"Hello! How are you finding the Scholomance so far?"

"Well, it's only the second day, I feel like anything I could say would be a curse on all the rest." 

"Fair enough. --I feel like I always want to ask newcomers about media. Was the Nirvana in Fire second season any good? Do they have a Black Widow movie yet?"

"Still no Black Widow movie, and the Marvel movies have been going steadily downhill for the last few years so if there is one I'm guessing it's going to be bad. There is a new Spiderman, it's animated and the soundtrack is great even if it does have a distinctly American idea of what anime looks like. I'm not actually sure I know what Nirvana in Fire is?" 

"Sorry. Chinese drama. I used to watch it with my mom."

"Ah. Yeah, I have no idea if it's good, one of my underclassmen kept trying to get me into live action dramas but it kept not taking." 

"That's interesting. I'd imagine that you'd enjoy them a lot, given your affinity."

"It doesn't actually ping that much with movies and TV shows, I think it's something about having multiple takes? I was obsessed with takarazuka musicals for a few years, though." 

"I don't know anything about that."

"It's an all-female theater troupe, they do incredibly glittery stage shows." 

"Oh, that sounds beautiful!"

"It is!"

And she can talk about that happily for a few minutes before reaching a point where it feels at all natural to say "I feel like now it should be my turn to ask about your interests but so many of the possible options are either prying or depressing or both." 

"Well, I do enjoy planning improvements to Shanghai enclave. And parties I'll throw once we have enough resources to have parties."

From Tomonori she would have heard that and thought ah. One of those.

But Meng Yao is already the sworn brother of the head of Shanghai, he has no reason to be sucking up to a freshman. And— her affinity isn't perfectly reliable with these things, she's attuned to performance not to lies— but it doesn't feel like it isn't true.

"...wow," she says, tone appropriately impressed. "Who'd Lan Xichen have to kill to scoop up someone whose hobby is logistics?" 

"Technically I killed it and it had dozens of tentacles and wanted to eat us."

"That would do it, wouldn't it." 

"Spent a week trapped in a classroom together thinking at any moment the wards would fail and we would die, became sworn brothers six weeks later."

"Yeah, I had been wondering why you'd swear brotherhood with someone in the Scholomance! But that makes significantly more sense than any of the things I came up with." 

Meng Yao's not going to explain the reason. If she can't figure it out herself, she doesn't deserve to know. 

"Xichen is very kind."

What does that have to do with-- 

Ah. Fuck. Yeah, okay, she would not have thought of it unprompted, but Meng Yao can see on her face the exact moment she has the thought Not for Xichen's benefit, but for Meng Yao's, (and that's a little bit deliberate but only a little, she's not lying just making things clearer than she strictly has to) and from there it's not exactly a difficult problem to solve. If Meng Yao is Lan Xichen's sworn brother, he is unquestionably a part of Shanghai enclave.

"...you're right, I'm sorry, that was thoughtless," she says, quieter. "He is." 

She's clever, he thinks, she's clever and she's smart enough to at least fake sympathy, and his face is smooth as if he's deliberately trying to hide the turmoil inside himself about the gift that Lan Xichen gave him, and the way that their love always has to be something he uses to survive. 

"Nie Mingjue," he says, "was also very kind. --We were all three sworn brothers, before he died. He and Lan Xichen were childhood friends, and he was the first Shanghai enclaver to reach out to me as a friend."

"I don't know anything about him, except what Huaisang was yelling yesterday." She's still very soft about it.

"He was good. A very straightforward person. If you wanted to know what he thought of anything you just had to ask."

That sounds terrifying. You do not say "that sounds terrifying" when someone has just told you that their dead partner was very good.

(That's unfair. In a lot of contexts, very straightforward people who tell you what they're thinking are fine. Mei, for example, is excellent. But-- there's a very specific sort of person who says things as subtly as Meng Yao does and Lan Xichen seems to, and if Ayako were describing Mei she would not have used those words even if technically they wouldn't be incorrect ones.)

"I'm... sorry."

This girl is very quick. Dangerous, if she decides to point it the wrong way-- and it's important to remember she's part of Kyoto, she's not Shanghai, on the final day he'd stab her and feed her to a mal if it got Jin Zixun out-- but it's still nice to talk to someone who seems like she can keep up with him.

"The past few months have been difficult for all of us. Nie Mingjue's death was a surprise, and now Song Lan... of course, I didn't know him, but Lan Xichen grew up around him."

There's something strange and Ayako is not going to poke it, not even in the relative privacy of her own head.

"Yeah. I— I don't know. I'm sorry." 

"I'm sorry, these topics are much too dark for breakfast. You should update me on new music."

Yes. That seems much safer, doesn't it.

She's still not poking at anything but she can definitely update Meng Yao on the last two years of new music.

He's excited by the new songs. Maybe she can sing some of them?

Her voice is much more suited to filling up a space than to being quiet enough to be polite while in the cafeteria but she can definitely try!

And then, after a few minutes of this, the bell for class will ring, and they'll both have other things to be thinking about.