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“So this is your partner, Ratio? I have to admit that I’m a little surprised that you have decided to share your life with somebody. Always thought you would become the one to be forever married to his research.”
The man in the ill-fitting anthracite suit sounded proud of his bad joke and the woman next to him giggled sillily. Aventurine found it hard to suppress the urge to roll his eyes. In contrast to him, Ratio did not bother to hide his annoyance, but those two nuisances probably did not even notice because they were too busy checking Aventurine from head to toe.
“Such a handsome man!” the woman proclaimed. “What a loss for womankind!” Once again, Aventurine felt lucky for his flawless poker face.
“Where did you get to know each other? If Ratio is interested in you, you must have quite the impressive academic record yourself, right? Where did you study?”, the man started his own investigation about what it could have been that made Aventurine interesting in the esteemed Dr. Ratio’s eyes, causing said doctor to finally run out of patience.
“We met each other at work. And we are here today for work, too. So would you please excuse us?” The annoyance in his voice was clear as daylight and left no room for any objections. Aventurine was more than happy to take the arm Ratio offered him and follow him outside.
“Old friends of yours, Ratio?” he teased when they were out of reach for any possible eavesdroppers. It earned him a stern look and an unamused huff from his partner.
“Who do you mistake me for? I was unlucky enough to share a classroom with them for several years, but we were as far away from being friends as imaginable. As you can tell, they are nothing but fools.”
Friends or fools, their interrogation had ruined the mood for Aventurine. He did not enjoy occasions like this in the first place - a soiree to celebrate the release of a new scientific study Ratio had worked on with a huge team of interstellar researchers - but meeting his former classmates had made him feel even more out of place than usual.
Ratio was a man with several doctor titles who had spent a significant amount of his time in schools, academies and labs all over the cosmos. Aventurine had only recently seen a classroom from the inside for the first time in his life when he had picked Ratio up from his work as a teacher of the Intelligentsia Guild. The question that annoying man had asked, the simple ‘Where did you study?’ was also the one Aventurine hated the most.
Back at the time before he and Ratio became a couple, Aventurine had seen no problem in telling the doctor that he had never been to school. Even then he had already known that this man would not blame him or look down on him just because of this, and he had been right with this judgment. However, people like this former classmate of his were different. They were like hyenas lurking for prey, and in their world, he was a limping deer. It would have been alright if they had just looked down on him, but he knew that this was not what they were searching for. His lack of education would reflect poorly on Ratio, and he would not allow for that to happen. He needed to do something about it.
He addressed the topic when they were lying in their bed after they had finally been able to leave the soiree. Aventurine could tell that Ratio was exhausted - socializing seemed more straining to him than a whole day of research or an extensive workout - but he knew he had to get this out of his mind if he was hoping to find any sleep that night.
“Can you teach me what it takes to brush up my basic knowledge?” he asked the sleepy doctor next to him, causing him to look fully awake in just a few seconds.
“Like… the stuff usual people learn in school?” Aventurine tried to further explain his request. He could tell that there were a lot of thoughts in Ratio’s head right now, but as expected, he did not pry. If somebody was willing to learn, the doctor was just too happy to encourage this.
They started their little school project just a day later. Ratio set up a schedule and got learning materials for him, and Aventurine caught a glimpse of what being a student must feel like. Sciences, languages, history - there was so much to learn. Turned out that even his knowledge of math was rather basic, although he had been pretty confident about it because of all the things he had taught himself for his job with the IPC.
They held their lessons every day after work, and Aventurine did his best to be a diligent student. He loved the way Ratio taught him, and he wanted to live up to his expectations. However, he was a grown up man with a full-time job and very little experience in learning systematically, so it should have been no wonder that he sometimes struggled. Memorizing the Latin grammar felt like torture after a hard day’s work, and Ratio seemed to have little understanding why reaction equations did not come natural to him.
Disappointing Ratio who put so much effort into this was out of question, so Aventurine started to work even harder. He stayed awake a little longer to review his vocabulary once again and got up a little earlier to read another chapter about cosmic history. He was pretty sure that he would never become a genius like Ratio, but at least he no longer wanted to shy away from smalltalk with his partner’s well-educated colleagues because he had not the slightest clue what they were talking about.
Like this, Aventurine grew smarter, but also more tired each day, and one particularly busy friday afternoon, he got up from his office chair at the IPC to get himself a glass of water against his throbbing headache just to find the world around him spinning and turning dark all of a sudden.
“You fool!” was the first thing he heard when he woke up the next time. It took him a minute to understand that he was lying in an infirmary bed at the IPC’s hospital, but only a second to understand who was with him.
“I love you, too.” he giggled, followed by a cough caused by the dryness in his throat. Turned out he had collapsed with a light fever - a result of exhaustion, if the nurse was to believe.
Ratio helped him to sit up and drink a few sips of water before he continued to insult him:
“Is it really that hard for you to keep yourself alive and healthy? Have you not learned a single thing?”
Had he not? Suddenly, Aventurine’s head seemed to be too heavy for his shoulders, and he decided that Ratio’s chest was the best place for it to rest.
“I’m sorry for being a disappointment.” he mumbled. “I really tried, but it seems that I cannot remember all those dates and suffixes and equations… At least I still look quite photogenic once I get rid of the bags under my eyes, haha. Maybe you can just show around a nice picture of me when you meet old classmates next time?”
With his head so close to his chest, Aventurine felt Ratio’s deep sigh with his whole body.
“So this is what all of this is about?” he asked.
“If by ‘this’ you mean whether this is about me being an idiot who will put nothing but shame on you: yeah, it is.”
“Aventurine…” Ratio sighed once again, and the addressed man knew it was bad when Ratio scolded him with his name instead of something like ‘damned gambler’ or ‘little fool’.
To his surprise, the next thing Ratio did before speaking up again was wrapping his arms around his significantly smaller frame.
“I encourage your willingness to learn, but if this is the sole reason for it, I will no longer be your teacher. How many times do I need to tell you that it does not matter to me that you never went to school?” Ratio asked him, and his voice was much gentler than before.
Aventurine found it hard to explain his point of view, but he tried anyway: “It may not matter to you, but it matters to people like those two classmates of yours! What do you think they would have said if I had told them about my lack of education? They would have looked down on you for wasting your time on someone like me, and I… I cannot stand this thought!”
“People like them do not matter.” Ratio stated plainly, and Aventurine knew that he meant it.
Still, he could not leave it at that: “But there may be others who matter. And I… have nothing to offer. Neither to them, nor to you. You are the one who always teaches me. You are the one who catches me when I fall. Every time. But what do I have to give to you in return?”
Much to his surprise, Ratio started to chuckle: “You really have no idea how much you teach me, huh?”
Aventurine now took the effort to move his head up from Ratio’s chest to be able to look him into the eyes, and Ratio’s affectionate gaze met his own confused one.
“Book knowledge is not everything, you know? For example… I had never felt physical attraction before I met you, and I had no idea how to show it.”
Now it was Aventurine’s turn to laugh: “Are you just praising me for introducing you to sex, doctor?”
Somehow, Ratio managed to remain serious: “Yes, amongst other things. My life has always been highly structured and rational. In the beginning, I thought that what you brought in was just chaos, and it took me some time to understand that this was the wrong way of looking at it. You are affectionate and animated, your way of thinking is unique and fascinating. You have all those traits I lack, and no matter how much I curse you, I would never trade having you around for anything else in the entire universe.”
It was hard to stay immune if one was praised so earnestly, and before he could once again hide his face by burying it into Ratio’s chest, a blush spread on Aventurine’s face.
“Okay, okay, you won. Maybe I am not completely useless after all…” he mumbled. Who would have expected that the harsh doctor could be such a flatterer? And the worst of it: as the doctor of truth, there was no doubt that he really meant his words.
“So, what do you say, gambler? Shall we continue to teach each other?” His tone was so gentle that it made Aventurine’s heart skip a beat.
“I would love that.” he replied quietly.
And so they continued, but without the former pressure Aventurine had put onto himself. The doctor would sometimes shake his head when his student used his new-found knowledge to scribble a bad Latin joke onto the door of their fridge (Oswaldo Schneider Consutor stultus est.) and Aventurine would sometimes chuckle in disbelief when he saw this genius of a man struggle with something as simple as enjoying to watch a movie without overthinking. (“But why did he throw a cake to the other’s face? What’s the deeper meaning? They did not even have an argument before?” - “Actually, doctor, it is just supposed to be funny. No deeper meaning whatsoever.”)
Ratio even made sure that Aventurine also experienced the other things every student used to do in school. They made little field trips with prepared lunch boxes and projects where Aventurine was supposed to craft something like a solar system with all its planets. It was a little silly, but also fun and very sweet, although Aventurine feared that his mischievous nature sometimes was a little too close to that of an actual child nagging his teacher. However, Ratio did not seem to mind it, and so their lessons stayed a part of their daily routine for a long time.
And so, the next time somebody asked him about his education, Aventurine had no problem finding the right answer: “I didn’t get the chance to receive a formal education, but we all know that I got the best teacher right here at my side.”