Chapter: The Fracture of Control
The dorm room was quiet.
Too quiet for her liking.
Wednesday Addams sat at her desk, quill poised above paper, the candle beside her guttering in defiance of the wind sneaking through the cracked window. Enid had gone to sleep hours ago, curled in her pastel cocoon of blankets. The room still smelled faintly of her lavender shampoo, something Wednesday never admitted she tolerated.
The candlelight painted the pages of her journal in gold and shadow, each stroke of ink a confession she would never read aloud. She'd tried to write something coherent — anything — but the words wouldn't come. Every line turned into something else. Every thought circled back to him.
Toji Frump.
{Do you think l should change the name to zenin. I had plan to change it after his backstory but you guys are impatient}
She hated the sound of his name in her head.
.Too sharp, too heavy, like the strike of steel on bone. Yet her mind whispered it with the rhythm of her heartbeat.
Unacceptable.
Wednesday set down the quill and exhaled slowly, almost deliberately, as though breathing could reset her mind. But it didn't. She stared at the page she'd been writing on and froze.
A sketch.
Not words.
Her hand, without permission, had drawn him.
Not just a vague silhouette or idle doodle. No — the ink bled into a precise portrait: Toji standing with his usual calm, eyes cold yet alive, that infuriating half-smile tugging at his mouth. She had captured him too well. The scar near his lip. The way his collar hung slightly open, careless. The shadows that seemed to cling to him like old sins.
Wednesday stared at the drawing as if it had betrayed her.
She dropped the quill. It rolled across the desk, leaving a smear of black like spilled thoughts. Her pulse rose, slow but certain, pounding in her ears.
This couldn't be happening. She was Wednesday Addams. Logic made flesh. Emotion tamed into obedience. Love — or anything resembling it — was a disease, and she had always considered herself immune.
And yet…
She reached for the sketch before she could stop herself. Her fingers brushed the paper, and something inside her shifted — a faint, almost imperceptible ache, the kind that comes from touching something forbidden.
She had fought monsters, stared into blood, danced with ghosts. None of that unsettled her. But this… this uninvited warmth that wrapped itself around her composure? It terrified her.
You've lost control.
The thought was hers, but it sounded like someone else whispering it — maybe her mother, maybe herself from a cleaner past.
Her throat tightened. Control was her identity. She did not lose control. She dissected it, catalogued it, broke it into manageable pieces. But here she was, trembling like an ordinary girl who'd glimpsed something she couldn't explain.
She tore her eyes from the sketch, forced herself to stand. The motion felt mechanical. The room spun around her — books, candles, shadows. Everything seemed smaller now, as though the walls were closing in to mock her failure.
Wednesday turned toward the window. The moon hung high above Nevermore, pale and pitiless. Somewhere below, the forest shifted, alive with unseen things. Maybe he was out there now — Toji, doing whatever men like him did when the night had teeth. Fighting, bleeding, surviving.
A part of her wanted to know where he was.
A smaller, more dangerous part wanted to go find him.
She gritted her teeth.
"This is pathetic," she muttered under her breath. Her voice was low, but the disgust in it was real.
Her hand, still trembling, reached for the sketch. She stared at the lines again — the way her own pen had betrayed her discipline to capture him so vividly. Even the shading around his eyes carried emotion she swore she didn't feel.
It had to go.
Wednesday grabbed the page and tore it clean from her journal. The sound was louder than it should have been — a sharp rip that echoed through the quiet room. Enid stirred but didn't wake.
Wednesday held the torn page over the candle flame.
For a moment, the fire hesitated, as if even it questioned her resolve. Then the corner caught, curling black, and the heat licked at her fingers. The sketch darkened, wrinkled, then turned to ash.
She didn't flinch.
She watched as the last of it burned away, the ashes rising and drifting across her desk. One piece landed near her hand, a fragment of his eye — still recognizable before it crumbled.
Her lips pressed into a thin line.
"Never again," she whispered.
The words were not a promise. They were an exorcism.
She leaned back in her chair, letting the last of the smoke fade into the ceiling. Her chest felt tight, her stomach hollow — the aftertaste of emotion she refused to name.
But the silence that followed was worse.
Because even now, even after burning him, her mind refused to let him go.
Images flickered behind her eyelids:
Toji standing in the courtyard, arms crossed, faintly smirking as she threatened him with her usual verbal knives.
Toji's voice, low and calm, cutting through her sarcasm with terrifying ease.
Toji's eyes the night of the fight — cold fire, violence restrained by willpower that mirrored her own.
The problem wasn't just that she'd grown used to him. It was that he understood her in ways that others didn't. He didn't fear her silence, didn't flinch at her words. He met her cruelty with composure, her logic with indifference, her darkness with his own.
He wasn't light to her shadow. He was reflection.
And that was intolerable.
Wednesday clenched her jaw. Emotion was weakness, and weakness was death. She had written those words a hundred times in her journal — sometimes for comfort, sometimes as a warning. Tonight, they felt like both.
She moved to the mirror. The candle behind her made her reflection shimmer like something half-alive.
Her face was pale as ever, expression calm, unreadable. But the eyes — her eyes betrayed her. There was something in them she hadn't seen before. Not fear. Not sadness.
Longing.
The realization hit her like a blade. She gripped the edge of the desk, nails digging into the wood.
"No," she whispered. "Not me."
She wanted to erase him from her thoughts, to stitch the hole he'd made in her control. But every attempt only deepened the wound.
Her mind replayed their conversations like scenes in a cursed play. The way he'd looked at her — not as a curiosity, not as a girl to analyze, but as something equal. The only man who had ever treated her intellect and darkness as normal.
He hadn't tried to change her.
He hadn't feared her.
And that, somehow, made her afraid.
Because if someone could stand in her storm and not flinch — what did that make him?
And what did that make her?
She closed her eyes. Behind them, Toji's voice echoed faintly, words from their last conversation — dry, teasing, precise:
"You look at people like puzzles. Maybe you're afraid one day someone will solve you."
He'd said it casually, almost mockingly. But now it echoed like prophecy.
"Arrogant bastard," she muttered.
Her hand brushed the candle flame again, just enough to sting. She needed the pain — something real, something that reminded her she was still in control. The skin reddened, but she didn't move away.
Slowly, she sat down again. Opened a fresh page. Wrote:
> "Attachment is corrosion. It erodes the self, blurring purpose with comfort. I am not built for comfort."
She underlined it twice. The letters bled darker, more deliberate.
For a long while, that was all she did — write sentences that sounded like armor.
But even armor has cracks.
Between the lines, her hand faltered once, just once, writing something she didn't mean to.
> "He makes silence feel safe."
She stared at the words, then scratched them out violently until the paper tore.
"Done," she said aloud, as though speaking it made it real.
The candle flickered in approval, or mockery — she couldn't tell.
She leaned back in her chair, eyes fixed on the wall. Her pulse had steadied now. Her breathing returned to its usual rhythm — sharp, measured, controlled.
She told herself she'd won.
That tomorrow, Toji would return to being what he always was — an anomaly, a dangerous distraction, another file in her mental cabinet labeled irrelevant.
And yet… as she blew out the candle and the darkness took the room, her hand moved unconsciously — fingers curling slightly, as if reaching for something that wasn't there.
She caught herself and clenched her fist tight.
"I'm done with him," she whispered again, to no one.
But outside the window, the night wind carried the faint echo of a motorcycle's growl — familiar, distant, fading into the forest.
And though she wouldn't admit it, not even to herself, the sound made her heart skip once before returning to its steady, disciplined rhythm.
---
Wednesday lay in the dark on her bed, the room still except for the candle breathing beside her. The flame bent and swayed, painting gold over her desk where ash still clung to the rim of a dish — the remains of the page she'd burned. Yet even gone, he lingered. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw the sharp edge of his smirk, the calm in his violence, the strange safety she hated herself for craving.
She turned onto her back, exhaling through her teeth, fingers tracing idle shapes across her stomach as if to carve him out. Her hand drifted lower with the motion, following lines she hadn't intended to draw, until she stilled — caught between thought and impulse. The candle guttered once, like a heartbeat.
Her breath hitched. A tremor of something nameless rippled through her, and for a moment she almost let go — almost. Then she froze, hand hovering, mind cutting through the haze.
"No," she whispered to the ceiling, voice sharp enough to shatter the silence.
She turned over, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders. The candle died in its wax, leaving the room swallowed by dark and defiance.
---
She was about to do it but sadly for you l am a bit of a sadist