A/N: I like this story, or at least the actual storyline. I read in one of the Fullmetal Alchemist books that Hiromu Arakawa keeps paper by her bedside for when she's hit with inspiration in the middle of the night, so I tried it, and I thought, "I bet Mark would have something like this." Only later did I hear that Stephen King does something similar, at which point I felt small and unworthy, but oh well. I hope you like this!! Also, I thorougly apologize for the shitty title.
Disclaimer: I kind of own the description of the notepad... I tried to think about what mine would look like on 'roids. But other than that, no.
Notepads and Cereal Bowls
A lot of people think that 4:00pm is way too late for any human being to be waking up. Those people have never met Roger Davis.
Roger stumbled out of his room at 4:15, eyes half closed and his bangs blocking his view anyway, still yawning and stretching. The winter cold suddenly sliced through his prone figure, and he hugged himself, regretting wearing only his plaid pants to bed.
He stumbled his way to the "kitchen" of the loft and flipped on Mrs. Cohen's hotplate. He hated waiting for the coffee Mark had left over for him to warm up every day, but it beat actually waking up at a normal time. He poured a bowl of dry cereal for himself and drifted over to the couch, lazily digging his fingers into his "breakfast".
After a few handfuls, he realized Mark was missing in action. "Mark?" He called through a mouthful of food, watching the bedroom expectantly.
No answer.
Roger glanced back at the bathroom - the door was open, no one inside. He quickly put down his cereal and approached Mark's room.
"Mark?" Roger ventured again. Of course, the idea that Mark might have left the loft never crossed Roger's mind, that would be too logical. Finally, Roger pushed into Mark's bedroom and announced, "Coming in, you better be dec--"
Roger cut himself off when he noticed that no one was in the room, and God knows he wasn't going to bother finish a sentence with no one even there. Suddenly curious, Roger began to walk slowly across Mark's empty - well, not empty, he was in it - room. Somehow, he had gone for years living in this loft without even seeing every room. There could have been a caged bear in there and he wouldn't know it.
It looked just as he expected... The floor was so littered with clothing and shreds of abandoned screenplays that for a moment Roger actually thought that the room may have been carpeted. Around eye-level, an almost unbroken line of different photographs was taped, tacked, or even glued to the wall. There didn't seem to be any lighting in the room, which made sense since Mark barely came in here for anything but rest. The room even smelled of sleep. Sleep has a smell? Roger asked himself. Apparently so. In a dark corner opposite the door, a bed lay unmade. It wasn't even a bed, really, just a mattress with a comforter and a couple of pillows. Near the bed on a far wall, a topless wooden crate sat on its side, and various articles of clothing Roger had never seen were shoved mercilessly inside. The top was dusty, though had prints on it that looked like they could have come from a certain scarf and camera.
Roger took his time, lightly touching the crate as he passed it, and approached the mattress. He vaguely wondered if there was a diary shoved under it. Or maybe some money. Money signs lit up Roger's eyes. He dropped to the floor and lifted up the corner of the mattress closest to the pillows.
No, there was no money. Instead, a thick pad of paper and a few pens lay just beyond the edge of the mattress. Roger quickly snatched the pad and let the mattress fall with a swift thwump. He slid down the wall between the mattress and crate and gave the pad a curious stare. It was very rustled and wrinkled, and looked about halfway used. He flipped quickly to the first page and began to read.
It was definitely not one continuous story. Instead, the face of the paper was the result of about forty different phrases being tossed together in a Technicolor tornado, and then a few bombs going off. Seemingly random sequences of words were scrawled in this direction and that, crossing paths and running off the page.
A few words were crisp and clean (Roger could easily make out the phrase "miso and hair clips" in stark black sharpie), but other pen strokes resembled cursive e's of an epileptic ferret. Every abstract thought was as enigmatic as the first, as well. It could have been an encoded shopping list, as far as Roger could tell. A few drunken drawings seemed to be thrown in just for shits and giggles, too. Every now and again, a page would be nearly untainted, having only a few lines of carefully spaced (if slanted) prose.
Roger flipped to the next page. It had the same kind of word hurricane going on. Flip. Same. The entirety of used-up notepad gave him the impression that he had discovered some sort of bizarre code.
Right on cue, Roger could hear the metallic echoes of someone clomping up the stairs, and within moments he recognized the footsteps as Mark's. He hurriedly shoved the notepad back under the mattress and started for the door back to the main part of the loft.
But luck was not on his side, and Mark must have been pretty far up the stairs before Roger had noticed, because as he reached his doorway to assumed innocence, Mark slid the huge metal door to the loft open.
He looked a little windswept, the color high in his cheeks, and hair more ruffled than usual. In one hand he gripped his camera. He placed it on the round table by the couch and began to unwind his scarf, all the while giving Roger a strange look. Roger plopped into an armchair to put some space between him and the scene of the crime.
"... Why were you in my room?"
Roger quickly put on an air of moody nonchalance. "No reason, really."
"Okay... Aren't you freezing? To normal humans, it's December."
"Oh," Roger said as if this were actually news to him. The cold reappeared to remind him he was still only in his plaid pants, and it was 4:30 already. "Right," He mumbled as he stood to shuffle back to his own room.
After a few moments of trying to find a sweater that didn't smell too offensive, Roger reemerged into the main part of the loft. The winning sweater was halfway over his head and Mark was picking up his cereal and eating it himself.
"So what time did you get up, anyway?" Mark asked from the couch. It had become a sort of game, seeing how late Roger could actually stay in bed.
Roger, finally sort of dressed, pushed the hair out of his eyes and shrugged. He sat down next to Mark and popped a few pieces of his cereal into his own mouth. "About four-ish, maybe."
He had always been a late-riser, and recognized the tut Mark made as the same kind his mother would make. "There's no point in getting up early," Roger replied to the unspoken challenge, as always.
"You could get a job," Mark remarked, as always, "a real one."
"So could you."
"Touché." Mark lifted himself off the couch (taking the cereal with him, Roger noted,) and made a beeline for his camera. He began fiddling with whatever he felt needed to be fixed at the moment.
"So," Roger began, trying to not sound too amused, "I thought making up secret codes was for little kids."
"Huh?" Mark grunted distractedly.
"Yeah, unless 'synchronized pigeons' is supposed to make sense."
And Roger could swear he could see Mark's back tense, even through his clothes, and he spun on the spot to face Roger. (Some cereal, still in hand, flew from the bowl and skittered across the room.) Roger could see the wheels turning behind Mark's eyes, and he finally responded with a new air of suspicion, "Why were you in my room?"
Roger finally let a grin break across his face. "I was exploring."
"Exploring."
"Yup." Roger leapt up from the couch and strode proudly into Mark's room, and returned a moment later clutching the ratty notepad. He waved it in Mark's face. "What the hell is this, anyway?"
Mark's hand flashed by his vision, and suddenly the notepad was out of Roger's grasp. "It's mine, that's what it is." He looked down at the papers in his hand for a moment, flipping through it quickly, and then stared back at Roger. "Don't go through my shit."
Roger put up his hands. "Okay man, fine. Whatever. But what is it?"
Mark sighed, defeated, and flopped onto the couch (tossing the cereal carefully onto the round table in front of him). "Just a pad of ideas for films. They all suck though."
Roger snorted. "I hear that." He snatched up the cereal and sat in the armchair, trying desperately not to laugh as he ate a handful. "They don't even make sense."
"They seemed good when I was half-asleep!" Mark yelled at no one, glaring at nothing. He had had this debate with himself many times, every time he looked back at his unintelligible scribbles. "If I actually woke up enough to think them out, they might have made sense!"
"Well, why don't you?" Waking up made sense to Roger.
"I'd turn into you, getting up at four and lazing around the rest of the day. And one of us needs to be something other than a bartender."
Ouch. "Okay, I give. I'll get up like a normal person. Look for a dayjob."
Mark gave him a disbelieving look. "What, really? I wasn't even thinking about that."
He wasn't? Damn. "Yeah, well, can't really take it back, now can I?" Roger heaved a sigh and pushed himself up out of the armchair, and headed for his room. "Have my clothes disintegrated?" He wondered aloud. He'd been wearing the same pants for-- well, longer than he cared to remember.
Mark laughed as he bent over for the abandoned cereal. "Good luck finding them!"
After about five minutes of searching for presentable clothes, Roger ran his hair under the faucet and finally deemed himself ready to job-hunt, at least a little. He stalked out of the bathroom and threw a goodbye over his shoulder at Mark as he pulled the huge metal door open.
"See ya," Mark replied absentmindedly. He was staring at his notepad, brow furrowed and eyes squinted as he tried to remember what in the world his nocturnal pen scratches meant.
Roger stepped outside the loft and turned around, one hand on the door. "Oh, and before I forget..."
"Huh?"
A small grin spread over Roger's lips, and his eyebrows shot upward with amusement. "I loved your idea of... What was it? 'Maureen - pyrokinesis master.'"
He slammed the loft door shut, just in time to hear a cereal bowl crashing into it.
A/N: SPECIAL UBER-THANKS to my beta for this story! I don't think she has a account, though. She came up with the wonderful ending, not to mention a hilarious alternate ending... after Roger says he'll get a job, it was something along the lines of, "and Mark was so proud he shagged Roger silly." It brightened my day.
If you review, I'll pay you back with 1,000 kisses! ... Or, you know... Not.