Time & Tears
Wednesday ran through the front of the house and the vice squeezing the oxygen from her lungs immediately released when she saw Harry -
alive, well, and uninjured.
“What happened?” Enid asked, panting as she ran in the room behind Wednesday. “Oh, no, Tyler.”
Harry and Xavier were kneeling beside Tyler’s body. Tyler was laying in the middle of a destroyed table, a position where he could have landed if the monster took a swipe at him.
“When did you get here?” Wednesday asked Xavier, relatively unconcerned with Tyler. She saw his chest moving and Harry’s hands were hovering above his wounds. Wednesday couldn’t see Harry’s face, he had his back to her, but he could handle his love interest and Wednesday would handle the suspicious addition of one of her top suspects.
“Is that important right now?” Xavier demanded, barely sparing Wednesday a glare over his shoulder. “We need to call an ambulance, get Tyler to the hospital.”
“No! No hospital,” Harry snapped, a more firm and stern tone than Wednesday was used to hearing from him. It was a delight to hear Harry become more assertive, she had been hoping he would eventually discover his backbone.
Enid whimpered and grabbed Wednesday’s elbow, an allowance she granted given their propensity to death that evening.
“He looks really hurt,” Enid said, her entire body radiating panic. “Harry, he needs a doctor.”
“I think I can help him. Xavier, let go of him,” Harry ordered Xavier. The usual meek boy had all but disappeared and Wednesday moved closer to see Harry’s face to ensure that this confident boy was the same one who came to the manor with them.
It was. It was indisputably Harry. Nobody else could mimic the puffy look around his eyes or the tears staining his cheeks.
And nobody could mimic the blue light that radiated from Harry’s hands to Tyler’s cut chest, causing Tyler to gasp and open his eyes in an instant.
“Don’t move,” Harry told Tyler, lowering his voice to something more gentle and usual for him. “I don’t know how to heal those cuts… I- I just- I don’t know how…”
“H-Harry…” Tyler reached up and touched Harry’s face, leaving a little smear of his own blood on Harry’s cheek. “I’m sorry…”
Harry shook his head and scooted backward from Tyler, his face shockingly pale beneath his black and blue hair. The smear of blood beneath his eye stood out like pink would in Wednesday’s wardrobe.
“I can stitch him,” Wednesday offered, noting the tension between Harry and Tyler to look into later. She kept her face dispassionate when the other teenagers looked at her for her offer. “I’ve been stitching Pugsley’s injuries for years.”
She had also been causing those injuries, but that was hardly consequential in the moment.
“Why don’t we get out of here before that monster comes back and let Wednesday stitch Tyler up?” Enid said, her eyes flicking around the parlor they stood in nervously.
“My house,” Tyler said hoarsely. His bloodshot eyes were trained on Harry while Harry fixedly stared at the floor. “Xavier, can you drive?”
“Yeah.” Xavier reached in Tyler’s jeans pockets and pulled Tyler’s keys from inside of them. He wrapped an arm under Tyler’s shoulders and looked up to Harry. “Harry, help me out?”
“Harry,” Wednesday shook Harry’s shoulder when he didn’t respond. Harry shuddered and his breathing sounded uneven; it would be an incredibly poor time for a panic attack.
“What?” Harry looked up at Wednesday and she could see his eyes becoming glazed with unshed tears behind his glasses.
Wednesday attempted to focus on the relief she felt at seeing him uninjured and alive in order to push away her skin prickling with an impending hive outbreak.
“Forget it, I’ll do it,” Enid said beneath her breath. She rushed over and helped Xavier lift Tyler to his feet. The two of them began dragging the boy to his own car while Wednesday held an arm out, temporarily blocking Harry from leaving behind them.
“You’re not hurt?” Wednesday asked Harry.
Harry shook his head, his face still irritatingly pointed at the floor.
“What is your problem then?” Wednesday asked in a whisper. She didn’t have time to interpret Harry’s emotions, again. She needed to get to Tyler’s home, find his father, and bring him back to showcase the evidence.
Laurel Gates was alive, living in her old home, and was either the monster itself or involved enough to be collecting the organs from its victims. Laurel must have moved back, taken a new identity, and Wednesday knew who she was.
And Wednesday had the proof, finally.
“I…” Harry peeked up at Wednesday, his watery green eyes partially hidden beneath his bangs. “I- I don’t have a problem.”
Wednesday gripped Harry’s elbow and pulled him toward the door after the others impatiently.
“You have a stammer, that typically precedes a problem. Usually, emotional, in which case I urge you to utilize Enid for assistance,” Wednesday told him briskly, her mind elsewhere. “Come on, we have a monster to turn in.”
Harry’s surprise behavior hadn’t ended with his temporarily harsh voice, apparently. He ripped his elbow from Wednesday when she tried dragging him to Tyler’s car.
“I can’t,” he told Wednesday, his eyes drifting everywhere except toward the car. He backed up, shaking his head. “I- I gotta go, I’m sorry. I’ll see you later.”
Wednesday watched in shock as Harry turned on his heel and began running away.
“Wednesday! We have to go!” Enid yelled from the backseat of Tyler’s car. “Are you coming?”
It took two and a half seconds to decide- Wednesday could go stitch Tyler’s chest wounds and finally catch the monster and possibly even its accomplice, or she could chase after Harry and try to decipher his emotional morse code.
“Thing, follow Harry, make sure he gets back to school safely,” Wednesday ordered her obedient follower before climbing in Tyler’s car and riding to the Galpin home.
Harry would be fine, he clearly wanted to be alone.
*****
Harry ran through the woods blindly, his chest burning and his stomach churning. He stopped beside a tree and wrapped his arms around the trunk to bend over and heave until all the acid curdling inside of him was spilled out on the ground.
The monster… the monster that Wednesday was hunting…
It was Tyler.
Harry had been snogging the same monster that killed those townsfolk and stole their organs.
Another wave of nausea washed over Harry and he spit more bile on the ground when he realized that he’d been snogging the monster that attacked Sirius.
Tyler.
Harry replayed everything over and over - every interaction he had with Tyler and every interaction with the monster.
“So you’re free to go with me to the Harvest Festival this weekend?”
Tyler handing Harry the little green bear, a dimpled smile lighting up his face.
“Now we all have one…”
The monster in the woods, running instead of attacking Harry…
Harry making a face at the latte that Wendy never made right, Tyler laughing.
“I put caramel in yours when I make them, it changes the flavor some.”
The monster attacking Sirius when he moved in front of Harry, knocking him to a tree and disappearing before help arrived.
“I’m sorry, Harry, I’m so sorry.”
Tyler staring at Harry in his car, only a few minutes before their first kiss…
“You get it, don’t you?”
“Get what?”
“How it feels to wish that everything was different, that you could be free from everything. You get it, right?”
Yeah, Harry knew how it felt to wish everything was different, it was a feeling he was plagued with while he sunk to the ground, his arms wrapped around the tree trunk, and tried to think clearly.
Harry didn’t like to make decisions on his own, he didn’t trust himself, but he couldn’t take this to anyone else- not yet.
Tyler’s freedom depended on Harry’s decision, and it weighed like a ten stone weight on his chest.
*****
Wednesday slowly stitched Tyler’s wounds, using the last wisps of her patience to ignore the tears the dropped off his cheeks and landed on his torso, blurring the numbing cream she had applied to his skin.
Three single lacerations shouldn’t be causing such a scene of excessive emotions, so Wednesday mused that Tyler’s theatrics had the same cause as Harry’s.
“Sorry,” Tyler mumbled again, an apology that grated on Wednesday’s currently very raw nerves.
“It’s not your fault you got attacked,” Enid said in a rush, her voice shaky. “We never should have went there.”
“Then we wouldn’t have the evidence we now have in our hands,” Wednesday reminded her, her hand never wavering as it left rows of even stitches across Tyler’s chest.
“But then we’d have Harry,” Xavier pointed out. He was seated in a chair beside Tyler, occasionally giving him very masculine pats on the back when Wednesday pulled tightly on a stitch.
“What’s up with him anyway?” Enid asked. “He didn’t seem like himself.”
“It’s my fault,” Tyler said. He hissed loudly when Wednesday made her next stitch less than friendly. “Ouch! Watch it.”
“How did you upset Harry?” Wednesday asked lowly, prepared to drive the needle clear through Tyler’s chest if he had purposefully hurt Harry.
Even if injured emotions didn’t truly count to Wednesday as a wrongdoing, they clearly did to Harry and his never ending depth of ‘feelings’.
Tyler took a deep breath and Wednesday’s hand paused until he relaxed once more so she could continue her stitches.
“I- we- it was your fault,” Tyler unexpectedly huffed at Wednesday. “Harry and I were supposed to talk and then you made him bring you along and ruined everything!”
Wednesday raised a brow without looking away from her work.
“An odd time to yell at me, considering I’m stitching your wounds,” Wednesday said drily. “Please, continue to berate me while I decide which artery this needle will look the best sticking out of.”
“It’s Harry, you know how he is,” Xavier murmured to Tyler when he wisely decided to hold back his comments about Wednesday somehow being the root cause of Harry’s discomfort.
“He’ll come around, let you apologize,” Xavier went on in a low and reassuring tone to his apparent friend. “It’ll be fine. He probably just needed some time to chill.”
“Yeah,” Tyler agreed shakily. He clenched at his hair with both hand, tending the muscles beneath Wednesday’s hand. “It’ll be fine…”
Wednesday had just placed her final stitch when the front door of Tyler’s house opened with a bang and Sheriff Galpin arrived home.
“Tyler?” he said, rushing toward his son when he caught sight of the injury. “What the hell happened??”
“I’m fine, Dad,” Tyler sighed. “It’s just a scratch.”
“It’s three 1/8 of an inch deep lacerations,” Wednesday said factually. “Hardly a scratch, but there are more important things you need to deal with, Sheriff.”
“I should have known you were involved, Addams,” Galpin said with a snarl. “I told you to stay out of this investigation and now you’ve gotten my son attacked by some damn outcast creep!”
“I’m not the cause for your son’s attack,” Wednesday said. “But if you’ll drive out to Gates Manor, I can give you evidence of the attacks and a blood sample of the monster.”
“You have a blood sample?” Tyler asked her. He snatched a tshirt from what seemed to be a pile of unfolded laundry and pulled it on. “How?”
“From the monster’s lair before someone tried to burn me alive,” Enid told him. Clearly Wednesday had been rubbing off on her, because the girl sounded entirely too smug about the assassination attempt.
“And your friend will support my story the instant he wakes up,” Wednesday told Galpin. “All you have to do is come see the evidence for yourself.”
Sheriff Galpin pointed at Wednesday and glared. “If you’re lying, Addams, I’ll have your ass dropped right back off at your school and unable to leave it again, understood?”
“Perfectly.”
When Wednesday, Enid, Xavier, and Sheriff Galpin arrived back at Gates Manor though, all her evidence was gone.
“It was here!” Wednesday said. She spun around the emptied basement in furious shock. “It was all just here!”
The car in the garage, gone.
The jars in the basement, gone.
The flowers in Laurel’s room, gone.
The monster or it’s accomplice worked quick.
And it was the final nail in their coffins- nobody made Wednesday Addams look like a liar.
Nobody.
*****
Harry hid outside Tyler’s house and watched when Wednesday, Xavier, and Enid climbed in the sheriff car. As soon as the car disappeared down the road, Harry steadied himself with a deep breath and crossed over to the porch.
Another deep breath, a quick and light knock on the door before Harry tucked his shaking hands in his pockets.
It took almost an entire minute, but eventually the door opened and Harry was staring directly into the obviously miserable face of Tyler.
Tyler’s eyes were grey - so grey - and swollen. Harry imagined they had the same red lines lining their eyes; he knew he’d rarely ever felt so miserable before in his life.
“You’re- you’re here,” Tyler said, sounding surprised.
“Yeah,” Harry nodded and forced himself to hold Tyler’s gaze . “I’m here.”
Tyler’s face twisted with what seemed to be a spasm of pain.
“In what capacity?” he asked Harry, his voice low and rough. “My boyfriend or my executioner?”
One last deep breath and Harry knew he had to do what was probably the most uncomfortable task he’d ever done before.
“I’m here to ask you some questions.”