Hero of Woe

[Thegameaholic]

The keys of the Viper typewriter sat idle, a row of silver-rimmed teeth mocking Wednesday Addams from the shadows of her desk. For the past three hours, the silence in Ophelia Hall had been absolute, broken only by the rhythmic, agonizingly slow drip of rain against the stained-glass window.

On the floor lay the anatomy of her frustration. Sketches of claw marks, police reports stolen from Sheriff Galpin's desk, timeline charts smeared with dried black ink, and profiles of everyone at Nevermore Academy. Every lead was a phantom. Every theory was a decomposing corpse that refused to yield its secrets.

She was at a dead end. The Hyde was a ghost, a primal terror tearing through the woods of Jericho, and for the first time in her life, Wednesday's intellect had proven insufficient. Her mind, usually a finely tuned instrument of torment and deduction, was spinning its wheels in the mud.

She hated failure. It tasted like ash and cheap sugar. But more than failure, she hated desperation. Desperation was a weakness of the mundane, a flaw in the human machinery that she pridefully believed she had excised long ago.

Yet, here it was, tightening its cold fingers around her throat.

Slowly, her gaze drifted from the useless papers on the floor to the bottom drawer of her desk. It was locked, not with a standard key, but with a complex three-dial combination padlock she had rigged herself.

Wednesday knelt, her black skirts pooling around her like oil. She spun the dials—six, one, ten—and the lock clicked open with a sound that felt dangerously like a gunshot in the quiet room.

Deep within the velvet-lined drawer, resting beneath a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's darkest poetry, lay an anomaly.

An obsidian-black smartphone.

Wednesday despised modern technology. To her, social media was a toxic wasteland of manufactured validation, and smartphones were nothing more than digital shackles, ensuring that humanity remained a collective of blinkered, dopamine-addicted sheep. She had loudly and frequently declared herself above being a "slave to technology."

Yet, she had kept it.

She lifted the sleek device, its cold glass surface catching the dim moonlight filtering through the window. It felt heavy in her hand—not because of its components, but because of the ghosts it carried. It was a lifeline she had promised herself she would sever, an artifact from a chapter of her life she had desperately tried to cremate and bury in an unmarked grave.

She hadn't thrown it away. She couldn't. And that realization irritated her more than the Hyde case itself.

It had been months since she last saw his face. Months since she had abruptly packed her bags, cut off all contact, and vanished into the night, leaving behind nothing but a cold, clinical note that barely scraped the surface of the truth.

"Our association has reached its logical conclusion. Do not seek me out."

A lie. A beautifully constructed, cowardly lie.

Wednesday powered the device on. The screen flickered to life, its bright luminescence casting a harsh glow over her pale features. Her thumb hovered over the contact list. There was only one name saved in the device. One name that mattered.

Ben.

She closed her eyes, fighting back the sudden, violent assault of memory.

Ben Tennyson. The boy with the ridiculous green jacket, the chaotic lifestyle, and a watch that could rewrite the laws of biology. By all accounts of universal logic, they should have hated each other. He was loud, impulsive, excessively cheerful, and possessed an annoying habit of eating fries dipped in smoothies. He was a hero, a savior of worlds, blindingly bright.

And she was the dark, brooding eclipse that sought to swallow the light.

Yet, he had been perfect.

Wednesday opened her eyes, staring blankly at the screen. Her mind, treacherous as it was, drifted back to the quiet nights they had shared before everything fell apart. Ben was the only person who had ever looked into the abyss of her soul and simply waved back. He never shrank away from her macabre fascinations. When she spoke of medieval torture devices, he listened with genuine curiosity, sometimes offering technical critiques based on alien technology he'd encountered. When she refused to smile, he never told her she'd "look prettier" if she did; he simply found ways to make her eyes spark with that rare, dangerous amusement he loved so much.

He had accepted her entirely. He never made her feel like a freak, a monster, or an outcast. In a world full of people who feared her or wanted to fix her, Ben Tennyson had simply wanted to know her.

And that was exactly why she had destroyed it.

Wednesday's grip tightened on the phone until her knuckles turned translucent white. She would never admit it aloud—not to Thing, not to her mother, and certainly not to him—but she was a coward. A wretched, terrified coward.

She remembered the exact moment the panic had set in. They had been sitting on the roof of his vehicle, watching a thunderstorm roll across the horizon. Ben had reached over, slipping his warm, calloused hand into hers. He hadn't said anything. He didn't need to. In that quiet, electric moment, Wednesday had looked at him and realized, with a sickening jolt of absolute certainty, that she was entirely, irreversibly in love with him.

It wasn't just a fleeting infatuation. It was a terminal diagnosis. She looked at Ben and saw her future—a concept she had always despised. She realized that if anything ever happened to him, if he were to be erased by one of his cosmic enemies or lost to the dangers of his calling, it would completely destroy her. He held the power to shatter her, and she had willingly handed him the hammer.

She had never experienced emotions of that magnitude. It was foreign, invasive, and utterly terrifying. It threatened the carefully constructed fortress of her independence.

So, she did the only thing she knew how to do when faced with an enemy she couldn't outsmart or defeat.

She ran.

Since that day, a hollow ache had taken up residence in her chest. The silence of her life, which she used to cherish, now felt like an empty tomb. There were no more spontaneous trips, no more fierce arguments over his reckless tactics, and no more quiet, stolen moments where she would pull him down by his collar, kissing him with a desperate intensity, leaving dark, dramatic smudges of her signature black lipstick all over his lips and jawline. He used to wear those marks like a badge of honor, walking back into his grandfather's RV with a smirk, completely unbothered by the teasing he would inevitably receive.

Wednesday shook her head sharply, her dark braids whipping against her shoulders. Get your head out of the gutter, Addams, she scolded herself internally. You are investigating a series of gruesome murders, not reminiscing like a lovesick protagonist in a dreadful romance novel.

She forced her focus back to the present. The Hyde was still out there. People were dying. Her legacy, her safety, and the safety of Nevermore depended on solving this mystery. If anyone had the expertise to analyze a creature that defied conventional biology—a monster that shifted forms and left nothing but carnage in its wake—it was the boy who wore an encyclopedia of alien DNA on his wrist.

She needed an expert. She needed an ally.

She needed him.

Wednesday took a deep, steadying breath, feeling the cold air fill her lungs. Her thumb hovered over the green call icon. For a girl who had faced down ghouls, murderers, and the existential dread of high school, her heart was beating at a pathetic, frantic rhythm.

She pressed the button.

She lifted the phone to her ear. The line began to ring. Each tone felt like a heavy pendulum swinging in her chest, ticking down the seconds to her inevitable confrontation with the past.

Ring.

Would he even answer? It had been months. For all she knew, he had changed his number, moved to another galaxy, or finally listened to his cousin's advice and blocked her completely.

Ring.

Her fingers trembled slightly—a detail she noted with supreme self-disgust. If he answered, what would she even say? Hello, Benjamin. I know I abandoned you without an explanation, but I require your expertise on a local cryptid. It sounded clinical. Absurd.

Ring.

She was just about to pull the phone away and terminate the call, to accept defeat and consign herself to solving the Hyde case alone or dying in the attempt, when the ringing abruptly cut off.

The silence on the other end of the line was heavy, charged with an impossible amount of tension. Wednesday held her breath, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

For a long three seconds, neither of them spoke. The only sound was the faint, familiar background hum of an engine—the Rust Bucket. He was driving.

Then, a voice broke through the static. It was slightly deeper than she remembered, carrying a exhaustion that hadn't been there before, but it was unmistakably him.

"Wednesday?" Ben asked, his tone a fragile mix of disbelief, shock, and a deeply buried ache that made her chest tighten. "Is... is that really you?"

Wednesday swallowed the lump of glass in her throat, forcing her voice into its usual, unshakeable monotone, though her eyes remained wide in the darkness of her room.

"Hello, Benjamin," she said softly. "I require your assistance."
The silence stretched over the digital connection, thick and suffocating. Wednesday held the phone so tightly against her ear that the plastic casing creaked under the pressure of her fingers. On the other end, thousands of miles away, the faint, rhythmic rumble of the Rust Bucket's engine was the only indication that the line hadn't gone dead.

She didn't give him the chance to question her. She didn't allow him the luxury of asking why she had vanished into the shadows months ago, leaving nothing but an icy note that read like a coroner's report. Instead, she opened the floodgates of her grim ledger, letting the facts spill out in a low, cold torrent.

"There is a creature in the woods surrounding Nevermore Academy," Wednesday began, her voice steady, though her heart beat like a trapped crow against her ribs. "The locals call it a myth. The police call it a bear. They are both fools. It is an apex predator, a bipedal monstrosity with disproportionate limbs, clawed appendages capable of severing a human torso in a single swipe, and eyes... large, unblinking spheres that reflect no light. It leaves its victims in pieces, taking trophies from their corpses with surgical, yet primal, precision."

She paused, listening for a breath, a chuckle, or the sharp intake of air that usually accompanied a normal person's horror. There was nothing. Ben remained completely silent.

"Three weeks ago, a student named Rowan Lascelles attempted to murder me beneath the gargoyle of the quad," she continued, her descriptive tone sharpening. "He possessed a page torn from an ancient text—a prophecy, featuring a sketch of myself standing amidst the burning ruins of the school. Before he could finish the deed, the creature emerged from the treeline. It tore him apart before my eyes. It did not touch me. It left me alive in the blood-soaked dirt."

She paced the length of her room, her black oxfords clicking rhythmically against the hardwood floor. Thing watched her from the top of the wardrobe, his fingers twitching in anxious sympathy.

"The headmaster claims Rowan ran away. The sheriff claims he never existed on the records. But the visions do not lie. When I touch objects associated with the victims, my mind is subjected to violent, necrotic flashes. I see the world through a fractured lens. I see a master—a puppet master pulling the strings of this beast. It is a Hyde, Benjamin. A dormant monstrosity triggered by chemical hypnosis or psychological trauma. I am at a dead end. My intellect has hit a wall of institutional deception and ancient secrets. I require an expert in anomalous biology. I require you."

When she finally stopped speaking, the room felt colder. Wednesday stood by the stained-glass window, her gaze fixed on the dark, weeping canopy of the Nevermore woods. She braced herself.

She knew how the script was supposed to play out. She had studied the psychological architecture of human resentment. Ben had every right to turn her own weapons against her. She expected him to laugh bitterly. She expected him to demand an apology for the night she walked out of his life without a backward glance, leaving him with a fractured heart and a bedroom smelling of her bitter clove perfume. She expected him to scream, to vent the fury of a boy scorned, or worse—to simply hang up and consign her to the dark.

She waited for the blow. Her jaw set, her muscles tightening in anticipation of his anger.

"Give me thirty minutes," Ben said.

His voice wasn't angry. It wasn't bitter. It was quiet, grounded, and carrying a heavy, mature resonance that sent a strange, unfamiliar shiver down her spine. There was no hesitation, no petty demand for explanations, no conditions.

"I'm in upstate New York tracking a rogue Techadon dealer," Ben continued, the faint click of a seatbelt buckling audible through the receiver. "I need to clean up the camp, secure the perimeter, and set the Rust Bucket's autopilot. Then I'll fly over as Jetray. I'll be at your school before the rain stops."

Wednesday's breath hitched—a microscopic flaw in her armor that she prayed he didn't catch through the digital line. "You... you will come? Just like that? Without a single inquiry into my sudden and unceremonious departure from your life?"

A brief, heavy pause followed. When Ben spoke again, his voice softened, losing the battle-hardened edge of the intergalactic hero and returning to the boy who used to hold her hand in the dark.

"You called me, Wednesday," he said quietly. "If you're asking for help, it means you're in over your head. And no matter what happened between us... I'm not going to let you face a monster alone."

The line crackled with a low hum of static.

"It's really good to hear your voice again, Weds," he murmured.

Before she could formulate a response—before she could construct a suitably cold, detached retort to shield herself from the sudden warmth blooming in her chest—the line clicked.

He had hung up.

Wednesday slowly lowered the phone, her hand dropping to her side. The screen went black, reflecting her pale, wide-eyed expression back at her.

For the first time in her fifteen years of existence, Wednesday Addams felt the sickening, corrosive burn of guilt.

It was a thoroughly repulsive sensation. The Addams family wore grief like a fine silk shroud; they celebrated misery, danced in the rain of misfortune, and found comfort in the macabre. But guilt was different. Guilt was an admission of a moral failing. It was the realization that she had inflicted pain upon someone who had done nothing but offer her an unblemished, unconditional sanctuary.

He hadn't screamed at her. If he had raged, she could have handled it. She could have countered his anger with her own sharp-tongued cynicism, reducing their past to a tragic, inevitable mistake. But his kindness—his immediate, unhesitating willingness to fly across states to protect her—was a specialized form of torture she hadn't prepared for. He had countered her darkness with absolute grace, and it made her feel remarkably small.

"Thing," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

The severed hand scurried down the side of the wardrobe, landing on the desk with a soft thud. He tapped his fingers rapidly, his movements frantic with concern.

"He is coming," Wednesday murmured, her gaze returning to the storm outside. "He will be here in less than half an hour."

Thing tapped out a series of quick, teasing gestures. Are you going to fix your hair? Put on fresh lipstick?

"Be quiet," Wednesday snapped, though there was no real venom in her words. She turned away from the desk, her arms crossing over her chest as she began to pace the floor once more. "This is a strictly tactical alliance. Nothing more. We have a mutual interest in anomalous entities. Once the Hyde is identified, captured, or terminated, he will return to his nomadic lifestyle, and I will return to my writing."

She paused, her fingers digging into the fabric of her black cardigan.

"I must ensure that I do not fall victim to my own psychological frailties again," she whispered to the empty room. "I cannot fall in love with him a second time. It would be an exercise in utter self-destruction."

The next twenty-eight minutes were a masterclass in psychological torment. Wednesday sat perfectly still in her high-backed wooden chair, her eyes tracking the slow, agonizing sweep of the grandfather clock's pendulum.

Tick. Tock.

Every second felt like a drop of boiling oil on her skin. Her mind, usually so adept at compartmentalizing information, kept drifting away from the Hyde case file. Instead, it dragged her back to the summer nights in the Rust Bucket—the smell of motor oil and old vinyl, the sound of Ben's laughter when she successfully predicted the exact grim fate of a criminal they were pursuing, and the terrifying, intoxicating heat of his skin against hers.

She remembered the dark stains of her lipstick on his jaw, a visual brand that marked him as hers, a mark he wore with a ridiculous, triumphant grin.

She closed her eyes, her jaw tightening. Stop it, she commanded herself. He is a tool for the investigation. A living weapon with a cosmic wristwatch. Nothing more.

At exactly twenty-nine minutes and fifty seconds, a sudden, violent shift in the atmosphere occurred outside her window.

The heavy, rhythmic sound of the pouring rain was momentarily drowned out by a sharp, supersonic crack that rattled the glass panes of Ophelia Hall. A brilliant streak of emerald-green light cut through the heavy gray clouds, illuminated by the flash of distant lightning. It descended from the heavens with terrifying speed, banking sharply over the pointed turrets of Nevermore Academy before dropping toward the secluded balcony outside Wednesday's room.

Wednesday stood up, her movements fluid and deliberate. She walked toward the French doors, her breath catching in her throat as the green light intensified, followed by the distinctive, high-pitched chime of an evolutionary transformation cycle resetting.

The storm rumbled overhead, but as Wednesday pushed the doors open, her eyes locked onto the figure standing on the rain-slicked stone balcony.

The boy from her past had arrived.
idk why but i'm way too hooked on writing this story to focus on writing the dragon prince one lmao