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simplytheevebest · 2 years

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Trick or Treat

Happy (early) Halloween! Enjoy this fluffy nonsense one shot featuring the dysfunctional Peters family, pumpkin carving, candy, and a return of the skeleton coat rack.

For some reason I love the idea that Farah recuperates from her nap at the Peters’ house because it’s sort of outside Rosalind’s jurisdiction, and … this happened. A total AU, I am making up a lot of things and playing fast and loose with characterization. Pretending Farah’s pendant was a gift from Saul (implied, not directly stated) and that the nap left her “powerless” (for now). Also making up how they celebrate Halloween in the other world. Unlikely to be continued, but never say never!

“And… done.”

Bloom likes to think she knows her dad pretty well. He played football in college and gets together with some of his firehouse buddies every once in a while to play a few low-commitment games in the park. He used to use football metaphors to help her study, not because they actually worked, but because hearing her dad try to relate a tackle at the thirty yard line to the steps of photosynthesis was usually just outrageous enough to get a laugh out of her and relieve some of those final exam jitters. He puts so much milk in his coffee it’s barely coffee, and she’d tested this theory once by giving him a cup of warm milk with only a spoonful of coffee -to this day she doesn’t think he ever noticed the difference, but the week-long experiment had earned her an A for her science project that year.

He does not, as the ‘cool kids say,’ wear the pants in her parents’ relationship, especially when her mom is being stubborn and Bloom is being impossible and it’s easier to bow out and let things settle than try to intervene. He isn’t afraid to confront girl problems, however, and though she hadn’t appreciated it at the time, Bloom can admit know that it was immensely thoughtful of him to bring her three different brands of tampons because he hadn’t known which she prefers. He does now. He is also a pretty exceptional baker, going above and beyond basic cookies and brownies to scones and Victorian sponge, and is an avid consumer of the Great British Bake Off.

He is also not an artist: for as well as Bloom knows him, she knows she’s never going to be able to guess the origins of the pumpkin he’s now proudly displaying to her. She wrinkles her nose, flicking a bit of pumpkin guts off her arm.

“It looks great dad, it’s a really good… mouse?”

“It’s not a mouse,” he huffs, fiddling with the battery powered candle to stick inside.

“Then why does it have ears?”

“Those are its eyes,” he traces the shape of a triangle in the space of what is very clearly the carving of a circle, “It’s a traditional jack-o-lantern. Very spooky.”

“It’s spooky how much it looks like a mouse,” Bloom quips, ducking to the side when he lobs a handful of pumpkin guts at her. She gapes dramatically, stuttering on a laugh when the pile of seeds and muck knocks over the plastic skeleton that never seems to make it back into the basement when Halloween is over. It’s a glorified coatrack most of the year, and it spills its burden to the floor, head popping off and rolling into the living room.

“What’s going on!” Her mother demands from the kitchen, and Bloom and her father share a look.

“Dad’s committing skeletal assault.”

Vanessa appears in the doorway, a bowl of candy in each hand, and steps cleanly over the toppled skeleton with a pointed look at her husband.

“That thing is making it into the basement this year, mark my words. Bloom-y, which bowl should I hand out to the kids? Gummies or chocolate?”

She weighs them both like a teetering scale, tipping them forward so Bloom can inspect the contents of gummy worms and Hershey’s respectively. Bloom takes her time mulling it over, reaching for her own battery-powered tea light.

“Gummies for the kids.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, then we get to eat the chocolate ourselves.”

“Genius,” Vanessa shakes the bowl, “I knew there was a reason we were sending you to that fancy school. Mike! Put some of the coats in the closet for Christ’s sake.”

Bloom snickers, turning her back on her dad’s attempts to return the pile of coats to the poor plastic skeleton too weak to hold them all up. It’s a miracle they’ve balanced so precariously up until now, and it’s only because it’s usually so obscured that her mom doesn’t kick up too much of a fuss during the year about banishing it back to the basement with the rest of the decorations. Bloom pops the candle into her pumpkin, not quite a masterful attempt, but still better than her dad’s, and turns it around for her mom’s approval.

“What’d’you think?”

“It looks great honey, better than your dad’s anyway. What is it, a rat?”

“It’s a jack-o-lantern.”

“Why’re its eyes so big?”

“He’s shocked at how rude you’re being,” Mike gripes, scooping up their pumpkins to deposit on the front porch. They’ve got the windows thrown open, a bit of a late-October breeze filtering through and ruffling the curtains, but it’s only now because the sun has set that there’s anything resembling a chill. Nothing like the damp, cold evenings in Alfea, because the only time the girls had complained of a heat wave the temperature hadn’t come even close to touching Gardenia on a mild day, but it’s refreshing, considering the baking sun from earlier.

Vanessa sets the chocolate bowl within reach, and Bloom fishes out a Kit-Kat, drawing her knees up to her chest.

“Has Miss Dowling been down?”

She only catches the edge of her mother’s frown, brows creased in worry as she gathers up the trashbags keeping the dining room table free from pumpkin mush. Bloom knows her dad pretty well, but her mom isn’t quite as easy to read. Her mom’s restless when it comes to hobbies, a new one almost every week, attempts to keep busy rather than fret over her only daughter’s social life -not that they’ve really worked. So Bloom can’t say for certain if her mom enjoys knitting or painting or hiking, only that she’s partaken in those things at some point. She knows her mom isn’t close to her own mother, a grandmother that lives out on the East Coast who sends checks for holidays but hasn’t visited in Bloom’s recent memories, which is probably why she tries so hard with Bloom. Her mom is a worrier, that much she does know, so she’s not surprised that her mom’s worry has extended to her daughter’s fugitive headmistress currently camping out in their guest room. (Her mom also takes her coffee black, and swears she can tell when her mug has even been in the vicinity of cream and sugar).

“Not today. Although she might’ve come down when we were out earlier, it’s hard to say. She’s very tidy.”

Bloom never thought she’d hear the day her mom regarded cleanliness a bad thing, but clearly she does. Vanessa is a doter, and Bloom knows it’s killing her, just a little, not to be able to wait on Miss Dowling hand and foot as a guest in their home. She’s used to it, since their usual house guest is her uncle Eddie, and he never looks after himself, which her mom hates, but also thrives on. It’s the being needed, which Bloom gets, considering she’d decided long ago she no longer needed her mother, and Vanessa had taken that about as well as the Titanic had taken on the iceberg.

Di-sa-ster.

It’s entirely likely that Miss Dowling waited, purposefully, to come down for a cup of tea (using a kettle Bloom knows for a fact was not “up in the cupboard,” looking a little too new to be used, like her mother claimed) and something to eat, and cleaned up so completely after herself that they’d have no way of knowing. It’d be funny, thinking about how her teacher’s fastidiousness is driving her mother’s hospitable nature up the wall, if it didn’t also make her sad to think about. Miss Dowling is their guest, but she’s doing an excellent job behaving as if she’s an unwelcome one, intruding on their good will and kindness, like it hadn’t been Bloom’s idea -at her parents’ insistence- to have the woman stay with them until she’d regained her strength.

“I’m going to check on her,” she decides, and Vanessa crumples the trashbags up with one hand, dumping the carving utensils in the sink with the other.

“Bring her some candy-”

“Not the Butterfingers,” Mike interrupts, “Those are mine.”

Bloom rolls her eyes good-naturedly, scooping up the bowl and taking the stairs two at a time. The guest room door is open, it usually is, like her teacher doesn’t think she has the right to boundaries and privacy in someone else’s home, but Bloom knocks on the doorframe anyway. Miss Dowling stands at the window, dressed like she’s expecting to host a meeting, rather than having spent the day inside doing nothing. Which isn’t entirely fair, Bloom knows she’s been working incredibly hard trying to reconnect with her magic, she just doesn’t imagine wearing slacks is going to be any more effective than sweatpants.

Her teacher turns, one hand wrapped tightly around the pendant at her neck, the other tucked across her middle.

“Bloom.”

“Miss Dowling. Candy?”

She holds out the bowl, knowing the older woman won’t take it, and counts to five before setting it on the bed, settling herself on the edge.

“Did you come down while we were out? Mom’s worried you didn’t eat-”

“I did, Bloom, thank you.”

She turns back to the window, fingers winding around and around the chain, lost in thought. Bloom swings her legs, purses her lips; it’s awkward, having her teacher here, not because it’s her teacher, but because it’s Bloom’s fault she’s here. A fugitive. In hiding. Presumed dead. All because Bloom’s impatience and reckless impulsiveness had seen fit to free a tyrant, just to better learn the answers to questions Miss Dowling had promised to help her find “tomorrow.” Bloom had taken the chance someone else could provide them sooner, yet here they were, with more questions now than they’d had before.

“Do they celebrate Halloween in the other world? I wasn’t there long enough to find out.”

Miss Dowling turns away from the window again, brows raised; then they furrow in contemplation, “We do, although it’s not quite so… commercialized. It’s a celebration of the living and the dead, more reminiscent, I think, of your Day of the Dead than proper Halloween. Alfea holds a festival every year, we invite the parents and guardians of the students, but some choose to go home to celebrate in their own way. We celebrate our own lives, and those of the ones we’ve lost.”

Bloom nods quietly: it’s an answer, but it hovers dangerously close to topics neither really wants to address.

“So no Spider-Man costumes?”

Miss Dowling huffs a laugh, finally stepping away from the window, “No, no ‘Spider-Man’ costumes, no costumes of any kind, though we do get dressed up. It’s quite fun.”

“I’m sorry I missed it.”

“There’s always next year,” and the acknowledgement of ‘next year,’ that they’ll get through this well enough for there to be a new year, that her headmistress will welcome her back to Alfea in time to experience it, has Bloom clearing her throat against the emotion choking it.

Bloom picks at a thread on the bedspread, “You know you’re not like, bothering us, right? We want you here. And mom loves taking care of people, seriously, she’d make a five course meal if you asked and she’d love every second of it.”

“I know,” Miss Dowling answers softly, and the mattress dips at the other end, by the headboard, as she settles across from her student. “But I’m cognizant of the danger I’m putting you in by being here, especially without my magic, and regardless, I am imposing, if not on your lives, than on your safety.”

“How is it? Your magic, I mean.”

Her teacher sighs, a sad, frustrated thing, and a hand comes back up to grip the pendant, “I can’t feel it. For the first time in as long as I can remember I can feel… nothing. It feels… emptying, like I’m missing a part of myself. Sometimes I think the flicker is there but it doesn’t last it’s-” she huffs another sigh “-it’s unnerving. I’ve lost that connection to myself, to… other people, and I’m not used to it.”

Bloom wonders if the pendant has anything to do with it, if it holds more significance than her headmistress is willing to share, so she doesn’t pry. She can’t remember what it felt like not to have her magic, so she can’t imagine how it must feel for Miss Dowling, and she doesn’t want to try. It makes her think of her mother, set adrift by a daughter who claimed not to need her, bouncing from hobby to hobby in search of… something, anything, to fill the space left behind, and when those didn’t work, she’d turn back to Bloom, tried to forcefully fill that space with repeated attempts at connecting that’d left them both drained from the pressure and the dwelling.

“Want to help me hand out candy to the trick or treaters?”

Miss Dowling blinks, bewildered, and Bloom smiles softly.

“Maybe you just need a little break. ‘Recharge the ol' batteries,’ like my dad says. And my mom always makes me hand out the candy and there’s only so many times I can say ‘wow cool costume’ without sounding totally fake so you could… I don’t know, help me.”

“I-” She’s going to refuse, Bloom can tell, but something changes, a split second decision, and the older woman’s expression softens. “I’d love to.”

Bloom beams, reaching for the bowl, and when she offers it this time, her teacher reaches back.

“Not the Butterfingers,” Bloom warns, “Those are dad’s, and he’s weird about his candy.”

Her parents greet them when they make it back downstairs, or rather her father accosts her poor headmistress, his botched pumpkin still in his arms, meaning he’s spent all this time defending his ‘artistic masterpiece’ against Vanessa, who retreats back to the kitchen with a shaking head.

“Miss Dowling, you’re an impartial third party. What does this look like to you?”

“Dad don’t make her judge your weird pumpkin-”

“Hush you! Well?”

Miss Dowling smiles politely, and Bloom catches a twitch at the edge of her mouth that might be a laugh.

“It’s a very nice… mouse.”

The laugh that bursts from Bloom’s mouth is drowned out by Vanessa’s triumphant, “Aha!” Leaving Mike to grumble under his breath.

“Ganging up on me in my own house. It’s shameful, is what it is. Shameful.”

“Ignore him,” Bloom swaps the chocolate bowl for the gummy candy just as the doorbell rings for the first of many times that night. She plasters on a megawatt smile, greeting the chorus of “trick or treat!” with an already lackluster exclamation over a lion, a fairy princess, and a Spider-Man.

“Great costumes guys, you look… great.”

“What beautiful wings,” Miss Dowling adds behind her, and the fairy princess beams, scurrying back to her waiting mother, which prompts Spider-Man to show off his “impressive” web shooters and the lion to give a “ferocious” roar. Bloom huffs, crouching to sit on the front step, and Miss Dowling lowers beside her.

“I thought you wanted my help,” she teases, and Bloom huffs again.

“You’re gonna put me out of the job. Seriously, mom’s going to make you come back every year just to compliment all the trick or treaters because she says I do a ‘crap job.’”

“You do do a crap job,” Vanessa calls from inside, and shuts up her husband’s laughter with an equally scathing comment about his pumpkin, again. “Honestly, the only two people around here with any creative spirit are myself and Farah, and she won’t be here forever, so where does that leave me?”

Bloom tunes out her parents’ playful banter, digging through the bowl for gummy bears; Miss Dowling accepts some of her own, just in time for a bumblebee, a Power Ranger, and two Pokemon to rush up.

“Trick or treat!”

#fate: the winx saga #fate the winx saga #eve best #ftws #fate winx saga #farah dowling #bloom winx #mike peters #vanessa peters #fate fanfic #abigail cowen #I really don't have an explanation for this

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