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‘Twas the night before Christmas, and Wednesday Addams’ very own personal ghost paid her a visit as she was lying awake in her bed. She sensed him before she could see him and, as it was in her nature to be partial to sinister presence, she then turned sideways toward the phantom in front of the now-opened window to welcome him herself.
Standing stately with curtains billowing around him, he was a vision of gloom and mystery. His tall stature was shrouded in deep black shadow that concealed his entire body, leaving nothing visible save one clawed hand. By appearance alone, he looked every inch the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come from Dickens’ story.
And yet, he was Wednesday’s Ghost of Christmas Past.
She greeted him with a question. “Have you come here to finish me off?”
He remained quiet at that; his sudden yet calculated steps forward were the only indication that he had heard her loud and clear. But his answer didn’t materialize until he came to a halt right next to her four-poster bed.
“On Christmas Eve?” he started, hovering over her. “Of course not. I’m not Krampus. Or whatever it is that eats naughty children or something.”
“You’re not.” Wednesday’s eyes had adjusted to the dark at this point, and she found herself looking up at familiar chiseled features. “You’re a Hyde, Tyler Galpin.”
And Tyler said, “That I am.”
“What do you want, then? If it’s not to kill me.” An uncharacteristic slur in her speech slipped through her gritted teeth—the aftermath of her carousing with her family earlier that evening. In addition to making her somewhat drowsy, it had also rendered her mostly defenseless, with nothing but her winter blanket as her shield. The thought of danger prompted her to peek at Tyler’s fingers, which had regained their human-like traits. He must have used his Hyde’s claws to scale the façade of the Addams Manor and reach her bedroom on the second floor.
Wednesday tried not to dwell on the fact that only the worthy could break into the manor unscathed.
Before her, Tyler sneered. “What? Can’t it be because I’m cold and in need of shelter?” When she merely glared at him, he sighed and rolled his eyes. “Joyeux Noël,” he continued, his pronunciation more than acceptable.
In the dim light, Wednesday’s pupils dilated.
“Christmas truce,” Tyler elaborated, filling the silence.
She took the time to swallow before finally asking, “What does that even mean, and why should I listen to you?”
“That means exactly what you think it means. We share an enemy now.” Wednesday opened her mouth, the beginning of a retort dangling from the tip of her tongue, but Tyler swiftly cut her off. “Don’t try to deny it. I know a stalker has been texting you.”
“How? Was it you?”
Tyler snorted. “Why would I waste my time texting if I can stalk you in person? I didn’t even know you have a phone until recently. How did you get it, anyway?”
“Fine!” Wednesday snapped hurriedly. “But you still haven’t told me how you found out about all this.”
“My impeccable timing,” he explained. “After I escaped, I ran away to a safehouse that Laurel—”
“May she rot in pieces.”
“—mentioned to me before. When I got there, I happened to overhear a couple of guys I’d never met yapping about the master plan for you and someone they called ‘liability,’ which turned out to be me.”
“Who were they? What plan?”
“How should I know? Laurel never told me anything beyond her plot against you and Nevermore!”
“What if you’re secretly working with them and this is just another one of your tricks?”
“You think I want this!? Going into the lion’s den with my tail between my legs?” he grunted. “I thought I was finally free, but no, I'm still being hunted. I’m no longer a slave, but at what cost? I have no one now.”
And just like that, Wednesday learned that there was a sting she still wasn’t immune to.
“And then?” she rasped afterward. “What did you do to those lackeys?”
“Well, you said it yourself,” Tyler noted matter-of-factly. “I’m a Hyde, so I did what Hydes do best.”
Startled into full consciousness, Wednesday gasped and sat up immediately. “Tyler!” she scolded. “You should have kept one of them alive and dragged them here! I could have put them in our torture chamber and made them talk!”
“Oh, because your torture methods worked so well with me, right?”
“That’s not fair,” Wednesday hissed. “I only had my emergency tools with me at the time.”
“Yeah, you really should have brought Laurel’s manacles and stolen her chemicals so you could inject them directly into my veins. After all, that’s how I got myself bound to one obsessive lunatic. What’s one more?”
“I—”
There were a million ways she could complete the sentence. But as she sat there staring straight at Tyler, a realization hit her all of a sudden, causing her to wonder if he was truly her ghost of the past. Because it wasn’t just her betrayer that she was confronting.
It was also her own mistake.
In the end, all she could manage was an averted gaze and a shaky whisper. "I didn't know."
A shuddering exhale came from where Tyler lingered next to her bed, followed by a poignant pause that stretched on too long for her liking. Mercifully, he then broke it with a murmur, “So, do we have a deal?”
Her eyes flickered back to his. “This doesn’t mean that I forgive you or trust you again. I only agree because we’re in my house, and if you cross me one more time, I will strap you to the guillotine myself,” she growled before resuming, her eyebrow twitched with a hint of mischief all the while, “besides, I’m sure it’ll be beneficial to have an oversized rabid raccoon on a short leash.”
“If that was meant to offend me, then I’m sorry to tell you, you gotta try harder than that. I worked in customer service. I’ve been called worse,” Tyler said, smirking. “You should try that sometimes, working for minimum wage. It builds character.”
Before she could return his insult, he already spun on his heel to stride across the floor, stopping only when he reached the window. Wednesday studied him curiously as he grabbed the panels and, instead of leaving the way he came and jumping out of her room, closed the window until it clicked shut.
“What are you doing?” she probed, watching him walk toward a lounge chair in a corner.
He spared her not even the slightest glance as he replied, far too casually, “I’m staying.”
“No.”
“Look,” Tyler said, turning to her with his arms raised and palms out like he was calming an untamed horse. “I wasn’t lying when I said I was cold and in need of shelter, okay? I’ve been on the run for more than a month now.”
Now that he wasn’t standing between her and the window, Wednesday could finally inspect him under a sliver of moonlight that illuminated her room. Only then did she notice the jacket that seemed a tad too small around his broad shoulders and the sweatpants that looked too loose around his narrow waist. Perhaps they used to belong to one or two of his latest victims.
“Just treat this—” he added. “Treat this as a way to keep track of me. I can sleep wherever. If not this couch, then the floor, your bathroom; it doesn’t matter. I won’t even say no to a private guest room if you’re so inclined.”
“So you can sneak out and burn down this house while I’m asleep? Not a chance! You need to be kept under surveillance at all times!”
Wednesday was seething as she lay down again, slamming her spine against the sheet. Thus, no one was more surprised than her when her hand seemed to move of its own accord to flip her blanket open, showing him the space that she had somehow provided him on one side of her mattress.
Christmas truce, right?
Part of her wished he would tease and humiliate her, anything that would incite her wrath. That way, she could withdraw her offer and banish him outside. Tyler, however, made his way back to her bedside obediently. Wednesday glimpsed at him out of the corner of her eye as he wrenched his feet out of a pair of sneakers that was too ill-fitted for the chilly weather. Maybe he was cold, Wednesday thought when he removed his jacket without a word, allowing her the view of his hardened nipples behind a dirty white wifebeater; it was probably the only piece he owned that was really his.
Part of her wished he would slash her with his claws then and there. That way, she could use her last breath to brag about how she never trusted him anyway and how she was right about him all along. She was pulled out of her reverie when the bed dipped slightly under Tyler's weight. His proximity made it possible for her to get a whiff of the cheap bar soap he might perhaps have used at a gas station bathroom somewhere, coupled with notes of frozen air, charred firewood, and blood-soaked game meat that reminded her of past family ski excursions in Transylvania.
“Sorry for ruining your Christmas Eve,” he blurted out once he was all settled in the bed.
Wednesday peered at the canopy above her as she addressed him. “I’d appreciate some awkward silence.”
Tyler, of course, denied her the simple pleasure. “I’ve been spying on you and your family, waiting for the right time to break in. And then, I saw you guys at dinner, and all of you seemed intoxicated, so I figured, why not tonight?” He proceeded afterward, “What were you drinking, by the way? It looked like eggnog?”
Wednesday huffed out an exasperated breath, inwardly cursing her nagging desire to correct others. “It’s called coquito. It’s from Puerto Rico.”
She could hear the rustling of his hair—now longer than she remembered—as he nodded. “Is that supposed to make you super drunk?”
“We put tequila in ours.”
Tyler snickered at that. “I’ve seen your father and brother dosing themselves with formaldehyde for fun, but tequila got you guys wasted?”
“It wasn’t just any tequila. It was specially distilled by my Cousin Itt.”
“Cousin who?”
“No, Whoo is his child.”
“Whose child?”
“Whoo’s a child, yes.”
“What?”
“Whatt is Whoo’s sibling. They’re twins.”
“You know what, I—”
“I do know Whatt. I just told you, Whatt’s family.”
“Wednesday.”
“They’ll be here tomorrow for the Yuletide feast.”
Tyler hummed in response. “What should we tell your family?” he inquired after a few prolonged beats. “About me?”
“The truth,” she remarked. “I’ll have you know, you’re hardly the first criminal we took in.”
The mattress shook beneath her when Tyler chuckled incredulously. “Right! Of course!” he exclaimed. “I should have brought gifts or something, like a good guest.”
“Why?” she asked sharply. “No one will expect you to.”
Between fits of suppressed chortles, he struggled to enunciate. “B— But still.”
“I really don’t see why. Technically, you came uninvited and therefore, unprepared. And you’re not a parent pretending to be Santa either. In fact, you’re no saint at all.”
The abrupt stop of Tyler’s laughter left a void that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. And yet, there it was, practically screaming in her ears, so painfully jarring, especially after a string of back-and-forth between them.
As it turned out, the awkward silence wasn’t much appreciated.
“Yeah, I’m bad, aren’t I?”
Like a malignant tumor, something suspiciously close to relief spread between Wednesday’s lungs when Tyler spoke again, invading her larynx and threatening to make itself known. She gulped it down forcefully and said, “You did murder people.”
“And that’s bad to you?”
Wednesday grew quiet as she considered, not necessarily his question but the you in it. Her. Wednesday Addams, who dumped piranhas into a swimming pool, who never cared about the names of the hikers that Hyde mutilated within Jericho’s woods, who resorted to torture at any given moment.
Who had discovered a man’s footprints in the woods behind the Addams Manor a few days prior, who refused more glasses of coquito to keep herself fairly sober, who unlocked her bedroom window.
Who let a monster into her bed.
“No,” she answered, then. “Does that make me a bad person?”
On the periphery of her vision, she caught sight of the gentle rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, "No. You’re the only good that I know in this world now.”
“And since I am good,” Wednesday choked out, ignoring the knot forming in her throat, “and I believe your actions are not bad, wouldn’t that mean you are also good?”
Tyler replied nothing to that and started moving around under the blanket, looking for a more comfortable position. At this, Wednesday glanced down—and gave a disapproving frown when she saw that she had unwittingly stacked her hands on her stomach. This was not the sleeping posture she was used to. She should be crossing her arms in front of her chest, creating a barrier around herself while she was in her weakest state.
“Maybe I am your present. Every good person gets one on Christmas Eve,” Tyler mumbled unexpectedly, derailing her train of thought. Despite being half-asleep, he still had that amused lilt in his voice, the kind of which she had heard from behind the counter and across the booth, and under the fairy lights and in the corridor to a high school gymnasium turned temporary ballroom.
Wednesday scoffed. “I have no need for presents. And you’re more like a lump of coal.”
“Ouch,” Tyler let out a muted cry, and Wednesday could detect a trace of his smile in it.
“At least coal is not useless. It generates heat,” she reasoned. “Then again, it is also highly damaging.”
“So,” he yawned, “it’s bad for you.”
Wednesday turned her head to the side carefully, just enough to see Tyler’s long eyelashes fluttering close.
“No,” she said. “It’s what I deserve.”