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Keepers and Awakeners can track each other through their link. The connected souls glow like silver stars in the mental domain, little beacons to follow down to the source. Pollux follows this beacon, footsteps silent and near-floating over the grounds of Mythag, down to the location his Keeper’s soul gleams.
He finds Leonora in the back tables of the library, inexplicably lying in a heap on the floor with her face very literally in a book. He says nothing as he approaches, but the link works to ways. She knows he’s come to find her and knows who it is that’s here. Pollux stares silently. Leonora just gives a comically long wordless groan that he assumes would be in his direction if she had looked up from the page she’s smushed her face into.
Her behaviour, were it his instead, would have him extensively punished in the Church. It’s behaviour unbefitting a god, which they both are. If Pollux had lain on the groud, he would be chastised that deities are barely even allowed to touch ground enough to walk upon it. If he conducted himself with childish whining, he would be mercilessly castigated.
Yet here Leonora, inheritor of the will from the formless Watcher, gets to look at him with one eye and grimace unattractively from where she’s flopped. Pollux isn’t jealous, per se, that sort of feeling has been long purged out of him. He just doesn’t get how this sort of thing is allowed by either Mythag or Leonora’s own self-awareness. “My lady.”
“Uuuuuuurgggh.” She stops looking at him, back to smushing her face in the book.
“Leonora.” He’s learned she doesn’t like the respectful titles much, but his own neuroses cannot trust that as a truth for her. All conversations must start respectfully. For the few months he’s been at Mythag, he still doesn’t trust that the other shoe won’t drop if he missteps. The name does at least appease her once more. “Ramona was looking for you. You’re going to miss class.”
“That’s fine, I don’t want to….” Pollux is silent, but his eyebrows still raise in unbidden surprise. Another thing he’s perpetually surprised that students in general and Leonora in specific don’t get harshly punished for.
But he did say he’d go find her, and that means he must also return with her in tow. He sighs quietly. As always, his voice is even. Long practice keeping his emotions generally unexpressed and in check, performing duties with rote perfection. “Why not?”
Leonora weakly smacks at the book her face is in. The movement reminds Pollux of a grounded fish, or a baby bird that has learned to move but hasn’t figured out how to make movement effective. From the look of it and his awareness of Leona, what he assumes happened is that she was studying it whilst pensively sinking down in her chair until she went too far, both her and the book flopped to the ground, and she elected not to move. Pollux leans to see what the book is. A perfectly normal tome for one of Doll’s medical classes. If he recalls correctly, Leona’s only class with Doll is field medicine. “You like field surgery, though.”
She does. She’s quite good at it in a way that frightens Pollux a little bit. He’s seen people who can manipulate flesh with ease and confidence, and all of those people were Sculptors that Juliette brought in. It never boded well. Though Leona doesn’t seem to have any awareness or the callous disregard for her subjects that Sculptors do, she’s just unaffected.
It simply also keeps Pollux from trusting Mythag too much, the niggling bit of doubt in the back of his skill that’s an important part of keeping him and his brother intact. “Uh-huh,” Leona whines, seemingly oblivious to Pollux’s perpetually over-fast thoughts. “But this is a lab report. I hate those. What do you mean I need to write out everything and write a thesis and closure? I have data tables, I don’t get why anything else is even necessary. I don’t wanna, and Doll’s gonna ask me why I don’t have it done today, and ‘it’s stupid, just look at the data for results, the conclusion is that extra caro work can eliminate the need for suture at all without risk of rejection if you don’t suck at caro’, how am I supposed to turn that into a whole paragraph? It’s already said.” She gestures emphatically as she talks, though still without actually getting up, doubling Pollux’s impression of ineffective animal wriggling.
He supposes he gets some of her complaints, but not so much that he understands why she doesn’t just do the thing she’s assigned. You are given an essay, you write the essay, and presumably if you do badly enough they drown you in the Black Pool so the fear of failure ensures top tier work.
Easy. “You do still have to turn something in.” Doll seems like she would actively turn failing students into jarred brains, and while he doesn’t entirely trust Leonora, he does still like her enough to ally himself and more importantly Castor with her. He’d hate for her to be turned into a jar.
“Uuuuuuugh!” She complains even louder. “What do I even say though, if I already proved caro transplants work and I can’t say ‘just read it again if you need a conclusion’?” At least now she scoots from under the table and sits up, squinting at him in exasperation. An important step forward.
Pollux shrugs. “That, but nicer?”
“I guess.” She rubs her hands over her face and picks the book up. “I’ll just write down some whatever. How much time do I have?”
Pollux looks up at the large clock on the wall opposite. “Mm. Eight minutes. Ten if you walk fast to the classroom.”
Leonora swears and Pollux bristles instinctively, the remains of his wings automatically fluffing as if to protect him from something that doesn’t happen. Her ire is only at herself. If she notices, and Pollux suspects she did, she says nothing. Body reactions rarely escape her awareness but at least she has tact. “Alright, fine, fine. I’ll just scribble and Doll can tell me it sucks, if you insist I go to class.”
And he does. At least, he has been told he must insist, so Pollux commits to that. He stands by to make sure Leonora actually does what she promised, an overseeing god as she picks up her pen that had been waiting patiently on the table. It is just scribbled down repetition, but at least it’s done enough that Pollux assumes Doll won’t decapitate his Keeper in disappointment.