Work Text:
It was late enough in the year that the leaves had started to turn and the air had started to cool and everyone had gotten enough into their schoolwork that summer’s free time seemed an alien dream that the autumn festival began. There was a pumpkin patch, and bobbing for apples, and a dunk tank that just about everyone Oz knew what conspiring to get Break into, and stalls selling baked goods, and a coop full of chickens you could meet, and the sort of rickety hand-assembled amusement park rides that could get a particularly litigious person very, very rich under the right circumstances. Elliot and Leo were going there on a date Saturday night; Thursday afternoon, Gilbert got off work early and took Oz and Alice to the festival so that they would have the chance to go at all, because for some strange reason the Vessalius siblings never went anywhere fun unless they were with Gilbert, Elliot, or Leo. Oz, of course, planned to use this as an opportunity to tease Elliot on Friday, but this afternoon, he wasn’t thinking of messing with his friend. He was enchanted by the festival, by the orange and yellow and red decorations, by Alice tugging him this way and that, practically giddy with excitement.
There had been a time when Oz was confused about how much Gilbert Nightray cared for him and Alice, but that time was long gone and now Gilbert’s love was a fact of reality, a background hum to the really important stuff of today—namely, enjoying the festival and all it had to offer.
The first place they went, because Alice could always be relied upon to be Alice, was the food stall area. Gilbert was prevailed upon to buy Alice a massive hot dog with every topping, and Oz a funnel cake, and then they set off towards the pumpkin patch before Alice could finish her food and demand something else to eat and thus ruin her appetite for dinner—though really, Alice’s appetite had never been ruined by anything in the past, and it was quite strange to think she’d start now.
The pumpkin patch was wonderful: though the pumpkins were not growing on the vine here, they’d been laid out in neat rows on top of hay, and were orange and bright and bulbous and beautiful. Alice and Oz debated which one to get as if they were going to bring one home with them. They wouldn’t; they wouldn’t even be sending one back with Gilbert, either, because he had banned them from the apartment around two weeks after Vincent had impulsively thrown out all his sex toys in hopes of forcing himself to ask Gil’s coworker Ada out. It hadn’t worked, and he had had to find workarounds, and now pumpkins were on the list of random objects that Gilbert refused to let in the apartment. After they had finished with the pumpkins, they moved onto the carnival rides and tried to persuade Gilbert to go on literally anything more dangerous than the carousel; when he vomited after the spinny cups, they sat with him until he felt better and then immediately dragged him onto the rickety roller coaster. After this, and only after this, they visited the chickens, because Gilbert was crying but still didn’t want to let them go somewhere he couldn’t protect them (and wasn’t Gil so odd, that he always worried about Oz and Alice, that it was a specific fear of his that they would die and he would not, that he didn’t like them going places alone not just because he feared they would be in danger but also because he hated being left alone by them—), and once he’d calmed down with a hen in his lap as Alice terrorized the poor birds and Oz did the bare minimum to control her, they went and got dinner.
It was the same sort of food they’d gotten earlier, the kind of deep-fried magic that was excellent at a carnival or festival but was terrible anywhere else, and afterwards they got dessert and sat under the stars, Oz and Alice aware that they would have to go home soon but still reveling in the perfect night, the perfect afternoon, the perfect day—a perfection that they would lose soon, but one they loved nevertheless.