Work Text:
“4.87539728e-8,”
Gakushuu Asano’s right eye twitched slightly. Still, he put down his pen and turned around, purple eyes easily finding Karma sitting with his front to the back of his chair, left arm and head resting on top of it, his right hand still scribbling down numbers.
“Is that related to our work in any way or should I ignore it like the rest?” he asked.
Like every random thing and comment Karma had spouted out ever since they sat down to work at the library. He was used to it by now but it was still irritating.
“It was the probability of us being paired up again for maths homework. If it were random, I mean,”
Gakushuu sighed. Unrelated to their work, then.
“Can you focus?”
“I’m done,”
“It’s not ‘done’ if it’s chicken scratch and I can’t read it,” he warned.
Karma laughed and tossed him his half of their work, three pages of exercises stapled together. Gakushuu frowned but took it. He hated their teacher.
At first he had loved her. Unlike a lot of maths teachers, she wasn’t fixated on a single method. The only thing that matters is the result, she would say, and ideally, a single person should be able to use multiple methods.
And then...She said that she’d regularly assign group homework where students would be paired and have to resolve sheets of exercises together. And that she would pick the pairs herself. Based on the methods she saw them use in their first test, and their grade.
As soon as she had said that, Gakushuu had known he was screwed. There was only one person with the same grade as him but very different methods.
They had tried working around it by each doing half of the work but it had been painfully obvious. So now they did that: each doing half the work then giving it to the other to change a few things here and there and make it look like they truly did it together.
What? Technically they were doing it together! They were sitting together at the library and he had to suffer through Karma’s absolute inability to focus for longer than twenty minutes.
He went over the exercises, adding a few things here and there. Karma’s way of solving maths problems was...Very much like him. He worked in short but productive bursts. He knew the standard method, there was no denying it, but he was good at thinking outside the box and it showed. He would find shortcuts that would allow him to go through the problems quicker, yet his answers were still clear to the corrector. Though, Gakushuu had found he could be destabilized by strangely worded instructions. Part of why he managed to go through things so quickly was because he spent little time reading instructions, spotting and recognizing the familiar words in a few instants, and getting to work almost immediately.
“It’s correct,” he finally said as he was done, getting a chuckle in return.
“Of course it’s correct,”
“Sometimes you rush too much through things and make stupid mistakes,”
“It happened once, how much longer will you hold it over my head?”
“Depends. How much longer will you hold middle school exam results over my head?”
Karma laughed it off, slumping even more on his chair, looking at the strawberry blond boy with half-lidded eyes. Gakushuu resolved to ignore him so he could finish his last exercise and get this whole ‘group’ project over with.
The redhead stayed quiet (for now), simply watching him work. Gakushuu was like a machine, sometimes. Precise, systematical. He was always impressed by how long he could stay completely focused. Actually, he had no idea how long he could go for, as he would always be the one interrupting him at some point to get him to at least drink some water, eat, or actually go to sleep. If he had ever wondered about Gakushuu’s eye bags before, he had his answer now. He approached every problem point by point, never missed a single thing. Organized and methodical, issues arose when he stumbled over a problem. He definitely had a hard time just leaving it on the side to focus on the rest and come back to it later. He obsessed over the things he struggled with, in maths like in everything else, no matter how few things he actually struggled with.
“Here, mess it up,”
Karma reached out to take the sheets, picking his pen back up. He couldn’t deny that he was ‘messing up’ Gakushuu’s work, every so often removing parts of his oh so detailed answers that he deemed unnecessary.
“I think we are actually a good team,” he suddenly stated.
The horrified look he got in return was enough of an answer, making him laugh.
“I still prefer competing with you than working with you,” he reassured.
Gakushuu smiled at that, and lightly kicked his ankle under the table.
“Focus,”