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"This blows,” Ace said as he stuffed streamers into a trashbag.
“Will you quit complaining and just do the work?” Jack snapped.
“Forgive me if I think it’s a little unfair that all of the upperclassmen get to go back to the dorms while we’re stuck cleaning up after all of those stupid tourists.”
Jack rolled his eyes. He didn’t have a good argument as to why only he, Ace, and the rest of the freshman populace were cleaning up the school after the Halloween Party. “Sure, it’s not completely fair, but we’ll get in trouble if we don’t do this.”
Ace huffed in annoyance. “Just say you’re a suck up, why don’tcha?”
“I am not a suck up.”
The wolf saw the redhead open his mouth to say something else but thought better of it and held his tongue. “I just don’t get how you don’t get fed up with it all,” he said instead.
“I don’t get why you get all worked up about it.” Silence fell between them for a few moments. Both of them knew that neither one of them wanted to do this, but it needed to get done. Jack noticed that Ace was more irritable than normal today. He glanced over at the redhead, who angrily continued to tear down the decorations they spent so much time putting up.
“Hey, are you okay?” Jack hesitantly asked.
It took a few moments for Ace to respond, and Jack was surprised that he even got an honest answer. “No.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
“It’s just-” Ace set his trashbag aside and gestured around the dining hall, still waving streamers around in his hands. “Doesn’t any of this bother you? The fact that we’re the only ones in this whole cafeteria and we’re stuck doing all of this? And that we’re basically just getting pushed around while the rest of our friends are partying it up in Fleur City?”
“We weren’t chosen to come along,” Jack said.
“I know but- ugh forget it!” He took his trashbag and started angrily shoving all of the decorations back in the trash. “I’m just sick of being exploited for free labor when we could just be chilling in our rooms.” Ace shook out his left hand. “And my fucking hand hurts like a bitch.”
Jack paused what he was doing and just stared at Ace for a moment. He could tell that there was more eating at him. Something specific regarding everyone’s trip to Fleur City. Maybe it even ran deeper than that. He surveyed the messy dining hall. “I mean… I guess no one will know if we take a break,” he mumbled.
Ace barked out a laugh. “You? Take a break?”
The wolf’s ears flattened. “I’m capable of taking impromptu breaks.”
“Yeah. Sure. I don’t even think you’ve ever taken a personal day for anything.”
Jack growled underneath his breath. He hated whenever Ace could read him perfectly. “Hey. I’m trying to get you out of doing some work for a bit. But if you wanna keep working then-”
“Woah there man. I never said I wouldn’t take you up on the offer.” Ace happily tossed the bag aside and headed towards the kitchen. “If you wanna take a break, let’s take a break. I’ll grab us food from the kitchen.” Jack just shook his head as Ace strode towards the back of the cafeteria. He held his tongue about stealing food from the cafeteria. His friend would only do what he wanted anyway.
He never understood the redhead’s blatant lack of respect for rules and structure. He could never pinpoint Ace’s motives for breaking rules, as even when it benefitted him, he would go and sabotage himself with little regard for what it would do to him. It bothered him to no end. Why would someone who could be so brilliant continue digging himself into a hole he could never crawl out of? He saw Ace’s potential to be a top student of their grade with his natural wittiness and talent, but he hardly put in the work. He didn’t understand how someone could set themselves up for their own failure on purpose.
Why in all of Twisted Wonderland would Ace Trappola want to fail over and over again?
“I think your brain’s caught fire thinking about whatever you’re thinking about,” the redhead said as he walked back with two trays of food in his hands. He set them down on one of the many empty tables in the room and sat down. “I can practically hear the computer fans whirring in your mind.”
Ace did an impression of an old computer overheating, causing Jack to roll his eyes. “I was just lost in thought,” he replied.
“Well what were you thinking about?”
Jack sat down across from the redhead, keeping his eyes trained on the tray. He was surprised to find that it was full of all of his favorites in the portions he preferred them in. “None of your business.”
Ace smirked. “You really know how to hold a conversation.”
“We’ve barely even started having a conversation.”
“Exactly my point.” He took a strawberry from his tray and bit into it, staring the wolf straight into his yellow gold eyes. “Come on! What’s the harm in talking? I know you’re a private person but we should take the chance to get to know each other.”
A sudden laugh escaped Jack’s throat. “You really wanna play that game when you’re one of the fakest people I’ve ever met at this school?”
The redhead’s smile faltered. He seemed to be thinking of an argument, but when he came up with nothing, he just shrugged his shoulders. “I guess you have a point, but don’t act like you don’t keep secrets either.”
“...It’s not keeping secrets.”
“Tom-a-to, to-ma-to. Your whole lone wolf act is cute but it's eating you up that you’re not on that trip with the rest of them, isn’t it?”
Jack glared at Ace. This whole conversation was ridiculous. “Projecting much?”
Ace flexed his gloved hand a few times, his smile becoming tight. “When are you ever going to admit that you’re pissed when you’ve been screwed over, and when are you gonna finally actually do something about the way you let people walk all over you just so you can get their approval?”
The wolf’s fist gripped the fork in his hand tightly. His ears went flat against his head. “I do not need approval,” he growled.
“Uh huh.”
“I don’t.”
“Sure.”
Jack suddenly didn’t feel as hungry anymore as he pushed his tray to the side. If Ace wanted to play this game, he’d play. “And what about you, huh? Do you always have to make things worse for yourself and drag the rest of us down with you? Or is that just how you roll as the team asshole that everybody tolerates because you just so happened to make nice enough with everybody so they keep giving you second chances?”
Ace’s smile completely disappeared as the two freshmen stared at each other. Their words hung heavy in the air between them, making their shared silence all the more suffocating. Both let their brief frustration with each other subside before speaking again, but even as they kept on looking at each other, the right words refused to form.
Ace was the first to break the silence. “Have you ever actually done something you wanted to do?”
The question caught Jack off guard. “What?”
“I’m being serious. When was the last time you did something you actually genuinely wanted to do with no one else influencing you or forcing you to get into it?”
It took Jack longer than he thought it would to come up with something. “Probably when I got the letter and chose to come here.” Ace raised an eyebrow until Jack clarified, “They wanted me to go to a local school. Close to the family.”
“I didn’t want to come here,” Ace confessed. The confession surprised the wolf beastman. The redhead had always gone on about how his brother went here, so he just assumed that that was the reason Ace wanted to go here. “I only applied because my parents wanted me to be like my perfect older brother who can literally do no wrong in their eyes. I didn’t know what else to do so I accepted and here I am.” He flexed his gloved hand a few times again, and Jack noticed that it was trembling almost imperceptibly. How bad was that pain in his hand? “Obviously I don’t regret it, but I didn’t want to do it.”
The wolf nodded slowly. “I understand that, but what’s your point?”
“Just… None of this is fair, we can agree, right? Doing all of this work while our friends are out there being the luckiest ducks. And even if we do it without complaint, no one’s gonna say we did good just because we did the work. You understand that right?”
Jack hated to admit it, but Ace had a point. Neither Leona, Vil, any of the housewardens (aside from Kalim), or any of the NRC staff would give them any sort of special favors or even tell them they did a good job. But still, if someone asked something of you, you don’t say no. “I know that it’s unfair, but sometimes you have to sacrifice things for others.”
“But all the time?”
“Not all the time.”
“So when does all the sacrificing go too far? When do you yourself draw the line at giving things up so that you can do something for someone who won’t even give you the time of day?”
Jack slowly absorbed Ace’s question and really thought about it. He wracked his brain for any instance that he did something that he wanted, but all that came up were instances of his parents telling him that his little brothers and sisters needed him there more. Or when all the times he wanted to hang out with his friends from school but couldn’t because his parents were working and no one was there to take care of his siblings. Or literally almost any instance of when they were short on money and he wanted something.
He always knew in the back of his mind that he sacrificed a lot of the things he wanted for the sake of family, but he never realized how much.
“I don’t know,” he finally answered after a few moments of contemplative silence.
Ace flexed his hand once more, wincing as he tried to ignore the pain. “I’ll tell you when you draw the line. You draw the line when you’ve done everything right. You’ve done everything right and even when you do that, you get nothing. No thanks, no word of congratulations, not even an acknowledgment. And sure. You may think it’s all gonna pay off later when you see how they treat everyone else and you’re just not trying hard enough, but it’s all a lie, and you’ve wasted your entire life trying to be Perfection incarnate.”
Jack just stared at Ace for a few moments, unsure of how to respond to the boy’s take. “I’m guessing there’s some experience backing that,” he carefully settled on.
A self-deprecating smile etched itself onto Ace’s face. “Yep,” he replied, popping the “p”. “Regardless, my point being is why are we being forced to do all of this while everyone else just gets to kick back and relax and enjoy life.”
The Savanclaw student nodded. “Yeah, but we can’t really do anything about that.”
Ace surveyed the room. “Well, I do have a few ideas, but you’re right that we will get in trouble if we do anything that’s not this.”
Jack glanced back down at Ace’s trembling hand. “We don’t have to go back right away I guess. It’s nice just talking to you.”
The redhead turned back to Jack and offered him a small, genuine smile that lasted for only a moment. “It’s nice talking to you too.”
Silence fell over them, but it was a good kind of silence. The kind of silence that you could bask in and feel at peace. None of the earlier tension between them was there anymore, and damn did it feel good to find someone they could both relate to with no more judgment on either side.
“I never thought I’d say this but you’re alright Trappola,” Jack said.
“You’re not so bad yourself Howl.”
Jack matched Ace’s small smirk. “You’re not gonna tell anyone we actually got along right?”
“Oh fuck no. Imagine all the questions.”
“The horror.”
“Exactly. They’d be begging us for details and prying for information. It should be the other way around since they were the ones to actually do something interesting.” Ace looked up at the clock and sighed. “We should probably get back to work if we wanna get out of here.”
“Probably.”
They took one look at each other and Ace just started talking again. Clean up could probably wait another hour or two.