Annaka leaves.
...Masozi watches her go, dully, still sitting on his bed. He notices, vaguely, that he seems to be shaking again and that his chest still feels tight and locked-up. It doesn't seem very important, though.
What is he supposed to do now? Is he still a prisoner under guard?
Masozi looks pleadingly over at Lan Xichen.
Masozi is kind of dubious! But for now it sounds like they don't have alcohol anyway, and the easiest thing to do is to go along with what Wei Wuxian wants to do.
"So everyone else here is, like, spell-competent in English, so it's gonna be you and me in English and Yanli and Jiang Cheng talking in Mandarin and Lan Zhan refusing to talk at all. Don't worry, they are definitely gossiping about you behind your back about how terrible your haircut is."
"Pleased to meet you." To Wei Wuxian, "- I need to learn Mandarin. Can you say the things they say in English after they say them, I think that would help me recognize the words better."
"Yep! Sounds good. And no editorializing, I promise." To Jiang Cheng: "I'm going to be translating between you guys and Masozi."
"Jeez, it's like no one trusts me."
(He translates this exchange to Masozi.)
Lang Wangji is convenient to listen to for these purposes! Since he doesn't say very many words at once! Masozi repeats the word he said under his breath.
And then waits to see if Wei Wuxian is going to start a conversation, because despite his earlier assurances, it turns out that he is still feeling very shaken, and incredibly exhausted.
He says, in Mandarin and then English: "Here's shijie's candy! You can have any opinion on it you want but remember that if you don't like it you won't need Annaka to murder you."
"It do not!" Jiang Cheng says in heavily accented English, and then remembers himself and repeats himself in Mandarin.
...This is probably supposed to be funny? Masozi is confused. He smiles at Jiang Cheng, though, and carefully repeats the Mandarin under his breath, and then he'll try Yanli's candy!
Yanli's candy is in fact very good; it's sweet and it sort of melts in your mouth.
....Honestly it's very weird how much less sad and exhausted this makes him feel?
He starts to say 'it's very good', and then instead digs out his notebook which is already almost filled with notes on Mandarin characters and pronunciations, and hunts through it, and then tries to say 'it's good' although, he is guessing, probably not very grammatically.
Masozi beams at him. And then flips around to try to figure out what other things he can say in Mandarin.
- he can say that he's happy, apparently, he knows the words for that. It's not uncomplicatedly true but it is, in fact, mostly true, and he doesn't know the words to say the more complicated version, so he says the simple version instead.
Yanli beams at him, with an effect something like stepping from a smoky room into the warmth of the sun.
His sister used to smile almost exactly like that. (Well, accounting for the very different ethnicities and features.) Not the baby one, the sister who was a bit older than him. She died when he was seven or eight, he thinks.
- he doesn't want to be crying, but apparently his emotions are still very all over the place, today.
Does Masozi have some kind of name-related trauma. He changes the subject immediately.
"We got you books about math from the library. I think nonmagical ones but you'll still have to be nice to them or they'll wander off." He pats the logic puzzle book. "You're so good at building mana. Masozi's going to love you."
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