Your take on Weyler, wherein Wednesday becomes Tyler's master?
This one got me in its teeth and didn’t let go! AU where Tyler turns down Capri in the graveyard and goes after Wednesday instead - I hope you like it anon!
Ship: Weyler || Rating: T || Words 1.8k ish??
“If you thought you’d catch me sleeping you’re more deranged than I thought,” Wednesday adjusted her grip on the knife, the cold night air cutting through her button-up black pajamas as she stepped out onto the quaint BnB’s balcony, “you make enough noise to wake the dead.”
She had been lying in uneasy slumber when the first sounds came, a rustling in the surrounding forest that could have been mistaken for an animal. The muffled thumps and curses that followed that could not.
She was up before he’d swung himself over the railing, glass-panelled door open wide as she emerged - armed and ready.
“Wednesday.”
One glance at the creature explained the uncharacteristically unsurreptitious nature of his arrival - her would be nemesis looked down right pathetic.
Tyler was hunched against the railing, wet-dog shivering as he stared at her - half hatred, all desperation in the moonlight of God-only-knew-where Canada.
Was this truly the same creature who had seemed to appear and disappear with a stealth even she had admired? Who had stalked her through hospitals and high schools like a living shadow?
Her gaze swept the scene, taking in the drainpipe barely clinging to the building’s siding, the dents in it the same size of his hands and the scuff marks on the perfect white bannisters.
So, he’d tracked them through the great white north only to climb her balcony like some monstrous Romeo.
But had he come for sonnets or a showdown?
As unlikely as the first seemed, the second looked just as improbable. If he was here for a fight it would be a short one. Her eyebrow ticked upwards as she sized him up, he was slumped inward, trembling as he glowered at her with red-rimmed eyes. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead, soaking his clothes along with the mud and blood and debris of the forest.
Unless he transformed it would be over in seconds, and even that looked like it would take a stamina he no longer seemed to possess.
Swallowing back a sigh, Wednesday let the knife fall to her side. It was still in hand, she wasn’t an idiot after all, but it was clear he was in no fit state for a proper brawl. Killing him now would be like shooting fish in a barrel, temporarily satisfying but ultimately disappointing. There was just no sport in it.
“How long have you been following us?” She asked instead, looking pointedly at the ruined sneakers under the stained cuffs of his stolen jeans. The soles were shredded, his bloodied socks peeking out from the holes he’d worn in them on the journey.
“Since you left Nevermore,” he muttered through teeth clenched so hard she imagined she could hear them cracking in his jaw, “your uncle drives like a mad man.”
“Of course,” she agreed with a shrug, “not that you’re in any position to throw stones.”
It took one mad man to recognise another after all, and Tyler was clearly slipping into insanity if he’d tracked her all the way here to… what? Shake at her like an impotent chihuahua in the middle of the night?
“Huh,” Tyler snapped his head away, not arguing with her but not explaining himself either.
The silence lingered, heavy and uncomfortable - it was usually her favourite kind - but tonight…
She told herself it was fatigue, she’d been hunting her renegade roommate with the obsessive fire she usually reserved for solving (or planning) murders, but she knew it wasn’t the whole story. It never was where he was concerned, as Weems had so often delighted in pointing out.
“Do you still have it?” His knuckles were white, hands clenching bruise-tight as he abruptly broke the silence.
Getting to the point at last, it seemed, what point however…
Years of strictly enforced self-control kept the surprise from her face, her eye twitching only once as she considered his question.
What was he looking for all the way out here?
“The drug,” he snapped his eyes at her as though she’d spoken the thought aloud, unforgivably good at reading her even now, “from the church. You said…”
Her self-control failed her for a fraction of a second, her breath leaving her in a sharp puff of air that clouded in the cold night air.
So that’s why he was here.
She should have seen it coming but she didn’t, a special kind of stupid plaguing her where he was concerned.
His mother was dead. His uncle. His father. Thornhill. Every tether he’d ever had had been cut loose, leaving him adrift in a sea of corpses with no masters or mentors left to cling to. She was smart enough to know what it meant, it was either find a new master or succumb to the slow embrace of insanity and death.
She’d thought he’d chose the latter, like she would, but she’d kept the vial close anyway. Swaddled it in bubble wrap and secured it in a pocket of her rucksack. Just in case.
“So you’re looking for a new master then.”
She flicked her gaze away from his dismissively, her palms sweating as she gripped her blade just a little tighter than necessary. Like a pointy little comfort blanket.
“I’m looking for you,” the vehemence in his tone would have been frightening in a less pathetic shell, his eyes almost painfully dark beneath his furrowed brow as he took a cautious step towards her, “Are you really gonna make me beg for it?”
She liked that idea.
A little too much, if she was being completely honest with herself. The thought of him on his knees pleading for her to chain him up thrilled her in a way she refused to examine too closely, a deliciously cold shiver running up her spine like someone was dancing on her grave as she met his gaze again.
He could be useful, she reminded herself sharply, pragmatically, when her thoughts threatened to derail, there was a reason she had made the serum in the first place after all. Why she had wanted him for her own even after everything they’d been through.
He could be a competent tool, a handy option for dealing with her more tenacious enemies. And then there was the fact he’d tracked her north at all, it was another useful skill - perhaps she could use him to pick up Enid’s trail and effectively kill two monsters with one stone. Or save them, as the case may be.
“I have to ask,” she said, her voice crisp and businesslike even as she let her eyes drag over him in hungry contemplation, “whilst I acknowledge that I am clearly the most logical choice to control you, why did you come to me?”
Was it just because she had the serum? Or had she misread the situation, did he mean to try take the drug from her and leave? Another Master already in mind to soothe his savage beast.
The thought made her fingers clench, something ugly throbbing in her chest. She rather suspected she’d break the vial before she let that happen, even if she didn’t quite know why.
“I came because-” Tyler’s throat worked as he swallowed, a muscle in his jaw twitching as he met her gaze with a furious sort of passion in his pallid face, “because as much as I hate the idea of having you as a master, I hate the idea of anyone else more. I’ve seen your darkness, Wednesday, and for better or worse it matches mine.”
So she was the lesser evil, there really was a first for everything.
“Do you truly think so?” He had taken another step forward and she’d let him, close enough now she could feel the heat radiating off him, feverish in the chill. “I don’t. You are chaos and confusion, Tyler,” she lifted her knife slowly, carefully, letting the flat of the blade glance over his cheek in warning as she tilted her head back to keep his gaze, “and I am a cold logical inevitability.”
He might be violence, but she was death itself. She always had been. If he truly wanted to be her monster he’d have to remember that.
Tyler didn’t pull away, his jaw tensing as he reached up to tug his shirt collar aside instead, baring his neck to her.
“Do it then,” he breathed, voice low and desperate as the muscles in his throat worked, “kill me, like you should have done back in that tower. Kill me or claim me, Wednesday, but for godsake don’t leave me like this.”
She couldn’t help herself, hypnotised by the way the moonlight glinted off her blade as she tracked it along his jaw and down his neck, watching the way his veins pulsed almost eagerly beneath the knife’s edge.
“You’d deserve it if I did,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. For what he’d done to Eugene, to Enid, to her. Not the attempted murder, the defenestration and shallow grave she could forgive easily enough, but for how he’d made her feel.
Used. Betrayed. Seen. Wanted.
His blood was so close to the surface she could practically hear his pulse, his jugular vein straining against his skin, begging to be cut.
“Maybe,” he agreed, his breath clouding the space between them as he shuddered under her blade, “I’m a monster, Wednesday, I’m not ashamed of it.” His eyes met hers from far, far too close, softened somehow as they drank her in, “But you are too, even if it is a different kind.”
He lifted his hand, hesitant, like she was the feral creature instead of him, maybe she was with the way her heart was beating. The awareness of it startled her, a wild, traitorous thing that thundered between her ribs as he reached for her. The scent of dirt and earth and blood filled her head as he gently closed his hand over hers.
And she let him.
Like she had before.
When he was a nice normie boy and she was the idiot who’d let him in.
It wouldn’t be the same, the voice in her head whispered, you’d have the power this time. You’d hold the leash. He’d be yours, to keep or crush however you saw fit.
"Wednesday..." his voice cracked on her name and for a moment she almost thought she felt something cracking inside of her too, the fault-line that had made her cut his bonds instead of his throat widening. It was a chasm she couldn’t close, no matter how hard she tried.
Why did her hatred still feel so much like the other thing? Why did it taste like obsession?
“You’d really do it,” she murmured, hating the way her eyes instinctively found his lips and her memory filled with the taste of him, fresh coffee and spearmint, “after everything, you’d still bind yourself to me.”
“You said it yourself, this is the only way,” his breath was ragged as he searched her gaze, mouth twitching in a tired smile as he leant closer still and whispered, “c’mon, Wednesday, let’s be monsters together.”
She didn’t say no.
