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Okay, look. I recognize that this post is no longer seasonally appropriate. But people, I need to talk to you about something, and that something is a bandom AU of The Addams Family.
It would be so great! I mean, let's be real, the Waybros were born to play these parts. Plus, the whole thing where Gerard looks like Christina Ricci? Family resemblance. It's perfect!
They're strange and unusual! Wait. That's a completely different movie.
Gerard would be Gomez and Mikey would be Fester. (Technically it ought to be the other way around, but psh, details.) The two boys are part of the odd and often macabre Way clan, and they grew up in a big Gothic house in New Jersey. (Legitimately, Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family, was inspired by all the gothic houses and cemeteries in his Jersey hometown. Just saying.) As kids, Gerard delighted in painting gruesome scenes (frequently convincing his brother to act as a model) and idolized Joan of Arc, and Mikey trained spiders to live in his hair and was best friends with a ghost.
Also running around while Gerard and Mikey were growing up? Little Frank Iero and Jamia Nestor. Now, the Nestors were great friends of the Ways—they hosted one another for elegantly ghoulish garden parties and belonged to the same poisonous plant of the month club. Gerard, Mikey, and Jamia had been attempting to kill one another (in a friendly way!) since they were toddlers. The Ieros, however, were your normal sort, and thought the Ways and their kind were all a bit... odd, if not downright spooky. They did their best to keep Frank away from "those strange children."
"Those strange children" INDEED. What on earth is Mikey wearing?
Unfortunately for their plans of continued mundanity, Frank met Jamia one October afternoon when they were eight, when he snuck onto the Nestor house grounds and found her walking the family hellhound, Gladstone. He was smitten with both of them immediately, and once Jamia determined that Frank was for serious and not one of the stupid Boy Scouts from the town, she totally adopted him, and she started bringing him around to the Way house when she went over there to play.
Frank was like *_______* because he had found his SOULMATES, okay. Jamia was awesome and had all of these really cool old-school torture devices that she inherited from her grandmother, and her hellhounds were so sweet! And Frank thought that Gerard totally hung the moon, and he loved listening to the amazing creepy stories that Gerard told. He kept the drawing that Gerard did of him as a gory corpse in, like, a place of honor in his bedroom, even if his mom frowned and made him take it down when company came over. He wasn't too sure of Mikey at first, because spiders, but then it turned out that Mikey was totally awesome and they bonded over a mutual love of knives, and Mikey taught Frank all of these awesome tricks! It was great. GREAT.
So that's how Frank Iero basically becomes part of the Way clan by extension. And they all grow up together, and Frank learns how to blow things up, and how to re-animate a corpse, and how to correctly apply eye makeup. His parents are, uh glad that he's happy, at least? And Jamia is a nice girl? They're not quite so sure about that Gerard boy, but he's a good friend to Frank. Even if he does seem a little obsessed with serial killers. (They actually think Mikey is the most normal, but that's because he trains the spiders to hide in his hair when he's over at the Ieros.)
And there are lots of strange and unusual shenanigans! Mikey's other best friend, Pete, who is a ghost who haunts the cemetery out behind the Way house sometimes, has connections to, like, every goblin and ghoul in the country. One summer, Frank's parents try to send him away to summer camp, and Gerard, Mikey and Jamia totally have to bust him out! Giant snakes are involved, because they get Gabe to help. Grandma Elena starts teaching Mikey (and Frank, who happened to be hanging around one day and was totally fascinated) witchcraft from the big black book, which opens up a whole slew of new ways for Mikey to try and cause Gerard bodily harm: Gerard is immensely proud.
(Frank also figures out, totally by accident, that he's into knifeplay. Gerard and Jamia both have really, gorgeously pale skin, is all. *______*)
During high school the other kids whisper about Frank and Jamia, who hold hands in the hallways but don't, like, announce that they're together, and sometimes show up with matching bruises in weird shapes, or incriminating bandages, and spend the whole day looking really smug and beaming at each other. But they also whisper about Frank and Gerard, who is two years above Frank and Jamia and Mikey but is always hanging around with them, and has definitely been sighted holding hands with Frank, and one time Gerard showed up to school in a dress and corset and Frank squired him around all day and carried his books. Luckily, none of them really give a shit what the rest of the school thinks.
Jamia goes through a phase where she experiments with drinking blood. Frank is very supportive.
And then Jamia and Frank show up to their Senior Prom with Gerard, and Jamia has two corsages, a black rose and a white lily, and the three of them waltz together during the awkward slow-dance portions of the evening and also bust out a wicked tango. Gerard is nervous, because this thing with the three of them, it's new, and he doesn't want to mess it up. Jamia is rolling her eyes and kissing Gerard when he gets too flighty and starts looking like he's going to try and create a doomsday machine out of the sound system and the snack table. Not that she's against it, in principle, but she doesn't have any of her tools with her. And Frank is beaming the entire night, because hell yeah, he's got his girl and his guy and a couple of knives tucked in his jacket for ~later. Life is good.
The prom ends in flames and mayhem, and it's basically the perfect evening.
This is an average day at school when you're running with the Ways.
So Frank and Jamia and Gerard are all in love with each other! Gerard has all the feelings and likes to speak French and use a ladies' cigarette holder (he thinks it makes him look elegant) and construct elaborately bloody scenarios to paint and get Frank and Jamia to be his models. Jamia is making her parents extremely proud by getting into the family business of designing implements of torture—and pleasure. Frank and Gerard are happy to help her test them both. And Frank does a little bit of everything. He takes care of the Way family fauna, including the irritable griffin who lives in the attic and Mikeyway's pet unicorn, and he dotes on Sweet Pea, the hellhound puppy that the Nestors gave him for his sixteenth birthday. He practices spells and hexes with Mikey.
And finally they're all graduated, and the four of them decide to take a vacation to celebrate! There is spirited debate over where to go—Gerard is a passionate advocate for France, because he wants to see Rouen, where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. But Jamia has family in the Bermuda Triangle, and the Nestors have a private schooner, and the weather is bound to be terrible, so it doesn't take much persuading to get the boys to agree.
Alas, this is where TRAGEDY STRIKES.
On their return voyage (it was a lovely visit, and Frank made friends with a couple of Hatian vodouisants and learned to make voodoo dolls. He bullies Gerard into the actually "making" part, because Gerard's dolls are way fancier than Frank's are) they hit an unfortunate run of sunny weather as they're off the coast of Florida. This, of course, drives everyone belowdecks for much of the day. Which means that there's nobody around to see it when Mikey trips over his own feet and plummets off the side of the ship.
It's only hours later that Gerard and Frank and Jamia realize he's missing, and by that point they're miles away.
They try the usual methods, of course—finding spells, asking the local sharks to patrol the waters, psychic readings. And they ask Pete, who goes even paler than usual and disappears, then shows up in the kitchen hours later, looking exhausted but announcing that if Mikeyway's dead, he's a really fucking good hide-and-go-seek player, because Pete can't find hide nor hair of him. They search for MONTHS, and nothing. D: D: D:
Gerard never loses hope. He knows Mikey is alive, somewhere—if only because Mikey would have come back to them, if he was dead, as a ghost or a zombie or a vampire. The fact that he's still missing means that something else has happened.
Gerard sort of curls in on himself, locking himself in the attic and filling canvas after canvas with Mikey sick, Mikey dying, Mikey as a werewolf, Mikey in Paris, Mikey as a gladiator in ancient Rome. But there’s one version of Mikey that Gerard paints that he has to burn immediately after, that really and truly unsettles him—it’s Mikey in a suit and tie, briefcase in hand, walking down a bright, sunny city street towards an office building, smiling. Normal. It’s horrid, and all of the other paintings are an attempt to get it out of Gerard’s head.
Frank and Jamia can’t coax Gerard out of the attic for weeks. When he does finally turn up to dinner one night, he’s wild-eyed and gaunt and filthy. He looks completely tragic, like he’s been wasting away while he mourns. Jamia wants to do him right there, but Frank grew out of his DIRT IS AWESOME phase when he was twelve, okay. Gerard sighs and frets and allows Frank to muscle him into a bath, and then into bed, where they can all wallow in their misery together. It’s the Way way.
Time goes by! *hums* Gerard’s mother and father decide to travel abroad, and are killed by an angry mob in a small German village, which was always a fond dream of his theirs. Gerard is quite happy for them. When their bodies are shipped home he buries them in the family graveyard, under a statue that he'd carved himself, and sometimes they still turn up at the holidays.
Frank and Jamia move into the Way house, and the three of them make it their own. Frank expands both his tattoo collection and the Way family menagerie. (The lion cub was just so adorable, tearing into that wild boar!) Gerard paints ghastly, constantly-shifting murals on the walls. They construct an outbuilding on the grounds for Jamia to run her business out of, with a workshop and a gallery space and everything. Sometimes Frank will go looking for Gerard, and he won’t be in his studio or in the library or in the kitchen, and so Frank will go out to Jamia’s workshop and find Gerard strapped upside-down into her latest infernal device, flushed and gorgeous and totally bossy, demanding “tighter” and “harder” and “more, more.”
Jamia, damn her, is a horrid tease who won’t let Frank near Gerard until she’s satisfied that the machine will fulfill her client’s specifications. Afterwards, though. >:)
They also hire some staff! Cousin Ray (who is Gerard’s cousin in the ~Jersey sense, not the actually-related sense) takes over as groundskeeper & cook from Elena, who is more than happy to retire from the position so she can spend more time out in her greenhouse, with her small army of zombie houseplants. Brian becomes the family solicitor: he and Bob act as mediators between the Ways and the outside world, and discreetly put out a lot of fires and generally make sure that no angry mobs with torches and pitchforks show up on the doorstep. And at some point they realize that Gabe has moved into their basement and been living there for some time, so he becomes their butler, for a given value of “butler” that means he answers the door when he feels like it and gets to drive their roadster. /pointless yet awesome cameos
And THEN, five years after Mikey vanishes, Gerard and Jamia and Frank decide to take a trip to the Continent. They go to France, and Gerard paints the tower where Joan of Arc was imprisoned during her trial, and the battlefield where she won her victory. They visit museums of torture in Italy and Amsterdam. Frank collects a new tattoo from each place they go. They visit the Scottish branch of the Way family, in their gorgeous, crumbling ancestral castle, and they meet a mad Scottish lord with whom Gerard is utterly enchanted, but with whom they all quickly become fast friends. They extend Grant an invitation to visit them at any time.
The three of them end up in Prague, and that is where they meet Lindsey Ballato, art thief extraordinare.
Lindsey is one of the best in the business! Her forgeries are so amazing, there are art galleries all over Europe exhibiting them as the real thing with no idea. Occasionally, well after the fact, she'll send along a helpful note. She’s stolen millions of dollars worth of art, and conned her way across the Continent, living the high life and never bored.
Except now she is bored. So she’s decided to stage one last heist, the crown jewel of her career, and then get out of the thievery game and into something new. Maybe focus on her own art. Or get into arcane tourism.
She is in the middle of this heist when she runs into Gerard Way. Literally runs into—things got a little hot while she was doing recon. Nothing she couldn’t handle, but she’d needed to get out while the going was good. She’s going one way down one of Prague’s spindly alleyways, cops on her tail, and Gerard is going the other, and she sees an opportunity and grabs him and presses him into a wall and sticks her tongue down his throat.
The cops run past them—which, seriously? Oldest trick in the book! They totally deserve to have her steal the one-of-a-kind, incredibly valuable book of dark magic that they’re keeping under incredibly heavy guard in their museum. She keeps kissing the pretty dark-haired boy until she’s certain the alleyway is clear, though.
And at first, Lindsey just thinks that Gerard’s a total innocent, but she says yes when he asks her if she’d like to get coffee with him, because she needs to lay low for a little while anyway. And then it turns out that Gerard is fascinating, innocent but also dark in this way that just calls to her. And then they meet up with Frank and Jamia, and Gerard introduces Lindsey to them by casually saying that she’s on the run from the police, like it’s no big, and instead of looking horrified they look totally intrigued, and asking about details, and Lindsey has to re-think some of her assumptions about them REAL QUICK.
Gerard and Frank and Jamia totally end up helping Lindsey execute her big heist, especially once Frank hears what she’s actually trying to steal, because he’s actually been dying to get his hands on that book for ages. There is much intrigue and danger, and a wee bit of evisceration, and a few adrenaline-fueled kisses. And through it all, Gerard and Lindsey are making *______* faces at each other, while Jamia and Frank look on fondly, because it’s sickeningly adorable—they’re perfect for each other. Lindsey is OBVIOUSLY meant to be part of their family.
After the theft is successful, they all decamp to one of the Way family villas in the Black Forest for a couple of weeks, so Frank can have some time alone with his new baby. Lindsey is still giddy—it’s sort of like how Frank felt, back when he was a kid meeting Jamia and Gerard for the first time, like these are her people. And she knows that she wants Gerard (and Jamia, and Frank, too, oh) but has no idea how to make the first move. Her normal methods are useless here.
Finally, Jamia throws her hands in the air is like “Jesus, okay, here is the plan” and Frank is like “Baby, you are a genius.” If they have to summon a demon to get Gerard and Lindsey in bed together, so help them, they will do it. And they do and it is excellent for all parties involved, especially once Frank and Jamia get in on that action, because tentacles are always great. And basically they all jointly propose to Lindsey, who accepts enthusiastically, and then they have a lot of kinky sex.
Gerard insists on cutting off all his hair and dying it white. As a disguise. >.>
They all go back to New Jersey together. Lindsey helps Gerard paint new murals, even more ghoulish and fantastically macabre than before. She and Jamia occasionally have a girls’ night out: they dress up, and drive to New York, and come back with bloodspatters on their corsets and in their hair, and primly refuse to tell Gerard and Frank what they’ve been up to. (The boys are so proud.)
Most of all, though, they love one another. At night, they fall together into the big, wrought-iron bed in the master bedroom. Depending on the night, there are ropes, or blindfolds, or red-hot pokers, or knives (still Frank's favorites), or Gerard babbling in French while Frank and Jamia and Lindsey take him apart, or the four of them testing out one of Jamia's new ~toys together. On special occasions, the book they stole from Prague makes a reappearance.
Sometimes Frank’s parents come to visit, and fine, maybe this isn’t exactly what they’d imagined for their little boy, and maybe they never thought they would have ghosts for in-laws, and maybe it was a LITTLE AWKARD when Jamia gave them that ~custom twenty-fifth anniversary gift, BUT. Well. The Ways might still be downright odd, but maybe everybody could use a little more of that in their lives.
And there you have it! The backstory that leads into the actual, uh, story of the film. Which is FORTHCOMING.