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Slam!
Deuce jumps, eyes snapping upward as the door to their shared dorm room swings violently against the wall and Ace pops his head into frame. Buzzing with far too much energy for a Monday afternoon, he scans the room twice before his gaze lands on Deuce, who is sitting neatly cross-legged on his bed and poking through a small purple pouch.
“Hey, what’cha have there?”
Deuce blinks, looking back and forth between the bag in his lap and a curiously approaching Ace.
“Oh — this?” He raises it up, tilts it for Ace to get a better look inside. “Epel gave it to me when I saw him today! It’s some apple-flavoured candy he got from home.”
“Epel?” Ace echoes with a raise of his eyebrows, sitting down next to Deuce to peer closer into the bag. “Awh, he didn’t give me anything! What’d you do that was so special?”
“Huh? No, I—” Shifting his attention to the delicate note card laid at his side, Deuce continues, a tad clumsily, “It actually says here that there’s a lot because it’s a gift for both of us — but... to be honest, I think he just got tired of eating so much on his own...”
“No way — really?”
At that, Ace’s face completely lights up, eyes glowing as he splits into a wide grin.
“Aahh, who cares why he did it? That just means more for us!!”
He snatches the bag from Deuce’s hand and, without missing a beat, immediately starts to tear into its contents. Deuce lurches in surprise, swiping fruitlessly at Ace as he squirms gleefully to the other end of the bed.
“Hey, no fair!”
“Nuh-uh! Finders keepers!”
“Half of that is mine!”
Ace ignores him entirely, blatantly enough to nearly warrant offense. Deuce watches as he pulls a fistful of wrapped candies out from the cloth, letting them scatter and spill messily across the bed and onto the floor as he gets to work on unwrapping one for himself.
“ C’mon, Ace,” whines Deuce, twisting to scoot closer toward Ace and have a half-hearted grab at the mess of candy he’s left all over, “I didn’t even get to have one yet!”
Successfully having rid his candy of its wrapper, Ace looks over at Deuce mid-toss of the plastic over his shoulder. The candy he’s placed into his mouth disappears with a soft pop! between his rounded pink lips.
“Not even one?” he asks, unexpectedly genuine in his surprise, the words formed strangely around the candy in his mouth.
“Not even one,” Deuce echoes, adding the slightest little pout to his frown for that extra special guilt effect. “Because I was going to wait for you to come back fir—”
Ace makes a little noise of some sort, a cheeky mix between annoyance and amusement — and, all too suddenly, surges forward toward him before Deuce can even finish.
It catches him utterly off guard, with an inelegant squawk. Deuce nearly falls back in time to avoid Ace, but Ace is faster, fueled by intent that far overpowers Deuce’s surprise. Ace grabs Deuce’s hand, splayed on the bedsheets, and tugs it toward himself at the same time he presses an enthusiastic kiss to Deuce’s lips — and, as Deuce loses his balance and gasps into the kiss, Ace daintily pushes his round apple candy from between his lips and past Deuce’s own.
Deuce topples awkwardly into him when Ace breaks the kiss, pulled right onto the other with the dizzying aftermath of his momentum.
“There! Happy?”
Ace pats his cheek, then pokes it in a curious, stupid attempt to see if he can feel the candy there. Deuce shakes him off, eyes widening as he registers the zing of sweetness now in his mouth.
“Ack — Ace!” He weakly smacks the other in the chest, face burning with a roiling brew of emotions. “That... Augh, that was so gross!!”
“What!?! Maaan, you find a way to complain about everything!!”
“Only because you shoved your candy into my mouth!!!”
Deuce breathes heavily into the quiet that falls after his words, still supporting himself against Ace in a way he’s starting to think cannot be very comfortable for the other boy. The candy rolls around half-absentmindedly in his mouth, nearly falling out with a particularly sharp breath — but he catches it before it can, almost hyperaware of his muscles as he curls around the candy carefully with his tongue.
It tastes fine.
Good, even.
Ace is the first to speak up again, still a couple of seconds later, tone carefully intrigued when he asks, “So... ‘s it just the candy? You didn’t mind the — the kiss?”
Deuce blinks in surprise, then huffing out a breath of utter disbelief as reaction — something between a punched exhale and a half-laugh. He realises then, belated, that perhaps Ace had intentionally taken advantage of all his wailing and complaining in order to steal a kiss out of his whines — the candy only ever a secondary thought in his mind.
He purses his lips, opens his mouth — closes it — bites at his lip once, pushing down a smile. Wondering somewhat bafflingly if he should be a bit more embarrassed to admit his answer, considering the complete foolishness that had just unfolded to get to this too-simple point.
“No, I guess I didn’t. Not really.”
He pauses.
“... at all.”
Ace breathes out a light sigh, one that escalates rapidly into boisterous, victorious laughter. Deuce feels Ace’s chest shaking with it against him, his mirth contagiously pulling Deuce into a wide smile of his own.
“I should ask Epel for more of these candies,” Ace muses, picking another wrapped candy up off the bed between thumb and forefinger and raising it up to get a better look. Deuce reaches up and bats it out of Ace’s hand, watching as it flies across the room and skitters beneath Ace’s bed.
“Don’t be greedy!”
“But imagine how many more kisses I could get out of you with an infinite supply!”
Deuce flushes bright red, and Ace breaks out into hysterical laughter all over again.
“Y-You could just ask me next time, stupid!!”