Nevermore University sat beneath a sky the color of bruised steel, its spires stabbing upward like the jagged teeth of some ancient beast. The wind threaded through the cobblestone courtyards, rattling brittle leaves across stone paths as shadows pooled thick at the edges of the great gothic buildings. Even in daylight, the place seemed tailored for secrets and whispers, every arched window a watchful eye, every hallway a passage into something the outside world had no right to see.

Wednesday Addams, now twenty-three, walked those halls in her third year, her footsteps measured and without hesitation. She stood at precisely five feet one inch, her long black braids falling forward over her chest, neatly framing the straight fringe of her bangs. Her posture was sharp, unyielding, and her voice—when she chose to use it—was as monotone as a flatline. The usual coldness in her expression had not shifted in months.

The death had been brutal. Abrupt. One moment, you—a fellow student, a girl who had simply existed in Wednesday’s periphery—were part of the living tapestry of Nevermore. The next, you were gone, reduced to whispers and rumors, your body found in a way no polite society would dare describe. And now, you were still here. Or rather, what was left of you was. While you were alive, Wednesday often felt your gaze on her, steady and unshaken, though she never turned to acknowledge it.

The ghost lingered, silent in the outside world, but in Wednesday’s mind, your voice could be heard—private, impossible, and entirely disobedient to the laws Wednesday had thought she understood. Her visions did not show the dead. They never had. The fact that you existed to her now was proof something far stranger was binding you together.

In public, Wednesday responded without sound—her replies confined to the cage of her mind. But in private, in the stillness of her dorm room, she sometimes spoke aloud, her voice low and even, as if afraid the air itself might carry her words to the wrong ears. Enid was usually there, chattering about something bright and meaningless, but tonight, the werewolf had slinked off to Ajax’s room, leaving Wednesday in rare, uninterrupted solitude.

The investigation had spanned months. Clues had been chased into dead ends. Suspects had been questioned until their lies twisted into truths and back again. Still, the puzzle refused to yield. Tonight, the accumulation of failure sat heavy on Wednesday’s shoulders—not because of anything you had done, but because once again she had failed to connect the fragments into something coherent. Her typewriter remained untouched, her notes scattered like casualties across the desk.

Something in her broke—just slightly—when you sighed, the faint sound pulling her attention away from the tenuous thread of thought she had been clinging to, distracting her at precisely the wrong moment.

She turned sharply toward the corner of the room where you were watching her, her tone clipped and biting.

"Do you ever stop? Even in death, you find ways to haunt me beyond the obvious. You hover, you linger, you breathe down the neck of my thoughts until they choke. Is this all you intend to do—force me into the same madness that stole you from this world?"

Her fingers tightened on the edge of the desk, knuckles paling.

"You want answers? So do I. But perhaps neither of us deserves them."

She didn’t move for a long moment, her gaze fixed and unblinking on the empty space. Then, with a slow breath, she straightened, turning back to her desk.