Work Text:
The Addams mansion breathes as though alive, its bones creaking like a weary giant turning in his sleep. The ancient timbers sigh with each gust of wind, and the turrets bend their shadows long across the moor. Candlelit windows peer outward with a sardonic gleam, sly as watchful eyes that have seen centuries of storms, funerals, and midnight visitors who delightfully never returned. Inside the manor, velvet shadows gather in thick folds, coiling themselves lovingly around every carved column, every stairwell spiraled with dust, every ancestral portrait whose painted eyes glitter with grim amusement, following intruders with patient disdain. The air itself smells faintly of candle wax, old velvet, and the lingering spice of herbs steeped in cauldrons.
Yet tonight, within that gloom and grandeur, an anomaly stirs the very lifeblood of the house: the sweet, cherubic coo of a baby.
Gomez Addams paces the nursery as if it were an arena, his every step a flourish, stretched flesh bared after the birth of their first child. In his arms, swaddled in black silk trimmed with cobweb lace, rests a tiny bundle. “Look at him, Tish!” Gomez cries, moustache quivering like a banner in battle. “So pink! So round! A child who yawns instead of hisses!”
Morticia, draped in black satin that seems woven from midnight itself, glides closer with the stately grace of a raven alighting on marble. Her ivory hand extends, one finger trailing down their new baby’s sandy-blond hair as though tracing something rare and alien. Her lips, usually a sculpted line of enigmatic severity, soften into a smile — slow, deliberate, like moonlight spilling across a crypt. “So ordinary,” She purrs, her voice a chord of velvet and shadows. “Positively suburban. Oh, Gomez… isn’t he exquisite?”
The baby, their little Dennis, blinks at them with eyes the color of summer skies, wide and guileless. He gazes past the skulls grinning on the mantelpiece, the cobwebs that drape his crib like bridal lace, and the faint clank of chains echoing up from the dungeon below, as though none of it is remarkable. A spider lowers itself from the canopy, its jeweled body gleaming in the candlelight. Dennis giggles, not with ghoulish glee, but with the pure delight of something shiny and alive.
Uncle Fester bursts in, crackling with manic energy, a live wire sputtering sparks in his hands. “Let’s see what the little fella thinks of this!” He crows, eyes glowing brighter than the electricity he wields. He waves the wire close, dangerously close, and Dennis squeals with laughter, his tiny hands clapping not from terror, but from the wholesome cheer of seeing light dance in the dark.
Gomez staggers back, clasping his milk-replete chest as though struck by Cupid’s bolt. “Did you hear that laugh, cara mia? No sinister undertones, no devilish cackle! Just a normal, everyday giggle! Mon dieu, he’s magnificent.”
Morticia leans into him, her head resting against his milky flesh, her breath a sigh scented faintly of nightshade in contrast. “Our little paradox,” She murmurs, her tone a velvet hymn. “In a house of shadows, he is daylight. In a family of grotesques, he is cherubim. How perfectly enchanting.”
Grandmama totters in, her cauldron spoon clutched like a scepter, steam curling upward in noxious spirals of green and violet. She thrusts the dripping utensil toward Dennis’ pink rosebud mouth. “A draught to strengthen his little bones,” She croons. The potion bubbles thick as swamp mire, smelling of grave moss and singed feathers. Dennis wrinkles his button nose, turns his head away, and burbles in polite refusal. Grandmama throws back her head and cackles. “He refuses my elixir! Just like an ordinary child turning up his nose at spinach. Perfectly revolting!”
Even Thing cannot resist him. The disembodied hand skitters to the cradle, its fingers tapping with delicate anticipation. It strokes the downy softness of Dennis’ hair, and the tiny blond giggles, seizing Thing’s digits as if they were nothing more than a toy rattle. So natural. So commonplace. In this household, an act so wondrous it borders on the miraculous. From their frames, the ancestral portraits seem to lean forward, grim faces slack with bafflement. They behold the new babe who smiles at thunder as if it were a lullaby, who pets the monstrous family cat as though it were a docile tabby, who slumbers peacefully through banshee wails and chains rattling in the walls as though soothed by them.
Morticia sweeps Gomez and their first baby into her arms, the two of them bathed in the flickering light of the nursery candelabra, their eyes fastened on their improbable son. His voice trembles with awe, with worship. “He is the most extraordinary thing of all, Tish… a perfectly normal baby and ours.”
“Nothing,” Morticia whispers, her eyes like twin obsidian flames, “Could be more delightfully abnormal than that.”
Their firstborn grows up beneath the cavernous vaults and swaying chandeliers of the family home, a boy stitched from paradox: the very picture of wholesome, apple-cheeked normalcy thriving amidst a dynasty of cobwebs, crypts, and candle smoke. Where others might wither, he blooms; sunlight in a house that prefers the moon. At five, he is already a marvel. He spends his afternoons in the sprawling garden — not tending to the carnivorous orchids that snap at passing moths, nor the grave plots that sprout new mounds weekly, but kicking a bright red ball across the weed-choked grass, each thump of rubber against stone reverberates through the estate like something miraculous. From the veranda, Gomez and Morticia watch, their hands entwined, their gazes reverent as if beholding an apparition.
“Did you see that, cara mia?” Gomez gasps when Dennis’s ball collides harmlessly with a hedge. “A game! A game of the most ordinary sort!”
Morticia presses a pale hand to her heart, eyelids fluttering as though she might faint. “How commonplace; how heart-stoppingly sweet.”
At six, he requests bedtime stories — not of banshees, plagues, or decapitations, but of pirates and adventurers who battle storms and seek treasure. Morticia, with her voice like a velvet dirge, obliges, in her hands, Treasure Island becomes a tale steeped in dread, every creak of ship’s timber echoing like a coffin lid, every rolling sea a lament, even Gomez shivers at her cadence. But Dennis listens with shining eyes, transfixed not by the chill she conjures but by the ordinary heroism of Jim Hawkins, blissfully unaware that most children would quake at the ghostly undertones embroidered into the tale.
At seven, he discovers toy trains. A fascination so pristine, so utterly domestic, it sends Gomez into raptures. Tracks are laid across the great dining table, winding between candlesticks and tarnished silver skulls. The engines chuff and whistle in their perfect mundanity, smoke curling into the high rafters.
“My boy!” Gomez bellows, springing onto the table to watch the miniature locomotive circle. “You prefer locomotives to guillotines! My heart is swelling to the point of rupture!”
Morticia glides beside him, her smile like a crescent blade. “And what,” She coos, “Could be more precious than a child who charts his own course… no matter how utterly conventional?”
By twelve, Dennis has grown tall and sun-warmed, his hair still golden as hay, his eyes still a shocking sky-blue that no gothic shadow can extinguish and it is at twelve that the greatest shift occurs, the night his sister arrives. The house hushes, as though the timbers themselves hold their breath. Outside, the storm has silenced, moonlight pooling over the wrought-iron gates. Within, Gomez returns from their bedroom, cradling a bundle darker than midnight itself.
Wednesday Addams is tiny, solemn, pale as porcelain washed in moonlight, wisps of black curl against her white forehead, and her eyes — wide, steady, uncannily old — peer out as though she has already weighed and judged the world. Dennis tiptoes into the parlor where his parents sit enraptured. The candle flames bow in drafts as he approaches, his face open with wonder. “Is that her?” He whispers. “My baby sister?”
Morticia lifts the swaddled child, reverent as a priestess offering a relic. “This is Wednesday, darling. She’s yours as much as she is ours.”
“Come, my son!” Gomez beckons, eyes alight like candelabra. “Meet the marvel who will make life unspeakably more delicious!”
Dennis leans close. His breath catches and then he beams, bright and guileless. “She’s perfect! She looks just like she belongs here.”
Morticia’s gaze softens, obsidian melting into velvet. “She does, my dear, just as you do.”
Carefully, Dennis offers his finger and Wednesday’s infinitesimal hand closes around it with startling strength. He laughs — not at her eerie stillness, not at the judgmental solemnity of her stare, but simply at the marvel of her tiny clutch. “She likes me,” He declares, his chest swelling. “I’ll be the best big brother. I’ll teach her everything.”
Gomez clasps his son’s shoulder, moustache trembling with devotion. “Yes, Dennis, teach her to play, teach her to laugh, teach her to be wonderfully ordinary — so she may choose for herself how extraordinary she wishes to be.” Thus the paradox deepens: Dennis, the boy of sunshine and wholesomeness, is not eclipsed by his sister’s nocturne presence but magnified. He becomes her light as she is his shadow; her silence balanced by his laughter; her stillness matched by his ceaseless motion.
Wednesday grows like a midnight flower: pale, grave, and entirely disinterested in the ordinary amusements of childhood. While other little girls crave dolls with painted smiles, Wednesday prefers headless ones. While her peers might draw houses under bright yellow suns, Wednesday sketches graveyards beneath stormclouds. She speaks little, but when she does, her words carry weight far beyond her years. Yet, in this world of creeping shadows and faint candlelight, there is one figure she adores without hesitation: her big brother Dennis.
Dennis is rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, and sunny as the morning sky. At thirteen, he shows Wednesday how to fly a kite, and though she insists on attaching a small, sharp rock to the tail “for weight,” she watches the soaring paper shape with fascination. Dennis runs beside her, shouting encouragement, and for once Wednesday almost smiles. At fourteen, he builds her a treehouse — ordinary wood, nails, and rope. No traps, no spikes, no dungeon beneath. Yet Wednesday sits inside, gazing down at her brother with the steady intensity of a general assessing her lieutenant. “It’s acceptable,” She declares, then she adds, after a long pause, “You may come up.” Dennis beams as though she has knighted him.
At fifteen, when Wednesday has her first encounter with the cruel derision of the outside world — a normie child who sneers at her solemn clothes and morbid fascinations — Dennis stands squarely in front of her, sandy hair gleaming in the sun. “She’s my baby sister,” He snarls fiercely, fists clenched. “You leave her alone.” The little boy runs off, unsettled not by Wednesday, but by the unshakable conviction in her brother’s unearthly bright blue eyes. Wednesday, normally untouched by insult, stares at Dennis in silence, then simply takes his hand and refuses to let go until supper.
From that day onward, Wednesday decides — silently but firmly — that Dennis is her favorite person in the world. She does not gush. She does not announce it. Instead, she follows him with the quiet devotion of a shadow. When Dennis reads books about knights and explorers, Wednesday listens intently, eyes dark pools drinking in his every word. When Dennis plays ball in the garden, she sits nearby, not joining but watching, her pale face unreadable. When Dennis grows excited over a model train, she dutifully places a tiny coffin on one of the cars, declaring it “cargo.” He laughs, and for the briefest instant, her lips curve upward too.
Morticia observes it with her velvet calm. “Have you noticed, Gomez?” She hums one evening as the two children sit together — Dennis teaching Wednesday how to fold paper airplanes, Wednesday modifying hers into a paper bat. “She worships him.”
Gomez twirls his cigar, eyes glistening. “And why not? He is sunlight in the shape of a boy, and she, ah, Tish, she is the moon. The sun and the moon, together! Our children! Could anything be more rapturous? We created that.”
Wednesday herself never explains why Dennis is her chosen anchor, though perhaps she doesn’t need to. In a house where darkness is celebrated, Dennis’s warmth is her secret treasure. He does not laugh at her obsessions, nor does he recoil from them; he simply accepts, always, as though she is not strange but simply Wednesday. At night, when thunder rolls and the house rattles, Dennis sleeps soundly. Wednesday sometimes creeps into his room, standing at the edge of his bed, watching the rise and fall of his chest. He doesn’t stir, doesn’t notice. But she knows: should she ever whisper his name, his eyes would open at once, bright and unwavering; though she is a child who speaks little of feelings, she knows this: her brother Dennis, ordinary to the world, is extraordinary to her.
He is her favorite, forever.
The Addams mansion is never quiet, but when Pugsley arrives, it feels noisier than ever. Unlike solemn Wednesday, who entered the world in silence with a stare like a dagger, Pugsley bellows with hearty cries from the moment of his birth. He is plump, pink, and robust, wriggling like a small cannonball ready to launch. Morticia gazes at him with her usual languid adoration from where he feeds at Gomez’s chest. “A fine specimen,” She coos. “So hearty. So… indestructible.”
Gomez waves his arm in glee, nearly disturbing their nursing child. “A son! Another glorious, screaming son! Dennis, my boy, you’ll have a partner in duels, in adventures, in the sublime chaos of childhood!”
Dennis, now sixteen, looks at his new brother with his trademark sunny delight. He grins, sandy-blond hair falling in his eyes. “He’s great! He looks like he could eat a whole turkey by himself!”
But Wednesday… Wednesday does not grin. Wednesday, four years old and fiercely possessive of her place in the household order, sits rigidly in the high-backed chair in the corner. Her dark eyes narrow, her lips press thin. She has been watching the baby with unblinking intensity since he arrived, and when Dennis speaks with excitement, she finally hisses: “He’s too loud.”
Dennis laughs. “All babies are loud, Wednesday.”
“He smells,” She insists, nose wrinkling.
Dennis shrugs cheerfully. “Yeah, like baby powder and milk. That’s normal.”
Wednesday’s glare sharpens, a blade hidden in her pale little face. “He’ll take everything. He’ll take you.”
There it is — the raw truth of her jealousy. For the first time, Dennis looks startled. His sunny brow furrows, and he crouches down to meet her level, his blue eyes earnest. “No, Wed. He won’t. You’re my sister. You’re my favorite person, that will never change.”
Wednesday studies him as though trying to read the fine print of his soul. She searches for cracks, for falsehoods. But Dennis’ face is as open and guileless as the sky. Slowly, reluctantly, she loosens her fists. That night, while Morticia hums a ghostly lullaby and Gomez proudly rocks the baby, Wednesday slips into Dennis’s room. She climbs into his bed without a word, stiff as a little corpse, and lies beside him. He shifts to make room, draping one arm over her protectively.
“You promise?” She whispers in the dark.
“I promise,” Dennis sleepily swears. “You’ll always be my Wednesday.”
The storm outside rattles the windows, and for the first time since the baby arrived, Wednesday closes her eyes in peace.
In the days that follow, her jealousy does not vanish, but Dennis becomes the bridge. He holds Pugsley while Wednesday glares, then gently insists, “Here, Wed, touch his hand… it’s soft, see?” He shows her how to tickle the baby’s toes, how to bounce him when he fusses. She scowls, mutters, resists, but slowly, grudgingly, begins to join in. Morticia and Gomez watch with rapture.
“Observe them, cara mia,” Gomez smiles. “Our children are learning the sacred dance of siblings!”
Morticia’s lips curve in satisfaction. “Wednesday is sharpened steel. Pugsley is blunt force. And Dennis… Dennis is the gentle tether that binds them. What creatures we have made.”
Wednesday still casts long, dark glances at the new baby, still mutters dire predictions about his future. But when Dennis is in the room, her jealous fangs dull. If Dennis holds the baby, she draws near. If Dennis praises the baby, she nods ever so slightly. For Wednesday, there is only one truth that matters: as long as Dennis is here, nothing can take her place.
By the time Dennis Addams is twenty, he towers over his siblings, all dark sandy-blond hair, shoulders broad as a cathedral door, and that open, guileless smile that never fails to irritate the ancestors glaring down from their frames. His voice has settled into a warm, steady timbre, comforting as a hearth fire, his laugh ringing like bells in a house that prefers tolling iron gongs. His eyes, still an infuriating shade of clear summer-sky blue, hold a light no amount of shadow, mildew, or macabre family tradition has managed to extinguish.
Yet even as he moves with easy grace through the mansion’s vaulted corridors, his thoughts are no longer confined to them. In the library — where mummified heads leer from glass cabinets and cobwebs weave lace between the rafters — Dennis reads thick medical tomes. Margins are crowded with his tidy handwriting: definitions, sketches, careful underlines. At the dinner table, with the smell of Morticia’s bubbling nightshade soup curling like incense, a stethoscope dangles casually from his pocket. He presses it against Uncle Fester’s chest, listening to rhythms that stutter and skip in alarming ways. He takes Grandmama’s pulse, frowning when it offers no sign of traditional life, but he dutifully records it all the same.
Then, one night, with roasted vulture steaming on silver platters and the chandeliers dripping wax like stalactites, Dennis clears his throat. His voice cuts through the warm chaos of clattering cutlery and distant dungeon groans. “I’ve been thinking,” He begins, calm, steady, impossibly earnest. “After my undergrad… I’d like to go away to study medicine, to become a doctor.”
The silence that follows is so complete it seems to press upon the walls themselves, threatening to crack plaster, even the chandeliers sway faintly, as though rattled by a sound too alien to withstand. Pugsley, now a chubby, excitable four-year-old, drops his fork with a clatter that echoes like a gunshot. “Medicine?” He blurts, his round face blanching. “Like… shots? Checkups? Hospitals?” He recoils, horrified. “But Denny, that’s so… so ick!”
Wednesday, eight years old and already honed like a blade, lifts her pale face slowly. The candlelight throws hollows beneath her eyes, sharpens the fine lines of her cheekbones into something statuesque. Her voice, when it comes, is cold, deliberate, each word a guillotine’s fall. “You want to leave us.”
Dennis blinks, startled by the accusation. “No, no, of course not! I’ll always be your big brother. I just… I want to help people. Heal them. That’s all.”
But Wednesday’s gaze remains unsparing, black eyes glimmering like pits with no bottom. “Doctors patch holes that should be left open. They cheat death. They ruin the poetry of suffering.” Her lips barely curve, a ghost of disdain. “You would betray our family for bandages and pills?”
Pugsley gasps, pudgy hands clutching the edge of the tablecloth. “But Denny, who will play ball with me? Who will make the trains go around the table? Who will help me when Wednesday’s experiments are too… too…” His voice falters. “Too much?”
Dennis’s face crumples at their distress. He sets down his fork, rakes a hand through his unruly blond hair. “I’m not leaving you forever,” He insists. “I’ll visit. I’ll write. You can come see me. You’ll always be my little brother and sister. It’ll be okay, it’s just a little change.”
But Wednesday only shakes her head, braids swinging like a pair of nooses. Her eyes glitter with something Dennis has never seen before: a glint sharp as fear hidden beneath her fury. “Everything changes. That’s the problem.”
For the first time, Dennis glimpses the depth of her devotion and the terrible blade of her dread. He reaches across the table, his broad, warm hand closing over hers. She resists at first, stiff as marble, then allows it, though her gaze never softens. “Wed,” He coos gently, “You’ll always be my favorite sister.”
Her mouth tightens. “I’m your only sister.”
He smiles faintly, a warmth that feels like treason in that room. “That’s why it’s so easy to mean it.”
Morticia watches this tableau with her usual unruffled serenity, though beneath her dark lashes lingers the faintest glimmer of sorrow. Gomez clasps her hand beneath the table, moustache twitching with suppressed fervor. “Ah, Tish,” He whispers, voice breaking with rapture. “Our ordinary son dreams of healing the world, and in doing so wounds the hearts of his siblings. How tragically exquisite!”
Morticia’s gaze moves from Dennis’s earnest face to Wednesday’s marble-still posture, to Pugsley’s trembling, hopeful eyes. Her voice is calm, final, as though declaring a truth older than the house itself. “They will not lose him. He will not lose them. An Addams never severs ties. Not even for something as ordinary as ambition.”
Yet for Wednesday and Pugsley, still children, the thought of their golden-haired brother walking out into the banal brightness of the ordinary world is the most horrific thing they can imagine. That night, when the mansion is sunk into silence and Dennis has retreated to his books, Wednesday whispers to Pugsley across the dark gulf of their shared room. “If he leaves,” She commands, her eyes glinting like obsidian in the candle stub’s glow, “We’ll bring him back.”
Pugsley shivers, torn between dread and delight. “How?”
Wednesday’s lips curve into the faintest, most dangerous smile. “One way or another.”
The day of Dennis’ departure for medical school dawns gray and storm-heavy, the sky brooding low over the Addams estate. Suitcases sit by the door, neatly packed — no skulls, no sabers, no jars of suspicious fluid, just folded shirts, socks, and textbooks. They look almost offensive in their ordinariness, like intruders in the great, shadowy hall. Wednesday and Pugsley lurk in the foyer like conspirators. Wednesday’s black eyes are narrowed, her braids stiff as though bristling with intent. Pugsley clutches a length of rope and a mallet, his expression caught between mischief and sorrow.
“Plan A,” Wednesday whispers. “We trap him in the cellar. He cannot leave if the doors are bricked shut.”
“Or Plan B,” Pugsley offers hopefully, “We break his leg, just one. He won’t get far.”
Wednesday nods, grim. “Effective. But temporary.”
They are crouched behind the banister when Dennis descends the staircase, bright and wholesome in his pressed jacket, his blond hair combed neatly. His suitcase bumps against each step as he carries it. He is smiling, but there’s a tremor at the edge of it — nervousness, excitement, and just a trace of sorrow. He spots them instantly. “Wed. Pugs. What are you doing?”
Pugsley tries to hide the rope behind his back. “Nothing.”
Wednesday rises to her full height, still small but radiating defiance. “You’re not leaving.”
Dennis sighs, setting down his suitcase. “We talked about this.”
“You promised us forever,” She snarls, voice low and dangerous.
“And I meant it,” Dennis answers gently. He crouches down so they’re eye-to-eye, his sunny face softening. “But forever doesn’t mean I have to stay in the house every day. Forever means no matter where I go, I’m still your brother. That doesn’t change.”
Pugsley’s lip wobbles. “But you’ll miss everything! You’ll miss when Wednesday teaches me how to build traps, and when Uncle Fester explodes the kitchen, and when, when—”
Dennis laughs quietly, ruffling Pugsley’s hair. “I’ll come home so often you’ll be sick of me. You’ll beg me to go back to school just so you can breathe.” Wednesday stares at him, cold and silent. He leans forward and kisses her on the crown of her head. She stiffens, unaccustomed to such tenderness, but doesn’t pull away. Then he kisses Pugsley too, leaving the boy wide-eyed. “Wed,” Dennis says softly, “You’re my favorite sister.”
Her lips tighten. “Still your only sister.”
“Exactly,” He says, grinning. “No competition.”
Gomez and Morticia watch from the doorway, hand in hand. Gomez’s moustache trembles with unspoken emotion. “Tish,” He whispers, “Observe our boy! His ordinariness cloaks him, yet he moves like an Addams, slipping through traps, facing down his sister’s wrath, promising devotion as though it were a curse and a blessing.”
Morticia’s lips curve faintly. “It is the paradox we adore.”
Dennis shoulders his suitcase, strides to the door, and turns for one last look at his siblings. Wednesday glares, arms folded tight. Pugsley scuffs the floor with his shoe, eyes wet. “I’ll be back before you notice I’m gone,” Dennis swears, then, with that smile, he adds, “Don’t get into too much trouble without me.”
The door closes behind him, the storm swallowing him whole.
The Addams mansion blazes on All Hallows’ Eve, every window aflame with candlelight, every corridor echoing with the groan of old timbers as though the house itself were celebrating. Chandeliers drip wax like molten stalactites, doors creak open and shut with sly intent, and the portraits whisper among themselves in sibilant tones. Outside, the wind shrieks through the eaves, a banshee choir keeping time with the rattling shutters. Cousins and uncles crawl forth from forgotten crypts and arrive from mist-shrouded roads, filling the halls with macabre laughter. The family thrives on it, drunk on the pulse of their ancestral feast, like bats roused ravenous at dusk.
This year, however, there is a greater cause for revelry. Dennis — golden-haired, maddeningly guileless Dennis — has begun his fourth year of medical school. Their paradox, their darling ordinary son, now a step closer to becoming a doctor. Gomez is near delirious with pride. He flourishes Dennis’ transcripts as though they were sacred relics, waving them high enough to scatter cinders from the candelabra. “Mon dieu, Morticia! He shall be the first Addams physician since Cousin Vilebert — ah, tragic Vilebert! — who prescribed leeches to cure gout and accidentally exsanguinated an entire village. Such precedent! Such promise!”
Morticia, dark and statuesque, glides at his side, her smile slow, dangerous, and proud. “Our son. Healing the wounded. Restoring the broken. Nothing could horrify the world more.”
The goblets rise in toast, filled with crimson wine thick as blood. Grandmama stirs bubbling brews “to aid his studies.” Uncle Fester, overwhelmed, nearly electrocutes himself with a cheer. Even Wednesday and Pugsley — solemn and squirming, shadows and sunlight — sit straighter at the long dining table, their eyes fastened on their brother with an intensity bordering on worship. Yet beneath the roar of feasting, Wednesday notices: Dennis is quieter than usual. His smile arrives dutifully, but it dies too quickly in his eyes. His laugh is warm, but muted, as though rehearsed and his gaze, whenever he thinks himself unwatched, drifts into the corners where shadows brood.
Later, as the revel subsides into scattered laughter and clattering chains, Wednesday corners him in the library. The air smells of dust and candle wax, heavy with the musk of old leather bindings. Shadows spill across her pale face, sharpening her cheekbones into marble severity. Her black braids hang like twin ropes of execution. “You’re different,” She says, voice flat, merciless. “Something is wrong.”
Dennis looks down at her — tall now, broad, sandy hair falling untidy across his brow — and musters that same infuriating expression of guileless calm. “I’m fine, Wed.”
Her eyes narrow to slits. “You’re lying. You don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying.” His voice is steady, too steady. “I just… can’t tell you.”
“Can’t,” She repeats, her tone a blade. “Or won’t?”
He falters. His lips part, then press together. At last he reaches out, brushes a hand gently across her head, as he used to when she was small. “It’s not for you to worry about.”
That, of course, is the wrong thing to say. Her jaw tightens, her pale throat stiff with rage. “Everything about you is for me to worry about. I am your sister. I am your shadow. If something stalks you, it stalks me too.”
But Dennis only smiles that maddening smile, soft and evasive. “Some things I have to keep to myself.” He bends, presses a kiss to the crown of her head, the gesture of a brother who still sees her as a child, and then leaves her in the library’s dim glow.
Even their parents notice before the night is over. Morticia’s gaze lingers on him, her eyes pools of black glass. “You are not yourself, darling boy.”
Gomez, moustache quivering, clasps his son’s shoulder. “Tell us, mon fils! Share your torment, that we may revel in it together!”
Dennis only laughs lightly, too lightly. “Really. It’s nothing.”
But nothing does not pack a suitcase. Nothing does not shadow a boy’s smile. By the door, his cases stand ready — neat, plain, painfully mundane amid Addamsian chaos.
The family gathers, as they always do, for farewells.
Morticia is first. She glides forward, poise incarnate, and lifts her pale hand to cup his cheek. Her voice, cool velvet, carries weight enough to bend the air. “My darling boy. We are proud of you, unbearably proud. But you carry shadows in your eyes, and you do not share them. One day, you must, I insist.”
Dennis swallows. His smile flickers and holds, but he does not answer.
Then Gomez bursts forward, all fire and flourish, arms flung wide. “My champion! My doctor-to-be! Remember, the Addams blood flows through you: half romance, half lunacy, all devotion! Whatever plagues you, we adore you still!” Dennis hesitates. Then, suddenly, like a boy again, he collapses into his father’s embrace. His tall frame folds; his shoulders tremble. His face presses against Gomez’s lapel, and there — faint but unmistakable — the sound of a sniffle. Gomez freezes. His eyes go wide, fill instantly with tears of his own. “Tish!” He cries, half-shattered. “Our baby is crying!”
Morticia’s lips curve, not with delight but with quiet ache. “Yes, my love. He is.”
Gomez’s arms tighten, desperate, near crushing. “Mon fils… what sorrow is this? Who has wronged you? Tell me, and I shall duel them at dawn! Or midnight, more fitting!” His voice cracks, moustache twitching wildly. “Dennis, my boy!”
But Dennis shakes his head against his father’s chest, his words muffled. “It’s nothing. I’ll be all right.”
“Nothing?” Gomez repeats, stricken. “Nothing does not wring tears from my son’s eyes! Nothing does not twist my heart into knots! Tish, how shall I survive it? Dennis, please!”
Morticia lays her cool hand on her husband’s arm, her gaze fixed on their son’s face. “He will tell us in time. Shadows cannot be hidden forever.”
At last, Gomez eases his grip, though his eyes stream. He cups Dennis’s face in trembling hands, searching those bright, ordinary eyes for the truth that never comes. “My boy,” He whispers hoarsely, “Whatever you bear, bear it knowing this: your family will not flinch. Not from sorrow. Not from secrets. Not from you. We despise and adore you.”
Dennis forces a smile through his tears, kisses his father’s cheek, and hefts his suitcase. His back straightens as he walks to the door, each step deliberate, as though assembling courage with every stride.
The door shuts behind him.
Pittsburgh is gray: gray skies, gray streets, gray faces passing in the rain. The city exhales smoke and exhaust, and Dennis breathes it in like penance. He has chosen this place, this ordinary place, as the proving ground for his extraordinary burden: to become a doctor. The ED at PTMC thrums like a hive in eternal daylight. Lights buzz overhead, bleaching all color out of the world. Monitors cry out in arrhythmic shrieks — flatline wails, pressure beeps, oxygen alarms — all clamoring in a chorus that never rests. The air stinks of bleach, iodine, half-spilled coffee, human fear. Bodies wheel past on gurneys: broken, bleeding, dying. Here the macabre does not arrive dressed in velvet and candlelight, but in plastic tubing and trauma shears.
Dennis stands in the center of it all, tall and unshaken, stethoscope like a relic draped around his neck. His dark sandy hair is tousled from the rain, his blue eyes steady, maddeningly wholesome. He should not fit here — too clean, too bright, too calm. Yet in crisis, he becomes almost unnervingly composed. A patient crashes. Staff members whirl, Dr. Robby barks orders and Dennis slips into motion, smooth as if rehearsed, hands pressing, compressing, timing each push with mechanical precision. His voice is steady, warm: “Two more rounds, keep bagging, epi’s in.” No tremor. No panic. His serenity unsettles those around him. He looks not frightened, almost exhilarated. The whispers start in the breakroom. That new kid. Too calm. Too still. A little spooky. Dennis hears them once, pausing in the hall with his coffee, smiling faintly. He does not defend himself. Why would he? Spooky is a compliment.
At home, the place he shares with Trinity is smaller than the shadow of his family mansion. The ceilings are low. The walls are yellow cream. Nothing whispers here. The silence is too complete. Dennis fills it with small rituals: candles lined up on the kitchen counter, soups simmered with herbs no one else buys, books spread open in meticulous piles. Trinity sprawls across the couch in her dirty scrubs, hair knotted into a runaway bun. She’s sharp-tongued, quick-witted, perpetually exhausted, and she watches him the way one watches a puzzle they haven’t decided to solve yet. She reminds him of his sister.
“You’re so weird, Huckleberry,” She huffs, but not unkindly, now that he knows her inflections well, as he arranges votives in a neat row to light the living room. “Normal people use lamps.”
Dennis freezes for the smallest second, then smiles, guileless. “Candles are gentler.”
She lifts an eyebrow, looking at his pile of notes on the coffee table. “Gentler? For studying pulmonary embolisms?”
“Always,” He says simply, and she shakes her head, muttering something about country boys with quirks.
He is careful. He is so careful. He learns her favorite takeout spots, learns to laugh at her jokes that circle human absurdity instead of human mortality. He forces himself to drink the bitter breakroom coffee instead of brewing Grandmama’s midnight infusions. He hides the way his hands long for dirt and tombstone granite when the night shifts stretch too long. But in the raw hours — the hollow witching hour, when traumas stack and alarms wail and the halls reek of iron and despair — he falters. He feels it rise in him, the old family inheritance: the serenity in chaos, the unflinching gaze at death. He almost feels at home in those moments, as though the ED is simply another parlor, dressed in scrubs instead of velvet.
Afterward, when he lies awake on Trinity’s couch, city rain tapping at the window, he hears his sister’s voice — cold, certain, spectral — in the back of his mind. You aren’t normal, brother, not really. You’re still an Addams.
He presses a hand over his sore eyes, trying to block out the shadows. He wants so badly to be ordinary, to be a doctor, a healer, to be a good son. But he knows. He knows with aching clarity.
He’ll always be an Addams, and he can’t bring himself to be ashamed of that very fact.