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(An Addams is often assumed to be human.)
….
Despite what the majority of the human, and not-so-human, population believes, Wednesday does not attempt to radiate a murderous energy. That is not to say that she does not, nor that she minds it. Only that it is not something she actively decides to do.
Enid would disagree. Enid Sinclair, for all her gossiping, blogging, and snooping – a display of her meagre investigative abilities that Wednesday is hard pressed not to violently correct (Enid can barely stand that sight of a papercut, let along the investigations that Wednesday favours as learning opportunities) – does not know anything about the Addamses.
This is not entirely of her own fault. Rather, it is a culmination born from the eccentricities that permeate the Addam’s history – whereby a large portion of their antics and exploits are lost to their ancestors, passed down only by word of mouth and bloodstained grimoires that never leave the manor – and the lack of resources available to the general public.
(Wednesday knows well when people have heard, even slightly, of her family and their natures. They are the ones who skirt the edges of her space, who shiver under her gaze, who scramble toward the walls as she passes. The ones who leave the room entirely, half-desperate not to draw attention to themselves and yet drawn to her like moth to flame.
By this measure, those who know little of her history are as easy to identify. They look at her and see goth, see someone trying too hard to seem dangerous. They are the ones who shove Pugsley into his locker and do not know the wrath they have brought down upon themselves. They are the ones who killed Nero and expect no repercussions. (She releases piranhas on the former, a tribute to Pugsley’s favourite animal, and to justice. The latter drop like flies, institutionalised and locked away one after the other. Wednesday sees none of them again.)
There is a miniscule number, amongst these reactions, who Wednesday knows are more familiar with the Addamses than they would likely prefer. They are the people who bow their heads, offer a polite word, and do their best to pretend that the person standing alongside them is not one of the most dangerous people they could find. Those people do not hesitate to offer support, and do not hesitate to withdraw from any form of plan that could cause an Addams trouble.
They know what awaits.)
Wednesday will admit that she is, if not the reason for Enid’s lack of knowledge, not exactly helping Enid overcome her misunderstandings and delusions. This is not through a lack of malicious intent, merely through a desire to suffer through the school year without numerous room changes due to the inevitable near-deaths of her roommates. (Wednesday thinks of her permanent record and the lack of ‘attempted murder’ listed there, pleased. She does not fail.)
Her arrival at Nevermore occurs with this plan already in mind, and she begins its execution from the moment that she steps through the doors. Wednesday is aware of what makes people shudder to come into contact, or merely proximity, with her, and though she cannot remove all of it, she can limit its effects.
(It amuses her to learn that, despite her active attempts to radiate less murderous intent than she does when alone or at the manor, people still give her a wide berth through the hallways, and cross the room to avoid meeting her.)
Wednesday could recite the Adams history before she could decapitate her first dolls. She knows its perils and its downfalls, and she knows exactly where she comes from. This is good. It means that she can subvert the influences as necessary (not murdering her roommate) and subdue the ravenous thirst for violence that all Adamses carry (for all that Pugsley seems a gentle sort, Wednesday knows that he feels the same call. He merely prefers it to be inflicted on himself.).
Enid Sinclair introduces herself with a wide smile and a “Howdy, roomie!” and Wednesday muzzles the feral thought that blood would make the obnoxious pink of her sweater far more bearable (she does not particularly want to be at Nevermore, but it is better than nearly anywhere else. She has been expelled from four schools. She knows.), steps neatly backwards away from the reaching hands, and does not smile.
Enid learns that she is half-dead, allergic to colour, and not interested in physical contact within minutes of their meeting. Within the hour, she has decided to disregard it all. Wednesday would be concerned by her significant lack of self-preservation and caution, but it is far more amusing to see the students (those who know who she is, who feel the energy she radiates, as smothered as it is) watch her with wide eyes and fear in their hearts.
(Wednesday does consider the amount of effort she would need to put in to change rooms (a miniscule amount, really. Sinclair can barely stand the sight of blood.) when she sees the pure amount of colour that the girl wears and parades, and decides that the negatives of that course of action (stuttering roommates, abandonment of her plan so early into its execution) outweigh the benefits. She remains in the dorm. She faces her bed and her desk away from the nauseating sight.)
By the end of her first day, Wednesday has established that people, Outcast or not, will always hate what they do not understand. The students look at Wednesday and see someone who is trying too hard, someone ridiculous, brash, abrasive.
Wednesday finds them amusing, really, and kindly does not kill them where they stand. She muzzles the rage inside her chest, soothes her longing for blood and violence that rises with every hour spent within the penitentiary, and hunts down the animals within the bordering forest through the night instead (if one or two happen to be the wolves attending the school, no-one would ever know enough to tell). She will make it through the year, without an additional expulsion or attempted-murder for her file, and she will not return.
….
(Adamses are often assumed to be human. This is wrong. They all learn, eventually.)
….
Wednesday does not attempt to keep her opinions private. It is not within the nature of an Addams to hide away such things, only plans and history and evidence that implicates rather than absolves. As such, Enid learns quickly of her dislike for technology.
“I refuse to become a slave to the soul-sucking void of meaningless affirmation that is social media,” she tells Enid when her roommate asks for first her Instagram account, and then her phone number. The girl looks at her as though she had killed someone, and Wednesday, thoughtfully, keeps her eye-roll to herself.
She does believe fully in keeping her history quiet and private, and therefore does not tell Enid the real reason for her lack of technology.
(Wednesday is a being of power and rage. Her very presence causes technology to stutter and glitch; touching such an item would see it broken beyond repair.)
Enid asks her to take a “selfie”. Wednesday despises the word, and further despises the explanation that Enid gives when she presents her with a blank look. She declines, harshly, and elects not to tell the girl that her device would have malfunctioned. (Wednesday cannot smother her presence through a screen. The “selfie”, as she finds out many days later, will bleed across the screen, the device surviving only because her focus was not on the camera. (Enid swears that she will never photograph Wednesday again.))
Wednesday abandons the dorm in the early hours of the evening, routinely, and releases her rage on the still-unsuspecting creatures filling the bordering forests. She empties herself of the longing for blood and violence and death, until her body sings only with the level of power and rage that she has always known, and returns to the dorm through the window well before Enid wakes.
(Her roommate is made of sharp claws, the bitter sting of continual disappointed words, and fragile sensibilities. Wednesday does not have the wherewithal to go through the process of moving rooms, and accepts these as a fact of life. She terrorises Enid with accurate accounts of the murders in her novel, and remains. (At least Enid will turn the music down, when she demands.))
….
Xavier Thorpe is a psychic artist. He attempts to impress her through drawings of spiders and snakes, making conversation in every silence that Wednesday craves. She does not kill him. He takes this as acceptance.
Wednesday categorises him as someone who knows nothing of her history. He looks at her and sees what he desires; sees a reserved disposition and not the active resistance of her very being, sees hard-to-get and not the effort she exerts upon herself not to kill him where he stands – smug, arrogant, and blind.
He tackles her out of the way of a falling gargoyle, and tells her that they are even when she demands of him why. Wednesday reconsiders her decision to leave him alive as she stares at the shattered remains of the only point of interest thus far into her year.
(Rage licks at her ribs. Her skin trembles with unreleased power. Her eyes darken in the face of the knowledge of what this boy has taken away from her.)
(Thorpe thinks her trembling hands are fear. Wednesday’s lip curls in disgust.)
She leaves him in the remains of the mess, allows him to believe what he wants to see. It makes it easier to slide below the radar, and if she kills a number of animals in the forest and hides them below his bed, he need never know.
(Wednesday has cultivated, unintentionally, the reputation of someone simultaneously feared and underestimated. Her peers voice that she is violent and cruel, and think, for all the evidence to the contrary, that she would not actually go through with her threats.)
Xavier smells of rotting meat for four days before he finds the first one.
(She replaces them each week.)
He submits himself to the nurse by the fourth week, fearful that he is hunting them down without knowledge in his sleep. The nurse proclaims him healthy.
(Wednesday resists planting another animal until a full week later. Her rage is sated, slightly, by the sobs that echo down the hallways as he begs to leave his dorm.)
….
Larissa Weems is the headmistress. This is what is known. She looks upon Wednesday as Morticia reincarnated, as a remnant of a past she is desperate to forget. She respects Wednesday in the same manner that she respects Morticia – angrily, resentfully, sorrowfully.
Wednesday classifies Weems as someone who knows little of her family. She respects Wednesday only for her quick wit and sharp tongue, for her academic excellence and the knowledge that she is Morticia’s daughter. She does not respect Wednesday for what she is, and who she comes from.
(Wednesday muses on this, occasionally, as she considers what she knows. Larissa attended Nevermore with both her mother and her father, and yet does not seem to understand what lives beneath Wednesday’s skin. Wednesday wonders if Larissa had less contact with her father than with her mother, and can see only the surface of who Wednesday is – her mother, though sharper than she ever was.
She does not seem to see below the skin, to the power lying in her every move, to the generations of rage that Wednesday has inherited and fed and nurtured until they are her own. She cannot see that Wednesday, for all she has inherited of her mother, is made from her father, too.
She cannot see what Wednesday comes from, what is written into her bones and her lungs and her heart.
Wednesday is her mother’s daughter, but she is her father’s, too.)
Weems interrogates Wednesday when Xavier’s situation is revealed. She tells Wednesday that her mother would never have done such a thing, and that she hopes that Wednesday strives to live up to her.
Wednesday looks at her with eyes that barely hide her power, with sharp teeth hidden behind a closed mouth, and rage burning within her heart. She allows Weems to see what she wants as she denies any involvement in the tragedy that has befallen Xavier.
(She does not display openly what Larissa refuses to see the hints of; the madness in her gaze, the power in her words, the rage under her skin. If Larissa is so naïve as to look a predator in the eye and decide that it is harmless, dressed up and paraded around, the consequences will fall upon her.)
(Wednesday does not harm her. She would never hear the end of it from her mother.)
….
Bianca Barclay is a siren, and the self-appointed Queen Bee. Enid introduces Wednesday to her as nothing more than a concept, when she receives the usual spiel given to new students on their first day. (Wednesday considers including the inane gossip and well-known rules of an establishment in her next torture session. She would have been more impressed if Enid had meant to cause her pain.)
(Wednesday attends the fencing session already dressed and with blade in hand. She considers the students before her through eyes that hold years of experience, and finds herself disappointed. They are weak at worst, and amateur at best.)
Wednesday considers Bianca within the category of those who know nothing of her family history. Bianca looks at her and sees someone trying too hard. She looks at Wednesday’s open disdain for the abilities of the students present, and mistakes it for unfounded arrogance in her abilities.
(Wednesday is arrogant, she knows. What Barclay does not realise is that her pride is built of steel and forged through hours of dedicated practice.
Barclay fights schoolchildren in a practiced dance, a performance curated under careful supervision.
Wednesday fights the creatures that permeate the manor’s forests, ducks her father’s swinging blade as she walks down the stairs, stabs her brother through the leg as he tries to twist past her guard, pivots away from her mother’s lunge in their kitchen. Wednesday does not perform a dance choregraphed by others. She writes her path in blood and pain and tears.)
Wednesday settles into the fight with an ease that she does not display. Bianca thinks she can be beaten down with the rest of Nevermore’s students, and is arrogant herself.
She lunges when she should pivot, so sure in her ability that she underestimates Wednesday entirely. This is her mistake. Wednesday escapes the end of her blade with graceful ease, and scores her point.
(She mourns the lack of blood on the end of her blade, and muzzles the violent urge to paint the ground red with Barclay’s blood. Such actions do not follow her plan. She need only last one year.)
Bianca looks at her with eyes that gleam with fury. A lucky move, she says, and Wednesday kindly does not give in to the rage that urges Bianca’s death.
(She wins the rematch, and all those that follow. The rage quells slightly at the anger she sees in Barclay’s eyes. (Good. Wednesday should not be the only one to fight her instincts.))
….
Eugene Ottinger is quiet, and timid, and more scared of Wednesday than he is of the rest of the school. He is the leader of the only school club she can stomach to join. He organises the bees and the honey with efficiency and power of his own. He looks at Wednesday with respect and fear, and allows her to join the previously single-person club regardless.
Wednesday settles Eugene into the category of those who know more of her family than they likely prefer. She sees the fear in his eyes, the shake in his hands, the nervous offers of assistance and support and conversation. (This would infuriate her, usually. Strangely, it does not.)
She goes about the tasks assigned to her with precision and care, careful not to damage even one of the many bees in the area (there are many, and Wednesday revels in the possibility of the death that will befall her should she make a single wrong move). Eugene offers her jars of honey without asking for payment, listens to her contemplations of murder and violence and rage with a pale face but determined ears, and, for once, Wednesday does not see someone pandering to the force that they know they stand alongside.
(She sees in Eugene the desperation for a friend, sees the determination within him to be better than what everyone sees, and she accepts his extended hand, shaking with the force of his fear but offered nonetheless, of company with a nod and grasping fingers.)
(She does not smile. (An Addams is a being of power and rage, and their very presence radiates murderous intent. Their smiles unsettle even the most composed and prepared of Outcasts. Wednesday, for all she soothes the rage and desperation within her with promises of later, will not scare Eugene more than she has already.) He accepts this with a grace that belies his cautious determination to be friends.)
….
Tyler Galpin is a Hyde. Wednesday knows this the moment she steps into the accursed coffee shop that he works in, knows the moment that his gaze meets hers and she sees the rage, fear, pain in his eyes. Wednesday allows herself the distraction of contemplation as she places her order, and he mistakes it for interest.
Wednesday places him into the category of those who know nothing about her family at all. He looks at her and sees what he wants to see; disinterest as playing hard-to-get, threats as a form of flirtation. (Wednesday wants to carve her ears off when he starts to tell her about the town, and himself, and the coffee shop, and-)
(She does not. She does not attempt to quell the rage rising within her ribcage, the power vibrating under her skin. She will harness this and he will meet his end when the time is right. (There is no reason to deprive herself of the few moments of interest that she has encountered thus far.))
Tyler introduces her to his father when the man arrives, and Wednesday stares into the eyes of the man who arrested her father years before for the murder of Garret Gates, and attempts almost yearly to bring him to justice. Donovan Galpin looks at her, and sneers his disgust for her father within his first breath.
(Wednesday comes off as aloof and uncaring, she knows. This makes no difference to the fact that she loves her mother, and her father, and her brothers. Galpin is a threat to their happiness and, if she is identifying the emotion in his eyes correctly, their lives. She wonders if he knows what his son is.)
Galpin looks at her as though she is dirt under his shoe, and snarls, “I expect I’ll be dealing with you sometime soon.”
Tyler stands to the side, inching back toward his counter and the relative safety of the coffee machine (it is spitting steam and hot water alike). Wednesday spares him little attention, and keeps her gaze fixed on the Sheriff. He narrows his eyes at her expression, and Wednesday relishes what she knows is coming.
(An Addams is a being of power and rage. They are often assumed to be human. This is wrong.)
Wednesday allows the rage to burn in her eyes, allows the power writhing through her bones and into her blood sing louder than it has since her arrival. Galpin’s eyes widen, and he flinches – a miniscule movement, barely noticeable.
Wednesday notices, and she smiles.
(Closed mouth, mostly. She does not need rumours of a girl with teeth like blades and eyes like fire to permeate the town. The residents here will assume the Sheriff is exaggerating, she knows, and she sees no reason to alleviate the disbelief that will spread.)
Galpin’s face turns pale as bone, and he steps fully backwards. His hands shake as Wednesday maintains her expression. Tyler peeks over the coffee maker with the face of someone who desperately wants to stop what they are doing.
Wednesday smiles at Sheriff Galpin, and says “Of course.”
….
(Adamses are often assumed to be human. This is wrong. An Addams is a being of power and rage, twisted into the form of a human visage. An Addams wields power beyond comprehension, and so few enemies ever live to tell their tale.)
….