Ex's to Lovers

Chapter 69

In Which Gilbert and Alfred Retaliate

Alfred was having a bad day. If he was anyone else, he might have blamed his failed chemistry test on himself, and the fact he'd sent much more time pursuing romance( such as buying a ring and thinking of ways to make Ivan break up with him) than actual school stuff (such as studying or paying attention in class) . But he wasn't another person, so Alfred chose to blame the low test score on the same person that he always did: Ivan.

"He's doing this on purpose!" Alfred raged at Gilbert with clenched fists. "Refusing to break up, avoiding me, he's doing it to mess with my head on purpose so I can't concentrate and will get lower scores, that jerk!" 

A more sensible person might have gently broke it to Alfred that Ivan was probably avoiding him for simpler reasons, like because of Alfred's non-stop break-up requests and harrasments, not because of some sort of underhanded plot to ruin Alfred's grades. Unfortunately, Gilbert wasn't more sensible, and did believe whole-heartedly that Ivan would do such a thing. 

"You should do something to get back at him." 

Gilbert suggested, maliciously. Alfred leaned forward in his chair, intrigued. 

"Like what?" 

In response, Gilbert grinned, and pulled out his notebook of carefully documented pranks from Alfred and Ivan's long history of pranks. Alfred had almost forgotten that he'd been in the habit of trying to inconvenience Ivan as much as possible without being caught, what with all the chaos he'd been causing, but immediately brightened at the sight of the book. Gilbert, seeing this, began to grin evily, and Alfred mirrored the look.

"Hell yeah!"

So both parties poured themselves into finding a new prank to mess with Ivan.

"What about the soap prank?" Gilbert suggested, looking through the prank suggestion page in his notebook. "The one where you put nail polish on it so you cant use the soap?"

Alfred leaned over the book. "No, see here? He did that to me in March last year.

" Oh." Gilbert sounded disappointed. "What about the fake orange juice prank? Y'know, you use the powdered cheese from kraft dinner instead?"

Alfred shook his head. "Nope. He won't accept food or drinks from me since the pudding cup incident, remember?"

Gilbert looked more annoyed. 

"We could sign him up collect trash, and then he'll get a ton of trash at his house?" 

"Are you crazy?" Alfred pointed out the most obvious issue in his plan, "Natalya lives there too, bro! She'll kill us!" 

Gilbert paled. "Right. Then.." 

He turned to another page, and brightened. Alfred read the title. "Pranks to do if we can get inside Ivan's house". Alfred began to grin again, malevolently. There were a lot of options listed there that they'd never been able to do, but now that Alfred had easy access to Ivan's house, they seemed a lot more possible. 

"Filling the room with Balloons,  dye his milk yellow, paste boy band posters in his room... These are all so good!" Gilbert ranted, "How are we supposed to choose?"

Alfred was torn, since all of the ideas seemed good. Then Alfred had a thought. 

"Why do we need to choose? Let's just do them all?"

Gilbert stared at Alfred in slack-jawed awe, then grinned even more evily than before.

"Alfred," Gilbert said slowly, "You're a genius!"

Somewhere in the school, Ivan, who had been avoiding Alfred as hard as possible, suddenly felt a chill go down his spine, and quickly checked to make sure Alfred hadn't hung up "please break up with me" banners or something. Finding nothing obvious wrong, Ivan shuddered, feeling a strong sense of foreboding.

Alfred waived down Toris and Yao to distract Ivan later that day. Yao agreed easily, thinking it was for the proposal. Toris gave Alfred a suspicious look that said "What-are-you-up-to-now-Alfred" but Alfred only beamed in response. Toris decided he'd rather not know, after all, and beat a hasty retreat before he could be implemented in Alfred's scheme. It was too late, though, and the plans were already set. Ivan would be out of his house later that day when Alfred and Gilbert snuck in.