Masozi takes another drink when the bottle reaches him again. "We should do math! I think that'd be fun. And I wanna see if being drunk makes me better or worse at Mandarin so you should do my flashcards with me." 

Nie Huaisang puts his head on Jiang Cheng's shoulder.

He has drunk enough that he has an excuse for this and no one is going to think he likes it when he's sober or that every time Nie Huaisang touches him is one of the most treasured moments of his life. He puts his arm around Nie Huaisang's shoulder.

"No math. I have to do enough math at school already."

"Zaizai doesn't like sex so you and Jiang Cheng can look at porn while Zaizai and I do math. --Man, remembering to speak in two languages while drunk is going to build SO much mana."

"It really is."

Nie Huaisang is so warm.

Being drunk does not in fact make the idea of looking at porn sound any more appealing. 

It also makes it harder to do arithmetic in his head, as he quickly discovers, but it's not like that's the most interesting part of math anyway. "Wei Wuxian you should give me more algebra problems to solve! Or make up a logic puzzle, those logic puzzles were really good." 

"Hm. If I give you one grain of rice today and two tomorrow and four the next day, how many grains of rice am I going to give you at the end of the month?"

"....Um, it depends if you're going to keep following the same rule about giving me twice as much rice each day? And if you run out of rice at some point." 

"Same rule and it takes place in Math Land where I can have as much rice as I want."

Masozi giggles. "I wanna live in math land! No one would ever starve, it'd be so good. ...Okay, do you mean the end of this month, or once it's been a month from now? ...Is that a long month or a short month, aren't some of them different numbers of days?" 

"Let's say thirty days."

"Okay. So I can...just count to thirty and double it each time? One is one, two is two, three is four, four is eight, five is sixteen, six is thirty-two, seven is sixty-four...? This is going to get really repetitive, I think there must be a smarter way of doing it but I dunno what. ...No, I can't just say 'thirty times two' - that's only sixty - huh, why doesn't that work, it's...doing a different thing than that...? It's not two times thirty, it's two times itself thirty times in a row - no, twenty-nine times, because the first day is just one... Hmm. Okay I think there has to be a clever way you can do this but I can't think of it because I'm drunk." Which is so unfair. 

"Do the street fighting math. Can you guess about how many grains of rice I'm going to have to give you on the thirtieth day?"

"I wanna...try to find the pattern? If I see how much bigger it gets between one and five and ten and fifteen then maybe I can guess how much bigger it'll keep getting? One is one, five is sixteen, ten is...hmm, right, I was only at seven days. Sixty-four times two is - a hundred and twenty - a hundred and twenty eight? That's eight days. Nine days is - two hundred and, and forty, no, and...fifty six. 256. And - I think that's actually the same number of steps. It's four steps from one to five and another four steps from five to nine. ...I wonder if 256 is sixteen times sixteen?" 

He closes it eyes. Focuses intently. 

"- It is! So I can - do multiple steps at once, I think? and now I know that eight steps is 256. So I can multiply that by itself and get to sixteen steps. ...Except I'm going to say it's 250 because it's street fighting math and that's easier. 200 times 200 would be four with four zeros - forty thousand? 300 times 300 would be ninety thousand. 250 times itself is in the middle so it's - um - about 65 thousand? ...And then if I multiply that by itself that gets me thirty-two days! Which is too many but I can just divide it by two again twice..." 

It turns out that when he's drunk, this is too much mental arithmetic.

"I'm going to pretend it's sixty thousand though, so it's easier. Thirty-six and eight zeroes. That's...um...three is a thousand, six is a million, it's - thirty six hundred million. I guess that's three billion and a bit? And then I need to divide it by two, that's - eighteen hundred million - and by two again, that's nine hundred million. ...I simplified a lot of things there but I think you'd have to give me about a billion grains of rice on the thirtieth day which is SO MUCH." Pause. "Is that right did I do it right?" 

"You're amazing. You're going to kick ass at Street Fighting Math."

Masozi is so delighted! He bounces and grins. "Tell me another one! ...Oh, oh! I wonder how big a bag you would need for a billion grains of rice. I bet you couldn't carry it. Should I figure that out?" 

"I assume you haven't gotten to the formula for the area of a sphere in geometry yet, should I just give that to you? --also, isn't drunk math great?"

In the corner, Nie Huaisang and Jiang Cheng and Wen Ning have been passing the drinks back and forth and are now thoroughly intoxicated.

Nie Huaisang has his head on Jiang Cheng's lap and does NOT have his hair played with because he DOESN'T HAVE ANY HAIR. "Why don't I have any hair, a-Cheng?" he says plaintively.

Jiang Cheng is patting Nie Huaisang's head and feeling warm and soft in a way that isn't all about the alcohol. "I like your hair. It's fuzzy."

"You just like fuzzy things."

"Yeah..."

Wen Ning is behaving identically to how he normally behaves except that he is smiling and internally he feels very happy and well-liked and a little bit like he is about to fall over.

Everyone seems to have forgotten he exists, which is probably the best possible outcome.

"I wanna try doing street fighting math to guess it!" Masozi looks around. Everyone should know how fun math is. "Wen Ning! Lan Wangji! Do you wanna do drunk math with us?"

...Oh no, Wen Ning doesn't speak Mandarin, does he. How do you say 'math' in Mandarin. Masozi says some words that he thinks mean 'want speak math?' because he can't remember the right word to use to describe doing math, but it could easily mean something completely different by accident.