"It's okay! I can sit wherever's convenient."

"I want to be as far away from that disgusting display as I can."

"...still, it was distracting for me so it was probably also distracting for you."

"Maybe I would be better at doing my work if Nie Huaisang weren't cuddling Tomonori?"

Really Jiang Cheng was the distracting one here, Wen Ning can't really handle yelling, but Wen Ning has gone through his entire life avoiding Jiang Cheng's attention and doesn't intend to stop now.

Yeah, Jiang Cheng was the distracting one for them both, but she is zero percent inclined to say that where Jiang Cheng can hear it. 

"I just sort of expect that fewer social undercurrents would leave everyone with more spare brain to work with." 

"I think Nie Huaisang should focus on his work so he can pass this incredibly stupid math class that isn't even really a math class it's an art class."

Hmm. What, if anything, is the politic way to handle this.

...well, when she puts it that way it's sort of obvious. "He'd be very good at art, if he were focused on art instead of on wizard towers."

(The dismissiveness on the words 'wizard towers' is... well it's not real, actually, but it's the fake version of a real thing, which is a little like being real if you squint.)

"Yeah! Exactly! He should learn about golden ratios and use it to make better pictures instead of wasting his time with this bullshit."

"Right. --anyway. Studying in my room or yours, Jiang Cheng." The library would also work but the trouble with the library is that if she sits in the Shanghai spot that has implications and if she brings them to Kyoto's that also has implications and she has tracked so many implications today. 

"I think my room has better wards."

"Wen Qing got Zixun to do mine and Mei's and Julian's, actually, but your room's fine. Lead the way." 

Jiang Cheng's room is spartan. A terrarium has been set up but there aren't any animals in it yet.

...Ayako isn't totally sure how to interpret the terrarium but she is zero percent inclined to comment. She sits down on the bed, leaving plenty of space. 

"So usually with Mei I wind up reading out loud because she hates reading and I hate studying alone, with Ning-san we'd agreed to quiz each other with flashcards, how do you usually study." 

"Wei Ying and I quiz each other." Which he can't do because he's in the fake math class for failures.

"Alright! I can do that. --what track are you on, I don't remember if I asked, I was assuming artificing from our history class but I'm creative writing so that's not actually a very sound assumption." 

"Alchemy, actually. I think they're not offering History of Alchemy this term in Mandarin."

"Oh, cool, like your sister? I wasn't really following the conversation she and Mei were having earlier but it seemed like she was good at it, anyway."

"My whole family is alchemists. My sister, my--" he pauses. "Wei Ying."

.....right. Okay. There's history there. There's a lot of history there, it sounds like. Probably she should ask... someone other than Jiang Cheng... what the history there is.

"Huh, cool. So you're probably going to want to focus on the natural world parts of this class rather than the architecture parts— personally I'm looking forward to the music section since I do so many song-spells—"

"My affinity is animals, I wonder if it'll give me animal spells."

Oh, that's the most reassuring possible explanation for the terrarium.

"I think one of the classic examples of fibonacci spirals is nautilus shells? And the table of contents had something about body proportions, I didn't read ahead that far though." 

"I hope I don't get a spell to change animals' proportions, that seems like it would hurt them."

"I also hope that! But I just meant it's clearly not affinity-irrelevant, right, it might not be your hardest math class but the point of giving it to you seems like it isn't the math." 

Wei Ying doesn't have a corpse math class, he doesn't say.

Instead he angrily opens his textbook. "Wen Ning, do you have the flashcards?"

"Yes." He hands them over.

Ayako quietly moves 'ask Yanli what the hell is going on with her brothers' forward a few days on her mental calendar and starts working on flashcard quizzing. 

Wen Ning stutters and fails to answer any of Ayako's questions.

She doesn't, visibly, react to that in any particular way. Just moves on and asks Jiang Cheng. But if this happens more than once she's going to stop asking Wen Ning things entirely, still doing her best not to call attention to why. 

Oh, she thinks he's a disappointment too. That makes sense.

He curls up into himself.

And when the study session is done she says "I can explain the math to you if you want me to? Or I can figure out a way for us to study where nobody's looking at you." 

"The... second thing would be nice?"

"You should probably just do his homework for him, he's not going to get it."

"I mean, if he winds up needing me to do his homework, I will wind up doing that, I have no objections to doing this homework twice. But I hate studying alone and explaining things helps me learn them and Mei isn't in this class, so." 

"I mean, Wen Ning, you know I like you, but you're not going to understand any of this."

Wen Ning nods furiously.

"Well, regardless, I'll be better off for having explained it, so it's not like it matters much either way." 

Shrug.

"I guess that's what she's paying you for."

"Yeah. Anyway, I think we're done for today?" 

"Yeah. See you at dinner?"

"See you at dinner!" 

And she leads Wen Ning to... hm. She didn't actually think this through. How about her room, which is more alone than the library. 

He obediently goes where he's led to.

Ayako's room isn't nearly as spartan as Jiang Cheng's, but she hasn't really put time or effort into it yet; she has a poster up of the outer senshi from Sailor Moon along with a few others of city lights and stage productions Wen Ning doesn't recognize, a dreamcatcher inherited from one of last year's seniors hanging on the wall above her bed, a few yards of patterned fabric folded neatly on the desk, a set of tuning forks on top of the fabric.

"Sorry. I-- wasn't sure whether it would help, if we were basically ignoring you? But it seems like it didn't, so." 

"I don't mind. I know I'm just holding everyone back."

"...well, I still don't want to scare you. And I meant what I said to Jiang Cheng, explaining things to you is only going to help me learn the material better." 

"I can try not to be scared, ma'am?"

"That's not--"

Whyyy this.

...you know, she reminds herself, there is in fact a solution to the thing where everything you do to avoid freaking out Wen Ning just freaks him out more, and it is to stop trying so hard. 

"...you don't have to do that," she says. "In the meantime, I would like to try to explain math to you, because if I can't explain something to someone else then I don't actually understand it myself." 

"Okay, I can do that. I do it for my sister all the time."

"Right! Cool. So, the Fibonacci sequence is this set of numbers that starts with 0 and 1, and..."

Her recounting of the concept of the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio involves fewer pictures than the textbook used, because she's speaking out loud, but a much higher percentage of them are squares drawn on graph paper as opposed to works of art with a spiral overlaid on top. 

Wen Ning pays very close attention and hopes that there's not going to be a test.

There will not be a test, but when she gets to the end of a section, she says, "So did that make any sense, I can slow down or go in a different order or something if it'd help." 

"That made sense!" Wen Ning says, as he would whether it made sense or not.

(It mostly did.)

"....did it actually, or are you just saying that." 

"...yes...?"

What is the right answer!

"It's okay if it didn't." She keeps her voice a little gentler than she'd usually be. "Just, I'd like to know, because that tells me where my understanding might not be as complete as it seems from the inside." 

Wen Ning very quietly brings up one or two things he didn't understand.

As earnest a smile as she can physically produce.

"Thank you for telling me." 

Hm, what if she explains it this way instead, and instead of numbers she just has the shapes— 

He's helping make sure that Ayako understands things so it doesn't matter if he's very stupid.

He tries to repeat this to himself until he believes it.

The shapes are better but they still flip around in his head a lot.

Whenever he says out loud that he's confused by something, he gets the response, "Thank you, that's really helpful, let's try it a different way." What if they draw the shapes, so he doesn't have to hold them in his head? 

This is easier, he thinks.

It still takes him a lot of time to get it.

That's okay. They can't do this every day, she'll have other homework, but right now she's mostly interested in proving to Wen Ning and to his sister and frankly to herself that he can too learn things, if his teacher is patient. 

"Thank you," he says finally.

"You're welcome."