A / N :

Do you ship any of the characters? Drop your ships here.

This chapter hits my Soji (Soph x Benji) heart right in the feels. Enjoy <3

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THE PAST FEW WEEKS HAVE been the brightest and most stress-free since I learned of the Monarchy.

Terrence hasn't once tried to approach me, and every revolutionary I've asked has a similar experience; they've been left well alone. I think Brittany's really taking into consideration what I said to her when we had our confrontation. When I saw a sliver of the vulnerable person inside her icy shell.

Well, that's the only reason I can think of for this retreat. After Thanksgiving break, the winter sports season officially began, shining a fresh spotlight on Reece's star position on the basketball team, but so did the academic competition season. Delaney and Benjamin both take their roles as club Presidents seriously, watching out for any sign of sabotage like that which befell them in previous years.

The Debate and Mathletes Clubs have conducted their tryouts and now practice after school three days a week. Delaney seems to be doing a good job of shouldering the role she's had for three years now but Benjamin is different. Lately, he's been austere, completely focused and largely absent. He spends every spare moment, including lunch, stolen away somewhere, probably studying and training himself.

Drew came up with the idea of visiting him today. "I heard that the Mathletes get so focused when they work you can do literally anything to them, and they won't react!"

"Like the Buckingham Palace guards?" I arch an eyebrow.

"Yes! How can we not test it out?" And he then runs off, probably to prove his theory.

So I'm left staring after him, wondering, "Who the hell told him that?"

Leah smiles secretively. "Delaney did."

It's pure chaos in the math classroom.

The desk and chairs have all been pushed to the back of the room, stacked in haphazard piles, to give the front of the room some space. There are four desks positioned equally from each other and their respective wall, each with a group of students around it, all huddled around pieces of paper.

Hushed and concentrated, wholly given to the task at hand, like they're witnesses to the birth of a galaxy. The Mathletes all possess a paralleled sense of determination. One team seems to be in an argument; I catch slivers of swears intermingled with mathematical words and decide not to get involved with that fight. Cue the trash-talking Mathlete background music.

Benjamin stands at the front. He casts a long glance around the room, and I know that we've not escaped his keen gaze — but the way his eyes never pause makes me think he doesn't even register our presence.

Instead, Benjamin turns back to the student who approaches him. The younger, shorter boy has a slip of paper in his hands, thrust out to Ben's discerning eye. Benjamin consults a sheet taped to the whiteboard and gives him a new piece of paper. Then the student rejoins one of the tables, ostensibly working on a new question.

Drew is with one of the teams, hunched over a figure working hard at an equation. Oh, for fuck's sake.

Drew starts prodding the poor girl, waving a hand in her face, nudging her writing arm. Obviously annoyed beyond reason, the girl snaps her head up from her work. She glares darkly at Drew, and growls, "What do you think you're doing?"

The air changes quickly. From teeming with persistent energy to uninviting, positively hostile. Sensing he's made a mistake thirty seconds too late. Drew starts to back away, the way someone would back away from a wild wolf mistaken for a husky. But however apologetic Drew is, it's not nearly enough to stop the girl throwing her ruler and protractor at him.

So what does Drew do?

He screams and runs away from the girl, clinging to and taking shelter behind Benjamin's tall frame. "Save me, Benny!" Drew wails, rather hyperbolically.

She delivers to Drew a stern frown; a warning to never do that again. Soon after, it seems that Drew is not worth the effort, and she returns back to the math problems that previously captivated her. Benjamin drops Drew, who, through some impressive feat of acrobatics, has jumped into his arms bridal style.

After collecting and returning the stationery to its owner, Benjamin frowns at Drew, "What are you guys doing here?"

"To help you relax, Benny boy. I also heard you were like guards, and I had a theory to test."

Leah and I exchange grins at Drew's excitable method of speaking, jumping from here to there with no clear pathway between his thoughts. A bemused look flashes briefly in Benjamin's eyes, raising his eyebrows so they skim his hairline. It then dawns on him that this is Drew whom he's talking to, so he shakes his head and refrains from asking any clarifying questions.

"Well, now that you're here you may as well be of help. Um..." He scratches his head. "Leah, do you want to check the answers for us? I had to do it since we didn't have anyone else but this way, I could get some practice in."

Dutifully, Leah takes her position leaning against the whiteboard. The girl who threw her utensils at Drew suddenly gets up from her desk and runs out of the room, only to return a minute later. She brings her paper to Leah, who checks the board and nods, looking bored already. "Where did she go?" I ask Benjamin.

"Oh, I put a garbage can at the end of the hallway. They need to go around it and come back. It's for stamina."

The thought of running incessantly and having to solve maths equations makes me cringe. "Fun."

"It is for some people," Benjamin replies. "You can be an honourary Mathlete for the day. We need another member on our team and who knows, you might like it."

"Really? Trust me, math is not one of my strong subjects."

"Every subject is your strong subject." I glance bashfully towards him, but he interrupts quickly, "I'm in your AP Calculus class, remember?"

There's a pleased smile on Benjamin's face as if his organisation of the afternoon has shaped up to be cheerful and productive. He believes I'll be a fine Mathlete, yet I look at the stringent behaviour of his team, their seamless working, and realise—

I'll never be that good at working.

In the world of maths, I will float but never swim, and I'm content with that.

"It's just for today. Just remember your order of operations and you'll be fine."

A soft, sceptical chuckle is my only response because the event of me embarrassing myself still seems largely possible. "It's not going to be that easy."

Drew's voice makes its way to my ear, and every head in the room swivels to him as he says, "So the girls get roles, but not me?"

"You can be our cheerleader," Benjamin decides.

Drew's face falls just as mine lights up with laughter.

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An hour later, the practice is nearly at an end.

Our team has two more questions to answer before we've won the mock-competition.

Every so often, Drew will sarcastically yell a cheer. "Two, four, six, eight. Who do we appreciate? Mathletes! One, five, seven, nine. Who's going to kick your behinds? Mathletes!" Followed by a depressing little wave of his imaginary cheerleader pom-poms.

A fellow teammate of mine exclaims, "I got it!" on the penultimate question. She looks merely a year older than Luke, just learning the ropes, and I know this must be her first year of Mathletes.

"What'd you get?" Benjamin asks.

I glance over her arm, to see her answer. It's not what I got, and by the sly glint in Benjamin's eye, I can tell he arrived at a different answer, too. I don't have the heart to correct her. Benjamin should though because he's somewhat of a mentor to his Mathletes. Instead of setting her straight, he only says, "Run it up to Leah."

Obediently, with a swift purpose in her feet, the girl is gone with a rush of cool air. After she's left the room, Benjamin leans forward on his elbow, smiling calmly at me.

I narrow my eyes. "Why'd you let her run? She made a mistake, and you could have corrected her. In the competitions, that would be a huge waste of time."

"Ah, but—" another confident grin, "—in the competitions, I won't be in her team. Different age divisions. So telling her would mean to train her to rely on someone else to double-check her answers. And that's not what math is about. Self-sufficiency and intelligence over kindness, Sophie."

That knowing smile of his makes the back of my neck prick. I know he's right, he's logical, but I feel like wiping the grin off of Benjamin's face. If only he didn't deliver his point so smugly. Smartass.

When the girl comes back, her breathing is ragged. "My answer was wrong."

"That's fine," Benjamin tells her. "We're miles ahead of the other team. Try again."

"Forty-thousand, three-hundred and twenty?"

I thought Benjamin was going to shrug and let her run a wrong answer again. But he glances at me, and his dark blue eyes soften marginally. "Not quite. Do you have any input, Sophie?"

I push my working into the centre of the table. "Eighty-thousand, six-hundred and forty?" The girl looks a bit embarrassed, kind of surprised, but mostly embarrassed. I feel a bit bad now, she's only a freshman. He's pushing her way past the limits of her age group — if there is such a thing. I smile reassuringly. "I only guessed. It's just permutations."

Benjamin smiles proudly at me, throws his pencil in the air, and catches it pointing down. Then he writes the answer in his familiar neat handwriting and gives the paper to me. "You answer, you run."

Ah, no. Running is not my thing, even less so than maths. Put the two together, and I might cry. "Um, that's alright. We can—"

"Seriously, Sophie," Benjamin drawls, his deep blue eyes alight with mirth at my hesitance. "Imagine this was the competition. What would you do?"

Well, assuming my team was stupid enough to not pick an actually talented runner to do all the fitness, and somehow running was a part of the competition, and that I somehow was the fastest on the team, then I'd run, no question.

And I can tell by both the girl and Benjamin's expressions that the first lesson of Mathletes is not one about math at all. It is about not wasting a second of precious, limited time. "Run, Sophie. You're wasting time."

So I do, my legs shifting into gear with a rustiness that makes me cringe. I throw a swear over my shoulder at Benjamin, who laughs just loud and long enough for me to hear before I'm out the door.

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"So how does the whole competition thing work?" I ask Benjamin, stirring the generous topping of whipped cream on top of my hot chocolate.

He hasn't eaten the whole day, due to his aforementioned newfound habit of boarding himself away in the library or in the Mathletes room. The amount of training and studying he does lately is extensive, almost extreme.

When Benjamin said he was getting some food from the Stereo Shack, I had wanted to tag along, because I was parched from all the running and in need of sustenance. And maybe I missed seeing him around all the time.

"Well, it's not only one competition we participate in. Maths season starts alongside winter sports, and we send multiple teams to all the competitions we have. Each competition gets more and more selective because they feed into the selection competition for the American Maths Olympiad team."

"Wow. Intense."

Benjamin shakes his head bashfully. "Of course, that's not attainable for everyone. But I want everyone to go as far as they can. For me, that's taking back the victory Derek cost us last year at the Eastern Maths League."

Half an hour before Mathletes ended, I finally figured out what was bugging me about Benjamin's behaviour; he worked out the answers twice as quickly as any of our team, yet never answered them himself. Like he was holding himself back on account of the rest of his team.

Because, according to him, "I am not a runner," even though he has ridiculously long legs.

"For the regional competitions that lead up to the Eastern League, there are only four members per team. Sadly, the divide-and-conquer technique works really well when the competing school is so small. Since the Revolution started, enough people have joined to actually send a team for each age bracket."

At the mention of the Revolution, and the tragedy that preceded it, a memory glazes over his eyes. Must be New York. It obscures that familiar sharp look about Benjamin that usually shines out from behind his navy irises. Feeling the need to distract him, I ask more. "How is the League scheduled?"

It works. His eyebrows furrow for a second, before the best way to word his answer comes to his lips. I find it odd about Benjamin, how solving problems comes so quickly to him, but having conversations is a less familiar sensation. He was always polite, from our very first meeting, but it took him many more weeks to actually warm up to me.

"In Massachusetts, schools are split into north, south, west and centre regional divisions. The best three teams of each pool are put into the qualifying rounds with the other nine teams from all the different divisions. There the top-scoring six teams, regardless of which region they come from, go to the Eastern League finals in New York for semi-finals where it gets cut to two teams. Finals obviously produce the winning team, and each member gets a chance to sit the Olympiad selection exam as an individual. National fame and glory, to a certain extent."

"How far did you get last time, before...?"

Benjamin looks away, focusing intently on the small handheld radio perched in the centre of our table, next to a little flower vase filled with coloured stones. As if out of habit, he dips his hand in and sifts through the small stones.

Sifting through those stones is actually something I've heard of — one of my mother's oh-wow-this-town-is-so-great rants. It's an old Carsonville tradition, has been ever since the Shack opened. Fishermen used to bring the small stones and shells from the beaches with them on their trips to give them good luck, and deposit them in the diners and cafes they frequented upon returning. A lot of the eateries along the main strip in the town centre have those lucky stones in vases or pots. Something about taking a piece of home with them, and keeping a piece of the world at home.

Benjamin drops the stones suddenly, his stern, almost angry face coming back. "The semi-finals and finals happen over the same week. We didn't get to compete in either."

Sometimes I think Benjamin has an even bigger ego than Reece Dormer. Not that I see it a lot, but I've noticed that almost every single guy I've met has something they are super defensive about. It's just that their weaknesses differ.

If you avoid the subject of competition, Benjamin will be the most articulate guy on the planet. But he always wants to compare our scores in AP Calc, and he absolutely despises losing. Having to suffer through having Derek in the same class must be difficult to live through.

"I just wanted to win it so much. There was a lot at stake. For me, anyway."

His bitterness radiates like a lighthouse, sending a strobe of suffering, a cry for help, out to the world. I place my hand over his, watching his tired stare flicker to me and soften a bit. His fingertips are cold, but his palm is warm.

I don't why I assumed Benjamin was fine. In all my fretting over my friends, he slipped completely under my radar. I've seen Leah concerned about the Revolution putting a larger target on her younger sister's back. I've seen Drew tormented by the memories of his old childhood friends, Reece and Derek, and the completely different people they grew up to be. I've seen Delaney upset by the newspaper's demands of not only her time and energy, but her ability to have continual hope of things changing.

I was there for each of them, while Benjamin shouldered everything he felt alone and retreated somewhere private — literally and figuratively. He never lets on what he's thinking, but I know he's been screwed over by the Monarchy just as much as anyone else.

"How badly do you want to win this year?" I ask, out of genuine curiosity.

Benjamin's eyes flare with that resolute determination at the core of him. "Anything but gold is worthless to me."

An exhale slips through my nose. I understand what he's feeling; it's the way he always feels. Unsated, and hungry for more. It's the feeling of wanting competition, the feeling of wanting to win so badly, it scares me just how far he will go to do it.

I've never felt that intensely about anything. I joined the concert band at my old high school but never the competition band, and this year nothing extracurricular struck me as worth my effort. But then I faced the Monarchy for the first time. And this fire sprung up inside. Cold fire, reflected in blue eyes and warm skin.

Letting Benjamin know I understand, I give his fingers a comforting squeeze. He returns it faintly, gently, nearly imperceptibly, before we finish our hot chocolates.