Author's Notes: Finally, no? I hope I still have some readers left, because I missed this. In fact I left it so long I forgot what, exactly, I'd been going to do with it, which is why some of you may notice that the beginning of this chapter was formerly the ending of the previous one - I ended up extending it to accommodate the story's new(ish) direction. I've also edited the other chapters, nothing so major as to cause insurmountable confusion from here on out, but little cosmetic changes that didn't sit right upon a reread. And so, without further ado...
Morticia closed the dormitory door behind her and leaned against it with a sigh.
"What happened?" asked Margaret. She was seated cross-legged in the center of her bed and surrounded by a moat of textbooks and lecture notes.
"Nothing untoward," Morticia admitted, and more was the pity, for although she found that she shared both fifth and sixth period classes with Gomez as well, their seating arrangements left little room for anything beyond surreptitious stares and lovesick daydreams. And what was worse, he hadn't waited for her outside of either, after the bell had rung. Either her lunchtime suspicions had been erroneous, or Balthazar's claim that his cousin preferred to savor the company of those he found unsavory was.
But why did she care so much what he thought of her? He was handsome, yes - quite possibly the most exquisite-looking young man she'd ever seen - but she barely knew him, and he was earmarked to be Ophelia's husband besides. It didn't matter if he despised her or was clandestinely enamored of her, he was off-limits, forbidden, taboo, and to pursue him would be a gross breach of familial loyalty. It was simply out of the question, especially now, in this new country, in the wake of Papa's death and the midst of Aunt Hester's generosity, when being a Frump felt so much more important than it ever had before.
"How was lunch with Fifi?" asked Margaret, with a rolling of eyes.
"Bearable." Morticia shrugged. "Actually, she was only there for part of it, but Balthazar and Itt were diverting enough companions."
Margaret's smirk became more a pursing of her lips. "I'm sure they were. And I suppose they're the ones who showed you to fifth and sixth periods? I went to the fountain at the end of lunch, but I must have just missed you."
"Balthazar did, yes. He was very chivalrous."
"Hmph," snorted Margaret. "That's usually the way they operate. Don't let him pull the wool over your eyes. Just because he's the least guilty of the three doesn't mean he's innocent."
"I'll keep that in mind." Morticia paused. "Which one, would you say, is the most guilty?"
"It's a toss-up between Itt and Gomez, really."
Morticia proceeded delicately, pitching her voice with hesitation. "You said you speak from personal experience?"
Margaret opened her mouth, closed it, and shrugged uncomfortably.
"Itt..." she began. "We were partners for an Art History project last year. I liked him. A lot. And I thought he liked me, too. He would fold me flowers out of paper and leave them sitting on my desk. And then one day, we were supposed to meet in the library. I was running late, and when I got there...there they were: Itt and Ophelia, re-enacting Rodin's Kiss. I left and told him the next day that I'd gotten sick, and that was why I never showed. And then at lunch Ophelia had a paper daisy tucked behind her ear. I may not be the brightest crayon in the box, but I can put two and two together."
Morticia frowned. "Ophelia was with Itt before she was with Gomez?"
"Ophelia was with everybody before she was with Gomez. Rumor has it she still is."
"And that doesn't bother him?"
Another shrug. "He'd be a colossal hypocrite if it did. Trust me, in that respect, they're perfect for each other."
"According to his cousins, he's faithful to her."
"Then he's an idiot. Or he's lying to them, too. There's no line he wouldn't cross. He drove his own brother away, seducing his girlfriends right out from under his nose. Gomez Addams comes from a long line of matadors on his mother's side and every girl is a bull to him, there only to make him look good until he gets bored of toying with her and finally gores her through the heart."
Once, as a child, Morticia had been in Pamplona for Sanfermines. She remembered being hoisted upon one of Papa's broad shoulders to see above the crowd, to watch through air thick with the smells of dust and smoke and human sweat as young men and women, kerchiefed in scarlet, tore through the city streets during the encierro, both leading and being chased, the bravest among them pacing themselves but a breath away from the stampeding horns behind them. She remembered the boy who had fallen one step too short and been speared through the thigh before he was flung like a rag doll into the sea of humped and heaving backs weighing one ton apiece.
Most vividly, she remembered the red smear he'd left on the pavement in their wake.
"Sometimes the bull wins," she said.
Margaret considered this statistical inevitability. "Ophelia is more or less the human incarnation of mad cow disease. That might give her a sporting chance."
Morticia smiled sadly. "It might."
"I know she's your cousin, but I wouldn't worry about her, if I were you. If there's anything Ophelia knows how to do, it's rebound."
Morticia shook her head. "I'm not worried." About her. "It's just...all so absurd. I move from Europe and the people here are even more Old World than I am."
"What do you mean?" Margaret asked around a yawn.
That's right - Gomez and Ophelia's engagement was still technically under wraps, and Margaret didn't appear to know that their courtship hadn't been arranged by the couple themselves.
"Oh, nothing." Morticia waved the question away. "Family politics. C'est ennuyeux."
She wasn't against arranged marriages as a rule - Papa and Mama had been chosen for each other by their own parents, and the match had proven to be a sound one, as emotionally successful as any made for love - but the thought of anyone attempting to arrange Ophelia into anything beyond a floral display seemed like a pipe dream at best, and at worst...
Morticia couldn't explain it, even to herself, why she so badly didn't want Gomez Addams to die. Death was a rite of passage, a reason to celebrate. It marked the learning of mysteries, liberation from the damp and foetid bonds of mortality. If suffering was the pathway to enlightenment, then death was enlightenment's doorway. She should have been thrilled for Gomez, she should have envied him, but, selfishly, all she could picture was a world without him in it. A world where she would be and his dark eyes and soft mouth and rich voice and feverish hands wouldn't, and the very idea left her breathless with grief.
Was this why they called it a "crush," this overwhelming weight on her heart, like the gargoyle Mama used to perch upon Morticia's chest at bedtime to encourage her nightmares? And to think, people acted as though these things were shallow schooltime infatuations. Did every attraction begin this way? Were crushes meant to suffocate one into love?
Love?
"I'm going for a walk," she heard herself say, and was glad when Margaret didn't offer to go with her.
The night air was cool, bordering on downright chilly, but she eschewed bringing her coat in favor of the clarity offered her by the cold.
It was what she would come learn was the school's quietest hour, with extracurriculars still in full swing and supper not yet on offer in the cafeteria, and she relished the solitude she found between the imposing stone buildings. She looked up at the stars, tiny diamonds scattered in a velvet dark void. The things they had seen. The people they had crossed.
If he couldn't be hers, that was one thing. If he couldn't be here at all, that was entirely another. Morticia didn't have to know him to know how much she would miss him; to be certain that, the moment his life ceased, what was left of hers would be nothing more than a hollow playact, a simulation of vitality no more profound than the convulsions of Giovanni Aldini's corpses.
Love, then.
Morticia Acherontia Frump was in love.
Twin tears rolled down her cheeks and dried there, crystallizing in the frigid air.
"Oh, Papa," she sighed into the night. "What am I to do?"
She waited, ears pricked, for the beating of bat wings, an echolocative screech of disapproval or consent, but it was a memory that supplied the sound: a song from an old film the whole troupe had gone to see at a midnight matinée in Lisbon. What a night that had been, with the ushers' eyes darting nervously around the freak-filled seats, remarking amongst themselves that the whole of Hades seemed to have turned out in attendance, drawn by Orfeu Negro's enchanted guitar.
She hummed a few bars, all hopeful lyrics and doomed delivery. Not all sad stories are tragedies. In sad stories, many bad things happen that may later be revealed to have been all for the best. Tragedy is knowing that all roads lead to heartbreak, and running down them with joy in your heart regardless.
"Manhã, tao bonita manhã," she softly sang, "Na vida uma nova cançao..."
I hate this, Gomez brooded, seated with his back against one of the incinerator chimneystacks on the rooftop of Jack Parsons Hall, the mad sciences building, taking what comfort he could from the soot. Odio esta maldita escuela...odio mi maldita vida...
How was he ever going to endure this? He had known of her existence for only a handful of hours, and each one had been an exercise in torturous restraint. He could scarcely look at her for fear of being physically incapable of looking away. His every thought had been reduced to the maddeningly mellow tones of her voice and the sinuous lines of her shadow that threatened, with every breath he inhaled, to expand into fantasies of rich moans purring through bone white flesh, and an irrepressible compulsion to make them real.
La quiero...la amo...
Gomez closed his eyes and dug his fingernails into his palms and crushed the filtered end of his kretek between his teeth in a pained grimace.
"Manhã, tao bonita manhã..."
That voice, that inescapable voice, English, French, and now even Portuguese in his head, a succubus speaking in all tongues, mocking him with talk of mornings he had no will to see again, if it meant he would wake from the dream of her.
"Na vida uma nova cançao..."
In life there is a new song. Her song.
Her song?
Gomez's eyes shot open. At once he was on his feet at the rooftop's buttressed edge.
It was her, strolling the path between mad and antisocial sciences buildings, a scant four storeys beneath him!
"Sing," he whispered fiercely, all harrowing reserve forgotten, drowned out by his heart pounding an allegro in his chest. "O, sing again, dark angel!"
"Cantando só teus olhos," his angel complied. "teu riso e tuas maos, pois ha de haver um dia em que virás..."
And come with eyes, smile and hands he did, climbing nimbly, lizard-like, down the ornately carved stone of the building's southern façade. He knew her song, its humid melody and bittersweet lyrics, he knew it - but from where?
His mother's bossa nova records. It was the love theme of another pursuit, he realized, that of the Brazilian Black Orpheus and his Eurydice during Carnaval in Rio, Augustinho dos Santos dubbing Breno Mello. Death had hunted Eurydice, Mina had hounded Orfeu, and Orfeu and Eurydice had haunted each other in turn. But did Morticia see the parallels? Had she chosen the song by chance, or could she truly be singing for him?
Gomez leapt the last few yards to the ground, landing in a scranch of leaves between two overgrown lambkill shrubs, and somersaulted to his feet just as Morticia rounded the corner of Parsons, heading in the direction of Torquemada Court.
Keep calling, he thought, as loudly as he could, keep calling and I will come...
"Das cordas do meu violao, que só teu amor procurou..." Morticia paused under the spiny branches of a hemlock tree and leaned a shoulder against the frayed bark of its trunk. "Vem uma voz falar dos beijos perdidos nos lábios te-"
She froze, startled at the sudden sound of rapidly approaching footsteps behind her.
Something inside her warned her to remain still, and she heeded it.
Her pulse sped up as the footsteps neared and slowed, and she knew who it was without knowing how, as a shark knows a storm by an urge to dive deeper.
Don't look back, Gomez inwardly begged, please don't look back. Look back and I am damned. Look back and I will die.
Her silence was his permission, her unwavering back a gesture from the Fates themselves that for him a chance of salvation still existed - or else irony was a grim reaper indeed...
A shiver crinkled through her when she felt the air behind her displace and heat with his presence, accompanied by a brief vision of blood-tipped horns and then, Cloves, she realized - that had been the warm and spicy something she couldn't place earlier, the gamey sweetness of cigarillos on his breath and his breath hot on the nape of her neck when he brushed her braid over her shoulder, but didn't otherwise touch her.
Instead she heard a rustle of fabric, and then the heavy, woolen warmth of his coat enveloped her, immersing her in that wonderful piquant smell, relaxing her utterly even as her awareness of her surroundings sharpened in focus. She thought his lips might have grazed the shell of her ear, just barely, just enough to prompt the gooseflesh always simmering beneath her skin to rise.
She gathered her voice and her courage, and asked him outright, "Why did you agree to marry Ophelia?"
Behind her, she heard him swallow dryly before he answered, "It's my punishment. For betraying my brother. For driving him away."
"Where is he now?"
"No one knows. It's been eight months since his last postcard to my parents. He was in Cuba at the time, but mentioned wanting to go by sea up to Norway, perhaps get in a little whaling. There was a hurricane not far off the coast. Mother's convinced he didn't make it. She said he ought to have just harpooned me and been done with it. By and large, I agree with her."
"I don't."
"You are the most resplendent, radiant, ravishing creature I've ever laid eyes on. I want to burn your name into my bones."
Morticia closed her eyes as desire flowered in her belly and lit through her limbs. "Then do it."
He inhaled shakily in response, and she knew his body was all but thrumming with the tension strung across the few millimeters' space between them. This power was still new to her, a thing the depths of which she'd only just begun to toe when Papa had pulled the sea floor out from under her feet with his passing. She wanted to navigate it well.
"Cara mia..." he breathed.
She smiled. "I like that much more than cariña."
"Then cara mia you shall always be!"
"Shall I? And who will make me so?"
"Not Balthazar," he said firmly.
"Not a boy who's affianced to my cousin, either."
A muted sob puffed against the side of her throat.
"I'll call it off!"
"How?"
Pained silence.
"Jilt her for me and my mother and I are turned out on the street. Jilt her for me and you may be, as well."
"We could manage. We could survive."
"Of that I have no doubt. But could you bear it, the loss of your clan? Your birthright?"
"For you, anything!"
"I'm flattered. But I couldn't." She heard his breath catch, felt his spirit stiffen, anguished. "I couldn't accept such a sacrifice from you, even if you gave it willingly. Your blood, yes; not your bloodline."
"Every last drop of it is yours," he vowed. "Every thread of sinew. Every organ. Every breath, thought, sound, second, aeon, until time itself decays! Cara mia, tell me what I must do to win you!"
"Find a way," she commanded, reaching up to lightly scrape her nails down his cheek. "Without rendering yourself liable, make Ophelia leave you, et je t'appartiens pour toujours-" A gasp punctuated the sentence as he pulled her roughly back against him, his soft mouth and sharp teeth suddenly at her throat. Her fingers spasmed, clutching at his hair as lust tided inside her, overwhelmingly intense, a rip current of arousal and adoration that would have swept her off her feet completely had his arm not shackled her at the waist, holding her upright against the hard wall of his chest.
Panic bubbled briefly through her - it was too much, she had misjudged, underestimated his own power, how quickly she herself might sink - but both it and their embrace was cut short by a bark of laughter a short distance off in the direction from which they'd come. She flinched, and Gomez jerked away from her so quickly she nearly stumbled backward. He steadied her with a hand to the small of her back, almost innocent, just as Balthazar and Itt rounded the corner of Parsons Hall.
"Morticia, cariña!" exclaimed Baz, already beaming. His smile faltered uncertainly upon taking note of the slightly taller, darker shadow behind her. "And Gomez. Should you really be up and about in your ailing condition?"
A vision of tearing his cousin's lips off his face flashed behind Gomez's eyes, but he stifled it, and managed a passably nonchalant shrug.
"Why submit to quarantine when I may be contagious?" he explained. "But not to worry, old man, I think it was an eight hour bug. And besides, I wanted to apologize to Miss Frump for my less than gallant behavior this afternoon. I'm afraid I didn't at all make a good first impression."
In the company of others now, she could face him safely, and she did, a gracious smile curving her crimson lips. "It's quite all right. After all, we're to be family."
Gomez's heart sang and sank at once at the two different possibilities her words implied. He forced a smile and bobbed his head in agreement. "Indeed. And with that, I think I'll absent myself before I do anything that might require your forgiveness again."
He didn't have it in him not to touch her one more time, given the opening, and so he took it, bowing over her hand to brush his lips chastely against the cool knuckle of her ring finger, knowing she would read the promise in the placement of the kiss.
Walking away from her was sheer agony, each step pulling tight the noose she'd looped around his heart. His lungs ached for a kretek but he licked his lips instead, drunk on the thought that cells from her body were now inside his, and folded his tongue back in his mouth in an attempt to recapture the taste of her skin, headier and more addictive than opium.
He made his way back to his dorm in a fog - or was it a steam? His body still burned from its contact with hers, and despite leaving her with his coat he didn't at all feel the cold. On autopilot he shed his school blazer and tossed it haphazardly on the dressing chair in the corner of his room, sat down on the edge of his bed and found himself trembling as if in the wake of some near-death experience.
Wasn't she, though? Embracing her, even if only for a few moments, had been the very apex of his life to date, the needle-sharp summit on a heart monitor between flatlines.
And he would flatline without her, of that he was certain. She'd insinuated within him a new basic physiological need: Morticia between food and air; between sleep and cyanide and nicotine, Morticia.
How in nine hells was he going to make Ophelia jilt him? It wasn't as though he had hitherto made any overtures of real romantic interest in her - and, truth be told, nor had she to him, until their parents had informed them of the betrothal. But since then, she had been putting real effort into her fawning, like the construction of a lattice to hold up later vines, and Gomez wasn't really sure how she honestly felt about him these days - whether she was still building, or if something had started to grow. If she had begun to genuinely care for him, indifferent as he was to her, what could he possibly do to dispel her feelings while maintaining his own veil of ingenuousness?
He'd never deliberately sought to make a woman despise him before, let alone perniciously, and Ophelia wasn't the type of girl to acknowledge anything subtler than a brick to the head.
A brick to the head, now there was something he could have worked with - the most elegantly simple of solutions, and one that would have brought him sincere delight - but the death of her cousin hadn't been Morticia's bidding, and Gomez would not begin his bondage to her in disobedience of her first request.
He buried his face in his hands and rubbed at his temples, unable to think straight. The caustic thought that Fester, with his inhuman combination of absolute cunning and personal appeal, would have known what to do dripped mocking holes in Gomez's brain like battery acid. He so badly missed his elder brother...
The hollow thumps of footsteps climbing the stairwell interrupted his sullen cerebrations, followed by the familiar nasal creak of the opening door.
Balthazar regarded him with a mix of hesitancy and suspicion. He wasted no time mincing words - a suitable trait, thought Gomez contemptuously, for a boy who never minced people, either.
"What exactly is your game, cousin?"
"What game?" Gomez asked, voice lined with leaden fatigue.
"Are you going after Morticia?"
"Don't be absurd. Ophelia would murder me. And her."
"Since when has imminent death stopped you from pursuing anything?"
Gomez shot him a scowl. "Since eight months ago, or have you forgotten?"
Balthazar shrugged, but at least looked chagrined. "You've had other girls since then, even discounting Ophelia."
"None of whom I was in danger of being related to."
The younger Addams smiled. "Then you really think I have a chance with her?"
"Ophelia? Be my guest. Everyone else has." In fact, Gomez considered it something of a marvel that Balthazar and Ophelia had never taken an amatory shine to one another - they were both so uncommonly purblind.
"I meant Morticia and you know it."
Shaking his head, Gomez finally gave in and retrieved a fresh pack of Djarum Blacks from his bedside table. He lit one. The hot smoke filled his lungs like a change of slippers after a long day of loafing about. "Old man, if today has taught me anything at all, it's that a chance always exists."
Balthazar's eyes brightened, shining like new pennies in the orbital sockets of someone freshly dead. "She's beautiful, don't you think?"
She's exquisite, Gomez wanted to say. Unique in all the world. The Devil broke the mold and fashioned her by loving, prideful hand. And she was made for me.
"She's lovely," was what he did say, and hated himself for being unable to wholly disagree, even to sour his cousin's opinion of her.
" 'Lovely?' An overcast day is lovely. Morticia is...is..."
"Blood on the snow beneath a midwinter moon."
"Yes! That's excellent, may I use it?"
"Shouldn't you woo her in your own words? What if I'm someday unavailable to assist you?"
Balthazar shrugged. "Write a phrase book before you go."
"Que te den por culo, Baz."
"I'm only joking." He sat down on his own bed and twisted his fingers together nervously. "I'm taking her out. This weekend."
Gomez felt the blood drain from his face and kick him in the stomach. "You're..." He cleared his throat, choking back bile and what might have been the beginnings of tears. "You already asked her?"
Balthazar nodded. "Not fifteen minutes ago."
"And she said yes?"
"She did. I'm not sure where we'll be going, yet. Maybe the bogs. The mist there really sets the mood."
The boy's grin, Gomez mused, would be so much more attractive with a few broken teeth.
"Like the peat sets bodies," he concurred, envisioning one body in particular.
Nevermind his own game, what was she playing at? Was this a test? Retribution? An impetus for him to hurry? Or was she, underneath all that serene aplomb, just as inconstant and fickle-hearted as her cousin?
If she was, did he care?
Yes, Gomez decided, he cared a great deal - but at the same time it didn't matter. The poison was in the wound, his soul already seething with the leaven of her raw perfection.
He had no choice. If a starting pistol she had fired, then Gomez would run with its bullet lodged in his heart.
And if he had to break Balthazar's to win (his heart, his teeth, his legs, their bond), then so be it.