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Wednesday had never trusted windows.
Doors, at least, were honest. They creaked. They resisted. Windows pretended to be thresholds for sunlight and then enabled everything the dark dreamed up. When she left the quad and stepped into her dorm that evening, the shutters of her distrust fluttered a warning a heartbeat before the room did.
A slipper of shadow unhooked itself from the ceiling beams. It thickened into the shape of a boy who used to be a boy.
“Hello, Wednesday,” Tyler said, and the syllables seemed to fog the glass.
Her posture didn’t change. She placed her typewriter case on her desk with the same care she might reserve for a skull. “Breaking and entering. How quaint. Sheriff’s son to the last.”
“That’s not who I am anymore.”
“Correct,” she said. “You’re the unsolved variable that keeps trying to prove me wrong.”
His jaw flickered. It was always the eyes, she remembered: the way something behind them glanced the world like a whetted edge. The Hyde was a tide rolling under his skin. One step toward her and the bones of his hands began to argue with themselves—lengthening, cracking, the fingers strung with tendon like harp wire. The face followed, cartilage shuddering beneath flesh, teeth presenting a private apocalypse.
Wednesday didn’t step back. She watched the change the way a scientist watches a successful experiment explode exactly on schedule.
“If you were planning to kill me,” she said, voice even as a ruler, “you shouldn’t have knocked.”
He lunged. She didn’t flinch. She only looked up—cold, admiring in the way a vulture admires thermals.
The Hyde stopped.
It was not compassion that arrested him. It was a collision: her refusal meeting the monster’s momentum. The thing froze, ribs heaving, and inside its ruin Tyler fought like a swimmer snagged on a memory. Slowly, perversely, he unraveled back into his human outline. The claws were the last to go.
“I still want to hurt you,” he whispered, as if confessing the desire would empty it.
“I know,” she said. “If it helps, the feeling is mutual.”
He half-smiled, which looked dangerous on him and yet honest, too. Then he moved the way shadows prefer: backward through the window, into the night that had smuggled him in. The curtains sighed. The room remembered to breathe.
Wednesday did not tell anyone.
It wasn’t secrecy for secrecy’s sake; it was taxonomy. What she had with Tyler was a species that died when exposed to strong light. Besides, Enid would try to fix it with affection and glitter pens. Xavier would reach for charcoal like a priest for incense. Principal Barry Dort would mutter about protocols, and Wednesday had never liked men whose authority required syllables arranged like fences.
The next morning, Nevermore treated her like a public monument pigeons had learned to cheer for. Fans, students, faculty who had once called her a liability now wanted a quote. Morticia and Gomez arrived with the kind of familial love that draped itself over furniture, and Uncle Fester brought sparklers he assured her were “ethically sourced from grave robbers who had it coming.” It was suffocating in all the ways that made most people feel alive.
She waited until the second tray of congratulatory pastries—funeral-dark eclairs, tragically edible—then excused herself. Grandmama’s gift lay just beyond the school’s reach: a small, privately purchased cemetery stitched into the flank of a hill, the wrought-iron gate carved with a Latin motto that translated roughly to “Please Disturb.” Grandmama had called it a “starter necropolis,” which warmed Wednesday’s heart like a refrigerated kiss.
Among the stones, the world remembered how to be quiet. Statues of angels had their eyes professionally scratched out. She approved. She walked until the noise of love and fame scraped off on the briars and then sat on a cool slab that would someday be hers.
The wind carried a smell of rain and old books. It carried another smell, too: the particular mint-metal breath of someone who thought distance was a disguise. Wednesday did not turn. She felt him on the hill line—Tyler, a silhouette folded into a sycamore’s shadow. He was watching the way a starving thing studies the hands that feed and the hands that restrain.
Let him watch, she thought. Surveillance is only dangerous when it replaces observation.
The hand on her shoulder was small, warm, and wrong.
Vision took her like a trapdoor.
The sky peeled back and Wednesday fell through photographs that moved. Blue tile. A number stenciled above a steel door. A humming, not music—a fluorescent light with delusions of grandeur. A woman’s face, half candle, half ash. The woman Wednesday had pulled out of the asylum’s forgotten wing not long ago—the unknown patient who had clutched Wednesday’s wrist as if certain of an address and said, Help me find my son.
In the vision the woman reached again and the touch was not benign; it was a key. The door in Wednesday’s head swung and behind it was a boy drawing monsters that looked like self-portraits of the future. There were lullabies with no melody. There was the Sheriff’s badge on a kitchen counter. There was a name that arrived without being spoken: his mother.
Wednesday went from vertical to stone with no transition. The headstone caught her, or the ground did; either way, the world stopped with her.
When she woke, the woman was there for real—hair dull as a winter field, eyes too bright. Her palms were bird-light. “You fainted,” she murmured, tone clinical but kind. “I’m sorry. Touch is… it does that to you, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Wednesday said, tasting earth. “And it’s usually worth the concussion.”
“It’s been years. They told him I was dead.” The woman’s voice lowered. “They told everyone.”
“Tyler’s mother,” Wednesday said. It wasn’t a question.
Something in the woman folded, and it was not weakness. It was relief’s skeleton. “You pulled me out. You saved me. I think… I think I can help my son.”
“You want me to be your courier between the living and the presumed dead.”
“I want you to introduce us,” the woman said. “Before he harms someone else. Before he harms himself.”
Wednesday considered the rules she had always crafted: never make promises; when you do, keep them as if they are knives. “I’ll arrange it,” she decided. “On a condition.”
The woman nodded, already agreeing with a faith Wednesday distrusted and envied.
Across the hill, Tyler had seen enough. He had followed Wednesday because the hunger to be near her was only matched by the compulsion to destroy what softened him. He had expected answers in the graveyard and instead received a ghost. When he recognized the woman—recognized not her face but the ache her absence had carved out of him—something ancient and animal bolted through him, and he ran.
He ran to what he hated.
Nevermore had once been a home he wanted to burn. Now he wanted to break into it and bully the truth from its archives. He came at dusk in the low shape of someone who had never learned to ask for keys. A window latch surrendered to him like a confession. He dropped into a hallway that smelled of cedar, chalk dust, and expensive denial.
“Mr. Galpin.”
The voice had a bureaucrat’s confidence. Principal Barry Dort stepped from a side office with a clipboard and an expression that thought it could manage the world with bullet points.
“I don’t take meetings,” Tyler said.
“Breaking and entering. We’ll call the Sheriff.”
“There is no Sheriff,” Tyler said, and the room cooled around the grammar of that.
Principal Dort straightened as if folding himself into a rule would make him stronger. “Nevermore is a sanctuary. Not for you.”
Tyler’s laugh was a mistake shaped like a sound. The Hyde came when he breathed wrong, and grief had rewritten his lungs. Claws split him. The principal’s clipboard dropped like a beheading in miniature.
Tyler tried to stop it. He did not. The hallway held everything and then held less.
When it was over, the body on the floor was not a man he had hated; it was proof. Tyler backed away, breathing sawdust, and claw marks wrote hieroglyphics down the wood paneling that said: this is what happens when you ask a monster for the story of his mother.
Wednesday didn’t yet know about the blood drying on the administrative wing’s baseboards. She was walking with Tyler’s mother down from the cemetery, the path shaved clean by wind and allegations. The woman’s story arrived in pieces: hidden by a faction that wanted hyde-science to go on without witnesses; years of medicated blankness; a recent, quiet escape engineered by someone inside who believed in mercy, or revenge disguised as it.
“I can reach him,” the woman insisted, fingers worrying the hem of her coat. “He was gentle once.”
“Gentleness is a rumor I don’t require,” Wednesday said. “But control is interesting.”
They parted at the gate. Wednesday’s promises were bones she could feel beneath the skin of her day. She went where any promise was always most difficult and therefore most satisfying to keep: the Bullpen.
The station had been polished since the night it had learned its final lesson about mortality, but clean floors only make ghosts more reflective. Tyler stood where his father had died—jaw set, hands in the pockets of a coat that looked self-conscious about its own weight. Grief fit him like a uniform; it issued orders to his posture.
He heard her, not by the footfalls but by the way the air refused to ignore her.
“I was going to tell you,” he said, turning. The words made no sense. Then he closed the distance between them before sense could object.
The kiss wasn’t a prelude; it was an alphabetical order that began where most people stopped. Wednesday did not move for a fraction—calculating, cataloguing—and then she answered, because curiosity is a more precise instrument than cruelty. He tasted like someone who had stayed too long in a winter house.
When they parted, she refused to step away because retreat is a verb she dislikes.
“I saw her,” he said. “My mother.”
“I know,” Wednesday answered. “I met her in my cemetery. She wants to help you.”
He laughed again, softer this time, and it came out broken but aspiring to music. “Of course she found you.”
“If you want to see her, you will give me something in return.”
His mouth slanted. “Of course you’d make a deal at a time like this.”
“Bargains are the only love language with a measurable outcome.”
He waited.
“After I introduce you,” she said, “you turn yourself in.”
“Back to a cage?” He glanced around the Bullpen, as if the desks would volunteer to be gallows.
“To confinement at Nevermore,” she said. “Controlled. Supervised. Not a kennel. I will visit. Your mother will, too. There will be therapy, which I personally find intolerable, but which seems to fix other people for reasons that escape me.”
“And if the Hyde doesn’t cooperate?”
“We will invent new chems of cooperation.”
His eyes closed, then opened on her. “You’ll really bring her.”
“I keep my promises,” she said, “the way most people keep pets.”
He nodded. It was not surrender. It was a hinge.
They made the meeting happen in a borrowed room at the edge of campus where the windows wore bars disguised as tasteful mullions. Wednesday stood near the door not because she feared them but because she respected exits. Tyler’s mother entered like a question that had waited too long for the right exam.
She reached for him. He flinched, from habit, and then didn’t. Her touch landed on his cheek. The Hyde snarled—an underground train passing too fast through an unlit station—and his shoulders twitched toward the change. Wednesday watched the mathematics of it: stimulus, response, counterforce.
“Hey,” his mother said, as if addressing both halves. “I see you.”
It was the gentlest spell Wednesday had ever witnessed. It didn’t end the Hyde. It made room around it—gave it somewhere to expand that wasn’t destruction. Tyler leaned forward, forehead against his mother’s temple, and some of the ruin inside him learned a new definition of quiet.
Afterward, he kept the bargain.
Nevermore cobbled together a place for him: not a cell, not a dormitory, a study lined with wards and furniture that had practiced being unbreakable. The faculty argued in memos so sharp the paper cuts looked ceremonial. With Principal Dort gone, authority became a chair several people tried to sit in at once; the effect was musical chairs for the self-important. Wednesday ignored it all.
She visited in the afternoons with the sun where he could not reach it. She played cello once in the doorway until a security sigil complained; Tyler said the music rattled the Hyde like old chains. She did not apologize.
His mother came twice a day. They talked about childhoods in the conditional tense. They touched hands with the careful choreography of people re-learning. Sometimes the Hyde pressed against Tyler’s skin like weather. She drew him back with stories of a lullaby that had not been a lullaby at all but the timed beeps of a broken monitor, which she had made into a song to keep him from crying. Wednesday watched and took notes she didn’t pretend weren’t feelings.
Therapy was conducted by a Nevermore clinician who believed in worksheets. Tyler’s mother came, too, because family group therapy had been recommended by several well-meaning demons. The Hyde hated the word therapy, but it liked the part where Tyler practiced breathing in counts of four while squeezing Wednesday’s hand under the table. She allowed it. The clinician pretended not to notice; clinicians have their own kinks.
On the fourth week, the board convened to decide whether Tyler’s confinement would continue or evolve into something with better lighting. Wednesday attended not as petitioner but as fact. She read aloud a list of incidents that had not occurred because Tyler had chosen not to let them—the only kind of credit she believed in. She did not mention Principal Dort’s death; the investigation had become a legend of conflicting memos, and legends bored her when they didn’t bleed.
When the board members argued, Wednesday’s mind wandered to the cemetery, to the plot of ground that would one day host her favorite kind of party. She thought of the window in her dorm and the way shadows had learned to behave when she told them she wasn’t prey. She thought of Tyler in the Bullpen kissing her like a last rite and then agreeing to live afterward anyway.
“Miss Addams,” a board member said, derailed by the force of her silence. “Do you believe Mr. Galpin can be rehabilitated?”
Wednesday weighed the words as if considering replacing one of them with a blade. “Rehabilitated is a consoling fiction adults tell themselves to justify mercy. What I believe is simpler: he can learn.”
“Learn what?”
“Where to put the monster,” she said. “And how to ask it, politely, to wait.”
They approved ongoing confinement with privileges; they called it a step forward. Wednesday did not smile, but her pulse wasted the effort on a single, satisfied beat.
That night she visited Tyler’s room. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, back against the bed frame, the monster curled inside him like a large dog that believed itself a secret. His mother had just left; the air still smelled like peppermint tea and the starch of hospital uniforms that hadn’t been worn in years.
“You won,” he said, meaning the board, meaning the day, meaning something more vulnerable he would not say because boys are sometimes cowards when honesty is the only weapon left.
“No,” she said. “We redefined victory.”
He watched her. “Do you ever regret not being afraid of me?”
“I am afraid of many things,” she said, closing the door as if she were sealing a pact. “Most of them are boring. You are not.”
He laughed—that broken sound trying to be music again—and then he tilted his head, asking without asking. She stepped forward. Their kiss this time wasn’t an assault against despair; it was a ledger entry: two signatures, witnessed by the night.
When she left, the guards nodded the way guards do when they’re beginning to like the prisoners. Wednesday returned to her dorm and locked the window, not to keep anyone out but to give herself the pleasure of unlocking it later.
In the morning, fans would cluster again. Family would love aggressively. Rumors about Principal Dort’s accident would congeal into something edible. Somewhere in the administrative stack, a memo would suggest grief counseling for the student body and receive ten competing memos about budget. Wednesday would attend none of it.
She had an appointment at a cemetery.
Grandmama’s gate sang on its hinges when she pushed it open. The stones watched her the way old friends do: without needing a reason. She stood by the plot that wore her name and listened to the wind rehearse eulogies. After a while, she took a pen and wrote a single sentence in her notebook: Do not domesticate what you can learn to negotiate with.
When she closed the book, she felt the distinct sensation of eyes on her, and allowed herself the smallest impulse toward theatricality. Without turning, she spoke to the wind.
“You’re late.”
The sycamore’s shade arranged itself into Tyler, hands in pockets, posture uncertain. He stayed beyond the gate because there are rituals even monsters respect.
“Good,” she said softly, not to him, not exactly—more to the idea of him that had finally learned how to stand where she could see it without demanding to be the only thing she saw. “Now we can begin.”
And because the dead make excellent witnesses, the cemetery said nothing at all.