Work Text:
Pouring over the grimoire she’d found over the summer while ransacking the staged life of Laurel Gates, Wednesday contemplates the thought of not going through with her plans for Tyler. This indecision lasts only a moment before rage fills her at the idea.
Because somewhere in the back of her mind, locked away into the deepest darkest dungeons of her thoughts, Wednesday knew.
For months, she had deliberately ignored the whispers that sounded far too much like her mother sighing over the curse carried in her blood, the one her grandmother nostalgically extolled the virtues of, the one her father thanked his unluckiest of stars for. The one no one seemed to realize had already extracted its price from Wednesday Addams.
After all, she was half a Frump. And as everyone loved to remind her, a Frump could only fall in love once.
For as long as she could remember, she’d sworn never to fall in love. It didn’t seem difficult, especially seeing the rather lacking examples of interesting humanity that surrounded her. It was simple really, her heart hardened as it was after Nero. No mere mortal would break her, would worm their way into her dubious affections, so she would be safe from the frivolous romanticism that had plagued her parents for decades.
But life would not be enviable if it were quite so easy to predict and control.
An exception to her rules appeared from the fog of monotony. A charming, snark filled sunshine of a Normie boy, who would make her quads better than any other she’d tried and seemed to find her macabre tendencies fascinating and endearing. One with dangerous hidden depths and a longing soul that drew her in effortlessly.
Tyler Galpin slithered into her very being before she even noticed, stole her heart between one sly smirk and the next shy smile, making off with it like a thief in the night.
She kissed him, she tortured him, he tried to kill her, she ignored him for months, he threatened her best friend, she was cruel in her dismissal of him, he tossed her out a window.
Around and around they went, neither willing to concede an inch of space to bring themselves closer together. Or farther apart. Just constantly circling each other, the best kind of nemeses.
Until now, when he’s coming apart at the seams and she’s running out of time to stitch him to her side, threading them together for eternity so no one can come between the Raven and her Hyde. They can only torment each other for the rest of their lives if they both have lives to live after all. And she refuses to let him forfeit this war through as insulting a means as death.
No, they are inevitable. Even if she has to drag him kicking and screaming into that inevitability.
But knowing Tyler and the arguments he has already made for her, Wednesday hardly thinks persuading him will be a difficulty. There was a reason they were so well matched, their respective obsessions firmly locked on each other.
“You sensed the monster in me, and you fell in love with it,” he stated, and oh, it would be so much simpler if that were true. So much more believable to the masses, that gothic, gloomy Wednesday Addams had found her match in a snarling beast rather than a boy who smelled like coffee grounds and freshly fallen leaves. That the blood soaked battlefield between them was where she fell for him, not the quiet moments of consideration and collaboration when he wove his way through the cracks in her walls. It had been a war of attrition she didn’t realize she’d been fighting, but every glimpse of brunette curls, every carefully planned interaction, every morsel of information exchanged, had drawn her nearer to the warmth of his flame.
His inner beast, his Hyde, was simply a bonus, an outlet for the darkness she’d already known existed within her boy. She hadn’t loved it until she’d learned it was him. She’d been interested, yes, been intrigued by the seemingly intricate plot plaguing their wretched town. But she hadn’t felt anything more than a vague sense of completion by (falsely) putting Xavier behind bars.
She’d wanted to fill the sudden void in her schedule entirely with him, had wanted to learn what it meant to hold someone else’s being in your arms and feel safe, had desired him. She’d discovered herself caught in the snare he set with words and actions and she’d leaned in and kissed him and for all of a moment, it had felt right and perfect in the most imperfect of ways.
And then she’d seen. And that vision shook the foundation of a love she’d placed only seconds before, as unstable as could be that all she could do was run and hide and scheme to cover the way her broken heart was screaming in despair.
“Don’t court this monster,” her mother had said, as if the courting wasn’t already completed months ago, her fate signed, sealed, and delivered to a cell in Willowhill.
As if her traitorous heart hadn’t shattered when Tyler had stared her down in the police station, throwing his betrayal in her face without a care in the world. As if the intervening months hadn’t been the most delicious agony as she deliberated over the paperwork to visit him time and time again, unwilling to take the first step yet, but knowing that she eventually would. As if she hadn’t fantasized over the first words she would say to her monster, how to needle and poke and prod and slice to cause even a taste of the pain that he’s caused her.
As if she hadn’t known this separation was merely an interlude in their tale, rather than the end.
Mixing her elixir, Wednesday sighed mentally, refusing to let the spirit of Larissa Weems see the discomfort her immediate calling out of the feelings that festered away in Wednesday’s chest had caused. It was one thing for Enid to call her out on her preoccupation with her plans for her Hyde, it was entirely another for a woman who hadn’t seen what they’d done to each other up close. Hadn’t understood how personal this vendetta of a love story had become the second he lied to her.
Wednesday knew she had more feelings towards Tyler than merely hate, it was simply the only one she was willing to admit to aloud, to anyone but him. She had a kaleidoscope worth of feelings and inklings that swirled entirely around him, her dearest of obsessions, all shades of gray that bled seamlessly from one extreme to the other. Because what was hate if not a soured, scorned love? What was contempt if not the most defiant of respect? What was fear if not the chaos of uncertainty before the calm of inevitability?
Drawing her completed potion into the syringe, there was no more time to second guess her course of action. It was time for decisiveness.
Because Tyler Galpin was hers, hers to love and to hate and to learn. Just as Wednesday Addams was his, his to hold and to catch and to keep. And gods help anyone who got in their way back to each other.