Work Text:
To the untrained, it might have seemed surprising that Wednesday possessed the ability to feel at all.
It wasn’t that she did not have feelings, as many assumed. Wednesday did possess the ability to experience emotion, but she kept them hidden deep beneath, never allowing them to surface. They were murky, muffled, as if held under water, until they slowly dissipated into nothingness.
Of course, she did let certain emotions rise up – dull-eyed melancholy, her go-to default expression; unnerving intensity, which she allowed to rise up when scaring people, a regular hobby; and on special occasions, murderous exhilaration, like how she felt when she set a school of piranhas after Dalton and his stupid swim team, usually surfacing as an sinister smirk. But to her, emotions were a weakness that was easily controllable, in her eyes. She’d mastered the art of it since the tender age of six.
But seeing Thing limp, bloodied, and motionless had awakened another sort of emotion inside of her – grief.
Pure, unadulterated grief, rocking her to the core, squirming out of her controlled grasp and reaching the surface. Emotion begins to mar her carefully controlled mask, and she feels her bottom lip begin to wobble and her eyes burn and prick painfully. She takes a laboured breath in, trying to control the short, agonising intakes of air and the high-speed drumming of her heart.
She watches the small sparks of electricity light up in feeble attempts to resuscitate her beloved disembodied hand, the flashes of light burning into her vision – a cruel reminder that each second, each spark, each failed attempt made it Thing closer and closer to the inevitable force of death. Death had always seemed like a comforting end to Wednesday; now, it loomed dark and intimidating, threatening to tear the ones she most loved away from her.
Uncle Fester stares at the motionless hand, holding back tears. “He’s gone, Wednesday.”
No.
No.
No.
Thing was her partner in crime. The only one she could trust in this wretched town Jericho. Her only living reminder of home. Him being gone was not possible.
Thing was always there, far back before her birth, and always constant throughout it. He was the one who comforted her when after she lost her pet scorpion, wiped her tears gently as she cried on his shoulder (wrist?) through the night. He was the one who constantly followed on to all her antics and adventures, no matter how strange, dangerous or ridiculous they could be.
For him to be gone, completely absent was just an impossible situation. One that followed zero logic, because Thing was the only constant thing in her life. There was no way, no way he could be gone-
And with that, Wednesday broke the promise she’d made with herself for ten years.
A hot tear slowly trickles down her cheek, and the floodgates open wide. Another falls, and another, each one disfiguring the perfect emotionless facade she had built up over the years.
“No, he’s not.” She sounds hysterical, even to her own ears. She couldn’t care less. She grabs the bloodied paper towel and sharply tugs it towards her. “Thing. If you can hear me…” her voice, usually cold and assertive, has been reduced to a weak, soft, shaky whisper. She sucks in a breath in a feeble attempt to stabilise her breathing. “If you die, I will kill you.”
There’s zero bite behind that last phrase. She stifles the sobs that build up in her throat, and she comes to the realisation of how much she loves Thing. She may have pelted him with threats or bitingly insulted him on many occasions, but the feeling of losing him is unimaginable –– it feels like her heart has just been ripped out, trampled on, spat on and shattered into tiny smithereens. She would do anything – kill, die, watch Legally Blonde until the words were burned irrevocably into her brain – just for Thing to have a chance of living again.
But right now, all she can do is one thing – hope.
She pushes the napkin back to the centre of the table and stares at her uncle, eyes glistening with unshed tears. “Go again.”