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“I want spaghetti,” Matt declared.
Shiro looked across the room at him from where he was lazily splayed out across his bed, his blankets twisted and contorted hopelessly into a little nest, while he did homework on his laptop. He’d been doing and saying nothing except slowly rotating through a cycle of positions for the past four hours. He was currently sticking his legs up in the air and resting them on the wall as he perched his laptop in the angle between his belly and his thighs, which meant that he was looking at him upside-down. “You want spaghetti?”
Matt sat up straight from his own lounging position on his own bed with his own laptop and stretched, wiggling his back and his legs to get all the little pops and crunches out. “I need spaghetti. My brain is crying and wants endurance food.”
Shiro raised (lowered?) a brow and grinned, huffing a laugh. “You realize that pasta is great for athletic endurance, right? Not necessarily brain endurance?”
Matt glared at his best friend with the most slack, unamused expression he could muster. “Shut up, Jock McMuscles. Not all of us wear socks with our sandals and know how footbasket works.”
Shiro stared at him.
Matt blinked. “Wait a minute. Football-”
A loud crack of laughter burst from Shiro’s chest and soon he was giggling and wheezing so much that his laptop fell into his blanket nest. He rolled to his side and grabbed his pillow while still squeaking ‘footbasket’ and chucked it at Matt’s head, who figured he was only able to dodge it because of the tears in Shiro’s eyes. “Just go out and make your spaghetti, asshat.”
Matt tried his best to hold in his convulsing chuckles as he wormed his feet back into his uniform boots and made for the door. “Love you too, jerkface!”
In the span of five minutes, he made his way down the dormitory corridor towards the large, glistening, white-and-chrome communal student kitchen. It was only when he got there that he remembered that everything in the fridge and cabinets belonged to other people, with various notes taped and pinned to them that all said different variations of ‘Touch this and I will kill you.’
Well.
Crap.
“Keith!” he blurted as soon as he saw the boy walking by.
Keith immediately tensed, then slowly perked up as Matt hurried over to him. “Yeah?” he asked, hesitantly. Their friendship was still new and slightly rocky, and they still depended on Shiro as the middle-man of over half their interactions just to get over the anxiety, but they were all right. Right?
Matt puffed his chest out and beamed at him anyway, putting his hands on his hips. “Would you like to help me commit crimes?”
Keith squinted at him and tilted his head. “For…?”
“Spaghetti!”
“Commit… crimes. For spaghetti.”
Matt batted his eyes and pouted, folding his hands and bringing them up to his chin. “Please?”
Keith was still squinting. “What’s in it for me?”
“I will share the spaghetti.”
Keith stared.
Matt stared back.
Keith stared some more.
Matt beamed him a smile.
“…Will there be meatballs?”
“Yes.”
Keith nodded decisively. “Then what do you need me to do?”
--
Keith lingered by the archway to the cafeteria as Matt strolled in and went straight up to the counter, where the head cook was finishing inspecting the equipment, shutting everything down, and locking everything up for the night. Luckily for both of them, Mrs. Du seemed to still be in the shutting-down phase.
“Ming!” Matt crowed, leaning on the display glass and winking at the weathered old kitchen warden. “Has anyone told you that you look like Lucy Liu?”
Mrs. Du arched a thick gray eyebrow and peered down at Matt through her eyeglasses, the stern wrinkles around her rich, olive face easing slightly. “Not since we landed a woman on Mars, Matthew.”
Matt waved her off and cocked his hip out. “Well, you don’t look a day over forty.”
“What do you want?”
Clutching his heart, Matt reeled back in feigned pain. “Can I not visit my favorite lunch lady on a Sunday night to see how she’s doing and also acknowledge the possibility that I may or may not be rewarded with a free dessert for being her favorite student?”
Keith had been slowly meandering towards the kitchen entrance during this entire exchange, and as Mrs. Du’s laughter began to devolve into clucking as Matt sashayed to the dessert display, he ducked under the folding counter and slipped into the back alcove, where the food was stocked.
He was met with an entire warehouse-worth of colors and shapes and sizes and words that melded together into a monolithic legion of shelves and eyeball static.
“Uh,” he said aloud.
Where was? The spaghetti?!
“WHAT?!” came Matt’s high-pitched yelp, swiftly followed by a distant, “You really- I wasn’t- Oh, wow! Ming! I’m touched! NO WAIT-”
Crap.
Oh crap oh crap oh crap.
Mrs. Du’s footsteps were coming towards the door and her low voice was saying, “That’s all you get, Matthew, now I really do need to close everything down and I won’t accept any more arguments!”
Keith sprinted over to the first pasta boxes he saw and grabbed-
Crap wait Matt had food allergies, right? What allergies did he have to look out for? And he was Jewish, right? What dietary stuff did that come with?!
He heard the handle of the door to the food storeroom begin to turn so he snatched the first box that said “gluten free,” a can with a tomato on it, and a meat package with the word “Hebrew” on the label from the freezer before dropping to the floor and rolling under the shelf just in time for Mrs. Du to open the door and step inside. She peered around for a few good seconds, nodded to herself, then turned the lights out and shut the door, plunging Keith into inky blackness with only the heavy scratching sound of the lock.
Keith let out a quiet curse and crawled out from his hiding place on his elbows, still cradling his stolen goods to his chest. He couldn’t see an inch in front of his face. After sitting up, he managed to stuff the food items into the top of his uniform jacket – wincing at the cold meat – and puffed his chest out proudly for his ingenious hand-freeing solution. That was when he felt and heard them all fall out and onto the floor.
After tucking his jacket into his pants and shoving the food into his jacket again, he fished out his phone from his pants pocket and fumbled for the flashlight feature. Once the light beamed on, he finally allowed himself to take a deep breath and assess his situation.
Climbing to his feet, he warily approached the door and leaned towards it, straining his ears to hear if Mrs. Du was still marching around. All he heard was the clanging of the sliding gate coming down and Matt’s distant babbling. Once the sounds quieted down, he tried the handle on the door and found to his not-so-great-surprise that it wasn’t budging.
Turning back to the storeroom, Keith prowled around and peered at the solid concrete walls before turning his attention to the ceiling.
It had a ventilation shaft.
--
Matt was pacing the halls and anxiously wringing his hands when he heard a sharp thump from the vents.
Immediately, he whipped his head up and watched in quiet awe as the ceiling vibrated shortly before Keith’s face appeared in the vent. Matt beamed at him for a split second before rushing to shush him when he opened his mouth, hurriedly pulling out his phone and tapping for a minute while side-eyeing the hallway’s security cameras before nodding decisively and waving Keith down.
Keith punched the vent grate out and sent it clattering to the ground, then dropped down. Matt looked him all over, taking note of the bulge at his stomach. “Are you… pregnant?”
Keith squinted at him. “No.”
Matt let out a fond huff and waved at his stomach. “A joke. So you got the stuff?”
Keith straightened up and actually smiled. “Yeah, I got the stuff.” He unzipped his uniform jacket and took out his spaghetti ingredients, handing them to Matt with a flourish.
Matt’s eyebrows slowly rose into his hairline as he read aloud, “Gluten-free angel hair pasta, tomato soup, and… kosher hot dogs.”
Keith’s face fell.
Matt blinked and looked up at Keith, then sniffled, his expression crinkling. “Awww, Keith, you’re so thoughtful! You remembered!”
“Yeah, well,” Keith murmured, rubbing the back of his neck and holding back a grin as Matt slung an arm around him and escorted him away from their crime scene and back towards the dorm kitchen.
--
Both Matt and Keith stood side-by-side, staring blankly at their hodge podge of ingredients and the various sizes of pots in the kitchen before slowly turning to look at each other and blink a few times.
Keith arched a brow and prompted, “Do you… even know how to cook?”
Matt rubbed the back of his neck. “Uh, no, actually. I thought… for some reason… there would be like. One of those microwave spaghetti dinners in the storeroom maybe?”
Keith shrugged. “I don’t know what I was expecting when I went in there, but I really don’t think the Garrison cafeteria has microwave dinners. Also, I sacrificed a lot to get this and you promised me results, so you’re committed now.”
“I’m committed? You’re a part of this now, too, you know! You’ve been drafted!”
“I don’t know how to cook either!”
After staring at each other for a solid thirty seconds, they both said, “Shiro.”
In less than a minute, the boys had stampeded up the stairs to Matt and Shiro’s dorm room. Matt flailed his card in front of the scanner and flung it open, causing Shiro to perk up from his criss-crossed spot on the bed.
“Can I… help you?” he prompted, looking at his best friend and best brother with a heavily amused grin.
“Help,” Keith demanded as Matt whined “Shirooooo save meeeeeee-”
Closing his laptop, Shiro scooched forward and swung his legs out to put his boots on. “I’m assuming this is about the spaghetti?”
Both Keith and Matt nodded.
“You two also realize you only have half an hour before curfew, right?”
Keith’s eyes bugged out while Matt began making a low, pleading whine noise that gradually morphed into “I’ll share the spaghettiiiii-”
Grabbing his dress uniform tie from its place on his bed post and tying it around his head, Shiro stood up and pointed dramatically at them both. “Lightning round spaghetti!”
“Lightning round spaghetti!” they roared back.
The three of them thundered back down the stairs and skidded into the kitchen, where Shiro immediately grabbed a small lidded pot sans-lid and filled it halfway with water in the sink at full-blast before setting it down on the stove burner and cranking the dial to maximum. The flames licked high up the sides of the pot and Shiro flourished his hand out, calling for “Noodles!”
Matt slapped the box into his hand and he immediately slid the angel hair out of its box and broke the sticks into quarters, then dumped them in the pot. He flourished his other hand out and called for “Pasta sauce!”
Keith slapped the solid can of tomato soup into his hand.
Shiro blinked at it. “Can opener!” Keith grabbed a large steak knife and flipped it, presenting the handle to Shiro. Shiro grabbed it with his free hand and grinned at him. “Thank you, Keith,” he beamed, then raised the knife high over his head and looked at the can with a glint in his eye before stabbing it, splattering himself in a spray of red which didn’t seem to faze him at all as he immediately poured the contents of the can into the pot.
With a victorious huff, he flourished his hand out again. “Meatballs!”
Matt handed him the kosher hot dogs with a quiet snicker.
Shiro only balked at them for a second before smirking and announcing, “It works!” He ripped open the entire packaging with one firm tug and then diced them into sloppy, uneven chunks with the knife, then used the package to dump them all into the pot. He stirred the thick, slimy, vaguely abstractly spaghetti-looking mixture – still with the knife – vigorously for about two seconds before slamming the lid back on and stepping back with a sigh of relief. “What’s my time on that?”
Matt looked up from his watch. “Three minutes!”
“Heck yeah!” Shiro crowed, high-fiving both of his teammates.
Keith immediately turned to peer into the foggy glass of the lid. “So how long is it going to take?”
He received an ambivalent shrug from his brother. “No idea. Until it’s squishy and soaks up the soup I guess?”
“Yeah but… how long?”
Shiro looked thoughtful for a minute before turning to Matt. “The hotter it is the faster it should go, right?”
Matt balked at the question and vibrated his head slightly before shrugging. “I guess…? I mean, that’s… Food… Heat. Yeah? Yeah.”
“Is there any way you can make the stove hotter, then?”
Matt squinted at the stove suddenly like it was personally challenging him. “I mean… I could make this thing significantly hotter. But I think that would A: take more than half an hour, and B: incinerate our food.”
Keith tilted his head. “How about a little hotter?”
“Hmm.” Matt rubbed his chin. “If I…” he warily approached the stove and then kneeled down in front of it. He peered around it for a while, standing up and leaning himself at different angles, before finally sighing and stepping back towards the others. “I can’t do anything with it sandwiched between the count-”
That was when they heard a loud metallic clang and a violent hiss, swiftly followed by a fwoom.
All three of them whipped around at the same time and saw that the lid had been blown off the pot and their frankenghetti was now in open flames. Shiro let out a curse and dove to turn the stove off while Keith sprinted for the nearest fire extinguisher and Matt peeled off his jacket and shirt to smother the small flames that had jumped to the wooden knife-holder and potted plant. Just as Keith returned and began spraying down the stove with foam, the fire alarm for the entire campus began screaming, alongside the distant sound of Commander Iverson’s enraged gravelly voice swiftly approaching from down the hall.
The three of them stood there, frozen – Keith wielding the fire-extinguisher with foam still in his hair, Matt standing shirtless with his smoldering clothes in his hands, and Shiro covered in thick red splatters while still holding the knife – before breaking into a sprint towards the dorm bathrooms, where Keith threw open the window and dove through it to tactical roll into the courtyard, swiftly followed by Shiro, who sprang up and yoinked Matt through so they could all take off running and cackling into the night.