Chapter Text
denial
Enid is dead.
Enid is not breathing.
Enid is lying on the floor, and she is covered in blood, and there’s a group of people, all trying to resuscitate her, and Wednesday honestly has no idea what’s going on or how she got here.
“She’s only just passed out,” Wednesday’s saying, her ears roaring. Her chest feels constricted, and her cheeks are wet. She’s crying.
“Weak, weak,” she berates herself. But of course she’s weak. Enid makes her weak. She’s always known that.
“You can bring her back. It’s not been long. It’s only been a couple minutes.” She’s babbling, she can tell, and there’s a desperation in her voice that she’s too sad to care about.
Ajax is there too, and he’s pulled the beanie down over his ears, eyes wide and red. He keeps taking short steps towards Wednesday and Enid, and then lurching back. Wednesday is thankful to him, for that. She wants Enid to herself.
When she wakes up, Wednesday will be there. She will not leave her side.
They keep telling Wednesday that she’ll have to go back to school (as if school is what matters, when your best friend is hurt like this) but she won’t listen, following Enid into the ambulance, regardless of protests.
“The ambulance. That’s good, right? It means you’re taking her to hospital? So she’ll be okay?” Her voice is shaking. One of the nurses turns away from her, tears in her eyes.
They keep asking her questions. How old she is, how old Enid is. Their relationship. What she’s studying at school. They’re clearly trying to distract her from the bloody mess of a girl on the stretcher beside her.
They reach the hospital, and Enid is whisked off to somewhere else, and though Wednesday tries to follow, the crying nurse stands in her way. And no matter how much Wednesday shouts, they won’t let her follow.
They take her to a different room where she curls up on a beanbag and tries to think positively. Enid’s in a hospital, the best place for her. The doctors were quick. She had blood loss, but there are transfusions, aren’t there?
Yes, Enid will be fine. Wednesday will take her home and they will lie on the sofa, and Wednesday won’t ever want to let her go again, but that’s fine, because she knows Enid will want to be held.
It does hurt, a little, that they won’t let Wednesday hold her.
When they tell her Enid has died, it feels like her carefully constructed fortress of lies to herself comes tumbling down over her head. Drowning her.
_______________________
anger
Of course they won’t let her see Enid. Even when she screams at them. Even when she sobs. Even when her voice is hoarse, and she can barely croak, all they do is shake their heads and say there’s nothing they can do.
“Of course there’s something you can do!” she shouts. “You could fucking well let me see her!”
They say no.
She’s not surprised.
She’s driven back to the school, which is abuzz with the news of Thornhill and Weems’ showdown. Wednesday couldn’t care less. She only hopes Thornhill survived, so she can kill her herself.
And it’s not fair, when Ajax appears at her door, and says kind things to reassure her, and tries to comfort her, and reminds her that other people have also lost someone. It’s not fair that she has to feel guilty for hating him, on top of feeling furious at Enid for dying, and furious at herself for being the reason.
That’s what it comes down to. Wednesday is the reason her best friend is dead.
Each night, Wednesday rages. She shouts, and she screams, and she cries.
Each morning, Ajax appears again. He doesn’t mention the dent in the wall, or the shattered pieces of stained glass ripped from the window, or the dark circles under Wednesday’s eyes from another sleepless night of fury.
They walk down to breakfast together, and Wednesday tries to quash her rising anger at every beautiful thing (how can it be fair, that they exist while her own is gone) and get through the day, just so she can go back to her room and see red again.
_______________________
bargaining
Yet as quickly as the anger had come, it is gone, leaving Wednesday with nothing. Her friends react with relief - they seem to think the absence of it will do her good - but in a strange sort of way, Wednesday misses it.
She misses it in the visceral way she misses Enid, the way that claws at her heart and has her wanting to scream. For a while, the anger had been all she had left of Enid’s death. She doesn’t know how to deal with it being gone.
(Really, it’s Enid she misses, not the ghost of her own emotion.)
Where once, each evening, she would throw things across the room, she starts to sit on the floor, and make deals with herself.
If she could just learn this cello piece in one night, Enid would come back.
If she could hold her breath for the three minutes it takes to begin brain damage.
If her plant would grow over a metre tall.
She fails each time, and berates herself harder with every lost bargain.
She knows, on a sensible level, that nothing would bring Enid back, but she can’t help but wish she could just win one. To know for sure.
She feels as though she’s killing her friend again.
_______________________
depression
When the bargaining is gone, it’s because Wednesday is too tired to make them anymore.
She’s just done with it all. With life (without Enid), with getting out of bed and facing the day (without Enid), with feeling like the world is losing its colour (because of Enid.)
So, she does the easy thing. She stays in bed, leaving only to use the toilet and to drink water from the bathroom faucet. She lets her friends worry about her, and she doesn’t care.
They come and talk to her, and she looks away. She ignores the food and water they bring, choosing to subside off the bathroom taps. She doesn’t know why she does this. She can only assume there’s a reason, deep in her psyche somewhere, which compels her to refuse the help she’s given.
She ignores the therapist who comes in from Jericho after the teachers finally get involved.
Where before she could not sleep, now it is all she wants to do. She doesn’t have the willing to do anything. Anything at all.
One day, Yoko comes in.
“Wednesday, you need to eat.”
“No.”
“I’ll get you anything. Burger King. Those disgusting little coffees you’re addicted to. There’s a McDonalds in town. I could get you a Happy Meal?” Yoko is babbling.
“Shut up, and fuck off.”
Wednesday’s voice is a low rasp from underuse. She can sense Yoko deflating.
She doesn’t care.
She knows her friends hurt too. But Wednesday loved Enid, more than they could ever imagine. When she loves a person, she loves deeply. Too deeply, perhaps.
Yoko chokes back what Wednesday thinks is a sob. She covers her ears. She doesn’t want to be reminded that Yoko is a person, with pain of her own. She can’t deal with anyone else.
Just let me be, Wednesday thinks. Leave me to die here.
_______________________
acceptance
What is death, anyway, but the ultimate loss to those who have loved you?
Wednesday has always rather liked pain.
But this is a different kind of pain.
This is the kind of pain which comes from losing someone.
Her chest is tight.
She inhales, she exhales.
It’s okay. She’s used to being alone. She’s always been alone. She had no one, and then she had Enid, and now she doesn’t have Enid anymore.
That’s fine. It was easier, when she didn’t love anyone. She didn’t have to feel like this.
“Goodbye, Enid,” she whispers to the jar of ash. She takes off the lid, tasting the salty air of the beach. She picks up a rock, and holds it to her chest, letting the coolness of the stone ground her.
Then she walks up to the shoreline and scatters the dust into the waves.
Enid’s soul returns to the ocean.
Wednesday’s remains tied here, to this earth.