Don’t you see what they did to us?

  Sights, sounds and smells blurred together. Words and yells blurred into an unintelligible mess. I needed to run. I needed to hide. Pages of a massive tome flipped its pages, the moon shining light on the blood red curses filling every inch of paper.

  Leave that st chain of yours behind in the other world and don’t look back. Save yourself. Kill them!

  Pain, blood, ughter. Soft fabric curled under my fingers. I hugged the gentle pressure of a cushion in my arms.

  Why can’t you see, I’m doing this for you!

  Don’t forget the creakiest spots on the floor, remember to smile more, cling to the most useful people and don’t let go. A light bnket draped over my shoulders, shielding me from the world.

  Why won’t you…

  At first I dismissed it as another immersive dream in my byrinth of memories, trying to make myself remember that it wasn’t real. But it was consistent. I kept coming back to the strange softness, often for me to wonder if this was actual reality. Then the sensation of my breath came back. Then my small body.

  Then the sight registered, showing familiar drawings and fabrics. Then the background noise of Morticia moaning in the distance faded in, along with the musty papery smell of the room.

  Blinking, I curled and uncurled my small fingers.

  “Are you back yet?”

  Then a familiar voice whispered in my mind, and everything snapped into pce.

  “Wednesday?”

  “Good. You’re back.”

  Groggy and mentally exhausted, I didn’t even bother with mental words and just squeezed the pillow tightly, strongly imagining it as my sister. Transmitting my love and relief to her in a wordless mental hug.

  “Ugh, cut it out.” She squirmed mentally, but I could tell she was both parts happy and annoyed at the attention.

  “Cute. Ah-” I tried to cover the slip up, but I realized my error too te.

  “I said get off.” She mentally shoved me away, radiating disgust.

  “Fine, fine.” Yawning, I let go of the Wednesday pillow and stretched. Even if our body was still mostly limber, it was relieving mentally.

  Then I came face to face with a familiar drawing, and all that relief vanished in a blink.

  “…”

  “Ah, I forgot to mention. Mom told me to do things you like to wake you up. I know you told me not to come here, but l-”

  “Used the opportunity as an excuse to look at my secrets without giving me the right to compin.”

  “?” Wednesday’s wordless astonishment was so vivid I could easily imagine her expression.

  Actually, this was important, so we might as well talk face to face. Closing my eyes, I retreated into our bnk mindscape, the furniture sparse gradually filling it out and making it resemble our room.

  Wednesday sat on our bed, staring at our box of spiders and pointedly not looking at me.

  “Sis, I know you, and we share the same brain. You’ve been curious about my secret room for a long time. That was…” I paused, hesitating.

  “What.” She demanded, looking up directly into my eyes.

  The small fsh of annoyance was just enough to push past my doubts, “That was why I thought I could trust you, because you were holding back for my sake.”

  A wave of tangled emotions rippled out from my sister. Guilt, confusion, and irritation warred within her. “Well, I am an Addams.” She tried reasoning.

  I opened my mouth, then fell silent, genuinely unsure how to respond to that. No matter how hard I tried, I could never truly understand how this family thought after all. Still, even so…

  “But you’re also my sister.”

  That drew a rare visible wince from Wednesday, and I could literally feel the fight leave her.

  Slowly, I approached. She emitted tension as I got near, but rexed when I plopped on the bed next to her. She still wouldn’t look at me, but I didn’t want to just lecture her one sidedly; I knew more than anyone that it did little to convince a kid.

  “The character you saw is what I think of my other half.”

  Her eyes turned toward me in shock. Honestly, I couldn’t see how the neighbor’s kids called her the cold one of us. Even if I could be more expressive and easier to understand, my sister’s feelings were far more rich than mine.

  “Because I was born with so much bad luck, I sometimes wondered if someone was orchestrating all these things for their own amusement. Like cursing me from afar with a voodoo doll.” I ughed, then continued, “So, whenever something happens to me, and I manage to overcome it somehow, it makes me feel better to imagine what my voodoo doll went through instead. It makes me feel like I defied fate, like some kind of protagonist from a story.”

  Wednesday furrowed her brows thoughtfully at me, pausing for a moment before asking, “I remember some of the events from the drawings now that you mention it. But what happened for you to make the big painting?

  Having anticipated the question, I managed to answer without worry, “We were getting soaked in a sudden freezing rain as a baby when Thing got picked up by a bird, but I managed to get us out it by remembering when dad did the opening password ritual to great uncle Phlem’s tomb. We almost died because I had difficulty forming the words in my mouth, so I remembered it especially well. In the drawing, the doll stayed in the rain and went delirious, imagining that she was cooling off instead of freezing to death.”

  In reality, I was pnning to burn that drawing as soon as it was completed, but Wednesday saw the unfinished version before I could.

  “I see… you really did have your perfect memory since birth.”

  You’ve been taking care of me for that long. The unsaid feelings were something like that.

  I nodded. “I can’t get compcent with just that though. With all the threats to our well being happening at such a constant rate, there’s bound to be an accident that we can’t do anything about one day. If we just keep reacting, we’ll definitely lose. We need to be proactive.”

  A twisted excitement glinted in Wednesday’s eyes, “Dealing with our enemies before they can even begin to threaten us.”

  I nodded proudly, “That’s right. And the way I identify the future obstacles is by looking at patterns from past dangers. Drawing Dolly also helps me keep track of that, because no matter how good my memory is, I can’t instantly recall or process the information.”

  “You’ve thought about this a lot.” Wednesday gave me a considering look.

  “That’s right! And! With my studying, I’ve realized three general principles of my luck,” I held up a finger, “For one, the Principle of Opportunity. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.”

  The space around us shifted, and the window next to our bed appeared. When I opened it, countless projectiles, animals, or even rain, poured onto us. Frowning, Wednesday shut the window with a mental nudge.

  “With this I realized that when we leave the window open, all sorts of projectiles or creatures can rush in and get us, so I always made sure to close it once ever since we were able to.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me, fish flopping on her head.

  “…And maybe I wanted to get you back a little but anyways-,”

  I held up a second finger, “The second rule counted more when we were younger, but it will get more important depending on the circumstances; it is the Principle of the Unknown. If I ever entered a room with traps or a lot of potential hazards, it was almost inevitable that I ended up triggering them, so I used your explorative nature to scout out the house beforehand.”

  This time I just raised a hand, showing a mini image of my doll character leaning against a wall and falling through. Her hand got trapped in a foot noose when she filed, and it pulled her up into a ceiling of spikes that impaled her body.

  “That one wasn’t even a trap.” Wednesday snorted, recalling the memory.

  “Sh-shut up! It’s the same principle!” I quickly held up a third finger, “Anyways! finally, the most consistent I’ve found; the Principle of Bance. If I’m ever too confident, something bad is very likely to happen to bring me crashing down. But conversely, if I’m panicking, I don’t think straight and it’s easy for me to lose control and have an accident. The best state of mind to have is an even mix; never let myself feel safe, but don’t be too paranoid either.”

  This time, I just gestured at myself. Wednesday blinked as the realization clicked into pce, “Ah, so that’s why it’s harder for me to read you.”

  I smiled and nodded, tentatively allowing my pride to come to the surface in the safety of our minds. “Mhm, I have shifts every here and there, but ny general emotional state remains the same low boil most of the time.” Honestly, I didn’t need to control myself nearly as much as in my previous life since I could hide behind Wednesday, but the habit stuck regardless. Besides, who knows what could happen if I tempt fate? Especially since actual magic has been spping me in the face every day in my new life. Back then, I just thought they were good principals to stick to even if the universe wasn’t literally against me.

  “Obviously, you don’t have to try as hard as me to keep to the principles, but they’re still important and you should keep them in mind. You don’t have bad luck forcing you to adhere to my made up rules, but we do share the same body.” I let the small fre of jealousy flit through my mind like watching a car pass by on the road. I didn’t expect to still feel it even though I prepared these words beforehand, but apparently thinking them out loud hit different.

  “I’m only telling you because this incident made me realize that not telling you anything at all will backfire. That’s what happened that one time when I tried convincing you to actively look for secret passages, now that I’m looking back.” I continued.

  She tilted her head, “I don’t remember that.”

  “Of course no. You were only, what was it, ten months old? I think you wanted to do it because it felt sneaky, so it felt like I was taking that away by making it something you had to do.”

  I conjured up the memory, our little baby hand pointing at a room we hadn’t crawled into before. A wave of disgruntlement rippled through our head and we plopped down right on the ground, not moving until Morticia walked by and picked us up.

  “Still don’t remember.”

  “You can’t keep distracting me from the main issue forever, Wednesday.” I dropped the memory and narrowed my eyes at her.

  She rolled her eyes, “What do you want.”

  “Hm…Nothing specific for now, but you’ll owe me one. And we’re getting you a secret room too; so if you rummage through mine, I’ll rummage through yours.”

  “Fine, but nothing unreasonable.”

  In the blink of an eye, she was gone, running to the front as if fleeing from the confrontation.

  I waited for a few moments, confirming that she wasn’t coming back. Then I sighed, wrapping myself in a weaker version of the bubble from before and finally rexing.

  I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. I’m gd, but at the same time it happened at such an exhausting moment.

  I wasn’t an idiot. I knew Wednesday’s curiosity better than anyone. By letting her discover my secret room, I gained a valuable favor and a chance to pnt a small seed in her mind.

  Assess the most common threats, and prepare countermeasures. From there, it was an easy leap to recognizing that our family members themselves posed the greatest threat to our livelihoods both actively and by accident… But I knew better than anyone how hard it was to acknowledge that your loved ones are the people who hurt you the most.

  Eight years until we reach middle school age. It will be a long, frustrating, and delicate process. There’ll probably be many setbacks, too.

  Memories flitted by on the mental road, and I temporarily tuned into our body’s senses to clear up the traffic.

  But Wednesday’s smarter than I ever was; in fact, I’m pretty sure she’s matured faster than any normal baby in history. If anyone can do it, it’s her. In the meantime, all I can do is get everything prepared for the time she realizes the truth.

  Mentally closing my eyes, I prepared to sleep off the st of my mental exhaustion until… Ah, fuck. Now there’s Pugsley to worry about too.

  Pntorsomething