Chapter Text
The vision does not begin with blood.
That is how I know something is wrong.
Normally, there is impact first—heat behind my eyes, the metallic taste at the back of my throat, the sense of my body being yanked sideways into a future that does not care whether I am prepared. There is usually pain. There is usually death, or at least the promise of it.
This time, there is only colour.
Pink. Too much of it. Loud, aggressive, impossible to ignore.
Enid is laughing.
The sound fractures the vision before it has time to settle.
I am standing in the quad. Or I will be standing there. The sky is a brittle blue, too sharp to be real, and Enid is in front of me, her hair pulled into a messy half-pony she only wears when she’s nervous but pretending she isn’t. She’s saying something I can’t hear because the future stutters, repeats, skips like a damaged film reel.
Her mouth keeps forming the same word.
“Wednesday.”
The moment she says my name, the world splinters.
The quad folds in on itself, tearing into overlapping possibilities. Enid is laughing and then she is screaming and then she is silent, eyes glassy, body too still. Enid is running toward me. Enid is running away. Enid is on the ground, hands scraped raw, blood blooming through the knees of her stupidly bright skirt. Enid is standing between me and something I cannot see, arms out like she thinks she can stop it.
I try to focus. I try to choose one thread, one outcome, like I always do.
They won’t separate.
They stack on top of each other, crushing me beneath their weight. I feel every version at once—the warmth of her shoulder against mine, the cold panic of her hand slipping from my grasp, the sickening absence of her entirely. My head fills with noise, with colour, with the echo of her voice saying my name over and over again like an accusation.
This has never happened before.
I reach for the edge of the vision, the way I’ve trained myself to do. Anchor to detail. Shoes on the stone path. The smell of damp leaves. The position of the sun. Something solid.
Nothing holds.
The futures ripple, collapse, reform. In one, she looks at me like I’ve betrayed her. In another, she doesn’t look at me at all. In a third, she can’t.
The pain hits late.
It detonates behind my eyes, sharp enough to force the air from my lungs. I gasp—and the vision shatters completely.
I come back to my body with a sound I don’t recognize at first. It takes me several seconds to realize it’s coming from my own throat.
My hands are clenched in the sheets so tightly my fingers have gone numb. My heart is trying to escape my ribcage. There is blood in my mouth.
I don’t remember biting my tongue.
The dorm room is dark, the predawn hour pressing in from all sides. Enid’s bed across the room is empty—of course it is. She fell asleep at her desk again, buried under a fortress of stationery and half-finished assignments, insisting she’d move “in five minutes.”
I sit up slowly, waiting for the room to stop spinning.
It doesn’t.
Something has changed.
Not the visions themselves—I am not arrogant enough to believe my power would simply vanish—but the rules. The clean, brutal certainty they used to follow. Before, a vision was a line: beginning, middle, end. You could intervene at the beginning, redirect at the middle, brace yourself for the end.
This was a web.
No. Worse.
This was Enid.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and press my feet to the cold floor, grounding myself in sensation. Tile. Chill. The familiar ache in my joints from too many nights spent awake. I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, the way I taught myself after the Hyde.
Control is not an instinct. It is a discipline.
And disciplines can be reinforced.
I stand and cross the room without looking at Enid’s empty bed. That way lies distraction. That way lies emotion. I cannot afford either.
The mirror above my desk reflects a pale, sharp-eyed version of myself, hair disordered, dark circles bruising the skin beneath my eyes. I look… unstable. That will not do.
I wash my face. Cold water. Once. Twice. Three times, until my skin burns and the last traces of the vision retreat just enough for me to think.
This is an anomaly, I tell myself. An outlier. A statistical irregularity caused by exhaustion, proximity, emotional interference.
Enid is loud. Enid is unpredictable. Enid is—unfortunately—important.
I dry my hands carefully, methodically, as if precision alone might restore order to the universe.
I will observe.
I will adjust.
I will not panic.
The first test comes sooner than I expect.
Breakfast is already in full swing when Enid barrels into the dining hall, trailed by noise and colour and the faint smell of whatever overly sweet product she insists on using in her hair. She drops into the seat beside me with her usual lack of spatial awareness, shoulder bumping mine hard enough to jostle my tray.
“Morning!” she chirps, already reaching for my black coffee without asking. “You look like you fought a demon in your sleep.”
I tighten my grip on my fork. The metal bends slightly with the pressure.
“No demons,” I say. “Just incompetence.”
She grins at that, unbothered, and takes a sip of my coffee. Her face contorts immediately. “Ugh. How do you drink this?”
“It keeps me alive.”
“Barely.”
She pushes the cup back toward me, and for a split second—just a flicker—I see it.
Her hand slipping. The cup shattering. Coffee staining the floor like blood.
I blink.
Nothing happens.
The cup lands safely on the table. Enid launches into a story about something Bianca said, complete with dramatic re-enactments and exaggerated expressions. I nod in the appropriate places, tracking her movements with clinical precision.
Hands steady. No limp. Breathing normal. Pulse visible at her throat.
Alive.
The relief that follows is immediate and unwelcome. It settles in my chest like a weakness.
This is unacceptable.
I spend the rest of the morning watching her the way one might watch a faulty wire—waiting for the spark, the misfire, the moment it all goes wrong. Every time she laughs too hard, every time she spins in place instead of walking in a straight line, every time she does something Enid, my muscles tense.
No vision comes.
That worries me more than if it had.
The next one hits during class.
I was taking notes. The professor is droning on about something irrelevant. Enid is doodling in the margins of her notebook, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration. I know this because I am not looking at her.
The future slams into me without warning.
Stairs. The main stairwell. Enid at the top, arms full of books, laughing at something behind her. A foot slips. Her body pitches forward—
—and then the vision fractures.
She falls and doesn’t fall. She breaks her leg. She catches herself. She hits the landing wrong, neck snapping with a sound I feel more than hear. She tumbles and laughs it off, embarrassed but unhurt.
I gasp out loud.
Several heads turn. The professor pauses.
I am already on my feet.
“Miss Addams?” he says sharply.
“I need to leave.”
“This is highly irregular—”
I don’t wait for permission.
The stairwell smells like stone and old varnish. My pulse is loud in my ears as I scan upward, calculating angles, timing, distance. Enid should be here in thirty seconds. If the vision is correct.
If any of them are.
I position myself halfway up the stairs, close enough to intercept, far enough not to draw attention. My fingers dig into the banister.
Control the variables.
Footsteps. Laughter.
Enid appears at the top of the stairs exactly where I saw her. My chest tightens.
“Wednesday?” she says, surprised. “Did you ditch class too?”
“Stop.”
She blinks. “What?”
“Don’t move.”
She rolls her eyes. “Wow, bossy much—”
Her foot slips.
I move without thinking. I grab her arm and yank her toward me, too hard, too fast. The books go flying. Enid stumbles into my chest with a startled yelp, fingers clutching at my jacket.
Behind her, someone else—another student, wrong place, wrong time—loses their footing on the scattered books.
They fall.
The sound is wrong. Wet. Final.
Enid stares at me, breathless, confused, very much alive.
“Okay,” she laughs nervously. “What was that about?”
I don’t answer.
I’m looking past her, down the stairs, where the future I didn’t choose is bleeding out on cold stone.
The vision was right.
Just not about her.
And as the screaming starts, as teachers rush in, as Enid’s hands tighten on my sleeves in silent, terrified confusion, one thought settles into my mind with perfect, horrifying clarity:
Every time I save her,
someone else pays the price.
And I am the one deciding who that is.
_________________________________________________________________________
They take him away on a stretcher.
I do not look.
I catalogue instead: the copper tang in the air, the way the stairwell echoes too much now that everyone is whispering, the way Enid’s grip on my jacket has tightened to the point of pain. Her fingers are shaking. Mine are steady.
This is important.
I note it carefully.
Control must be measurable.
“Wednesday,” Enid says again, quieter this time. “What just happened?”
I finally look at her.
Her eyes are wide, bright with shock, glassy around the edges. There is a small red mark already forming on her wrist where I grabbed her. I must have been rougher than intended. The vision did not account for my own strength.
That is another variable I will have to adjust for.
“I prevented you from falling,” I say.
She lets out a short, breathless laugh. “Yeah, I noticed that part. But you looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
Incorrect. I had seen several deaths. Only one of them was avoided.
“A miscalculation,” I say instead.
Her brows knit together. “You don’t just miscalculate people almost dying.”
Almost.
The word scrapes against something sharp in my chest. I step back, gently prying her hands from my sleeves. The contact lingers longer than it should. I am acutely aware of the space between us, of how easily she fills it.
“I need you to go to your next class,” I say.
“What? No, I’m not just—Wednesday, are you okay?”
The concern in her voice is… inconvenient.
“I am functional.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It is sufficient.”
She hesitates, torn between confusion and loyalty, and I can see the exact moment she chooses to stay. Enid always does. That, too, is a problem.
I make a decision.
“Enid,” I say, lowering my voice. “Please.”
The word feels foreign on my tongue. I do not use it often. Her eyes flicker, surprised by the concession, and then soften.
“Okay,” she says slowly. “But you’re telling me later.”
Later is an abstract concept. Later implies a future that remains intact.
She backs away reluctantly, glancing over her shoulder more than once as she goes. I watch until she disappears down the hall, her presence receding like a fading signal.
Only then do I let myself breathe.
The administration calls it an accident.
They always do.
I am questioned. I provide facts stripped of interpretation. Timing. Movement. Physics. I omit intention. Intention complicates causality.
No one asks me why I was on the stairs.
No one asks how I knew.
That, too, is familiar.
By the time I am released, the sun has shifted, casting long shadows across the quad. The day has moved on, indifferent to its own near-catastrophe. I should feel relief.
Instead, there is a hollow pressure behind my ribs that will not ease.
I return to my dorm and sit at my desk without turning on the light. Enid is not there. Her absence is loud.
I open my notebook.
Page after page is filled with my usual shorthand—dates, names, outcomes, corrections. Patterns. Predictions. Evidence of a system that has always obeyed me.
Until now.
I flip to a blank page and write one word at the top.
ENID, VISIONS.
I hesitate only briefly before drawing a line beneath it.
Underneath, I begin listing variables.
Social. Emotional. Physical. Lunar cycle. Proximity to me.
The list grows quickly. Too quickly.
My pen scratches harder against the paper as a realization takes shape, ugly and undeniable.
The visions fracture when she is involved.
Not always immediately. Not predictably. But consistently.
Every broken future, every overlapping outcome, every moment of uncertainty traces back to her presence like a fault line.
This is not coincidence.
This is causation.
I lean back in my chair, staring at the ceiling, and let the thought finish forming no matter how much I dislike it.
Enid is destabilizing my abilities.
Or—
No.
Worse.
I am destabilizing them because of her.
Emotion bleeds into prediction. Attachment muddies clarity. My power has always been clean because I have kept myself clean—detached, precise, untouched.
Enid touches everything.
Including me.
The image of her laughing in the vision—of her bleeding, of her looking at me with betrayal—flickers through my mind again. I clamp down on it hard enough to make my temples throb.
I will not allow this to continue.
I flip the page and write a rule.
RULE ONE: ENID SINCLAIR IS NOT TO BE INVOLVED IN INTERVENTIONS.
The sentence sits there, stark and final.
I stare at it for a long time.
Then I underline it twice.
Enid returns late.
I hear her before I see her—soft footsteps, the rustle of fabric, the careful way she tries not to disturb me. The door clicks shut behind her, and she freezes when she realizes I’m awake.
“Oh,” she says. “Hey.”
Her voice is tentative. Cautious. That, too, is new.
“Did you finish your classes?” I ask.
She nods. “Yeah. Mostly. I kinda… left early.”
Guilt flickers across her face. It makes something in my chest twist unpleasantly.
“Because of earlier?” I ask, though I already know the answer.
She shrugs, dropping her bag onto her bed. “I couldn’t focus. Everyone’s freaking out.”
“People always do,” I say. “It will pass.”
She watches me for a moment, clearly deciding how much to push. “You didn’t answer my question.”
I tilt my head. “You’ve asked several.”
“Are you okay?” she says again, more firmly.
The future flickers at the edge of my vision—Enid pressing, Enid finding out, Enid hurt because she knows too much.
I shut it down.
“I misread a situation,” I say. “It won’t happen again.”
She frowns. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
“It is statistically within character.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
She moves closer, sitting on the edge of my bed, invading my carefully maintained perimeter without asking. The mattress dips. I am acutely aware of the heat of her through the fabric.
“I saw your face,” she says quietly. “You were scared.”
I do not deny it.
I also do not confirm it.
“Go to sleep, Enid,” I say. “You’re exhausted.”
Her jaw tightens. “You’re deflecting.”
“No.”
She huffs out a breath, frustrated, but doesn’t press further. Instead, she reaches out—hesitates—and then gently takes my wrist, turning it over to inspect the faint bruising there.
“You grabbed me really hard,” she says, not accusing. Just stating fact.
“I prevented you from falling.”
“I know.” She looks up at me. “And… thank you. But next time, maybe warn me before you yank me like you’re saving me from a burning building?”
There will not be a next time.
I extract my hand from hers carefully, deliberately. “Duly noted.”
She studies me for another moment, searching for something I will not give her. Finally, she sighs and stands.
“Goodnight, Wednesday.”
“Goodnight.”
She turns off the light.
In the darkness, I listen to her breathing even out, cataloging the rhythm, the proof of life.
Alive.
Safe.
Because of me.
And because of me,
someone else’s blood on the stairs.
The weight of it settles over me, heavy and inescapable.
I close my eyes and make myself a promise, as cold and precise as the rules I live by.
I will protect Enid Sinclair.
I will do it perfectly.
And I will never, ever let her know the cost.