Deriving Functions

Kyle hated Sunday nights. They should have been pleasant evenings; he always made sure to finish his class assignments by Saturday at the latest so that he would have the rest of the weekend to relax.

But unfortunately for him, his dumbass boyfriend just had to put off his homework until the last possible minute, including the stuff that he had absolutely no grasp of whatsoever. Kyle had tried again and again to get Stan to at least attempt to do it earlier, but he always spent all that earlier time freaking out about how he didn't understand it at all before running off on a beer run and drowning himself in video games for hours. And then, lo and behold, Sunday night would sneak up and Stan would remember that he needed to pass this course and start begging Kyle for help.

Which, of course, he did, because he did not want to deal with Stan's bitching and moaning about how he was gonna flunk out of college and become a crack-addicted hobo living in the gutter.

"Dude, why the fuck couldn't you have taken a different math course if this is so hard for you?"

"Because all of the Analysis classes were full by the time I registered!"

"That's because you never wake up on time for web registration."

Kyle sighed. He'd tried to get Stan to withdraw from his Calculus class, but he was being incredibly pigheaded about it. Someone was definitely getting his ass kicked out of bed on time for next term's registration... and probably taking Analysis when he ended up failing Calculus, because at this rate, Kyle seriously could not see Stan passing.

And now Stan was making those damn puppy eyes at him, so grudgingly Kyle decided it would be best to just get this over with as quickly as possible before he started whining. Well, he'd undoubtedly be whining regardless... God damn this was annoying. "So, what is it you don't get this time?"

Stan was shuffling through his messy notes, looking for that week's assignment. "Umm... the chain rule."

And already Kyle wanted to kill himself.

"Are you sure your problem is with the chain rule and not, you know, finding the derivative?"

"Both, probably," Stan admitted with a grimace.

Stan was always having issues with derivatives, and Kyle just did not feel like dealing with that head-on at the moment, so he decided to focus on the other issue at hand.

"Okay, well, what's the problem?"

Looking a bit flustered, Stan opened and closed his mouth a few times, but no intelligible words came out. Finally he just grunted and shoved a crumpled piece of looseleaf into Kyle's hands. "Here."

He skimmed over the messy scrawls, and before he could repress a groan, out it came. "Staaan... you need to take the derivative of the inside function! You can't just take it out and leave it there!"

Stan's immediate response was some gargled, almost inhuman noise. "I can't help it! I can never remember that part!"

"So you at least know you're supposed to take the derivative; you just can't remember to do it?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

Kyle actually laughed at that. "Dude, then it's not that big a problem. You just need a way to..." he smirked, already coming up with ideas, "remember what you need to do."

And Kyle did make sure that Stan would remember. In fact, their neighbors just might remember too, given how loudly Kyle screamed for Stan to "derive" his "function."

Stan's TA probably never would understand why one of his students turned beet red every time he mentioned deriving a function.