As always, this contains dark content and is rated M.
Music to listen to, Perfume, by Britney Spears
"I'll never tell, tell on myself but I hope she smells my perfume"
Cowritten with graceonce
Big thank you to Ly Merrick and Foxxaye for beta-ing!
—
The school was eerily quiet, something Cordelia had grown accustomed to in the last few years. As she moved past each door, knowing very well the rooms behind them were empty, she let her mind wander.
She used to walk the halls like this when she lived alone with Madison. The girl slept late and she'd get up and sneak out of their room to enjoy the morning hours by herself and to finish paperwork (bills, mostly). And then one day, a new girl decided to visit.
Nan herself was interesting. Her parents didn't seem to care too much about her and had let her take a train all the way to New Orleans to meet with Cordelia. She was a Salem descendant, one of the last of her line. She was powerful, the headmistress had learned that right away.
And she was dangerous.
The teenager was a clairvoyant, and it'd taken her about five seconds for her to relate all of Cordelia's thoughts on a dog she'd kept for three months as a child. And Cordelia'd been scared. If she could access memories of an animal she herself barely remembered, what would she know about Madison? The blonde had been training for years to keep others out of her head, of course, but the fear of being found out didn't leave her mind.
She'd given Nan a spot in the academy almost right away. She couldn't plead lack of space, obviously, and she needed to keep an eye on the girl, who knew what else she'd discovered in the back of Cordelia's thoughts?
She moved farther down the hallway, reaching the rooms at the end of it. Unlike the others, they held some semblance of life.
She knocked on the first door and Nan and Queenie moved easily past her, like shadows. A meeting called, their mornings interrupted by a new classmate, a new sister. A new enemy, for some. Her dark eyes followed Nan until they'd taken the stairs.
Her hand shook slightly as she knocked on the last door, results of stress that plagued her every morning, every night, her secrets the cause of it all. Unrelenting.
Madison Montgomery opened the door, clad in only her underwear, black and cheetah print. She'd missed Madison the night before, the girls had come back so late from their party and the witch hadn't dared come to her room (She guessed it had something to do with the fact that she now roomed with Zoe), and seeing her now melted her insides. Cordelia's eyes roamed up the girl's body hungrily, and she finally met her hazel eyes with her own dark ones.
"Meeting. Downstairs." She said. The actress raised an eyebrow at her and smirked.
"Shall I come down in this?"
She was teasing, begging, in her own way for the headmistress. Cordelia felt her breath hitch in her throat as Madison taunted her. She was right there, and it had been so long for both of them, what with the students roaming the halls.
But just past Madison's shoulder was a blushing Zoe. She had watched the short exchange in a mixture of confusion and embarrassment from the desk a few feet away. Cordelia tore her eyes away from Madison, shaking her head as she attempted to contain her own embarrassment in front of the new student. She couldn't scare her away like this, not yet, not before she had a chance with her. She abandoned her task and walked away from the room without a word, throwing a dark look back at Madison. She didn't have to voice her concerns, her eyes said enough.
A warning. A threat. A promise. Madison grimaced and closed the door.
Cordelia breathed a small sigh of relief when conversation resumed from inside the room as she walked down the bright hall to her mother's door. She had been stinking up the house all day and Cordelia's nostrils burned as she came closer. Ignoring her disgust and the urge to gag, she knocked.
"Fiona?" She called. "I know you're there."
There was no response. Madison and Zoe had started fighting, their voices reverberating through the halls. Cordelia considered going back to the room to break it up, especially if it meant there was another chance she could see Madison—
Cordelia stopped herself. Fiona had never been clairvoyant, at least not enough to get into Cordelia's mind after her training to keep her out, but she would still be stupid to risk it. She knocked again.
"Open the door, mother!"
After a few seconds, Fiona opened her door slightly and peeked through the crack between her door and the doorframe. "I'm kind of busy right now."
Even through the small crack Fiona allowed, the smell became even worse, like death itself.
"My god, what's that smell?"
"I, uh…I went to a Chinese doctor," Fiona explained. "He gave me some herbs to boil and I know it's kind of pungent."
Fiona spoke softly and seemed to stumble over her own words. Given that Fiona had never known for keeping her mouth shut or for feeling frazzled, Cordelia tried to look over her shoulder into the room, but Fiona moved to block her line of vision.
"Well, we're about to have our morning gathering," Cordelia told her. "I'm going to be going over the house rules with the girls and I would like you to hear them"
"Hm…sounds riveting." Fiona laughed to herself as she closed the door. "I'll be down in a minute."
—
Cordelia and her girls sat in the living room awaiting the Supreme as she dawdled around upstairs. In the meantime, Queenie had launched into the story of her discovery, of the man who spat insults at her and ended up with third-degree burns. Queenie reveled in the descriptions of the man's arm burning and the comebacks she shot back at him, and it sure seemed to pull her audience in: Zoe was enthralled in the story. She sat watching Queenie, mouth slightly open, eyes wide. Cordelia dug her teeth into her bottom lip as she stared at the girl. Cordelia had to admit, Madison had been getting older and the drug use had thinned her hair and stolen the youthfulness from her face, while Zoe, innocent until the incident with her boyfriend, had all the beauty Madison had lost. She was so young, so willing, and it would be so easy.
Cordelia felt a sharp shoe dig into her leg. She looked over at a dissatisfied Madison.
"What?" She mouthed mockingly. "Bored of me?"
Cordelia shot Madison a warning look and Madison rolled her eyes in response. Queenie had just about finished up her story and had turned to Cordelia.
"It made the local newspaper and that's how Miss Cordelia found me," she finished.
Cordelia forced a smile onto her face. "You didn't want to join us at first."
Queenie laughed bitterly. "I grew up on white girl shit like Charmed and Sabrina the Teenage Cracker. I didn't even know that there were black witches. But as it turns out, I'm an heir to Tituba." Queenie turned to Zoe to explain. "She was a house slave in Salem. She was the first to be accused of witchcraft, so technically I'm part of your tribe."
Madison scoffed. "Is this where we all sing Kumbaya?"
"Bitch, I will eat you!" Queenie stood and lunged at Madison. Alarm bells went off in Cordelia's mind and she was consumed by the need to protect Madison first and worry about reputation second. She jumped in between the girls.
"Hey, hey, hey, hey!" Cordelia paused as she searched for words to explain herself. "You guys have…got to start taking care of each other. We have enough enemies on the outside."
"Miss Foxx?" A deep voice called.
"Yes?"
Cordelia turned to see two police officers showing their badges. Her stomach dropped and she felt a chill crawl up her spine along with a sudden urge to vomit. She looked desperately at Madison.
"Detective Sanchez," the man continued. "NOPD homicide, my partner is Detective Stiles."
Homicide? The word rang through Cordelia's brain as she turned back to face the detective. "What's this about?"
"We'd like to have a word with two of your girls."
—
Cordelia had sat and listened to this man interrogate her girls for around fifteen minutes. His tone was condescending and sickly sweet and, even worse, he pulled and abused evidence as needed. Cordelia felt the muscles in her legs tensing under the table as the men attacked Zoe and Madison again and again, becoming more vicious by the minute.
"Can I ask you why you visited one of the survivors in the hospital?" Detective Sanchez continued.
Cordelia saw the anger flash in Madison's eyes as she looked at the image the Detective was holding up for her, then up at Zoe.
"Um…I felt bad for him," Zoe stammered out. "We just met him the night before and he…seemed nice."
Madison looked to Cordelia nervously.
"He died right after you left," the Detective asserted. "The doctors can't uite figure out how, but when we checked you out we noticed another boy you knew died in the exact same way right before you got here. A boy named Charles Taylor."
Cordelia watched as the tears built up in Zoe's eyes. They had found her breaking point. She stood suddenly, the chair toppling over behind her.
"They gang raped her!" She screamed. "And they got what they deserved."
"How did you flip the bus, was it the wheels?"
Cordelia felt a cold sweat forming on her forehead. A student like Zoe who wouldn't be able to control herself in these situations was dangerous to the Coven and, even more than that, Cordelia herself. Queenie was blind and Nan was easy manipulated, but Zoe was altogether too soft.
"I—I have no idea what she's talking about, nobody raped me! She's clearly lost her mind!" Madison argued, but Cordelia could barely hear her over the thoughts raging through her head.
"Madison did it!" Zoe kept yelling. Cordelia stood in attempt to control the girl, but to no avail. "She can move things with her mind. And I killed that asshole in the hospital, I have powers too, we're witches!"
"I'm sorry, Detective," Cordelia interrupted her. "Zoe has clearly suffered some kind of mental break."
"No! No, enough lying, it's over! Everyone here is a witch, I'm so sorry, please don't send us to jail, please…"
Cordelia's head spun. All the nights, all the time she had spent dreaming of having Zoe instead of Madison came rushing back to her. If she had done anything, or even attempted it, everything would be over right now and she would be going to jail instead of the girls the detectives had come to question.
Zoe would never be able to keep the secret.
"Nobody's going to jail," a familiar voice broke through the chaos. "Girls, will you leave us, please?"
Cordelia had never been glad to see her mother before this moment. And as she told the men, "I'm Fiona Goode. I'm in charge everywhere," Cordelia could feel the power in the room shift from herself to her mother. It felt as though her entire world's rhythm and structure was overcome by the new arrivals at Robichaux's. Zoe was too soft, Fiona was too powerful, and her stakes were higher than ever.
—
Cordelia knelt over her potions chanting Latin to herself. She found herself falling into a trance, her mouth on autopilot as her mind wandered. She cursed her luck more than anything. Her body refused to bear children, her mother had begun to claim power within the Coven, and Hank was being as useless as usual. She was rummaging through her drawers absentmindedly when she heard someone step into the greenhouse.
"Think it's gonna work?" Hank asked suddenly.
Cordelia jumped in response to the sudden noise. "Jesus, Hank! You scared the shit out of me. You shouldn't even be in here."
"You okay, baby?" He mocked. She could smell the alcohol on his breath and fought the urge to roll her eyes.
"It's all going to be alright, I just—I need to concentrate." She shooed him away before returning to her work. "Just give me twenty minutes, okay?"
Hank mumbled something to himself as he turned to leave. Cordelia slowly bent down to check her spell's progress, pushing her hand in between the leaves of an overgrown fern. Lying there in the soil was an egg.
It was ready.
Hank and Cordelia kneeled in the middle of a pentagram formed from ashes and soot. Cordelia led him through the ritual and, the further they went, the more engrossed she became with her husband. Hank was clueless as to what was happening. He followed her actions with his eyes carefully despite being slightly drunk and slightly confused, and Cordelia felt herself basking in his attention.
He truly was clueless. Not just about witches and rituals, not just about the Coven, but about everything. He was under Cordelia's thumb like everyone else. Trapped in her web. Though the Coven was dying and Madison was becoming more and more unresponsive by the day, Cordelia felt herself relaxing. And Hank was particularly useful. She hated him with her whole being but he was a perfect distraction to everybody else.
Fiona was too focused on her hatred of Hank to realize that Cordelia hated him just as much and to realize what her daughter was doing just under her nose. Zoe and Queenie would never suspect Cordelia because she was married. And Nan and Madison…well, they were special cases.
And as she heard the eggs crack open and the snakes slither towards her, she let these feelings out, let her rage and her love and her stress and her darkness come out and felt them reverberate through her Academy.
It was all hers.