Beautiful magic absolutely takes precedence over food.

Tomonori doesn't particularly resist Nie Huaisang touching him, now; it's really the path of least resistance to just go along with whatever kind of affection his new friend prefers. Also it's easy to just accept things when he is being offered the chance to look at the sword!!!

"Thank you so much," he says, which maybe he has already said multiple times but it bears repeating.

Nie Huaisang sits down at the table. "Lan Zhan! Show Bichen to Tomonori."

"No."

"Lan Zhaaaaaaan, I promised.'

"Mn?" asks Tomonori.

Lan Zhan isn't very good at people but he knows when he's being mocked.

"No."

"Lan Zhaaaan." Nie Huaisang makes the puppy dog face. "He helped me in lab! I could have been eaten by a homework! Aren't you grateful?"

"Mn," Lan Wangji says, but he unsheathes his sword and hands it over to Tomonori for inspection.

Tomonori inspects (!) the sword (!!)!

It looks- really complicated, actually, he'll need to stare at it for a while. So he does, smiling widely and not looking at Lan Wangji or Nie Huaisang the entire time.

Tomonori is very cute, especially when he's looking at magical objects. (Who is he kidding when he says he can do whatever, he's clearly an artificer.) 

But Lan Zhan is also very cute, and more importantly has a very big sword, an affinity for killing mals, and a known high level of tolerance for Nie Huaisang. 

So Nie Huaisang scoots up very close to Tomonori, their thighs touching, and says in a very interested tone of voice, "can you tell me about it?"

Oh good Nie Huaisang has a friend.

Dammit, he also has a completely flat affect. How is Nie Huaisang supposed to know if this is working.

"You're very disciplined," Tomonori says wonderingly, because wow this sword has a lot of dumb rules, maybe Lan Wangji is just too stressed about them to say more than a syllable at a time? "Did it choose you, or did you choose to become what it needed, first?"

"The Lan family traditionally collects mana by following three thousand rules. It's so many rules. I don't think I'd be able to remember them all. A lot of them are duplicates though. Or kind of vague. 'Do good things, don't do bad things...'"

Maybe he should put his head on Tomonori's shoulder to see if Lan Wangji is jealous now.

Oh, that's nice.

What?

Why is Nie Huaisang's head on that guy's shoulder? 

He's not even an enclaver. And he's fat. Nie Huaisang is so much prettier than that guy is and he deserves someone as pretty as he is. And he's ignoring Nie Huaisang in order to stare at Bichen! If Nie Huaisang's head were on Jiang Cheng's shoulder Jiang Cheng would not ignore him in favor of even the coolest sword in the world, because Jiang Cheng understands the minimal standards of how you should treat your boyfriend. And Jiang Cheng is a real artificer trained by the Shanghai zongzhu himself and not this random fat Japanese kid who doesn't even know what track he wants. 

Jiang Cheng has no feelings here it's just that, objectively, Nie Huaisang deserves better.

It's nice that his questions are still getting answered even though Lan Wangji can't answer them. This is one of the other things that would be nice about being in an enclave. There are so many more of those than ways of getting into one.

Tomonori did not think people who just became friends put their heads on each other's shoulders but it doesn't seem wrong to return the gesture. He leans into it.

"Do you know how old the enchantments are? They must have been extremely difficult..."

Of course he's already trying to think how he could do them. Not with what he knows how to do now, but maybe he can reason from what he does know- too much of his knowledge is theoretical. His parents only let him do as much supervised lab work as they thought was safe, and now he's probably behind everyone else-

Ha. SUCCESS. Nie Huaisang will successfully have Extremely Cute Lab (And Possibly Shop?) Homework Boyfriend even if he doesn't have Extremely Hot Sword Boyfriend.

"Bichen is incredibly old, it's been passed down in the Lan family for generations."

He twists around to see how Lan Wangji is reacting to this.

Awwwwww.

Well, that's unhelpful.

Stop asking him about swords!!!! Nie Huaisang doesn't care about swords!!!! If JIANG CHENG was Nie Huaisang's boyfriend he would listen to him talk about art ALL DAY and not talk about swords even a little bit. Except maybe their artistic value. Maybe once they graduate they would go to a museum of swords together and look at them from an artistic perspective. NOT that Jiang Cheng is interested in Nie Huaisang, because he isn't, but you know. Hypothetically.

"There must be so many artifacts in the enclave. I've only ever really seen my glasses. A family friend made them for me. I helped, but she did the really dangerous work," Tomonori says, with obvious disappointment in his voice.

"Oh, I'm glad she did the dangerous work, I wouldn't want you to get hurt."

Nie Huaisang, that's not how things work for normal people.

Jiang Cheng isn't interested in Nie Huaisang. His mother made it very clear that romance in the Scholomance wasn't about beautiful boys with soft hair who make things that Jiang Cheng can't imagine making, things that aren't useful they're fragile and lovely, like they're from a world where people are allowed to have fragile lovely things. It certainly wasn't about boys whose tears made you want to hold them and keep them safe from everything bad that happens in the world and whose smile made you feel like life has a meaning.

No, romance in the Scholomance is about staying alive, and Nie Huaisang wouldn't help keep anyone alive, so Jiang Cheng isn't interested in him.

So he doesn't feel jealous of Tomonori having someone worry about whether he'd get hurt in lab.

"Thank you for saying so. I have to take some risks to learn."

That's what his father would say, anyway.

"Have you ever wanted so badly to satisfy your curiosity that you would take those risks?"

"No. Absolutely not. I am here for one thing and one thing only which is staying alive."

"Oh. That makes sense. You can be more careful, right? There are so many of you, with different skills. I just have me."

This touching moment is interrupted with a purple electricity whip crackling onto the cafeteria table in front of Tomonori.

Tomonori shrieks! If he had been standing, he might have stumbled backward, but instead this mostly disturbs Nie Huaisang’s position as he shifts. His heart is racing and he’s calculating- preparing to burn mana that he doesn’t have, re-calculating, what can he do with- he would be dead already if this had been real- was that someone from Shanghai!?!? Tomonori tries to place the face but he can’t. Was there a test? Did he fail? (Again?)

He stands up, clumsily disentangling himself from Nie Huaisang.

“I- I’m sorry. Did I do something to offend?”

Directing this at the man boy with the whip is probably somehow rude, too. Maybe he’s about to die. Tomonori wants to take it back.

"My whip is better than Bichen," he says with an amount of anger usually reserved for someone murdering your cat.

Honestly, there's a lot of disagreement about this.

???

“I- it’s beautiful,” Tomonori says, and of course he means it, because now he can see it with his glasses, now that he’s turned the lenses towards it, but that won’t be the right answer, will it. There’s another hurdle he didn’t see- not males, not homework, but something in the way he talks or moves that they can all see is wrong.

He stands very still and doesn’t say anything else.

"Yes! It fucking well is and you will appreciate it!"

Lan Wangji is confused by the amount of anger here-- no one even mentioned Zidian-- but is also used to his incomprehension about Jiang Cheng's anger being even more complete than his incomprehension about everyone else's emotions other than his brothers'. 

"a-Cheng," Nie Huaisang wheedles, "I was going to show him Zidian" like when he was going to get bored of me without a chance to look at new shiny magical items "you don't have to almost hit people with purple electricity whips. That scares people."

"Don't call me a-Cheng!"

Well if he’s being threatened into admiring magical artifacts he can do what he was doing with Bichen but vibrating with stress instead of enthusiasm, with less Nie Huaisang putting his head on his shoulder.

There are plenty of compliments Tomonori can give to- Zidian, (which he wants to ask about too, do they all have names, but he doesn’t ask). He does so, lovingly describing the enchantments he can see.

Nie Huaisang puts his head on Tomonori's shoulder again and gives his hand a reassuring squeeze.

"He's so good at figuring things out!"

"It's not that great. I know all that about Zidian already."

“I can work on a better spell,” although he can’t do this forever, Tomonori needs to specialize eventually. If some of Shanghai wants him to go artificing track but some wants him to- and they don’t, they haven’t offered anything-

He hates politics. He doesn’t understand what anyone wants from him except Nie Hauisang.

He doesn’t push Nie Huaisang away, but he doesn’t lean into it this time. He watches Lan Xichen’s and Zidian’s wielder’s faces. Maybe their faces will tell him whether he passed.

Lan Xichen is over at Kyoto enclave's table and shows no obvious sign of noticing that this happened.

"Well, you should work on a better spell. Useless piece of shit."

Icily: "Jiang Cheng."

"I'm not apologizing! He's just an indie."

"Jiang Cheng."

All of this is getting very confusingly out of hand.

Nie Huaisang says, "Tomonori, do you want to go sit at that table over there?"

“Mhm.”

???

He grabs Tomonori's arm and navigates him to the nearest mal- and human-free table.

"I'm sorry. Jiang Cheng is just like that."

Okay. So- okay Tomonori will need to think about all of this later but right now he should make sure to be a good friend, probably?

”I understand,” which is the biggest lie he has ever told in his life but he thinks it’s polite to lie about that.

"Okay, so, that was weird and terrifying and I have no idea what to do about it so instead you should tell me more about magical theory."

Okay! Tomonori will be subdued and not particularly receptive to having any heads on his shoulder but he will discuss magical theory and answer any questions Nie Huaisang has.

DAMMIT.