#and chess

And they’ve decided, this game night, that card games were their best approach for the safety of their house, relationship, and sanity. The thing is, James isn’t the best at these games, they can admit that. They do well with the games that they do play, and they were also part of the reasons behind some of these games getting banned from their household, but there’s never been anything that they’ve banned because they were too good at it like Regulus with Monopoly. 

Until they’re on their third card game, Regulus and Barty have only won thrice, collectively. James has won every. Other. Round. That they played. James has a track record of 16 out of 19 games.

“I’m going to kill you.” Barty mutters, looking James dead in the eye, “I swear to God if you win again, your body will not be found.”

“Okay,” Regulus hums, pushing Barty away from the table where, thankfully, James and Barty are sitting opposite each other, “I think card games are getting banned from game night, too.”

“We’re going to run out of games to play on game night soon.” James says, although they admittedly have a cocky smile on their face as they place down their hand, showing that they’ve won. Again. Barty nearly flips the table. Regulus gently takes the cards from both of their hands and cleans the ones on the table, putting them back in the box before walking over to the ‘banned’ shelf that they have and putting the pack on it.

“Running out of games or not,” Regulus states, “We’re done playing games tonight, I think we’re too high strung.” James agrees and goes to start making the three of them some hot chocolate to ease some of the tension that they’ve caused. 

When they’re done and Regulus has calmed Barty from the edge of murder -- Barty asks him how he’s not upset at James winning constantly, and he is, but he’s calmer than Barty and therefore needs to calm him down -- and the three of them are settled down on the couch with a comfort show, Barty finally asks, “How are you so good at card games?”

James takes a second to answer, “My dad really liked playing card games when I was young, that was usually what we ended up playing and if you think that I’m good at card games, you should never play with my dad. It also became a thing that since Peter was good enough at chess, I could never beat him, so we’d start playing cards and he’d get frustrated then it was a back and forth of us going between chess and cards.”

“Which is why you two don’t play games together.”

James nods, “My dad is incredibly strategic and, to beat him, you had to learn how to best him in his own game.”