Apocolocyntosis
It was a cool autumn night and the full moon was shining brightly on an icebear, who was climbing up the wall of a little house.
The bear was panting hard, because he was pretty fat, and clearly not used to the exercise.
The bear was dressed in a wizard costume, because it was Halloween.
The bear was also wearing a long blue and gray scarf adorned with the Ravenclaw crest, because it was Muke.
He reached the ledge of a window and leaned on it with one arm, holding himself up while he fished around in his robes with the other.
He pulled out a wand that was clearly supposed to look magical, but was probably only sufficiently advanced, and tapped the window with it. The glass in the window vanished.
Muke clambered in through the window frame, landing in a heap under the windowsill and catching his breath. He then took a moment to look around the moonlit room.
He froze in place as he realized he was not in the empty guest room he had been aiming for, but had blundered into the bedroom of Frey himself!
The coyote would have to have been used to things that go bump in the night to sleep through a four-hundred pound bear tumbling through the window, but apparently this was the case.
Nevertheless, the fat bear got up as quietly as he could and tiptoed towards the bed, leaning over the sleeping coyote. Frey’s eyes were shut; he was breathing regularly with only a little snoring, a peaceful expression on his face—but better safe than sorry, Muke thought, and touched his wand to the yote’s forehead, whispering, “Somnium.”
The coyote’s sleep deepened visibly, and the bear started breathing easier.
He pulled the covers down, revealing the gray coyote to be dressed only in pink-and-white striped boxers, which he left undisturbed.
“All right, let’s get to work,” he said quietly. He reached into his robes again and pulled out a tiny seed—at least it looked tiny in his fluffy chubby fingers, though it looked like an ordinary pumpkin seed when he set it on his sleeping friend’s flat stomach.
The wand came up again and he described a circle around the seed with it, after which he gave it a tap and muttered the word “Apocolocyntosis.”
The seed disappeared into the yote’s hide, and after about five seconds his belly started to fill, rounding out, firming up. The icebear put out his paw to stroke the canine belly, feeling ridges form along its length and watching the fur turn orange under his ice-blue paw.
Muke tapped on the swollen belly a few times, gently. At first it was still the soft thump, thump you might get if you tap your own belly, but after a very few seconds the sound became more solid, and his claws went tak-tak against it.
The bear stepped back to review the effect of the spell. Where moments ago was a sleeping coyote, there was now a sleeping coyote with a large—nay, massive—furry pumpkin for a belly.
The fat bear’s stomach rumbled.
He climbed into the yote’s bed and straddled his legs, ignoring the creaking protestations of the bed under his weight.
The bear put his wand away—this called for a personal touch—and he pulled a large kitchen knife from his robes. He removed it from its clear safety cover, setting the latter aside, and plunged the knife into the prodigious underbelly formed by the curve of the big pumpkin.
Muke paused, then, to make sure the knife hadn’t woken him. He realized he hadn’t actually considered if it would have or not. The coyote wasn’t screaming or anything, so the part of the spell that rendered harmless things that would normally hurt was in effect, at least. But had he woken up?
“You might have woken up,” Muke said, trying to employ his famous logical skills, “if I’d stabbed you in the arm or something, but nobody ever woke up from being stabbed in the pumpkin, therefore you must still be asleep.”
The sleeping coyote murmured, “Mmm, of course, I’m definitely still asleep.”
Satisfied, Muke returned his attention to the knife, working a large hole in the underside of the pumpkin that was Frey’s belly. He pulled out the section of shell he cut out and set it aside, and with a low hungry growl reached into the hole and pulled out a handful of the pumpkin’s innards, cramming it into his mouth and slurping it down with clear enjoyment.
He bent down, bracing one arm against the upper edge of the yote’s fruity belly and reached in deep, slurping the sweet flesh from the inside of the pumpkin and shoveling it into his maw, seeds and all, sucking his paws clean after every mouthful.
Over his constant chewing and the repeated scrape-scrape-scrape of his claws along the inside of the pumpkin, the hungry icebear didn’t notice the logically-must-be-sleeping coyote’s moans of pleasure as Muke literally ate him out.
Frey’s belly was a big pumpkin and it took the tubby bear the better part of an hour to scrape clean his insides. After he’d finally sucked his paw clean for the last time, the overstuffed bear rolled off his friend, his swollen bulk jostling with Frey’s massive pumpkin gut for position in the small bed.
The coyote rolled over in bed to face the bear. “Am I still supposed to be asleep?”
Muke frowned and pulled out his wand, and tapped Frey’s nose with it. “Hush, you. I said Somnium.”
Frey opened his eyes and smiled at the bear. “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Muke frowned again and reached into his wizardly robe, pulling out what should have been an impressive leatherbound grimoire but was really only a paperback grammar—of Latin. He flipped through the vocabulary in the back. “Well, I’ll be hornswoggled. Last time I try to pick up a spell from a fanfic.”
He dropped the book and the wand and sat back up, grabbing the coyote’s pumpkin and rolling him onto his back and straddling him again.
Muke pulled a pencil from his robes and started sketching out a pattern on Frey’s pumpkin-gut.
“What, just a face?” Frey said. “You’re an artist, you should be able to carve out, like, Washington crossing the Potomac, or the Delaware, or whatever it was, or something!”
“Washington crossing the—” Muke spluttered. “I don’t have all week, sweetbeast! It’s Halloween tonight.”
He started muttering something about back-seat pumpkin carvers when Frey grabbed the possibly-magic wand and gently thwacked the icebear’s head with it. “Silentium.”
Muke, finding himself muted, stuck out his tongue at Frey, who only giggled at him, and finished drawing his pattern, which was a traditional jack-o’-lantern grin and not Washington crossing any river whatsoever.
He took up the knife again and slowly started carving out the face. He leaned some of his weight forward on Frey’s chest so he wouldn’t squirm too much as he worked; the coyote mumbled various appreciations at the sensation of the knife splitting his thickened hide.
Muke took his time carving out the jagged mouth, the triangular nose, and the spooky eyes, setting aside the cut-out portions on the off chance he might need them later.
When he was done, he patted the side of Frey’s pumpkin and started looking for his wand to light it with.
“Scary-looking!” said Frey, leaning up to look down at himself. “You probably shouldn’t have picked something so scary! How’m I gonna sleep at night?”
Muke was still groping around in the moonlit dark for the wand.
“Washington would have been safer. This is definitely not safe.”
Muke sat up again and mimed waving the wand, questioningly.
“Definitely not safe,” Frey repeated.
Muke resumed looking around, pawing at the sheets for the the wand. Frey, who was actually still holding it, raised it up while the bear’s back was turned, and tapped his pumpkin-gut with it. “Monstrificum!”
The jack-o’-lantern lit up. Its eyes narrowed; its grin widened.
The coyote got up, reached out and grabbed the bear’s arm. Muke would have yelped in surprise if he hadn’t been under the silencing spell, but there was no hearing him yell as the animated pumpkin spread its jaws wide and engulfed the icebear’s paw.
Muke tried to free his paw, but even though the pumpkin’s jaws were not actually closed on his paw, he still couldn’t extricate himself from the light that filled the grinning jack-o’-lantern. He looked up pleadingly into Frey’s eyes, but saw that they too were filled with the sinister orange-yellow glow.
And it was the growling voice of a monster, not Frey’s gentle voice, that said: “Such a juicy, tasty bear…”
The icebear struggled as the pumpkin swallowed more of his arm, and the monster’s hand reached down with supercanine speed and strength to grab Muke’s other arm and feed it to the glowing mouth.
Muke shouted silently as his arms disappeared into the light, and the pumpkin monster’s jaws gaped wider to take in the bear’s head.
The coyote fell back on his rump; even possessed, Frey didn’t have the strength to hold four hundred pounds of icebear up with his belly, and the growth of his own belly as it swelled to engulf the fat bear didn’t help his balance either. The jolt from landing was enough to shake off a little of the monster’s hold, though, and the light in the coyote’s eyes flickered as he struggled to free his will.
But the monster’s strength grew again as it fed, and the bear’s belly was already lodged between its jaws as it continued trying to open wide enough to swallow him.
Frey struggled to lift his left paw, which by sheer luck still tightly gripped the probably-magic wand.
Muke’s belly finally fell into the light blazing from Frey’s middle. Frey opened his own mouth to shout some counterspell but the monster’s light shone out immediately when he did; with fierce effort Frey forced his mouth shut again.
Muke’s stubby legs disappeared into the light.
Frey opened his mouth again with a struggle, found it fully under his power this time, and shouted, “Exorcismus!”
With a growl he forced his arm down and whacked himself in the pumpkin with the wand.
The light blazed out of Frey’s body and then burned out as the spell fired, and the coyote slumped back onto his pillow, released from the monster.
He felt woozy and almost fainted, but managed to keep his head. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes, but he felt like he’d been fighting the monster for hours.
He took advantage of the quiet to try and recover himself.
The sound of the doorbell nearly spooked the poor yote out of bed altogether, and it took him a moment to recognize that was what it was. “Coming!” he yelled. The coyote was halfway down the stairs when he realized he was still in his boxers.
And carting around a massive pumpkin for a belly.
He went back and grabbed a bathrobe, about the only thing that would fit him in his condition, and made it to the door just as the trick-or-treaters who’d rung it were turning to walk away.
A tiger in a tanuki suit and a tanuki in a tiger suit turned back when they heard the door open and demanded candy: “Trick or treat!”
“Nice costume,” the tanuki added, poking Frey’s pumpkin.
“You kids are out late, aren’t you?” Frey said, looking to the tray beside the door where the candy had been, but of course he’d given out all the candy earlier, before he’d turned in for the night.
“11:58,” said the tiger. “Still Halloween. Trick, or treat?” He waved his pillowcase of sweets threateningly.
“I don’t think I have any…” Frey was pondering raiding the kitchen for sugar, but before he could get to wondering if a bottle of maple syrup would appease the little tyrants, he was interrupted by the tanuki, who’d reached his paw into his pumpkin belly.
“Dude!” he said. “He’s full of candy!”
Frey bent down to look, surprised, and when he did so a stream of candies wrapped in ice blue and black spilled out of him and onto the ground.
“Dude!” the tiger said, bending down to fill his sack with candy.
Frey picked up a piece. Ice blue and black, with a picture of an icebear in wizard’s robes on it, and he remembered. “…Muke?”
“Never heard of him!” both kids said in unison. Having gathered as much as they could carry—there was a lot of candy in him, it seemed—they ran off.
The coyote shook his head, feeling a hundred pounds lighter and overcome by a wave of sleepiness. He turned to go back to bed, unwrapping a piece of icebear candy and putting it in his mouth.
His expression lit up at the flavor.
“Mmm… such a juicy, tasty bear…”