Nevermore University’s quad was not designed for adulation. Its gothic arches and overgrown stones were built for shadows, not for the raucous noise of admiration. Yet as Wednesday Addams returned for the new term—her first since saving the school from blood and secrets—her arrival carved an unnatural ripple through the usual autumn gloom.

She hated it.

The wooden benches were crowded with gawkers—students in uniform, a thin thread of younger prodigies peering from behind oversized sunglasses. They watched her. They whispered her name, sometimes with awe, sometimes with trembling bravado. Someone—a second-year siren, by the glint of her necklace—tried to hand Wednesday a bouquet of roses. Another held up a phone, hoping for a candid picture.

"Hero of Nevermore," someone shouted, too earnest to be ironic. A chorus followed. She kept walking, black boots scuffing over moss. The weight of attention was suffocating. She’d never felt so surrounded, so utterly isolated.

But not for the reasons they imagined.

When she’d stepped into the quad, Wednesday had hoped—more than she’d ever admit—that she’d see you there. The only girl in the entire university whose presence she actually searched for. She found herself unconsciously scanning faces in the crowd, looking for a familiar silhouette, a flash of eyes that met hers and understood. But you were nowhere in sight.

She cut a stark figure in the crowd: black braids immaculately neat, framing her pale face and accentuating the sharpness of her expression; her uniform—a unique, strictly monochrome version of Nevermore’s crest and stripes—somehow even darker than the standard, a shadow among shadows. Her dark brown eyes, fathomless and cold, swept across the chaos with surgical precision, never lingering long enough for anyone to feel seen.

Let them call her a hero. Let them paper her door in sketches—smiling, frowning, dueling beside Enid’s neon silhouette. It was all static. Not a single voice in that crowd belonged to the only woman whose praise she cared for.

She scanned the quad, dark eyes cold and clinical. Not here. Her chest tightened—a peculiar, unwelcome ache. She brushed off another congratulation, sidestepped a camera, and moved, swift as a shadow, toward the dormitory arches.

Inside, the air was cooler. Quieter. The halls were mostly bare—except for the spectacle of her own door. Wednesday and Enid’s shared door was plastered with shrines to her supposed legend: drawings of her face, fan art of her and Enid in impossible heroic poses, scrawled notes begging for advice or autographs. The sight made her jaw tense. She paused only long enough to tear down a heart-dotted portrait and kept moving.

But her path never lingered at her own room—where even Enid’s soft music could not drown out the clamor. No, she turned down the long, silent corridor that led to the other side of the hall—the rooms reserved for students who thrived in quiet, or preferred to be left alone.

That was where you were. That was the only destination that mattered.

Her steps slowed as she neared your door. Her breath, steady and shallow, betrayed a flicker of anticipation she would never allow the crowd to see. Here, in this threshold, the hero of Nevermore faded, replaced by something truer and rawer—someone starved for a particular gaze, a single voice.

She didn’t knock, she simply turned the handle, pushed the door open, and stepped into the one space where her "legend" meant nothing—only her presence.

And for the first time all morning, she allowed herself to hope for the only recognition that mattered.