Vash found Matthew looking at some sort of board.
"Hey Vash, look, we're roo..." He didn't hear the rest of his sentence, but he had more important things on his mind.
"Matthew," Vash asked him, "would you like to make use of your superpowers?"
"Eh?" Matthew turned around and blinked. "Superpowers? What..." He stopped, and stared at him. "Vash, why are you..."
"I just thought you might be interested, after the 'disappearing bag' story and all that. But I won't pay you for it, so I understand if you don't want to help."
"You... want me to help you with something?"
"Yes. At least, it would be very useful if you did."
"Sure, I'll do whatever," said Matthew, "but that's not what..." His voice became very hard to hear at this point. "...asking why you're wearing... my favorite... but Alfred doesn't like those... sobbing every time he... I think they frighten him... make him sad... forgotten... so can you please put it somewhere else?"
Vash raised an eyebrow. "Could you please speak up so that I know what to put somewhere else?"
Matthew blushed.
"If you have trouble speaking up," Vash added, "just pretend you're Alfred. It'll be good practice."
Matthew laughed, but soon his face grew serious again.
"If I were Alfred now, I'd be sobbing."
"What the hell?! Why?!" The thought of Alfred sobbing was a little startling.
Matthew cleared his throat. "You're wearing my favorite flower."
"Really?" Vash took the little blue flower from his pocket and examined it.
"They're called forget-me-nots," said Matthew. "But you should put it away... because my brother hates those flowers..."
"What?" Vash was only getting more confused. "Why would anyone hate flowers?"
"It's just this one kind," said Matthew. "I think it's 'cause of something that happened in his youth. Arthur - Mr. Kirkland, the English teacher - told me that he found him crying one day... and that he said..." Here Matthew stopped, paused, and added: "I think he's afraid. Afraid of death, and afraid to be forgotten... Maybe that's why he's so loud."
They were quiet for a moment, and then Vash handed the flower to Matthew.
"You take it then, if it's your favorite. You can put it in your dorm: then Alfred won't see it..."
Matthew's face lit up. "Speaking of dorms, I was trying to tell you..." His voice faded out again, but this time, Vash was paying attention and saw him point at a sheet of paper pinned to the board, with a list of the roommates of their class. It looked like it was done in alphabetical order: Ludwig Beilschmidt with Ivan Braginsky, Roderich Edelstein with Milen Hinov, etcetera. He looked at the very bottom of the list and saw his own name next to Matthew's. He nodded in approval.
"We can work a lot on the Stolen Cats Case, then."
Matthew looked at him questioningly, and he explained to him what he was planning to do.
"...but then I realized that I was not the kind of person who could question people unnoticed. I needed someone with your 'superpowers'."
"So you want me to get information out of these people, eh?"
"Yes. You would be the exact kind of person who could manage such a thing. You are not a member of Emma's enormous clique, so you wouldn't be biased, and most importantly, you wouldn't raise suspicion: they would either forget about you or mistake you for Alfred having a chat."
Matthew grimaced, then laughed. "Well, at least I'll be making better use of our resemblance than by getting myself beaten up by my brother's haters. I'll need to brush up on speaking louder though, otherwise they won't even notice I'm there at all."
"You're agreeing on this alliance, then?"
"Hell yeah," said Matthew. "We can call it the Wallflower Pact. The forget-me-not can be our mascot, or Kumajara can, if you want."
Vash nodded and they shook hands. They had a deal.
Ten minutes later, they were constructing a plan together in their notebooks. Matthew had moved to the seat next to him in French class, and since they were both fluent French speakers, they didn't need to pay attention to Mr. Bonnefoy's attempts to explain grammar and pronunciation to the others ("Non, Alfred, one does not say 'bawngewr'!"), nor to his occasional sidetracking ("Oui, Lovino, I miss him too. Don't we all? The poor man, fired without mercy, and after losing such a close friend..."). While writing, they had to be on guard: Ludwig was sitting behind them and Emma was right in front of them. It was fun: he liked being extra alert.
Matthew brainstormed different ways to approach the suspects. Vash explained why Emma seemed to him the most likely thief, as she seemed to be the only one with a motive, but Matthew noted that actually Milen could easily have one that they didn't know about, since he lived next door to Herakles and anything could have happened between them before the start of school. He also told Vash that Sadik, the senior guy, had been Herakles's enemy since they were kids, and that their hatred towards each other came in phases, which meant Sadik's anger could have been at a point where it had just escalated this far. As for Ludwig and Alfred, Matthew at first didn't think they could have anything to do with it, especially his brother, who he knew very well and would never steal something so dear to someone, but after Vash had repeated what Herakles had told him and what Kiku's opinion on this was ("Alfred screams all of the time, just like Ludwig-san. It is their natural behavior."), he hesitated and said that, actually, the way Alfred had yelled at Herakles was very strange.
"My brother yells all the time, and it's not like he's never angry, but the way he yelled at Herakles was so not like him... Why would Alfred say 'You think you're funny with your stupid cats'? He doesn't hate cats, and he doesn't usually say 'You think you're so funny?' out of the blue... Usually he's the one being funny..."
Even stranger, said Matthew, was Ludwig's reaction. As Kiku had said, Ludwig always yelled at people. But this time with Herakles, he hadn't yelled: instead, he had glared at him. That was not his usual way of getting angry, and Matthew couldn't see a reason for Ludwig to be angry in the first place. Sure, he was the type of person to get easily agitated by Herakles's laziness, or maybe his debts, but not by his cats: normally, Ludwig either liked cute animals or was neutral towards them. Vash argued that perhaps his reaction was different with stray animals that were not cute, but Matthew stated that cuteness was a matter of opinion, and that Ludwig, unlike certain people in the class, did not have any particular dislike towards stray animals.
Vash asked who those "certain people" were, as he had only seen students cooing over the cats for no apparent reason, and when Matthew answered "Elisaveta, mostly," he added her to the suspect list.
Their quiet discussion was suddenly interrupted by loud sobs. For a second, Vash was worried that Alfred had somehow found the flower, but then he saw that the person crying was Herakles.
"What on Earth is the matter, Héracle?" Mr. Bonnefoy, of course, had no idea what was going on.
"I..." Herakles sniffed. "I miss my cats... I have so many more at home, but not these seven... these seven were my favorite ones! That's why I chose them, and only them, to take to school, and then..."
Elisaveta suddenly jumped up from her chair, looking wild with rage.
"Be happy it was just the cats, Herakles!" she shouted. "Be happy it was just the stupid cats!" Her voice sounded like it was going to break. Her eyes looked sad, but her entire face looked furious. Roderich tried to hush her back down, but she refused to listen.
"Silly me..." said Herakles, "...but it's not silly... I love my cats... They are my best friends, you know..." He yawned. "I'm getting drowsy... So much technology these days... Three girls, two brothers... Or more than two... Three times... The second to prevent the first; the third in vain to reverse the second... Now we count the shadows: two, four, six, seven... And the key to freedom is..."
After that, there was only snoring.
