A/N: It's been a while since I waded into fanfiction territory, so bear with me if I'm a little rusty at this. Check out the link on my profile page to read Providence as intended.
Disclaimer: I do not own, nor claim ownership of any of the characters used. The Addams Family and all affiliated storylines, characters, and productions all belong to the Chas and Tee Addams Estate.
The peremptory cry of withered limbs and nigh lifeless greeneries subdued and discarded any and all other thoughts entertained by the fair creature's long restless mind. Her frail fingers encircled a tin watering can coated in a gossamer thicket of dust as she chided herself for her insufficiency, distressed by the shoddy state of her garden. She wasted no time debating which of her plants she'd gratify with a quenching shower and instead tended to the wilting spines and balding fronds nearest her perch. She was ambivalent to caress the once spry, florid leaves of a particularly skeletal shrub and elected against it, deterred by the entirely palpable potential for them to collapse. Her guilt was peaking.
"Morticia, the plants again?" The abject silence of the sanctuary, fetid and comfortable, was imbued suddenly by the pointed singsong of a woman slighted, "Really, darling, they can be pruned and watered any time. I only get one first impression, however."
The young horticulturist was still consumed by her onus, though her sister's presence made it all the easier to façade with dissonance. Her frown stiffened and her entrails knotted. She was hurt.
"Morticia, I'm speaking to you." the woman said deliberately, probative in an effort to receive a reply. She was incapable of hostility, she knew, but attempted it regardless.
The breadth of the girl's proud shoulders collapsed on exhale and she hung her head. The room resonated with the calamitous clatter of the watering can against the table top as she gruffly dislodged it from her fingertips before pirouetting sloppily on her heels. She unearthed the nerve to stamp ahead a few paces and rooted herself in place, watching in withdrawn perturbation as her sister ensconced herself upon the weeding table in the corner. She pondered a severe expression for a moment, but felt remorseful for narrowing her eyes at the otherwise faultless woman. Her fingers toyed with the loose ebony strands punctuating either of her plaits. She never knew what to do with her hands.
"Ophelia, I understand your feelings. I've understood your feelings for days, now, and it's driven me from my garden. If you'd leave me to my plants for just a few minutes, I'd be happy to go right back to commiserating with you, but I can't be left to my devices without first being left."
Ophelia plucked at the decrepit flower petals haunting the tabletop upon which she sat, noticeably troubled by the juxtaposition of petrified black plant flesh upon her own. She promptly discarded them once more, spooked at the very thought of decay. "It's not commiseration I want, dear, not tonight."
"Is it tonight?" the more stoic of the siblings iterated incredulously.
The woman nodded with a grandiose gesticulation of her hands, leaping from the table and setting the nursery aglow with her smile. "Come with me!"
Her flaxen locks swelled languidly in accordance to her every enthusiastic endeavor, pooling about her bare bronzed shoulders in sedentariness and flowing in all manner of directions in times of fluidity. Ophelia was rare to stagnate, as her attention was easy to woo and just as easy to falter, and as such she found herself striding melodically toward anything remotely enticing. Her more constant inclinations resided with nature and music, a shallow pair of interests she shared with her sister as part of a shallower pool of similarities between the two. Lush blossoms adorned her crown and attire, variant hues and aromas aplenty reamed around her visage, entangled in her hair and very nearly sprouting to life on the ground she trod.
Morticia's eyes widened as her sister approached her, every footfall of her bare soles inspiring a searing pinprick in the fine tissue of her palpitating heart. Apprehensions aside, however, the younger of the two women exuded a physical composure very nearly unattainable, regret and ire perishing in favor of temperance and measure. Her naked lips were an inscrutable line and her eyes, though massive and reflective of the low hanging lamplight, were similarly enigmatic.
"Me? But Mother was so intent on supervising." She feigned a vague sort of despondence.
The tow-headed ingénue snickered complacently as she swayed on her toe tips about the girl's rigid frame, reaching out with inquisitive fingers for her hair and smock. "Oh, Mother's quite set on supervision. As for who it is that's doing the supervising, she's a tad more lenient."
"You're not serious," she followed the woman's every move with unapologetic skepticism, "You know I don't like people."
"Then ignore them! It's just a formal way for the Addams boy and I to meet before Mother, Father, and his parents discuss the wedding plans, the dowry, all that. Think of it as a little get-together among friends." Ophelia had put her dancing to a temporary halt, more interested in disheveling the prim braids on either hemisphere of her sister's head.
Dissatisfied by the brief description of the evening's festivities, the girl pursed her lips and hinged a well-manicured brow. "I don't like parties, either."
"Well, you're in luck," she was perfunctory and lethargic in speech, not nearly as overtly boisterous as she had been before. A grin toyed provocatively at the corners of Morticia's mouth as the woman raked her nimble, sun-kissed fingers through the liberated sable tendrils draped over either of her shoulders. The tentative affection was nothing if not bribery, both were aware, but she welcomed it all the same.
"It's a funeral."
"A funeral?" the words burst free of her lips before she could devote any pragmatic thought to the matter, her heart rapping insatiably at her chest and a patient grin sprawled across the pallid canvas of her face, unshackled. "Open casket, do you think?"
Ophelia laughed, sweeping her sister's hair betwixt her fingers. "I don't know. I guess you'll just have to come and see for yourself."