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Chapter 52 - Mischief

It was now several days later, and life at Wammy's had finally fallen back into its predicable pace. The talk between lessons was peppered with hopes and wishes for the approaching yuletide and though there had hardly been enough snow to dust the tree branches, a full-on snowball fight orchestrated by Mello and Fritz was about to commence on the back lawn. One that I expected to be quite short lived.

"Now, hold still one more moment." I urged Beto as I zipped him up into his good coat. The seven-year-old was in my opinion much more justified in his unbridled excitement than the grown man taunting the smirking blonde teenager by the back doors.

"My team is going to give you such a drubbing, you won't even know what hit you!" Fritz threatened with a good-natured glint in his eye as Beto stopped squirming and let me tie his knitted cap with ear flaps under his chin. I shared a beleaguered look with Anne who was busy matching pairs of boots for the few children still in their socked feet and she grinned in reply.

"A drubbing? Don't make me laugh! You may know your way up in the air, mate, but I assure you the ground is a different story." Mello pushed his hair off his face and stuck out his chin. "Tell 'em, Matt."

"Er, yeah, You might as well give up hope now. There's no way you're gonna beat us!"

Jinya skipped up then in a pink ski jacket and a fuzzy white beret and stuck her tongue out at the others. "There is certainly a way! You all might have the book smarts, but we've got the street smarts! Don't we, Fritzie? It won't do much good to be thinking when you're being pelted with snowballs! Begging for mercy is more like it!"

"Thinking?" I asked confused as I helped Walseka put on her mittens.

"Didn't you know?" Anne laughed as the four of them went outside to set up the parameters or rules or whatever people do when they create a house-wide snowball fight. "It's L's successors against the rest of us! The geniuses against the gifted! That's how Mello's been touting it."

"But..." I did the quick arithmetic in my head. "We will be dreadfully outnumbered."

"You've got that right." Jude groaned, a brown jacket thrown over his hooded sweatshirt as he came into the mudroom. "L's not even playing."

I sighed but understood. I hadn't seen much of L in the last few days. He felt like he was on the verge of a triumphant breakthrough in the case and had positively thrown himself into his research, seemingly taking up residence in headquarters and only emerging when absolutely necessary. In the past, when L began to work extra hard and speculate endlessly and run himself ragged searching for answers, it had been best to keep my distance and I was following that logic this time as well. I had however woken up to a chocolate truffle resting on my bedside table every morning since his all-nighters had begun so I suppose some things had changed.

"So, without L, there's five...against at least three times that number." I determined aloud and Jude shook his head.

"Wrong, four. Near says he has "no desire to participate in such childish acts."

"Too bad." Anne frowned. "With the way he throws his robots around he probably has a good arm."

"Well right then." I sighed fitting my own hat on my head, my expression grim. "Do we surrender now or wait a round or two?"

"You do know this is completely unfair, Fritz." I crossed my arms as the boys started contributing to our arsenal of snowballs on the one side of the back lawn that they had dubbed our territory.

Before Fritz could respond from the other side of no man's land, Mello spoke up, dropping several snowballs into my mittened hands. "Don't act like we're at a disadvantage, G. The little ones will be easy to knock out of the way. Then it's just Fritz, Jinya, Omar, Anne and Linda. We'll destroy 'em!" His blue eyes sparkled with mischief.