Treat or Trick? by Roommate of the Quillster
Chapter Notes: Written for Leslie as a SpookySPEW treat. :)
Thanks to CMWinters for indulging me in what turned out to be a brilliant brainstorm session. Portions of the story are completely written by her, and I have used them with her permission.
This is the first year after the Dark Lord's first defeat, so there's an official holiday, which is why Bill's home from school. Halloween 1982 was on a Sunday. Bill would have been almost twelve, Charlie almost ten; Percy just turned six, the twins four and a half, Ron two and a half, and Ginny fourteen months.
As a note, British Muggles don’t trick-or-treat. :)
“Don’t forget to be home at a decent hour. Last time you were out late,” Molly said with a glance toward Bill’s listening face, “the you-know-what came out, and you came home without Fred! Lucky for you, it was at my aunt’s house…”
“Molly, I promise. No late night excursions. No you-know-what. Even if it is the one year anniversary celebration and every other decent wizard will be out””
“ARTHUR!”
“Okay, okay! I promise. No late nights; we’ll even be home early.”
Molly nodded as she turned to her children. “Enjoy yourselves at the celebration tonight. And no trouble,” she added as she looked pointedly at three of her sons.
Moving Ginny to her other hip, she kissed her husband and stepped out of the house on her way to her aunt Muriel’s. Unfortunately, Molly was the only one willing to take care of her ill aunt over the holiday. With six young boys and a fourteen-month-old baby, it wasn’t easy to leave. But Bill was home to help tend the young ones, and Molly thought Arthur could manage.
Once Molly and Ginny left, Arthur turned back to his boys, beaming at each one of them.
Bill and Charlie looked at each other. Somehow they knew they wouldn’t only be going to a party that night.
“Dad, are you sure this is okay?” Percy asked as he looked down at the stripes on his coat and trousers.
“Absolutely. All the Muggles dress up for the Celebration.”
"Are THEY celebrating the death of You-Know-Who, too?" Charlie whispered, wide-eyed.
“No… it’s more of a seasonal thing,” Arthur replied.
“But Mum said””
“Hey, Percy,” called Bill as he looked up from behind Charlie’s costume, “relax. A little fun never hurt anything.”
Percy pulled at the overly large zoot suit he was wearing. “So what am I supposed to be then?”
Arthur grinned excitedly as he answered his son. “You’re a vampire.”
Percy looked skeptically down at his costume.
“How come Charlie gets to breathe fire?” Fred asked, his face in a clearly defined pout. “We don’t get to breathe fire.”
“You’re a pumpkin,” Percy stated.
“Charlie’s a dragon,” George said, his lip out in a matching pout. “And you get to suck people’s blood. We don’t get anything neat.”
“You get to have leaves in your hair,” Bill said. “Not to mention all the pumpkin seeds inside that pumpkin you’re wearing that you can spit at people.”
“Wicked!” said the twins as they looked at each other and started digging around inside the giant pumpkin.
“As crazy as this is,” Bill said to Charlie, “you have to give the Muggles credit for something. This is kind of fun.”
“You mean because I get to breathe fire and you get to have beetles crawling on the outside of your mummy costume?”
Bill and Charlie met each other’s gaze and grinned. Bill then turned to look at his dad. “So, how do you know this will work?”
“An American Ministry official called me today for a follow-up report on a case we’ve been working on together. He mentioned he was leaving early to take his children out for Halloween. The Muggles do it every year.”
Arthur surveyed his children and nodded. They had successfully used only Muggle tools to create the costumes, at least they mostly did. Ron’s bumblebee suit had an actual stinger on the end. Fred and George were inside an actual pumpkin that Arthur had enlarged and fit both of them in. Percy’s suit glowed in the dark. Charlie’s dragon costume had an attachment so he could breathe fire ” an acetylene torch ” minus the ‘tape’ used to attach the fire device to his costume. And Arthur had charmed Bill’s mummy costume so raisins swarmed all over it like beetles on a rotting corpse. But those things were quite minor really.
“So, why are we doing this?” asked Percy for what felt like the hundredth time. “Aren’t we supposed to be going to the Ministry celebration?”
“Aw, Percy, lighten up,” said Bill as he playfully hit his brother. “We’ll get there after we get some candy ” isn’t that what you said happens, Dad? They just give us candy?”
“Precisely.”
As they approached the outskirts of the Muggle village, Arthur eagerly headed for the first home.
“Dad, how come no one else is out on the street?” Charlie asked.
“Oh, they’re probably all in the main part of the town. There aren’t that many houses out here, so people are probably by the homes that are close together. We haven’t missed it. I’m sure everyone else already came here.”
Charlie met Bill’s gaze and shrugged. It was possible, but he was starting to grow a bit nervous.
“All right boys, here we go.”
Arthur opened the gate and walked up to the home, gathering his sons around him but making certain he was toward the front. “Are we ready?”
His six sons nodded, mostly excited but slightly anxious at the new venture.
Arthur rang the doorbell. At the first house, Arthur pushed the illuminated little button, muttering under his breath to his sons about how clever these Muggles were. He stepped back, beaming with pride, and when the door opened, all six of them shouted, more or less in unison, "Treat or trick!"
“What?” asked the dumbfounded Muggle. She stared at the six of them in complete confusion, right up to the point where Charlie spun the valve on the acetylene torch, appearing to belch a column of flame, which singed Bill's wrapping.
The Muggle squealed and slammed the door in their faces, causing Arthur to cast a hasty Aguamenti at the door which was now in flames.
"Oi, Charlie! Not so much, son!" Arthur admonished.
"Sorry, dad."
"Yes, well . . . perhaps we should move on to the next house then, shall we?"
His children nodded.
At the next house, a Muggle man answered the door.
“Treat or trick!” exclaimed Arthur at the top of his lungs.
The Muggle man was quite bewildered. He looked around at the six children in their costumes, each holding a sack toward the man at the door with an eager look on their face. The strange man with them was just as excited if not more so than the children.
Arthur racked his brain completely confused at why the man was just staring at them. “Oh, yes! Trick or treat!”
“Um… what?” the Muggle at the door asked.
“We’re treating!” exclaimed Arthur. He nodded at his children who were still extending their sacks toward the Muggle at the door.
“You must have the wrong door,” said the man.
Arthur stared at the man then started laughing. “You’re funny,” he said. “I always forget how funny you people are.”
The man stared at him and began closing his door.
Arthur put his hand out to stop it. “You don’t understand,” he began. “It’s your custom.”
Silence surrounded the group as the Muggle stared blankly back at Arthur.
“Excuse me?”
“We’re here for the candy you give out when we come treating on Halloween,” said Arthur, feeling quite pleased with himself. Then he looked around. “You must not have that many visitors on the outskirts of the village?”
“What are you talking about?”
At this point, Bill and Charlie were starting to get nervous. This wasn’t exactly going the way Dad described it. The children instinctively moved closer together and lowered their bags.
Arthur gestured to his children. “We dressed up.”
At that point, the Muggle noticed Charlie’s fire source and his eyes almost bulged out of his head. “Are you lot some kind of nutters?”
Arthur quickly realized this wasn’t going over well. “Well, perhaps you don’t participate,” he said more to himself than to the man in the door. “Perhaps it’s a selective thing?”
“I have no idea what you are referring to, but my wife has called the policemen who will be here shortly.”
“Oh, lovely!” Arthur exclaimed. “I have always wanted to meet them.”
As Arthur was distracted by the thought of meeting the officers, the man slammed the door, and the children heard the bolt lock into place.
Percy burst into tears that turned almost immediately into wailing sobs.
Somehow, in some sort of coordinated maneuver, the planning of which Arthur had completely missed, George sliced Fred’s arm, and Fred stuck his now bleeding arm in Percy's face, trying to force Percy to "drink it like a real vampire!"
"George! Fred! That's enough! Oh, you two! Percy, stop that, it wasn't that bad.”
Ron, who didn’t know any better, added his two-year-old tantrum to the mix.
Arthur frantically tried everything to calm them, but when it made it worse, he decided they had better not meet the “please-men” in circumstances where you couldn’t even hear yourself think.
“You did WHAT? ARTHUR WEASLEY!”
Arthur entered the kitchen to see his wife holding Ginny and a scared looking Percy sitting at the table.
“Percy, take you sister upstairs so I can have a talk with your father.”
Molly looked at Arthur, and in a controlled voice said, “You went to the Muggle village.”
Arthur tentatively looked at his wife. “Yes.”
“Why.”
Arthur explained the conversation he’d had with the American Ministry official.
“Well, Molly, you see, we went treating," Arthur began.
"What . . . exactly . . . is treating?" Molly demanded in an icy voice.
"You go, in the costumes, and you knock on doors, and, well, you ask for candy."
Molly gawked at him for two full minutes. "You took . . . my children . . . out in this weather . . . dressed like refugees from the Janus Thickey ward . . . with beetles scurrying all over them . . . on a school night . . . to the Muggle village . . . begging for candy?"
"Now wait just a minute there, Molly, they're my children, too . . ."
“And you thought it would be fun, did you?”
“Well, yes.” Arthur went on in detail about what happened at the Muggle home.
“I’m not exactly sure why he didn’t have treats,” Arthur concluded. “But he said something about calling the please-men. But then Percy and Ron started to cry, so we had to come back home before we could meet them.”
Molly finally exploded. “Arthur Weasley! Have you gone completely mad?”
"But Molly!" Arthur protested, "it was great fun, and look at Charlie . . ."
Charlie obligingly spat out another column of flame, singeing one of the beetles which leapt off Bill with a squeal and darted away.
Molly’s eyes grew wide with rage before it burst out of her. "Out! Out! Out!” she said as she not-so-gently escorted her husband out of the house and shooed her children back inside. “Of all the hare-brained, half-witted, daft schemes you’ve come up with Arthur Weasley, this one definitely tops them all!”
That evening, Arthur decided the one thing missing from his newly finished broom shed was better insulation.