Gomez's war cry rumbled against the basement walls, causing an immediate effect.
Tully's face drained of all color and panic made his hands tremble, causing the red-hot iron to slip from his fingers.
"How the hell did he get in?! The judge was supposed to have banished him!" he stammered, backing away.
"Stop behaving like a coward!" Abigail glared at him with eyes that shone not with fear, but with opportunistic malice. "This is perfect! If they are all here, we can trap the whole family in one fell swoop and end this farce. Gordon! Go upstairs right now and stop him! Kill him if necessary!"
"..."
However, Gordon remained rooted to the spot.
His gaze was unfocused, as if his mother's words were a foreign language he no longer understood.
The echo of her previous words resonated louder and louder in his head.
"Have you gone deaf as well as stupid? I told you to move!" Exasperated by his inaction, Abigail ran toward him and gave him a violent shove in the chest.
Although he staggered slightly from the shove, Gordon did not obey.
He raised his head to look at her and in his eyes, usually submissive and fearful, something new had been born.
...
Meanwhile, in the grand foyer of the mansion, hell had broken loose with chaotic elegance.
Gomez Addams had turned the hall into his dance floor. Using his knowledge of every floorboard, fighting with a madness driven by love that did not fear death.
"En garde, Mr. Alford!" he bellowed jumping from the staircase banister with a flourish of his sword. "You have dared to touch my wife! Prepare to be carved like a Thanksgiving turkey! Aha!"
Steel clashed against steel, although Tully could barely defend himself.
The antique furniture burst into splinters around them, while Gomez was a whirlwind; one moment he was on the chandelier, swinging like a pirate, and the next he was rolling on the carpet, dodging a slash to respond with a precise thrust that ripped the lawyer's expensive suit.
The children weren't mere spectators either.
Pugsley, taking advantage of the chaos, pulled a life-size "STOP" sign from his jacket, who knows where he had gotten it from, and, with a grunt of effort, smashed it with a satisfying sound against the nape of Tully's neck when he tried to back away.
Wednesday, for her part, observed from the second-floor gallery and calculating the trajectory, waited for the exact moment, and released the knot that held a heavy medieval knight's armor.
Clang
The armor plummeted from the heights and crashed against the ground a few millimeters from Tully's feet, who let out a high-pitched shriek, paralyzed by terror.
While the main hall succumbed to the anarchy of the Addams, Lief moved like a professional assassin around the exterior of the mansion.
He circled the property until locating the small basement window, high and protected by thick iron bars that faced the garden.
Without wasting an instant looking for the door, Lief crouched down. His legs acted like springs and with a jump he launched himself in a straight line toward the opening, devouring the distance with terrifying ease.
Crash
The sound of glass exploding and metal twisting filled the basement.
Lief went through the window like a cannonball, ripping the bars from their frame with the sheer force of his inertia, and landed in the famous Spider-Man pose on the cold stone slabs.
The crash obviously made Abigail and Gordon, who were still in their tense family conflict, jump from fright.
They turned their heads in unison to see an unknown young man, covered in dust and glass shards, slowly standing up without a single scratch.
"Who the hell are you?!" shouted Abigail, taking a step back, with the poker still in her hand.
But Lief didn't even grant her the honor of a look.
His eyes ignored them and settled directly on Morticia's figure, still cruelly stretched on the rack.
He walked toward her with calm steps, ignoring the tension in the room and upon reaching the rack, he grabbed the thick steel shackles that imprisoned Morticia's wrists with both hands and simply squeezed.
Crack
Two metallic snaps resonated.
The steel broke as if it were rotten wood under the pressure of his fingers.
Morticia, freed from the tension, moved her wrists to regain circulation and slowly sat up from the torture table, smoothing her dress as if she had just risen from a nap.
Her eyes met Lief's and, far from showing relief, a charming and mysterious smile lit up her face.
"Thank you, my young gentleman, but I must admit that your entrance was dramatic and quite unique."
"The pleasure is mine, Mrs. Addams," Lief replied, returning her smile with courtesy.
Lief's display of brute force left Abigail and Gordon in silence as they watched the remains of the destroyed shackles, unable to process reality.
"Monsters...!" she whispered, backing away with a horrified face, "You are all damn freaks!"
In that instant of collective paralysis, Gordon moved.
However, to his mother's surprise, he did not rush at Lief nor try to defend her. Instead, he turned around and ran with heavy, desperate steps toward the stairs, ignoring his mother's screams.
His feet pounded the steps as he headed toward the depths of the mansion toward the library that had remained sealed for years.
In his mind, a single thought burned with the force of a fever.
His mother was right: he had been useless all his life, a tool... a mistake.
But the Addams... they had looked at him and seen a brother, an uncle, a relative.
If he was going to be useful for once in his miserable existence, it would be in the Addams way.
Gordon burst into the immense library and using fragments of memory that seemed to belong to another life, he stumbled, knocking over piles of papers, until he reached a bookshelf.
He climbed the ladder with surprising agility for his size and extracted a thick, sinister volume from the highest shelf, bound in human skin that still retained some warmth to the touch.
The title shone "Hurricanes, Typhoons and other small domestic disasters."
He jumped from the ladder, landing with a dull thud, and threw the book open. His eyes scanned the pages frantically until he found the passage he was looking for and, with a hoarse voice, began to recite the words of the spell.
!
The instant the last word left his lips, the air pressure in the mansion plummeted, causing everyone's ears to buzz.
The entire library began to tremble!
The books vibrated on their shelves as if they were afraid, and out of nowhere, swirling currents of air began to materialize.
A wild and chaotic force abruptly exploded with the library as its epicenter, expanding throughout the house.
In the main hall, the duel had ended abruptly. Gomez, Tully and Abigail, who had just run upstairs, were violently shaken from side to side as the sudden gale invaded the room.
"What the hell is this?!" shouted Tully in horror, clutching a door frame to keep from flying away.
"Ah, magnificent!" exclaimed Gomez, who, far from being scared, opened his arms as if to embrace the chaos, "Feel that, dears! The house is breathing! It is the breath of passion! Winds of change!"
The force of the wind increased exponentially in a matter of seconds, forming a visible hurricane that began to wreak selective havoc inside.
The glass windows exploded outward in a shower of sharp diamonds, the velvet curtains and antique tapestries were ripped from their rods, spinning in the air like crazed ghosts.
Tully and Abigail didn't stand a chance.
"No! The money! The mansion!" she shrieked, trying uselessly to dig her heels into the carpet.
But the magical force lifted them off the ground as if they were rag dolls. Both were dragged through the wind tunnel, screaming and kicking in the air, before being violently spat out through the shattered windows, being hurled into the darkness of the night, far... very far from the Addams family grounds.
Miraculously, amidst the destruction, Morticia, who was walking up the stairs with Lief, and the children remained standing, barely disheveled.
The storm seemed to dodge them, caressing them like a summer breeze while it devastated everything else.
"Bravo! Encore!" applauded Gomez, his eyes shining with pride, "That is the Addams spirit!"
However, in the eye of the hurricane, the scene was less festive.
Gordon held the magic book open against his chest, in the center of the library. His body trembled painfully, acting as a lightning rod for all that unleashed energy.
When the hurricane finally subsided and silence returned to the mansion, the book began to glow with blinding intensity.
Suddenly, a golden beam shot out from the pages of the book, impacting precisely on Gordon's head.
"Aaaahhhhhhh!"
"FESTER!"
Gomez's surprised cry rang out and without wasting a moment, Morticia and the children ran toward the cry of pain, finding a scene shrouded in smoke.
The family gathered around the smoking figure of Gordon, who lay on the floor, with the spellbook still open beside him.
Eternal seconds passed before Gordon's fingers twitched with a spasm.
!
Slowly, very slowly, his eyelids lifted. But the eyes that looked at the ceiling were no longer those of Gordon Craven, the scared and manipulable man. The mist of weakness and confusion had evaporated, leaving in its place a clear, manic gaze with a glint of perplexed recognition.
He turned his head to focus on the anguished face hovering over him and his lips moved several times.
"Gomez?" He murmured with a certainty he hadn't had in years.
Gomez's face lit up with a joy so pure it seemed capable of illuminating the library.
"It's you! By all the demons of hell, it's you!" kneeling down, he grabbed the lapels of his jacket, shaking him with emotion, "Speak to me, mon frère! Tell me you're back!"
"Brother..." murmured Gordon, discarding that name forever.
Now he was Fester.
He looked Gomez in the eyes and felt the dam in his mind break.
The memory fragments that had been blocked flooded his consciousness like a violent but welcome tide: the storm in the Bermuda Triangle, losing his way, the empty years of amnesia wandering without purpose, and finally, the humiliation of being found and used by that harpy Abigail.
Everything made sense.
The lightning didn't want to hurt him, it had rebooted his brain.
He was, undoubtedly and irrevocably, Fester Addams.
"Gomez!" Fester felt his eyes filling with tears of happiness and ignoring the pain in his muscles, he trapped his brother in a bear hug, "I'm back! Damn it, I'm back home!"
Gomez laughed and returned the hug with the same ferocity.
"Magnificent! The family is complete again!"
The crisis that threatened to destroy their legacy had ended in the most Addams way possible: with violence, and an emotional resurrection.
While the warm atmosphere of the family reunion filled the library, everyone's attention slowly shifted toward the figure remaining on the periphery.
Lief was leaning casually against the doorframe, with his arms crossed and an expression of satisfaction, observing the touching reunion.
Standing up, Gomez pulled away from his brother, straightened his suit, and walked toward Lief.
He didn't ask questions about his origins or his methods and, without warning, he extended both hands and pressed them firmly onto Lief's shoulders, looking at him with burning gratitude.
"Sir! I have no words in any of the living or dead languages I master to thank you. Your appearance has been providential, like an avenging angel sent by fate itself to deliver us from mediocrity! You have saved my home, you have freed my wife, and you have returned my brother to me!"
With those words, he took a step back and opened his arms in a welcoming gesture.
"Listen to me well! From this night on, you, Lief Connor, have a sacred place in this mansion. You are an eternal friend of the Addams family, a blood brother in spirit!" His eyes shone, "And now, to celebrate that we have recovered our lives from the clutches of bureaucracy, I insist that you stay! You must dine with us! We will prepare a banquet worthy of a celebration.... I will not take no for an answer!"
Lief looked at Gomez's effusive smile, and then shifted his gaze toward Wednesday, who was standing next to her uncle.
A dinner with the Addams family?
Lief smiled, pushing himself off the doorframe.
"It would be madness to refuse such an offer, Mr. Addams. It will be an honor."
________
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