Ayako is in her room well before curfew.

It has been... an incredibly long day. As if two entire weeks, each individually made up of fairly long days, were crammed into a single day.

She thinks the politics at Shanghai's table are going reasonably well? Meng Yao thinks enough of her judgement to give her permission to talk to someone who will yell whatever she says while standing on a table. Wen Ning is learning math, Wen Qing will probably be happy about that. She thinks maybe she's got an angle on Jiang Cheng; she definitely does if "ask his sister what is up with him" counts as an angle.

The politics in the cafeteria at large... well. It's a little, she thinks, like having had swimming lessons in four feet of water for twelve years, and then suddenly being thrown in the ocean. It's not that you haven't been training for this your entire life, but it's so much bigger now.

Kyoto isn't worried about Masozi, if they were they'd be pulling her and Mei away from the Shanghai table and Haruto wouldn't be helping Lan Xichen announce things, so Ayako shouldn't worry about it either, and if Kyoto's strategy is to keep their freshmen at the Shanghai table then the upperclassmen have decided that they're being visibly unworried which means it's even more important that she follow their lead. It's a vote of confidence, a we aren't concerned for our freshmen's safety so you shouldn't be either-- Tokyo will probably follow suit if Kyoto holds, and she thinks she saw Xichen at the Beijing table, and probably someone is handling Seoul, and if the major enclaves all seem unconcerned then the smaller ones will take that as a signal that the people with the most information think it'll be fine, and if enough people believe that things will be fine then they will be.

(This is not a metaphysical sort of belief, like the students' knowledge of the blueprints reinforcing their truth. This is just plain, simple, politics. If everyone trusts that Lan Xichen has things in hand, and nobody panics, things will in fact go smoother, to the benefit of everybody. Probably.)

And-- Lan Xichen is Shanghai, she reminds herself, and does not have Ayako's best interests at heart, however good he's been to her or to anyone else. He'd sacrifice her in half a heartbeat to save his own people. That's fine. Whether or not to trust Lan Xichen is not her decision, it's her upperclassmen's, and they have decided yes, and so she doesn't have to trust him, she only has to trust them.

...that does, actually, make her feel better. She might have been thrown in the ocean, but she's not struggling against the currents alone; there are still people older than her and more skilled than her, who have been doing this for longer than her, that she can lean on.

She has a team. She's not alone. She tells herself those things, over and over, while she does her vocal exercises and then crunches to build mana and tire herself out before she goes to sleep. 

"I want to go to the opera," Meng Yao says.

Lan Xichen laughs. "Do you even know anything about the opera?"

"I know rich people go to it."

"All right," he says indulgently, "we can go to the opera. And nice restaurants. You can get a century egg."

"And we're going to fuck," Meng Yao says, "on a king-size bed, with silk sheets. And then I'm going to sleep in until noon and we're going to fuck again."

"I'll wake you up with a blowjob." Lan Xichen sighs. "I'm going to walk around blindfolded."

"Is there any point to walking around blindfolded, er-ge?" Meng Yao says teasingly. "Do you just want me to laugh at you when you walk into a wall?"

"The fact that you can."

Jiang Cheng hates Tomonori. 

What is Nie Huaisang thinking? It's the second day. You should at least keep it in your pants for the first week. Everyone else is settling in, finding their rooms, figuring out their class schedules, and here Nie Huaisang is draping himself all over this kid (who is somehow even less attractive than Jiang Cheng, what the fuck) like he has literally nothing to do in his entire life except try to get his dick sucked.

Maybe he has a really good affinity. Nie Huaisang is the kind of person who would be into people with really good affinities and not dumb affinities like animals that you can't even use because there are no animals in the Scholomance. 

Back home, when he felt like this, Jiang Cheng would pet one of the bunnies of unknown origin until he fell asleep. But there are no bunnies here and he doesn't need one. He had thought about asking for a stuffed animal but it would be stupid to use the weight on it, and anyway stuffed animals were for little kids and he was an adult. Madame Yu would have hit him for it and, worse, made that face. Wei Ying doesn't need a stuffed animal. Wei Ying isn't afraid of anything. 

He doesn't break down. 

He plans out the work he's going to need to do for Masozi's clothes. He sets up his first batch of moonshine with the fruit he took from the cafeteria (it's all nutrient slurry but he figures that maybe being shaped like fruit will help it decide that it needs to be alcoholic). He does his homework. He does sprints across his room, as fast as he can, hard enough that he wants to puke, hard enough that he's collapsed in the corner between sessions. 

And then he curls up on his bed and cries. 

He doesn't have time to mourn da-ge. He can cry at orientation, that's fine, it sets expectations early, but if he's going to be overemotional and useless he has to be overemotional and useless and beautiful and charming. No one wants a depressed lump as a lover or as a friend. He can choke up about da-ge when he needs to, when he'd benefit from someone thinking he's vulnerable (Lan Xichen is a soft touch, he's figured already, and Meng Yao will give him what he wants to keep him out of trouble). He is an ornament and not a tool, and that's bad enough, but a broken ornament is even less valuable than a broken tool. A broken tool maybe it's worth your while to fix.

But da-ge... he remembers da-ge being kind to the younger children, da-ge's pride when he mastered a sword form, the way that da-ge picked up every martial art you threw at him like he was born to do it, the joy da-ge took in moving, da-ge's love of Hong Kong martial arts movies, da-ge's quick anger and the way that Nie Huaisang could always soothe him even when no one else could.

(He remembered the way his parents looked at each other, when they were on the "just let the kid draw, he's going to die anyway, he might as well have a nice childhood" stage of the cycle. It said Nie Huaisang is going to die but at least we'll have Nie Mingjue for comfort.)

You can't have an ancestral tablet in here. It shows you're dwelling too much on the dead, and you don't survive if you're dwelling too much on the dead. Ancestral tablets, much like grief, are for if you get outside.

But Nie Huaisang draws a bird. He loves birds; of course he's going to decorate his room with them, there's nothing suspicious about that. It's a sketch of a beautiful blue sky, the sky that Nie Mingjue hadn't been able to see for two years and would never see again, and against it a raptor, sharp-taloned and sharp-eyed, about to pounce. 

He leaves a lot of white space so he can add in birds for everyone else he needs to mourn.