#after christmas chocolate sales brings the absolute worst in people

[drowsyanddazed]

braved the after christmas sales rush to get myself some terry’s oranges, am now hiding under the covers in my bed, you would not believe the horrors i faced

[kane-and-griffin]

“I Put a Spell On You“

A Kabby Halloween fic in three parts for the AU The Woman That Fell From the Sky, in honor of @brittanias‘ birthday! 

(Yes I know it’s 6 weeks away, but it’s her favorite holiday and I regret nothing)

PART 1: “Cara Mia” (Halloween 2004)

GOMEZ: “How long has it been since we’ve waltzed?” MORTICIA: “Oh, Gomez . . . hours.” --The Addams Family

Holidays for the first few years are muted affairs.

Clarke is four when they move to Massachusetts, and the move is as great a shock to her system as the loss of her father.  The entirety of her small young life, undone and turned inside out.  Neither of them have the stomach for Thanksgiving or Christmas that year; Jake died in April and eight months is not enough time for them to face the misery of attempting to replicate holiday traditions without him.  New Year’s, Easter, Valentine’s Day, their wedding anniversary, Father’s Day, his birthday.  The endless, endless repetition of moments for which Jake is supposed to be there, but isn’t.

Then, a year and a half later, the terrible thing happens, the worst day of all their lives, and Marcus arrives at their doorstep with ash in his hair and kisses Abby’s mouth like she thought no one would ever kiss her again, and something, ever so faintly, begins to click into place.

He’s still there a month later, when the leaves begin to turn from green to gold to crimson, and the town begins to don its autumnal finery for the fall festival.

Clarke and Abby did not go to the festival last year.  Jake had been the one who carved their jack o’lanterns every year, elaborately detailed masterpieces of witches on broomsticks and black cats arching their backs.  He had a box of delicate, fine-bladed woodworking tools he used only for pumpkins, something Abby had long ridiculed him for.  She’d brought the box to Massachusetts, only because she could not bear to throw it away, but it had been moved straight to the garage and she’d never looked at it again.  She’d put a bowl of candy on the porch for the neighbor children, in the interests of seeming neighborly, but that was as much holiday spirit as she could muster.

Marcus, however, has never lived anywhere that was not New York City, and the fall festival is a thing of wonder to him.  So, to appease him – and because once he says the words “free candy” it’s impossible to dissuade Clarke from adding her pleas to his – they walk down after dinner on Halloween, and Abby – against all expectations, and very nearly against her will – finds herself slowly giving in to its charms.

There are orange twinkle lights wound around the columns of the gazebo in the town square and a small hay bale maze for the children.  There is a long table of caramel apples and popcorn balls and chocolate truffles dipped in orange fondant with charming toothy grins.  There is hot spiced cider in big black iron cauldrons, steaming with dry ice and scented with ginger and cinnamon, ladled out by a line of moms in pumpkin-embroidered aprons.  (Marcus and Abby’s steaming paper cups get discreetly spiked with bourbon by Roan, the hardware store owner, who shoves the flask back in his pocket as Officer Pike pretends not to notice.)  Clarke is the only child not wearing a costume; tiny witches and vampires and princesses and Frankensteins abound, along with one particularly grotesque blood-spattered zombie, introduced to them as Octavia Blake from down the street.

Everyone in town knows Dr. Griffin’s story by now – knew it within hours after the “SALE PENDING” sticker went up over the “FOR SALE” sign on the old white house on Birch Street.  Vincent the realtor had stopped by Indra’s for coffee that morning and told her everything, so by dinnertime everyone knew.  They orbited her at a safe distance for the first year or so, treating her rather gingerly, as though she were made of glass.  Under other circumstances she would have found this profoundly irritating, but inside that cocoon of grief, the less she had to talk to people, the better.

But now she’s at the fall festival, she’s drinking cider and holding hands with a tall dark-haired man in a leather jacket and she’s letting her tiny blonde daughter race through the hay bale maze at full throttle, excited squeals of glee echoing through the night air, and she’s smiling, and this is the moment the town falls in love with Marcus Kane for the very first time.

Because he made the doctor smile.

He comes back for the fall festival the next year, and the year after that.  Abby still can’t bring herself to open the box in the garage, and says a gentle but firm no to Clarke’s pleas for elaborate decorations.  They put out a bowl of candy on the porch, as all the neighbors do, and they stroll down to the fall festival and drink their cider.  Abby lets Clarke wear a costume (a cat the first year, Belle the second), but declines to wear one herself.

By their fourth year in Massachusetts, Clarke is eight, and Abby’s lackluster commitment to Halloween becomes a bone of contention before school has even started.  Marcus let her watch The Addams Family with him one night over the summer when Abby had an emergency late-night surgery and he was on parenting detail alone.  Clarke loves anything Marcus loves, so she is prepared for his favorite movie to become her favorite movie before he even turns the television on, and she falls head-over-heels for the glaring, morbid Wednesday Addams.  Maintaining basic table manners, after this, becomes a trial (“Pass the parmesan cheese.”  “What do we say, Clarke?”  “MORE.”) which Marcus’ badly-concealed chuckles do not help.  But she sets her heart on dressing up as Wednesday Addams in July, and by the time September turns the corner into October, she has worn her mother down.

Abby does not sew.  Or, more accurately, she does not sew fabric.  (Her surgical stitches are a thing of beauty, but those skills do not translate to any domestic project more elaborate than repairing a loose button.)  But her neighbor Callie does.  Callie was Abby’s first real friend in town, inviting her to book club and backyard barbecues and brunch potlucks until she slowly began to get her feet under her again, and begin to feel marginally less alone.  Callie is the neighborhood’s resident domestic goddess; her flower garden is always perfect, her table settings colorful and elegant, her sugar-dusted loaves of holiday gingerbread appearing like magic on doorsteps up and down the street every Christmas morning.  And she can sew, because of course she can, so once she overhears Clarke at the supermarket staring covetously at the racks of polyester costumes and lamenting the lack of a Wednesday, she steps in immediately.

“Oh, I love The Addams Family,” she tells Clarke, smiling.  “I’d be happy to make you a Wednesday costume.  Easy as pie.  And your mom should be Morticia, don’t you think?”

And once the words are said, of course, there is absolutely no peace in the Griffin household until Abby finally, finally, finally heaves a weary sigh, walks across the street, knocks on Callie’s door, hands her a bottle of merlot, and says only, “I give in.”

Callie goes to work immediately, laughing Abby’s checkbook out of her hands (“don’t be an idiot, this is a gift”) and taking both mother and daughter’s measurements, occasionally leaning down to whisper conspiratorially in Clarke’s ear and making the girl giggle so hard her blonde curls bounce against her shoulders.   Two weeks later, two long flat boxes (wrapped in black paper with black silk ribbon, with the beheaded stem of a rose tucked in each, which makes Clarke shriek with glee) appear on the front step.  In Clarke’s, a crisp black dress with a starched white collar, black tights, little black boots, and even a black wig already combed sleek and braided into perfect tight pigtails; in Abby’s, a long black wig and a dress that makes her eyes widen when she puts it on its hanger and realizes how low the neckline plunges.  (“She’s bisexual,” points out an amused Marcus when she calls him that night, his voice sounding bitterly disappointed that he’ll be working that weekend and won’t get to see it.  “It’s a gift for you and for her.”  Marcus has always liked Callie.)

Clarke loves her costume so much she has to be forcibly restrained from wearing it to school every single day for the whole last week of October, and something of her giddy joy begins to chip away, bit by bit, at Abby’s reserve.  She remembers this herself, after all, she’s not so old that she’s forgotten the year she dressed as Princess Leia and grew out her hair all year so it would be long enough for her mother to braid into side buns, or the year she was six and it rained so hard she had to wear galoshes under her Cinderella dress instead of glass slippers and cried about it all the way to the first house on the block but stopped as soon as she was handed a Kit-Kat.

Jake has been gone for four years.

The box has been in the garage long enough.

On Friday, when the school bus drops Clarke off on the corner, she is momentarily disoriented, and for a second, she is unsure whether she has arrived at the wrong house.  Because it looks like Halloween, for real, it’s the Halloween house of her eight-year-old dreams, with pumpkins and hay and a wreath of dried leaves on the door.  And when she opens the door, she gasps so loudly Abby can hear her in the kitchen and comes outside, wiping her hands on her apron.  (Mom is wearing an apron?)  There are shiny glass pumpkins and pretty black candlesticks and pretend spiderwebs on the dining room chandelier.

“You were too little to remember,” Abby says, “but me and your dad, we used to love Halloween.  We dressed up and had parties in the apartment every year.”

Clarke looks around, eyes even wider, taking it all in.

“Did all of this belong to Dad?”  Abby nods.  “Did you not want to look at it before because you were too sad?”

Abby is startled, as always, by the depth of this small child’s perceptiveness; sometimes it’s like talking to a tiny grownup.  She nods, not quite trusting her voice yet, but Clarke doesn’t press her any further.  “I’m glad you’re not so sad anymore,” is all she says, and trots into the kitchen where her eight-year-old senses have unerringly detected the scent of cookies.

The next morning, after pumpkin pancakes (picked up from Indra’s diner, of course; Abby’s baking skills were maxed out yesterday in baking ghost-shaped cookies and letting Clarke decorate them), Abby takes her daughter by the hand and leads her out to the backyard, where she has laid old newspaper all over the surface of the old rickety picnic table, and two absolutely perfect pumpkins – round, sleek, glossy, their sunset-orange skins free of every blemish – sit next to a cardboard box duct-taped shut which Clarke has never seen before.

“Pick one,” says Abby, and Clarke can’t do anything but fling her arms around her mother’s waist.

 Sunday dawns crisp and clear, perfect Halloween weather.  Clarke is incandescent with eight-year-old glee, and even Abby is finding herself, surprisingly, getting into the spirit of it.   They eat dinner early, around four-thirty, and Callie comes over to help them dress.   The knock at the door, around five-fifteen, just as Abby is finishing her makeup, startles her.  It’s far too early to be children; the fall festival kicks off around six, with the trick-or-treaters beginning their rounds shortly thereafter, once their parents have each had time for a cup or two of Roan’s “special” cider.  Abby leaves Clarke sitting on the side of her bed, Callie winding her blonde ringlets into neat little pincurls so the wig will lay flat, and descends the staircase reluctantly, already feeling a bit ridiculous.  If it’s the FedEx guy, and she’s in a skintight black dress cut so low she can’t even wear a bra . . .

The door swings open while she’s halfway down the stairs, startling the life out of her, and she freezes in place.

It’s definitely not the FedEx guy.

“Cara mia,” says Marcus, who is standing at her door in a flawless Gomez Addams costume – pinstriped suit, slicked-back hair, his face clean-shaven save for a perfect pencil mustache – and Abby feels her heart crack open inside her chest.

She stands there, a little stupidly, not entirely convinced she isn’t simply imagining this, until he closed the door behind him and she finally collects herself enough to descend to the bottom of the stairs and meet him in the foyer.

“I would very much like to kiss you,” he says, fiery warmth in his gaze as his eyes travel up and down her body in the curve-hugging black dress, “but it looks like you just finished your makeup and I don’t want to ruin it.  So just know I’m saving one extra for later.”  But he does put his arms around her, pulling her close, pressing his mouth against the creamy bare skin of her shoulder, and she has to swallow hard over and over again to keep from crying off the perfect wings of black eyeliner that took her three tries to get right.

“How are you here?” she finally manages to whisper, but the mystery is solved before she can even finish her sentence.

“Clarke,” she hears Callie’s gleeful, mischievous voice from above her, “I believe your Halloween present is here.  Run downstairs so I can come take some pictures.”

“Pictures of what?” Clarke demands, little feet scampering out of her room towards the staircase, where she too stops short at the sight of him.

But Clarke recovers faster than her mother did, launching herself down the steps with lightning speed to fling her arms around him and let herself be lifted up and pulled close to his chest in a massive hug.  “You look just like him!” she squeals.  “You even have the mustache.”

Marcus sets her back down on her feet and examines her costume.  “Perfect,” he pronounces emphatically.  “She did great.”

“I told you I would,” laughs Callie, descending the stairs, camera in hand.

Abby stares from one to the other.  “Did you two cook this up together?”

Marcus and Callie grin at each other conspiratorially, like mischievous children.  “Maybe,” he says, refusing to elaborate further, then bows deeply at Abby and holds out his hand to her.  “Cara mia,” he says again, his low voice making her shiver even with Clarke and Callie standing right there.

“You’re staying the night, right?” she murmurs into his ear as they pose for photo after photo, so quietly that Clarke doesn’t hear her.

He chuckles, warm and low.  “That depends.  You don’t have to give the dress back, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Then I’m definitely staying the night.”

“I can’t promise you I’ll want to wear the wig any longer than I have to.”

“I’m willing to compromise on the wig,” he says, winking at her, and then pulls back and pivots smoothly on his heel to dip her dramatically in his arms, making Clarke giggle, and suddenly even the delicious thought of Marcus unzipping her out of the tight black dress is pushed out of her mind by the realization of what this is and what she’s doing.

They have matching Halloween costumes, so they can go trick-or-treating together.

Callie is taking family photos of them.

These are family photos.

They are a family.

She feels that old, familiar pang in her chest, thinking of Jake, but it doesn’t push the smile away or dull her happiness.  Not like it used to.

Jake always meant that box to be opened.  He always meant those orange paper Halloween lanterns to hang over the dining room table.  He always wanted this for Clarke.  He would want this for her now.

Perhaps it is possible, after all, to get back the thing she’d lost.  Something different, but no less real.

Because Marcus is family now.  She knows this, down to her bones.  Yes, he came to see her, and yes, she can tell from the way his eyes never leave her that the allure of Abby dressed as one of his favorite movie characters was a powerful draw.

But he did this for Clarke.

She knows this even before she makes him say it to her, out loud, later that night, as they stand in the white glow of moonlight streaming in through her bedroom window, as he steps in close to her and kisses the back of her neck to unzip the black dress.  She knows it as he leans over to steal a bite from Clarke’s candy apple, knows it every time he reaches out instinctively for her tiny hand as they cross the street to get to the next house, knows it as he lifts her into his arms to let her sleepy head droop onto his pinstriped shoulder as they make their way back home.

Every time he gets in his car and drives out of Manhattan and through the long stretches of forest-lined highway to pull up in front of her front door, it is not only Abby he’s coming home to.

“I just like to see her happy,” he says helplessly, when she asks him, and she does kiss him then, turning around in his arms, unzipped dress sliding off her shoulders, black wig and red lipstick gone, face pink and clean.  Just Abby and Marcus, alone in the moonlight, with a tiny blonde creature snoring two rooms away, sleeping the sleep of the candy-intoxicated, hair a wild golden cloud from Callie’s pincurls.  “I just wanted to see the look on her face.”

“I don’t know how to tell you,” she starts to say, but can’t finish the sentence.  She doesn’t have the words for him, for what it means to her.  He bought a suit for this, shaved off his beard for this, cut his hair for this, and drove four hours from Manhattan with a jack o’lantern in his back seat, just to make Clarke smile on Halloween.

He tilts her chin up to look into her eyes, and she sees that his are shining with tears.  “I like to see you happy too,” he says softly, and then bends his head to kiss her, and no one says anything for a long time after that.

He lets her sleep in the next morning, since it’s her day off, and takes Clarke to school himself.  She wakes around nine-thirty to the smell of nutmeg and cinnamon, and comes downstairs in her pajamas to see a pan of pumpkin-cinnamon bread pudding on the counter.  The kitchen is empty, but she knows he must be home; there’s a steaming mug of coffee on the marble island, with more in the pot for her, and his keys and wallet are sitting next to them, along with a little rectangle of yellow paper, creased like he’d folded it up and put it in his pocket.  But it’s unfolded now, and she can see the logo of Saint Henry’s Church at the top of it, which is unexpected enough that it prompts her to pick it up and read it.

It’s a receipt for a five-dollar donation.

She stares at it for a long time, bleary with sleep, puzzling it out, before she hears the back door close and sees him come up the steps, holding the glass votives he took out of the jack o’lanterns before putting them into the compost bin.

“Dia de los Muertos,” he says softly, as he enters the kitchen.  “Tomorrow is All Souls’ Day.  Clarke and I stopped by the church to light a candle.”

“For Jake,” she whispers, and he nods.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he confesses, coming closer and putting his arms around her.  “Any of this.  But I always want her to feel like there’s room for both of us – for him and for me – to live side-by-side.”  He kisses the top of her head.  “Is that okay?” he murmurs into her hair, sudden worry in his voice.  “Should I have asked?”

She shakes her head, face still buried in his chest, the cotton of his sweater warm and soft beneath her cheek.

“No,” she whispers.  “It’s perfect.  You did everything right.”