Chapter Text
“You there!” a woman with no eyes cried out from across the street, pointing at Tyler and Mom. “Son of Addam! I need to talk to you!”
The woman rushed towards them with no regard for the cars whizzing past. Mom tightened her grip on his hand and pulled him closer.
“What do you want?” Mom asked coldly. Tyler hid behind her legs at the tone. Nothing good ever happened when Mom talked like that.
“You need to keep an eye on him. No son of Addam grows up right.”
Mom told him to cover his ears, and then she said some very bad words to the woman. He asked what the woman meant later that night as she tucked him into bed, but Mom only smiled and told him to never to listen to anyone like her.
“You’re a good boy, Tyler. Whoever she thought you were, it’s her problem. Not ours.”
***
Lucas, Jonah, and Carter appeared before Wednesday and Tyler, blocking their way to his car with baseball bats. Tyler’s heart dropped into his stomach.
“Do me a favor, sweetie,” Laurel had said a week ago. “Take care of Wednesday.”
He could not let these idiots get a hold of her.
“Wednesday, run!” Tyler grabbed her by the elbow and ran, pulling her back into the crowd. They were getting stares, but that was fine. Hopefully, the witnesses would scatter his friends and give them a chance to slip away and circle back to his car.
Tyler was just about to lead her behind a carnival game when she bumped into someone, seized, and began to fall. He caught her in his arms.
Her eyes rolled to the back of her head, her neck had snapped back as far as it’d go without breaking, and her muscles were stiff like she’d been dead for days. Carter shouted his name far too close for comfort.
Tylet picked her up and sprinted for his car.
She was still seizing when he laid her in the back seat on her side. He couldn’t stop shaking himself, panic giving a low buzzing under his skin that he only controlled through sheer force of will. The fact that she wasn’t jerking or choking was the only thing that kept him from completely freaking out.
“Tyler!” Jonah shouted from across the parking lot.
Tyler jumped into the front seat and hit the road without looking back.
***
Down the road from the festival was a side road that led to a parking lot that hikers liked to use. It was near impossible to see if you didn’t already know it was there, and the parking lot was completely hidden from the road. Tyler parked there and crawled into the back seat.
Wednesday was still seizing and he didn’t know what to do. The nearest clinic was about ten minutes away and going there would destroy any chance of them getting out of town. He didn’t think Wednesday would want him to jeopardize her escape, but he didn’t want her to die.
Tyler brushed her hair to the side, revealing her neck. A part of him briefly wanted to sink his teeth into her and rip her apart. That part crooked his head, inhaled deeply, and couldn’t smell any sickness on her. In fact, she smelled really good, and he suddenly wanted to bury himself in her scent and never come up for air.
Just as he touched her pulse, Wednesday jerked awake. Tyler snatched his hand away as if he’d been caught in the cookie jar.
“Where am I?”
“My car. Are you ok?”
Wednesday sat up, not taking her eyes off of him.
“I didn’t know what to do. You just seized up and Lucas— they were still chasing us. I can take you to a clinic if you want.”
“No doctors. I’m fine. Just start driving. We can still make it to the train station.”
Tyler couldn’t tell if she was angry with him or not, so he just did as he was told and returned to the driver’s seat. Wednesday crawled into the passenger’s as he backed out of the lot.
She didn’t say anything as he drove, but she didn’t look away from him either. It unnerved him, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
Was this normal behavior for her? He couldn’t tell. He knew better than to assume it wasn’t, but she was staring at him like she could see into his soul. Then again, maybe she could. He didn’t know what exactly made her an outcast.
Tyler parked outside Burlington Station.
“Here we are,” Tyler said awkwardly.
Wednesday didn’t move, and the silence stretched between them.
“Why do you want to leave Jericho?” Wednesday finally asked.
Because that town sucked the life out of people. Because the only things waiting for him back home were suffocating silences, meaningless pretenses, everyone telling him what to do, and lies. White lies. Black lies. Lies that would kill him if they didn’t kill everyone else first.
Because a desperate part of him wanted to get as far away from Her as possible. Because every second spent pretending like things were ok when they wouldn't ever be ok again made him feel like he was stranded at sea, drowning with nobody left to notice or care. Because he didn't want to kill people anymore.
“Why would I want to stay?”
Wednesday stared at him, expressionless and stiff as she always was. “Why go back then?”
“I—”
“If you want out so badly, why not just leave?”
Tyler smiled fondly. “Are you asking me to go with you?”
“No,” she snapped in a way that made him certain that she was. “I’m just curious about whether or not you’re a liar or a coward. You refused payment because you wanted at least one of use to ‘get out of that hellhole town’. So, you either want to leave and are too much of a coward to actually do it, or you don’t want to leave, and you’re lying about it.”
The thought of going back made him sick.
“I want to leave more than anything.”
Wednesday stared at him some more, nodded to herself, then held her hand out. “Give me your wallet.”
Tyler rose his brows sharply as if to say, ‘excuse me?’, but she didn’t react.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s mine? Go swipe someone else’s wallet if you need cash. I only have my card anyways and I doubt you can pass my license off as yours.”
“I need yours.”
They stared each other down. She wouldn’t budge and he couldn’t believe he was doing this, but he handed her his wallet.
“Stay here,” she ordered before leaving the car and taking his wallet to an ATM by the station’s main entrance. She returned a while later with her bag full of cash.
“What the fuck, Wednesday?”
“If you’re coming with then we needed to liquidate your earnings before we got too far. Your father will track us here and assume we took a train. Start driving so he can waste time searching in the wrong direction.”
Tyler couldn’t find a trace of irony in her face. “I never said I was going.”
Wednesday looked at him like he was stupid. “Just drive.”
Tyler thought about everything his life consisted of and everything he actually had to lose. It wasn’t much, and looking at Wednesday then, Laurel’s last order played in his head.
He wanted to take care of her. He wanted to leave. There was every chance that this would be a terrible idea. They’d get caught immediately. If not by his dad, then by Laurel who wouldn’t stop before she had him locked up again. Even if they didn’t, he wasn’t looking forward to adding high school dropout to his resume.
“Ok,” Tyler said and started driving.