Work Text:
Wednesday sat back in her chair with an uncharacteristic sigh, cracking her fingers from where they’d gone stiff from typing away at her typewriter for too long. Back in her room after the… events of the evening, she’d needed to do something to burn off the excess adrenaline – and something else, something awfully close to distress that she was unwilling to name.
In the space of only a few hours, she’d learned her parents had covered up a murder, which in itself wasn’t too distressing, it was actually surprisingly clever executed, but it had resulted in her nearly losing her favourite plaything. Pugsley.
In the process of recovering her miserable little brother, she’d had to witness her Mother turn into a blubbering mess, spilling the great ‘family secret’. Going after Pugsley had revealed Thing to actually be a severed body part of the crazed man that was Isaac Night.
That had been a terrific surprise.
She’d been buried then, under the watchful gaze of Isaac, her little brother and not surprisingly, Tyler. Somehow, the Hyde did always turn out to be at all the wrong places at the wrong times. She hadn’t missed the strange look on Tyler’s face, but at the time she’d been too occupied with the shivers that ran along her spine at the prospect of being buried alive. As she’d expected, it had been a thrilling way to go.
It had not been thrilling to be unburied, only to come face to face with a transformed Enid. No, that had been downright heart-stopping. Even when she thought of it now, it made her heart lurch painfully in her chest. The silence in their shared bedroom grated on her nerves for once, so she’d sought to drown it out by clacking away manically, working on her novel.
Hopefully, Agnes would return to her come morning with news on Enid’s whereabouts, and Wednesday could go and retrieve her. Wednesday’d be able to find something to get her to transform back into her human form, she was certain of it.
Her hand drifted to her neck, and she winced when she touched her throat. She’d studied her reflection in the mirror before, had found the splotches of dark blue and purple from where Isaac had choked her. They looked painful and gruesome, and her throat ached whenever she swallowed. As delightful as that felt, she let it serve as a reminder of her failure. Her failure to keep Enid from wolfing out and therefore having to living through her worst nightmare – ending up alone.
Then there was that other failure.
She’d heard his agonised cries long before she’d climbed up to where he’d been tied down to a table at the top of Iago Tower where Isaac planned to carry out his masterplan. Deep down, she’d already known, then, that she would not be able to kill Tyler.
Walking up to him, the axe raised over her head, and looking at his desperate, pained face, listening to his plea for her to kill him, there had only been one thing she could do.
She’d severed the binds on his hand and for a moment, time had ground to a halt. Their gazes had locked, and Tyler had asked the one question she could not possibly answer.
Why?
She growled at herself, the feelings that threatened to stir up in the wake of it all and set to writing again. She wasn’t really writing anything useful, she knew she was going to throw out the pages later, but it was the only thing she could do as the silence left vacant by Enid rang in her ears.
Thing was around somewhere. That was the one thing that soothed her mind, that even though she had lost Enid for now, and…. lost sight of Tyler, she still had Thing. She was eternally pleased and grateful that the hand had chosen to return to her, not that she’d ever admit that out loud again.
The keys of the typewriter clacked emptily as she reached the end of another page, so she leaned forward to take it out. It was only because she twisted to her left to place it on the growing pile of soon-to-be discarded pages that she saw it at all.
There was a shadow on the balcony, pressed close to the window. For a moment, hope surged in her chest as she thought Enid had returned, but that hope flickered out in less than a second – the shape on the other side of the window was much too small to be her friend, especially in her wolf form.
In the next moment, she snatched the knife strapped to the underside of her desk and shot up out of the chair, walking over to the middle of her room and scanning the rest of the room for any other perpetrators. Nothing.
Her eyes widened in anticipation and she felt a flutter of excitement in her chest as she raised the knife above her.
“Show yourself,” she commanded, drawing the knife up and holding out her other hand in challenge.
The figure jumped at the sound of her voice and jerked forward, stumbling through the window as it tumbled open. As the lights illuminated the person, Wednesday instantly recognised the huddled body language, the unruly head of brown curls.
“Tyler,” she said breathlessly, unsure of whether she meant that to come out as questioning as it did.
Tyler’s gaze snapped to hers and in the ultimate betrayal of her body, she felt another flutter deep in her stomach. Tyler’s wide eyes shifted between her own and the knife she still held poised, ready to strike him if he so much as breathed wrong.
She’d made the mistake of trusting the Hyde before.
Tyler looked stricken, and while he remained frozen, she allowed herself to take him in.
He was wearing an off-green vest, not entirely zipped up, revealing the upper part of his chest and collarbones. Her eyes trailed along the rim, finding his chest littered with the scars left by Enid, and new, shallow cuts. Further up, close to his shoulder, there was the tell-tale stain of dark blood giving away a worse injury, and she could only just make out the jagged, red edges of a wound about as big as her palm.
Tyler shuffled a step closer and she snapped her eyes back up, cursing herself for letting her focus drift, caught by something as trivial as a scrap of skin from someone she’d been interested in at some point in time.
Forcing a scowl onto her face, she studied his face as his apparent confusion dragged on. His wide eyes were red-rimmed, his face streaked with even more scratches and cuts. His jaw was set tightly and his eyes flickered about the room, only briefly landing on her. He looked… out of place, almost forlorn.
She frowned despite herself.
“What are you doing here?” She found herself asking in a surprisingly gentle tone. The scowl involuntarily slipped from her face when she saw the subtle flinch at her voice.
There was an uncomfortable sensation in her chest, something she could name if she wanted to. Which she decidedly did not.
“What? I don’t…” Tyler began, meeting her eyes head-on for the first time. He looked about ready to flee, painfully uncertain, and he averted his gaze when she saw that he realised she could see right through him.
“I didn’t know where else to go.”
Pathetic, Wednesday thought, even as a knot formed in her stomach at the wounded tone of his voice.
She was going soft, weak. It was the only explanation for what his admission did to her.
What she should have said was something scathing and unfeeling like ‘Why would you think you’re welcome here?” or “You thought you had a place here?”
Instead, she heard herself saying, “Okay.”
There was a long moment where neither said anything, and she stared at him unabashedly, even as his focus seemed to drift. She found the wound on his shoulder again, where it had bled into the fabric of his hoodie.
“You’re bleeding.”
He looked up at her with a frown, before quickly looking away again, sleeved hand coming up to adjust the shirt a bit in attempt to hide it from her. “I’m fine.”
I didn’t ask, she should have said, would have said if it were anyone else. I don’t care if you’re alright, I don’t care about you.
But that was a lie.
“Sit down, Tyler.”
He stared at her for a long moment, and she let him. She stared right back at him and watched in morbid curiosity – sending a pang of something through her as she recalled his words in Willow Hill – as his emotions played out on his face.
She saw his hesitancy, his wariness and exhaustion. How he was trying to hold himself back, at one point glancing back at the window behind him with an air of desperation, like he wanted to run away from her again. Wednesday saw that settle into something else as he looked back at her, closing his dark eyes for just a beat and then there was something awful on his face.
It was something awfully close to hope, and her heart felt as if gripped in a tight vice. She forced herself not to react to that, even as she knew deep down that that same feeling flickered alive inside of her, too.
Painfully slowly, he began moving. Not taking his eyes off her for even a moment – allowing her to see the distrust that still shone through – he carefully made his way over to her bed and Wednesday’s heart skipped a beat. He was watching her as if she would pounce on him any second, to take him down and drain his life from him with her knife, and here she was getting the foolish urge to feel giddy at the mere thought of Tyler showing her this trust, sitting down on her bed.
She realised she’d dropped her hand holding the knife back down to her side only when she thought she should probably put it away.
Turning away from him, she walked over to her desk, keeping her movements slow and purposeful, so as not to startle Tyler. Despite feeling like a total idiot for feeling as if he was some scared animal, she couldn’t make herself stop doing that.
She placed the knife on her desk, not yet willing to put it back in the sheath even though she knew Tyler was not a threat to her, neither was his Hyde. She stooped down and retrieved her first-aid kit from the lowest drawer of her desk. Once she’d straightened back up, about to turn to the bed, she found Thing on her desk, carefully hidden from Tyler’s view.
Although he signed to her to ‘be careful’, she could feel his smugness radiating off of him. She sent him a piercing glare, and Thing scrambled back to hide in between the clutter of her desk.
Taking a subtle breath to steady herself, she walked over to the bed, to Tyler.
He’d averted his eyes again, staring off into the distance with a haunted look in his eyes and she could not deny the flare of remorse she felt at seeing him so brought down.
Tyler’s silence was almost enough to unsettle her. He’d always been the talkative one out of the two of them, but now he seemed to be somewhere else, leaving Wednesday with the oppressing silence.
And wasn’t that something? That was twice today that she had wished for someone to fill the silence that threatened to bear down on her. The chasm in her chest that had been carved out by Enid was cleaved open further by Tyler and the sensation was foreign to her.
She set down the kit on the mattress at Tyler’s side and that seemed enough to break him out of his stupor. He tensed when he looked up at her, suddenly standing in front of him and she swallowed at the intensity of his gaze. There was a time where she would have found it thrilling to stand above him like this, would have liked that power play, but something had changed tonight.
Moreover, Wednesday wasn’t dense. She knew enough to realise that Laurel’s ‘unlocking’ the Hyde wasn’t all sunshine and roses. Quite the opposite was true, she feared.
In a way, that made her appreciate this situation more. She would not abuse Tyler’s trust like it had been in the past.
“I want to clean the wound on your shoulder, can you shrug down your shirt so that I can reach it?” She asked him, her tone stern but not mean in any way.
A flash of surprised gratitude flashed across his face and she felt both glad and disgusted that her hunch was somewhat truthful.
He did as he was asked and pulled his shoulder free of his hoodie, turning slightly so she could reach it better. She swallowed at the sight that met her. The injury looked gnarly. His skin was mangled and torn, not too deep but she suspected that was only because he healed quicker as a Hyde.
She opened the box and pulled out the materials she needed, splaying them out on the bed. She grabbed the bottle of saline solution and some gauze and wet it carefully, all the while not looking at Tyler, hopefully helping him not feel trapped by doing so. From the corner of her eye, she could tell he was watching like a hawk, his body tense.
She turned to him with the gauze in hand, and silently asked if she could go ahead. He gave her the barest of nods and she leaned in slightly, beginning to dap gently at the edges of the wound. Deep red saturated the gauze straight away and she found herself entranced by the vividness of the colour. She kept her attention divided between cleaning the wound, trying to be gentle for him, and watching Tyler’s body language.
He was breathing quite shallowly, but not worryingly so. Wednesday swallowed tightly as she realized she knew what his breathing pattern was usually like and her eyes flickered to his for only a beat, but he caught her gaze anyway. Tyler looked more guarded now, and she couldn’t decipher any of his emotions in the brief glance she’d gotten.
After only a few wipes, she had to replace the gauze. She fell into an easy pattern of preparing the gauze, dapping away at the blood and leaving his skin clean and raw in her wake, making her way around the wound, and then as far as Tyler had pulled down his hoodie. She wouldn’t ask him to pull it down any further, he had clearly set his boundaries and she allowed him to have that control.
She took a moment to consider how to treat the wound now that it was clean. It wasn’t even bleeding anymore, thanks to his enhanced healing, and she found herself glad for it. She recognised the wound for what it was. It was a bite mark, caused by a set of jaws much larger than a human jaw.
“Is that from your mother?” Wednesday asked, breaching the silence for the first time in a long while and she breathed easier for a second, not realising how oppressive it had gotten.
Tyler wasn’t looking at her, his head turned down so that his eyes were hidden behind his outgrown curls. He nodded wordlessly.
She swallowed tightly, awkward in the face of his silence, obviously missing something. She fumbled for words, uncharacteristically eager to talk. “It won’t need any stitches, but I’ll put a bandage over it.”
Tyler merely nodded again, so she took that as consent to continue. In practiced motions, thanks to many lessons from her mother and practice on Pugsley, she began taping the bandage down. She saw Tyler’s lips part suddenly and braced herself.
He closed his mouth again, biting on his lip before sighing very softly and confessing, “She’s dead.”
Wednesday drew up short, continuing her handiwork after only a second’s pause, hoping he hadn’t noticed her slip-up. She wondered what prompted him to suddenly mention that. Wednesday already knew that he’d killed his master. “Who, Laurel?”
Tyler flinched at the name and breathed out with a shudder, risking a look at her before looking away again. She cursed herself for throwing that name around so carelessly, but couldn’t take it back. She did, however, realise her second mistake. As Tyler’s throat bobbed, she closed her eyes as a wave of remorse washed over her before he voiced her realisation out loud, “No… my mom.”
His voice… Wednesday busied her hands that threatened to lose their steadiness with a new patch of gauze as she battled with the lump that had suddenly appeared in her throat, as she tried to breathe around the unexpected punch to the gut.
She felt like an inexperienced newborn, but she didn’t know what to say to something like this, how to deal with someone else’s emotions, someone’s grief. Especially here, as she was somehow able to sense that Tyler himself felt somewhat conflicted over it.
She let the moment pass, wanting to pummel herself all the while for her incompetency, but she brazed on.
“I’ll clean your other wounds, too,” she stated, not entirely waiting for his consent as she brought the gauze down on another scratch that ran over his collarbone.
Tyler drew in a quick, inaudible breath and raised his hand as if to stop her, but stopped mere inches from her skin. She still felt her wrist tingle with his phantom warmth. He looked at her then, raising his chin, “You don’t have to, Wednesday.”
She knew that, she did, but she had to do it, for some reason. And damn her, she knew why.
“I know,” she began, meeting his eyes with a sense of nervousness that was novel to her. “I want to.”
She looked away from his face, not wanting to see the reaction that evoked in him, not wanting herself to respond to his reaction. His hand fell back into his lap, either from shock or allowance, but she took it for his permission anyway.
She only needed the one patch of gauze to clean up the rest of the cuts that were visible to her, and she absolutely fought against any impulse to look at him, or to ask or say anything to him. Her own breaths felt forcibly calm, which she didn’t allow herself to think about.
After having prepared a smaller piece of gauze, she brought it up to his face, intending to clean the cuts on his cheek. Tyler tensed and moved his head away from her an inch, before noticeable stopping himself. He looked up at her, measuring her for a beat, before going back to his former position, although still tense. “Sorry.”
Discarding his unnecessary apology, she renewed her efforts. As gently as she possibly could, going unbearably slow, she cleaned every cut. She was well aware that Tyler was barely breathing anymore, his chest unmoving except for the occasional shallow inhale. On his exhales, she could feel his warm breath fanning over her hands and she didn’t know if she wanted to pull away or lean in.
Trying to distract herself, Wednesday rewound to what he’d said about his mom. She didn’t know much about his mother, since she’d been dead all of Tyler’s life, and then saved from medical experimentation by Wednesday herself. She’d seemed friendly enough when they’d met, if a little… odd, and that was saying something coming from an Addams. She briefly wondered what their relationship was like in the little time they’d had before Francine had died a second time, but cut herself off.
It didn’t matter anyway. She was dead now.
She carefully wiped at a cut running all the way up to his temple, trying not to look into Tyler’s eyes and thought about the state of his life.
What would he return to, now that he’d been freed of Laurel Gates’ will? He wasn’t enrolled in any school, that she knew of, and in the grand scheme of things, he’d probably lost his job at the Weathervane, too. Tyler didn’t have any friends to speak of when they’d met, and the ones he’d befriended through Wednesday all feared him since they learned that he’s a Hyde.
Her thoughts spiralled, increasing her unease and she ached for him.
His father had been murdered only weeks ago, and he’d lost his only remaining family members on the very same day, no matter how close they were or were not.
No friends, no dad, no mom, no family and – Wednesday loathed to admit – he did not even have a master anymore.
Tyler was all alone.
Finally, Wednesday was able to grasp the terrible reality that Enid had once painted to her, on that very first night they’d met, when the werewolf had expressed her fear of ending up and dying alone.
Wednesday hadn’t understood what would’ve been so bad about that, then. She’d even thought it sounded like a good ending. Now, with Tyler sitting right in front of her, she wish she still felt the same.
All of a sudden, the sorrow overwhelmed her, and she didn’t even try to stop herself from feeling it.
Her heart ached.
She moved a step back from him, throwing away the bloodied piece of gauze and spoke before she knew what she was doing, “I’m sorry, Tyler.”
He looked up at her, breathing out roughly and gulping a breath back in, confusion and suspicion in his eyes. “What would you feel sorry for?”
“I don’t know,” she threw out reflexively, before cursing at herself and making herself add onto that, “Everything.”
He studied her, eyes still half-hidden behind his hair and he zipped up his hoodie, covering his chest again. Tyler’s eyes moved over her face and she felt nailed to the ground, at a complete loss of what to do, how to cope.
It felt like her hatred for him, her own distrust towards him had suddenly melted away now that she was face to face with a version of the Hyde that had been flayed and stripped down to his very core.
It felt like eternity before Tyler’s expression morphed into one of deep exhaustion. He closed his eyes and exhaled a long, drawn-out breath, his head hanging down. She wanted to reach for him, to hold him and that impulse alone was enough to stun her into further immobility.
“I’m tired, Wednesday.”
She was breathless as she took him in, sorrow settling over her as she read his defeated body language.
Not thinking about it twice, although a voice in the back of her mind told her that she really should, she offered, “You can sleep here.”
His head shot up at that, brows furrowed in perplexity at her offer. She stood her ground as she let her words sink in, feeling something familiar like mirth creeping into her at her ability to catch him off-guard like this. He huffed at her after a few seconds, shaking his head lightly.
“I would ask you if you were sure about that, but well,” he paused for a second, looking up at her from under his hair with a glint in his eyes, “you’re you.”
As the corner of his lips curled up into a very slight smile, she let herself mirror it.
It was a hint back to the time where they’d been close. He’d often asked her if she really meant something she’d said, and she would always reply with ‘I always mean what I say, Tyler.’
He stood up wordlessly, managing not to sway despite his clear exhaustion and the soreness she was sure he’d be feeling. Once he’d moved aside, she threw back the duvet of her bed, subduing the voice in her head that told her all of this was an incredibly bad idea.
She knew that come morning, things would be different. The darkness of night always had that effect on things, and with the brightness of the morning and the clarity of day, she knew that her hesitancy towards him would return in some manner, as would his. Her priorities would change, as she would hopefully have a lead on where Enid had disappeared off to.
For now, none of that mattered.
She helped him settle onto his side on the bed, trying not to aggravate any of his injuries. He sent her a hesitant, wondrous look and she met it with a steady gaze, let him study her for as long as he needed to feel a modicum of safety. It took a while, but eventually, some of the turmoil in his eyes died down and he rested his head on the pillow.
Now that her job had been done, she was unsure how to proceed. The duvet was still pulled back, covering only the lower parts of Tyler’s legs. She made up her mind and her eyes sought out Tyler’s, who was looking in between her and the duvet. She asked him the silent question with her eyes and he gave her a nod, for once not tainted with any distrust and that eased some of the tension that had crept into her body.
“You will not breathe a word of this to anyone,” she threatened, employing the habitual threat she made whenever she was about to do something very un-Wednesday-like.
Tyler’s eyes shuttered, and she realised her words for the blow that it was and felt the urge to apologise to him. “Tyler, I’m…”
His lips drew into a shaky smile, and she could have punched herself for making him feel the need to make her feel better.
“I know,” he said softly, before adding, “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t have anyone to tell.”
That definitely did not make her feel any better, but she didn’t know how to admit to that, so she weakly nodded.
She didn’t waste any time after that, simply taking off her outer coat and slowly, cautiously crawling into bed beside him and she pulled the covers over them.
It was a bit of a tight fit, what with her bed being a single bed, so they ended up facing each other, breathing into the few inches that were unoccupied in between them. With Tyler’s face that close, there was another flutter in her stomach that she tried to ignore.
She reached behind her to flick off the light switch, and the next second, the room was engulfed by darkness. The only illumination was provided by the sliver of the moon that lit the night sky, but it wasn’t enough to make out Tyler’s shape in front of her.
Neither of them said a word, and it took a good while for her body to start relaxing into the mattress. She felt more than heard Tyler’s breaths evening out, until he was finally breathing like he normally would and that settled Wednesday enough to start considering to actually fall asleep next to him.
She thought back to the little words that they had exchanged this evening and there was a growing part of her that was happy to have him next to her, safe from any further harm for now.
She had no idea of how to deal with any of what he’d gone through, since she was the type of person that liked to stab her problems. Since Tyler had already done the honours of stabbing one of his problems, and all the other ones weren’t material, there was no way she could help in that area.
That was not to say that she wasn’t willing to learn how to help him with their remnants, the traces and the imprints they’d left on him.
She knew she was going to say the stupidest thing she’d ever said aloud, knew it from how heavy the words felt on her tongue, what the words implied.
She reached out her hand towards him, placing it in the open space between them.
“You have me.”