Chapter Text
#
Tyler Galpin was six and small for his age — the kind that made adults pat him on the head and say things like “you’ll grow into it.” His curls refused to stay brushed no matter how many times his mother tried to tame them into submission, springing rebelliously in every direction the moment she turned her back. Still, he had stayed as still as a statue while she buttoned him into his nicest Sunday clothes — the stiff collared shirt that itched his neck, the little gray vest he despised, the polished shoes that pinched at his toes. All for some big family get-together at his uncle’s house.
He wasn’t sure why it was supposed to be such a big deal. His father and Uncle Isaac rarely saw eye to eye. Dinners here usually started late, ended early, and spent the hours in between steeped in a kind of grown-up tension Tyler didn’t have a name for — sharp and invisible, like lightning in the air before a storm. He had learned long ago how to survive these occasions: stay quiet, stay still, stay out of the way until it was time to go home.
This time, though, the house felt different.
There were more coats hung on the brass stand by the door, more shoes lined neatly along the wall. The big dining room table — a piece of furniture that looked like it had once belonged to a castle — was set for more people than Tyler could count on both hands. And from somewhere deeper in the house came the sound of voices he didn’t recognize — rich, lilting, strange voices, speaking words that rolled off their tongues like secrets.
Uncle Isaac had married Aunt Ophelia several years ago, but Tyler had never met any of her family before. Apparently, tonight was the night. His mother had spent the entire drive here reminding him to mind his manners and be on his best behavior and not to comment on anything unusual, which Tyler found deeply unfair. What if they were unusual? What if they were the sort of people who liked snakes or wore cloaks or collected human skulls like the stories his classmates told about old houses on the hill?
He didn’t want to find out.
So Tyler did what he did best under such circumstances: he vanished.
It wasn’t difficult. The tablecloth draped nearly to the floor, a heavy velvet curtain hiding the shadowed world beneath. It smelled faintly of wood polish and cloves down there, and the muted light from the candles above spilled through the fabric in thin, golden threads. Tyler wriggled into a corner, tucked his knees up to his chest, and clutched his favorite toy knight — its lance bent, its shield chipped from too many adventures — close to his chest.
It was quiet under the table. Safe.
Above him, the adults’ voices rose and fell in polite conversation, laughter punctuating sentences he couldn’t quite make out. Platters clinked, chairs scraped against the polished floors, and every so often the sound of unfamiliar names floated down to him. Addams. Morticia. Gomez. Pugsley. Each one stranger than the last.
Tyler sighed and let his eyes trace the intricate carvings along the underside of the table, trying not to think about how long this night would drag on. If he was lucky, no one would notice him until dessert. If he was really lucky, he could make it through the entire dinner without anyone expecting him to talk to some weird cousin twice removed about his grades or how much he’d grown.
But luck, as he would soon learn, had never been on his side — and hiding under tables had never saved anyone from the sort of girl who would find him there.
That was when he saw a pair of small black boots stop in front of him.
He froze. The boots did not move. They tapped once — deliberate, unimpressed. Then a girl crouched down to his level, lowering herself into the gloom beneath the tablecloth as if entering a new world. She was pale — unsettlingly so — and the candlelight above painted shadows across the sharp little angles of her face. Her eyes were dark and fathomless, studying him as though she were deciding what species he might be.
That was the first time he met Wednesday Addams.
“You’re hiding,” she said, not as a question but as a statement of fact.
Tyler’s throat went dry. “N-No, I’m just—”
“You’re trembling,” she added. “Like a rabbit. Or a boy about to be devoured.”
His breath caught. “Devoured?”
She tilted her head, unblinking. “It’s a distinct possibility with my relatives.”
Something in her tone made it impossible to tell if she was joking. Tyler pressed his back against the heavy table leg, gripping the broken knight tighter. “I—I should go.”
“Should you?” she asked, sliding closer on her knees until she was directly across from him. “Or will you stay and accept your fate?”
“My… fate?”
“Me,” she said, with a small knowing look that made her seem older than she was. “I’m Wednesday.”
It was the first time anyone had ever introduced themselves to him like a threat.
“I’m Tyler,” he whispered, unsure whether speaking would hasten his doom.
“I know,” she replied, as if she had always known. Then her gaze flicked to the ruined toy clutched in his hands. “You broke him.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Tyler said quickly. “It just— fell.”
Wednesday extended a hand. “Let me see.”
He hesitated, but something about the way she looked at him — steady, expectant, commanding — made it impossible to refuse. He placed the knight into her pale palm.
She turned it over carefully, her thin fingers surprisingly gentle. “It isn’t ruined,” she pronounced after a moment. “Merely wounded.”
“I can’t fix it,” Tyler said, cheeks hot with embarrassment.
“I can,” she said, pulling something from the pocket of her black dress. A thin length of wire, coiled like a snake. “Hold him still.”
Tyler did as he was told, mesmerized as she threaded the wire through the toy’s broken arm joint, twisting it with quick, precise motions. “Where did you learn that?” he asked, voice small.
“My Uncle Fester,” she said. “He once reattached a toy vulture’s wing with a spoon and a paperclip. This is child’s play.”
She gave the arm a final twist and handed the knight back to him. The arm held. The toy stood.
Tyler stared, astonished. “You fixed it.”
“Obviously.”
“Thank you,” he said, grinning in spite of himself.
Wednesday regarded him coolly, as if gratitude were an unfamiliar language. “You’re welcome,” she allowed at last. Then, after a pause, “I could have replaced the head with a fake beetle carapace instead. It would have been an improvement.”
Tyler blinked. “A beetle?”
“They’re much sturdier than human knights,” she explained. “And considerably more loyal. I like arachnids. I have a pet scorpion at home, but Mother didn’t let me bring him.”
He laughed then — an unsteady, surprised sound — and Wednesday’s lips curved, just slightly, at the edges.
She had frightened him — but she had also fixed what was broken.
Tyler turned the toy over in his hands, tracing the place where she had pieced it back together. A little while ago, he’d been chewing his lip and clutching the broken knight like a lifeline, certain that the very presence of all these dark, strange people might swallow him whole. Now, with her sitting beside him, that fear seemed to shrink, small enough to breathe around. Her dark braids framed a face that already wore solemnity like a crown. There was a glint in her eyes — one he would come to recognize as a peculiar Addams mixture of morbid curiosity and unyielding boldness — and Tyler found it difficult to look anywhere else.
So they sat together in companionable silence beneath the banquet table, Tyler testing the miracle in his hands, and Wednesday observing him the way a scientist might study a curious specimen. Above them, adults laughed too loudly and clinked their glasses, oblivious to the small, secret world forming beneath their knees.
It might have stayed that way — quiet and still — if not for the sudden thud and a pair of grubby hands wrenching up the edge of the tablecloth.
“Wednesday!” Pugsley’s round face appeared upside down, his hair sticking up at odd angles and his shirt stained with something suspiciously red. “I caught a rat! Want to see?”
“No,” she said flatly.
“It’s still twitching!” he added with delight, shoving a small, wriggling burlap sack into her lap.
Tyler yelped and scrambled backward, colliding with the table leg. Wednesday sighed — a long-suffering sound far too ancient for a six-year-old — and pushed the sack away with one pale finger.
“Pugsley, remove yourself from my presence.”
He blinked. “But—”
“Now.”
“But—”
“Or I will tell Mother about the frog in your pocket.”
Pugsley gasped and clutched at his trousers protectively. “You promised you wouldn’t!”
“I lied.” Wednesday’s tone was serene. “Go.”
He huffed and stomped away, muttering something about sisters being boring and ungrateful. The rat sack thumped against the floor as he left it behind.
Wednesday kicked it aside.
“I hate him,” she muttered darkly.
Tyler, still wide-eyed from the rat incident, blinked. “He’s your brother.”
“Unfortunately.”
“He just wants to play.”
“So does a guillotine,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I want to spend the evening with one — although the prospect of that is infinitely more appealing than spending the evening with my addled brained younger brother.”
Tyler stifled a laugh — the kind that started as a nervous hiccup but grew into something real. “You’re really weird.”
“Thank you,” Wednesday said again, and this time he realized it was always meant as a compliment.
The room above them swelled with the sound of a toast, glasses chiming and voices rising. Tyler peered toward the gap in the tablecloth. “Do you think they’ll notice if we take the big one with the jam?” Tyler whispered, pointing at the heaping dessert tray just visible through the gap in the tablecloth.
“They won’t,” Wednesday said with absolute confidence. “And if they do, they’ll assume it was Pugsley. He’s always guilty of something.”
She crawled out from beneath the table without hesitation, her little boots silent on the parquet floor, and returned moments later with two shortbread cookies and a silver spoon she had stolen purely for the thrill. Tyler gaped at her audacity.
“You’re not supposed to—”
“That’s the point,” she interrupted, handing him a cookie. “Rules are meant to be questioned. Or broken. Or rewritten entirely.”
Tyler bit into the jam-filled cookie, eyes wide and delighted. “You’re kind of kooky.”
“I prefer spooky,” she replied primly. “And that’s the second time you’ve used flattery on me.”
“It is?”
“C’mon, let’s go. I want to climb the roof.”
“The roof?”
“Stop repeating everything I say or I’ll put a curse on you. Now, move.”
It was Tyler’s turn then. Feeling suddenly braver — perhaps it was the sugar, or the way Wednesday looked at him like he was something worth noticing — but Tyler scrambled after her, nearly tripping over the rat sack in his haste. They slipped through the edge of the dining room and into the corridor beyond — a hallway lined with dusty portraits and sconces shaped like skeletal hands. It was ridiculous, he knew — climbing a roof in his good shirt, in the dark, in a house that didn’t belong to him. But something in her tone made refusal impossible.
So he followed.
They climbed a narrow servants’ stair, then another, then crawled through a window onto a sloped expanse of slate tiles slick with moonlight. Tyler’s heart pounded in his chest, every instinct screaming that this was a very bad idea. Wednesday, of course, was already halfway up the incline, balanced with infuriating ease.
“Come on,” she called down to him. “Are you scared?”
He swallowed hard and scrambled upward. His knees scraped on rough stone, his palms burned, but he didn’t stop — not until he was standing beside her at the crest of the roof.
The view stretched endlessly before them — the shadowy sprawl of the Addams estate, the dark woods beyond, and above them a sky splintered with stars.
Tyler was breathless. “It’s— beautiful.”
“It’s high and dark,” she corrected. “Which is better.”
They stood there, shoulder to shoulder, the night wind tugging at their clothes and the faint sounds of the party muffled below. Tyler glanced at her — this strange, unsettling girl who had terrified him, fixed his toy, defied gravity, and dragged him right along with her.
“Thank you,” he said, though he wasn’t sure what he was thanking her for — the toy, the view, or the sudden, exhilarating feeling that the world might be much bigger than he’d ever thought.
Wednesday didn’t reply, but her mouth twitched — just barely — at the corners.
And somewhere far below, Pugsley’s angry shriek echoed through the halls as his rat escaped its sack, but up here, none of it mattered. Up here, they were conspirators. Explorers. Perhaps even instant friends. The damage was done — or perhaps the miracle. Something wordless had bound them there beneath the table and on the trembling climb upward: a fragile alliance of curiosity and courage, daring and delight. And he, breathless and fascinated, realized he wanted to follow her anywhere.
But before they were anything else, let it be marked that they were friends.
#
They didn’t grow up side by side. They grew up in snatches — stolen moments and borrowed whispers, measured not in seasons but in the few precious days their families spent together each year after Isaac Night married Ophelia Frump. They were the kind of friends whose lives ran on parallel tracks most of the time, intersecting only briefly and brilliantly before diverging again.
The Addamses lived far away, tucked deep within the wild woods of New Jersey, in a sprawling house that Wednesday told him was all crooked spires and ivy-choked balconies, black-iron gates that creaked like old bones. It was a place steeped in stories and secrets, where the ordinary was regarded with suspicion and the macabre with reverence.
Tyler’s world was smaller. Quieter. Jericho was a sleepy town with clapboard houses, church steeples, and maple trees that exploded into crimson every autumn. The biggest excitement of the year was the fall fair, where everyone knew everyone and where nothing ever really changed. His father’s steady presence as the sheriff’s deputy made Tyler well-liked, even popular. He spent his school days riding bikes down tree-lined streets and his weekends exploring the woods behind his house with his best friend, Lucas — the sheriff’s son, and the kind of boy who was always daring Tyler to go faster, climb higher, jump farther.
There was one strange thing about Jericho, though — a looming, gothic school perched just beyond the town’s edge. Nevermore Academy, they called it. A place for “outcasts,” though no one ever explained what that really meant. Tyler’s father said to stay away from it, and so they did, mostly. But sometimes, Tyler would pause his bike on the dirt path just far enough to see its pointed roofs rising over the treeline, wondering what sort of people lived and learned there.
Once a year, his ordinary maple-scented life collided with Wednesday’s extraordinary one. Those meetings were always strange in the best possible ways. They were heralded by a letter sealed in black wax or a phone call from his Uncle Isaac saying, “They’ll be here by dusk.” They began with a long drive down a winding road or the first sight of the Addams hearse pulling into the gravel driveway. They began with Pugsley terrorizing the dog and Morticia sweeping into the room like a dark comet.
But most of all, they began with Wednesday.
Sometimes she appeared silently at his side, as if she’d materialized from the shadows. Other times, she marched right up to him and announced, “I have plans.” Plans that involved graveyards or rooftops or frog dissections or challenges that made Lucas shake his head and call them both weird. And every time, the collision of their two worlds — Jericho’s simple rhythms and the Addamses’ delicious strangeness — created something electric. Like two elements that should never meet, and yet, when they did, they sparked.
When they met that third summer in the overgrown orchard behind the Night estate, Tyler had brought a magnifying glass and a notebook — “for science,” he said earnestly — while Wednesday had brought a rope and a shovel — “for something far more interesting.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked, peering at a patch of earth that had once been an unmarked graveyard.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Dad says most strange things have simple explanations.”
“Then your father lacks imagination.”
The following year, they turned the Night estate into their personal kingdom. Wednesday led, of course — devising elaborate schemes to booby-trap the greenhouse, where Pugsley had threatened to steal her pet scorpion (and had greatly suffered for even daring the threat), and they staged a mock trial in the wine cellar where Tyler was the prosecutor, and Wednesday the judge, jury, and executioner. They were caught before the sentence could be carried out.
The summer he turned ten, Tyler arrived quieter. He still smiled when he saw her waiting by the wrought-iron gate — still let her drag him into another scheme involving grave rubbings and fake séances — but something was different.
His mother hadn’t come this year.
“She’s tired,” he said when Wednesday asked, his voice too casual. “Just resting.”
Wednesday didn’t press. But later, when they were sitting on the roof of the carriage house watching fireflies blink across the lawn, she asked softly, “Are you frightened?”
Tyler stared at his hands. “I don’t want her to be sick.”
“She’s still your mother,” Wednesday said after a moment. “Illness doesn’t change that. My Grandmama says death is just another room. Illness is only the hallway.”
It wasn’t comforting in the usual sense — not soft or sugar-coated the way adults tried to be when they spoke to him about his mother. But that was exactly why Tyler’s throat felt tight all of a sudden. Because at least Wednesday wasn’t lying to him.
Everyone else was.
They said things like “She just needs rest.” Or “She’ll feel better soon.” They spoke as though his mother were recovering from a cold, as if weeks spent in sterile rooms were nothing worth worrying about. His father was the worst of them all — he wouldn’t even say the word sick. He dodged questions, changed the subject, ruffled Tyler’s hair and promised “She’ll be home before you know it.”
But Tyler wasn’t stupid. He noticed the way the house grew quieter each time she was admitted, as though even the walls were holding their breath. He noticed the dark crescents under his father’s eyes, the smell of burnt coffee in the kitchen every morning that seemed to mix with the smell of alcohol, the way grown-ups lowered their voices when they thought he wasn’t listening. He didn’t understand the words — “progressive,” “degenerative,”— but he could feel their weight in the room like a storm cloud waiting to break.
And now, sitting on the carriage-house roof with Wednesday beside him and the night air cool against his face, he felt something shift deep in his chest. Because here was someone who didn’t pretend. Who didn’t hide the truth behind a smile or a promise.
He looked over at her. She was pale in the moonlight, her knees drawn up beneath her black skirt, her dark eyes steady and unflinching. There was no pity in them — only recognition, as if she understood that some things were too heavy to be wrapped in cheerful lies.
“It’s bad,” he whispered, and the words sounded small, but they were the truest ones he’d spoken in months.
“I know,” she said simply.
“She doesn’t… she doesn’t get better anymore. Not really.”
“Some things don’t.” Wednesday tilted her head slightly, the faintest crease in her brow. “But the hallway is still part of the house. And you are still walking it with her.”
He frowned, turning the metaphor over in his mind. “What happens when she reaches the room?”
Wednesday was silent for a long time, the night sounds filling the space between them — crickets, distant wind, the soft rustle of leaves. Finally, she spoke. “Then she’ll cross there and wait for you. Maybe you will knock on the door sometimes. And sometimes you will think you hear her on the other side. And maybe she will hear you. Maybe she’ll be waiting for you on the other side.”
Tyler swallowed hard. It wasn’t a promise. It wasn’t false hope. But it felt real in ways that others words hadn’t.
He didn’t say anything else after that. They just sat there together, two small silhouettes on the edge of a roof under a sky full of stars. The silence wasn’t empty. It was steady, anchoring — a kind of companionship that didn’t need words.
He wrote her letters after that visit — shy, halting ones at first, each sentence crossed out and rewritten until his handwriting looked more like a battlefield than a note. Sometimes he told her about school or about Lucas’s latest harebrained idea. Sometimes he described the woods near his house and the creek where they used to race bikes after the rain. And sometimes, when he was feeling brave, he told her about his mother — not the version the adults talked about in clipped phrases and forced smiles, but the real version: how the house felt too quiet without her, how her perfume lingered on the hallway rug, how some nights he dreamed she was better and woke up angry that she wasn’t.
Wednesday always wrote back.
Her letters came on thick parchment, folded with surgical precision, sealed in black wax and addressed in careful, looping script. They were never long — sometimes no more than three or four sentences — but they were always unmistakably her. Each one carried a dark pressed flower tucked inside, brittle and black, or a coded riddle scrawled in the margins that took Tyler hours to decipher. She quoted dead poets and Victorian poisoners, compared Jericho’s maple trees to gallows, and once sent him a page of hand-drawn diagrams showing how to build a functional guillotine out of kitchen utensils.
It became their ritual — letters passed like secret messages, their worlds stitched together by ink and paper.
One spring, a letter arrived unlike any of the others. The wax was darker, glossier, and her handwriting sharper than usual, as though it had been carved instead of written.
“I am in mourning,” it read. “Nero is dead.” Nero, he realized after reading twice, her pet scorpion — the one she had shown him once during a visit, perched proudly on her shoulder like a macabre little sentinel. “He met his end at the hands of cretins who believed themselves immune to retribution. They will learn otherwise.”
Tyler stared at the page for a long time. He wasn’t sure what one was supposed to say when someone’s scorpion died. He chewed the end of his pencil and started and stopped three drafts before settling on the only thing that felt honest: “I’m sorry about Nero. That wasn’t right. If I’d been there, I’d have beaten up the boys who did it.”
He sealed it before he could second-guess himself, certain she’d roll her eyes at the clumsy offer. But her reply came days later, brisk and characteristically unsentimental: “Your services are not required. I have already exacted my revenge. But it pleases me to know you would have dirtied your hands for me.”
Tyler read that sentence over and over again, until he’d practically memorized it. There was something about the way she phrased it — not thank you (Wednesday Addams never thanked anyone) but something better, something that made his chest feel a little less heavy.
He didn’t know how to explain it, but it mattered — that she’d told him, that she’d let him in. And it mattered even more that she hadn’t laughed at the idea of him standing up for her.
It was a strange kind of friendship — black wax and dead flowers, scorpion obituaries and guillotine sketches — but it was theirs. And as the hospital stays grew longer and the nights grew quieter back home, those letters became Tyler’s anchor. He carried them in a bundle tied with string, tucked beneath a loose floorboard in his room. On the worst days, when his father was silent and settling into his chair with a half-drunk bottle of whiskey that made its way towards empty by the end of the night, and the house felt too big and too empty, he would unfold them and read them again — the pressed flowers brittle beneath his fingertips, the words steady and strange and entirely hers.
And for a boy whose world felt like it was slowly falling apart, Wednesday Addams’s letters were proof that something — someone — was still holding on.
#
The next summer, she didn’t tease him about the dark circles under his eyes or the way his hands fidgeted. She didn’t make jokes about mortality or dare him to do anything reckless.
Instead, she brought books.
They spent long afternoons sitting cross-legged on the parlor floor, reading aloud to each other — Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Poe and Shelley and a stack of obscure Addams family journals she swore were “more accurate than most medical textbooks.” That’s when he really learned about outcasts. That’s when he actually finally started to understand his uncle’s strange abilities to lift things and move them about, how Pugsley could shock him with his fingers, how the world saw people like the Addams family as other. His father certainly didn’t like their kind, and for some specific reason he especially hated Wednesday’s father. Not that his mother ever let that stop Tyler from hanging out with Wednesday — and his father always gave in to whatever his mother wanted, at the end.
Sometimes, when Tyler went quiet, Wednesday didn’t fill the silence. She just sat beside him until he spoke.
Once, late one night, she said quietly, “You may write to me if things get worse.”
“They’re already worse,” he whispered.
“Then write to me more.”
#
The next time he saw her, there were no games. No orchard, no schemes, no secret worlds under the table. The church smelled like lilies and rain, and Tyler’s shoes were too tight. He hadn’t spoken much in days. People kept telling him how “strong” he was being, and he hated every word of it. He didn’t feel strong. He felt hollow — like someone had scooped everything out and left a trembling shell behind.
He almost didn’t notice her at first, standing in the back row in a black dress too formal for a girl her age. The Addamses had driven up from New Jersey that morning, and though they’d offered to sit with his family, Wednesday had quietly slipped away from the cluster of adults and approached him where he sat on the steps outside.
“You didn’t answer my last letter,” she said.
“I didn’t know what to say.”
“‘I am sad’ would have sufficed.”
He huffed a broken breath — almost a laugh, but not quite. “I miss her.”
“I know,” she said. “You always will.”
For a moment, neither spoke. Rain drizzled softly on the church lawn, and the bells tolled in the distance. Then Wednesday reached into her pocket and produced a folded scrap of paper. It was a page torn from one of their shared books, a single line underlined twice: “Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.” — Thomas Gray
“She isn’t gone,” Wednesday said. “She’s just in another room.”
Tyler swallowed hard. “The hallway,” he murmured, remembering.
Wednesday nodded.
And then — carefully, awkwardly — she sat down beside him on the wet steps. They didn’t talk after that. They just sat there in silence, shoulder to shoulder, while the rain pattered softly on their black shoes. It was the first time he realized that friendship could be more than laughter and dares.
It could be a hand held steady in the dark.
#