Chapter Text
Being the only psychic in a family of telekinetics was… not fun. Enid had learned early on that she didn’t matter. Her mother made sure of it. Training her awareness to avoid everything her brothers threw at her became a necessity once they stopped throwing plushies and started throwing rocks with enough force to shatter glass and her mother’s response was to ground Enid for breaking a window. At first, her father’s quiet love had comforted her, but after the fourth trip to the ER followed by a harsh scolding and more grounding, it wasn’t enough. Now, every puppy-eyed look sent her way made her hate her father a little bit more for not protecting her, for allowing her brothers to treat her like a target dummy, for not defying his wife for anything, not even when his own daughter almost got blinded and will have permanent scars and Esther’s response had been, “Great, now you’re going to be even harder to marry off.”
So, when her mother decided to send her away to Nevermore, a fancy boarding school for outcasts in Vermont (nearly five thousand kilometers away), Enid had been ecstatic. She made sure to keep her elation to herself, fearful that if her mother knew she’d change her mind. Her father drove her to the airport, the car silent for once with only the two of them in the vehicle. He managed to find a parking spot and offered to walk her to security, but Enid refused. He offered to help with her bags, but Enid refused. He offered her those goddess-damned puppy-dog eyes and a hug. Enid stared at him until his arms dropped back down to his sides and walked away from him without looking back.
It was there, barely twelve years old, scarred and battered, alone for the first time ( fucking finally ) in her life, surrounded by strangers, and about to find herself on what almost seemed like another planet, Enid felt free for the first time. She felt safe for the first time since she was four.
Wednesday feels… conflicted, about her current situation.
After countless attempts on having her attend a normie school close by, her parents have finally given up and have resorted to their final, though much-awaited, option: their own alma mater, Nevermore. The only con (for them): it’s all the way up in the almost wilderness of Vermont, about five hundred kilometers away from the pride. Too far away for her parents. Not far enough away for Wednesday.
If there is one single good thing to take away from her borderline exile, it’s that she will finally be away from her parents’ smothering attention.
Wednesday’s musing is interrupted by a pungent wave of arousal that makes her gag and snarl at her parents, who have the decency to look sheepish before reminding her once more that this is her own doing. It’s nothing she hasn't heard about a dozen times, so she easily tunes them out, lowering the hearse’s window to let fresh air enter the car and clean the atmosphere from her parents’ smothering and nausea-inducing pheromones.
She knows that going to Nevermore is basically a cage, the same cage her father and uncle were sent to. Not even the most secure and secret KGB base had been able to hold Uncle Fester for more than three weeks, but he’d been detained in Nevermore for the full six-year education that the establishment offered. On the other hand, she’ll be away from her family’s influence, and that’s... exciting, to say the least.
So… yes. Wednesday has conflicted feelings about Nevermore, but there’s nothing she likes more than a challenge, and vows that she will achieve what not even her uncle managed to do: escape Nevermore.
Her plans are derailed, however, the moment Principal Weems opens the door to what is to be her room for her first year, and a wave of the most delightful and alluring smell, a smell that blanks her mind of every word of her extensive vocabulary except MINE , reaches her nose.
When Principal Weems tells her she’s getting a roommate, Enid is ecstatic. For the first three years at Nevermore before she got emancipated she’d been forced to have a single room, and during the fourth year she did get transferred into a double, but they ended up being an odd number of students in Ophelia Hall, and so she remained alone. She was upset at first, but then Yoko pointed out that her big ass room is perfect to have sleepovers in, so it turned out ok in the end. Her fifth year was gearing up to be the same until three weeks into the semester, Weems calls her to her office and informs her that a new student is transferring, so she will be getting a roommate after all.
As soon as the Principal dismisses her, Enid races to her room and starts cleaning it from top to bottom, moving everything that’s been spread out into her half and, after some consideration, goes to rip out half of the colors on the window. She’s fully aware of how colorful she is, and she doesn’t know if her new roomie will appreciate it, but as soon as her hand brushes the cold glass, her spine snaps straight, her head thrown back as her sight flashes white.
“Enid, this is your new roommate–”
Slick black fur beneath her hands, thick and warm.
“You look like the consequence of a rainbow and a golden retriever having an affair,”
Callused hands gripping her, one around her waist and the other raising her own hand high. She twirls and finds her back pressed against a warm chest. It vibrates.
“Never let anyone tell you you’re not enough, mi luz de luna (my moonlight) , you’re worth so much more than everyone in this wretched school combined.”
Black eyes set in a pale face. They morph slowly, the pupils lengthening, the irises lightening until they look silver. Black fur grows around it as the face transforms.
A single finger, nail painted black, pushing a full glass of water across a table. “Willa, no!” The finger pauses. For a second. Then it keeps pushing. “Don’t you dare, Willa— stop!” The glass teeters and tumbles off the edge. It shatters on impact, fragments, and water everywhere.
A cat purring, but it’s far too loud. Something soft and warm wrapped around her, cradling her. It’s vibrating. She feels loved.
Her head hurts as she comes out of the vision. She stumbles back from the window, the scraper dropping to the ground as she cradles her temples and falls onto her knees. She’s never been good at interpreting her visions –scarce as they are, she never gets much practice–, but they always turn out to be true, even if sometimes it takes her a while after the fact to realize what it had been.
As the ache goes down from white-hot to a semi-mild throbbing, Enid manages to rise from her slumped-down position and retake the scraper, and returns to her task with slight trepidation. Thankfully, no other vision resurfaces, and she can go about her task while she tries to decipher her vision. One thing is certain: it has something to do with her new roommate.
Even with all the clues her vision gave her, it takes Enid an incredibly long time to not only figure out what kind of outcast Wednesday is, but what they actually grow to become for each other. It’s obvious, so incredibly obvious that it shouldn’t have taken her more than half the semester to realize.
It starts on their first meeting. Enid goes to hug her new roomie –who is extremely cute–, and doesn’t have time to register the Principal’s alarmed “Enid, don’t–” or Morticia’s “Dear, Wednesday doesn’t enjoy–” before her arms are around the petite girl. A second passes, and then Wednesday goes boneless in her hold, small but strong fingers gripping the bottom of her shirt. She manages to see the adult’s shocked faces for a moment before the shorter girl stiffens and backs away. Later, as she goes around introducing her to all her friends, more than one finds themselves at the business end of daggers and claws (shifter, then?) when they try to touch her new roomie.
She’s given the next clue that very night in what Yoko has come to call The Ear-Splitting Incident . She’s trying to figure out what kind of shifter Wednesday is –the shorter girl had been unusually tightlipped about it, but she vehemently insisted she wasn’t a ‘flea-infested mutt’, so she’s not a werewolf– as she goes about her night-time skin-care routine. Wednesday apparently doesn’t follow one, as she –and Enid is quoting here– doesn’t insist on covering her face in junk that only dries out her skin and clogs her pores. Entrenched in her thoughts as she is it takes her some time before she notices that the sound of Wednesday’s typewriter –an honest-to-Goddess typewriter– has ceased. As she exits the bathroom, her mouth open to tell her new roommate that she can use the ensuite, she freezes midstep when she sees that the room is empty. She looks around, and for a moment fears that she just imagined everything before she realized that the other half of the room is filled with stuff. Then there’s a scraping sound from above, and when she looks up all she sees are glowing eyes and a shadowy figure crouched on the beams.
Her scream is, as previously mentioned, ear-splitting, and has half of the building pounding at their door.
As the days and weeks pass, small things start adding up –to what, Enid doesn’t know, but she starts writing every little clue down in a notebook so garishly colorful that Wednesday would never touch–: the way she just stares at things, the religious way she cares for her hair, how things she leaves on her desk or shelves somehow are always on the floor when she returns, how she loves climbing and being on high places (which is incredibly funny because she’s just so Goddess-damned tiny!) and looking smug about it. And the little gifts, too. Every couple of days there’s something new waiting for her right next to their door: flowers, feathers, shiny rocks. Given, it could be from someone else, but the few times somebody left her or Wednesday something at their door, the goth had kicked it down the stairs with a snarl pulling at her lips.
In her defense, the gifts usually appear after Wednesday has knocked something over or upset her, so she thought they were just apology gifts. Which, in hindsight, should have been a clue in itself: Wednesday doesn’t do apologies.
Anyway, she finally realizes (or better said, she gets slapped in the face with it) on the second full moon of the semester. They were supposed to spend the afternoon in the woods collecting samples for Botany, but Enid decided that her time was better spent watching Wednesday climb trees, so here she is, about an hour after curfew, in the middle of the woods, gathering specimens and trying not to jump or flinch at every sound and howl. All shifters are in the cages –Wednesday included–, and all animals get scared away from the surrounding woods during the full moon, so she knows for a fact that she’s safe. This may sound counterintuitive, but that’s the deal; in Nevermore, at least.
So when the crickets stop singing and she gets the distinct feeling that she’s being watched, Enid finds herself incredibly disturbed. She should be alone in the woods: non-shifters are confined to their rooms, the shifters locked in their cages, and the normies are far too scared to come on normal nights, much less on full moons. Yes, someone else could have sneaked out like she has, but everyone else in her class did what they were supposed to, and no one else has an easy escape route from their room without having to sneak past the dorm parents. Not likely.
She straightens, puffing herself up to look as big as she can, just like Yoko taught her: if they don’t see you as prey, they’ll leave you alone. She doesn’t really remember what animal they were talking about, but Enid doesn’t really think it matters. She looks around, the sample jars in her bag clinking together, and tries not to flinch at every little rustling sound.
She still needs a couple more samples, but she can always get those tomorrow before class. She scans her surroundings one more time to make sure there’s nothing around her, and then turns around and promptly freezes once more. This time, however, she was a very good reason to. Because standing in the middle of the trail about ten meters away from her is an incredibly massive panther that’s looking at her with intense silver eyes.
So… yeah… Enid faints.
Wednesday watches with a mix of concern and amusement as Enid crumbles to the ground the moment she sees her. To be fair, Wednesday has been stalking her for the past half hour and the poor girl's blood pressure must have been through the roof. She stalks closer and nudges at the blonde’s cheek, but she’s out cold. Oh, well. Wednesday looks around, but she knows there’s no one close. She carefully grabs the scruff of Enid’s sweatshirt with her mouth and drags her off to the side, reclining her back against a tree.
She steps back and simply watches for a moment before giving in to her instincts and worming her way between Enid and the harsh bark. She curls around the limp form and starts purring. It comes out slightly stuttery at first; it’s been years since she allowed herself to purr properly, even less for more than a few seconds, so she’s a little rusty, but the second she starts to feel Enid’s warmth through her coat and she can bury her nose in her scent, her purr kickstarts on its own and there’s no way she’ll be able to stop it anytime soon. So she simply curls herself tighter around her mat– roommate and waits.
Thankfully, it doesn’t take her long to come around. She wakes as she always does, first making little sounds of discontent and cuddling closer to what she probably thinks is her bed, then yawning so hard she looks like she’s roaring. A kitten roar, but a roar nonetheless. And then, when she blinks her eyes open and rubs one of her eyes with her fist, does she seem to remember where she is. She tenses up, and Wednesday purrs harder, moving her head so she can rub her cheek against Enid’s arm, leaving a scent mark behind in the process.
“Ok, Enid, don’t panic. You’re ok, it’s just a really big cat, it’s fine, you’re– holy shit those claws are big,” the blonde takes a couple of deep breaths, and when Wednesday looks up at her, they lock eyes. Enid’s widen, and Wednesday blinks. Slowly. “Oh, Goddess… I’ve seen you before, I had a vision about you; oh shit… Ok, let’s just…” Enid takes a deep, shaky breath and slowly raises her hand towards Wednesday’s face. She watches it slowly approach, and from the corner of her eyes she sees Enid screw her eyes shut and turn her face away. “Please don’t bite me, please don’t bite me, please don’t bite–”
Wednesday doesn’t bite her. She stretches and sniffs at the hand before rubbing her forehead over the fingers. Enid squeaks, but after a few minutes she moves again and starts petting her between her ears. Her purr starts up once again, and she kneads her paws against the ground.
“Ok so this is really happening, I’m not dreaming. You’re real. Shit, I don’t remember… I saw this, I remember feeling your purr and your coat but…” Enid seems to relax against her. “Ugh, I can’t– I saw you transform I just can’t remember!” Enid stops petting her, and her hands move to cradle her head and move it so she’s looking up at the blonde. She looks into those intoxicating eyes and slowly blinks once more. “Who. Are you?”
Wednesday thumps her tail against the dirt and shifts, waiting for a second for Enid to lean away before rising to her paws and shaking herself. With a little chuff, she looks around for the sturdiest-looking tree and jumps, her claws digging into the bark like it’s made of foam. Once she’s halfway up, she looks down at Enid and blinks. Enid blinks back.
“Wednesday?” Wednesday mews, and lets her tail swish twice before she lets go and lands safely back on the ground. She retraces her steps to Enid and sits in front of her while the other girl makes her best impression of a fish out of water. That lasts for a few seconds before Enid huffs and shakes her head, a smile tugging at her lips. “You know what, that actually makes so much sense.”
Wednesday being a big ass cat makes incredible sense, now that she knows. The staring, the things on the floor, the grooming, the offerings –Enid is so incredibly thankful Wednesday didn’t offer dead animals like she’s heard some cats do–, the heights thing…
“Uhh… Enid?”
“Hmm?”
“What’s Wednesday doing?”
Enid looks up to where Yoko is pointing, a forkful of lettuce hovering over her plate. And there is Wednesday, up on the roof that overlooks the quad, staring down at them like a tyrannical overlord surveying her queendom.
“Oh, she’s just watching. Hey Willa!” she finger-waves at her girl when those dark eyes –so different from the silvery eyes she has when transformed– swing her way. Wednesday stares, and then blinks. Slowly. Enid returns it as best as she can, and the tiny shifter tilts her head to the side, staring for a few more seconds, before returning to watching the other students.
Enid giggles and raises her phone, snapping a picture that she immediately turns into her wallpaper. She goes back to her salad, completely ignoring the looks her friends are giving her.
They're just jealous of how cute her girlfriend is.