Chapter Text
Moonlight filtered in through the smeared windows of a shed that had once housed the brooding artwork of a troubled teenage boy. On another night the space would have been too dark to work within, the shadows conquering all but the most open of spaces, but this was the night of the full moon and its pale candescence earned one night of reprieve. The shadows were held at bay.
All but one.
The dark form of Wednesday Addams would not succumb to something as intransient as moonlight.
The shadows clung to her as she worked, rallying with a superior force as their brethren were beaten back. Her dark clothes and hair provided refuge for them, and even her hands were covered by thick gloves, leaving only the pale skin of her face and the glint of her eyes to pierce the night.
The moonlight meant that Wednesday did not have to risk giving away her presence. The yellow, flickering lightbulb would remain unlit, and no one in the school would be any the wiser to her late night activities.
The full moon was useful in other ways, too.
No one would be expecting her in the dorm. The teachers would be too distracted corralling wayward werewolves into their woeful enclosures, and her exuberant roommate was herself being corralled. With no one to miss her and no one to see her the only thing that would have given away her activities was if someone ventured close enough to the shed to hear the tapping chink chink chink of her work.
But the only people insane enough to be out on Nevermore grounds late at night on a full moon had the last name Addams, and Wednesday had sent Thing to make sure Pugsley was tied to his bed.
(She had wanted to see to it herself of course, it had been a while since she'd last done it, but she just didn't have the time. And oh, didn't that encapsulate it all?)
Thing knew. There was little she could keep from him and less still that she wanted to, but in any event, he had been there when she made her choice, and so had Fester. Her parents probably suspected - it was difficult to smuggle such a heavy artifact from the manor to the school completely unnoticed - but if they knew, they hadn't said anything, and that left her a little surprised. Perhaps they didn't know after all.
She'd have to tell them all eventually, but she wasn't ready yet. For once, no one was being murdered, or bullied, or was lost in the Canadian wilderness; no boys were breathing down her neck rambling about connections or signals, and better yet, no boys were fawning over Enid either. It was quiet in a way that she had always loathed, and even now a part of her itched at the peacefulness, begged to break the monotony. But she found that despite it all, she was happy. Her family was happy. Enid was happy, and that most of all should be preserved as long as possible. She wasn't ready to take it all away.
(Enid would be devastated to lose her, but Wednesday knew it would be worse if she ever found out why. If Enid ever found out just how Wednesday had restored her from her alpha state. She'd blame herself, wrongly, because in the end it all came back to Wednesday fixing her own mistakes.)
So she worked in solitude, in the few moments she could carve out where no one would be suspicious of her absence and no one would stumble across her. She blew the latest batch of dust from the granite and leaned back to observe her progress.
Only the inscription was new. The rest was a work in progress that she had begun the day after Nero was buried, the small scorpion etched crudely but prominently in the top right corner. Her skills had clearly improved over time, but she had added to the border haphazardly, leaving plenty of space for further additions. She would work on it over the course of a lifetime, after all.
(She wouldn't even have eighteen years.)
There were the thorns and stems of headless roses for her mother, the thin straight lines teaching her control. The crossed swords for her father had helped her with symmetry. Thing had laid himself flat and allowed her to trace his outline, and she delighted in making him think she was going to chisel so close as to actually strike him, without ever quite doing so. Pugsley taught her little, but he was present all the same, the stick of dynamite tucked at the bottom corner as if it was wedged there, ready to blow it all away.
Her biggest challenge had been when she decided to inscribe her favourite bars from Elgar's concerto. The straight lines of the staff, the curves and positions of the treble clef and the bass clef, and of course the intricacies of the notes and rests themselves. It had tested every skill she had learned up until that point. She surrounded it with lightning bolts for Uncle Fester, ensuring it would draw the eye.
Her favourite piece however was the howling wolf she had added on her first return from Nevermore.
All of these engravings were interspersed with empty space, a blank canvas left for a later that would never come. She may yet get time to add to it, but for now she was focused on making sure the text was exactly as she had seen it in the vision of her funeral.
WEDNESDAY FRIDAY ADDAMS
2006 - 2024
PASSING OUT OF SHADOWS
INTO ETERNAL DAY,
WHY DO THEY CALL IT DYING?
THIS SWEET GOING AWAY
She had considered doing the opposite, of course. Of spitting fate in the eye and refusing to mark it into the stone. If she never completed the engraving, how could the vision of her funeral play out?
But it didn't work like that, and regardless, it wasn't worth the risk. A price had to be paid and she'd signed the cheque willingly, so there was no point in leaving the headstone for another to finish. Not every Addams carved their own but she'd decided long ago not to trust hers in the hands of another. She'd much rather do it herself, even now.
The third advantage to working on the full moon was the serenade of howls that haunted her evening. If she listened closely, she was sure she could pick out Enid's voice in the chorus.
It had become increasingly apparent that Wednesday was in love with Enid Sinclair. She’d buried her head in the sand for a while but there really wasn't another explanation for how she had felt being confronted by the vision of Enid's death, or how she reacted to seeing her with Bruno, or how much she was willing to give to bring the wolf back from the wilderness.
Her denial had likely stemmed from cowardice, but so little of that mattered now. She no longer cared about showing weakness, or proving her mother right, nor did she fear rejection. Why bother, when there was so little time left to suffer from any of it? When she finally let the love past the boundaries of the prison she had penned it in, when it reached out from her heart into her gut, rose to tingle along her scalp, and flowed down her arms to twitch at her fingertips, when it settled in the place inside her where it was always meant to be, she could even admit that it might, possibly, be reciprocated.
There was a way that Enid looked at her sometimes and Wednesday's breath caught as she let herself believe, even if just for a moment, that Enid loved her too.
(Why did it take so long for her to see it? Why had she let the fear blind her? She'd take a life of unreciprocated love over this amputation of their potential, of their passionate possibilities. She'd never been more angry with herself when she'd realised what she lost.)
And yet, even without fear of rejection, she would die without the words passing her lips. It would be cruel to Enid to put that burden on her now. If she didn't love her back their last days would be tinged with awkwardness, but if she did it would be worse. To give her such love and immediately snatch it away again? Even for an Addams the tragedy was too much.
Wednesday chipped away at the smooth expanse of gray stone. If she was lucky, and she worked through the night, she'd finish the epitaph before sunrise, although she was sure she'd pay for it tomorrow. Then she could use any other time to add further embellishments or carvings. She'd been quite taken with the idea of marking the cobweb window of her Ophelia Hall dorm indelibly onto her headstone. There was no greater symbol of her bond with Enid after all, two halves of a whole, monochrome and colour united in a way that shouldn’t work but it just did.
They'd saved each other more times than Wednesday could count. Given everything that had happened it should surprise nobody that one of them would eventually die for the other.
Wednesday was glad it was her.
(At least it wasn't Enid.)