Author's note: Thank you so very much for your reviews on the previous chapter! I am very much enjoying writing this and I hope you are enjoying reading it.


Normal. The word rang around the room, bounced off of the walls and made the pages of the books rustle. Thing lept onto the couch between them and curled his fingers around the edge, fraught with anticipation of the conflict about to erupt. His wife's mother, his brother and his sons poured into the room behind his daughter. There might as well have been a thousand people witnessing the beginning of his downfall, though to have his most intimate family pay witness to his torture was a pain uniquely fostered within him. He all but shook with horror.

"Just be…" Wednesday flapped her arms around gracelessly and beside him his wife flinched.

"Darling," Morticia tilted her face again towards him, though it was not to him her affectation was addressed, "We will be grace personified."

His daughter moaned a little, "Our idea of grace and theirs-"

"Will be the same, I'm sure," Morticia finished gently, "Have some faith in us, my darling."

"I do! I'm just asking for us to be ordinary," she said, defeat lacing her voice as she fell into the plush seat beside the fire.

Everyone was watching her with curiosity, the same curiosity with which someone drove past a car crash and felt both guilty and compelled as they observed. He winced as Morticia's eyes, her mouth set in a fine grimace of confusion, swivelled toward him. When he did not meet her glare, blatantly ignoring her silent request for defence, she visibly tensed beside him.

"And we are promising we will be," he suddenly said, lifting his eyes from his shoes but never once looking towards Morticia, "Whatever that is."

"And this boy, Lewis, will fall madly in love with us."

He nearly smirked, for his wife's mistake was deliberate. She knew his name was Lucas and she knew exactly who he was. Morticia, despite herself, derived great pleasure from the privileges of mental torture unique to motherhood.

"It's Lucas mother," Wednesday whispered.

"Of course it is," she answered as she stood, "My darling. I promise you, we will all be normal."

-0-

"The implicit suggestion is, of course, that we are somehow abnormal," she let her robe drop to the floor.

There had never been a painting, nor a vision, nor a commitment of such beauty to memory as there had to be when he looked upon her. He cursed himself when his swallow was audible. She smiled, as she always did, when she caught him in his admiration. Eros. The love of the physical. The love derived from physical pleasure. The madness of the gods.

"Tish…"

"Gomez?"

"There's nothing abnormal about you," he whispered, "Not physically anyway."

As she passed by, she swatted him on the shoulder lightly. He caught her hand and kissed her lips and then returned to polishing his shoes. He had been at this task for almost an hour and the finely tooled patent was now just a distraction for him rather than a true goal. He pushed them to the side and watched her retreating form for a moment.

To this woman, this woman who was everything, he was lying.

She disappeared into her dressing room, and despite himself he hoped that she would have somehow redressed when she emerged. No such luck was befalling Gomez Addams tonight. The only thing she reappeared with were two dresses on hangers and stockings on her legs.

If it hadn't been beautiful it would have been indecent. To look towards the ceiling and acknowledge the gods' torture of him would be to give into this night of trials and tribulations. Instead he simply stared.

"This or this?"

She presented the dresses to him. Both were predictably black but unpredictably and unusually knee length. He recalled she had commissioned the one on the right for the funeral of a friend and the other for a dinner with one of his associates.

"Something else underneath first, I hope."

"Why don't you help me pick those instead? Small, satin, lace? Corset…"

"A tempting offer," he smirked, "But they were meant to be here ten minutes ago."

"Imagine how late we could be," She held up the dresses like the balances of a scale, "Hmm?"

"The one on the left," he answered.

"Is it normal enough?"

The words were almost bitter. He looked towards her and felt a pang of guilt so intense that he could barely muster a smile at her cattiness.

"More than normal," he smiled, "But never bland cara mia."

"Never bland," she repeated, "Lace me up won't you?"

"Do you want to kill me?"

"Oh yes, yes very much so," she cocked an eye-brow, "But you will love your death."

Death, indeed, was a certainty. Perhaps at this rate - as his hearth thumped and he pulled on satin laces and she leaned forward against her dresser and moaned in the most feral of pleasures – he would die much quicker than he realised. Perhaps death would be a release from all of it; from the perfidy to which, with every passing moment, he was bound further.

"I will always love you."

As he tied the knot one final time so it lay snug in the valley of her lower back, his voice was weak with the protestations from his denied body.

"I know that," she was almost dismissive in her rebuttal but belied her scolding with a touch to his cheek, "Are you feeling contemplative?"

"No, out of my depth rather," he muttered, "And worried about mistakes."

"Don't be," she said softly, sliding her dress over her hips, "Don't be."

"You always put me at ease," he confided, as if it were some desperate secret.

"That, mon cher, is my job," she said softly.

-0-

Wednesday paced atop the stairs, every now and then peering down into the lobby below. Lurch waited dutifully by the door and from the large window at the far end she could see the gravel drive that wound towards their house; the drive up which the Beinekes would come, bringing her fate with them.

She thought of her conversation with her father this afternoon and was almost overcome with fear. Lie to her mother; she failed to see now what the Wednesday of this morning had been thinking. She almost wept at the very reminder of how utterly foolish she'd been. Between her fingers she twisted the pink cotton of the dress that she had donned in the hope of appearing normal. She had gone to the mall that very morning and bought this and spent hours in front of the mirror imagining her mother's every possible reaction. Then she had seriously considered going to the nearest mental health facility and, after signing herself in, seeking a second opinion as to the state of her sanity.

She grew warm with indignation then cold with shame intermittently. First she would tell herself that her mother was not in a position to judge, that her father was sentimental, that her parents' marriage had been far from well brokered and a little more than selfish. Then shame would befall her and she'd think only of how much she loved them and how terrible she was being.

Never once had they smothered or controlled her. When she was little they had indulged both her and her brother and they indulged the three of them still. Her life had been charmed and never once hard. In short, she had no right to resent them.

She thought back to her days of teen angst; though more muted, they had been far deadlier than those of her contemporaries and yet her parents led her through them with aplomb, even though at times throttling her must have seemed attractive, and brought her out of the other end with love unparalleled. Her brothers too were encouraged and admired and loved as if they were precious and rare things. They were good parents, despite how in contrary to common culture they were. Despite how unlike Lucas' family they were, even despite how in love they still were.

Her guilt-hued nostalgia led her to think about her youngest brother's first few months of life. Her parents hadn't been given a moment between their battling children and their lovesick brother and yet still they managed to hold them together with the ease with which they appeared to do everything. After that even Wednesday had been in favour of the month long tour of Eastern Europe they decided to take, despite her fear that she would be blessed with a fourth sibling.

"What in all that is holy are you wearing?"

She looked down to see her little brother, moustachioed face titled upwards in utter horror, looking at her.

"A dress."

"A travesty," he countered, "Mother will-"

"Leave mother out of this," she snapped.

He shrugged his slight shoulders, his satin vest lifting as he did so and his little face, so pernicious yet cute, crumpled like paper in a precursor to weeping. His miniature rapier, the tip blunted from so many altercations with the suits of armour around the house, dropped to the floor with a clatter. Startled by the noise, more afraid of attracting the attention of her parents sooner than she had to, she panicked.

"Pubert," she crouched so she was eye-level with him, "I am sorry. Just don't bite anyone tonight, alright?"

She touched his pomaded hair.

"You're changing," he wept dolefully, seeking out her rarely given affection as he curled his hands around her neck. She was about to shake him off when she realised that was hardly fair.

"I'm not," she tried to protest feebly but even to her own ears it was unconvincing.

Was changing really such a bad thing? Was normal really so awful? She knew though that one thing she had done was already a sin; she'd driven a wedge between her two biggest allies. Why not, she thought to herself, commit a few more before you're caught out?

-0-

In the parlour Lurch had gone all out with the dusting, lit a sparking fire and on the sideboard had provided a fine selection of cocktails. Late, and most certainly lost, their guests had yet to appear. Pubert was sandwiched between them and as was his habit, was fidgeting with the sleeve of his mother's dress. He took these little fits of affection often and Gomez would wake to find him squashed between their sleeping forms in bed or his feet pattering across their bedroom floor to ask politely if he might climb in.

"I love you mother," he told her softly, cupping his hand around her ear as if it were a secret. He produced a thorny stem - one which had been previously pilfered from the greenhouse no doubt - and offered it to her.

She kissed his cheek, pulled him into her lap, and cradled him there.

"My little prince of darkness," she whispered across his brow.

In that very moment, had it not been for the grumbling of a car across the gravel, Gomez might have wept with sheer love or perhaps set the world alight with revelations as he observed the scene playing out beside him. Instead he was so overcome with emotion that the moment slipped by him and soon the booming of the bell announced the arrival of the Ohioans.

Morticia pulled her little boy to her once more, then set him down on the floor.

"Have you even see Wednesday?"

She turned to him for a moment, her hand snaking out to touch his on the couch in an illustration of camaraderie. As soon as he could, and despite how terrible he felt, he withdrew his hand.

"No, I haven't."

He looked up just in time to see the strange look which darted across her face, then her features reassembled into the mask of passive calm which was typical to her. Suddenly the room felt unbearably warm and small, as if the walls were pushing in on top of him. Their eyes, so used to finding each other in these moments of need, locked together and he knew suspicions had taken root in her mind.

Below his ribs he felt the stirring of terror.

"Gomez," she leaned towards him as the rest of the household dutifully filtered into the lobby, her voice low and concerned, "Is there something wrong?"

"No," he answered too swiftly and, to her keen ears, guiltily.

She gave him a long glance then pulled away from him. Her entire face, for a moment, was a portrait of hurt but just as quickly as it had painted itself, it was erased. His heart, heavy with guilt, was almost leaden with horror.

"As you say," she nodded her head, but lingering around her mouth were the traces of her disappointment.

She swayed away from him then, back straight and hips pushed forward, just as Lurch pulled the door open.


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