Chapter Text
Thunderous laughter eclipsed Nevermore’s raucous halls.
“Oh, ‘Tish, you were horrific,” Gomez said, throwing himself at her mother’s feet. Morticia tucked an oiled lock of hair behind Gomez’s ear as one might sheath their blade and submerged herself in his undivided attention.
Students cut a wide arc around their theatrics. Wednesday shadowed a gaggle of sophomore girls, indistinguishable from the crowd.
“Nonsense, mon chéri, I merely did my job.”
“French? My stars, you destroy me!”
Gomez feverishly kissed her arm.
An older student gagged.
A younger student whipped around in bewilderment.
“Are they allowed to do that?” He asked one of his friends.
Wednesday didn’t speak up. The answer was certainly no, but making a commotion was pointless. No amount of salt, iron, or catholic wafers could pry those two apart once they heated up.
She trailed the morning traffic in silence. Tuning out her parents was much easier than the unsolicited commentary. Hushed murmurs weren’t so quiet when everyone participated; Nevermore was always loud after the lunch bell, but her parents had a talent for making any situation worse.
The student body was a sauna of idiocy. Students blew kisses at each other and mimed swooning. Dimwitted conversations bled together and dug into her ears like ambient static. Teenaged curiosity suffocated her worse than their stench; disappointed eyes scanned the crowd and passed through her unblinking, unable to sate their intrigue.
Wednesday felt their questions coming like a seventh sense and learned to avoid ineffectual chatter.
Without fail, they all wanted to know the same thing:
What’s the deal with your parents?
The first time someone asked, she’d been in polite company. She took ten seconds to compose a diplomatic response that didn’t include violence or vulgarity:
They are soulmates.
The second time someone asked, the situation lent itself to expedited action, and the poor-excuse for a gorgon barely escaped with his snakes intact.
Rumor spread quickly. The words changed, but the intent didn’t.
How long have they been together?
Do you ever think about how different they are?
If they’re this bad at Nevermore, are they even worse at home?
Why are they so… like that, but then you’re like… so not like that, y’know?
Wednesday shut each inquiry down with all possible hostility, but no amount of intimidation could cork the curiosity born in the wake of her parents’ supernatural magnetism. Wednesday had solved murders, slain revenants, saved the school, and restored an Alpha, but the only interest strangers took in her personal life was the mystery behind her overly-affectionate parents.
Whispers chased her down every hall. Self-preservation led her through quiet corridors, but routine demanded exposure. Every day she passed the Admin Wing, and every day, her parents put on a show that followed her all the way to the Quad.
Hecklers needled her incessantly. Wolf whistles cut through cramped hallways. Every word spared was another brick built upon her disdain.
It took everything she had to continue uninhibited by the invasive pest called peers.
Almost, she thought. I’m almost there.
Her human shield fragmented. Some of the pressure dissipated. She stuck closer to the sophomores; the air was lighter, less charged, and she almost relaxed her shoulders.
Almost.
They chatted in circles. As camouflage, they were serviceable. They were too fixated on their phones to count an odd number in their rank. Insofar as ignoring them, Wednesday’s subterfuge was smooth sailing until the second lunch bell announced their tardiness.
One had noticed some Addams Weirdness, but it wasn’t hers.
“Did you guys see Mr. and Mrs. Addams?
Wednesday’s shoulders knit together.
“Obvi,” one girl said. “They got really into it today. Unsure if it was gross or cute—but it got me wondering why it never fazes Wednesday, y’know? She’s so square, you’d think they’d get under her skin.”
Wednesday instantly clocked her as one of Agnes’s former associates. A hanger-on of a hanger-on-turned-ally, she was somehow an oneiromancer weaker than Thorpe, if such a thing were possible.
“She’s probs desensitized. Hund-O percent, they’ve been like that forevs. No midlife crises or marriage counseling can light a spark like that.”
Another sophomore piped up.
“Ooh, what if our Ice Queen is secretly a sap?”
A burst of giggles struck Wednesday like a sledgehammer.
Before Wednesday thought better of it, she cleaved straight through them. Their giggles died and Wednesday spawned curses in her wake, putting as much distance between her and their teenaged theory crafting as fast as possible.
She escaped, but garnered more attention in the process. An unfamiliar student waved her down, and she was all-too eager to disappoint.
Bile scorched her throat. Wandering eyes grated against her skin. Antiquated halls swam in her vision. Her switchblade sat like a stone over her heart. Leather dug into her thigh where her Bowie sat, itching to taste virgin blood.
Their attention burned. She festered like an open wound.
Buttons pinned her shackles. A Hangman’s noose looped her collar twice. Blazer, button-up, and bra baked her in a brazen bull. Her starched skirt rubbed her calves raw and scraped her knees bloody. Wednesday picked through the crowd, teeth glued together and palate tasting like saltpeter; she felt her pulse in her gums and her breath in her bones. It was all she could do to not take the nearest student by the throat and squeeze until they expired—if she touched another living creature, she might erupt, and the last thing she needed was Morticia and Gomez cleaning up after her.
Wednesday latched onto her homicidal urges like a life raft. Without them, she was certain that she’d drift off course, driven mad by the insufferable smog of human blight. Malice wrapped her in a protective bubble; loitering students unconsciously averted their eyes and hurried out of her warpath.
If only they knew.
Social fatigue dogged her heels like hungry fire.
By the time she saw the double-doors, she was halfway to sprinting. The organ in her chest responsible for pumping blood squeezed in anticipation. Clammy hands threw open both doors and she barreled into the Quad, desperate to find her breath of fresh air.
She fought through the mid-lunch legions, heedless of the crisp autumn breeze, deaf to the roaring patrons, and blind to all else but the dappled chrysanthemum standing on a picnic bench.
Wednesday stopped short.
Enid looked terrible.
She held the rapt attention of three separate tables. Furs, Fangs, and Nightshades watched her strut above them like a Queen at Court. Shakespearean confidence swept her hands across the Quad in a dramatic retelling of an old story Wednesday would never tire of hearing.
Impeccable taste draped her shoulders in royal purple. Sunlight glinted off her golden hair and elaborate dyes hypnotized her audience with kaleidoscopic hues. Enid cut a striking figure with each deliberate pause in her story, giving every listener enough focus to feel special. Wednesday wasn’t the only captivated straggler; other loners lurked around the Quad and donated their respect anonymously, but Enid wasn’t blind—she paid them more subtle nods, but always made sure to include them.
She was the most dynamic thing in the Quad. Bright and effervescent, the command she wielded over their peers was truly admirable.
Wednesday closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
Tension melted away. Unbearable volume dialed back. Autumn grew gentle on her skin. The world stopped drifting, and when she opened her eyes, her anchor was beaming at her.
“—and then he swiped at me!” Enid continued her story while watching Wednesday. She pinned her hair above her ear, showcasing the pink scars across her scalp. “I was dazed, but the nausea grounded me and kept me fighting until the sheriff arrived; I dove for his legs, but he caught me by the nape—”
Wednesday stood by the Nightshades table. Enid continued her story for another uninterrupted minute, flashing her pearly fangs and sparkling claws. Younger students clapped, inspired by her narrative, while the Nightshades merely grinned, bemused by the liberties Enid took in their shared experience.
Enid bowed and sloshed like a full glass, overflowing in mirth. Wednesday stood far enough that she could jump down unimpeded, but close enough to catch her if she stumbled.
“You didn’t wax poetically over our subsequent embrace,” Wednesday observed, crossing her arms.
“I didn’t wanna embarrass you!” Enid said, bouncing on her toes.
“That’s never stopped your storytelling before.”
She pouted, but her eyes crinkled.
“You’re such a stickler for the narrative,” Enid said. Wednesday’s cardiovascular system hiccupped as Enid’s eyes dropped to her empty, crossed arms. The faux-pout quickly became real. “Hey! You promised you’d eat today.”
“The nerve of you,” Wednesday drawled. “Is it my fault Nevermore hired a jester on the same day I began my tomato diet? I repurposed my lunch into projectiles.”
Enid gasped in mock offense and checked her uniform.
“Wow! You missed every shot. That means you’re starving, right? Only death’s door could tank your accuracy that bad,” Enid said, and booped her on the nose. “Don’t worry, I’ll save you!”
Wednesday watched her skip to the lunch truck. Two Furs made space at the front of the line, and Enid rewarded them with a smile. She made a mental note to add them to the list, but couldn’t decide between the bad one or the worse one. Her attention strayed a heartbeat too long; Enid caught her staring and retaliated with a devastating wink that promised future mischief.
“Hello, Earth to Wednesday,” Yoko said, waving at an empty space beside her. “Do you have the Chem notes, or are you too busy studying Lycanthropes to lend a girl a hand?”
Wednesday scowled at the vampire.
“I’ve seen your student file, Tanaka. This is the eighth time you’ve taken Chemistry in as many years. Have you considered dispensing knowledge instead of sucking it out of everyone else like a parasite?”
Yoko shrugged.
“They say it takes a village.”
“You’re worse than Kent,” Agnes materialized in the empty seat. Yoko jumped out of her pallid skin, hand over her undead heart like it was threatening to beat. Her fright was amusing until Divina cooed and tried consoling her with a kiss, only to earn another tongue lashing from Agnes. “And you’re almost as bad as Wednesday.”
Bianca snorted.
“Sick burn,” Kent said.
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Wednesday said.
Agnes raised an eyebrow at her. Yoko and Divina looked at each other, holding back smiles. Bianca, Kent, Eugene, and Ajax pretended their lunches held the secrets of the universe.
“...You’re both disgusting around your favorite people.”
“Rude,” Divina said, but openly smiled.
Wednesday clenched her jaw.
“I do not have favorite people. You are all intolerable to variable degrees. Some more than others,” she said, glaring at the whole table.
“Right,” Agnes said. She stood and poked at Wednesday’s face. “But we all see who you find the least intolerable—”
Wednesday snatched Agnes’s wrist right before her index finger touched her nose.
“—just as easily as we can see she feels the same.”
Wednesday squeezed like an iron vice.
Agnes didn’t flinch.
“The way you two look at each other is insane. Somehow you’re sweeter on Enid than Divina is on her girlfriend. Shoot the messenger if you must, but at this point, we’re all waiting for someone to make a move.”
“Oh my god, are we finally having this conversation?” Yoko asked around the table.
“Where I choose to rest my eyes isn’t your business, DeMille.”
Agnes’s spine straightened out.
“Maybe it should be.”
Agnes vanished.
Wednesday held her wrist for a second longer. She considered biting off the offending digit, but lost her chance. Enid skipped back to their table and smiled at her through Agnes; Wednesday let go and felt the air bend around Agnes’s escape.
“They didn’t have any tomatoes, so I got their grossest apple,” Enid said, shoving the bruised, soggy fruit in Wednesday’s outstretched hand. “They had some super-duper ripe ones, but I know you prefer the ones that are almost-dead, but not quite, y’know?”
“Another successful hunt, chiot,” Wednesday said.
Yoko choked into a napkin.
If Enid noticed, she didn’t comment. Something else occupied her mind as she shifted from foot to foot.
“Do you really not mind when I talk about the hug? I know you’re fighting tooth and nail for your scary reputation, ‘n I really didn’t wanna make it harder.”
Another cardiovascular anomaly gave Wednesday pause. A small frown tugged Enid’s lips to her chin and pinched her eyebrows together. Her genuine concern sequestered a portion of Wednesday’s intestines and introduced centipedes into the ecosystem.
“...You were correct earlier. I am a stickler for narratives, and I demand exactitude from my own.”
Enid shimmied closer, expression brighter.
“So I can say the great Wednesday Addams needed a hug after Crackstone?”
Wednesday scoffed and schooled the shiver threatening her spine. She rolled her eyes, careful to look anywhere but the pink lipstick below Enid’s nose.
“You may tell people that you passed out in my arms after I vanquished an undead warlock and saved Nevermore Academy.”
“Oh sure, that’ll definitely enhance the narrative. I’ll get right on that after you finally write in a hot girlfriend for Evelynn,” Enid said, with a shit-eating grin. Wednesday’s eyebrows shot to her hairline. The Nightshades looked at each other in confusion as Enid continued. “Since you know so much about narratives, I’m sure you agree that’d be a totally adorable route for her characterization, right?”
Her chest thumped. Heat crept up her neck. She silently thanked Agnes for leaving. Only two people had earned access to her novel, and neither broached the subject in public.
A two-pronged attack, with that look in Enid’s eyes, would unmake her.
“I…” Wednesday swallowed. Her eyes landed on Enid’s lips and lingered. The words ricocheted between her ears and left her grasping.
Write in a hot girlfriend for Evelynn?
There was only one eligible woman in her manuscript.
Enid rocked on her heels. She bit her lip, color dusting her cheeks. Good humor glinted off her eyes, but something lurked beneath.
Wednesday couldn’t quite make it out.
She leaned in for a better look and watched them darken.
“Good Lord, this is hard to watch,” Yoko said, voice falling far away.
What kind of joke was it? Wednesday wondered, as their shoes touched. Banter? Referential? Light-hearted, or genuine? Truth wrapped in fiction, or another performance? Is the appropriate response to reciprocate with another private anecdote framed around subtext?
Something ugly twisted in her chest.
She hated jokes.
The art of comedy was artificial. Jokes were a perversion of storytelling; words bent into format. Insert set-up, associate audience, drop punchline; predictable and asinine, Wednesday found no humor in sterile wordplay.
Real, authentic humor happened unintentionally.
“...I will take it under consideration,” Wednesday said, dead serious, “on the condition you tell the unfiltered truth in future retellings.”
Enid huffed. Strawberry mint toothpaste saddled her breath. It burned Wednesday’s sinuses worse than arsenic. That something behind her eyes melted and dripped into a strange smile.
“In that case,” Enid stretched her pinky between them, “we have a bargain.”
Wednesday’s heart pounded. The pinky wiggled, beckoning her in, but Wednesday stared through it. She couldn’t decipher the odd curl pushing Enid’s lips apart, couldn’t identify the foreign pinch between her eyes, couldn’t categorize the assortment of her features into a recognizable expression.
Most confounding of all, she felt the urge in her chest again.
Thick moments strung together before Wednesday remembered where she was and what she was supposed to be doing.
She lifted her pinky halfway to Enid’s before it happened.
The air over Enid’s shoulder shimmered. Gooseflesh raised every hair on the back of her neck. Wednesday and Enid only had a split second before cold, invisible fingers seized them by the ears and forcibly closed the space between their lips.
She fell apart instantly.
Her vision blurred, then went black.
Strawberry mint disemboweled higher brain function.
Static overwhelmed the noise in favor of blissful, yawning silence.
Primal instincts like rage and preservation withered. Paralysis abolished fight or flight; she was frozen on Enid’s lower lip, a helpless caricature of herself.
Her hands found shoulders. Powerful, corded muscles clung to Enid’s slender frame. She squeezed without thinking, enamored by their inflexible integrity. They were nothing like her lips—pliable, soft, welcoming, and pushing.
The weight on her ear disappeared, but the warmth stayed.
Grew. Intensified.
Enid is kissing me, Wednesday thought.
She did not think again. Biblical greed overpowered common sense. Enid tasted like home, and in this void of nothingness, it was the only place she wanted.
Wednesday kissed her back.
Just for a moment.
Then reality hit.
Her eyes flew open. The world slammed into her. Cheers erupted where silence had reigned.
“Finally!” A Fang said.
“Get a room, you two,” Bianca smiled.
“Like father, like daughter, I guess?” Ajax high-fived Kent.
Yoko was doubled over, crippled by a fit of laughter. Divina wore a huge grin and bumped Yoko’s shoulder with her own. Eugene stared at them, bug-eyed and confused, fork frozen between tray and mouth. The entire courtyard stopped what they were doing to watch, hooting and hollering and clapping like this was some momentous event.
And Enid.
Her eyelashes fluttered open.
There was a brief, perfect moment of glazed suspension. Enid pulled away in a daze, fingers catching her lower lip like she’d just woken up from a dream.
Then the pigment drained out of her face.
Wednesday let go of her shoulders. Enid stepped back as pure, unadulterated horror sanitized her repose. The world lost a little more color as she slapped a hand over her pretty mouth, the whites of her eyes bright and haunting.
“No,” she whispered. The Nightshades were still celebrating. They didn’t hear her, but Wednesday certainly did. “Oh god. Oh my god, I’m so sorry. That wasn’t supposed to—oh my god.”
Wednesday worked open her mouth. A hundred thousand generations of evolution demanded time to recuperate. Language in the modern sense failed her, and in the wake of her own personal nightmare, only one word escaped her vocal cords:
“...Agnes,” Wednesday said. She wrenched her eyes off Enid and scanned the crowd. “Agnes?”
The lunch bell rang.
Her knees nearly buckled.
“Agnes!”
The air shimmered beside the Poe Statue. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but she didn’t care. Wednesday threw herself forward on newborn legs, fully conscious of the Bowie digging into her thigh.
Enid said something she didn’t catch. Shame clogged her ears and drowned out the Nightshades. She turned her back on the Quad and stalked away, surfing the chaos and hiding the heat in her eyes. A clawed hand caught her elbow, but she twisted with enough violence to banish the perpetrator into anonymity; she dove into the crowd and raced after Agnes, fully intent on vivisecting her.
Pins and needles filled the void between her ears. She followed her body a few paces behind, watching as she tore open empty classroom doors and broom closets.
Her skin was a frayed tapestry of exposed nerve endings, but she felt nothing—not the twist of knobs between her fingers, the invasive stares of curious onlookers, and least of all the desire to attend class.
Imagination braided into sickness. She saw her future with prophetic unease. Returning to class meant sitting next to Bianca and weathering her perception. Returning to class meant passing the Admin Wing, where the rumor mill was undoubtedly turning. Returning to class meant giving Agnes a chance to escape, it meant going to another class afterward, it meant returning to the dorm, it meant confronting Enid and the horror embedded in her face.
Her boots squeaked. It echoed down the long corridor. Class was in session, leaving her in complete privacy.
With trembling fingers, she touched her lips.
They tingled. Opaque residue came off. Saliva and pink lip gloss—just enough to sting. She rubbed her chin raw with a handkerchief, erasing everything except the memory.
It replayed in her mind ad nauseum:
The realization.
The split second before oblivion.
The subsequent horror and unfiltered distress.
Wednesday Addams was supposed to revel in horror. She wasn’t supposed to witness it and crumple inwards, but she wasn’t supposed to kiss anyone and watch the conviction drain from their eyes, either.
Unbidden, the image of her parents sprung into her mind.
Morticia and Gomez. Gomez and Morticia. Disgusting as they were, she could not deny them each other. For all their faults, their love was too pure for doubt; it didn’t bend under interlopers or fray at the edges, it just was.
They were seamlessly woven into one another. For every second they spent apart, the world held its breath. An untouchable force bound their essence together with all the bias of a poet. Their example was branded into her DNA and time had only deepened her certainty: any romance without their untainted authenticity wasn’t worth pursuing.
Wednesday checked over her shoulder.
She saw nothing, but that didn’t mean no one was there.
“Did you ruin it, Agnes?” she asked. The empty corridor swallowed her question whole. “I don’t remember how I wronged you, but the scope of your retaliation was… impressive.”
The gallop in her veins slowed to a canter. She smoothed the wrinkles in her uniform and fixed her bangs. Returning to class now was inadvisable; Enid was inevitable, and she needed time to strategize.
She must mend the rift Agnes opened before it turned into a feud. Even if Enid regretted her, she would rather leave Nevermore than find a new roommate, and that meant she needed answers. What to say, how to say it, what Enid felt, how she felt—she needed time alone to untangle the jumbled mess in her head, and there was only one place on campus she could go:
The Library.