It was Halloween, the holiday of candy and costumes and good-spirited spookiness, but as was always the case at Wammy's House, the race was on. In this particular instance, that race would be taking place quite literally as the students attempted to make their way through an elaborate corn maze themed after the holiday, as was the annual tradition. Of course, Wammy's House being an academy for aspiring successors to the three best detectives in the world, this was no ordinary corn maze; rather, it was more of a combination maze, haunted house, and crime simulation game.
The goal was not just to find one's way to the exit – which would have been difficult enough, since the maze had been designed by L himself – but also to solve a murder mystery and obtain enough evidence for conviction in court before reaching the culprit at the end goal, meanwhile managing to remain undetected and not succumb to any of the numerous booby-traps or red herrings set out by the killer. There were rumors that the people who attacked children in the maze really were criminals who had been unleashed into the maze to weed out the weaker of the children, stories of how the skeletons decorating the cornstalks really were their fallen comrades from years past, but those were probably just some of the many tall-tales invented by the overly creative minds at Wammy's House. Probably.
Originally the maze had been intended to be fun, but like most things at Wammy's House it had quickly warped into a competition which everyone took much too seriously, the primary offender of this mindset of course being Mello, who saw this as a valuable opportunity to prove his superiority to Near in spite of the fact that being the first to make it through the maze or solve the crime would have no practical effect on his ranking. Matt had tried to explain this to his friend and convince him that the best way to celebrate Halloween was to stay in their dorm and play some zombie video games, but as per usual Mello was only willing to hear what he wanted to hear, and in the end Matt had been dragged out to the maze with all of the other children to partake in the day's activities. Probably this was because one of the rules was that the students were required to divide into pairs, and Mello would accept no less than having the third ranked student at his beck and call.
Essentially the whole school was gathered now on the lawns overlooking the large cornfield that seemed to stretch endlessly behind Wammy's House, its dried out stalks rustling almost eerily as the wind rushed through them. It was chilly, to the extent Mello was wearing a hooded black jacket and boots today, looking rather more forbidding than usual as he pursed his lips and waited for the blast that would signal that they could begin. His eyes shifted in an almost paranoid manner to where other pairs of children stood in front of some of the many the entrances that lined all sides of the maze, while Matt simply stared at his PSP and hoped this would be over soon because there were few things he hated more than being outside, and he didn't really buy into the whole Hallmark holiday thing either.
There was a sudden bang, and Mello was off, Matt trailing absently behind him as he simultaneously ducked under some fake cobwebs and entered a 23-chain combo into his handheld game system.
"I found the first clue!" Mello exclaimed almost instantaneously, sounding more angry than excited as he reached into what appeared to be a random row of corn and extracted a random cornhusk, which upon further inspection was in fact a piece of husk-colored paper that had been rolled up and tied there. How Mello had managed to spot that remained a mystery to Matt, who didn't have as much of an eye for detail as Mello and would have probably bypassed it entirely if he had been alone. "It's a ransom note, with a lock of hair taped to it… 'how dare you plant seeds of suspicion in the garden I have nurtured; in return for the information you have stolen from me, I have stolen someone from you'… meaning… ah, it's a reference to Rapunzel – the hostage must be in the top of that tower to our left. Now we just have to figure out how to make our way over to that side of the maze."
"Nice," Matt commented disinterestedly as he passed the fourteenth level in his game and moved on to the next one. They continued walking, Matt almost stepping on some sort of projectile booby-trap when he became too involved in a boss battle, but luckily (or perhaps unluckily) Mello shoved him out of the way and so Matt only ended up falling on his ass instead, much to the gamer's annoyance. He needed that ass in good shape for sitting in front of his computer all day, thank you very much. Unfortunately Mello was even more annoyed by this incident just by virtue of being Mello, and so he confiscated Matt's game from where it had fallen in the dirt after claiming that it was distracting him, concealing the device in some inner pocket of his jacket from which even Matt didn't dare attempt to retrieve it. Sulking now, the redhead lit up a cigarette and let it dangle between his wind-chapped lips, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his vest as he whined at Mello's back much like a bored child trapped in the backseat of a car on an exceptionally long road trip.
"Can't we just hop over this wall? I'm pretty sure the exit is two rows to the right of us right now. We'd be the first to get there," Matt coaxed, glancing up at the obstructive barrier formed by corn and stacks of hay put in place to prevent just such cheating.
"No, it doesn't count unless we solve the crime first, you dipshit," Mello disparaged, still stomping forward on the dirt path weaving countless contradictory forks throughout the rows of corn, just the repetitiveness of which was boring Matt to the point of insanity. He needed flashing lights and beeps and high-speed car chases, but alas, Mello had his PSP, and now the only thing semi-entertaining to stare at was Mello's ass— "Matt, are you looking at my ass?"
"Yeah, I think it's getting saggy from sitting around and studying too much," Matt replied shamelessly, somewhat confused as to how Mello knew this when he hadn't so much as glanced in Matt's direction. The blond boy's instincts were so sharp sometimes that they bordered on supernatural, which made slightly more sense in this case because it was Halloween and supposedly the veil between the human and spirit worlds wore the thinnest on this day – if one believed in that sort of shit, which Matt didn't, so then again it didn't make much sense after all. "And P.S. stop being a creeper with those eyes in the back of your head."
"You're the creeper, stop checking me out and ask me out instead if you're so into that," Mello countered, just as there was a horrible, high-pitched scream from somewhere deep within the maze.
"I hope that was Linda," Matt commented absently as the pair continued to make their way toward the tower.
"Maybe it was Near," Mello responded, and Matt laughed, choking awkwardly on cigarette smoke as he did so.
"Near would scream like a girl, wouldn't he," Matt replied, still chuckling slightly.
"DUCK!" Mello screamed, and Matt did so even though he didn't really know what was going on except that he trusted Mello. A moment later an axe, which looked rather real, swung through the empty space where Matt's head had just been as Matt simultaneously used the force of his jump toward the ground to swing his leg around and trip his attacker. The masked man collapsed beside Matt with a groan, and Mello was quick to collect his weapon, pinning the man's arms behind his back and pressing the axe against his throat, the blade of which was apparently rubber because it bent rather uselessly. Meanwhile Matt rubbed his now twice-abused ass in a somewhat lamenting manner, ruing the day that someone at Wammy's House had decided celebrating Halloween in such a manner was a good idea.
"I'm okay, in case you were wondering," Matt said as he stood up and brushed some dirt from his jeans, hoping that he wouldn't actually have to wash them for the first time in months. As expected, Mello ignored him, his attention transfixed solely on the man below him with one of those wide-eyed, almost maniacal expressions that Mello tended to get when he sensed that victory was imminent.
"If you don't tell us everything you know, I'll break your fingers one by one and shove them so far up your ass you will cough them up again," the blond threatened, tugging at one of the fingers in question to prove that he meant every word.
"Language, Mello!" the masked man responded in a rather indignant manner, and also a rather familiar one. "And don't even think about it or you will be serving detention with me until you are on your deathbed. I've already been instructed to give a clue to whoever manages to subdue me, so there is no need."
"Roger?" Mello and Matt asked simultaneously, and as Mello's hands were full Matt was the one to step forward to pull off their attacker's mask, revealing a mass of graying hair and Roger's annoyed face, his sizeable nose half-pressed into the mud as he glared at Mello and Matt out of one eye. Mello let go of Roger's finger in rather disappointed manner, albeit reluctantly, as if seriously considering whether continuing to torture the elderly caretaker was worth the punishment they would receive.
"So what's the clue?" Mello prompted, still sitting on Roger's back as Matt shifted none-too-subtly sideways in order to put his boot over the still-smoking cigarette that had fallen from his lips and into the dirt just next to Roger's head.
"3820," Roger answered. "And yes, I saw that cigarette, Matt. Detention this Saturday evening."
"Wow, fuck my life," Matt muttered, though he made the most of the bad situation by removing his boot from the cigarette, dusting it off, and putting it back in his pocket for later usage.
"3820?" Mello echoed, oblivious to his friend's plight as he continued to stare wide-eyed at the man trapped beneath him.
"You heard me, 3820. Now let me up!" Roger commanded, and Mello complied, removing his body weight from the old man's undoubtedly brittle back.
"I knew I shouldn't have volunteered to do this... I just wanted to traumatize a few of the children, maybe maim or seriously injure a few…" the man grumbled to himself as he stood up in a rather hunched manner with a hand on the small of his back, grabbed his mask from Matt's hand, and started back in the direction from which Mello and Matt had originally come, disappearing quickly into the sea of corn. Mello and Matt saw him off and then likewise continued in the direction of the tower, which was close now, only a row or two away.
"I hope you're happy Mello, you got me another detention. That makes the running total something like five million," Matt complained, but as per usual Mello drowned him out, literally talking over Matt as he tried to work out the hint aloud.
"3820, 3820… they can't represent letters… unless zero is A? DICA? No. 3820, is that some sort of pop culture reference?" Mello asked, half-glancing in Matt's direction.
"I got nothing," Matt said without much interest. "Hey, Mello, you're going the wrong way. We need to take a right here."
"No, we need to go left!" Mello insisted, and so they rounded the corner in the maze to the left, only to come to a dead-end and be forced to double back the way they came. "Wipe that stupid smirk off your face, the only reason you're good at this kind of thing is because you play too many video games. But okay, you can navigate. I'll solve all of the clues and keep you from getting killed by one of the traps because you have no attention span whatsoever and are completely oblivious to your surroundings. Remind me to never let you watch monitors for me or anything."
"Fine by me," Matt affirmed, but then they both forgot about this conversation because actually they were both kind of ADD.
Finally the pair reached the tower, a rickety wooden structure that resembled a child's tree fort more than anything, although there were no steps or ladders leading up to the small, half-enclosed room balancing almost precariously at the top. It certainly didn't look safe to climb, but Mello was never the type to be deterred by matters such as safety, so he prepared to scale the wall by grabbing onto the long, braided rope that fell from the top of the tower – thus tipping over a large vat of liquid that spilled directly over Mello and Matt's heads.
"Ahhh, it burns!" Mello screamed, wiping at his eyes, but Matt was fine because he was wearing goggles and for once they had proved to be useful rather than just weird.
"Did they seriously just dump vinegar on us?" Matt said, sniffing himself and wrinkling his nose in distaste as he decided that he smelled a lot like salad, which was not a food he particularly enjoyed. Couldn't they have at least dumped Coke on them or something? "What do they think this is, the Middle Ages?"
"3820… not DICA, ACID," Mello said with a calmness that could only mean he was about to flip some serious shits, so Matt took a step back and tried to blend into the scenery, which was a bit difficult as far as Matt was concerned because his outfits were always a gaudy conglomeration of stripes and colors, not to mention his fire engine red hair. Thankfully in this case Mello directed his rage not toward Matt but rather toward climbing up the side of the tower at top speed, and a few moments later Mello was shouting down at Matt from the entranceway to the fort, dripping vinegar from the tips of his blond hair like a light, not-so-refreshing rain following a nuclear holocaust. "I think they killed the hostage already, it's all spattered with blood up here. The spray pattern looks like it came from blunt force trauma from a small, circular object. Do you see anything like that down there?"
"Uh," Matt said, glancing about himself and noticing a patch of freshly disturbed dirt near the edge of the small clearing in which they currently stood, clearly meant to indicate that something had been hastily buried beneath it, probably as the culprit was fleeing the scene. Matt crouched down beside the unmarked mound and dug into the loose soil with his thick leather gloves, hearing Mello jump down beside him and then feeling Mello's shoulder against his own, shoving him aside as he apparently decided that the redhead wasn't digging fast enough. The next moment Mello extracted a blood-spattered paper weight from beneath the earth, turning it over and over a few times in his hands as he inspected it for additional clues before depositing it in one of the clear plastic evidence bags that had been distributed to the students.
Matt caught a glimpse of his PSP as Mello inserted the evidence bag into the inner pocket of his jacket, and Matt ever so stealthily reached for it, but Mello smacked his hand away, and Matt only ended up brushing his fingers against Mello's nipple which was extremely awkward as far as he was concerned, but Mello didn't seem to notice or care. The blond had a one-track mind, and today just like basically any other day, he was fixated solely on winning and becoming the best and blah blah blah. Just thinking about it for ten seconds was enough to exhaust Matt, so he wasn't really sure how Mello lived with that that train of thought on a daily basis without going crazy… well, maybe Mello had already gone crazy, but that was okay because Matt liked him anyway.
"So the murder weapon is a paperweight… we must be dealing with some sort of office crime, perhaps a business dispute?" Mello mused as he stood up and wrung out the vinegar from his bobbed hair, apparently not caring that it simply dripped onto Matt instead.
"That doesn't even make sense, we're in the middle of a fucking cornfield if you haven't noticed," Matt bitched in as bland a manner as possible, as was his specialty. "And why would someone be holding a hostage in an office? Wouldn't it make more sense if it were a basement or an abandoned factory or something?"
"Don't be such a killjoy Matt, this is just supposed to be for fun," Mello said condescendingly, even though this comment was rather hypocritical because Matt and everyone else in the orphanage knew that Mello was not going to make the holiday pleasant for the rest of them if Near managed to make it through the maze and solve the crime before he did. "But you're right, maybe this was just a decoy, in which case we've lost a lot of time… we need to hurry…"
Mello grabbed Matt by the armpit when he didn't move, lifting his friend up roughly and once again dragging him along in some random direction through the maze of corn because there hadn't been any particular hints as to their next destination in the vicinity of the tower. They'd been walking around for perhaps twenty minutes when they finally came across another pair of students, two younger girls dressed as angels whom Mello promptly cornered against a wall formed by cornhusks and hay barrels, a menacing expression on his face. Matt watched, bored, as Mello threatened the small children by ripping off feathers from their costume wings one by one, until at last the quivering girls extracted the pieces of evidence they had found from their trick-or-treat bags and handed them over to a smirking Mello, looking very much like the bully who had just shaken the spare change out of someone's pocket. As the little girls ran off sobbing, their holiday thus ruined, Matt couldn't help but laugh at their misery because although he was not nearly as aggressive as Mello, he was equally misanthropic and otherwise sadistic.
"Ah, good one, Mello," Matt chuckled breathlessly, mostly because he was out of shape and he had already filled up his quota of exercise for the year by walking around the corn maze for the past hour or two, then he continued in a rather ADD manner, "Hey, look, candy."
"Don't—!" Mello tried to stop Matt, but it was too late, he had already reached into the bowl of candy sitting on a random hay bale in the maze and extracted a few pixie sticks from within, ripping off the tip of a bright blue one with his teeth and then holding it within his mouth much like a cigarette. "Seriously Matt? What if that's poisoned? Don't come crying to me when you die because I will just hire an exorcist to get rid of your ghost."
"That's cold, man," Matt returned blandly, taking some more candy and stashing it in his back pockets for later, even though etiquette generally demanded that one only take two pieces of Halloween candy at most from unattended bowls such as the one that the duo had stumbled upon. "And I seriously doubt there's anything sketchy about this candy. It is Halloween, after all, so eating candy is kind of the point."
"Hmph," Mello said, even his noncommittal grunts laden with insult.
"Look, they have your favorite kind," Matt replied in a completely unperturbed manner, taking some Cadbury chocolates from the bowl and shoving them off onto Mello, who tried to act stubborn and refuse the candy, but then relented and had three fun size chocolate bars shoved into his mouth within a few seconds. Like Matt he deposited more than his fair share of chocolate into his pockets, and then the pair continued to walk onward into the labyrinth of corn as Mello examined the evidence he had stolen from the other children more closely. There were a few receipts, which had clearly been edited to conceal some sort of monetary transaction, and also a flash drive, which Mello handed off to Matt due to the implicit understanding between the two that anything involving technology would fall under his jurisdiction.
"I need my PSP to access the data," Matt lied, but Mello was already wise to his ways, and so the blond boy insisted that he could and would use his cell phone for the job instead. Sighing, Matt plugged the small thumb drive into the side of his heavily customized mobile device, which now resembled a clunky, miniaturized computer more so than a phone. Within a minute, the gamer had hacked into the data and had it pulled up on his screen, which he handed off to Mello for the data analysis part because he was too lazy to even attempt it. There were hundreds of files, statistics, and charts to dig through from some clearly bogus company called All Hallow's Shipping Services.
"This guy here, Jan Welder, he seems suspicious, don't you think?" Mello asked in a way that was probably rhetorical, but Matt glanced over Mello's shoulder at the data anyway. Mello was pointing at one particular personnel file from amongst the countless others they had uncovered, a brief company profile that stated that Jan Welder was an executive manager and had been employed for just under a year but had been promoted twice for unlisted reasons.
"What makes you say that?" Matt asked, not seeing any reason why this person was significantly different from the hundreds of other suspects available to them.
"Just a hunch," Mello replied, still staring at the screen as he easily dodged a net that fell from somewhere over their heads, as if to confirm his uncanny instincts. "I think this guy infiltrated the company to use their shipping routes as a cover up for smuggling some other goods, bribing let's say person A to get his promotions and thus the power to abuse the shipping routes. Then when person A gets cold feet and tries to back out, our suspect kidnaps someone related to person A to use as leverage against him. But person A unexpectedly goes to the police, and Jan Welder panics and kills the hostage, fleeing the scene and inadvertently leaving the evidence needed to convict him on all accounts…"
"You lost me a while ago, but okay, if you say so," Matt responded, noting that the sky was beginning to darken and it was probably dinnertime. He thought he heard some children chattering on the other side of the single row of corn that currently separated Mello and Matt in the maze from the world beyond its bounds, probably students who didn't care nearly as much as Mello and had already given up. Hopefully, however crazy Mello's speculations sounded, they were on the right track and would be back inside before all of the good food was gone. "Do we have enough evidence to head for the end game now? I'm tired as shit."
"Yeah, I think so," Mello confirmed. "If I'm correct in my suppositions, which usually I am."
"Don't be so modest," Matt said sarcastically, shuddering as another gust of wind blew through the cornstalks and picking up his pace in order to keep up with his friend.
An hour or so later, Mello and Matt had wound almost all the way around the outskirts of the maze, which required travelers to take an incredibly indirect, obscure route in order to make it to the final goal, retrieving a few more pieces of evidence in the process which somehow seemed to support Mello's initial, wild guess. It was pitch black when they reached the exit at last, the only light in the world seeming to come from the many jack-o-lanterns that lined the path leading out of the maze, the handful of stars dotting the cloud-shrouded sky above, and two flashlights as some teachers passed by them and explained that one other child was still lost somewhere in the maze and needed help.
Not particularly caring about this, Mello and Matt collected a time-stamped ticket proving that they had exited the maze from the appropriate vista and continued to the table beyond the maze to fill out a sheet of paper with their names and their conclusions on the case, which looked like the mutated cousin of a Clue answer sheet with about a hundred blank spaces asking questions as to the series of events in the crime, the place of murder, names of the victims and culprits, the murder weapon, and so forth. This was then stapled to the evidence that Mello and Matt had gathered in the maze and deposited in a slot in the top of a box, which Mello squinted into and shook for a while before concluding that only a few other papers were in there, even though Mello and Matt were apparently the last to leave the maze aside from the child who had been separated from his or her partner and was still stuck inside.
Mello was not happy about this fact, but on the other hand, as Matt was quick to point out, the other contestants did not appear to have gathered even half the amount of evidence that Mello and Matt had managed, so although Mello and Matt might receive a penalty for time, they would probably more than make up for it with the quality of their evidence if they were indeed correct in their conclusions. Mello hesitated, then nodded, seemingly placated by this explanation as only Matt was capable of doing, and so the pair headed back into the building and made their way to the dining hall, which was even more alight with gossip than usual as students darted back and forth between tables and stood in clustered groups of costumed monsters and witches about the room, discussing something in hushed whispers.
"What's going on?" Mello demanded more so than asked, grabbing onto some random student's arm.
"Uh, Near is still trapped in the maze. Apparently Linda got scared and ran off, triggering one of the booby-traps, which happened to malfunction and broke Near's leg or something," the boy explained, then backed away slowly as Mello began to cackle in a rather deranged manner. About fifteen minutes later, Mello had finally calmed down enough to hold down his dinner without spewing it right back out of his mouth and into Matt's face as he burst into laughter for the umpteenth time, and after clearing their plates of pizza and other junk food, Mello and Matt headed back to their room and then to the communal showers to remove the vinegar, dirt, and other artifacts of the day.
"Pass me the soap," Mello said, holding out a hand for the bar which Matt had been rubbing against his head, having forgotten his shampoo back in their room and being too lazy to go back to retrieve it. As Matt handed it to his friend, Mello seemed to notice something and started laughing again in that creepy, humorless manner that would've scarred anyone else except Matt for life. As it were, Matt just glanced placidly at his friend and took it all with a grain of salt.
"What?" the redhead prompted, turning off the faucet and reaching for his towel.
"Have you seen your ass?" Mello snickered, doing likewise as he began to towel dry his hair, wrapping it into a turban around his head in a rather girlish manner which Matt knew better than to comment upon.
"It's kind of hard to see my ass when it's on the back of my body, so that would be a no," Matt retorted with his usual sarcasm as he made a half-hearted attempt to dry his body and then pulled his X-Boxers on over his still mostly soaked legs.
"You have a huge bruise all up and down your back, it totally looks like you just got ass-raped," Mello explained, still laughing at Matt rather than with Matt, but the redhead wasn't particularly bothered.
"It's your fault," he shot back, shaking out his hair like a dog and purposely flicking as much water as possible in Mello's direction.
"You wish," Mello counterattacked with a shove to Matt's shoulder, then he pulled on his own black pajama pants and shirt as Matt put on a striped t-shirt and some sweats, and they headed back to the dorm in companionable silence. No sooner had they returned to the room than Mello was looking out the window, pointing out to Matt that there were more flashlights than ever peppering the maze now – apparently they hadn't found Near yet.
"Maybe he'll die of blood loss before they find him," Mello said hopefully, his face still pressed up against the glass and looking very much like a five-year-old sitting too close to the television screen as he watched his favorite show.
"That's nice," Matt commented, settling into his chair to play some computer games. Mello stayed at the window, giving Matt play-by-play updates on what was happening outside until finally Near was brought into Wammy's House on a stretcher about ten minutes later, and once he was inside Mello finally plopped onto his unmade bed, putting an arm under his head and still smirking to himself as he stared upwards at the ceiling and partook in perhaps his twentieth serving of Halloween chocolate for the day.
"This was the best Halloween ever," Mello said, looking at Matt as if seriously asking for his opinion, which was a rare occurrence. Matt glanced at his friend in turn, and maybe he was imagining it in the half-light of the room, but Mello's typical smirk could have almost been construed as a genuine smile.
"Yeah, it was alright I guess," Matt agreed rather apathetically, most of his attention diverted toward trying not to get his head blown off in his video game, or maybe he was just trying to act cool. In retrospect, although the day had been full of annoyances, it hadn't necessarily been bad, and more importantly if Mello was happy, Matt was happy, at least for the most part – Matt couldn't exactly say he was looking forward to the twelve days of Christmas celebration, which at Wammy's House included events such as Olympic-style triathlons involving cross-country skiing, rifle shooting, and crime solving in the midst of England's blizzard-esque winter weather conditions. But as for the here and now, it was just him and Mello in their dorm room at almost twelve, and Halloween hadn't quite ended yet. Maybe it would never end, and they'd always be teaming up to go on some stupid, fruitless adventure, if they had any say in the matter… because as long as they were together, that was just as well.
A/N: This was surprisingly easy to write, I can't believe it ended up over 5k! I think I am finally breaking through my perfectionist anxiety about writing and allowing myself to just write for fun. Hopefully it is still coming out halfway decently even though I am not obsessing over my wording so much. Anyway, thanks for reading if you made it this far, and Happy Halloween! Reviews are greatly appreciated. ^^