Drop thee stones this instant.
---
The house was quiet when Hester Frump pushed open the unlocked door.
Too quiet.
The kind of quiet that doesn't belong to a home — only to graveyards.
She stepped inside, the heel of her boot tapping lightly against the blood-speckled linoleum. At first, she didn't understand what she was seeing. Her brain refused to process it, as though some protective instinct was trying to shield her.
Then her gaze lifted.
And she saw him.
Toji.
Small.
Shaking.
Kneeling in a puddle of blood with his mother's lifeless body in his arms.
But that wasn't what froze her breath.
It was his eyes.
They weren't the eyes of a child.
They weren't even the eyes of a man.
They were the eyes of something born in violence…
…something that had crawled out of the edge of death and decided to stay there.
Hester's hand trembled.
Her heartbeat hammered so hard she could feel it behind her teeth.
She had seen horrors — she had caused horrors — but never had she looked directly into a gaze that felt like staring down the throat of a monster.
Not an outcast.
Not a creature of myth.
A monster crafted entirely out of human suffering.
A monster with a human face.
Her lungs compressed.
Her vision fluttered at the edges.
She had to look away — not because she was disgusted…
…but because she was terrified that if she kept staring, whatever was inside that boy would stare back.
She swallowed hard, voice brittle.
"Toji…?"
He didn't respond.
Didn't blink.
Didn't breathe right.
He was gone — lost in whatever torment he had birthed moments earlier.
Hester finally forced herself to look again, her eyes darting over the carnage.
Naoya Zenin lay crumpled on the floor, neck snapped, face twisted in a defeat he never saw coming.
Shoko Zenin — gentle, quiet, loyal Shoko — lay limp against her son, lips still curved in the faint shadow of her final, tragic smile.
And suddenly, Hester understood why Morticia had called her.
Shoko had reached out.
Reached out to the only person she trusted who wasn't bound by family, politics, or bloodline rot.
Morticia couldn't go — stranded in the barren silence of the Kerguelen Islands, the Desolation Islands, thousands of miles away.
A place so isolated it swallowed signals, swallowed help, swallowed everything.
But Hester could come.
Hester, who Shoko had once trusted more easily than she ever trusted Morticia.
Hester, who had once shared tea with Shoko, whispering disdain for their own families under the breath of late nights.
Hester, who promised once — drunkenly, bitterly, fiercely — that if anyone ever hurt Shoko,
she would make them regret being born.
And now Hester stood in the ruins of that promise, the smell of copper and tragedy thick in her throat.
She took a step forward, slowly, carefully.
The floorboards creaked, and Toji's eyes flicked up to her — just a fraction, but enough.
Her blood ran cold.
This was not simply grief.
This was something older.
Something darker.
Something that tasted like vengeance and loss and destiny twisted in a way no child should ever touch.
"Toji," she said again, barely above a whisper, "I'm here."
He stared at her, silent, hollow. Something flickered behind those empty eyes — recognition, rage, despair, or maybe all three tangled together.
Hester forced herself to kneel, as slowly as if approaching a feral animal.
She reached out, hesitant.
"Toji… put her down. Let me help."
His voice came out scraped raw, shredded by screams he hadn't finished releasing.
"Don't… touch her."
Hester froze.
And for a long, suspended moment, the world held its breath around them —
a monster born, a witness trembling, a home broken beyond repair.
And Morticia Addams' distant voice, echoing from thousands of miles away, haunted the back of Hester's mind:
"Get to her. Please. She thinks Naoya might kill them both. I can't get off this cursed island in time. Hester… she needs you."
But Hester had arrived too late.
Too late to save Shoko.
Too late to save Toji from becoming what he did.
All she could do now was decide:
Would she save the boy in front of her?
Or leave the monster behind?
--
The ambulance lights painted the Zenin doorstep in frantic red and blue, but Toji didn't watch them.
He sat on the back steps of the house, wrapped in a blanket far too large for him, head bowed, hands still stained with his mother's blood.
Hester stood a short distance away — close enough to intervene, far enough not to provoke.
She had insisted on riding with him, but he refused to be touched, refused to move anywhere near the gurney that carried Shoko's body.
He had walked out of the house himself, barefoot, silent, rigid with a kind of grief that no child should ever be forced to swallow.
Morticia's voice crackled through the phone at Hester's ear — the satellite connection barely holding.
"Is he alive?"
A question laced with dread.
"Alive," Hester whispered.
"But not untouched."
There was a long silence. On Morticia's end, wind howled like a starving beast — the sound of the Kerguelen storms eating at the island's edges.
"Hester… bring him somewhere safe. You know what he carries in his blood. And now… what he's awakened."
Hester looked at the boy again.
He wasn't crying.
He wasn't shaking anymore.
He was simply… still.
Still in a way that frightened her far more than the chaos inside the house.
"I won't leave him," Hester said.
"You can't let the Zenin elders take him," Morticia warned.
"They will call him a curse… or a weapon."
Hester's throat tightened. "He's a child."
"And they don't care."
The call died in a burst of static.
Leaving Hester alone with the night, the corpse of her friend, and the boy forged in blood.
---
Hours later, the police were gone.
The coroner's van was gone.
The Zenin clan members hovered at the edge of the property — vultures in silk, waiting for their chance to claim what they believed was theirs.
But Hester didn't let them close.
She sat beside Toji, not touching him, not speaking, simply staying.
It was the only thing she could offer him that didn't feel like betrayal.
Finally, as dawn bled across the sky in bruised shades of lavender, the boy moved.
Barely.
A small shift, a glance in her direction.
And in a voice scraped raw, he asked:
"Where… will they take her?"
Hester's breath hitched.
"To the morgue first," she answered gently, honestly.
"Then… I'll make sure she's not alone."
Something flickered behind those deadened eyes.
Not life — not yet — but recognition. Maybe trust. Or the faintest echo of it.
"Naoya?" he asked.
Hester paused, choosing her words carefully.
"He Can't hurt anyone else."
Toji's fingers curled into the blanket.
His voice dropped to a whisper, cold and trembling.
"I didn't mean to."
Hester's heart cracked for the first time in what felt like centuries.
She turned fully toward him, lowering her voice, steady but tender.
"Toji… listen to me. You were defending your mother. You were trying to protect her."
He shook his head once, sharply, like the motion itself hurt.
"It wasn't me," he whispered.
"It felt like… something inside me. Something hungry."
A chill ran down Hester's spine.
Morticia had warned her.
Shoko had hinted in their last letters.
And Hester had ignored the signs — dismissed them as the ghosts of Zenin superstition.
But now…
now she saw it clearly.
The boy was not just grieving.
He was awakening.
Hester exhaled slowly, the gravity of the moment sinking like a stone in her gut.
"Toji," she said softly, "I'm going to ask you something important… and I need you to be honest."
He nodded, though his eyes stayed on the ground.
"When you looked at Naoya… did you want him to die?"
The world seemed to pause — the air, the birds, even the rising sun.
Then Toji looked up.
And for the briefest moment, Hester saw it —
the thing behind his gaze.
Not evil.
Not hatred.
But inevitability.
"No," he whispered.
" I didn't want him to die."
A beat.
"But I didn't want to stop because for once he was the one afraid."
Hester felt the truth settle like frost in her veins.
This child — bruised, bloody, broken — was standing on the edge of something terrible and enormous.
And she was the only one between him
and the vultures waiting to claim him.
"Come with me," she said.
Her voice did not shake.
"Please. Don't stay here. You don't owe them anything, Toji. Not your grief, not your pain, not your future."
He breathed out slowly, and for the first time, his shoulders sagged.
As if he were finally allowing himself to feel the weight of what he'd lost.
And then he whispered the smallest word in the world.
"…Okay."
Hester stood and held out a hand.
He did not take it.
But he stood and walked beside her.
And that was enough.
As they left the Zenin estate behind — a place soaked in cruelty — Hester felt it:
A storm gathering behind this child.
A prophecy stirring.
A hunger older than bloodlines waking from its long sleep.
Toji Zenin had lost everything.