Version 2
"Matt!"
The floor creaks, and a rustle as of socked feet on bare wooden floorboards reaches his ears.
"Psst! Hey!"
His eyelids open a fraction despite his best efforts. His initial impression is of an eerie blue light.
"Matt!"
The previously hushed voice, now tinged with impatience, approaches closer. It is accompanied by a finger, which pokes at his shoulder insistently.
He groans and closes his eyes again. "Piss off," he tries to say, but the words emerge garbled by his pillow and he is unsure how intelligible they are. All the same, he expresses the extent of his hospitality by rolling over and pulling his blanket up over his head.
The finger prodding him retreats, for which he is glad. This lasts all of two seconds, as shortly afterwards his blankets are ripped from his frame like a plaster from a wound, leaving him exposed to the perpetual draught which haunts his bedroom, lurking around the window and the crack under the door.
He groans, digs his toes into the mattress and does not surface. He can withstand this tactic.
The voice, returning after a brief holiday, is airy yet with a tinge of grim determination. "I can't see why you wear these stupid things all the time. They're really uncomfortable.
Other than the ticking of the watch on his bedroom table and the constant faint humming sound, the room is silent.
"What?" he says wearily, just curious enough to ask.
"These goggles."
He lies still for another moment or so, before rolling over and peering incredulously at the source of the voice.
And indeed, Mello is sitting cross-legged on the end of his now semi-stripped mattress, chocolate in hand, surveying the room through the tinted plastic lenses of Matt's cherished goggles. He has put them on clumsily: the strap cuts across the tops of his ears, causing his hair to stick out in all directions.
"You look ridiculous."
"Yeah, well they're yours, aren't they?"
"I wear them properly."
"Who cares anyway?" Mello says, pulling them off and tossing them to the ground. "You're sitting up now."
"You took my blankets."
"You weren't waking up. Listen-"
"You're evil."
"Maybe if you weren't so lazy I wouldn't have to do it," Mello says indignantly. "It's spring, anyway. What's your problem?"
"It's cold at night," Matt gripes, getting out of bed and crossing to where his bedclothes lie strewn across the floor. "Especially here. The wind goes straight through the walls."
Mello hops down off the bed as Matt heaves his blankets back onto it. He walks to the door, looking distracted, then turns and gestures vaguely at the laptop on the bedside table, which emits a faint blue light and a constant whirring. "If you don't mind that being on all the time, what's the problem with a bit of cold?"
If Matt replies, it is muffled by the rustle and creak of him swinging himself back into bed. He lies contentedly for all of half a minute, until suddenly a bright white light shines into his face.
He screws his eyes shut. "Argh, what the hell?"
Mello sounds infinitely smug as he sits back on the end of the bed. "I just jiggled the mouse. You really do have a boring desktop background."
Matt grits his teeth. "I swear, if I weren't so tired, I'd kill you. You'd better not have messed around with my downloads."
"Nah. I need your help. I'm not going to piss you off."
Matt almost rolls his eyes. This is so typical of Mello. "Do you really expect me to help you? You've already pissed me off by waking me up in the middle of the night."
"What time is it, anyway?" Mello asks, sounding entirely too innocent.
Matt is about to check his watch, but realises that doing so would require opening his eyes, and stops himself. "Late. It's not natural to be awake at this time, Mello. Kindly get out."
"I know it's not," Mello says, ignoring Matt's last sentence. "That's the whole point."
"What are you going on about?" Matt asks, resigning himself to at least sitting through the disturbance.
"I've had a great idea."
"Really."
"Yup."
"A great idea."
"A brilliant idea."
"That's nice." And he rolls over, facing the wall, and pulls the pillow over his head.
He can almost hear Mello's mind working, thinking up a plot to keep him awake with minimal effort.
"Hey, Matt."
He grunts.
"Is your laptop charged up?"
It is a testament to how tired Matt is that the relevance of that question does not sink in immediately. "It's been running all day," he mumbles, "and I only plugged it in when I went to bed, so no. It might have a few minutes of power." He tugs the blankets around himself a little tighter.
"I was just wondering, you see."
"Mm."
"Out of curiosity."
"Right."
"Because I think I may have pulled the cord out by mistake just now."
Three, two, one.
Matt explodes out of bed like a firework and seizes Mello by the neck of his T-shirt. "You did what? Are you serious? You little…"
But Mello is laughing. "You're so gullible, Matt! Seriously…"
Matt hesitates, derailed but still fuming. "You mean you didn't do anything?"
"I said I wouldn't piss you off, remember?"
"You're not doing a very good job of that," Matt mutters, releasing his grip on Mello's collar.
"You overreact so much, you know that?"
"Yeah," Matt says sarcastically. "And how would you react if I threw all your chocolate away?"
"Well, anyway."
"That's what I thought."
"I need you to help me," Mello says, so stubbornly that even Matt is impresses, and produces what appears to be a roll of wire and a box of pins.
Matt stares at him, wondering where on his person he could possibly have concealed the items, clad as he is in nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of grey shorts.
Mello obviously misinterprets the stare as a lack of comprehension of his Brilliant Idea. "See, I've been thinking, and I came up with a great trick! Trip ropes across the doorways. See?" He waves the roll of thread.
"That's not a brilliant idea," Matt says, feeling disappointed for some irrational reason. "We've tried that before. Near just stepped over it."
"That was the old version. This is new improved Version 2!"
"Stop trying to speak my language."
"Then listen! We won't just put the trip rope across Near's door. We'll put one across every door in the whole building."
It is ambitious. Matt has to grant him that. "Well, ok. But it'll be really obvious. They'll be able to see the ropes."
Mello smirks, picking up the roll of thread. "Fishing wire. And we won't need many pins. We'll put one at each end of every wall in the corridors, and stretch the wire all the way across. We'll need to trip ourselves, so that nobody suspects us. But it'll be worth it."
Matt nods slowly. "Right… I guess it could work…"
"There's one more thing. The fire alarms."
"How could they help?"
"Think about it, Matt! We put trip wires across everyone's bedroom doors. Then, as we go back to our rooms, we set the alarms off. By then it'll be about three in the morning."
"What time is it now?" Matt asks weakly.
Mello doesn't reply, swept up in the flow of his own narrative. "Everyone will be caught off-guard. They'll be confused and annoyed, and sleepy from just waking up. They won't suspect a trick. It'll be great! It's like getting one up on every kid here."
Matt frowns. There has to be a flaw in this plan. It takes him a little over a second to think of one. "If we set the alarms off, everyone will come out of their rooms at the same time."
"Yeah, that's why I said we'll have to trip too."
"But if we do that we won't have long to get back into our rooms before everyone wakes up. What if we get caught?"
Mello blinks. He has no concerns with being viewed as a troublemaker- and it would be too late for that even if he did- but the main reason why he is so excited about the plan is its scope and anonymity. "Is there an alarm nearby?"
"It's on this side of the corridor, but it's at the other end."
Mello grits his teeth. Falling at the first hurdle.
"What about your room? Is there an alarm near there?"
"I don't know."
"You're a testament to fire safety."
Mello glares.
"Well, look," Matt says, trying to figure it out. "The alarm's in the same place in every corridor, right? And your room's on the left, looking from the top of the stairs. That means you're on the same side of the corridor as I am here."
Mello's brow clears. "Yeah… Yeah, you're right! And I'm in the third room down, so I must be close to the alarm. I'm always the first in my corridor to get out of bed in the morning, and they'll all be slower in the middle of the night." He grins. "Or we could actually burn something to set it off."
Matt rubs his eyes and thinks about this.
"What do you think?" Mello says eagerly.
"I think you're either crazy or a genius."
"I'd like to think I'm a subtle mixture of the two. Shall we go?"
Author's notes: Written for chrono-contract, who asked for "a fic about Matt and Mello's favourite things to do to annoy Near, L, Watari, Roger and the rest of Wammy's". Well, L and Watari aren't around, but hopefully this'll do. I hope you enjoy it.