#scratchimoff

[aparticularbandit]

Heart's Desire

Summary: In old coven trials, they cast the spell Heart's Desire on their condemned.

The spell manifested a new, illusory world, wherein the condemned were given everything they ever wanted. For a serial killer, the world might be full of victims for them to tear apart, or it could show a world where the trauma that triggered their sequence of murders never existed. It's believed that the original purpose of the spell was to provide empathy for the condemned, but by the time it was used on Agatha, its more common use was one of punishment.

To learn what the condemned wanted most and then to make sure that they never gained it.

For a long time, no one realized that living through the spell and coming out the other side was often torture enough, and once they did, the Heart's Desire was considered a last resort.

This realization occurred roughly a hundred years before the spell was used on Agatha.

Her mother just didn't care.

Rating: T.

AO3

“Oh, no,” Agatha whispers as she walks into the room.  Her fingers hook into the threads of magic surrounding her – surrounding all of them – and cling to it as though that will soothe her, as though that will make her feel better.  She looks towards it, even though it has no physical form, and her gaze drifts through the magic on which she is focusing to where Rio stands beyond it, even though she doesn’t see her.  “Not again.”

She knows the spell.

In this moment, just as it falls about them, Agatha knows the spell.  She can taste it in the air, just as she can taste the counter-spell on her tongue.  It isn’t an easy spell; it isn’t an easy counter.  The coven would need to help her stop it before it takes root in their minds, before it encompasses them, before it becomes so much harder to leave.

But she knows the spell.

Agatha says nothing, and she lets it wash over her.

~

When Agatha was eighteen years old, her first coven put her on trial.  She’d reached too far above her station, they said, and she deserved to be punished for her sins, no matter what reasoning she’d had to reach for that knowledge.  It mattered little how well they all knew of her problems controlling her power and the damage that lack of control caused; maybe they’d been looking for a way to end her ever since she was born.  (Her mom certainly had.)

Afterwards, the rumors circulated that Agatha murdered her coven.

No one really cared what came before the murder.

~

The spell encompasses all of them.

It stretches out from Agatha’s heart and ripples outward – unseen and invisible, but an effect all the same – and it takes advantage of her knowledge of the others to grow and expand and engulf them the same way it engulfs her.  She doesn’t see them, but she knows that they won’t feel the sharp stabbing spears through them the way she does know, won’t feel their entire brain smoking as what feels like flames flicker on either side of their head.

They aren’t the center.

Agatha is the center.

It draws on her and from her, and she feels herself stretching thinner and thinner until—

~

In old coven trials, they cast the spell Heart’s Desire on their condemned.

The other witches in the coven would carry something on them to remind them that the world they were in and seeing was not the real one, so that they could invoke the counter-spell as soon as they learned what they wanted to learn.

The spell manifested a new, illusory world, wherein the condemned were given everything they ever wanted.  For a serial killer, the world might be full of victims for them to tear apart, or it could show a world where the trauma that triggered their sequence of murders never existed – a world where their mother might still be alive, a world where they weren’t abused, a world where their high school sweetheart never left them.

It’s believed that the original purpose of the spell was to provide empathy for the condemned – that more of the worlds seen were something like the latter instead of the former – but by the time it was used on Agatha, its more common use was one of punishment.

To learn what the condemned wanted most and then to make sure that they never gained it.

Sometimes, this took the form of multiple interlacing spells. Sometimes, this meant they were locked away.  Sometimes, this meant they were stuck in a family with people who cared about them because for some people, that’s more torturous than anything else.  (Sometimes, after growing close to them, they were forced to kill them.  Multiple condemned could be dealt with in this manner.)

For a long time, no one realized that living through the spell and coming out the other side was often torture enough.

Once they did, the Heart’s Desire spell was considered a last resort.  Worse than that.  It’s better to kill the condemned than it is to put them through all of that.

This realization occurred roughly a hundred years before the spell was used on Agatha.

Her mother just didn’t care.

~

Lilia snaps out first.

Agatha is the center, and so the spell builds the others’ illusions based on her unspoken and unconscious assumptions of what they most want might be.  She knows quite a lot about magic, but she doesn’t know as much as she pretends to know about each of her so-called coven members, and she certainly doesn’t know much about Lilia Calderu.

Lilia sees through the illusion almost immediately.

Almost.

She has never personally been under the Heart’s Desire, but she has been one who cast it, centuries before Agatha was born, before anyone understood what it meant.  As a result, she still remembers the spell to protect herself, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t still shed a single tear when she dispels the illusion surrounding her and makes herself little more than a spectator.

Agatha might know much about her, but she knows enough for it to hurt.

She does not hold this against her.  Agatha is not the one who cast the spell; the Road did.  She didn’t choose this torture.

No one would.

~

Agatha tries not to think about the time she spent under the spell during her Salem trial.

None of it was real after all.

But she remembers how nice it was to have a mother who loved her, to have a full coven who supported her, to have friends among the other daughters of her coven, to be accepted.

If she thinks about it, she misses it.

(And then refuses to say anything about it to anyone else.  Her desires sound so pitiful.  She has all this magic, all this talent, all of this witchcraft and knowledge.  But in the end, when she was a kid, she just wanted to be normal.)

((For a witch, anyway.))

~

Alice sees through the illusion almost as soon as Lilia does – not because the spell isn’t able to mostly accurately predict what Alice most wants, but because she’s already, in a sense, been given that.

The illusion gives Alice her mother back, crafting a world where she never died in that fire, where her music lives on even more than just that Ballad that has haunted her entire life.  But it’s the Ballad itself that breaks Alice out; it plays in the background as her mother dances in front of a fireplace, and the music and the flickering flame remind her—

She knows what happened to her mother.

This isn’t it.

When Lilia arrives for her, Alice isn’t ready to leave the illusion, but she does so regardless.

Her entire life, Alice has wanted to protect people.  She couldn’t protect her mom.  But she can protect the others.

~

Evanora broke the spell.

Evanora said the spell must have been set wrong.

Evanora said there was no way that Agatha wanted a life that she’d always had, if not for her wickedness.

Evanora said a lot of things.

Evanora’s coven believed her.

~

The world created by the Heart’s Desire has layers.

Lilia wants to get Teen first – like Alice, he wouldn’t know about the spell and certainly wouldn’t know how to break himself out of it if he caught what was going on – but he was closest to Agatha when the spell was set, still closest to Agatha in terms of the world they inhabit.

And there’s a darkness there.

Something she can’t see.

Alice wants to stay behind, to see if she can cut through to get to him, but Lilia counters.  Three witches are better than two.

They find Jen glorying in her power.  It takes Alice’s protection spells to break her out.  Even still, Jen doesn’t want to believe them, but she listens when Lilia gives her a small test – if she sets the counter-spell, then that proves the illusion one way or the other.  Jen doesn’t change her mind, but she says the spell anyway.

She cries when her magic is ripped from her again.

~

Evanora doesn’t want to try the Heart’s Desire spell again.  Someone did it wrong – or maybe Agatha herself is the one screwing it up, the same way that her natural magic screws everything else up.  Since they can’t figure out what she wants most, they should blast her.  They should end her the way that covens have been ending problematic, murderous, evil witches from the very beginning.

Because they refuse to believe what they saw as spectators, they don’t realize that in attempting to murder Agatha, they are doing exactly the opposite of what she wants.

Torture on torture on torture.

(She’s so tired.)

~

The three spectating witches look at darkness.

Lilia suggests that the sigil prevents them from seeing Teen’s desires the same way that it prevents them from knowing his name or anything personal about him.

Jen says that’s foolish – the spell is centered on Agatha, who knows just as much about Teen as they do and who certainly wouldn’t be able to provide the spell with enough information to give him anything remotely correct for what he might possibly want.  None of them could.  The sigil shouldn’t prevent them from seeing lies.

Alice pushes past both of them into the darkness because saving Teen is more important than trying to figure out why they can’t see shit.

~

Agatha’s son is dating another boy.

She hasn’t met him yet – in point of fact, Nicholas hasn’t said anything about it yet – but she can tell.

A mother can always tell.

~

Jen says it would probably be better if they called Teen by something other than Teen.  If they don’t use his real name, how can he even hear them?

Alice ignores her.  She’s taking in the monochromatic grayscale surrounding them as the darkness shifts more from a black void into what might as well be the colors of an old TV sitcom.  Before her grandmother died, she’d introduced them to some of the old shows she’d used to learn English, saying lines as the characters did and laughing, smiling.  The fact that Teen seems to now be living in one – she can only assume, since she can’t see anything else – and that Agatha seems to think that’s what he wants more than anything—

It makes her uncomfortable, if she’s honest about it.

(She won’t say that to the others.  They wouldn’t get it.)

Lilia catches sight of Teen first.  She points him out, gestures to the others, and then stops.  Is that other boy with him his boyfriend?

~

Agatha sighs as she shares lunch and tea with her mother.  It’s a constant weekly event: every Wednesday, lunch and tea with her mom.  So they can catch up.  Sometimes they meet more often than that, when they want to see each other or when something bad happens, but that hasn’t been the case in a while.

She confides her worries about Nicholas with her.

Worries is maybe the wrong word.  She’s not worried about him.  She just doesn’t understand why he won’t come out and say what’s going on with her.  It’s not like she would mind.  Has he met her?

Her mother just laughs.  She reminds Agatha that she hadn’t wanted to tell her she was dating a girl either.

Agatha smiles, snide, and runs her finger along the lip of her teacup.  It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to tell her mother she was dating a girl.  She hadn’t wanted to tell her she was dating—

~

Teen won’t listen to them.

Teen can’t see them.

It’s entirely possible that Teen can’t hear them, either, so it’s not intentional that he isn’t listening to them.  With no way of seeing what he’s seeing – other than the boy he’s with, a boy that he calls Nicholas – they have no way of inserting themselves in the world he’s seeing.  They aren’t spectators here.  They can’t reach him.

Alice volunteers to stay with him while the other two go on ahead, but Lilia says a witch with protective magic will be of particular use when they speak with Agatha.  Jen suggests that Lilia stay behind, but Lilia chastises her – Jen hadn’t been able to realize her own illusion was just that, and she wouldn’t have known the counter-spell if Lilia hadn’t taught it to her.  Of the three of them, Lilia has the most experience.

Jen stays behind, while the other two go on ahead.

~

Agatha’s wife tugs on her sleeve.

They need to go.  Coven meeting, after all, and Agatha can’t miss that.

Agatha doesn’t ask how Rio got there so quickly, how she just appeared as though she’d been there the entire time.  She had been there the entire time; she was just very good about not being seen until – or unless – she wanted to be seen.

Rio kisses her.

They need to go.

Now.

Agatha glances over to her mother, and her heart aches.  She doesn’t understand why it should.  Life has always been like this.  Life will always be like this.  She’ll see her next week – or sooner, if she wants.  It’s okay to leave.

Rio mentions that Nicholas said something to her about bringing someone over to meet them.

Agatha leaves immediately.

~

Rio is never under the spell, or if she was, she’s already broken it by the time Alice and Lilia show up.  Alice glares at her – if she’s been out all this time, then why hasn’t she gotten Agatha out yet?  Only one of them is necessary for that, right?  They could have been done with this shit.

But Rio just shrugs.  It’s not her call.

Lilia’s brow furrows – she guesses something; she sees something – but whatever she guesses or sees, she doesn’t say.  It’s a suspicion, nothing more.  The more important thing is the smile on Agatha’s face that looks so weird and wrong there because it’s a happy smile, and it’s only on seeing this one that she and Alice have to realize that none of the others have been real.

Agatha invites them inside.  There’s a coven meeting.  Her son should be joining them.

Her son? Alice mouths as they follow Agatha inside, but Lilia doesn’t meet her eyes.  She’s heard the rumors, and she’s not surprised.

To be quite honest, Lilia isn’t surprised with anything they see spiraling out from Agatha.  A happy home.  A happy marriage.  It’s possible she noticed an older witch leaving the illusion – perhaps Agatha’s mother.  That was the other thing about the Heart’s Desire spell: more often than not, what people most wanted was this.  Most people didn’t want global reign or infinite power or everyone dead at their feet.  What they really wanted was—

There doesn’t need to be a knock at the door, but there is.

Lilia turns, sees Jen outside the window with wide and frustrated eyes, and makes the connection first.

She makes the wrong connection, of course, but she makes the connection nevertheless.

~

Agatha opens the door to Jen – another coven member, running later than normal, but she was likely preoccupied with someone who needed her magical expertise, and she says as much, not noticing the cringe on Jen’s face, since she’s focused on someone else.

Nicholas.

Agatha brushes her hands through her son’s dark hair as his bright blue eyes shift from her to the boy he’s brought with him.  He introduces her – she doesn’t recognize the name, and she turns to the teen with an eyebrow raised.  Then she recognizes who he is: Wanda’s magical boy.  She beams.

They’ll be building a coven of their own soon, so it’s perfect that they’ve found each other.  It’s always better to know that there’s someone in your coven that you can trust from the start, so that you won’t be alone.

Wanda’s boy says Wanda won’t be joining them today.  Some sort of superhero business with his robot dad.

That’s fine.  They can continue without her.

~

The other witches can only stare as Agatha has a conversation with Teen and Nicholas that they cannot hear.

Jen’s eyes narrow.  This is proof, after all, that Agatha must have set the sigil.  She’s the only one who is able to communicate with Teen within the world that he’s created, so—

Lilia doesn’t think that’s true.  Whatever world is in is one of Agatha’s own creation, spiraling out from the Heart’s Desire spell.  Of course, she would be able to speak through it to Teen.  It’s centered on her—

Alice just wants to know how they break the thing.  She turns to Rio and then to Lilia.  One of them has to know.  Spill.

~

The first crack comes.

Agatha tucks her fingers into the magic she always feels all around her.

It feels wrong.

It’s felt wrong for the past several….

Oh, she knows better.  This spell doesn’t care about time, so however much she thinks has passed, it’s probably not correct.

Agatha tucks her fingers into the magic and feels the lie again and feels the others trying to snap it.  To snap her out of it.  But the Road has changed the spell; she feels that, too.  So when she looks up with the light in her eyes, she reaches out, finds the thread tied around Teen’s neck like a noose, and snaps it.

He wakes.

His brows furrow.

Teen says he was home.  Like nothing ever changed.

Agatha smiles.  That’s the spell.  She wants to reach out and cup his face, but she doesn’t.  Instead, she tells him to leave.

He refuses – says he won’t leave her—

That’s not the point.

Agatha looks to the others.  They see.  One by one, they leave, guided by a Lilia who knows exactly what has to happen and who knows that whatever it is, they don’t want to see it.  She places a hand gentle on Teen’s back and leads him out.  It takes a moment, but then Jen follows.  She’s curious, but not that curious.  Alice hesitates, gaze landing on Rio.  Isn’t she going to leave?  Why do they have to leave?

Rio meets her eyes.  They have to leave because Agatha doesn’t want them to see.  She gets to stay because Agatha wants her to stay.

When Alice is gone and the door’s shut tight behind her, Rio turns to Agatha.  She doesn’t say anything.

Agatha turns to Nicholas and holds him to her chest.

(She knew, she knew, she knew, she knew, but a few stolen seconds under this stupid, stupid spell is better than nothing.)

((She’d stay here if she could.))

She takes Nicholas’s neck in her hands.

Takes a deep breath—

~

Teen hears the sharp snap of broken bone and looks up just in time to see Agatha staring at him through the windowpane, her son’s neck shattered in her hands.

~

Agatha tells him later, when she knows that he’s Billy, why the spell felt so familiar to him.  It’s the base of the one Wanda used to create the Hex, making the world her own Heart’s Desire.

Billy’s brow furrows.

He doesn’t ask about Nicholas.

[aparticularbandit]

Okay but consider.

If Teen is Nicholas and is still MLM. and we get Billy later.

Do you know how many awkward fanfics I could write of Nicholas and Billy going on a double date with their moms?

Nicholas and Billy meet cute and then their moms meet over a holiday or something and then oh, no, now their moms are also dating, better get married first so they don't end up being stepsiblings, there's no way this will not be awkward, Mom could you have picked literally anyone else, are you just doing this to annoy me?

It would be. the MOST fun!

[aparticularbandit]

SO.

This is your head's up that - unless it is relevant to current Agatha All Along etc. - if you send me a prompt, I will probably be saving it for December.

I apologize ahead of time for the wait! But I'm trying to get all of these set and ready so, like I said above, I won't end up. rushing everything.

And also the addendum that if there are no prompts then I'm just gonna do whatever, which is fun for me, but I'd like these to be things y'all want.

SO LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE PROMPTS AND ETC.

So.

Last December, I tried to post fic daily - whether that was a one-shot or a chapter of something longer - because I understand that December can be a really rough time of year for people (including me), and I wanted to try and help ease that a little.

...given that most of those were written either the day/night before or day of, I'd like to get an earlier start this year.

SO.

I'm taking prompts! Now throughout December! For any of the fandoms I'm blatantly in and writing (Marvel (both MCU and comics (one I'm better at but. I can research)), Danganronpa (new this year!), Kathryn Hahn etc. (Mrs. Fletcher and Glass Onion (yes, I will take fam requests)), Jane the Virgin (Roisa primarily but I can be persuaded to write other ships), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (with the addendum that my Jess is...complicated)) AND OTHER FANDOMS - last year I wrote Everlark! and got into Marvel comics to write Viv Vision! among! other things!

So like - prompt away! Feel free to send in random stuff, because the worst I can do is say no, and that's basically the same as not asking me in the first place.

That said!

Please do not ask me to write Game of Thrones. I know nothing other than the first book, the first two episodes, and what I've seen on my dash. It would be wildly out of character.

Please also no Hazbin Hotel because that is a minefield of triggers waiting to happen.

Also I do not write smut or graphic sexual content. Those are the big nos.

BEYOND THAT. ASK AWAY. AND WE'LL SEE.