“Yeah, I bought, like, one of everything,” he said, setting down bag after bag of goodies. This was his first Halloween in Hoenn, after all; he had no idea how many trick-or-treaters they’d get, and he wanted to be prepared!

Also, he wanted candy for after, but that was beside the point.

“Oh, uh.” He paused to receive his kiss, then ripping open the sheet package and tossing it over the island. “If-- you want?” He didn’t sound very excited by the concept.

Memo still didn’t really enjoy carving pumpkins, and honestly, the idea of eating… the stuff that comes out of it? Yeck. But he liked the finished product, so he had to power through

Alex’s next comment caught him off-guard.

“I am?” he asked, blinking.

Alexei Ivanov
tricking or treating

☉

He crinkled his nose, a face of half-disgust. “They’re not my favorite thing,” he admitted, shucking the plastic on the cheap carving kit he’d bought at the store, “but… it’s our first Halloween together you know?” He shrugged, setting them down to search the kitchen for a sharp knife. “It’s about making memories.”

He found a kitchen knife and set it gently on the island.

“Well, I am stressed,” he said, hating how it sounded like a confession-- like a sign of weakness-- and he tried to hustle right past it. “Because, you know, end of the world? We’re all a little stressed.” He waved his hand, dismissing it.

“I was thinking a Noivern. You?”

Alexei Ivanov
tricking or treating

☉

“Yeah,” Memo said, thinking Alex was agreeing with him, thinking that was the end of it all, and they could move past it, “everyone’s stressed.” Now they could-gag- carve their pumpkins, eat some candy, watch Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School, and have a nice evening.

Alex admonished him for the sheer amount of sugar he’d brought home. He doesn’t comment on how his pet names are worming their way into Alex’s vocabulary, but he notices it, and it makes him smile. “Have as much as you like. It’s for-- well, not all of it is for us. But it is for us. And I didn’t know how many Trick-Or-Treaters you usually get and, you know, with the dome, and supply shortages I-- I didn’t want to be underprepared.”

He was stressing again. He exhaled a long, measured breath.

His smile grew when Alex revealed what his pumpkin was going to be.

“Oh, that’ll be so cute. You should put them in a witch's hat or such.” He thought of their little gaggle of lambs all dressed up in costumes. “Actually, we should do that in real life.”

Alexei Ivanov
tricking or treating

☉

“Yes!” he says, a few octaves below an excited squee and two seconds away from clapping his hands together. He exhaled. Take her down a notch, bud. “Or… we could do them all a different costume but in the same theme! Like… Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or something.”

Memo was lost in visions of a platoon of lambs in costumes. He wasn’t even paying attention to the drunk gummy bears Alex was making (thought if he had noticed he would have made a face about you’re just using plain vodka?)

Alex kind of shook him out of his idyllic daydreams.

“Yeah,” he said, in a long, measured exhale, as he reached for the box of nitrile gloves he’d bought so he didn’t have to… touch the stuff inside. “Yeah. I can do this. But… you go first?”

Alexei Ivanov
tricking or treating

☉

“Seven,” Memo corrected, voice mock-scolding as he clicked his tongue. “Forgot about Ovejita. For shame.”

Of course, his little lamb was a part of the family. Their family.

He forced himself to look back at the pumpkin. It was a dizzying thought-- one that made him so happy he might cry. So, instead, he focused down the enemy and steeled his expression into resolve.

“Oh, you’ve never carved a pumpkin before?” Memo asked, expression breaking into something softer and curious. It wasn’t something he’d done in a long time but, given Alex’s predisposition towards bleeding out, he imagined activities centralized on sharp objects weren’t very prevalent during his childhood.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what we do,” Memo said, face going a little pale as he mentally said a prayer and plunged the knife into the pumpkin.

Despite the strangeness of, you know, stabbing something, this part wasn’t too bad. Carefully, he carved a circle around the pumpkin’s stem, about three-quarters as wide as the gourd. As he retracted the blade, the dreaded sticky orange guts clung to the knife.

“And then we, you know,” he said, already cringing at the smell, “gut it.”

The pumpkin top came off, revealing the goop and seeds inside.

Alexei Ivanov
the guillermo/ceej anti pumpkin carving experience is REAL
tricking or treating

☉

“We could use Atalys,” Memo offered, delighted to be distracted from the task at hand-- the smell was already making him nauseous, bringing forward vivid flashbacks of kicking and screaming on the kitchen floor as his parents forcibly drove his hands into the cold, smelly innard of a beheaded pumpkin: Ester trying to soothe him, Mira much too old and ladylike for this, Oli threatening to upend the gut bucket over his head as a joke. “She’s not a Wooloo but. It’d be better than Jove, anyway.”

He heaves a sigh and hovers his hands, clad in nitrile gloves. The dust from the inner lining coats his fingertips.

“You were always a ghost?” he asks, half a laugh at the irony of it. “Always? Didn’t you ever want to be something else?”

Alex offered him a bowl. Memo closed his eyes and said a little prayer and reached in.

“It’ll be hollow when-- when we’re done,” he said, scooping a big handful of seeds and orange goop and trying really really hard not to heave. He slung it in the bowl and went back for more. “We gotta get it all empty. Might have to cut a little bit off the sides, I think. I haven’t carved a pumpkin in forever so I can’t quite remember.”

Alexei Ivanov
the guillermo/ceej anti pumpkin carving experience is REAL
tricking or treating

☉