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It is five in the morning. Ace wanted to be wrapped back up in his cozy bed with his favorite fluffy red blanket. He finds himself missing the sound of Deuce grinding his teeth in his sleep from across the room because to him that is a sound he associates with sleep. He loves basketball, he really does, but this is not worth it. The worst part is that he’s the odd man out here! He thought that at least Floyd would be irreparably exhausted too- or at most not have even shown up! But here the fucker was at five in the damn morning with all the energy he usually uses in a day! And Jamil- well Jamil’s kind of just chilling. He's picked a spot on the curb and made himself comfy, sitting coolly while Ace feels like he’s dying.
The bus isn’t even here yet! This sucks! Why couldn’t they have been playing Royal Sword this week? Then he’d wake up at a normal time and the bus ride would only be half an hour but nooooo- they just had to be playing another school that wasn’t even on Sage Island. Some other fancy private school up in the ranks with Night Raven, yeah, but this school was in the Rose Kingdom. They had to wake up, take the mirror chamber out, and are now sitting on the curb outside the most prominent transportation hub in Rose Kingdom. A hub that happened to be a twelve and a half hour drivefrom where they need to be. Why didn’t this stupid fancy rich school have a mirror chamber anyway? Who the hell were they even playing again? He’s so tired he can barely remember. Alice’s Academy for the Wonderous? Sounds right. Sounds pretentious. Sounds like twelve and a half hours away.
Out of the corner of his eye Ace sees Jamil sling his bag over his shoulder and stand. Damn, he didn’t even notice the bus pulling up around the corner. Jamil’s so observant like that. Or maybe Ace is just blind but to be fair it is a little foggy and those headlights are a little busted.
Vargas is saying something to them all but his booming voice is not meshing well with the early hour and everyone with at least a five mile radius flinches. Ace swears he even saw a bird's wings falter as it flew by. Guess it was something about putting equipment bags in the space under the bus because the other guys on the team start chucking bags in there before making their way into their home for the next ridiculous amount of time. Ace has always wondered what it would be like to ride under there, hidden away among the bags. Maybe he’ll ask Floyd. He seems like the kind of guy who’s done it before.
They’re told to just sit anywhere so Ace flops down into an empty seat across the aisle from Floyd. Behind Floyd is Jamil who’s already pugging in his earbuds. Dude still uses cords? Whatever, doesn’t matter. What matters is a nap. Ace sticks his backpack between himself and the window and does his best to curl up as comfortably as you possibly can on a school bus. The last thought he has is how grateful he is to have stuffed an extra hoodie in his bag so he could pretend it’s a pillow.
—
He only slept half an hour.
The sun had finally come up and was so bright. So. Very. Bright.
He had tried to shield his eyes or to roll over and shove his face into his backpack for some semblance of darkness but the damage had already been done. He was awake. Ace sits up, still feeling unfairly groggy from sleep that wasn’t even worth it, and the first thing he hears is Floyd laughing. He whips his head up to see Floyd with his back to the window and long legs bent taking up the rest of the seat. Man, this must suck for him. Ace can't even imagine the discomfort of being that tall right now.
“Your hair ‘s all fucked up, Crabby,” Floyd snickers. Is it? Ace practically rips his phone out of his pocket and opens up the front camera to check and sure enough, Floyd’s right. Ace runs his fingers through it until he decides that it's a reasonable mess rather than a I slept on a busmess. “Aww it was kinda cute~” Ace shoots a glare at Floyd’s cooing.
“How are you even awake?” Ace hates how scratchy he sounds.
“Huh? I always wake up that early.”
“...What. Why?! I thought you’d be against mornings! Is it just me?!!”
“Nah, Jade’s the one that doesn’t do good with mornings. I try to sleep in but I get too restless and that’s usually when Jade chucks a pillow at my head.”
Ace cannot imagine that in the slightest. He’s heard the twins’ idle conversations when Floyd forgets something in the dorm and his brother brings it to him in the middle of practice and he’s heard him talk to Trey and Riddle about housewarden business and the like every so often when he’s at Heartslabyul to pass off interdorm paperwork, but he’s never really talked to Jade personally aside from the… Contract incident. Sometimes that anemone appears in his nightmares. Even still, he always had the impression that Jade had it all together not unlike some sort of machine. Guess he’s got his quirks too, he is a person after all. No matter how much he has the presence of some sort of Lovecraftian horror. Suddenly Ace is uncomfortable with thinking about Jade for this long.
“Jamil, are you a morning person too?” Ace asks pitifully. He’s gotta get someone on his side. “Jamil? Jamiiiiiiiiil!!” He’s being ignored! He knows Jamil can hear him too because he only has one earbud in! His hair might be long but it’s still tied back! It doesn’t cover his ears in the slightest. He can see him being ignored!
Floyd’s eyes flit between the two- or more accurately between Ace and the back of his seat- before he flips himself up onto his knees to look backwards over the seat and poke Jamil in the forehead. “Hey Sea Snake.”
“What?” both earbuds are out now.
“You a morning person?”
“No.”
“Mmkay.” and then he readjusts on his seat, legs still looking cramped against him. “Sorry Crabby, answer’s no~”
“Are your legs okay?”
“Yeah why wouldn’t they be?”
Has he never… Has he never been on public transportation?!! Forget asking him about the underside of the bus! Adjacent to him he can hear Jamil hiss, clearly already seeing the problem. They’ve still got twelve hours on this bus.