Chapter Twenty One: Afterword, the Afterward
ArtemisAvant
No longer running, from carpal tunnel
- Location
- Cornfield Central, Indiana
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Chapter Twenty One: Afterword, the Afterward
She wakes, sporadic, fits and spurts. Salt and fire pours into her mouth, traces the length of her arm and pumps a slow electronic pulse into the burning channels of her body like lemon on the weeping wounds. Love then, rushes through her system, hemorrhaging and tearing off pieces of itself in its haste to heal.
Eventually, Enid knows she cannot pretend this living dream as her own anymore. Time to get up. Time for the waking world.
It is as if her body has conquered a terrible sickness, one that has easily and thoroughly infested her every vein, her every blood vessel. Swaddling herself in cheap cotton sheets that nonetheless seem to shine a brilliant white, Enid spills out of the bed. The sickroom's cot. She isn't cold, but the weight, the anchor of it dragging her down is a welcome burden on her shoulders.
Somehow, through shaking, stumbling steps gaining vitality and vigour with each rush of blood through aching limbs, Enid comes upon the infirmary's bathroom. It smells faintly of menthol, strawberry pink and watermelon red. The taste of it in the back of her nose pales to the tang of Maria's blood still lingering on her tongue.
There in the silvered mirror, there, the girl in the mirror stares back at her with an obnoxiously clear and hale skin. All but for the ruddy red slash in that picture perfect image where her mouth, jaw and cheeks used to pink. It looks like and is exposed muscle and tendon, dark crimson against the colorless shade of her skin in the darkness. Enid flicks the light on, a pretty picture it does not make. Hesitantly, she reaches for the scarred wound. Plucks a string of sinew connecting the jawbone that reaches somewhere up into the un-charred portions of her face.
Punching her reflection is probably the emotionally healthy thing to do, a vent for her turbulent emotions just below the surface. Instead, Enid thinks about the trouble it would cause for Nevermore's already overworked janitorial staff, and instead deliberately reaches out to the side of the mirror to open its polished facet and reveal a cabinet of medical miscellany.
The medical mask hides it well enough. It's the good, expensive kind. Fit for sensitive preppy Outcasts and all their assorted quirks. Cotton-like, lambswool that hardly irritates her open flesh, it covers the last parting gift of Maria and the torrent of flaming blood she thrust into Enid's biting mouth, so concealed to where, why… if you simply never remove the mask, Enid can pass for herself. Well enough that Enid doesn't feel like shattering her reflection and carving off her face until it regrows itself correctly.
And then the screaming from, surprisingly, outside herself starts, and Enid, as helpless to habit as the moth chooses the flame despite the heat, follows.
…
The logical, detail oriented portion of her intellect acknowledges the red moon hanging lofty and heavy with purpose above, but the fight-turned flight portion of her brain overrides that pointless source of crimson aesthetic in favor of ensuring her every adrenaline-fueled step brings her not in the jaw trap of the monster unveiled and towards the less obvious snare of Nevermore, safety. Continuance.
Wednesday curses Tyler's unintentional genius in stripping her of her most accessible and thus discoverable weapons in using the local authorities as tools against her for perhaps the twentieth and last time. Already she feels her foot catch on a gnarled root hidden by moonshadow, already can she visualize the coming future. No vision required— her sprawled and senseless on the detritus of the forest, the monster beset on her intent with size and claw to tear her apart. A death once most welcomed and now, shameful and tinged with its inevitable consequence of her inability to defend Nevermore against Rowan's prophecy made manifest.
She hits the ground, hard. Breathe pushed out from her lungs as her shielding arms bunch up and into the diaphragm of her stomach, bruise surely forming on her skin but soon too late for any bruise to matter at all.
Bang. Death averts itself. The crack of a pistol, revolver— one undoubtedly owned by the Sheriff Galpin, father and son reunited in their most base selves, and Wednesday lifts her dirtied face into salvation. She is proven wrong.
Enid Sinclair, calmly, fires again. Not the father after all, but no less of a fated reunion under bloody Luna. In her right, she carries a stroke of silver rested at hip, and like the swashbuckling pirates of old, aims with her left. Aims true.
Tyler's bulbous eyes, comical and hideous in its irregularity, like the great multifaceted eyes of a fly condensed into a single raving pupil, burst like a ripe balloon of gore and milky white fluid. The liquefied remnants of said eye.
Scrambling to her feet, Wednesday naturally adheres to firearm principles and swiftly absconds away from the firing line. Her fists clench at her side, wanting, needing to act with her lost roommate and slay the monster— but she may as well wish for Mother and Father to act with propriety once in their lives. She is weaponless, never defenseless, but certainly unequipped to handle a brute of greater strength and admirably devilish cunning.
"Can you talk like this, Tyler? You conscious in there?" Enid calls out, her voice hoarse and raspy in a way that suggests long disuse. Fitting for the girl that has been in the nearest thing to death since Parent's Day. Comatose and frustratingly obtuse even then. "I think you are. After all, we're all back here again." Then the apparently accomplished marksman swivels partially to look at Wednesday. "Hey, Wednesday." Causally, as if she had not sheltered the beating, pulsating life of Wednesday within her own two hands as a cradle.
You graverobber, you magus, defiler of that which lies beyond death, you necromancer. You have brought the fluttering fragility of life from certain death and yet dare to act as if miracles can be sold? Wednesday can only piece together the shattered remains of her dignity and greet in a tone strangled of all else, "Hello, Enid."
Enid smoothly flips the rapier in her hand, and sinks it deep into a nearby tree. Wednesday is surprised at herself, able to still muster up surprise of the previously-withheld depths of her roommate's magnanimity. "There's some pilgrim-looking dead thing smelling like your blood heading to Nevermore."
That, Wednesday dimly mourns, would be Crackstone borne from her blood once again to enact violent, intolerant history.
There is only one response to that, and it is not the growl-chuckle that distorts out from Tyler's enlarged mouth. And with startling sudden clarity, Wednesday recalls that yes, the Hyde is still here, and it is not only them two caught in the scarlet light of the moon. "I should probably say something villainous and suitably diabolic here, right, Wednesday? Like, oh you still think you can run—?"
Bang, the bullet goes wide as torpid eyes widen in the frenzy of movement Tyler exhibits. So her desperate flee, her fortunate escape, all it only a toying thing as a cat paws a mouse into a corner. It burns a ugly thing in the lining of her stomach, burns until it rages something fierce. Wednesday Addams is no one's mouse. She hunts cats, and as well everyone with a lick of sense would know they are the apex of the food chain. Tyler will be no different.
Enid speaks and Wednesday is drawn out of her villainous monologue, "But you're too cool for that, let me guess." What— oh, Tyler and his disappointing lack of villainous speech. No flair these modern devils.
"Is that how you see me?" In the Hyde's warbling, distorted mangled vocal cords, the self-effacing mock hurt rings all the more false. Pressing a hand the color of putrid oyster to its chest, the Hyde shakes its overly large head. "Wow, say what you really mean."
Enid obliges. "Sure, die."
Unfortunately… Tyler does not return the favor.
Tyler lurches forward, cutting off Wednesday's skulk into a particularly dark shadow and to the shining silver edge of her imminent removal from her ill-fitting damsel in distress role. "Are you sure I'm the murderer? Two bloodthirsty little girls, honestly, I'm feeling a little upstaged."
Bang.
Tyler whistles even as splinters shower over him. "Wasting bullets, tsk, tsk, dear old dad only has six rounds. Old fashioned types, you understand." He pauses as if recalling some inane memory lost all its misty-gilded joy. "Three."
"Say less, wouldn't you?" Enid murmurs under her breath, walks forward in the clear opposite of all sense any competent marksman would tell her, and certainly against any advice given to shoot down a hulking beast. Wednesday nearly shouts at her, but holds her tongue. Turning Tyler's attention on her sloth-like crawl towards the forest's edge would only doom them both.
It is a monstrous thing, to watch unrealized potential climb into the waiting jaws of its killer. For the very first time, Wednesday betrays herself, and decries death and its cruel finality. All the snarling frothing potential bursting into fur, the oxymoron of her Roommate resolved not by well-due moonlit savagery but red battle. She gazes at the colorful contradiction that approaches and then the back of Enid as she crosses the invisible axis point leaving them in perfect suspended equidistant distance from each other. Enid doesn't even glance at her, doesn't acknowledge the tenuous, fractious distance that has so risen between them like the tide of that moonless night floods all the came before. Though she should be comforted by the stately, respectable wall erected… even though she undoubtedly is…
Wednesday waits for the shot, ready to abandon all pretense. As soon as that fourth bullet fires, she will scramble, crawl, throw herself to that rapier and combat the Hyde herself. It is the sensible thing to do, the only thing to do. She is prepared, she has trained and sought out the tools of murder for her own accounts in writing.
She is not trained in understanding Enid Sinclair.
Enid tosses the gun at Wednesday's prone form. Haphazard, embarrassing flailing ensues until cold clammy hands tighten around the handle. It's warm. Alive. "Sorry, but you'll have to make due with three." Claws unsheathe, wicked sharp killing implements so far removed from the deadly beauties Wednesday glimpsed oh so long ago. Ragged and hooked in places, clean efficiency and blaring colors lost to its newfound talon-like shape.
"Go."
Wednesday runs, grabbing the glinting rapier and gunmetal revolver in hand, towards the fire. The question pounds in her head, why? Why does she listen? Why does she run the opposite direction— pragmatism can no longer suffice as her mask. She cannot claim steadfast logic as her reasoning, it was simply… in Enid's command… she found surety. And Wednesday as cruel and wicked of an omen in black she may be, is no thief of a kill.
And yet.
As Orpheus, as any who dares cheat death, as any and all who cannot place their trust in whatever gods come after life, despite herself, Wednesday looks back.
Enid doesn't.
…
…
She wakes, sporadic, fits and spurts. Salt and fire pours into her mouth, traces the length of her arm and pumps a slow electronic pulse into the burning channels of her body like lemon on the weeping wounds. Love then, rushes through her system, hemorrhaging and tearing off pieces of itself in its haste to heal.
Eventually, Enid knows she cannot pretend this living dream as her own anymore. Time to get up. Time for the waking world.
It is as if her body has conquered a terrible sickness, one that has easily and thoroughly infested her every vein, her every blood vessel. Swaddling herself in cheap cotton sheets that nonetheless seem to shine a brilliant white, Enid spills out of the bed. The sickroom's cot. She isn't cold, but the weight, the anchor of it dragging her down is a welcome burden on her shoulders.
Somehow, through shaking, stumbling steps gaining vitality and vigour with each rush of blood through aching limbs, Enid comes upon the infirmary's bathroom. It smells faintly of menthol, strawberry pink and watermelon red. The taste of it in the back of her nose pales to the tang of Maria's blood still lingering on her tongue.
There in the silvered mirror, there, the girl in the mirror stares back at her with an obnoxiously clear and hale skin. All but for the ruddy red slash in that picture perfect image where her mouth, jaw and cheeks used to pink. It looks like and is exposed muscle and tendon, dark crimson against the colorless shade of her skin in the darkness. Enid flicks the light on, a pretty picture it does not make. Hesitantly, she reaches for the scarred wound. Plucks a string of sinew connecting the jawbone that reaches somewhere up into the un-charred portions of her face.
Punching her reflection is probably the emotionally healthy thing to do, a vent for her turbulent emotions just below the surface. Instead, Enid thinks about the trouble it would cause for Nevermore's already overworked janitorial staff, and instead deliberately reaches out to the side of the mirror to open its polished facet and reveal a cabinet of medical miscellany.
The medical mask hides it well enough. It's the good, expensive kind. Fit for sensitive preppy Outcasts and all their assorted quirks. Cotton-like, lambswool that hardly irritates her open flesh, it covers the last parting gift of Maria and the torrent of flaming blood she thrust into Enid's biting mouth, so concealed to where, why… if you simply never remove the mask, Enid can pass for herself. Well enough that Enid doesn't feel like shattering her reflection and carving off her face until it regrows itself correctly.
And then the screaming from, surprisingly, outside herself starts, and Enid, as helpless to habit as the moth chooses the flame despite the heat, follows.
…
The logical, detail oriented portion of her intellect acknowledges the red moon hanging lofty and heavy with purpose above, but the fight-turned flight portion of her brain overrides that pointless source of crimson aesthetic in favor of ensuring her every adrenaline-fueled step brings her not in the jaw trap of the monster unveiled and towards the less obvious snare of Nevermore, safety. Continuance.
Wednesday curses Tyler's unintentional genius in stripping her of her most accessible and thus discoverable weapons in using the local authorities as tools against her for perhaps the twentieth and last time. Already she feels her foot catch on a gnarled root hidden by moonshadow, already can she visualize the coming future. No vision required— her sprawled and senseless on the detritus of the forest, the monster beset on her intent with size and claw to tear her apart. A death once most welcomed and now, shameful and tinged with its inevitable consequence of her inability to defend Nevermore against Rowan's prophecy made manifest.
She hits the ground, hard. Breathe pushed out from her lungs as her shielding arms bunch up and into the diaphragm of her stomach, bruise surely forming on her skin but soon too late for any bruise to matter at all.
Bang. Death averts itself. The crack of a pistol, revolver— one undoubtedly owned by the Sheriff Galpin, father and son reunited in their most base selves, and Wednesday lifts her dirtied face into salvation. She is proven wrong.
Enid Sinclair, calmly, fires again. Not the father after all, but no less of a fated reunion under bloody Luna. In her right, she carries a stroke of silver rested at hip, and like the swashbuckling pirates of old, aims with her left. Aims true.
Tyler's bulbous eyes, comical and hideous in its irregularity, like the great multifaceted eyes of a fly condensed into a single raving pupil, burst like a ripe balloon of gore and milky white fluid. The liquefied remnants of said eye.
Scrambling to her feet, Wednesday naturally adheres to firearm principles and swiftly absconds away from the firing line. Her fists clench at her side, wanting, needing to act with her lost roommate and slay the monster— but she may as well wish for Mother and Father to act with propriety once in their lives. She is weaponless, never defenseless, but certainly unequipped to handle a brute of greater strength and admirably devilish cunning.
"Can you talk like this, Tyler? You conscious in there?" Enid calls out, her voice hoarse and raspy in a way that suggests long disuse. Fitting for the girl that has been in the nearest thing to death since Parent's Day. Comatose and frustratingly obtuse even then. "I think you are. After all, we're all back here again." Then the apparently accomplished marksman swivels partially to look at Wednesday. "Hey, Wednesday." Causally, as if she had not sheltered the beating, pulsating life of Wednesday within her own two hands as a cradle.
You graverobber, you magus, defiler of that which lies beyond death, you necromancer. You have brought the fluttering fragility of life from certain death and yet dare to act as if miracles can be sold? Wednesday can only piece together the shattered remains of her dignity and greet in a tone strangled of all else, "Hello, Enid."
Enid smoothly flips the rapier in her hand, and sinks it deep into a nearby tree. Wednesday is surprised at herself, able to still muster up surprise of the previously-withheld depths of her roommate's magnanimity. "There's some pilgrim-looking dead thing smelling like your blood heading to Nevermore."
That, Wednesday dimly mourns, would be Crackstone borne from her blood once again to enact violent, intolerant history.
There is only one response to that, and it is not the growl-chuckle that distorts out from Tyler's enlarged mouth. And with startling sudden clarity, Wednesday recalls that yes, the Hyde is still here, and it is not only them two caught in the scarlet light of the moon. "I should probably say something villainous and suitably diabolic here, right, Wednesday? Like, oh you still think you can run—?"
Bang, the bullet goes wide as torpid eyes widen in the frenzy of movement Tyler exhibits. So her desperate flee, her fortunate escape, all it only a toying thing as a cat paws a mouse into a corner. It burns a ugly thing in the lining of her stomach, burns until it rages something fierce. Wednesday Addams is no one's mouse. She hunts cats, and as well everyone with a lick of sense would know they are the apex of the food chain. Tyler will be no different.
Enid speaks and Wednesday is drawn out of her villainous monologue, "But you're too cool for that, let me guess." What— oh, Tyler and his disappointing lack of villainous speech. No flair these modern devils.
"Is that how you see me?" In the Hyde's warbling, distorted mangled vocal cords, the self-effacing mock hurt rings all the more false. Pressing a hand the color of putrid oyster to its chest, the Hyde shakes its overly large head. "Wow, say what you really mean."
Enid obliges. "Sure, die."
Unfortunately… Tyler does not return the favor.
Tyler lurches forward, cutting off Wednesday's skulk into a particularly dark shadow and to the shining silver edge of her imminent removal from her ill-fitting damsel in distress role. "Are you sure I'm the murderer? Two bloodthirsty little girls, honestly, I'm feeling a little upstaged."
Bang.
Tyler whistles even as splinters shower over him. "Wasting bullets, tsk, tsk, dear old dad only has six rounds. Old fashioned types, you understand." He pauses as if recalling some inane memory lost all its misty-gilded joy. "Three."
"Say less, wouldn't you?" Enid murmurs under her breath, walks forward in the clear opposite of all sense any competent marksman would tell her, and certainly against any advice given to shoot down a hulking beast. Wednesday nearly shouts at her, but holds her tongue. Turning Tyler's attention on her sloth-like crawl towards the forest's edge would only doom them both.
It is a monstrous thing, to watch unrealized potential climb into the waiting jaws of its killer. For the very first time, Wednesday betrays herself, and decries death and its cruel finality. All the snarling frothing potential bursting into fur, the oxymoron of her Roommate resolved not by well-due moonlit savagery but red battle. She gazes at the colorful contradiction that approaches and then the back of Enid as she crosses the invisible axis point leaving them in perfect suspended equidistant distance from each other. Enid doesn't even glance at her, doesn't acknowledge the tenuous, fractious distance that has so risen between them like the tide of that moonless night floods all the came before. Though she should be comforted by the stately, respectable wall erected… even though she undoubtedly is…
Wednesday waits for the shot, ready to abandon all pretense. As soon as that fourth bullet fires, she will scramble, crawl, throw herself to that rapier and combat the Hyde herself. It is the sensible thing to do, the only thing to do. She is prepared, she has trained and sought out the tools of murder for her own accounts in writing.
She is not trained in understanding Enid Sinclair.
Enid tosses the gun at Wednesday's prone form. Haphazard, embarrassing flailing ensues until cold clammy hands tighten around the handle. It's warm. Alive. "Sorry, but you'll have to make due with three." Claws unsheathe, wicked sharp killing implements so far removed from the deadly beauties Wednesday glimpsed oh so long ago. Ragged and hooked in places, clean efficiency and blaring colors lost to its newfound talon-like shape.
"Go."
Wednesday runs, grabbing the glinting rapier and gunmetal revolver in hand, towards the fire. The question pounds in her head, why? Why does she listen? Why does she run the opposite direction— pragmatism can no longer suffice as her mask. She cannot claim steadfast logic as her reasoning, it was simply… in Enid's command… she found surety. And Wednesday as cruel and wicked of an omen in black she may be, is no thief of a kill.
And yet.
As Orpheus, as any who dares cheat death, as any and all who cannot place their trust in whatever gods come after life, despite herself, Wednesday looks back.
Enid doesn't.
…