Rachel & Matt - Donuts, books and late-night cramming

[x-eidolon.livejournal.com]

Rachel and Matt do their regular thing in the kitchen in the dead of night. Only this time, a history book gets involved and Matt has to figure out how to teach American history to an idiot.


"It's 2am, do you know where you are?" Matt asked as he walked into the kitchen. That was the most common place for him to find Rachel and the most common time for her to be up. "And what are you eating? Can I have some?" he really should be asleep right now. The story of his life.

The redheaded teen pushed the box of sugar-glazed donuts over to him, not even questioning his presence as she dropped a highlighter onto an open book and propped her head up on her palm. “Sugary goodness. You’re not going to be able to sleep if you eat this.”

"Awesome," going to get some orange juice, Matt ate the donut happily. "Who needs sleep? What are you doing? This isn't your usual morose brooding," which was a nice change. He wasn't even dressed to sleep since he was wearing socks, sweatpants and a sweat shirt. That was way too many clothes for sleeping.

“Studying,” she said with a loud sigh, adopting her ‘morose brooding’ set up with her head thunking onto the table even as a hand reached out to steal Matt’s juice. “Trying to study. Not really.” There were doodles down the whole margin of the page she had been stuck on for the last 45 minutes. One of the doodles looked suspiciously like Essex getting his leg sawed off. Yeah, the-sitting-down-with-a-book thing wasn't working. Never did. “Fucking boring shit.”

"What're you studying?" Matt asked, reaching over for her book and running his fingers over it without permission. "Oh. History. That's easy. It's a story. Who did what, when and why?" It seemed from the context that she was studying the end of the Civil War. Blah, that was kinda boring, but not too bad. "You want some help?"

“Sure, I guess,” Rachel wrinkled her nose and blew her fringe off of her nose. “The war bits are fine, because that’s like tactics and learning from people’s fuck ups on the field or something. But the treaties and the dates and the—who really gives a shit where pieces of paper were signed anyways?”

The redhead threw her hands up in the air and snagged another donut, angrily tearing into it. Getting frustrated with something she (practically) voluntarily subjected herself to was stupid. And it wasn’t like the stuff she needed to know was hard. It’s just that… “It’s so pointless. And I don’t learn well from books.”

"If you don't learn well from books, why are you trying to read one and learn stuff?" that seemed counter intuitive. Matt sat down and made himself comfortable. He did alright reading and learning that way, but not everyone did. "That seems backwards."

“Because attending class is worse,” she said plaintively, almost whining, around a mouthful of donut. Not for the first time, Rachel found herself really, really missing the more active part of her telepathy.

"Why's that?" Matt asked. He had thought more along the line of tutors or at least, a more active form of learning. He was very hands-on, literally, when it came to things like that math and science, it helped him a lot. If he just read the book he could probably regurgitate the definitions and things, but actually understanding how it worked was a whole other issue. History though, he was good with.

“I have the attention span of a gnat and a problem with authority,” was the prompt response. She was quite obviously quoting someone else. Rachel eyed Matt for a while, then shook her head with a sigh. She could explain till the cows come home but he probably wouldn’t be able to understand her frustration to an appropriate degree without giving him more information. Then again, she’d probably end up telling him one day anyways. So what was the big deal? “Plus, I used to be able to pluck information from other people’s heads and learn that way.”

That was infinitely useful, "Past tense," he said, picking up another donut, "That sucks. No wonder you get so frustrated. Adapting to losing something like that is harder probably than the information you're trying to learn. You have to train your brain to do what you want in a whole other way," Matt was thinking about learning Braille and how to adapt when he first lost his sight.

“Yeah. Fucking fuck,” she said emphatically. “Makes me feel like a fucktard.”

"Okay, come on," Matt got up and tugged at her hand, gathering her book with his other, "This isn't helping. So let's go do something that might."

They paused to let Rachel grab the donuts and switch off the kitchen lights, but the redhead let him lead her away without any resistance through the dimly lit corridor. She didn’t ask him where they were going, even, implicitly trusting that he wasn’t going to lead her to doom of some kind.

2am was much too late for doom. Or early. Whichever. Instead, Matt led her to the currently unused recroom. "Okay. So. Sitting in front of a book isn't a good way to learn stuff. Talk to me, tell me what you know about this," he held up the book and flopped on a couch, making himself comfortable.

Uhm. Rachel sank back against the couch and closed her eyes – because hey, they forwent the lights again. “There were black slaves. Because reasons. The slaves and their slave states decided that enough was enough and that fuck it they weren’t going to stand for white people shit no more and so they created their own country. Then the civil war started -- although why it’s a ‘civil’ war when there are two countries involved, I dunno. Abe Lincoln was involved. Jefferson Davis was involved. A lot of people got killed. Uhm. The slaves lost the war? Because reasons. But then the American constitution got amended to give them American rights? So they won, really. And Lincoln was a nice dude.”

That was....okay, well, the idea was there, "You were good until the white people shit," Matt agreed, "Basically, the white people with slaves liked having slaves and didn't want to change that. And this is a good place to show where the winner writes the history books. The Northern states didn't recognize that the Southern states seceded, so they termed it a civil war. Since they won, it was the civil war and not something else. Except see, it was never actually about slavery at all. It was a side issue, but the whole thing was really more about money and economics," and if Matt had this wrong, hopefully it wasn't too off the mark. He hadn't taken US History that long ago, "The southern states were agricultural and had a more...almost feudal society in a lot of ways. Plantation owners were the lords of the estate and all that. The northern states were beginning to industrialize so there was a lot more social mobility. Plus, there was the issue of taxes and how did you count a slave? They were a person, but they were owned, you know? Or were they not people? "

“Oh-kay, wait. So the North attacked the South for their farms? Or because the South being a country pissed them off?”

"Because they wanted to tax the south for each slave to get more money," Matt explained. 'Why' almost was always 'money.' "And the slave owners said no, they didn't count for taxes. That's the 3/5ths compromise," which made no sense, "The south didn't want to pay more taxes per person, it cut into the profit," whereas the north didn't have slaves, so every person was taxed. "Also, yes. The South seceding pissed them off."

The redhead blinked at him, her slow nod morphing quickly into a vigorous shake of her head. “Matt. Dear, darling, wonderful Matt. I think y’should just assume I know nothing about the Civil War” – which probably was the case – “and start right from the very, very beginning. Please?”

Laughing, Matt opened her book to go over things and make sure he was getting everything correct per the test and all that. What he retained might be different from what he was supposed to remember after all. That was the way these tests worked.