“I’d, like, be all ‘I should of seen this coming’, but, like, no, no I shouldn’t have, this is super out of left field? I said that I wanted to make them feel like part of the - okay no I can see where you fucked up. I super don’t want to make them feel like part of this family, I, like, want to make them feel like part of a normal family, with super regular pepper shakers and super regular wine and super regular people.”

“I’ll add prunes to the menu. We aren’t normal, honey. If you want them to leave alive we can aim for that, but the Addams family isn’t ashamed of itself.”

He takes the pepper shakers and puts them away in the cupboard; they squeak at him annoyedly. He ignores the increasingly faint shrieking noise from the oven.

“I’m maybe, like, a solid fifty percent ashamed? I’m, like, ashamed lite, now made with sugar substitutes. Except the sugar is death. We’re gonna go for a death substitute, tonight, and that substitute is gonna be ‘a completely normal dinner and completely normal conversation’. And you’re gonna call off grandpa, and tell the poltergeists to go poltergeist somewhere else.”

“I suppose we can get rid of almost anything interesting we’d planned for the evening, and that might be boring enough to qualify... but we really are going to have to keep the game.”

“Mooooom.”

“We only have a chance to do it once a year! And I’m sure that your little boytoy’s parents won’t mind it that much.”

“This is, like, really super not cool, and if they don’t like me I’m totally blaming you.”

“A little parental resentment is only healthy, darling, I’ve tried to murder my mother eight times.”

“And Uncle Fester cut up grandpa so he could be the bloodline thingy, I get it. It’s, like, not a super healthy dynamic? I don’t wanna wanna murder you?”

“I drowned your pet spider when you were twelve.”

“Kitty?”

“I also paid that young ginger thing to be your friend, when you were fifteen.”

“Man, now I, like, feel weird about torturing her, it’s super not the same when they don’t actually like you - and that’s totally fucked up but I super forgive you. But I’m not gonna forgive you if you mess things up with Lucas, and that doesn’t mean I’m gonna try and poison you or something, it means I’m just not gonna talk to you anymore.”

She throws another mouse into the impatient jaws of an herbaceous alien carnivore.

“Fine.”

Friday and Pugsley are wrestling in one of Addam’s family basements - nobody’s quite sure how many basements the house has, and everyone’s quite sure that the house doesn’t either, but this one is, at least, reliably available.

They wrestle regularly; only one of them ever wins. That perpetual winner presently has his younger brother in a chokehold, pinned to the ground.

”Man, Pugs, I just, like - can’t get over him, you know? I don’t super know whether I wanna lock him up in a basement and never let him go or take him with me everywhere and never let him go. The second one is still cool if I, like, get a leash, right? Maybe I should get a leash and the basement could, like, be a sometimes thing. He’s just so... so. You know! I dunno. We went on a date to the zoo a couple of days ago and I killed this bear and he was super worried about the bear and also super worried for me so I reanimated the bear and we had sex in the moonlight and I - ugh, I dunno. I brought him flowers and they weren’t even the good dead kind and he was so so happy. I think I love him at least a little in the regular way and not the way where you’re plotting each other’s deaths - like, I’m doing that too, but I know for sure I’d bring him back after a minute, you know? Is that weird? It’s weird. Maybe it’ll, like, be less weird once there’s a leash.”

Incoherent choking and gurgling sounds!

“Yeah, I think so too.”

The doorbell rings, a while later; it sounds unnervingly organic.

“We are going to leave them out in the rain for at least five minutes, there’s only so far you can bend decorum.”

“Mo-oooooom, my boyfriend is going to be we-eeeeet.”

“I hear it goes... smoother... that way.”

“I super did not need that mental image from my mom, thanks.”

“I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom, we get all of the good innuendos and homicides. If you’d rather escort your little playdate in and leave his parents outside for fifteen minutes...”

“Having my mom call the guy I’m fucking a ‘playdate’; also totes weird and gross.”

He goes to the door, opens it, yanks Lucas in, throws him over his shoulder like a twink shaped sack of potatoes, and heads back to the dining room.

(“... our evening begins most auspiciously and with great glamour,” observes Lucas’s father, in a sharp and increasingly damp suit. He looks entirely too young to have a nineteen year old son.)

(“It does! It has. Love you,” says his mother, who doesn’t really look old enough to even seriously consider having children.)