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My fierce black-hearted queen. At last you've come.
Only you, that's all I've been talking about to the staff here: did Wednesday call, did Wednesday send an email asking about my conditions, when's Wednesday going to come and visit. And I know that their stone faces will spit nothing back at me, vague non-answers and psychobabble, and that I'll be judged yet again for having an “unhealthy obsession” but I don't care. With you I'm more myself, more whole.
You're my light in the darkness—no. My one patch of comforting darkness to fall into. In this place where the lights are always on, you are my only solace.
The staff here want me to be the good boy, to spill my guts to their fake-soothing faces and then gratefully talk about how much it helped me to get those feelings out, in what they call a “safe space” — a “safe space” where I'm stuffed all day with pills down my throat and raped in the ass with more drugs if I don't comply. I could do what they wanted, easy. Talk about my “recovery journey” and “managing my symptoms”, about how much I want to heal and change. There's a part of me that actually wants just that. That wants to let them in, wants to let them help me, wants to be saved. The good boy part of me, that took orders and smiled at customers, that stammered and nervously smiled at the first hint of confrontation. All the while repressing, repressing, repressing the part of me that wants to rip their throats open and watch them scream.
They think that they are helping. In fact, they're encouraging the split.
I don't bothering trying to explain all this to the doctors. I've been through all this before, at the boot camp, with Dad, with the other therapists, with Laurel, they're all the same. They never listen. All of them wanting me to regurgitate whatever they said back to them, to stay in control, to obey them.
Only you are different. You don't really give a fuck that I've killed people. Oh, you want revenge, of course. Obviously. I mean, I played you. Deceived you. Hurt the people you care about: Eugene, Thing. And now you want to show me you can play me right back. Own me, make me suffer. Hurt the people I care about. No problem. Only, you're going to have some trouble with that last part. Because unlike you, I don't have a Eugene or a real family. For me, there is only you.
And I know that if you could just stop hating me you would love me. And everything would be perfect. Disable the collar, break through the bars, bust out and then just get out of this town. Go on the road, Bonnie and Clyde. I could make you smile again if you'd just let me take you somewhere we could be alone, a quiet graveyard where I could kiss you again, bring out a thermos of espresso and these antique filigreed shot glasses I saw at Uriah Heep's, sit together under this pitch-black throw blanket I got for us before all the Crackstone shit happened and watch the sun go down, I swear baby, you'd love it.
Hunt down everyone who's ever dismissed you, treated you like a freak. Drag them to you and throw them at your feet, give you the option to watch me tear them apart to bloody shreds or to do it yourself while I hold your gifts trapped in my claws. I think, I know I could make you smile again with that. I swear, Wednesday.
The doctors tell me Laurel's miles away, locked up somewhere else, physically restrained from telling me what to do anymore. I still hear her voice in my head sometimes but it's fainter now. It used to be like a bell that tore through all my other thoughts, a force that pushed me like gravity towards whatever it was she wanted me to do. Now she's just one more voice in my head telling me I'm shit, like Dad, like the boot camp guys, like the doctors here with their diagnostic jargon that basically boils down to “you're shit” if you take away the medical euphemisms. You, though. You never thought I was shit. You hate me, fine, but that's not the same thing. You don't look at me and see dumb normie, hick, rabid animal, that thing, that beast who's killed people, bipolar disorder with paranoid and dissociative tendencies. I knew it from that night at the police station where I finally got up the courage to show you who I am, and fuck, Wednesday, there was no way to hide it anymore, I could smell it on you, and it wasn't fear. I think you would've torn me to shreds if you'd still had your knives on you and there weren't cops around. And then shoved your face in the wounds, stuck your tongue out and lapped up my blood. And then let me kiss you again, hold you in my arms and trail kisses from your lips to your neck and whisper into your skin the exact details of how it felt when I killed Rowan. It felt like coming alive, Wednesday, coming into my own body and feeling its power as mine for the first time. The one kill I did that wasn't on Laurel's orders, I could tell you all day about just how good it felt.
You're the only one I want to tell it to, Wednesday. The only one who I know will understand.
And you'll get it if I tell you that I never wanted you dead, not even when Laurel did. And that's why I had to track you down when I felt it moving again, that dark, rich scent that drives me crazy, and then you were there in front of me suddenly like a vision I'd made up inside my head and all the voices in me were duking it out over what it really meant, Laurel telling me you just wanted me caged or put down like all the others do and the good boy in me wanting to stammer out some unbelievable apology and the monster in me wanting to tear your clothes off but knowing it would please master more to tear your heart out, and you, you just looked up at me and said in your steady voice “this will not end well for you” and even when I changed, showed you the monster firsthand, even when I had you slammed up against a tree with my claws coming down ready and able to end you, you just looked up at me that same way and I saw it, smelled it, you weren't afraid.
Just like how I could never fear your beauty.
That's love, Wednesday. Not unhealthy obsession, trauma transference, Hyde bonding mechanism, psychopathic fixation, delusional disorder.
Love. Every part of me, for every part of you.
And I know, somewhere deep below all these voices, that you feel the same way.
I could feel it in the way you kissed me. Sounds stupid, doesn't it? But it's true.
I caught your scent earlier, coming up to the place, walking through the hallways, but now I hear the doors unlock. Now I feel how close you are. Soon the last airlock will open and you'll be here in front of me, I'll see your face again at last. You'll stand before me and stare at me with those pitch-black eyes, and I'll beckon you to come closer. See everything I am, everything they've made me into, everything I could become.
The last locked door's unbolted.
Hello, Wednesday.