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An extremely loud crash had woken her up.
That’s all Lydia knew - at the moment. And, being a strange and unusual (etcetera, etcetera) teenager did not serve to excuse her from being just that: a teenager. A teenager who had just been woken up at noon on a Saturday, which was basically 3 in the goddamn morning for someone who stayed up until, well, significantly past 3 in the goddamn morning.
Hell, she could deal with ghosts in her house, and she could deal with Delia’s sculptures of Whatever-The-Fuck, and she could (tentatively) deal with Charles desperately trying to relate to her, but she could absolutely not deal with shit going bump in the night while she was trying to sleep off an entire day of classes, a math exam, and maybe-possibly a wine cooler. Just, like, two or three, though. Discreetly.
Another crash. And then a few smaller hits following it. It was relatively unclear whether the headache threatening to split her skull in two and leave her dead on the ground for the roaches was due to the rude awakening or the hangover that she had prayed to whoever would listen wouldn’t come. The only thought that even managed to enter her brain was that she needed to get up (ugh) and locate the source of the crashing (ugh part 2). Whether or not she would slaughter the person/being that was causing the Motherfucking Ruckus would entirely depend on the explanation that person/being had for making the noise in the first place.
She wrapped one of the probably fifteen black-adjacent blankets she had haphazardly strewn across her room around herself, effectively turning herself into a goth Virgin Mary, before gingerly prying open her bedroom door, her eyes screwed shut so as to block out the fourteen-thousand-watt lights Delia seemed to require be on at all times. For someone who had been living with incredibly pleasant ghosts for at least three or so months, Delia seemed to continue to be very uncomfortable with the unknown. Which, fair. Encountering a disgusting demon doesn’t really do amazing things to a person’s psyche.
“Lydia!”
Fuck.
Lydia spun around towards the all-too-cheery voice, her eyes wide like those of a stunned animal, ready to attack with pretty much anything she could get her hands on. Until she realised that the cheery voice was Barbara. Sweet, kind, gentle Barbara, whose bright smile would be a little Eldritch-horror-esque if you thought a little too long about the fact that she was very, very dead.
“Good m-”
Lydia held a hand up, shushing her as the awful thudding hit whatever floor it was hitting and bounced off the inside of her skull like an annoying little kid’s quarter machine bouncy ball.
“Barbara. The noise. What is it.”
The only response she received was a subtle eyebrow raise and an expectant look. Oh, Jesus Christ -
“Good morning, Barb.”
And thus returned the Eldritch smile.
“Good morning, Lydia. I think there’s lunch fixed for you for whenever you want it - it’s Adam’s recipe!” The unspoken “but Delia fixed it, so be careful” hung in the air for a bit before Lydia huffed impatiently. “Oh, the sound. It’s probably Adam.” Barbara waved dismissively, as if it was suddenly normal for Adam to be slamming things around when Lydia was trying to sleep. (Well, it could have been normal. To be fair, she was kind of a houseguest. She didn’t really know their routines. Maybe Adam had scheduled Obnoxious Noisemaking Saturdays.)
“And where is he?” Lydia was about to go absolutely ape shit. Having ghost parents was pretty awesome- except for the times that they were less like cool friends and more like real parents that seemed intent on being as vague and Parently as possible.
Barbara shrugged a bit. “I’m pretty sure he’s in the attic. I’ve been busy today - very important ghost stuff.” (Meaning she’d been desperately trying to find ways to be able to drink wine. Pretty much all day. She had enlisted Delia’s “wise assistance”, but the conversation always skewed towards purchasing some sort of quartz nonsense, and Barbara was incredibly uninterested in getting roped into a pyramid scheme.) “Which I should really get back to!” (She had a bottle in the basement that she had been saving for “the perfect occasion” - just another testament to her inability to find the “right time” to do absolutely anything. And by God, she wanted to drink the damn thing now, so she was going to find a way, even if it meant possessing Delia for the rest of the day. That wine was expensive.) “Tell Adam I love him, even though he’s an idiot.”
With that, Barbara ran off and Lydia just sighed, digging her fingers into her temples. She had absolutely no idea what that meant. But Adam was still clanging around up in the attic, and it was doing absolutely nothing for her hangover - which was definitely a hangover, so every deity she had prayed to was going to get some choice words sooner or later.
But there was no time for that, because Lydia needed to get Adam, who she loved so dearly, to shut the fuck up.
She climbed the stairs - gingerly, one step at a time, barely resisting the urge to slam her hands over her ears. What was he even doing? What do ghosts even do that makes that much noise? If it weren’t for Barbara distracting her, Delia would probably have called her psychic (or whatever) to cleanse the house of poltergeists (read as: give 200 United States Dollars to a middle aged man for him to light a clump of sage on fire and wave it around in the air, which would really just manage to make Adam a whiny mess because he “absolutely hates the smell of sage, Jesus, it’s so overwhelming”) hours ago.
Shit, she’d just been standing at the door for, like, ten minutes. Deep in thought. Pensive. Iconic. Hey, at least the door wasn’t locked. The sound seemed to somehow get ten times louder as she swung the door open, and if Adam weren’t already dead, she’d have killed him right then and there.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Well, that shut him up. Adam spun around, affronted, bottle of glue in one hand and rubber mallet in the other, along with and Oddly Shaped Very Small Plastic (???) Piece Thing gingerly held between his teeth. If she couldn’t see ghosts, she’d probably have even less of an idea of what was going on. “Lydia! Language!” (That came out a bit wrong, obviously, due to the aforementioned weird thing of an unconfirmed material that he was holding in his mouth. Fortunately, he transferred it into the rubber mallet holding hand after that. She was half worried he’d choke on it or something. Can ghosts choke? Lydia Deetz, asking the real questions.)
“God, fine, Dad.” By the looks of the goofy grin on his face, it was pretty obvious that calling him Dad wasn’t going to ever work as an insult. The big dummy just liked being a father figure too much. At least she tried. She rolled her eyes, offering him a slightly strained smile in return. “What the heck are you doing?”
His face fell a bit into an awkward half-smile, half-grimace sort of look upon the realisation that he was, in fact, going to have to answer for his crimes. “I’m, uh, building. A model airplane.” Wait, what? “No, no, listen, I know that look, I promise, it’s not weird or anything, I just - you know, on the Internet, no one knows you’re dead, so you can buy whatever you want, and -” No, that didn’t sound right. That actually sounded really, catastrophically wrong. “I mean - what I’m saying is - I bought this online because I was bored and Barbara told me I had to build it today or she would ‘smite’ me for wasting money.” He threw up finger quotes around the word smite - he was pretty sure, according to Barbara, that just meant she’d make him sleep on the couch. And he did not want to sleep on the couch. He did not want to sleep on the couch so much that he avoided reminding Barbara that, seeing as they were both dead, money really meant nothing, so maybe having a really uncomfortably large model airplane wasn’t terrible. Seriously, the thing was probably going to end up being bigger than his entire head or something (which, wow, he’d always made tiny models, so this would probably be awesome!), and he had all the time in the world to build it. And all of the friends he had made on the model-building forum that he had joined (under a pseudonym, of course) (that pseudonym being the username ”caspertfg1988”, because, come on, Barbara, that’s clever!) told him that this model was “an awesome, challenging build”.
And Adam wanted an awesome, challenging build.
At least he wasn’t fruitlessly trying to restore things anymore! Or buying more aluminium siding! He was just… using money that he had saved for the duration of his marriage to… build a plane. In the attic of his house.
Maybe he deserved to sleep on the couch.
“Why don’t you help me for a bit? It’s Saturday. You don’t have anything to do, right?”
“Okay, ouch.” Lydia feigned offence for a split second before remembering that if Adam thought that he had even come close to hurting her feelings, he would Die: Part Two. “You’re right, though. I’m doing absolutely nothing today.” She wiggled her fingers a bit, silently celebrating her vaguely depressing Saturday - you know what, there is absolutely nothing wrong with only being friends with your ghost parents, your actual dad parent, his weird, pyramid scheming wife, and the three other goth teens in your graduating class. It made existence interesting.
Adam grinned - the sort of grin that made him look like an excited kid and always made her grin back, even if it was against her will - and pressed the small rubber mallet into the palm of her half-hearted jazz hand. Oh shit, that was trust. He loved that mallet. It was the “good rubber” and everything - whatever that meant. It suddenly hit her that he was, like, really trusting her with his belongings. Like, this cool (ghost) friend that she’d known for only a few months (she’d have to check her pay stubs) trusted her. Damn.
“Come on, come on, you don’t want me to get smited, do you?” She chuckled - well, more like expelled air from her nostrils with a smile - and sat down on the floor next to him, bumping his shoulder with her own before turning her attention to whichever parts of the model he asked her to work on.
A couple of minutes into their very important endeavour, Lydia realised that the loud noises had subsided exponentially, despite now having two workers to make presumably twice the noise. “Hey, Adam?” He peered up at her from behind the instructions pamphlet, looking somewhat caught off guard. She couldn’t help but laugh a bit at how ridiculous and completely fatherly he looked with his glasses pushed down to the tip of his nose before asking “What was all the noise about?”
He shot her another awkward, toothy half-grin. That seemed to be Adam’s Look of the Day. “If I don’t pay enough attention, things will fall through my hands sometimes. It’s a little easier to make yourself focus when there’s someone else around to laugh at you.” He went a bit red. “I also tripped over the wing a couple of times. The pieces were all spread around the floor, and it was really very overwhelming.” Yeah, the look on his face pretty much told her that. Sometimes, he just looked like the physical embodiment of anxiety.
“Nah, I get it. Just wondering, ’cause you sort of woke me up. Don’t worry -” Easier said than done - “It was totally worth it.”
They worked in a relatively comfortable silence after that. She’d gotten him talking about the plane a couple of times - every time, though, he’d stop mid-sentence, make some sort of comment about how he was “probably talking too much, sorry, sweetheart” and turn back to the instruction manual. It made her pretty sad, really. (Not the “sweetheart” bit - that was actually pretty cute. Look at him, being all dadly.) She wondered how many times he’d been told to shut up. She made a point to try and file away some of the information he rambled off at her - it was a 1:16 model of a “Curtiss Jenny” from “one of the World Wars, I think”. He admitted to not knowing a whole lot about planes - he was more of a “tiny cars and buildings kind of guy”. (His words, not hers.)
He told her a lot about a model of the town he’d made - apparently, he’d sort of deconstructed it to an extent just to keep it out of the way, but he said he’d “love to put it back up some day and maybe add to it, if this little town decides to ever change”. She almost wished she had a notebook or something so she could jot down everything he was saying - her memory wasn’t perfect, and he really did talk a lot. Not that it wasn’t interesting! It was just a lot, and sometimes he’d get very quiet or just trail off completely, becoming intensely fixated on one specific part that he couldn’t quite figure how to fit. Those were the times that he tended to forget about the things in his hands and drop them, which always scared the absolute shit out of him.
All things considered, the build wasn’t nearly as complicated as Adam had expected. The help was definitely appreciated, especially when he put a very small and extremely important piece somewhere and absolutely could not find it for a solid ten minutes, only to have Lydia come back upstairs from a much-needed snack and find it immediately on the table. Which also happened with his glasses. And his wood glue.
Even in death, he was a very forgetful man.
But despite every little setback that made the whole process somewhat frustrating, the pair managed to finish the entire project pretty much right before dinner. Which didn’t really matter to Adam, but he might have rushed things just a bit near the end just to make sure that Lydia would be able to eat - he worried. (A lot. He worried a lot. Lydia hadn’t signed up for an anxious Jewish second-father, but she’d gotten one, and she’d just have to learn to deal with it.) He especially worried when Lydia had smashed her finger with the mallet that he had loaned her (therefore making it his fault, obviously), but she had vehemently promised that she was absolutely fine and did not need to go to the hospital, Adam, it’s not that big of a deal. And he had laughed when she held out her hand, melodramatically demanding that he ”kiss it better”.
He had laughed, yes, but he still took her hand in his and kissed her already-bruising finger with the same melodramatic flourish as she had used - because it made her laugh and it maybe made him feel a little better as well.
They both stood over the finished product for a second in, well, shock and awe before Adam spoke up.
“You know, I read the product description online, and I still didn’t think it was going to be… that big.” It was huge. Bigger than his entire upper body. He’d joked earlier that it was going to end up being bigger than Lydia, and she had punched him in the arm pretty hard for that, but he wasn’t actually serious. And, really, when you’re sitting in the middle of a bunch of tiny parts, you don’t really think, hey, maybe this plane is getting unmanageably large. Maybe I’ve made a mistake. “Am I supposed to just… leave this up here?”
Lydia shrugged. “Beats me. You’re the one that bought it.”
Hubris.
That’s what Barbara would say to him when she saw the plane. He could hear her saying it. “Adam, your hubris will be your ultimate downfall.” Maybe not those words particularly - she wasn’t a character from a Greek tragedy - but it’d definitely be something like that.
And she’d be right. This plane was two and a half feet wide and two feet long. She always was the first to completely support his hobbies - there was absolutely no denying that. They supported each other so ferociously that, for a while, it was almost a competition between the two of them to see who could support the other more. But if he had the right to tease her relentlessly for accidentally buying 30 pounds of clay instead of 3, something he knew she still remembered despite it having happened probably five years before, she would absolutely immediately assume that it was her right to tease him for (sort of) accidentally buying a massive plane.
Maybe he could give it to Charles as some sort of strange, eccentric birthday gift.
Lydia insisted upon taking a few photos of the model - she seemed really proud of it, which made Adam absolutely ecstatic, because they were bonding! He didn’t completely understand why she wanted him in at least a few of the photos so badly, but he didn’t protest when she chucked a sheet over his head so they could take a selfie together with it. Hey, if it made her happy, it made him happy. (She absolutely lost her mind when Adam put his glasses over the sheet. Like, “had to put her camera down so she wouldn’t drop it while she was laughing” kind of lost her mind. They obviously didn’t show up in the photo, but she’d scribble them on with a Sharpie later - it was important.)
She’d taken probably fifty pictures before they were interrupted by a somewhat impatient shout from below: “Adam, Lydia, dinner!” Delia still didn’t seem to completely understand that Adam, being very much dead, physically could not eat, but he did always appreciate the sentiment of being invited to the table.
“Good luck with whatever she’s cooked.” He grinned almost wickedly at Lydia, who just groaned in response, heading towards the stairs at an absolute snail’s pace. She’d generally avoided Delia’s cooking for as long as she possibly could - she obviously didn’t want to upset her step-mother, but, really, Delia just could not cook. She could mainly just burn. And over-salt.
As they entered the dining room, Adam’s eyes scanned the space momentarily before noticing an extremely jarring lack of paranormal activity - outside of himself, of course.
“Hey, where’s Barbara?”
Delia just smiled at him in a way that was very, very much not like Delia and leaned over the edge of the table, pressing her lips to his cheek. He jumped a bit, eyes wide and ears blazing hot, which just made her laugh in an also very, very not-Delia fashion.
Then she winked at him, turned, and tossed back the last bit of a glass of extremely expensive wine.