Chapter Text
There is a shade over the sun, dimming its light and diluting its brilliance.
Or, in terms that do not come unbidden from the depths of Wednesday's traitorous, maligned brain, there is something wrong with Enid.
And there has been for far too long now. Since, if Wednesday allows herself to be honest and analyze that which she wants not to face, the Hyde.
A year since the culmination of that semester's terror is fast approaching, and it has Wednesday in a reflective mood. And what she sees when she combs through her memories relating to her roommate is disquieting. There were times that she had been worried about Enid, quite significantly so, in fact. But they had really been independent moments, and she hadn't stitched those pieces together into the tangled web of change she sees now.
Wednesday keeps a leatherbound pocket notebook on her person at all times, in which she keeps notes dedicated mostly to her current investigation but also, as needed, lines of prose that strike throughout the day, details of her visions, homework assignments, and Important Details about the people she may be forced to consider friends. The last had been a suggestion from her new therapist she began seeing at the beginning of the spring semester for those insipid court-mandated appointments, all of which she had diligently sat through without attempting to escape or stonewall. Sure, her answers were less than straightforward and required significant effort to attain, but this new doctor is infuriatingly good.
Her office is furnished in dark walnut and leather, and plants with trailing vines of deep green, waxy leaves decorate the place. The heavy drapes, a deep green velvet, are always drawn when Wednesday arrives for her session, leaving the room cast in shrouded lamplight. There are no ticking clocks or unbearably bright colors to give her a headache.
As for the doctor herself... well, Wednesday has felt prodded and fundamentally misunderstood and disliked by all of her previous court-appointed shrinks, including the tragically deceased Dr. Kinbott. She does not feel so with Dr. Ehli, whose gaze does not linger too long on her own, and whose acceptance of Wednesday's rather spooky ways was immediate and uncompromising. The doctor had explained that she was not in the business of changing Wednesday, but rather in assisting her in building a proverbial toolkit designed to maintain mental and emotional homeostasis. Especially as it pertains to social situations, she had tacked on, a knowing glint in her eyes. Wednesday did find that wording quite palatable, and she had the good sense to know that while her interior emotional state and sense of self is relatively ironclad, her social skills could use a bit of buttressing.
Plus, their first few sessions had been spent discussing the Viper de la Muerte manuscripts, which Dr. Ehli had quite complimentary feedback about. And she had actually managed to find a small plot hole in the first manuscript, letting Wednesday know both that she had read her work with incredible care and that she was incredibly perceptive. Wednesday did not find herself irascibly enraged by any of the constructive feedback, and the doctor kept her assumptions about parallels to Wednesday's real-life relationships to herself, at least for the time being. And she had sought permission before reading the books. Those early sessions had certainly won Ehli points in Wednesday's book, and although she knew that it was essentially intentional manipulation by a cog in the cruelly grinding machinery of modern life, she allowed it. Because their sessions really didn't feel like that. When she deems the room worthy enough of hearing her speech, Wednesday feels listened to. And she finds many of the doctor's suggestions helpful.
Such as, perhaps, accepting the fact that if she is to stay at Nevermore, building connections to others is beneficial. "Knowledge is power, cliche as it sounds," the doctor had said. "And having strategic connections with people who can get you reliable knowledge, well... That's half the battle."
All true, Wednesday supposed. Her first semester at Nevermore had been a stark example of that. The doctor had continued by saying that reciprocation is an essential part of that network, and that she may have to adapt to the other person's idea of the benefit of friendship to adequately reciprocate. "Not everyone runs on information, not always. Maybe a peer helps you with an investigation and you, in return, sit with them at dinner, or help with homework, or give them something nice. Whatever gives them a similar benefit to that you received. And a person who has had that experience will be much more likely to help in the future."
And, yes, Wednesday knew that all of that was obvious, that she could have said those exact words if prompted on how to maintain a friendship. But there is something about being told in such plain language, and the doctor had talked of building, which cannot be done well without a solid foundation. Dr. Ehli kept talking about reframing situations to align with Wednesday's worldview, and Wednesday did just that, letting the information sink in as the truth.
They'd talked about not treating relationships as directly transactional, detached and businesslike, but more like a living creature, breathing and needing nourishment. Wednesday was obtusely opposed to that the first few times it was brought up, but she kept thinking about how true that was about her and Enid's relationship as it developed over that first semester. How it felt like a delicate, trembling bird cupped loosely in her hands, unpredictable and tenuous. Every moment between them a potential for that thread of trust to break, and when it had, it'd been terrible. The memory of that, the oppressive weight of loneliness as half of the room lay vacant, pushed her to accept the idea.
And then she kept thinking about Eugene, his dejected face as she left him at the goddamned Rave'N, the sight of him so broken and small in his hospital bed, again the loneliness as she haunted the beehives thinking of him. Both memories hurt deeply, and not because she'd lost assets in regards to her investigation. It was the lack of presence that clawed at her, the inability to be with the people she understood more than others, and who understood her the same way.
Wednesday told the doctor about both events haltingly, and, yes, she accepted begrudgingly that she'd made friends. Best friends.
It was also around this time that Wednesday decided that if she was going to be indefinitely stuck with Enid, forced to continue being a friend, she might as well be a good friend. Someone had to be there for the poor pup, and Wednesday doesn't do anything that she really puts her mind to in halves.
Part of her Working On Being A Friend toolkit- what Wednesday had taken to thinking of as a knife roll full of very sharp and very precise surgical blades- was keeping notes. Pay attention to her friend's interests and details about their lives. It was simple enough, of course, she'd been doing that since she was old enough to understand what an investigation was. Just applied to her friendships. It proved useful in terms of the whole reciprocation thing.
But recently, the notebook has been consumed with nothing but Enid. Well, most of the notebook has always been dedicated to Enid, but this is in a distinctly investigation-oriented manner. Wednesday has mapped out the past year of their intertwined lives, and with it, Enid's sliding descent into the miserable, moping mess who has been haunting Nevermore in her best Wednesday impression.
The first tangible sign that something was wrong could be found in the communications that took place between the abrupt end of her first semester at Nevermore and the beginning of that spring semester.
Wednesday hates the phone that Xavier had given her. But yes, at times, it is useful. She is a particular fan of the weather app and little else. She had refused anyone's attempts at communication via the wretched thing. Except for Enid. For her, Wednesday capitulated.
Enid was free to text her as many times as she wanted, Wednesday had no power over that. But Wednesday could control her responses: one a day, organized against Enid's flood of- useless, more often than not- thoughts.
It had become part of her routine, the precursor to her nightly writing time. She did not look forward to it. Looking at the phone made the inside of her skin itch, made her eyeballs feel too big for their sockets. She hated the sound made when her fingernails meet the glass, the sounds made when a notification comes in, hated it all.
But the few times she had tried to end her night without responding to anything Enid had said were spent tossing and turning with insomnia. Solved only, inexplicably, when Wednesday drew the blankets over her head and endured the too-bright light of the phone even at its dimmest to scroll through their message thread. To slowly, shakily tap out a response to her.
And the phone had become slightly more bearable once Enid had provided detailed instructions describing how to turn on silent notification delivery and dark mode. She had emphatically rejected Enid's offer of instructions for creating social media accounts. For the first couple of weeks of their protracted break, Enid's texts had been a flood of poorly spelled, exuberant ramblings. Most of them had been more emoji than intelligible English.
The first thing to change was the frequency. They had been incessant at first, coming in at all hours of the day.
And then, suddenly, the deluge of texts was reduced to a few specific hours a day. Wednesday would regularly receive texts from 6:00 AM until 8:00 AM, although she’d never known Enid to wake up anywhere near that early by her own will. The texts would start back up again promptly at noon, but they would stop cold at half past the hour. It would be silence until nine that night, occasionally later.
All times, of course, in Enid’s three-hour-earlier time zone. So when Enid started texting at nine, it was midnight for Wednesday. She stayed up to read them all as they came in, even if she had already sent her daily missive. There was not a word about Enid’s sudden new schedule. In fact, she largely stopped talking about the particulars of her day. There were snippets, but not the long-winded breakdowns on the time Enid spent daily with her Californian friends like Wednesday had come to expect. Wednesday could scarcely recall further mention of those friends, either.
Then, the spelling started to improve, however marginally. Then, the emojis started disappearing, and the messages started getting shorter. There were far fewer pictures, when before she had sent so many of her meals and the sunsets and the ocean and herself, and, and, and.
Wednesday might have been worried then, had they not also been writing letters to each other. In her first text, Wednesday had been very adamant about the infrequency of her willingness to send messages. She had provided her mailing address, with the slight suspicion that Enid would not take her up on the invitation to write.
Three days later, Lurch held an envelope out to her wordlessly. She snatched it and hid in the furthest, draftiest spire of the manor to read it by the flickering light of a candle. It contained three pages of notebook paper, ripped out and folded messily. There was a postcard tucked into the pages, showing a lighthouse cutting through thick fog in the bay. She stared at it for long minutes, imagining Enid searching for the gloomiest postcard on the rack. When she returned to her room that night, both the letter and the postcard went into her nightstand drawer.
The letter itself was carefully written, Enid’s usual chicken-scratch actually legible for once. Every word indented the page, because Enid holds her pen with an iron grip and presses like she’s trying to convince the paper of her words.
Wednesday found her fingers ghosting over the words as she read all about Enid’s flight home, what each airport had smelled and sounded like, how weird it was to be back in a bed that once was familiar and no longer is, how it’s harder to sleep without the sound of another person breathing in the room. She read over it three times before leaving the spire.
She wrote back that night.
And when Wednesday received another letter the next day, she felt real surprise. This one was just as long and just as rambling, with so many spelling mistakes and examples of a poor grasp on English grammar that Wednesday felt the need to take a red pen to it. She had no idea how there could possibly be this much to say within the space of one day. But again, she could tell that Enid had written it with such care that all that fell by the wayside. And Enid had decided to write every day, apparently.
So she wrote back that night.
And every night for the rest of the break.
Enid’s letters often came with trinkets. By the end of the break, Wednesday had amassed a hoard of stickers, bookmarks, scraps of paper with little doodles, bits of messy origami, even a woven friendship bracelet in black and grey that Wednesday sometimes slipped on in the privacy of her bedroom.
In turn, Wednesday sent away copies of short stories as she completes them, or botanical illustrations, once a charcoal portrait of Enid that had made Wednesday feel queasy while she worked on it. She chalked that up to Pugsley. Yes, surely he must have been testing an experimental poison on her. That would explain her... hysterics. More frequently, she included treasures of the forest surrounding her home: leaves, feathers, spore prints taken from mushrooms, a few pressed flowers.
Wednesday treated Enid’s letters like treasure in their own right, a quickly growing stack of notebook paper that she refused to allow anyone but Thing to touch. And she only allows Thing to handle the pages because, frequently, the last page is for him.
On the pages meant for Wednesday, Enid began by responding to the contents of Wednesday’s last letter, not point-by-point like Wednesday’s responses, but hopping madly from one topic to the next. Then she would begin a tangent.
Often, they were about music. Enid seemed to have gotten into the habit of listening to albums straight through, over and over again. It was quite the departure from the structured, apparently aesthetically pleasing playlists that she had so agonized over at Nevermore. This habit gave rise to lengthy pages of, essentially, album reviews. Enid's thoughts were messy, her attempts at lyrical analysis always disorganized but occasionally, and perhaps increasingly, rather apt.
Wednesday thought that if Enid would dedicate even half this amount of energy to her blog, dormant for the break, it could be coherent. Not, of course, that she had any occasion to know what that insipid digital rumor mill contained.
She read patiently through weeks of Taylor Swift analysis, and the numbing torture that filling her brain with a decade of pop culture knowledge caused was addictive. (And, yes, Wednesday was also quite a big fan of the musical omnibus available on her cell phone. It opened a world of Latin classical guitar that Wednesday found to be wonderful writing music. Enid had taken the time to create a list of the Swift woman's most miserable, melancholy melodies. Wednesday loves a good list, and Enid had organized this one in a color-coded chronology that she had to appreciate. It was sufficiently efficient. That had cajoled her into giving the music a try, and much of it was decently miserable. Sue her if she enjoyed it. Just a little.)
But there was plenty of other music for Enid to write about, and that she did. Various K-pop groups were also frequent mentions, complete with Enid's valiant and stumbling attempts at learning Korean.
And, about three weeks into their break, Enid started to write about books. Wednesday hadn’t known her roommate capable of partaking in the menial task of reading. She’d had to coerce Enid into just opening her textbooks during the semester, let alone actually reading them.
But suddenly she was writing more page-long reviews, this time for novels: seemingly endless books about packs of wild cats, a series about a vampire and a werewolf competing for one normie girl's attention, another series about a vampire in San Francisco falling in love with a human, a brief stint with Stephen King (whose every work Wednesday had read), which bravely started and ended with a book called Rose Madder. It was actually a particular favorite of Wednesday's, with its overall dark and macabre tone wonderfully slashed with stunning depictions of depraved violence. The antagonist was particularly unhinged, falling into a frothing, blinding madness that had Wednesday gripped. The novel was complicated by a dramatic dip into a fantasy world, punctuated by a terribly powerful mistress whose very countenance would reduce a person to quivering insanity. In Wednesday's eyes, a true masterpiece.
Enid had picked it up because she recognized the name as the color, of course, and the author as someone who Wednesday was particular to. She'd bravely choked the contents of the book down, finding quite positive things to write about the themes of freedom from a caged, horrible and lonely situation. It took her twice as long as most other books and she refused to go near King again, but she would declare it entirely worth it if she knew that Wednesday reread her letter reviewing the book frequently, her eyes tracing the familiar script that made her feel like someone understood. She would take that to her goddamned grave, though.
As Enid wrote, my mom said that appearinces are important and she doesn’t like it when I read magazines or stuff on my phone so I’ve been going to the library most days. It also gives me some time alone I guess which is nice because the house is always so loud. The boys are so annoying like they always fight and break stuff and I have to clean ussually because they have other stuff to go do. And being here gives me time to write to you. My mom doesn’t like that I spend so much time doing this and all the postige costs make her kinda mad but I told her that it was an assignment from those sichologists (sorry I know that’s not right but idk) after all the trauma stuff and that made her give up a little.
(Wednesday had included several books of stamps in her next letter. They were horrific. She’d had to endure the slow torture of being in a government office, and that was the excuse she had given to a teasing Thing. Two of the choices the wary clerk showed her were tulips and mountain flora. Wednesday glowered. She knew that Enid would love them.)
And that was a common phrase in her letters. My mom doesn’t like. It popped up with such frequency that Wednesday wondered if the damned woman found joy in anything. But Wednesday knew the answer to that- yes, she did, if it pertained to her precious sons. From the way Enid wrote about her brothers, it was obvious that she craved their approval and attention. And they seem obviously disinterested in giving it to her. Hell, they were so bent on ignoring her that Wednesday hadn't even known that three of Enid's brothers also attended Nevermore.
What else did Esther find objectionable? Only her daughter's hair, clothes, makeup, painted nails, perfume, eating habits, which are at once too much and not enough, weight, height, general appearance, scars, latent ability to wolf out, which had not received even a single word of praise, lack of desire to go on blind dates with hot, single local werewolf boys.
And...
My mom doesn't really like it when I talk about you. She thinks that all of the Crackstone stuff was your fault and that you should have been kicked out of the school. She said that having you around is dangerous and she wants me to switch roommates but we already tried that once right so... like I'm not gonna let her dictate that part of my life + there's not much she can actually do about it because Nevermore has rules like collages do about parent interferance with living situations. But mostly I just don't talk about you. I bet that's how you would prefer it anyway. I guess I do all of my talking about you in these letters lol. And I'm really sorry but I guess that you won't be able to come to San Fran without my mom being all weird and judgy. Maybe you would like that too but it would be... a lot. I don't know if I could take her talking about how unsafe you are when you saved all of us. Do you talk about Nevermore much to your family? I know you don't really want to be like your parents but just so you know I definately think that your time there has been unique :). My time at school hasn't really been like any of my family's.
(Wednesday's answer to that paragraph: It is fine that you do not talk about me to your family. I would begrudgingly be fine with you talking about me as it pertains to your life, but not if that causes strife. The Crackstone incident, was, ultimately, set in motion by my appearance at Nevermore. But the school weathered it as well as could have been expected. It is in the past. Feel as you, or your mother, may, but that is my perspective. I reciprocate your wish of ongoing cohabitation. Do not feel the need to apologize. Again, I do not wish to cause strife in your home. The semester will be upon us shortly. I do talk briefly about school to my family. I must admit that Mother is right. I would rather be at Nevermore than any other institution. And I concur with your assessment: our time has been quite unique.)
As Christmas approached, Enid's letters grew shorter. More and more often, they looked hastily composed, like Enid had to write in stolen scraps of the day. She'd written everything is so crazy here. We're hosting a bunch of the Sinclair pack and it's like I haven't had a single second to breathe in between all of the chores my mom is giving me and all the questions everyone is asking me. Everyone's all releived that I'm normal now but they all want to talk about it and... I guess I don't. I just want everyone to treat me like they treat the other kids. But they all transformed when they were supposed to. So as much as I am normal now I'm still not normal now.
When Wednesday received the letter dated December 25th, it took every ounce of control she had not to rip it open in the sitting room in front of her entire family. She refused to admit it to herself, to Thing, who pointed it out every chance he got, or her parents, who were aware only that their daughter was so vexed about the holiday delay affecting postal service, but she was worried. Enid had scarcely texted since Christmas Day, and the texts had been brief and rather superficial. In the five days since the holiday, Wednesday had received less than a dozen texts. The letters, she thought, had to reveal more.
When Lurch handed Wednesday the few envelopes marked with her name, she did not snatch them and storm away, leaving her family to stare stunned after her. No. She took them, thanked him graciously, and retired to her bedroom.
The door had hardly slammed shut behind her before that first envelope was open and Wednesday was strangling the life out of the paper inside of it.
One sheet of lined notebook paper. A scant handful of words written in green glitter gel that indents the page. That's all. Wednesday blinked at it more than she can remember ever blinking in one day before.
Dear Wednesday,
Merry Christmas! I hope your day was totes awful and your gifts were not what you wanted at all :)) I'm excited to hear all about what you got (and Thing, too, because I know he's part of the family)!! I know you said it was just the immediate family this year so I bet it was pretty low-key. What did you have for dinner? Do you have dinner traditions or do you switch it up every year? The Sinclairs are big on tradition. Every year we have prime rib AND ham AND whatever the pack catches on the holiday hunt. This year they caught a big buck with really big and gorgeos (idk you'll have to tell me how to spell this one) antlers and it was kind of sad to watch them bring him in. I know that we use every part of the animal and all, but still. Kind of sad. Anyway. Lot of meat, is my point. Another point for Nevermore- the vegetables there are edible. There are vegetables in the first place, lol.
Anyway! It's pretty late now that everyone is gone and all of the cleaning up is done. I didn't want to end the day without writing you though even though I have to wait to send it anyway. Just a couple more days now, huh? I can't wait to be back at Nevermore. I'm going to write you letters for the rest of the days of the year but I guess I'll hang onto the last few. It'll be quicker to just hand them to you then!
Looking forward to seeing you again. I hope you don't mind waiting until the new year for your gift.
With cheer,
Enid
Wednesday was crushingly confused. It was... nothing. The contents of the letter were absolutely nothing. The letters dated December 26th and 27th, the last that Wednesday would receive that break, were similarly meaningless fluff.
She didn't know what to do. She didn't know what she could do, because Enid was still barely sending texts and she'd be packed between her brothers in a minivan to make the grueling, days-long drive to Vermont by the time a letter got to her house. Wednesday's option was to wait.