So Adrissu twiddled his thumbs all afternoon and took a long walk around the town square as sunset approached, putting his name in early at the restaurant and sitting idly with a glass of wine for nearly half an hour before he caught sight of Pollux entering the building.
The elf wore a set of dark robes that were practical and plain, but of much nicer quality than the work clothes he had been wearing when they met yesterday. Pollux caught Adrissu’s gaze from across the restaurant, hesitated, then walked toward him. As he drew nearer, Adrissu could see silver accents on the hems of his robe, sparkling threads that caught the light on his collar and his sleeves. He hid a smile in his glass of wine; it was a flattering look on him, despite his stony expression.
“Hello,” Pollux said stiffly, as he sat down across from Adrissu.
“Thank you for coming,” Adrissu replied, managing a smile. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to come after all. That one’s for you.”
Pollux looked suspiciously at the glass of wine in front of him, but begrudgingly picked it up and took a sip. His eyebrows raised slightly, and he took a small second sip before setting it back down.
“So,” he said, looking resolutely down at the table instead of at Adrissu. “What shall we talk about?”
“What do you remember about me?” Adrissu asked. Pollux frowned.
“I remember enough.”
“Butwhatdo you remember? Everything? Most of it? If there are any gaps in your knowledge, I’d be happy to fill you in. I want to make sure we’re on the same page.”
Pollux was silent for a long moment. Then, finally, he started in a small voice, “I remember most of it, I think. I remember being a human, and an elf before that... And I think a human before that, as well, but it gets blurry. I know I’ll keep reincarnating to come back to you. I know... what you are. Who you are. I remember you quite clearly, clearer than any other details of my past lives. I remember... dying.” He flinched as he said it, and Adrissu’s heart squeezed painfully.
“I’m sorry for the burden that must have been on you,” Adrissu replied softly, and almost immediately Pollux’s expression hardened to stone once again.
“Don’t say that,” he answered quickly. “I know you’re not sorry about what you’ve done.”
“I’m not sorry for that, no. But that’s not what I said,” Adrissu replied, relishing in the flash of angry heat that crossed Pollux’s face. “I don’t want you to suffer. That was never part of my plan. If you remember most of it, then surely you remember that we had a solution to it, a plan to…” He trailed off uncomfortably.
“What got me killed last time,” Pollux said flatly, and Adrissu nodded. “Yes. I remember that too.”
“Then why did you try to avoid me? Why wouldn’t you come to me so we could fix this?”
Pollux did not seem to have an answer to that, looking down at his wine with an expression Adrissu couldn’t place. It frustrated Adrissu to feel like he understood his mate so poorly, but already he could tell that pressing Pollux for an answer was likely to drive him further into silence. Instead, he drank deeply from his own glass and waited.
It took a minute for Pollux to find the words that he was searching for. When he spoke, his voice seemed even smaller than before, making Adrissu painfully aware that the elf was still terribly young.
“I don’t know why,” he murmured, his face pinched in a bitter frown. “The first thing I could remember feeling about all this, the more I remembered, was being angry. It all felt so unfair. And that was the motivation for so much of my life that I don’t think I ever thought about it beyond just... needing to be angry.”
Adrissu mulled this over for a moment, considering the abrupt change in Pollux’s tone. “Tell me about your life,” he finally said, in as gentle a tone as he could manage. “You know about me, but I don’t know anything about you yet. Tell me about yourself.”
“I am an orphan,” he said sharply, the cold mask falling into place again effortlessly. “I grew up in the Sunrise Children’s Estate, about a day’s journey west of Polimnos. It’s distantly related to the mercenary guild you were once involved in, so the most robust option for the children there to make their own way is through the combat training they provide. I participated in this until I aged out. I’d earned enough for two years of study at the Feld Heslyn campus.”
“You were a student at the Academy?” Adrissu interrupted, for the first time utterly taken aback. Pollux had been in his own secondary campus and yet they had never met?
“I purposely avoided you, if that’s what you’re asking,” he responded dryly. “And like I said, I could only afford two years. But I had a natural aptitude, and remembered much of what I knew in the past, so... That was all I needed to get a foothold in the field of weapon enchantment. I heard that there was a group trying to expand on the research of Granville Kipp and Daiana Gray in Wintergrove, so I headed here after I left the Academy. It only took two years or so before I spearheaded that group, and we’d earned enough money on other enchantment jobs to set up a dedicated studio, which you’ve seen. So I have some employees working on rote enchantments to pay the bills, while I work on the... Well, the weapon.”
“The Dragonslayer,” Adrissu remarked. To his credit, Pollux had the decency to look cowed.
“Well, it’s technically not the Dragonslayer,” he said. “The Dragonslayer is a variation on Kipp’s original design. The new one is my design.”
“Does it have a name, then? I’m sure you don’t just call itthe weapon.”
Now he was looking uncomfortable. “They’ve just been calling it the Blackthorn.”
Adrissu stifled a laugh at the irony of it all. Evidently, Pollux was a warrior at heart, more like Ruan than any of his other lives had been; he had been ready to kill Adrissu with a weapon of his own design, bearing his own name.
“I thought I was doing something good,” Pollux blurted, capturing Adrissu’s attention again. “The red dragon that’s been terrorizing Wintergrove—that’s the one I’ve been more concerned about. I wanted to avoid you, yes, and sometimes I thought about hunting you down, but... Yesterday I couldn't kill you. I realized I never really wanted to hurt you. I don’t...” He trailed off, grimacing. “I don’t know how to feel about you.”
“I see,” Adrissu replied just as carefully. “Well, I can understand that. I have no expectations of you, truly. I only wanted the chance to talk with you like this and get to know you better. So you don’t have to decide how you feel about me, as it were, right now. Or any time soon. I have all the time in the world.” He managed a slight chuckle at that, and it heartened him that a tiny smile ghosted at the corners of Pollux’s lips in response.
“Perhaps some time to think all this over would help,” he agreed. “Strange as it sounds, I... I had tried to avoid thinking about what would happen if we did meet. I spent so much effort in avoiding you that it didn’t occur to me that we could meet outside of Feld Heslyn.”
