How have I gotten this far without a Halloween chapter? Also, I still am at a loss for an explanation as to how Nick Fury's chapters became the comic relief ones. It's so paradoxical. But I love it.
Nick IV: Three Blind Mice
"No."
"But Mom, please?!" Nick pleaded.
"I said no."
"Why not?"
"I don't trust you out there without an adult, especially at night."
"What difference does it make if it's nighttime? I can't tell."
She paused, so clearly Nick had made a good point, but he doubted he'd convinced her yet. "Still no."
"Matt's dad is letting him go."
"Matt is more experienced than you."
"So just because he's a better blind person, he gets to go? That's not fair." Nick crossed his arms with a huff.
"That is not what I said. There's no such thing as a 'better blind person.'"
"You just said he was better at being blind than me."
"I said he had more experience. He's had years to practice navigating; you've only had a few months."
"What if I get Red or Jake to come with me and guide?"
"I'll go with him," Jake offered. Nick knew Jake didn't actually care about helping him; he just wanted to see people's reaction to Nick's costume. They still hadn't run the idea by Mom because she'd probably veto it, but they'd talked and laughed about it most nights before bed since the beginning of October. Nick fully intended not to tell her at all, and just leave the apartment with his real costume hidden under other accessories.
"How big a group will you be going with?" Mom asked with a defeated sigh. Nick knew they had her cornered.
"Me, Jake, Red, and Matt," Nick said. "His other friends aren't going, but he wants candy, so he offered to join me when I said I was working on convincing my mom to let me go."
"Alright, fine. But I want you back inside by nine."
"Deal." That gave them two hours to obtain as much sugar as possible. The next day at school, Nick informed Matt of his success.
"Sweet. I can't wait."
"Me neither. What are you going as?"
"A lawyer," Matt said.
Nick thought that sounded rather boring. "So you're just going to wear a suit?"
"And my dad helped me modify a briefcase to carry candy. Trust me, for a lot of people, there's nothing scarier than a lawyer showing up at your door."
"I like the way you think," Nick said deviously.
"What are you doing?"
"You'll see."
"You're going to have to tell me at some point. I have a feeling you don't want me to guess because that would require feeling you up."
"I hate to break it to you, but we are not there yet, Murdock. And we never will be."
"Then tell me what your costume is."
"I'll tell you on Halloween."
"Fine."
He, Jake, and Red planned their route to maximize candy haul over the week leading up to the event. They'd start by covering Nick's entire building from the top down, and then do the same for every building down the street until they ran out of time. "Man, can you imagine trick or treating in the suburbs?" Red asked. "With all the houses so far apart, you'd have to work three times as hard for the same amount of candy."
"What's the point of gorging yourself on candy if you burned off all the calories just getting it?" Jake added.
"Exactly." Nick fist-bumped Jake. At a quarter to seven, they set out. Nick brought his cane along just in case, but to maximize their pace he kept it in his bag and just placed his free arm on Jake's elbow. He trusted his brother not to let him walk into anything.
"Are you going to tell me what your costume is now?" Matt asked.
Nick smirked. "I'm not wearing my prosthetics."
"You're joking. Do you have sunglasses on?"
"Yes. And I'm only going to take them off for anyone who dares to ask, 'What are you supposed to be?'"
"I can't decide whether to be amazed or afraid."
"Be both."
The first couple doors, nobody asked about Nick's lack of a costume. He'd just worn all black like he usually did, and presumed that most people probably thought he was a secret agent or something. He was looking forward to the first person to ask, and he got his wish on their fourth door.
"Oh, how cute. A lawyer, a lumberjack, and…what's your costume, sweetie?"
Nick tried to restrain himself from laughing prematurely, but he turned to face the source of the woman's voice and slowly removed his shades. Her reaction was immediate, a strangled half gasp, half scream accompanied by the words, "My goodness. How did you do that?"
"It's a secret," Nick said. They thanked her for the candy and moved on, and only then did Nick allow himself to bust out laughing. "That was everything I hoped it would be."
"You should have seen her face," Jake said, also laughing.
"I want to do it again."
About one in every five or six people to answer the door asked about his costume. Whenever he heard the question, Nick's heart soared knowing he had the opportunity to spread the scary spirit of Halloween. Easily the best thing, and possibly the only good thing, to come out of losing both his eyes was having a built-in way to scare the shit out of people. He got all sorts of reactions ranging from nothing to high-pitched screaming, and Nick savored each and every one of them. Except for the one time he made a young child cry; he wished he could take that one back. But the string of expletives he heard from a man on the fourth floor more than made up for that. Nick stored some of those phrases away in his memory for future use.
He quickly learned that he preferred the people who physically handed out candy to those who simply held out a bucket. They'd worked out a system beforehand for figuring this out: Jake went first at every place they visited, and he tapped Nick on the arm once to instruct him to hold out his bag, twice if he needed to fish through the bucket himself. Luckily, he didn't have any allergies, because it was almost impossible to tell what he was getting. The shape of the candy was easy to tell, but he had no way of knowing if it was M&Ms or Skittles since they were the same shape. The same applied to all the classic chocolate bars.
"What time is it?" Nick asked after they finished their second building.
"Eight thirty."
"We have time for maybe a few floors, but then we have to head home. I'm afraid of what Mom might do if we break curfew."
"Okay."
They hit about fifteen more doors before they started back for the Furys' apartment. On the way back, a man jumped out from behind a dumpster to scare them. Jake and Red lost their freaking minds, but Nick had heard him shuffling around back there before he leapt out, so it didn't scare him. Matt was also unfazed. Jake jokingly threatened to leave Nick alone in the middle of the sidewalk to find his own way home if he didn't stop laughing at him. Nick knew what block they were on and could almost certainly find his own way, but he listened to Jake anyway. The kid didn't deserve to be ridiculed after spending his entire Halloween with his big brother as arm candy.
"How do you guys do this?" Matt asked as they sat down in Nick's living room to trade. "Are you throw everything you don't want in the middle kind of people, or is this a formal bartering kind of situation?"
"A little bit of both," Jake said.
"Wow. You guys got a lot." Dawn had finished her own trick-or-treating with Mom earlier. "Can I trade too?"
"Sure," Jake said. "You got anything good?"
Nick reached a hand into his bag of candy and pulled out a piece of chocolate. He brought it to his nose and caught an unmistakable whiff of peanuts. A Snickers, then. It would've taken too long to sniff pieces from the buckets that were offered to him while going from door to door, but now that he could just sit here with his own haul, he could actually identify them. Matt was doing the same thing beside him.
"Is that how you guys identify candy?" Red asked.
"How else?" Matt replied. "You mean you actually trust what the wrapper says?"
"Yeah. It's never been wrong before."
"Have you ever found a miswrapped piece of candy?" Nick asked.
Matt laughed. "No. But I wouldn't know if I did unless somebody told me."
"I have an idea!" Red announced. "Why don't we see who's faster at figuring it out?"
"I'm down for a little friendly competition," Nick said.
"I'm in," Matt agreed.
"Can I play too? Jake asked.
"Go find something to blindfold yourself with and we're game."
"I'll just use Dawn's, it's right here."
"Since when does Dawn have a blindfold?" Nick asked. He'd never heard word of this before.
"I got it to watch movies with," she said shyly.
"That is literally the most counterintuitive statement I've ever heard."
"She wants to watch them like you do," Jake told him.
"What?"
He heard Dawn approaching and she wrapped him up in a hug from behind. "I wanted to know what it was like just to hear the sounds and the audio description like you do," she explained. "And I liked it."
"You like it more without watching?" Nick didn't think it was possible for someone to choose to watch a movie without watching, but apparently his sister was full of surprises.
"Sometimes. I can use my imagination. I can picture all the guy characters as Denzel if I want to."
Nick laughed. "Really? All of them?"
"Yeah. Remember when we watched Space Jam? There were like…four Denzels in that movie."
"What about Bugs Bunny?" Nick asked.
"He was Denzel too."
"You see, I pictured Bugs as Danny DeVito," Matt said matter-of-factly.
"Danny DeVito was literally in the movie as a different character," Nick countered. "Bugs Bunny is a fucking cartoon, why are you out here fancasting him as real people?"
"Because we can, silly," Dawn said, bopping him on the head.
"Can we go back to the candy thing? I don't have nearly enough sugar in my bloodstream to deal with your bullshit."
"Okay, I've got the blindfold on. Red, are you going to be in charge?"
"Sure."
Nick, Matt, and Jake sat in a line while Red sifted through all the candy in search of three identical pieces to give to them. He heard Red place a piece right in front of each of them and, when prompted, picked it up. It was a square package full of circular pieces, which narrowed it down to M&Ms, Skittles, or Reese's Pieces. The fruity aroma immediately gave it away, but Matt blurted out, "Skittles," before Nick could say it. Nick beat him on the next one though, which was a plain Hershey bar. The one after that he didn't even have to smell. He could tell from the shape that it was Whoppers because no other candy consisted of a tube of perfect spheres.
"Mounds," Nick said for the next one.
"No, it's Almond Joy," Matt insisted. "I can smell the almonds."
"You're both right; I gave you different ones. Jake, what do you have?"
"I don't know. I think I smell peanut and caramel, but it doesn't feel like a Snickers."
"It's not a Snickers."
"I have no idea." Jake handed the bar to Nick, and he tried. It did smell like a Snickers, but the texture was different.
"Is it a Baby Ruth?"
"No."
He handed it off to Matt, who immediately said, "Pay Day."
"Bingo."
"I don't think I've ever seen a Pay Day," Nick said.
"Me neither," Jake said.
"They're one of my dad's favorites," Matt explained. "Can I bring this home for him?"
"Sure," Red said. "Okay, this next one will be for all the marbles."
Nick picked up the piece in front of him and immediately noticed it was way larger than any of the others. "These are just pretzels," he said after shaking the bag.
"Exactly."
"Give me back the Hershey bar so I can eat it. Pretzels on Halloween is just nonsense."
"I'll eat them," Matt said. Nick tossed him the pretzels and accepted the candy from Dawn. They spent the rest of the night trading off their least favorites, and Nick ended up with a haul better than he'd gotten any previous year. Mom collected her obligatory taxes of Tootsie Rolls and Reese's cups, and he gave a few lollipops to Dawn for free because he knew they were her favorite.
"We should do this again next year," Matt said before his dad came to pick him up.
"Definitely. And I already have the perfect costume idea."
"What's that?"
"Three Blind Mice."