Work Text:
Matt idly flicked a pen between his fingers, occasionally tapping it on his desk, both he and the sun glaring at the far wall. Ever since he graduated last year and been selected for the Kerberos mission, he’d been rather bored. No, that was an understatement. He was absolutely and utterly bored out of his mind. The ‘extra material’ he was assigned was nothing new to him, and Shiro was always off teaching or hovering over some kid or other. Like he probably was going to do in a couple of hours, once he woke up. Anyway, the point was, there was pretty much nothing to do.
Matt groaned, tossing the pen down and absentmindedly grasping for his snack pile, eventually grabbing a pack of chocolate-covered raisins. His fingers and mind were itching for something to do other than ‘studying’. Most of his spare parts had been confiscated from his room and he wasn’t technically allowed to touch any of the garrison’s active tech without permission.
But, he suddenly thought, nobody said anything about the staff kitchen.
He was technically allowed access to that, now that he was ‘past graduation’, and he had quickly learnt that one of the rules of the kitchen was that as long as you weren’t hindering anybody else, anything goes. A grin stretched across his face as he pushed himself up, cackling a bit to himself. Finally, something to do.
---
The coffee machine was the first victim.
The poor, innocent technology never knew what hit it. Its every secret and inner mechanism were surrendered to Matt as he tinkered and fiddled and disassembled it, down to its last screw. When he started, Matt had identified 3 problems with it – Afterwards, he had found 19. And he knew how to fix them. It should be simple, as long as he could find the right parts.
Leaving the machine disassembled on his desk, he went over to what was lovingly called “The Pit” by instructors and students alike. It was exactly what it said on the tin. A pit of obsolete and old machinery, only held by the Garrison because of its previously militaristic nature, just sitting there in a useless pile. Matt was intimately familiar with the place, having scavenged around quite a few times in the last year. The bell calling for the first class of the day rang in the background, barely registering in Matt’s mind as he went to work, decisively grabbing pieces and parts, collecting them all in a small pile before carrying it back to his room.
The corridors were quiet as Matt strode back to his room. Which suited him just fine, he didn’t quite want to explain to anybody why he was carrying spare bits and bobs from the direction of The Pit back to his room, early in the morning. Oh, he thought internally, imitating a conversation with some stranger, I’m just going to improve the coffee machine to more efficiently do literally everything. He also vaguely realized that abducting the coffee machine before the day had even begun was, probably, not the best thing to do, considering that about 98% of the staff literally could not function without coffee.
Whoops.
Oh well. Sacrifices must be made in the name of science! And also the destruction of boredom. But mostly science.
The pile of spare parts joined the pile of discarded parts on his desk. Matt poured the last of the chocolate raisins into his mouth, before dramatically crinkling up the wrapper and tossing it to one side. He cracked his knuckles and grinned. Time to get to work.
---
Two hours (and three more trips to The Pit while actively avoiding any authority figures that still remained functional) later, and Matt was finally confident that there was nothing more that he could add on to the coffee machine to make it work better. Externally, nothing had changed, except for the two small buttons that now said “Volume on/off” and “Surprise!”, but internally, nearly nothing was the same. All that was left was to sneak it back into the kitchen without encountering anybody.
He made it to the kitchen without hassle. Quickly, grimacing at the smell, he poured in the coffee beans back into their designated position and turned the machine on, before turning around, intending to sneak out.
Ironically, he came face to face (or, well, face to chest) with Shiro, who looked down on him with a remarkably deadpan expression.
“Um… hi?” Matt said, sheepishly. “I definitely did not do anything to the coffee machine.”
Shiro just kept staring emptily at him, before simply shaking his head and pushing past Matt. Matt noted that he moved rather robotically over to the machine, quickly brewing himself a cup. By his calculations, he had roughly 74 seconds for the coffee to brew and another 27 seconds before the caffeine made its way into Shiro’s system, so he did the only reasonable thing he could do in the situation.
Matt ran like hell back to his room with a shiteating grin on his face, locking the door and hiding in his bed, grabbing his laptop and another pack of snacks along the way. He would probably regret everything for the next 24 hours, but he wouldn’t take that back for anything.
And his fingers had finally stopped twitching. Thank god.