Chapter Text
“You doing anything for Halloween, Douxie?”
Hisirdoux looks up at Wynn where they are cleaning the cafe table across from him.
“Nothing special.”
This was true; patrol didn’t really count as anything special. You could say this about All Hallow’s Eve: the Celts had gotten it right - the boundaries between worlds were a little more blurred on the day. Merlin always spoke irritably about the Church’s establishment of Alholowmesse - All Saints Day - to supplant Samhain (even though, or perhaps especially because, the change had been before Hisirdoux’s time.) But, of course, as these things went, the day had survived in the form of All Hallow’s Eve. Some things just didn’t stay dead.
So of course Hisirdoux and Archie’s job would be harder today. He’d say this for the States though, they went more in for Halloween revelry then England (though he heard that was changing these days) which did help to disguise some of the odder mischief that got past him.
Not that hiding the weirdness was much of an issue in Arcadia these days.
“Probably hang out with Zoe, maybe watch some Addams Family.”
“Oh, Addams Family Values is one of my favorite movies,” Wynn says, wiping the table down, their lanyard, strung with their pronoun pin and their ace, aro and nonbinary pride pins, swinging back and forth as they worked. Hisirdoux has his own lanyard with matching pride pins on days when he remembered to bring it from home, which was rarely - but most of the customers were regulars from town, who knew him alright, or, at least, as well as he wanted them to. “Has Zoe asked out what’s-her-name from the concert yet?”
“Kira - no, but she tells me about her texts all the time.” This ongoing saga - involving a nine-hundred-something year old hedge witch from upstate who had driven down for a concert and had given Zoe her number but who Zoe wouldn’t ask out - had been a frequent topic of Douxie’s griping; which was mostly their fault for asking. Wynn liked to check in on how Douxie was doing - all of the older cafe staff did, but Wynn especially, at the ripe old age of 27 - because they thought Douxie was a 19-ish year old just out of home and coming to terms with his identity, and not, well, a 919 year old wizard who is mostly just struggling with cell phones and glad that the Western world had managed in the past few decades to come up with a greater variety of words to describe how he had always felt - mostly, he’d just been sticking with ‘wizard.’
(He’d decided he was a few centuries too old to get used to a new set of pronouns - ‘he’ had always been fine with him anyway - but one of the annoying parts of pretending to be a feasible human age, was that he couldn’t turn on anyone who scoffed at Wynn’s they/them pronouns as ungrammatical with “‘They’ has been used as a singular for centuries before some English grammarians got their panties in a twist about it, source, I fucking lived through it , and people - including writers of no small talent - kept using it anyway, so bite me and my first-hand experiences of the first performances of Shakespeare’s plays .” )
“Hey, Zoe tips well, you should tell her that the cafe is a perfect date spot.”
Admittedly, being 923 did not make Zoe any more capable of asking out girls, so. Maybe Wynn had a point in looking out for the lot of them. He smiles; it’s a little silly, but it is nice to have a friendly wing to duck under. Well, a metaphorical friendly wing, in addition to Archie’s literal and figurative friendly wing.
“Yeah, I’ll tell her, so you can make sure she takes one of your tables.” Hisirdoux says with a grin.
Wynn snorts.
“You got any plans?” Hisirdoux asks.
Wynn swings a butter knife. “Dress up like a Jedi and hand out candy to trick or treaters.”
“And that’s what, again?”
Wynn shoves his shoulder. “You are not too young for Star Wars. Especially not with the new ones.”
Too old, actually. “And then you’ll eat the leftover candy yourself, of course.”
“Of course,” Wynn says. “I’ll bring you some, you’re like a toothpick, you need to eat.”
“Look at you, a grandparent at 27.”
“The last couple years aged me a few decades, what can I say?” Wynn says. “Hey, speaking of Halloween plans - you’ve got that black cat, right? Archie?”
There had been much exclaiming over pictures of Archie among the cafe staff, much of it fixated on ‘how did you get him to wear glasses?’
(They had all assumed ‘oh, he’s nearsighted’ had been a joke.)
“Yeah,” Hisirdoux says, smiling a little at the thought of how Archie would respond to being referred to that way.
“Be careful he doesn’t get out tonight, y’know? People can get especially weird about black cats on Halloween. I mean, it’s not like there aren’t weirder things in town, but, you never know.”
He and Archie had survived the witch trials, so he had a feeling they could handle anything the residents of Arcadia threw at them. “I’ll make sure to keep him with me,” he says, as he would, technically, do just that on patrol.
“Good kid. Hey, do you ever get him to wear any Halloween costumes, or is it just the glasses?”
---
“ - I’m just saying, I think if you wore a little cape the folks at the cafe would go absolutely nuts.”
“Absolutely not.”
Hisirdoux looks over the street. Nothing yet, but he can hear the sound of voices approaching.
“- never too old for trick or treating, I say. Who needs Halloween parties?”
“Aja and the Palchuk, apparently.”
“Yeah, well, they can hang out at the Kissing tree any time, it’s not every night that’s - Halloween!”
“Steve should be here. What if there are Halloween Creeps to Slay?”
“Then I’ve got it handled -”
He sees the three of them come into view:
Toby Domzalski (Okay tipper, friend to the Trollhunter and the new Shadow Sorceress, frequently spent hours in the cafe working on the script for ‘Kleb or Alive’, which Douxie had heard a great deal about, because that was apparently what screenwriters did. Also a regular with Darci, who always tips well.)
Krel Tarron (Did not understand the concept of tipping, asked why he was not simply paid fairly for his labor by his employers, which, well. He wished more people asked that question. Hadn’t understood Wynn’s ace and aro pride buttons either, and when explained had complained that their ship’s translation algorithms were out of date, and finally there were English words for him. Had once fixed the coffee machine and now none of the staff understood how it worked.)
Eli Pepperjack (Always tips 20% without fail, friend to Steve Palchuk, somehow, and had once given Douxie a very enthusiastic ramble about how the town was full of trolls and aliens and wizards, to which Douxie had nodded along agreeably. Had definitely seen real trolls - well, before everyone in Arcadia had, that is.)
“- you could have just worn your armor for a costume.” Krel says, who appears to be blue and four-armed. “If you insisted my usual form was sufficient costume - “
Hisirdoux files away that bit of information. Krel doesn’t look like any fae he’s encountered. Maybe Eli was on to something with all three of his conspiracy theories.
“Hey, you were the one who didn’t want to dress up.” Toby says. “Besides, everyone knows what my armor is about now. They don’t know - Bounds, Jason Bounds.”
“I’ve got armor!”
“You’ve got your Titanium Man costume, Eli. No offense, but it’s not exactly Troll-forged armor. Didn’t you make it with scraps from your garage?”
“Hey! Scraps were all the Titanium Man had to build his first suit of armor, and he was able to use it to fly and fight the -”
“If this Titanum Man were able to build a flying machine from scraps, he may have been a passable engineer, by Earth standards. I’ve found -”
“The Titanium Man is one of the very best engineers in the Phenomenal universe! In the first movie -”
Hisirdoux sees the monstrous claws first, a dpemp is approaching from the shadows as Eli continues his description of the movie.
“Let’s go -”
He jumps, spells already being pulled up from his bracer, and Archie flies after him.
“Keep it away from -”
“I know!” He launches a magical net, yanking the dpemp into an alleyway. It gnaws at the glowing strands in the shadow of the brick wall. “I’ve got it -”
“Careful, it’s -”
He looks at Archie’s warning, the dpemp has already gnawed most of the way through the net.
“C’mon, Arch - together.”
Archie immediately takes his meaning, jumping up on Hisirdoux’s shoulder, wings flaring out as he breathes fire, turning from red to blue with Hisirdoux’s enchantment. The dpemp screeches at the enchanted flames, falling to the pavement.
“Back to the other side with you!”
“Another vital Arcadian tradition protected.” Archie says archly.
Hisirdoux looks out of the alley to see the three trick-or-treaters arriving at a townhouse across the way. A flash of bright light catches his eye, but he quickly realizes it is a glowing toy lightsaber, not magic.
“Woah! Cool!”
Well, maybe a little magic.
“C’mon, Arch. Let’s keep protecting that Arcadian tradition.”
The wizard and the black cat disappear into the shadows of Halloween night.