A Piece of Cake [poppu]

Wei didn't like it when Hari wrapped gauze around his injured arm. Though, looking at the smiley sticker on his gauze, it did cheer him up a little bit about the whole thing.

Well, not really, but he guessed getting a nice sticker out of the whole thing was better than getting nothing at all, so he wouldn't even try to complain.

Hearing Hari clear his throat got his attention and he listened as Hari spoke in his language, not quite getting the intonation right and flat out supplanting the English word 'baking' into the sentence twice. He wasn't so sure how he felt about being called a big monkey butt but all the same--

"Shao," he said effortlessly. "Shao is the word you'd use for baking food."

Still, he wasn't so certain... after all, just because he was invited didn't mean he wasn't ruining everything and getting in the way. He pushed those thoughts out of his mind for the moment, sliding a small smile on his face to at least get Hari's concerns off of him for the time being.

"How long does it bake for?" He asked.

"Yes," Wei said softly, his smile not reaching his eyes. "Yes, it's perfect."

Another sticker was put on his face, but he wasn't totally sure what it was. The monkey boy tilted and squrimed and arched, screwing up his eyes to get a look at what exactly he'd just had poked onto his face and for what reason. Well, he guessed he understood the /reason/--he wanted to make him feel better. And what better way to get someone out of the dumps than to poke their faces with stickers?

Wei took the cookie from Hari and bit into it, feeling the whipped cream enter his nose but not particularly worrying about it.

Forty-five minutes until the bread would be done. What could he do for 45 minutes?

"Since you can't eat a lotta stuff," he started, his English stabilizing and his enunciation improving since switching languages. "What is okay for you to eat?"

The little monkey listened closely as Hari talked about what he could eat and what made him sick, nodding occasionally to show he was listening. This was weird, he realized in the middle of Hari's sentences. It was usually him who carried their conversations, talking about home and his big brother and his mom and what his hometown was like, letting him remember them in a sweet way through rose-tinted glasses of better times.

But it was weird, he realized, that Hari was carrying their conversation now. He was used to Hari asking a question and Wei answering his question immediately, even if it cut in the middle of another sentence he was saying.

And apparently Hari noticed this as well.

How would he explain to Hari how lonely he was most of time, how much he missed the orange cliffs and dry heat of home? How could he explain that he wasn't smart enough to come to this school, and that he was having good day if he came back to his room with only one F jostling in his backpack? How could he explain that even though he only spoke two languages, the two languages jostled in his head and stepped on each other's toes, and that reading a book in English was such a struggle that he hadn't picked one up in weeks.

Not even his text books?

"I'm fine." He said, biting into the big cookie again to occupy his mouth. "I've just been on edge. School's hard."

In truth, school was only about half the problem. He was starting to get this recurring nightmare every so often that was really impeding his ability to have a good night's sleep, coupled with his homesickness and sickening displays of romance and overt sexual-ness of the campus around him, it put him in an awkward and rather uncomfortable place. It had affected him so much that he'd had to go to the infirmary for it, where the nurse misdiagnosed it as simply an upset stomach and gave him some medicine before letting him fall asleep on the bed in the office.

She ignored his insistence that it wasn't his stomach, but rather an allergy.

When he mentioned adjusting to human society, Wei gave a little shrug. "There's not much to adapt to," he said quietly, folding his toes and finishing his cookie. "Turpan City had a lot of people people. The only difference is if people people saw me in Turpan they would call animal control."

Then Hari said the few words that Wei both really wanted to hear but also really didn't want to hear. Wei liked Hari. He helped him bake and gave him food and didn't make him feel bad and worried about him like a weird mix of Houlin and Mama. He was comforting and supportive, but still Wei couldn't fight a sense of unwieldy and looming unease.

The monkey trusted him completely yet...

Yet...

Wei smiled, his showing his canines and giving an emphatic nod, his whole outlook seeming to change instantly. "I'll climb the wall if I ever need you!"

The familiar smell of banana bread entered his nose and he hopped over to the oven, sniffing at it haughtily, not unlike how a dog or a cat would inspect a vacuum cleaner or a broom they'd just been swatted with. "Is it done? Is it done?"

He frowned at when he said that it wouldn't be done for another ten minutes, but he supposed that he'd waited this long, he could wait a little while longer. Wei trotted back to his seat and plopped into it, drawing his feet up to the lip of the chair, his dexterous toes curling around the edge to give him a bit more grip.

"You're getting a roommate?" He asked, intrigued. He wondered what kind of person Hari would be able to live with if contact was a problem. Maybe someone who needed to live in a plastic bubble, like the kind he saw on TV. Either way, he wanted to meet Hari's new roommate. Maybe if he made friends with the guy they could have sleepovers.

"I don't have a roommate," he said, giving his head a small tilt. "They tried to give me one, but no one wanted to room with me. Apparently I scream too much."