"DRAW FOUR?! ARE YOU SERIOUS, ROWAN?!"
"Strategy, Wildcard! It's called strategy!"
"It's called BETRAYAL! I had ONE CARD LEFT! ONE!"
"Should have played your reverse when you had the chance."
"I didn't KNOW what the reverse did because your brother was still explaining the rules while you were already dealing cards!"
"Adaptation is a skill, Sage. Darwin would be proud."
"Darwin would flip this table!"
Ronan interjects with the measured authority of a man attempting to mediate a conflict while simultaneously planning his own devastating card play.
"For what it's worth, I would have hit you with a Skip instead. Rowan's approach is excessively aggressive for a first-time player."
"Thank you, Ronan!"
"That said, you absolutely should have played the reverse." He drops a Draw Two on Rowan's position. "Also, draw two, brother."
"WHAT?! RONAN! WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE A TEAM!"
"In Uno, there are no teams. There are only survivors."
The bickering escalates through the next four rounds with the specific, accelerating intensity of a card game whose mechanics are designed to convert friends into adversaries and quiet evenings into judicial proceedings. Rowan plays with the aggressive, chaotic energy of a man whose strategy consists entirely of maximum disruption. Ronan plays with the calculated, patient precision of a man who builds his victories from the wreckage of other people's plans. Archie plays with the silent, analytical focus of a man whose card game approach mirrors his hockey IQ: minimal investment, maximum observation, devastating execution at the precise moment when his opponents have committed to positions his hand can exploit.
I play with the specific, furious, rules-still-being-absorbed energy of an Omega who has been playing for twenty minutes and is already threatening physical violence over a card game because competitive instincts do not distinguish between hockeyand Uno and the desire to win is the desire to win regardless of the medium.
We are mid-game, mid-bickering, mid-argument about whether a played card can be retracted after the next person has already drawn when I notice a pause in the chaos.
The twins are looking at each other. The loaded glance. The twin-specific, bilateral communication that compresses a conversation into a single shared expression. Rowan's amber eyes carrying a warmth that his brother's cooler gaze reflects and amplifies.
Then they look at me.
Rowan sets his cards face-down on the table.
"We just realized we don't really know much about you." His voice has shifted from the competitive register into the genuine one, the transition carrying the specific, deliberate cadence of a man who is making a conversational bid that matters more than the card game surrounding it. "Beyond the hockey and the eating habits and the tendency to sneeze at inappropriate moments."
Ronan sets his cards down too. The synchronized gesture carrying the weight of a decision they have made together.
"Why don't we use the three days you're off to go on a date with each of us?" His amber eyes meet mine with the quiet directness that I have learned characterizes his most significant proposals. "Get to know each other properly. Not through Uno and soup, although both are excellent mediums. Through actual conversations in actual settings where the topic is not hockey or medical emergencies."
He pauses. Then adds, with the specific, measured delivery of a man dropping a payload he has been carrying since the nurse's office: "Besides. Archie owes you a date. Courtesy of me."
Archie groans from his position beside me.
"Fucking blackmail."
Rowan grins. "Admit it, you're squealing inside to take your Omega out."
Your Omega.
The words land in my chest with a warmth that the soup and the Uno and the shoulder-to-shoulder contact have been building toward all evening. NottheOmega. NotanOmega.YourOmega. Possessive. Specific. Carrying the pack-level claim that was formalized in a nurse's office while I was semiconscious and that is now being referenced with the casual, already-established certainty of men who consider the matter settled.
Ronan adds fuel with the dry, calibrated precision that makes his teasing more devastating than his brother's because it is delivered at a volume that sounds like fact rather than provocation.
"If I remember correctly, when Wildcard was out, you were telling her Dad?—"
