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By the time the two of them manage to settle themselves inside of a study room, it's past sunset, the slow rise of the moon visible from the window of the room.
They've been wandering the corridors nonstop for the past 20 minutes– it's a wonder they even found the one they happened to stumble upon. In a little bout of good fortune, Liu Xiao manages to reach the study room first, barely seconds ahead of another group of students. Students are particularly vicious this time of the year, scouring the buildings left and right in search of study rooms. Final exams have sunken their poisonous claws into all of the students in their university, leaving none unscathed.
It doesn’t take long for them to settle into silence, the two quietly working side-by-side through their various study materials.
If he truly had control over his life, Xia Fei wouldn’t even bother trying to associate with Liu Xiao (likely, all of that energy would likely be poured into skirting around him instead). He can’t quite put his finger on the feeling, but the man unsettles him, the blonde’s hackles rising whenever the man turns his sharp gaze on him. It was pure dumb luck that the two happened to attend the same college– even dumber luck when they found themselves sharing classes with each other.
Whatever Xia Fei looked upon with disgust Liu Xiao took with glee, the Annoyance not even batting an eyelid as he pressed every single one of his buttons in that slick and subtle fashion of his. All in the name of “friendship”, his ass.
Shoving down a groan, Xia Fei turns back to the math problems before him, re-contemplating his life decisions as the numbers swim in his vision (if only he could turn back time and reverse his attempt at graduating with a degree in Applied Physics; and maybe make sure that his Calculus professor had never gotten a job at their university in the first place).
Xia Fei can feel an aneurysm coming from just staring at the numbers before him, so he supposes that desperate times call for desperate measures. With a sigh, he turns towards the asshole seated beside him, question at the tip of his tongue. “Liu Xiao, you took Multivariable Calculus last year, right?”
In the corner of his vision, he sees Liu Xiao gently placing down his book in hand, his eyes glinting with interest. “I did,” he says.
“Could you…” Oh god he was really doing this, wasn’t he? “...could you help me with these math problems?”
He’s only met with a questioning stare in response, so he stumbles a little as he rushes to clarify, face flushing slightly in embarrassment. “My professor created some really weird problems, and you’ve already taken the class so…” he trails off, not knowing how to finish.
Chuckling, Liu Xiao closes his book, placing it on top of the rest of his textbooks. “Take this as a token of my friendship.” Xia Fei scrunches his nose at that statement. Freakin weirdo.
At least he was getting help.
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Xia Fei hates being proven wrong.
“Help” translated to the two helplessly (it’s 12am, and Xia Fei is tired; he can’t help but make puns ) staring at the questions on the board, not quite understanding how to approach them.
Calculate the flux using the vector field〈x + exy , y + cosz (xy), 1〉 over the surface z = (x3 + y3 ) z bounded by z = r3 .
"Liu Xiao, I have to be hallucinating this."
Meanwhile, Liu Xiao stands in front of the white board with mild intrigue, looking more and more amused by the second. “Fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a question where the bounds extend to infinity.”
"How do I find the flux if there's no discernable region!?" he cries out, shoving his head into his palms.
He doesn’t even want to think about the mountain of word problems from his notebook that remain unvisited.
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It’s 2am, and they still haven’t looked at the flux problem yet. Instead, they’ve decided to spend their energy tackling some of the other topics. Perhaps it was Xia Fei’s shallow method of preserving his sanity, but fooling himself into thinking that he actually understood any of this material was currently the only solution in sight, so he made do and suffered through the math. Eventually, Liu Xiao turns his attention back to his own mountain of work, assisting wherever he can while trying to tighten the combination matrix for his analytics project.
It’s the boredom that prompts him to spark conversation, idly chattering while he works through another triple integral. “Did you know that on the second day of class, he gave us a quiz that had a degenerate parallelogram in it?”
Liu Xiao pauses his debugging, glasses gleaming underneath the fluorescent lighting of the study room. “Isn’t that the parallelogram with all four vertices on the same vector?”
“Yeah, but I ended up with a calculation error in the process, so I got two different imaginary lengths instead,” Xia Fei huffs out. “I had to write two entire paragraphs for the second part of the quiz explaining why I couldn’t take the cross product of imaginary numbers,” he mutters, scribbling down the solution for the question he was working on.
“Your professor sounds interesting.”
“Of course you would say that,” he says rolling his eyes, and they fall back into silence.
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“What I want to know is who the hell uses Epsilon Delta on a day-to-day basis.”
“You’re doing your proof wrong." Xia Fei turns his glare on Liu Xiao before faltering slightly at the serious expression painted on the man’s face. Resigned, he wearily erases everything he wrote on the board, now pondering as to how to restart.
Just as he finishes wiping his whiteboard clean of marker, Liu Xiao’s expression morphs, facial features relaxing into a small grin. "Heh, that was a lie."
Xia Fei was going to end him. No scratch that, Xia Fei was gonna castrate him.
"You piece of–"
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It’s 4am when Liu Xiao takes a small break from his work, finally directing his full attention to Xia Fei’s newest crisis (he didn’t know if he could exactly label it new if this was the blonde’s 18th unsolvable integral, but he holds his tongue for now). And as any good 'friend' should, he really does try to help. However, there are times when some situations are lost causes, and this was certainly one of those situations.
“What is it that your professor always says… that the devil is in the details?” he quips, lightly patting Xia Fei’s back as the blonde buries his face into his arms, holding back tears.
Xia Fei’s response is barely audible, sounding slightly choked. “I feel like this class would be easier if he stopped throwing in those devils.”
Liu Xiao sighs before standing up. “I’ll grab you some coffee.” When he doesn’t get a response he adds, “Power through, you’re almost at the end.”
At this Xia Fei pokes his head out, eyes rimmed red from exhaustion. “You’ll help me out with these Lagrange multipliers when you get back, right?”
He snorts, ruffling the blonde’s hair. “Yes, I’ll help you find your Lambdas.”