Work Text:
“Todos los caminos conducen a ti”
.
.
.
(&)
The words fell from her mouth and she never saw it coming, maybe expecting them to nest in her mouth floor like tiny insects’ paws, creating wounds where they incubate but never fall.
“Is Tyler dead already? or has he become mad? Willow Hill will open again, I heard that” she said flatly, though only a truly attentive person could see her eyebrow rising, her irritation gathering mold, infecting parts of her she believed were stone as cold.
Capri looked at her with a mildly annoyed expression and crossed her hands on the desk, suddenly getting nervous. Wednesday stared straight at her face, intending to catch every single detail of her emotions, maybe to later decodified them in a book, trying to look for hidden meanings that confirmed that -again- her teachers were all incredible greedy, stupidly evil and a waste of time and space.
“He is getting better, he could be better but”, a sigh, as if she was calculating the right words to say “well, he’s been through a lot, so I try not to push it; he would in time learn to…adapt”.
“Yes, killing people is an exhausting activity”.
Now Capri was clearly irritated, straightening up in her seat.
“You of all the people should know that things were not black and white Wednesday—”
“I don’t want to talk about it”, she interrupted, “but I do want to know how is exactly is this hyde community is supposed to help a Hyde to stop going to bloody crusade”, she added quickly, hoping Capri would drop the subject and give her what she really wanted, “the information is…. deficient”.
She was standing in the middle of the small room: an improvised office, wooden floors, damp walls, boxes on the floor and white papers in the desk; it gave the sensation the place was new but never finished; Capri would probably didn’t had time to organize it. Wednesday never sat down and tried with all her strength not to even breath, hands at her sides like a statue, the most comfortable she could ever be in a place that felt so normie.
“Well, we try to form a bond between them, like a magic network, building strong relationships through bonding activities”, Capri relaxed and spoke professional and it felt for a second she was back in Nevermore, her read hair moving slightly as she spoke.
“Who would have thought the solution was cringe friendships and support groups.” She replied coldly, inadvertently clenching her hands, feeling the mold getting to her fingers and tendons, the emotion getting out of her without permission. The feeling made her feel strange, more like an output she hadn’t expected at all: the situation, well, was starting to feel like something she needed to take charge of and put an end to, because she would not allow no more leaks without her will. Capri, of course, didn’t notice it, at all.
“It’s actually how werewolf packs work—well, in a really oversimplified way”. The mention of werewolves brought a memory so freshly to her mind she hated herself a bit for losing her of her mind for a second. She was getting displeased in a way she didn’t anticipated, the whole conversation making her felt she was under a microscope, the layers of her brain delicately separated from each other, someone trying to find those fruit flies’ eggs that were her emotions, and for the first time in a long time, she felt she was stepping into a trap she could not really see, fogged by all the mundane words. She hated it there, she hated Capri and her need to maintain teacher-student appearance, she hated that her teacher was trying to help him and she hated most of all being in a situationship she could not control at all. She missed being in the morgue, honestly.
All this… heated emotion was utterly annoying.
“And still, I don’t see how this would help Enid, you know, your former student who is lost”.
“I already told you Wednesday, I can help you find her, but you need to cooperate with Tyler, Enid is under extreme danger, I don’t think you truly comprehend that right now there are probably whole packs of werewolves tracking her and every passing second she’s getting harder to find and to return to her old self…Tyler is a hyde, I don’t have to explain to you what that implies for our security. He already knows her, and can smell her from miles away, which can help us reduce the time considerably”.
“I don’t need his help and I don’t need to remember you why he knows her so well” the words were harsh “I only wanted to know if you were somehow useful, but I can see you are still the same naïve teacher who expects the solution for everything is to connect with our feelings. This was a waste of time, good bye”.
“Wednesd—”
She was gone, her steps steady and quick, and her head bubbling, the mold corrupting the intrinsic parts of her: it was an enemy she wasn’t paying real attention, but how could she, anyway? When the enemy know her brain better than she did, and had wandered the dark halls of her heart with solicitude.
(&)
She had the worst sleep: a blank and white noise, like staring down a hospital hall. The nightmares were gone, hiding in a place she couldn't reach. Of course she tried to forced them, but it was futile: her mind refused to cooperate. A part of her knew she needed help, some kind of spiritual help, but the idea of talking to Weems seemed so impossible right now, especially when she was always telling her useless things (and her mother was not even a sane alternativity, not even in theory)
She had to find the solution alone, as always.
Not that she doubted of her capabilities, but even Wednesday would admit she wasn’t a totally trustworthy person right now, and she had to come up with a way to find a solution with the minimal bias but that was really hard to do when the subject was, well, herself. She dressed herself all black, not letting an inch of her skin getting sunlight, trying draw comfort from the image of a void reflected in the window. She wasn’t going to lose, that was not even a question or a possibility. The sun caught her pale skin but she didn't give it time to warm her, not even a bit. She was gone again; time was a luxury she couldn’t waste.
When she stepped out of the wooden cabin, her breath caught, and her eyes widened in slight shock expression: being scared was something she had never experienced before an unexpectedly this was her first time, only it wasn’t a ghost, not a monster, or a therapist session with her parents, but a living person in a dark green jacket and caramel curls, casually leaning on a car. So normal. So mundane.
She knew better than that.
“What are you doing here? I was clear I didn’t need help”.
His shoulders slumped slightly. His face was exactly as she remembered: a topographic map, a big scar across his cheek that, strangely, she only remembers under a blue light, her memory of him were the negative of a photograph. In contrast, daylight made him look more juvenile, his hair clean, the ends brushing his neck. (She knew better) She crossed the space between them, regardless.
“Capri said to be here at this hour. I didn’t know the reason”. Tyler said calmly, like he had been expecting that attitude.
She stared at him, trying to remember how she had felt before that night in the tower, where she spared his life, in moment that was so uncharacteristic of her that she judged herself harshly still to this day for her lack of commitment to her principles. But she found only a vague sensation, the anger had been rotting inside her from that moment and it was transforming some spaces in her body, rearranging things that were always in the same sacred place, unveiling partial mirrors where her other self stared back at her, in a way she didn’t understand yet, but she suspect it, because she had known the ending to Dorian Gray since childhood.
Tyler looked so much like him and at the same time, nothing at all.
(She knew better, She wasn’t going to lose)
“I thought the whole point of the hyde community was not to have another middle-age woman as a master”.
Wednesday said with resentment, it was better that than walk into unknow territory. He clenched his jaw; he was clearly angry. (That is, the Tyler she knew, the one she fought and won)
“She is not my master” he replied with composure, murmuring the words almost through his teeth, trying his best to remain in control. “I know you don’t trust me, okay? I will not apologize—”
“I wasn’t expecting that”.
“But I will not fight you either, I don’t want to, I—” but then he stopped, as he had almost slipped of something. Wednesday watched it with irritation; how possibly he could surrender so easily? closing the animosity they both had like something he could sweep under the rug like nothing had happened. He had no right to do that, to snatch from her fingers her long-awaited revenge. It seems like he knew what she was thinking because he backed away without another word, got into the car, and lowering the window, he asked:
“Are you coming? I thought we had no time”.
She wasn’t going to go with him. There was not a single reason for her to do that. Her capabilities for itself were more than enough and Uncle Fester had a motorcycle with a ridiculous helmet, which she let him slide because well, he was her favorite.
Thing was going to be so dramatic.
Because she got into the car, slamming the door harder than she intended, staring straight ahead, ignoring him. She didn’t want to look at his stupid smirk deep down she knew he had.
(&)
“You do know google maps exists, right?”
It was the first time in nearly two hours that a word had been spoken. The ride so far had been, well, unexpectedly quiet. She suspected this pause in their cat-and-mouse fight was something probably Capri had instructed him to do, because she couldn’t believe a word from his mouth, He probably had something brewing under his sleeve—
(“Kill me”
The plea appeared in her mind, his tortured face, his convulsing body, his closed eyes when he trusted her to end his life. Wednesday blinked quickly, erasing it from her mind, but the pencil she was gripping stabbed through the map—)
She was in fact struggling with the enormous map across her lap. Even though the journey so far had been smooth and she had managed to maneuver the long paper, it was still very impractical. The crinkling noise of it being folded and unfolded several times had preceded Tyler’s comment.
She ignored him.
“Stop right here, twenty meters from this point” she pointed out, and he stopped in the place she referred to, at the side of the highway.
Wednesday didn’t know if he was aware she was looking for Enid, although she didn’t care at all if he followed or not.
“This was the last place she was seen?” He asked once they both stepped into the forest.
“48 hours ago, yes”.
Well, Capri had told him more that Wednesday wanted her to, but at this point it felt futile try to hide from him the real reason of her visit to the monster-freak support group her teacher ran.
The forest floor was incredible humid, the sun was high above them, but the trees were so densely packed the sunlight barely filtered through as they moved deeper into the woods; he looked up for a moment, the branches never quite touching, forming a canopy of crown shyness. The brown of the trunks encapsulates the light, creating a hazy green mist that floated over everything. It seemed Wednesday was trying to find any trace or clue that could bring a light to Enid’s trail; he followed behind her, as he always did, watching at her back, her neck, her side profile whenever she focused her gaze.
“You won’t find anything; it probably rained yesterday”. She paused for a second but then continued with her search. Still, he could almost taste the steaming emotions under her hands, her grip on the flashlight tightening. “But she’s not that far, there are faint traces of her scent, she probably took the path along the riverbank, heading towards the mountains”.
“And you know all of that because of smell?” she asked for the first time, turning to face him, with the flashlight aimed straight at his face. He noticed that her words didn’t have the tone she intended, because for a second, he felt she was willing to enter into the unknow third place forming between them.
“No” he conceded, “but I would do that, if I were her. It’s the only place where is hard to get caught”.
She only looked at him for a moment, and he was suddenly back in Weathervane, when she had weighed the decision of giving her name like it was a delicate, intricated trap, not something to be exposed with the rest of the world.
“Let’s find a glade and camp there, I don’t want to stay out of her path”.
He followed her, wondering if it would always be like this, him walking behind her, never quite closing the distance between them, like the trees above their heads.
(&)