"Right then," whispered Fred as the four of them approached the staircase that was in the corner of...what looked like a basement. There were boxes everywhere, clearly labeled "Honeydukes" in a neat, flowing handwriting, so that, at the very least, explained how Fred had figured out exactly where they were. "I'm gonna go upstairs and check everything out, see if anyone is up there—"
"Wait!" Ever grabbed his arm, yanking him back down the two steps the red-head had managed to climb. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew what they were doing was illegal, and she wondered vaguely if wizard cops—were there even such things? And were they called cops?—would come and expell them from Hogwarts, or arrest them and throw them in some kind of wizard prison. "We need some kind of signal! Like—like in those James Bond movies! Oh, never mind," she whispered, waving a hand dismissively at the boys' confused faces. "Just...whistle or something!"
"I can't whistle," admitted Fred, sliding his hands into the pockets of his robes. "I could knock on the basement door if we're all good."
"That'll work," Ever mumbled, releasing his hand. She couldn't help but be a bit disappointed; she'd imagined scenarios of being spies with elaborate signals to tell them the coast was clear, or hand signals as they skirted through long hallways. She settled back against the wall between George and Lee, folding her arms over her chest as they waited for the signal. None of them spoke; the air between the three of them seemed to grow thicker with every second that they waited, wondering if Fred had somehow gotten caught. The silence seemed to stretch an hour, but after no more than a couple of minutes a knock came at the door. The three Gryffindors glanced at each other and then, in a whirlwind of gangly limbs and too-big feet, they rushed up the stairs, practically tripping over each other in the process. Fred opened the door for them, and when he spotted them, he scurried out of the way, biting down on the back of his hand to keep from giggling too loudly.
"It'll all be here when you lot get up. Don't break your necks over it." Ever was the first to reach the top, and she turned to poke out her tongue at him, but stopped mid-gesture with her tongue still hanging out of her mouth when she realized just what kind of shop this was; a candy shop. Boxes of treats lined the walls, all the way up to the ceiling, with ladders like the ones she pictured in old libraries that rolled along the shelves on each wall so customers could reach them at any height. Just laid out on the floor were all kinds of lollipops, chocolates, caramels, other candies, and vibrant colors dominated the room. She felt like—well, like a kid in a candy shop, she thought, grinning as she whipped her head left and right, trying to decide what to look at first.
"Acid pops," she read quietly, inspecting the closest, bright green candy; it almost didn't look safe to eat, and as she reached out to touch it, Fred knocked her hand away gently.
"I wouldn't do that," he whispered. "We tricked our little brother into eating one once. Nearly burnt through his tongue." Ever snatched her hand away, grimacing, and Fred nearly burst out laughing at the look and was again reduced to biting down on the palm of his hand.
"Well...what about sugar quills?"
"Oh yeah, those are great!" George whispered, coming up beside the two of them and plucking one of the candies off of the shelf, sticking the end in his mouth. Some part of Ever wanted to chastise him—it was stealing, after all!—but the other good three quarters was too tempted to try one herself, and she gave into the urge. She plucked a quill out of the rack and popped the end in her mouth, and it nearly melted on her tongue. It tasted like cotton candy—and she supposed the concept was similar; it was spun sugar, after all—but it took a bit longer to melt...maybe it was a spell.
"Are there other flavors?" she asked around the sweet, and that was nearly it for the candy. The mostly dissolved bit broke away from the rest of the quill, and she scrambled to catch it before it could hit the spotless tiled floor. Fred snatched it from the air and broke it in two, handing the larger piece to her.
"Keeper's fee," he grinned, popping it into his mouth. "You've got chocolate and strawberry, and loads of others, but they're charmed flavors 'cause if they tried to put it into the sugar it'd get too heavy and break it...or, that's what my dad says, anyway," he mumbled, going a bit red around the ears; that's when Ever realized she'd been staring at him, intrigued as always at any new tidbit about the wizarding world, and dropped her gaze, feeling her cheeks heat up. "But...yeah," the red head continued briskly, seeming to shake himself, "since it's a charm they usually don't taste as good, and the spell wears off completely after a couple of days.
"What do they taste like after the spell's worn off?"
"Nobody waits to find out," whispered George from Ever's other side. She nearly jumped out of her skin; she'd forgotten he was there. The girl glanced back at him, and he grinned wickedly. "Sorry, Moore. Didn't mean to startle you." Ever wrinkled her nose at him and wandered off to one of the corners of the store, examining rows of boxes stacked on top of each other. She saw a few names she recognized—Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, Chocolate Frogs, Pumpkin Pasties—and even more that she didn't. What in the world were Fizzing Whizzbees? Drooble's Best Blowing Gum? Pepper Imps sounded spicy, so she steered clear of that box, and Totflossing Stringment just sounded odd in candy form. And...
"Blood pops?" she whispered, pulling one cherry red sweet from the box to examine it.
"For the vampire enthusiast," Lee murmured from across the room. "Or vampires with a bit of a sweet tooth, I suppose. I wouldn't," he cautioned when she sniffed at the lolly gingerly. "They taste like blood. Really." Ever immediately dropped the candy back in the box, wiping her hands on the front of her robes for good measure. The boys snickered behind her, and eventually she had to join in, resuming her little search through the boxes.
By the time the clock chimed nine—none of them knew exactly where the clock was, but they could clearly hear the metallic clangs that told the hour—Ever had so much information about wizarding candy crammed into her head that she felt like she'd be quizzed on it in the morning. They wandered sleepily back to the passageway, with Ever checking behind them that everything was exactly as it had been before they'd come in before closing the basement door.
The trudge back to the castle was a long one. The four of them were tired and, in the case of the twins, their pockets were weighed down with candy. When they finally—finally, Ever thought, her legs aching from the hour or so walk there and back—got back to the statue of the one-eyed witch, it took George a good five minutes of rummaging about in his pockets to find the map, and the first years spent another five minutes scouring it for prefects on patrol, mapping out the best possible route to the tower.
All told, it was close to midnight before the four Gryffindors returned to their common room, which was blessedly empty. For a long, drowsy moment the four of them merely stared at each other, and then, hit with the realization of the little heist they'd just managed to pull off, they erupted into giggles. The giggles weren't exactly quiet; they'd spent too much of the last three hours or so being far too quiet to worry about their volume level just then. Lady luck was with them, because none of the prefects deemed their little ruckus worthy of inspection—they'd have found four children with very dirty hands and faces, two with bulging pockets of sweets they couldn't have possibly gotten to if they had—and before too long they climbed the stairs and, with a quick shower almost as an afterthought, Ever dropped into bed.
Her dreams were less than sweet that night, but in the morning she didn't remember them.