Chapter Summary: One last hurdle and the children are free. The Addams Family has its debut without even realizing it.
Chapter 2
Morticia steps out of the elevator and down the long hall. The little tune fades as the doors close behind her.
She hums a dark melody and feels the echoed reply reverberate through her ribs. The runes carved under her skin burn like a bath of hot coals and magma. Again, there's a distant reply to her incantation. She can't help, but smile. Oh, Gomez.
Morticia opens the first door in the hall, to a lab. And closes it. Not the lab she's looking for.
It's unfortunate that she can do no more than communicate her continued existence to Gomez. An oversight to be fixed, in the future. For now, her family will have to go on with only knowing she is alive, if elsewhere.
She opens the next door, too. A frown tugs at her lips, Thing was much faster at finding things.
The door doesn't creak once. None of them do.
Morticia continues down the hall until she finds the right room - the lab with the large, arching machine that now smells of ozone and despair. Her favorite perfume.
And smoke. The machine is smoking.
Oh no, did it break? Morticia hurries to the contraption and its controls.
She reads through the error log. The machine overloaded - most likely after the one use - and parts would have to be replaced.
Morticia straightens. Unable to handle more than one use? Definitely not an Addams machine.
The slap of little feet wander closer and Morticia turns to see the adorably gaunt faces of the children. Their tiny faces are wonderfully pallid. But what could have made their expressions twist in such worry?
They stop at the open door - not quite blocking the doorway, leaving room for her to walk out unhindered if she so wished - and stand looking at her fearfully. But the fear is not aimed at her.
"Did something happen?" Morticia asks. She walks to them and crouches to look at the closest one in the eye.
The children look amongst themselves with pinched expressions. They're little chests heaving, they shuffle around until Luca steps forward. He gasps for breath like he'd been running. All of them are.
Morticia can feel the dark tendrils entwined around his bones - hidden under the surface - and she keeps an eye on them as Luca begins to speak.
"Plea- Please, "Luca rasps out, gulping in air like he can't get enough, "I- We can't-!" Luca takes a minute to catch his breath and to straighten his posture.
His eyes are still hesitant in meeting her eyes, but this new fear seems to outweigh any opinions he had of her. "Some of the kids tried to leave, but- ...They were shot down! As soon as they stepped out the front door, they were shot and we couldn't even see from where!"
Morticia frowns and extends her hearing. Past the rapidly beating hearts of the children in front of her and through the walls. Past all the tiny, delicate hearts within the complex.
Outside. Slow beating hearts and calm breathing. 28 of them.
Whoever was outside wasn't afraid.
"More Estraneo?" she asks. It was possible that some scientists had deemed it better to leave the building and take care of the survivors as they bottlenecked at the doorway. However, they felt too calm to be the scientists she had met within this building.
Luca shrugs, shaking his head in jerky motions.
Morticia smooths a hand over her dress and glances back at the machine. That could wait.
"I will take a look then, "she assures, but doesn't head to the front door. Instead, Morticia follows a memorized path. A path leading to the roof.
The children follow, a distance away. Up as far as the elevator will take them, up the stairs, and out the door.
The chill gust of wind greets Morticia to the roof and she pulls a few strands of hair from her lips.
Morticia keeps walking - towards the edge of the roof - and towards where she can hear most of attempting assassins.
The Estraneo's building is in a forest. That's all Morticia has a chance to glimpse before the top half of her head is gone.
If she still had eyes, Morticia would have blinked. Instead, she steps back to hide behind the lip of the roof. She can barely hear the shots.
So there were a few snipers hidden within the camouflage of the forest.
The Addams family has many snipers in the family lineage. 62 alive, 87 undead, and many more ghosts happy to teach any Addams who asked.
Morticia is one of them.
Her head is regrowing itself even even as she steps back. Morticia turns back to the children - her steps still the epitome of grace.
The skin of her bald scalp itches until new hair sprouts and doesn't stop growing until it reaches her lower back again. She blinks, and yes, her eyelids are back as well. Morticia bends her knees and leans down to be closer to eye level to the children.
"Can you bring me any weapons you can find?" She asked them.
Luca and the children behind him stare in mute horror. Then, they nod and scutter away.
Morticia turns back. And rips her arm off.
She holds back on regrowing her arm - to keep the connection with her torn arm strong - and wiggles her fingers. Morticia is reminded of Thing. Will there be a helpful, disembodied hand to assist her around the house in this world?
Morticia doesn't even have a house here.
She frowns down at her torn arm and flexes it thoughtfully.
She'll… She'll have to get a new home. At least a temporary one. One to live in while she fixed the machine.
Morticia hears the small footsteps of the first few children returning from their assigned mission.
She stops. The children.
The children will need a home, too.
Morticia straightens her severed arm - hand flat and ready to be used as the world's deadliest spear - and decides then and there. She won't return home, until she's sure that these children will be taken care of. After all, she doesn't have to live in the house for it to be home to them.
Her arm arcs in the sky and dips down.
One less heart beat.
She can't help but sigh as she remembers the competitions Gomez and her had. Target practice was one of her favorites.
Morticia wiggles her still disembodied hand and digs through the chest of her latest victim. She can't see her arm nor the assassins hiding, so she can't quite do what she had done with her leg earlier, unfortunately.
She'll leave her arm down there, just in case.
So she turns to the four children waiting behind her - whose arms are full of anything from gleaming silverware to a blood splattered crossbow - and smiles at them.
"Let's take a look at what you brought, "she tells them.
They carefully drop their loot to the floor and step back. Each child keeps a weapon on them and Morticia smiles. Still so untrusting.
"No, no, not that one." Morticia holds out her hand out for the small knife in the girl's hand. The girl freezes and - glancing at the other three children - hesitantly hands it over. Morticia replaces it with a cleaver.
The girl blinks and her little arms buckle under the new weight, before steadying. Much better.
Under their incredulous stares, Morticia turns the small knife in her hand and gets a feel for it. Then, she tosses it back. She is busy deciding between a fork or a spoon when the knife hits its target and silences another heart.
Hm. The fork is sharper, but the spoon is made of metal. Well, if they need utensils later on, they can just get new ones.
The plastic fork finds home in a woman's throat and the spoon finds one in a man's eye.
Morticia picks up the crossbow. Not quite up to the craftsmanship of an Addams crossbow, but that's fine. Still such a darling weapon.
12 arrows and 25 hearts remaining. Oh, and- two were running away.
No sense of adventure, those two.
Probably the types to run away from a cave honeymoon, too. Morticia hopes they aren't married.
Her disembodied arm finds another assassin and climbs up the pant leg. The heartbeat rises as they struggle to remove her limb, but her nails are sharp and easily cut through cloth and sinew. Her fingers dig between ribs and shred organs. The man's heart slows to a stop.
12 arrows and 22 hearts. Morticia lets the arm degrade and regrows another. She murmurs against the crossbow and scratches a sigil to its stock.
With arrows and crossbow, Morticia crawls up to the lip of the roof.
Wind. Calculate for arc. Aim.
The arrow sails off and another soon after. Both of them burst with dark tendrils to swallow the targets whole.
Morticia uses up the remaining arrows and moves back, when something arcs in the air. It clacks onto the roof and rolls to her feet. It explodes.
Her ears ring as they heal, along with the front half of her body. The back of her dress lays in tatters.
More bottles are thrown - both onto the roof and through windows - and a fire breaks out. Red fire.
They remind her terribly of Uncle Tic, but a thought slices through her musings.
The children. The machine.
Three more assassins run away. Eight left, and only two with molotov cocktails.
Morticia throws two forks, but a fire has already started within the building. Smoke rises from the windows. It was much less smoke than she would expect, even with the strange fire coloring. But there was no time for that.
She quickly turns back to the children behind her.
"You need to leave." Morticia tells them. "Don't use the front door," all the remaining assassins have their guns pointed at it, "instead go to the -2th floor. The last room is connected to a tunnel that will take you out of the forest."
The stare at her frightened and she tears her arm off again.
"If you run into anyone, use this."
One of the boys cautiously grabs the arm, holding it out as far as possible from himself. She holds his hand.
"Take any other children you see, "Morticia orders and the children run down the stairs.
Morticia worries for them, non-Addams children are so delicate.
Fortunately, so are non-Addams adults.
Morticia grabs a carving knife and jumps off the roof. With a whirl, she lands knife-first onto an assassin. The knife cracks through the skulls down through his throat.
Five hearts left.
She has to do this fast, the children and the machine are at risk.
Morticia hurls the knife towards the next closest-
Her disembodied arm is tapped and she lets go of the boy's hand. Straightens it like a spear.
Did they run into trouble?
The hand meets against a chest - too big to be a child's - begins to dig her fingers through it. Unfortunately, she doesn't have the incantations Thing has, and cannot see through the skin of disembodied limbs. Another oversight to correct.
Morticia pulls out the carving knife and swirls around to slice at the woman behind her.
Three hearts left. They beat fast, in fear.
What a delightful sound.
Morticia spends precious seconds dispatching them, before turning to the front door and its pile of bodies. All of them in various stages of decomposition.
She would have moved them, but the strange, red fire takes care of it for her. Helpful, but worrying for the children - trapped in a building with that fire.
Much of the front entrance is already disintegrated, but the fire's potency seems to have slowed.
Morticia rushes past through the fire - skin burning and healing, only for the new skin to burn away, too - and shrinks her hearing range to better focus on the children.
The next few minutes are a blur of heat, crumbling walls, and rushed conversations as Morticia directs the children to the exits. Until at last, every little heartbeat stands outside the complex.
It's fortunate that the machine room is one floor lower from the main entrance.
Morticia claws through flooring and cement - the material crumbling under her hand - until she can fit through the hole. She runs to the machine.
It's smoke mingles with the smoke of the fire.
Morticia won't be able to fix it now. But that doesn't mean she won't have time to fix it later.
She steps closer to the machine, quickly she begins murmuring an incantation and tugs at the darkness nestled underneath her skin until it stirs. Morticia scrawls sigils on the walls and floor around the machine until the air seems to writhe.
Morticia weakens the machine's connection with this dimension.
Her bones snap and skin tears as twisting shadows shoot out of her ribcage. The shiny, black tendrils coalesce into one and grow larger and larger and larger.
The tendril grows a large, gaping maw and teeth sharp enough to cut through the fabric of time. And it swallows the machine whole, along with the flooring and wall it was attached to.
It will remain hidden in the belly of a beast, until she calls for it once more.
The Beast shrinks back into Morticia, through Morticia. Her bones grind uncomfortably as the tendrils slither through. Like seaweed stroking the legs of the careless.
The sigils show themselves - covering her bones, her organs, and the underside of her skin - but only once. Dark magic and curses. Overlapping and layered on top of one another.
The last tendril disappears from this plain of existence, through the piece of the void that lives within Morticia. And the sigils fade with it.
Morticia takes a breath.
Bones snap back into place. Skin and sinew reknit itself together, and she once more stands whole and nude and scarless.
Morticia eyes the remaining crater. Loose wires and crumpled pieces of concrete hang from the edges, precariously.
It's unfortunate that Morticia can't use The Beast to travel home. Living creatures of flesh cannot cross through that path between dimensions. Even an Addams wouldn't survive the trip. Yet.
For now, Morticia will have to focus on the machine. And the children, of course. Goodness knew those children needed a home. A good, proper home with a nice grave in the backyard. One near a nice, damp cave where they could go play in.
Fire continues to lick at her skin, a tickling burn.
Morticia shakes herself from her thoughts and turns her back to the wreckage. Instead, she stares at the flames which seem to cling to every surface, including materials that aren't flammable.
With the children out of danger, Morticia takes the time to experiment with the strange flames. They burn - as any proper fire should! - but more than that, they seem to disintegrate that which they come in contact with. Is this how fire worked in this world?
Fascinating, but would she be able to find new clothes in this fire?
Morticia hurries up to the upper levels - toying with the red flames all the while - to where the living quarters reside.
Many of the closets she came across were full of white coats which Morticia couldn't understand. Didn't they have enough squirreled away in secret compartments in their labs? She just can't resist the full body shudder at all the white.
However, Morticia does end up finding some nice, black clothing. There's a few black turtleneck sweaters in one of the scientists' rooms, and - luckily - black pants seem decently common.
No full, black dresses, unfortunately.
Morticia stretches out one of the sweaters out to admire the knitted design in the mirror. It has that perfection of machine manufactured knitting, but that was alright.
Even if Morticia prefered her own hand knitting. It was much easier to sneak in protection sigils when no one looked too hard at the designs.
The bottom of the mirror is singed as fire licks at its edges.
Morticia brushes a hand against the fascinating fires one last time and leaves the room.
They stay long enough to watch most of the Estraneo complex cave in on itself. The supporting structure must have fallen apart from the fire.
At some point, the red fire fades and leaves behind the fire Morticia is more familiar with.
She eyes the remains curiously, before herding the children away. They meet up with those who left through the other exits.
Morticia expands her hearing once again, stretching out until she can hear the distant murmurs and heartbeats that signify a town.
"Let's make our way to the nearest town, alright dears?" she asks the wide-eyed, blood splattered children.
There's a tense silence as all the children walk with her. No one speaks up, but they glance at each other suspiciously without trying to get caught. Adrenaline still ran high.
They're suspicious of each other - and of her - no doubt.
"...Who. Who are you?" comes the quiet question.
The small child stares up at her. Luca. The boy she saved mid-experimentation.
The question comes to her as a surprise, but Morticia is not caught so off guard that she forgets the customs she's learned of this world.
"I am Morticia Addams, of the Addams Family, "she replies.
There's a murmur of conversation as the children seem to absorb this information.
"...What are you?" The question cuts through the commotion like a knife. A glittering, red eye peeks at her from the darkness.
Morticia smiles. Such a bold question.
"An Addams." Her shadow ripples and the Void peeks through her dark eyes.
There are no more questions that night.
Together they they reach a town and find a nice, grimy alley to sleep in for the night.
Morticia has a pang of longing for her tanning reflector. The full moon was just perfect for moonbathing.
Morticia awakens to a horrifying skeleton hovering over her, its teeth and phalanges as sharp as knives.
Her mouth parts in wonder and she reaches for it.
The skull is smooth, but not quite what bone actually felt like. Like it was made by someone who's never touched cleaned, human bones before.
A movement catches her attention.
"Oh, is it one of yours?" Morticia asks.
A small boy with purple hair and a single, blood red eye stands behind the creation. The tentacle illusion boy.
"It looks wonderful. Have you considered adding some blood splatters, perhaps?" she continues.
His smile twitches as if struggling to keep smiling, but Mortica doesn't see why. It was a wonderful monstrocity. How she wished Cousin Slip was here to give him pointers. There was so much potential in these physical illusions.
Not only that, but his eyes.
His eyes speak of years beyond his physical age. He looks seven, but as an Addams, Morticia knows the real question is: For how long?
But she won't ask.
The skeleton shifts to lift one of its claw-like hands. Color blooms from the hand, turning it pink and then red. The color and viscosity adjusting until it looks identical to blood.
Morticia hums her approval as she drags a finger through the liquid. It even smells and feels like real blood.
She turns to the boy and gives him a warm smile.
"The blood came out wonderfully realistic, " Morticia compliments.
The boy's little eyes widen and he stiffens where he stands. His eyes dart around - searchingly - like he has no idea what to do in this situation.
Then he clamps down on whatever emotion he's feeling. Shoulders straighten out, eyelids lower, and smile widens once again.
"...Thank you, "he murmurs and Morticia decides against calling out his false bravo.
The illusion dispels itself as Morticia stands.
She eyes the sleepy children. Some are midway through waking up while others are already watching her with sharp, cautious eyes.
They all need a place to sleep. Morticia doesn't mind sleeping out in the cold, hard ground, but she would prefer to have a roof over the children's heads.
"Perhaps I should look for a job…?" she wonders.
It's been a long time since she's had to look for one. The last time she's gone job hunting, finding a job was relatively easy.
Keeping a job, Morticia found, was much harder.
Morticia watches the children wander through the the streets. Some had already left, looking confident enough that Morticia was sure they would figure something out.
More will probably break away from the group as time passes. Regardless of her help, Morticia was still an adult in their eyes. A very, very dangerous adult.
She turns to the young illusionist who has not stopped studying her since she woke up.
Morticia crouches to look at him at eye level.
"What do you think? Would you like to join me in my job hunting?" she asks him.
"Sure." The boy's smile stretches too wide. He's got the Addams charm, this one.
Morticia gives the boy another glance over.
"Oh, pardon me, "she says, "What's your name?" Morticia can't keep calling him 'boy,' even if just in her mind.
He stands there, eyes sharp and tiny body covered in blood.
"...Mukuro Rokudo."
The children that leave Morticia integrate themselves into the homeless population almost seamlessly. There's a scuffle or two over territories, but even that falls under the radar of most. Fighting among the homeless is common, after all.
But even the various Families know that the homeless hear the furthest.
So when a man or two comes snooping for information in exchange for food or money, the inquiry spreads.
Who killed the Estraneo Family?
The tiny, new children of the streets find themselves holding a very juicy piece of information. They have no reason not to share it, and the information spreads.
Who else, but the Addams Family?
Happy New Years everyone, hope your year has been delightfully spooky.