign of the showerhead turning on. Agatha contemplates the merits of joining her but ultimately decides it would probably be too much too quickly. She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, certain she’s getting whiplash from how violently her thoughts are swinging from one extreme to the other.
Yesterday had been a lot. Yes, they slept together and yes, Rio said that Nicky’s death wasn’t Agatha’s fault. But nothing was magically erased in the process, no matter how badly Agatha wishes it was. There’s still more to be said, more hurt simmering somewhere on a back burner waiting to be addressed. Just the same, there’s a lightness that wasn’t there before. A tentative hope for something better.
When she finally follows suit and rises from the bed, Agatha eyes both the clothes that Rio had set out for her yesterday and her dress still on the floor in the corner, pondering which look would feel less in tune with a walk of shame. She remembers, too, that her car is still parked at the Perlman lawyers’ firm. The moment she realizes she’ll probably have to ask Wanda to drive her to get it back, Agatha suppresses the urge to flop back down onto the mattress, desperate for as little evidence of her breakdown as possible to exist in the world.
In the end, she pulls the t-shirt and basketball shorts back on and borrows a pair of slides from Rio’s closet. Agatha collects her dress, blazer, heels, and underwear in her arms and piles them onto the couch while she roots around in Rio’s kitchen, listening to the sounds of Rio traveling back and forth between the bedroom and bathroom while she gets ready for work.
Rio emerges from the hallway just as Agatha finds a grocery bag under the sink and shoves her clothes unceremoniously inside to be dealt with at home. Agatha lets her eyes rake over Rio’s form, dressed in a green short sleeve blouse and black slacks. Her blocky heeled pumps are still in her hand, waiting to be put on.
Agatha knows that she saw Rio naked truly less than an hour ago. Knows this, and still feels herself starting to salivate at the sight of her in her professional ensemble. It’s as if Agatha has spent so long redirecting her emotions into anger and hate that she didn’t realize that so much of said emotion was this unbridled lust.
Still, she’s trying not to rush things or send herself spiraling one way or another with mistimed action, so Agatha simply tucks her hair behind her ear with her free hand and knots the grocery bag shut while pretending she wasn’t slack-jawed staring. As it is, Rio notices anyway and gives her a smirk laced with amusement.
Agatha clears her throat, looking pointedly past Rio and out through the living room windows. “I called an Uber to take me back to the house. I’ll be out of your hair in a second,” she offers lamely.
Rio’s bare feet shuffle awkwardly as she shifts her weight, the pumps swaying in her hand. “I could’ve driven you.”
Agatha rolls her eyes. “It’s on the wrong side of town, dumbass. You’d be late for work if you did that.”
“Okay, well this is feeling weirdly like a one night stand and I don’t know what to do to make it not feel like that.” Rio’s eyes are wide and exasperated, like she’s lost all patience for playing coy or beating around the bush. Agatha checks her phone to see that her Uber is still two minutes away before setting the bag with her clothes down and rounding the counter.
She takes Rio’s face between her hands and squishes her cheeks ever so slightly, draining some of weight out of the moment. “I know. But it’s not.” Agatha pulls Rio’s face down to meet her own, kissing the tip of her nose and trying to fight back against the immediate feeling that she’s overstepped. “We’ll talk about it soon, okay? I–” she cuts herself off before she can say I promise , but Rio seems to catch it anyway. She leans her face into Agatha’s right palm.
“Soon,” Rio agrees, releasing them both from it.
Agatha pulls back, collecting her things from the counter and walking to Rio’s front door. She spares one glance back to where Rio is leaning against the wall and stepping into her shoes, trying to act entirely nonchalant while she watches Agatha leave.
“Have a good day at work.”
“You too. Te veo. ”
On Saturday, Wanda mercifully agrees to drive Agatha back to the law firm to retrieve her car on the assumption that it hasn’t already been towed. Or it would be merciful, but Wanda demands that in return for her help Agatha must tell her everything about the deposition. With no viable alternative, Agatha acquiesces.
She tells her the most minimalistic version of events, starting with Rio staying over the week before and the call she’d had with Lilia, telling herself that they add necessary context. Then Agatha describes the musty room, the vicious tone that they questioned her in, the way she narrowly avoided causing a scene. Waking up in Rio’s apartment and staying there. Agatha pointedly does not tell Wanda about the sex, though she sees her mouth curl into a smile when she mentions leaving the next morning.
“I am so proud of you,” Wanda says, sniffling and shaking her head slightly, “for all of it.” To Agatha’s horror, Wanda seems to be tearing up slightly at the wheel. Agatha shifts further away in the passenger seat of the SUV, pressing her hip against the door.
“Don’t get all weird and soft on me now, Maximoff. It’s disgusting.”
Wanda ignores her. “If I wasn’t actively operating heavy machinery on the highway I would hug you right now.”
Agatha rolls her eyes. The thought of a hug from Wanda is disturbing but the sentiment causes something small and warm to bloom in her chest all the same. She neglects to tell Wanda that she hasn’t heard from Rio since Wednesday morning when she’d checked to see that Agatha made it home alright and left a thumbs up on Agatha’s response. Best to let at least somebody bask in the sense of relief that had left Agatha days ago, replaced by an increasingly anxious undercurrent.
Wanda drops her off at her sedan with a hand on her arm and a sincere offer to come back another time and egg their row of shiny, stupid cars that does bring the ghost of a smile to Agatha’s lips. As thanks, Agatha threatens to set her hedges on fire if she ever repeats what Agatha told her to another living soul. Wanda merely blows her a kiss.
Saturday bleeds into Sunday and seeps all the way through to Thursday without a single text from Rio, almost as though nothing has changed at all. Agatha does not continue to check her phone, thank you very much. By Thursday afternoon the phone lives almost exclusively in a drawer in Agatha’s desk, entirely out of sight and (not so entirely) out of mind.
It’s fine, she tells herself. They’re both busy people, especially after taking a day off of work in the middle of last week. And now Agatha knows just how much Rio’s been working, seemingly inventing new hours of the day just to get more done.
Agatha chews on the end of her pen, staring listlessly at her laptop screen. There’s a lot that she’s learning about Rio lately– a lot that she never considered, really. She thinks back to Rio’s apartment that screams ‘divorced dad chic’ and the cigarettes in her pocket and how incongruent they both are with the image of Rio in her head. She may as well be a new person entirely, a voice in Agatha’s mind supplies. A new person that may not want to be back on speaking terms with Agatha after all that they’ve put each other through.
The thought makes her gut twist, bringing something mean and insecure and unfair to the surface until it pulses in time with her heart. What are they supposed to do here, really? Start acting like the last three and a half years never happened? Pretend everything is normal? The anxious current beneath her skin grows to a heavy static. She thinks of her almost-promise to Rio to talk about it, but every conversation– if they could even qualify– that they’ve had in nearly four years comes back in a rush of shouting and biting and an anger so visceral that her face heats at the thought alone. Agatha's eyes flick to where her phone is burning a hole in the drawer inches away. It doesn't seem like Rio is too enthusiastic to talk about it either, then.
But Agatha lets out a huff of frustration with herself, pulling the pen from her teeth and scribbling on the notebook page before her. She tries, for her own sake, to find another angle of looking at it before she spirals into oblivion and loses any progress she may have made.
It’s true that there are parts of Rio that she doesn’t know because she hasn’t been around to see them. It’s also true that Rio had carried her home in that same old Subaru and had made Agatha the same comfort meal that she’d perfected years ago. It’s true that Rio had put on a nature documentary the moment she’d gotten custody of the remote, just like Agatha knew she would, and that she’d touched Agatha in the way that only she knows how to. True that she'd woken up in Agatha’s arms and said I’m glad you’re still here.
So perhaps it’s a bit soon to be forming hard and fast opinions, all things considered.
A notification vibrates up through the wood of the desk and Agatha, to her shame, flings the drawer open with so much force that it almost breaks. When she lifts the phone up to check it, the frustrating balloon of hope that had sprung up in her chest pops quickly. It’s only Alice, sending another text to remind her of the support group meeting tonight. In her previous unanswered text Alice had explained that this week’s meeting was going to be a party of sorts with more of the plaintiffs than usual coming to town.
As Agatha and Rio had been the last to join the case, their deposition was the last as well. The group was celebrating that they’d all survived the grueling process, more and now only had to wait for Stephen to work his magic and deliver the verdict that they all so desperately want.
Agatha had read and reread Alice’s initial text when it came through on Monday, unsure exactly how to decline. It felt too harsh to say that she was pretty sure she’d tanked the entire case when she told Big One that she didn’t blame the clinic for Nicky’s death even if it was the truth. She’d then left the thread, opening Rio’s contact to type and delete a message asking if she was going to go. In the end, Agatha hadn’t said a word to either of them.
She decides that her best course of action is to tell Alice she isn’t feeling well, which is more or less the truth, in a way. Alice responds with some kind message or another that Agatha doesn’t read, choosing instead to leave her phone in her office to wash her hands of the whole thing.
Agatha fills her evening with various activities– a neighborhood walk where she ignores Sharon’s offer of lemonade and narrowly avoids getting drenched by Herb’s overpowered sprinkler system, half of a shitty romance novel that she can’t believe she’s wasting her brain cells on, and a game of online Scrabble against Lilia played on her tablet. (Personally Agatha much prefers regular Scrabble, where she can make up fake words and convince her opponents that they’re just too stupid to understand her word of choice. The digital age deprives her of this joy.)
The sun has long set when Agatha stops back into her office on her way to bed, pulling the phone from its drawer and finding her only missed texts to be from Wanda. Based on the hour, Agatha knows that the support group’s party must be over. She wonders if Rio went.
Agatha navigates back to Rio’s contact, her thumb hovering over the call button just below her blurry contact photo. She wants to ask did you go to their party? How was it? Did I ruin their whole case with my stubborn rage? And while we’re here, am I still something that you could want? Are you ignoring me because last week was just a fluke for you?
So anyway, Agatha does not do that. She turns the phone off and leaves it face down on the desk, certain it’ll have ample time to torment her tomorrow.