Chapter Text
Wednesday Addams believed in inevitability.
Decay. Doom. Disappointment.
The human body was a rotting vessel from the moment it was born. Life was made to end. Feelings were parasites. Love was a terminal illness.
And yet there he stood. In his own dorm room. Making tea for a girl who glittered when she cried.
Not wholly metaphorically. She used that sparkling mascara that made his eyes water, and it trailed down her cheeks when she cried.
Enid, formerly Elliot, was now she—officially, firmly, shyly. Like trying a new spell in front of a skeptical coven. She sat cross-legged on Wednesday’s bed in a sweater far too large and far too his. Her legs were bare. Her hair was tied up in a chaotic bun. A pink scrunchie sparkled in it like a crime scene dressed in sequins. It was appalling.
Wednesday's stomach did a small weird jump. Perhaps the end was near, he mused.
“I like this,” she said, fingers wrapped around the mug he handed her. “You. This. Us.”
“I’ve suffered head trauma with fewer symptoms,” Wednesday replied, collapsing into his chair like a condemned man facing a firing squad made of feelings.
She smiled at him like he was the sun. She had no business doing that. Not when he had spent years perfecting his inner dark crypt.
Then, after a sip: “Do you think I should go on hormones?”
He nearly choked.
She looked up, startled. A little scared. “I just—I want boobs. Eventually. Is that shallow?”
He swallowed, slowly. As if he were trying to keep his heart from leaping out of his throat and screaming something he wouldn't be able to take back, something he wasn't ready to admit yet.
“No,” he said, voice oddly hoarse. “It’s not shallow. Wanting your body to look like home is not a crime.”
She fidgeted with the sleeve of the sweater. “Lyra—new werewolf girl, Year 3—has, like, perfect curves. She wore this bodycon dress the other day and I just… I felt like a half-formed paper doll watching her.”
“You are not a paper doll,” he muttered. “You are the original manuscript. Smudged, dog-eared, ripped at the edges, but the real thing. Everything else is just fanfiction.”
She laughed wetly. “I think you just called me canon.”
“Don’t push it.”
The silence returned, but it was warmer now. Or maybe he was just feverish with how much he wanted to touch her.
Then: “Sometimes I still feel like Elliot. Not… inside. But in the mirror. Like the world still sees him. Like I’m pretending.”
Wednesday leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You are not pretending. Elliot was the act. This—this is you forgetting your lines because you finally stopped reading someone else’s script.”
She looked at him like he’d handed her a key to a locked door in her chest.
And then—because fate delights in torturing him—she touched him.
Accidental. Her fingers brushed his. Perhaps not so accidental. His heart reacted like it had been tasered.
He did not move. He could not move. Her touch was a quiet apocalypse. He never wanted to be ruined in it so much.
“I don’t want to feel this way forever,” she whispered. “Like I’m wrong.”
“You’re not wrong,” he said. “You’re just… becoming.”
She blinked fast. “What if I never grow breasts?”
“Then I will personally bribe every surgeon in the country,” he said, deadly serious. “Or build you a bra that makes biology surrender.”
She laughed again. Then quieter, a hushed admission: “I’m scared.”
He moved to sit beside her, their thighs barely touching. “So am I.”
Her eyes widened, half-shocked, half-incredulous. “You are?”
“I am experiencing a catastrophic identity crisis,” he said, voice bone-dry. “I feel things. I want things. I make tea. I am one sigh away from becoming my father.”
“God forbid.”
“No, Satan forbid.”
Then she leaned on his shoulder. Softly. Naturally. Like it had always been allowed. Like she belonged there.
“You know,” she murmured, “I used to think love was supposed to be loud. Grand gestures. Exploding fireballs of emotion.”
“And now?”
“Now I think it’s you brewing tea and threatening insurance companies.”
He swallowed. “I would burn a hospital for you. One full of patients”
She laughed, a genuine, hearty laugh that comes from the stomach. “You'd do that for fun, my love. But I know what you mean.”
He looked at her then. Really looked. And she looked back like he was something worth seeing.
“I love you,” she said, quiet as a spell.
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Not yet. If he said it, he’d never be able to stop.
But he let his fingers lace through hers. Held on.
When she fell asleep curled into him, chest rising and falling in small, vulnerable sighs, Wednesday stared into the dark like it owed him an explanation.
He was infected. Tainted. Softened.
The rot had reached his heart.
And when he finally closed his eyes, it wasn’t sleep that found him—it was the crushing, terrible realization that he would never love anyone like this again.
That he couldn’t.
Not because he didn’t want to. (He knows he will never want to)
Because no one would ever be her. There was only one Enid Sinclair to whom he could belong, in this multiverse.
And he would spend the rest of his life and after that worshipping that single, devastating truth.