Fun Halloween Activity #53
A/N: Happy Birthday, 'rene-chan! Sorry I couldn't get you anything else…
Warnings: Randomness, OOC, lack of coherence, lack of plot
Halloween was an important day of the year. Children lived for this holiday. Who didn't want, for one night, to be anyone else, anything else? Who didn't want to get all the free candy they could possibly eat in one year? Who didn't enjoy bobbing for apples, egging houses, and all the other activities normally associated with the holiday of black and orange?
Ryou didn't, for one.
Granted, Ryou wasn't a normal child. In fact, he wasn't a child any longer. At sixteen, it was considered immature to get excited about Halloween. Dressing up was generally in the sphere of younger people, unless a contest was involved. Candy corroded teeth; it wasn't exactly a good idea to binge-eat the sweets. He was a well-behaved boy who wouldn't even think about doing damage to someone else's property. In short, he wanted just about nothing to do with the holiday.
Which was completely contradictory to what he was doing right now, which was sitting at a table staring at a pumpkin with a knife in his hand, preparing to carving a Jack-O-Lantern. Oh dear. How had Ryou gotten himself into this position?
It had all started during the lunch period, when Yuugi had asked what seemed an innocent enough question.
"Are you guys doing anything special for Halloween?"
"Not much."
"I was going to take Shizuka trick-or-treating, but she says she's too old for it."
"Nothing really."
Ryou amused himself with his food, arranging the various components into random patterns.
"Well, I was thinking of setting up a sort of carnival somewhere for the little kids. It's dangerous for them to go out trick-or-treating and this'll provide a safe environment –"
Jou quickly picked up on Yuugi's train of thought. "So this would be just a small place where they can have some fun and still get candy, right? That's a great idea! And, I'm sure Shizuka would want to help. Who else could we find?"
Ryou balanced a carrot on another mound of rice and added some string beans around it, poking them into place with his chopsticks.
"Well, I can do face-paintings and such, and I'm sure Kaiba wouldn't mind providing candy and supplies, especially if we drop some hints that he could supervise Mokuba himself in a single place where the kid could still have some fun –"
An unidentified sauce or pudding of some kind joined the string beans. Was it hair? Decoration? Did it matter?
"– What sort of activities can we organize?"
"There's bobbing for apples, and pie eating –"
The green peas were prodded unwillingly into the sauce, rendering them temporarily immobile.
"– We could have scavenger hunts with the candy!"
"But I'm sure there's something else we're missing. What could it be?"
One of the cherry tomatoes slipped out of place; with the stringent harshness of an accomplished drill sergeant (in this case, the "drill" sergeant was a single chopstick), it was rapidly forced back into place.
"What do you think it is?"
A ghastly yet strangely appealing face glared back at Ryou from the plate.
"Say, Ryou, that's very good."
"I know what we're missing now! Jack-o-Lanterns for decoration!"
"Why does Yuugi have to be so convincing?" Ryou asked the innocent pumpkin. Its fellows (and fellow victims, the more sadistic part of Ryou's own mind snickered) were ranged behind it. Yuugi had pulled out all the stops in this case. He'd given Ryou puppy eyes for crying out loud!
Bakura wandered in then, chewing an apple contentedly. Ryou did not want to know where it had come from. "What are you thinking about the brat, Ryou?" He eyed the knife in the boy's hand and continued, jokingly, "Dare I hope it has something to do with that?"
"It does have something to do with 'the brat' – at the moment, I'm agreeing with you that he deserves the title, but it probably isn't what you're thinking."
"What a shame." The taller boy answered back, smirking. "So what are you doing with it?"
Gesturing expansively at the round yellow gourd in front of him, Ryou waited for a reply.
"…"
He got it a few minutes later. Ryou really had to excuse Bakura; he wasn't quite used to modern-day holidays yet, not even those involving screaming, running away, mischief, sweets, and, marginally, sharp metal objects. The marginally was probably the problem, though. Knives tended to sharpen the other boy's memory pretty well. (Ryou could practically see them in there).
"…So, do they bleed when you cut them?"
Sighing in exasperation at Bakura's preoccupation with the aftereffects of stabbing, he shook his head no.
"Where's the fun in that?" The boy asked with a bored expression.
Ryou really had to stop and question himself there. Where was the fun in cutting things that didn't bleed? The only thing better about it was the lack of mess. That reminded him.
"I didn't take the seeds out."
Bakura looked much more interested then. "Seeds? Dare I hope that they're surrounded by slimy stringy…"
Quite frankly, the list of adjectives that Bakura gave Ryou reminded him far too much of entrails, which begged the question of exactly what his Yami used to do after he was done robbing people. Unfortunately, the disgusted look on his face brought Bakura back down to earth.
"So…?"
Ryou sighed again. He seemed to be doing quite a lot of that lately. "Yes."
"Wonderful. Where can I find another knife?"
It had actually been fun, Ryou thought wonderingly. Bakura had actually been a great help, practically, erm…digging in to the task of carving Jack-o-Lanterns, though he'd drawn the line at Bakura's carving detailed (and uncannily accurate) drawings of the intricacies of the human anatomy and limited him to making the traditionally grotesque faces. This had led to a semi-serious competition between the two, which Bakura had won, hands down. Ryou sincerely hoped that Bakura hadn't seen that expression on the face of anything human, or worse, been the one to put it there (though, considering that this was Bakura, anything was possible).
"Well." Bakura set down his knife with his right hand (and Ryou let out a mental breath that he'd been holding ever since Bakura had started rummaging in the utensil cabinet, complaining about the dull knives) and stood with his hands behind his back. "That was fun."
Ryou resisted the urge to do a dramatic double take and settled for, "Oh, really?"
"Yep." Bakura said, titling his head to look at their work in a satisfied manner. He had taken the time to line them all up on the kitchen table – now faces with varying expressions of agony, anger, and simple terror-inducing grimaces stared blankly back at them. Ryou sent up a silent prayer to any gods who might be sympathetic to children, that none of them would be mentally scarred by any of those carvings.
"Nnh," Ryou nodded in assent.
"And you know what the best part is?" Bakura asked, without acknowledging Ryou's response, still seemingly staring at the orange faces.
The words were dragged out of him unwillingly. "…what's the best part?"
"I don't have to clean up!" and the spirit threw a handful of the still sticky seeds at Ryou, laughing maniacally.
"Why you-!" Ryou managed to get out, before realizing that his energy could be put to other uses; he scraped up some seeds to retaliate.
Bakura did end up helping to clean, if only because Ryou had threatened to withhold access to the knives (although, technically, this would not have worked). He had also lost during the…"seed-ball" fight he initiated – Ryou could be rather vicious when knives weren't involved.
Fun Halloween Activity #53 – Carving Jack-o-Lanterns With Your Yami
Owari