Jordan Hale believed in exactly one universal truth about mornings: they existed to be conquered, not enjoyed. This was a philosophy Magnus Chane did not share, which was obvious from the way he showed up to training on Wednesday looking like a man being marched to his own execution.
"You're late," she said, not looking up from her stopwatch.
"By thirty seconds." He panted. "And only because you keep moving our session time up."
"Thirty seconds is thirty seconds you could've spent stretching. Drop and give me twenty before we even start."
"Jordan—"
"Twenty, Chane."
He stared at her.
"Gonna be twenty-five if you keep staring at me."
With a sigh, he dropped, and she watched him struggle through it with satisfaction.
Jordan had long since stopped feeling bad about making Magnus suffer. At first, she had. Only by a little, but still, she had felt bad. Probably. Maybe.
But that had been back when she was still figuring out what exactly he was capable of, and whether his tendency to look like he was about to die during training was because he actually was about to die or because he simply had an unusually low tolerance for physical discomfort.
By now, she knew the answer. That was just his default setting and he likely could still handle more.
The session that followed was standard brutality — sprints, drills, sit-ups, and more — the kind of full-body exhaustion that came from the specific brand of suffering Jordan believed would build strength, character, and resilience, though not necessarily in that order.
Though to be fair, she had indeed pushed him harder this morning. Not because he had done anything wrong, exactly, but because she'd noticed that he'd come into training looking distracted. Magnus was usually easy to read when he was tired: his shoulders sagged, his movements got slightly less precise, and he grunted and whined more often. Today, he'd shown some signs of being tired, but he was unusually quiet.
She had asked him once whether something was wrong, which he denied, and she had decided not to push. If Magnus wanted to tell her something, he would eventually. He wasn't good with keeping secrets, and it was probably something with Alex again. Though the fact she hadn't heard any new rumors about them yet — which, considering how half the campus documented their lives like a bizarre reality show while the other half pretended not to care but was probably following said show religiously — was strange. Nothing about which "lucky girl" was going to be "invited" into the bedroom of Alex Reyes yet, nor had there been any article-long forum post overanalyzing Raccoon Boy's playbook on whichever girl he and Reyes were chatting up this week. Even those accounts Jordan was ninety percent sure were what Sofia used to spread rumors through were unusually quiet this week.
By the end of the session, Magnus was on his back on the ground, staring up at the sky with the expression of a man ready to die without regrets. Or maybe he was just too tired to remember his regrets. Jordan wasn't sure which. And she didn't care.
"You're getting better," she told him, which was as close to a compliment as he was going to get from her.
"I feel like I'm gonna die!"
"That's how getting better feels. Here, drink." She tossed a bottle at his chest without looking. "Five minutes earlier for tomorrow."
"Stop moving our session time up!" he groaned from the ground.
But she ignored him, already walking away.
***
A few hours later, she spotted him again, in the cafeteria for lunch, with Alex and Sofia. They were leaning toward each other in the way people did when they were discussing something they didn't want overheard.
Jordan made a beeline for them anyway, taking off her earbuds and slipping them into her pockets as she walked. As she approached their table, their conversation stopped. She narrowed her eyes at them suspiciously as she put her tray down and dropped into the seat beside Sofia and opposite Alex.
"Hey," Alex said casually, too casually. "What's up?"
"Nothing," Jordan said, filing the silence away without commenting on it further. She hadn't crossed the cafeteria for that anyway. "You guys free today?"
Alex raised an eyebrow.
Magnus stared at her for a long moment. Then, slowly and warily, he asked: "Why are you asking?"
Sofia simply leaned back in her chair, watching everything with great amusement.
"Just answer the question," Jordan snapped.
"My only Wednesday class is a morning lab session," Magnus said, "and I didn't even have that this morning since it's the first week of the term."
"It's my day off." Sofia folded her arms together.
"Yeah. I'm free." Alex shrugged.
Jordan made a face, like she had just swallowed a fly. "I want to keep trying… the thing we started during Spring Break."
They all stared at her.
"You know what I meant!"
Alex and Sofia stared harder, while Magnus grabbed his drink and started sipping.
"You two really gonna make me say it?" Jordan grumbled. "The hanging out and being…" She shuddered. "…friends thing."
Sofia snorted, pointing at her. "That will never get old."
"Shut it, Ramirez. Or I'm leaving."
"No, you're not!" Alex said gleefully.
Jordan glared at her.
Magnus cleared his throat. "Um, where are we going?"
"My room?" Alex asked. "It's—"
"Absolutely not!" Jordan cut in. "Your room feels like enemies' territory."
"Rude!" Sofia protested.
"Jordan, we're not enemies," Alex reasoned. "We've never been enemies."
"I know that. And I never said we were enemies. I just said your room felt like enemies' territory. Totally different things."
"How are they different?!" Alex and Sofia both said in unison.
"They just are."
"Fine. Whatever," Alex conceded. "Your room then?"
"Not mine, either. Feels like I'm using home-field advantage to lure you all into a trap."
"Are you?" Magnus looked up, a little alarmed.
"No. I said it feels that way, not that it is that way."
"You're being really confusing!" he concluded.
"I'm not. I'm just… being honest."
There were looks being exchanged — first Alex, Sofia, and Magnus were sharing one about Jordan's state of emotional honesty; then all three girls were sharing one before they all looked at Magnus.
***
Fifteen minutes and a jog across campus later, they were all filing into Magnus's basement dorm room.
The room was smaller than Jordan expected and cleaner than she'd assumed, given how mildly disheveled he generally looked in person. She dropped her gym bag onto his desk the second they walked in. It landed with a thud, and then a smaller thud nobody noticed — an earbud charging case slipped out of the outer compartment and rolled into the dark space on his desk beneath the small bookshelf.
"Okay," Sofia said, glancing around the room. "What do you have to play in here?"
"I have a deck of cards," Magnus replied. He paused briefly, then added: "Also, I have a Switch."
"You have a Switch?"
"Yeah."
"Since when?"
"Since before I knew any of you."
"Why didn't you say anything about it?" Jordan asked.
"Forget that!" Sofia chimed in. "Why haven't any of us even seen you with it?"
"I don't play it that often. Only when I'm in the mood, so it's mostly just stored away in my room." He shrugged. "It was a birthday gift… from an Uncle Sal I've never met and didn't even know I have."
They stared at him.
"You're weird," Jordan concluded.
"Yeah," Sofia added, "other guys would be playing it all the time if they had one."
He shrugged again. "We playing or what?"
"Sure. What games do you have on there?"
"In terms of multiplayers? Only Mario Kart."
"Perfect!" Jordan said.
"You sound way too happy about that." Magnus eyed her suspiciously.
"You all should be worried." She grinned.
Magnus stared at the three women settling comfortably onto his bed and opening a bag of chips between them, then swallowed. "Why do I have a feeling I'm gonna regret this?"
But he proceeded to hook the Switch up to his laptop and hand out controllers to them anyway before sitting down on the edge of his bed.
The game started and Jordan immediately drove straight into a wall.
Sofia burst out laughing. "You all should be worried," she mimicked Jordan.
"Shut up, Ramirez. I'm just getting used to his controller."
The game continued.
"That's cheating," Jordan said, when Magnus overtook her a lap later.
"How is that cheating?"
"You distracted me."
"I am literally just sitting here."
"That sounds like a you problem," Alex said in defense of her boyfriend.
"Everything's a you problem when you're losing," Sofia said, not looking away from her own screen. "But you two are being disgusting again."
"She's right. Could you two not flirt while we're playing Mario Kart?" Jordan scowled. "…Also, I'm not losing."
"You're in fourth," Alex reminded her. "And we're not flirting."
"Temporarily. And you two definitely are flirting."
There were more arguments — about items, about shortcuts, and about whether a blue shell was a legitimate game mechanic or a war crime. Alex won two races in a row without saying much of anything, which annoyed Jordan more than losing to Magnus ever could have.
The blue shell argument was technically never resolved. Magnus was on the "legit mechanic" camp, Jordan was firmly against it, Sofia was more interested in watching them argue than actually picking a side. Alex was, of course, on Magnus's side, though whether it was because she was his girlfriend or because he'd used it on Jordan, allowing her to take first place on one of the races, was something only she knew.
Somewhere in the middle of it, the conversation drifted loose from the game entirely — classes, professors worth hating, a cheer event Alex had coming up, and Tony. Which sparked another "is Tony a normal raccoon?" debate where Alex and Jordan were on the sane side while Magnus and Sofia refused to see reason.
"Can you two stop being disgusting for five minutes?" Jordan said, when Alex leaned her head against Magnus's shoulder during a loading screen and he smiled down at her in the specific soft way he apparently only ever smiled at her.
"No," Alex said, entirely unrepentant.
"Gross," Sofia agreed.
"What did I even do?" Magnus asked.
"Existed, mostly," Jordan said.
Sofia nodded in agreement.
He stared at them, but accepted this without further protest.
Underneath the bickering, though — underneath the game and the chips and the increasingly petty item-based warfare — Jordan kept noticing something she couldn't quite name. A beat too long before Magnus laughed at something. A glance between him and Alex that carried more weight than whatever they were actually talking about. Sofia checking her phone more than the conversation warranted, like she was expecting it to do something.
Jordan didn't know what it was. And she didn't like that. But she couldn't exactly demand an explanation when she didn't even know what the question was. So, she filed it away the same way she'd filed away the silence in the cafeteria: a small, specific data point that didn't fit the shape of the rest of the afternoon — something she'd think about later, probably, if she remembered to.
Her phone alarm went off a little after four.
"Shit." She was up before the sound finished. "I've got to go."
"Already?" Sofia asked.
"I've got somewhere to be." She grabbed her bag off the desk, slung it over one shoulder.
"Are we making this a weekly thing?" Magnus asked, already reaching to pause the game.
Jordan considered it for exactly as long as it took to walk to the door. "If all of you are always free on Wednesday, sure."
"Oh-Em-Gee. Look at that," Sofia said. "She's already making plans!"
"Don't make it weird, Ramirez!" she said, and left before anyone could get another word in, shutting the door behind her.