Chapter Text
The dollhouse is stunning.
The welcome-home gift her parents have given her to celebrate the end of her first semester at Nevermore is fit for a princess. A perfect little replica of their New Jersey mansion complete with the wrought iron gate that surrounds it.
Wednesday knows every inch and every hollow of her home like the back of her hand. She could recite like a poem each and every crack spreading along the ceiling, every single brush stroke on the walls. She could touch blindfolded every surface the moonlight shines on when the windows are left open in the dead of night, and could walk around without a candle in her hand and not trip even once.
She’ll admit she’impressed, seeing it now reproduced so masterfully and faithfully in every little detail, homesick as she’s been (though she loathes to admit it). She watches her own room stare back at her, a miniature headless doll resting on top of a scaled-down canopy bed made in dark, intricate lace and a tiny library with even tinier removable books, precisely the same ones she'd see if she were to turn around towards those shelves. The other rooms are just as impressive,with the spiderwebs sewn in the purest of silks, the soft bear rug in the living room, the scaled-down stained-glass windows, and all the secret passages hidden behind teeny-tiny wooden doors.
Really, she's almost moved.
Almost.
...
Wednesday doesn't claim to have the eye of an artist, but she's still a perfectionist in her own right. So, she keeps staring and staring at her parents' bedroom, at the dull shine of the pale-colored floor, but something just isn't right.
She’s always loved the master bedroom’s floor. It was a ridiculously expensive gift from the Frump family to her mother for her nuptials, and Morticia is so fond of it that she barely allows them to step on it, let alone touch the valuable, rare ivory with their shoes. Doing so would be a sure way to get hexed.
As children, she and Pugsley weren’t allowed to enter their parents' bedroom at all. Which would have been fine, really, if only Morticia had been more often outside of it.
...
Wednesday was seven years old when their youngest brother Pubert died, the little fragile thing that he was. Her mother, in her pain, barricaded herself inside her rooms for two months straight without allowing no-one but her husband to walk through that door. She remembers spending almost an entire summer sitting on the cold stairs on the other side of that corridor, trying day after day to console her brother and distract him with little games of torture, and night after night just waiting, trying and failing to sneak a peek at her mother, and managing to see again and again only the nauseating, shining hue of those damned whitish slabs.
'You have to leave her alone, my sweet nightmare, you have to be strong' Her father would often say in those times, stroking her face with hands just a tad too big and too rough. 'Or you'll make your mother ill'
'How could I make her ill?' She would ask then, void-eyed and godless, always staring, always watching. Stomping her feet in frustration and agony.
'You don't understand, love' He'd answer then, shaking his head. 'You're a true Addams woman, you have death inside you. And you cannot bring up death to a woman who just lost her child'
It barely felt fair. Wednesday had lost a brother too, her mother halfway gone with him, and her father so wholly and completely wrapped around her that he could do nothing but cater to her every need and whim.
...
It got harder after that. Wednesday guesses that it’s easier when people are gone for good, dead, rotten. You can make your peace with that. She visits Pubert’s grave often, and leaves flower crowns made out of rotten daisies and weeds. But sharing your home with someone who's sometimes present, there with you, smiling and loving and full of affection and life, and other times they’re just a shell of themselves, staring into the void, murmuring nonsense, a weeping pathetic ghost of the person they used to be, that’s a whole other Pandora’s box.
Sometimes Wednesday catches herself wishing her mother had died with Pubert. A proper haunting would be fun, at least.
...
Just once, when Wednesday was barely eleven years old, she dared disobey her mother. Heartbroken and shaken from the loss of her beloved pet Nero, she came running to her in search of comfort. Morticia’s face didn’t twist in horror at seeing her daughter’s tear-streaked cheeks and desperate frown, but it did once her eyes landed on the blood and mud dripping from her fisted baby hands right down on her precious ivory floor.
Paying off those boys’ families to keep quiet wasn’t a problem, neither was keeping the authorities out of it, not with the kind of money the Addams family can flaunt. Recovering from Morticia's impulsive hex, that hadn't been fun. She'd spent a week on bed rest, but the pain wasn't nearly as awful as having to stand her mother fussing over her and her endless, tear-jerking apologies.
...
Wednesday stares now at the vulgar attempt at replicating her mother’s sanctuary with what she guesses can only be white marble inside the dollhouse. Does Morticia yet again not want to share that part of her home with her? How dare she. Her blood boils at the thought of her mother’s pretentiousness, her deliberate choice to exclude her once more, even with a gift that’s supposed to celebrate her coming home from a childish, forced exile.
Suddenly Wednesday it’s seven years old and crying on the other side of that bedroom door again, begging for her mama to want her and love her, wanting her to understand she just lost a brother too, and has another one to look after. Suddenly she’s eleven years old bursting into the room with mud under her fingernails, ripped hair that isn’t hers gripped tight in her tiny fists.
The marble it’s elegant and good enough, but it doesn’t shine quite the same, nothing else can.
She bets blood wouldn’t look nearly as pretty on it, either.