Chapter Text
The rain clouds gathered all day above the watchful gaze of Morticia Addams in the lone bay window. They rose over the hills with the dawn light, darkening as the day lightened, and boiled at lunchtime in the reflective expanse of the lake, flat as a millpond as the world held its breath. When the first drops finally fell in the dark, they hit Wednesday’s forehead and skipped her eyebrow, landed again on her cheek and slid down into her collars. Finally. It had certainly taken long enough. She stood from her spot by the water’s edge, face set, watching the black iron sheet come alive across its surface as the heavens opened.
“It’s time for you to go.”
Wednesday didn’t look back at the woman still sitting on the Jetty, and she couldn't feel any eyes on her own back either. It had taken all break, but she dared to hope; perhaps the intruder was finally becoming despondent to Wednesday's walls.
The grass squelched under the first heavy step she took from the elevation of the boat house deck, each step that followed getting wetter and more precarious as she crunched down onto the pebble shore, along the embankment opposite, and into the austere shadow of the Addam’s Family home. Her mother was still in the window, watching like a gargoyle just as she had been that morning when Wednesday had first come into view. Wednesday didn’t wave back.
She passed up on the front door. Around the side of the east wing of the house where Lurch kept his gardening tools was what Wednesday called a sour spot; one of the two perfect places on the estate that couldn’t be seen from any of the house’s 290 windows, nor from the band stand, nor the cemetery, nor Pugsley’s black and white tree house. The pipes here were old but built to last, embedded into the masonry where the stone work jutted out and painted with coat after coat of black until even the chipped parts only showed yet more black underneath. Brittle fragments of it flaked and stuck to Wednesday’s palms as she gripped and got her footing. The rain made it more difficult but she enjoyed the challenge and the danger that came with it.
It only took her a few moments to reach the first stone ledge, decorative and useless and a plateau of moss and lichen in the damp shade. Climbing the sheer edge of the building was not the fastest or the most obvious way to the turret balcony, but it kept her mind busy until she got there and came with the perk of avoiding meeting anyone on the way up. When it rained, she couldn’t deal with anyone until after she had reached the roof. Her face trembled with effort.
A low rumble rolled around the basin of the shallow valley as she dug the tip of one boot into the space between the stone pillars decorating the underside of a window ledge, her fingers clawed around the metal spikes that kept the birds from settling on top. One slip here and she’d have the gory end of her dreams, impaled six times over and left to hang there in the darkening night for someone to spot when her father roused the inevitable search party after dinner. But she didn’t slip. Not at that window, nor the next, not on any of the ones on the third floor, or the fourth. The fifth floor on this side didn’t have a window in her path and she edged sideways along the cement cracks where she could, reaching until her muscles burned and her joints ached to pull herself to the sixth, the last floor if you discounted the basement, sub-basement, the dungeon, and the accidental wine cellar.
Enid would have a fit if she knew Wednesday had made a habit of doing this. She didn’t know why Enid sprang to mind just at that moment, just as the cold had begun to seep down the back of her bare neck. Or maybe she did. Maybe it was the ghost of the snood punishing her. Her jaw tightened. She was almost there.
The wind buffeted freezing the rain into her eyes as she lifted one leg carefully over the last railing to the balcony. She dropped her gaze and let her eyelashes shield them, staring down at the nauseating drop to the ground below as it tilted and spun with her.
“It really is an interesting way to cope. Perhaps you’d like to talk about it this time?”
Not now, not ever. Wednesday wiped her palms down on her knees and stood up straight, finally back on solid ground. The rain drove harder for how exposed she was up here, silvery sheets drenching her bangs to her forehead and her clothes to her skin. This was the small, round maintenance balcony above the library and she had stolen every key to the window that gave access. No one could reach her out here and the acoustics were so that it made it difficult to pinpoint exactly where on the roof she was. It was perfect. Or it had been.
“I was perfectly clear that it was time you left me alone.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean—”
“It means everything. Go. Away.”
“What other audience do you have all the way up here, Wednesday?”
Wednesday refused to say it again.
The blonde rested her head back against the wet stone and sighed disapprovingly, blue eyes following Wednesday’s hands as she dragged the black plastic covers away from her cello case. She sheltered the velvet insides away from the rain and pulled the instrument out with the other arm, staunchly not looking at her company. Her face was starting to hurt with the effort of keeping it neutral, the rain coaxed her. It was supposed to be safe now, but she was here.
Wednesday hitched herself up onto the thin window ledge and pressed her cold fingers down into the shape of chords, angled the bow and began to play. Maybe she would go away if she played the right tune. The vibrations passed through the hollow cavity of the instrument into the hollow cavity of her chest and all at once she felt better, guided more by the feel of them than the sound the strings produced above the weather. The water ran from her hair line in rivers over her face, dripping from the tip of her nose, shuddering from the ends of her lashes as she moved with the tune. The muscles in her face screamed.
Dr Kinbott watched through the ever-bleeding slashes across her face as Wednesday drew a harsh inhale and stared out at the blackened view of the lake. The giveaway muscle in her cheek twitched. Kinbott knew Wednesday needed three things; the rain, her cello, and isolation. It was Wednesday’s own fault— she’d told the woman weeks ago about her routine up here in the hopes it would make her stop seeing her, but all it had done was ensure she never got the last thing she needed. Now, every rainy spell became a test of Wednesday’s mettle, of how long she could go with the perfect cover of a wet face and the comfort blanket of her cello to feel like it wasn’t as bad as it was, before the last necessary pillar crumbled and not being alone wasn’t enough to hold the weight up all by itself. Until she cried with someone staring at her. Kinbott stared at her.
Wednesday sawed at the cello under the unflinching gaze, determined. Her throat burned. Violence tinged the mournful tune she had concocted on the fly, straight from her head and into the churning wind. She remembered what Tyler had done to her and immediately blocked it out. She thought of Enid’s vile little unicorns instead. That hug. The tight shape Enid’s arms had made behind her back— Bianca’s face butted in, when she’d said how lucky Wednesday was, that dress, that dance, that date— No. She wouldn’t lose the rest of her mind over it all— paint pouring down over her for those glorious moments she’d assumed it was blood, Eugene’s stupid bees. Pissing off Weems. She could do this, she could focus on the pleasant things. Almost getting to electrocute Xavier.
The knife forced hilt-deep then twisted into her gut.
She shivered as she lost the battle. She’d left Enid’s snood abandoned inside the Gates’ dumb-waiter.
“Didn’t take very long tonight, hm?”
Wednesday never knew how Kinbott could tell when the rain water had turned to tears. She stubbornly waited for the rain for precisely that reason; if even she couldn’t tell what was a tear and what wasn’t, then who was to say there were any at all? No matter how much her face hurt, she never let it break from its neutrality. Until Kinbott had begun to gatecrash each event, Wednesday had had no real grasp of when she was or wasn’t crying herself, so how a hallucination knew, if she truly did, was beyond her. It made no sense.
“Do I have to scream?”
“Maybe you should. Catharsis.”
That was a no, then.
“No?”
Just ignore her.
“You screamed at your brother this morning. Why not now? Wednesday, are you scared to look at me?”
Wednesday shot a dark glance across her left shoulder without fully looking, at the blood-soaked beige outfit and the blood-soaked hair. Kinbott smiled inoffensively, there was even red in her teeth. The slashes across her face weren’t running clear with the rain water. The vibrations of the cello faltered and then picked back up without another hiccup, but the violent edge leaked noticeably away.
“You’re a little off-key.”
Off-key? The melody stopped abruptly and Wednesday spun around in one motion, bow hand flung out to steady herself as she dropped down from her ledge. Rain drummed on the polished wood of the instrument in the new quiet as she seethed at the vision she simply couldn’t rid herself of.
“Tell me what I have to do to get rid of you.” She demanded, teeth clenched, bow slashing outwards and then pointing accusingly at the therapist’s head.
"I tried logic. I tried drugs–”
“You certainly did...”
Wednesday seethed.
“You could try being nice?”
“No.”
Kinbott scoffed. “I’m starting to think you don’t want me to go away.”
“Then you’re as foolish as you are dead.”
Kinbott waited her out, watched Wednesday’s breathing falter in the silence when the jab wasn’t risen to.
“…Better?”
She hated whatever this was. Wednesday’s knuckles whitened around the neck of the cello and her lips pressed together just long enough to bleach some colour from them. Irritated at the touché, she put the bow back to the strings and began to play again, trying to sit back on her perch and keep her fingers from slipping along the wet strings at the same time.
“Christ, Wednesday. There’s no need to deafen me, too.”
“You’re dead. And I told you to go away.”
By some miracle Kinbott shut up, and the next time Wednesday turned to glare at her, she was gone.
For the rest of the night she had brooded in her attic, taken her meal in solitude, rebuffed her father’s efforts to engage her in evening chess or worse, conversation. She’d avoided her mother’s concern, corralled Thing into behaving himself as a good hand should and leaving her be while she combed her air-dried hair out smooth and re-braided it. She’d slept like she now knew the dead really did— with her eyes open, asking herself endless annoying questions and not getting any rest. But it was Sunday now, storm passed, and Wednesday was tired of the constant internal categorising and recategorising of her grief.
“Let me sleep.”
“It’s daytime.”
“Then leave me to my repose.”
“You don’t look very relaxed.”
She lifted her head and glared at her brother’s figure in the boathouse doorway, soft and round and weak in the early post-dawn haze. The rushes she had whipped his chubby calves with years ago had grown almost as tall as him again in the recent lull between his irregular growth spurts. They grew from the shallows in the thick, sandy mud, the murmurous haunt of flies when it got unseasonably warm like this.
“I could drown you. Would that be better?”
The wrong thing to say, in hindsight. Poorly framed. The run-up was shoddy, too much threat too soon. Pugsley knew her. She’d put herself on the defensive and given away there was something to be defended.
“You’re too late. It’s been over thirty minutes since I ate.”
“I’ll manage.”
“But it’s not the same without the cramp.”
Wednesday rested her head back across the the boat timbers, over the rib cage of coarse, fat rope dipped at its ends in a waxy black sealant that was cracking and perishing with age. She wasn’t comfortable. The curve of the boats, two upside down and one the right way up nestled in between, had every vertebrae from the Atlas all the way down to her pelvis at an elevation different from each of the others. It was the closest thing to torture Wednesday could think of while remaining free of the house. She was almost impressed that Pugsley was giving it a run for its money.
She closed her eyes and time passed. She listened to the water lap at the sides of the good boat, the one that still lived on the water, trapped between the sides of the horseshoe jetty where it was moored under the open-sided shelter. She listened to the flies in the rushes, the distant sound of Lurch sawing a windfall log into axe-able chunks for firewood. She listened to the occasional bird, to the way the wood croaked under her when she breathed deeply enough, trying to block out the echo of Enid’s furious words with it all— You wanna be alone, Wednesday? Be alone! Stupid to still be replaying– Enid had forgiven her.
She listened to Pugsley breathing, still stood in the doorway watching her.
“You’re tempting me, Pugsley.”
“I don’t believe you. You’ve gone soft.”
Oh, no. Not from him, too. She'd take it from herself but not from– she bolted up into a 90° angle, the ends of her bangs flying up and out and settling scruffily where they should have neatly framed her cheekbones. The whites of his eyes showed as his head reared back away from her despite being well out of reach.
“Listen to me, you—” under her, something shifted, the cloth canvas not so secure after being climbed on, the ropes giving, the wood slipping against itself. Wednesday dropped a foot and a half down into the scooped-out centre of the middle boat, one hand shooting out to grab for support and finding nothing but more canvas sheets that wrenched from their hooks and covered her over like a bed sheet ghost. Shafts of dust filed down through the slats of the roof in fine lines over her exposed leg and shoulder as she struggled, frustration surfacing over the initial confusion.
In the immediate, Pugsley laughed at her— one loud, delighted, escapee bark— and then the panicked sound of his shoes slapping up the dirt path outside dragged Wednesday out of her self-made trap on a furious sisterly instinct.
She would drown him after all.
Un-athletic as he was, Pugsley could be fast when he needed to be— she’d taught him that young. ‘If you’re going to be prey, at least be hard to catch.’ It was coincidence that at the time she had needed live targets, and a bigger coincidence that he’d been shot four times. A little voice in the back of her head reminded her that two coincidences were a clue.
She tore out of the row of boats in a cloud of dust and powdered debris and kicked off from the sturdier one at the front, still hopping for balance to get after him, brows knitted. She was above this really but she could only ask so much of skulking in the boathouse to make her feel better.
Her braids flew as she flogged herself to catch up, silent enough in her approach that Pugsley yelled when he whipped his head around to see if he’d lost her only to be roughly tackled to the ground in the same moment. They rolled, Pugsley more comfortably than her for all of his practice, until she had him by the collar of his shirt and sweater vest. She dragged him like a big cat hauling a carcass twice it’s size down to the waters edge, rolled him over, pulled the wool of the front of his sweater up over his face, and dunked him unceremoniously scalp-first into the lake water. He let all of his air escape in the first two seconds and then flailed without coordination until she took her hand from his wool-clad forehead and he emerged up at her from under the surface, mouth wide open under the cable knit and eyes screwed shut. Rivulets of water ran from his hair and back down into the lake. She counted his gasps one, two, three, and then dunked him back under. Wondered what Enid was doing. Wondered if a lobotomy would make her stop wondering. If Fester was any indication, probably not. He did so love a werewolf.
She waited a few extra seconds than usual before she let Pugsley resurface and yanked the sweater off his face.
“Had enough?”
He spluttered and shook his head, sprayed water from his lips like a horse, opened his eyes and then screwed them shut again against the stinging.
She sighed. He kept yelling her name for a moment after he re-submerged, a garbled, watery bubbling of syllables. It didn’t uplift her like it was supposed to, like it used to. But then, what did?
She watched the sun begin to rise behind the weathervane on the far gable as Pugsley grappled messily with her iron wrist. She used to like the black crow that perched on the rusting prongs of the compass but now it left a bad taste in her mouth. A quad of espresso and stupid decision, to be precise. Maybe she’d find a way to dismantle it.
This time, Pugsley spoke promptly through his first heaving breath.
“Mercy!”
Wednesday hitched her brow. “I should wash your mouth out. Does mother know you’re using words like that?”
He coughed up some water and widened his eyes as far as they would go in an attempt to clear his vision. “Does mother know you climb up to the roof?”
Hm. She hadn’t known he knew that. “I’m eighteen. I can climb anywhere I please.”
“That means no—” she made to dunk him again, “No!” He held his hands up. “Anywhere you please!”
“Good.”
She let go of him and stood up, bolt straight and staring down over him like the reaper out stark in the balmy peach air. Stirred-up water had seeped into the ends of her black jeans and they clung cold to her ankles.
“Help me up?” Pugsley held one awkward arm up toward her, smiling hopefully.
“No.”
She went back to the boathouse.
The morning had a chill to the air when it stirred, despite its warm hues. The grass in the long shadows of the trees still crunched where the dew had frozen over night. It would still be a warm day– warmish, warm for the season– but not quite like yesterday. Yesterday had been insufferable, before the storm had broken it. She stepped up onto the decking and pushed the old door open, resigned to just go to sleep and hope someone dragged her to the car when it was time to go, bumping her head from every stone along the way. Her voice wavered when she saw who was laying across her spot, looking far more comfortable than she deserved.
“For god’s sake.”
Kinbott turned her head to look at her figure in the doorway but Wednesday didn’t stand there watching like her brother had. She turned on heel and immediately marched back the way she’d come. She was not in the mood. She wouldn’t ever be.
“You can’t walk faster than I can appear, Wednesday.”
Kinbott stood at the end of the path in front of her. Before Wednesday could open her mouth to reply, the woman moved to take one step, which covered the entire distance between them at terrifying speed. Wednesday refused to take a step back as her tormentor came to an abrupt, unnatural stop right up in her personal space.
“I think I can take a hint faster.”
Kinbott laughed in her face as Wednesday walked straight through her and carried on.
“Developing a sense of humour? That’s progress.”
“Shut up.”
The Addams’ Family cemetery was left to grow wild and dangerously unstable underfoot, in keeping with the resident’s preference. Nero was buried here, along with the last five generations of Addams’ and three of her great grandfather’s most beloved black funerary horses. Her mother told her they’d had unicorn blood in them when she was five, and she’d never really known if it was a lie or not. She sat on the stone mourning chair closest to her scorpion and let the cooler air of the Yew tree’s shade tame her temperament back into it’s box. She had to get a handle on this before she left for Nevermore, but she’d been telling herself that for weeks and so far, it had only gotten worse.
“Looking forward to school?”
Wednesday put her face in one hand and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“How did you become more annoying in death?”
Kinbott leaned forward from her seat beside her in Wednesday’s peripherals. She smiled and shrugged.
“I’m trying to help you.”
“I don’t need your help— you’re not real. You couldn’t even help yourself—”
“Wednesday? Darling, who are you talking to?”
Her mother stood by the low cobbled wall with her hands clasped together in that way people did when they thought she might need to be handled delicately. When she glanced, Kinbott was gone. It seemed her mother had that effect on other people, too.
“Nero.”
“Oh. Oh, well…” Morticia didn’t fully believe her, it was plain on her face. “Your father wanted to remind you that you’re still not packed. You leave for Vermont in four hours.”
“Thing has it covered.”
“Dear, Thing’s a hand. You might lend him one of your own.”
“…Fine.” Wednesday stood and gave an awkward, performative glance to Nero’s headstone while her mother still watched from the sidelines. She cleared her throat in case Kinbott was somehow still lurking.
“I hope you like it here. It’s where dead pests belong.”
To her dismay, her mother was right. Thing had not packed nearly fast enough on his own, and he’d destroyed her room in the process.
“I’m not going to ask how this happened,” she said, as she looked from her tipped over drawer of dark bras to Thing’s mortified cringe. She sighed.
“No, I’m not angry.”
Thing tapped and twisted.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
She was; she was fuming. But not with him.
She opened the steamer trunk and reconsidered that sentiment at the mess inside, clothes and books and a random pair of earrings in a careless pile. It took an hour to order the chaos, another hour to gather together all of the things she needed, and another hour after that to organise them in a way that allowed for everything to fit.
At some point during, Pugsley, fresh from the second morning shower Morticia had forced him to take to get the lake silt out of his hair, brought her a delicate china plate with an apple sliced open into a flower, drizzled over with honey. She took it grudgingly, and told him to remind Lurch that this guilty pleasure of a snack wasn’t on the list of indulgences he was supposed to flaunt around. Pugsley called her weird like he loved her more than anything for it and left. She picked at the slices one by one, watching Thing double check her books were all accounted for.
“I suppose you’re coming with me?”
He turned and lifted a thumb, and then let it fall back down onto the desk with a soft thunk. Wednesday sucked the honey from the side of her own thumb and contemplated. If her parents hadn’t ordered Thing to go with her, she was technically at liberty to leave him behind. She lifted her eyes back up at the tapping out of a good point.
“Mm. Enid would be devastated.”
She took another slow bite of apple and decided whether Enid’s devastation was a particularly delicious thought, but predictably, it wasn’t. Enid Sinclair, the brightest shade of grey. Always ruining a perfectly good time with her pretty, sad eyes and revolting sense of compassion. Trust a werewolf to get her claws in. At her silence, Thing stared harder at her. Accusingly. Judging.
“Calm down. You can come. But on one condition— your pledge of loyalty to me remains. I don’t want my parents inextricably looped into this semester, too.”
Thing bowed politely.
“Good. Pack your moisturisers.”
He scuttled away to fetch them from whichever of his cubby holes he’d stashed them in last and Wednesday finished her apple. She’d saved the best for last, the bitter, amygdalin laced seeds. The tiniest trace amount of cyanide, her favourite. She pretended the honey was an annoyance as she picked them out of the core, and that she only licked her fingers clean because she had to. She imagined Enid rolling her eyes. Though, if Enid ever found out about this, Wednesday would put a duelling pistol in her own mouth.
“Ah, my li’l death trap— are you all packed up and ready to go?” Her father pushed the ajar door open with a hesitant smile, watching bemused as she pushed the plate quickly out of sight.
“Yes. Thing is fetching his neroli and bergamot.”
“Taking the li’l guy with you?”
“He insists.” It wasn’t a complete lie but she didn’t elaborate on the details. The last thing she needed was her father getting excited about room mates like a first year.
“He’ll be good company…” Gomez looked around the now bare looking room. “Your mother and I will miss you. And your brother, too. Are you going to say goodbye to them?”
From the corner of her eye, the inexplicable figure of Dr Kinbott stared at her.
“No. They’ll survive.”
“Well, you know me; I’m always willing to aid and abet my li’l girl. But your mother has been watching like a hawk, I don’ know if you’ll give her the slip so easily.”
Lurch appeared, crossed the room with a respectful nod to the patriarch and another to Wednesday, and collected the plate with it’s evidence under the latter’s death stare. He grunted in response and shielded the remnants of the honey from Gomez’s view as inconspicuously as he could. He left, and Wednesday stood abruptly before any questions about it arose.
“I’m ready to go. If Thing isn’t ready by the car, I’m leaving him behind.”
“Alright, mi cariño.” She eyed him at the suspicious timing of the reference to ‘honey’, however tenuous. He smiled. Kinbott smiled.
Wednesday left to find sanctuary in the back of the car.