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It's hard to get the recommended amount of sleep when you're haunted by Murphy's law. It does get tamer during the night, if you compare it to daytime, but that doesn't mean bad things don't happen. It was a usual situation for Milo to wake up to a tree lying halfway through his window, or to be awoken in the middle of the night by his bed simultaneously disassembling itself. One time he woke at 4 am to a fire in his room, started by a faulty electrical socket and some papers.
It was safe to say sleep deprivation was something that he, like most of his ancestors, was very familiar with. It didn't affect him most of the time, only giving him any real trouble when it got really bad.
Today just so happened to be one of the worse days, sleep wise. The thing that woke him at 5 in the morning was the noise of tearing metal and crumbling concrete as a small helicopter crashed partially through the outer wall of his room. By some miracle no one got hurt, both pilots climbing out of the wreck without much injury and apologizing profusely and offering to pay for reconstruction, but, unsurprisingly, no one really went back to sleep until it was morning.
Luckily it was summer so there wasn't school to be ready for early in the morning, but still, Milo felt just a bit miserable. It didn't help that he was going over to a friends house that day, and these particular friends were the active type. Oh well, he'd just deal with it by powering through it. He'd get to rest properly the next night.
He'd met these friends not that long ago. Phineas and Ferb were an odd pair. They were a rare example of people as optimistic about life as he was. He, Melissa and Zack had hung out at their place before and the brothers quickly learned how to Murphy's-law-proof their inventions, at least to a controllable extent, mostly by adding about a million fail saves. Not that it worked every time, but nothing ever went too horribly badly. It was fun.
He was looking forward to hanging out with them again, despite his tiredness. The plan was for him, Melissa and Zack to arrive at their house separately and then spend the rest of the day there, with an open possibility to stage a sleepover, if the circumstances didn't become too dire and they felt like it.
He set out quite early, allowing time for anything that might sidetrack him, but all in all not much happened. Some cars swerved a bit too close, the asphalt cracked in front of him in some places, but in the end it didn't postpone him that much, so when he'd parked his bike in front of the Flynn-Fletcher household it was still an hour or so till the rest his friends would arrive.
Welp. Nothing he could do about it. He walked up to the side gate and knocked on it.
"It's open!" He heard a voice call from the backyard and pushed open the gate, letting himself in. The space of the backyard was mostly empty, save for a tree some ways away from the entrance. It felt barren, as a lot of the times he'd seen this backyard it was taken by some mechanism or another. They didn't stick around for too long of course, but still.
He'd located the boys sitting under the afromentioned tree, with Phineas looking up and waving at him enthusiastically and Ferb giving a couple of waves as well before looking back down at the blueprints laid out before them.
"Hi Milo!" Phineas called cheerfully "you're over early"
"Hi guys" Milo answered, walking up to them and settling down in the shade "i'd departed early in case anything happened but nothing major did" He shrugged "it's really unpredictable that way"
"It's ok" The redhead shrugged as well "we haven't really picked what we're gonna do today. There are multiple projects that seem good to build today"
"Should we wait till everyone's here?"
"I think so, yeah. See what seems good then" Phin replied. Ferb gave a silent thumbs up.
****
When he woke up he couldn't tell where he was for a second. Then he remembered.
He was still under the tree, now leaning against it with his back and with his backpack in his lap. His right hand was resting on something softer and warmer than grass and there was some leaning against the same side shoulder.
Blinking sleep out of his eyes he looked down. There was Diogee, snoring quietly under his right hand. He'd wondered if the little dog followed him, and turns out he did. Then there were the boys.
They were both out for the count, asleep in the afternoon shade, with Ferb in a more or less sitting position, leaning against Milo's shoulder and Phineas laying against his brother's other side, hugging their pet platypus to his chest.
Milo hadn't quite remembered falling asleep. They were passing the time by talking about this and that and he must have dozed off somewhere during that. It was a battle lost against the tiredness of last night and the summer sun. The boys must have followed suit.
The Murphys weren't known to nap much. What with everything going wrong they didn't have much time or opportunity to relax during the day. It surprised Milo that during his entire stay so far nothing has gone wrong. To be fair they weren't really doing anything other than talking, but he half expected for the tree to uproot during their little nap, or for the fence to their backyard to fall over. But no. Everything seemed clear.
He thought back to that pistachio incident during which he'd met the Flynn-Fletcher brothers. They discovered then that they had the opposite luck to him, that everything turned out for the best when they were around. That, unfortunately, didn't cancel out his own negative effect, but they did use it to aim it back then.
Maybe somehow they were interacting now as well. Maybe in the situation when they weren't being attacked by plant monsters and were just taking a nap the two opposite luck effects did cancel out? It wasn't the worst theory, so he was willing to consider it. Maybe he'd ask the boys to look into it for him. When they woke up.
Glancing at his watch he found it's been almost an hour since he'd arrived. That meant the rest of their party would be coming over soon. Then they could get started on their project of the day.
But before that happened he was all for a few more minutes of shut eye. He didn't get to nap peacefully very often.
