Authors note: I do not own any characters created by J.K. Rowling. Full credit goes to her for all situations and information mentioned in any of the 7 books or interviews, etc. as well. However, the storyline of this fanfic is all me and the little voice in my head – and thus, of course, not to be copied by anybody else – that would be stealing my creativity, my ideas – and not very nice
A/N2 This oneshot was written for the Twin Exchange Title Swap Project (by the Twin Exchange - go check out that forum, it's pretty amazing!). I was assigned the title 'Once Upon A Spider' (which was submitted by RemusLives).
It was a well established fact that Ronald Weasley, Auror, did not like spiders. This fear had been installed in him at a very young age, and it appeared that he had never managed to quite get over the trauma.
What was not quite as known, however, was that Ron was not the only Weasley to deal with this particular phobia. As a matter of fact, the whole situation which had signalled the beginning of Ron's trauma, had originally been concocted as a way to relieve another Weasley from the exact same problem. The twins' plan, brilliant though they were even at such a young age, had been inspired by an incident concerning one of their other brothers, which they were lucky enough to have seen happen just a few months earlier.
At this time, Charlie Weasley had just come home for his Easter Holidays after starting Hogwarts 6 months previously. Always the child termed as the most 'tough', Charlie had greatly enjoyed the freedom that Hogwarts and its grounds offered him, after being looked after (although he had coined it 'spied and pried upon' years earlier) by his mother, Molly. As such, Charlie had wasted no time in acquainting himself more closely with the Castle and all it's secret pathways and curious nicks and corners.
After Christmas, he had determined that he knew Hogwarts well enough, and that it was time to venture outside. Having determined what the best night, hour and duration were for his first exploration into The Dark Forest, he left a mere two nights before he was to be on his way back home. Although it is still assumed that he actually managed to follow the path quite some way into the forest, nobody actually knows what happened to him afterwards. When he appeared at breakfast the next morning, however, he looked very pale, a bit sweaty, and could not seem to force his limbs to stop twitching.
When he arrived back home, his parents at first assumed that he had just heard some scary stories about the forest. After all, what other explanation could there be for their twelve year old son's sudden, and quite inexplicable, fear for any sudden movements? After a few days, however, when it started to become clear that the fear seemed to develop into a full-blown phobia, and that their son, for the first time in years, started to have nightmares that would cause him to crawl into the bed with them, they figured they had probably best see somebody about it.
As it turns out, not many Healers actually knew what to do about a twelve year old boy who seemed to be traumatized by something or other. Eventually, however, they ended up with a rather young Healer, who was rather interested in what the muggles called 'psychology'. He insisted on talking to Charlie alone, and after what seemed like forever, but could not have been more than half an hour, he came to the conclusion that Charlie did indeed suffer from an 'Unresolved Phobia', and needed to be slowly, and under safe circumstances, confronted with the object that had caused said trauma.
The other children would never find out what exactly had caused Charlie this 'Unresolved Phobia', but from that moment on they were constantly told two things: the first, to never or ever wander into the Dark Forest, the second, "gradual confrontation".
It was, of course, the second that the twins managed to remember, while they paid next to no attention to the first. As such, it was also the second that inspired their plan. Up until that moment, Ron had been quite - if not fond of, then at the very least 'okay' with spiders. George, on the other hand, had one night woken up to find that a spider had decided that his face would be quite a good place to go to sleep, and had been unable to stand the little creatures ever since. At the very mature age of six, the twins decided that it was way past time for George to get over this little bump on their road to being the ultimate youngster-pranksters, and that is how they came up with their plan.
In their defence, of course, they were only six, and as such could have no idea of the far stretching consequences of what they were about to do. Then again, knowing their set of mind, even at that particular age, they might just already have decided that 'why not' was the best approach to any moral dilemma of the pranking-kind .
They started their plan, very simply, by asking their mother to change the main characters from the stories she read to them every night: at first, the villains were spiders, and soon enough, the heroes and princesses too joined the eight-legged force. Molly, strange though she may have thought it to be, found herself with no other choice but to comply, and as such she was telling stories about how prince Hairyleg had to conquer the dragon Eightleg to save his darling princess Manyeye after she had accidentally been bitten by a very poisonous tarantula. It became something of a relief to Molly that she could tell her younger son and daughter all about Harry Potter, Saviour, afterwards, and she simply could not (or would not, as she feared that the reason might be quite horrifying in and of itself) figure why this sudden wish would have occurred.
When that didn't have a lot of effect, they determined to look for the resemblance to spiders in all of their food: from spaghetti to meatloaf, anything - with the right amount of imagination and some creativity - could be made to resemble those horrors. This gave cause to some quite entertaining meals - one of Arthur's favourites was the time where George and Fred managed, not only to give their meatballs legs, but to actually make them move a bit as well - but again, it did not seem to help towards the twin's purpose. Although George was now okay with people mentioning spiders and the general idea of them, he still tended to make a very high, odd sound whenever he actually saw one.
After this, the twins took a pause to try and figure out what they might do next in order to relieve George from his problem, but no inspiration would come until the moment when they just 'happened' to hear Bill and Charlie talk about how Charlie would have to actually go into some forest in order to try and 'conquer' whatever it was that might be out there. At this, Fred had the idea for what he dubbed Mission 'Spiddy' - or 'Tedder', he wasn't quite sure on the actual name yet. Either way, the plan was absolutely foolproof. Fred had just figured out how to change one type of stuffed animal into another type of stuffed animal - there was nothing more fun than watching his mum trying to figure out exactly where his blue teddy had gone to, and where his green elephant had come from - and although it didn't always work quite as he wanted to (his stuffed pig had only one eye), he thought that this could help George to 'confrontate' his fear of spiders.
Mind you, I say foolproof, but that was of course not taking into account one very important factor: Ron. Now Ron was at that time a somewhat adorable four year old who was very much aware of the fact that his younger sister, Ginny, was the daughter that his parents had long since longed for. It wasn't really that they loved her more, but it was clear that they tended to give her just a bit more attention, give her what she wanted just a tad bit sooner, and so on. Ron had, predictably, reacted to this by demanding some attention, be it by acting up or by telling on his brothers' acting up. On the day that Fred had chosen to execute Mission Spiddy, Ron had made the big mistake of telling on him and George for throwing a beetle into his porridge, and Fred had not yet learned quite how to let go of certain feelings, such as anger and resentment.
So when Fred saw Ron play with his teddy next to George, while Ginny was throwing her dolls around, Percy was reading and Bill and Charlie were passing a Quaffle outside, it really shouldn't have come as much of a surprise when he let just a tad bit of that anger seep into his magic and ended up doing not quite what he intended. Although, one might probably say that Fred did, in fact, do exactly what he had intended to do, only better. Either way, all of a sudden, Ron's teddy had not only changed into a spider-shaped plushy, said plushy actually seemed to come to life, and its long, thin and hairy legs were already making their way into his mouth.
Fred seemed to find this occurrence quite funny, and his following laughter would result in his being given the longest time of grounding since the time he and George almost got their younger brother to take an Unbreakable Vow. Said younger brother would never quite manage to escape the memory of the way the hair tasted, and the sound the grotesque spider made as it clicked its way closer and closer to his face, any time he actually saw any spider - be they small or big. George, although he did laugh at first quickly froze when the spider then began to make its way towards him, and in his fear did something that would destroy any hopes he had of ever getting over his fear of spiders: he sent the spider straight to Fred. The spider, by this time quite angry and upset, decided that this boy would be the one that he would either eat, or force to be eaten by. One leg at a time, the spider crawled its way up Fred's body and onto his face. By the time Arthur and Molly arrived and managed to Banish the creature, Fred needed a change, George was crying, and Ron seemed too petrified to even think about making any noises.
In all the years that followed, Fred never even once again suggested a way for George to 'confrontate' his fear of spiders, no jokes about Ron's obvious phobia were ever made by either twin, and Molly was very careful to make sure that no spiders ever entered any place where either George, Fred, or Ron might encounter them - the ensuing panic attacks were just not worth the extra minute of free time she would have gained from letting them be.
Although neither Fred nor George would ever admit to their fear of spiders as openly as Ron did, one has to note that, even in all the years following Fred's death, not a single product created by Weasley's Wizard Wheezes would ever contain any ingredients that required the use of actual, whole, dead or alive spiders.