<You're smiling, I pushed the button. I can take over entire if you want. It's not really a punishment oriented educational system.>

He doesn't especially care how much control Ashkon wants but he would really really like it to be predictable and something he can plan around, whether that means Ashkon taking over entirely or laying claim to specific body parts or specific times of day or really whatever.

<Thank you.> For not taking this opportunity to get coy about it. He supposes Ashkon could still be gaslighting him but it's not useful to think about that so he's just not going to. Whatever. He tries to think how to phrase a question about how the classes will work instead.

<I don't know that many details since I haven't had a chance to tour the campus or anything!>

The staffperson is waiting with one of the bracelets that lock on to the wrist and Ashkon holds out their arm for it.

<That's fair.>

He wants to check if Ashkon actually did take over but they'll look so silly if he tries something and the answer is no. And now he's afraid to take literally any actions whatsoever up to and including trying to shift his weight because what if it gets in the way of something.

<Won't get in the way at all. If I'm really distracted you might be able to move something I wasn't planning to let you but I hear it's pretty hard to do.>

Well. In that case he's going to systematically try everything he can think of so he can get himself to relax about it.

None of it works! Ashkon is piloting him through thanking Nocawe and SPRUCE / TASSHIN 908 and then heading for the exit; his host can't move a muscle of his own volition at all.

He gets increasingly silly as he gets increasingly confident he won't embarrass them (can he lick his nose? he couldn't even lick his nose before, he obviously can't now) and then stops trying. His eyes don't flutter closed; he doesn't stretch like a cat about to go to sleep. But there's no level on which he's worried about being punished for whatever he does, and there's usually some level on which he's worried about that. It's been obvious since he was accidentally kidnapped that there's really nothing he could do, if all these new worlds were hostile, and he's been despairing and listless and unmoored, but now it's mostly just relaxing.

...Maybe also a little bit hot. Oh, no, Ashkon can hear him thinking that. New topic. New topic right now. <So, how'd you get interested in music?>

<Yeerks are blind, but we can hear! I've liked music since I was born. And writing a new magic song is one of the best-scaling ways to accomplish anything. They work on totally nonmagical devices copied a trillion times!>

He’s impressed.

<If you can hear, what do you need me for?>

<Ardas - magic ones, one of them isn't magic and it doesn't work there - sort of react to music that you're trying to get to do something. You can't compose a magic song without that feedback. And Yeerks can't sing.>

He feels really sorry for Ashkon not being able to sing. Which is maybe strange, given how he feels about his own voice, but maybe that just makes it fitting for them to pair up.

<Just singing or do instruments work too?>

<Instruments can help support a song with vocals but it does need a voice.>

<And it’s - your voice now, enough for you to get whatever feedback about it?> Oh look, a tangled mess of mixed feelings.

<I think so? I guess if it doesn't work then - I'll have to figure something else out, but I think it should...>

<I hope it works.> Obviously he wants Ashkon to have nice things. And it would be disappointing to turn out to be useless. And it’s so fitting, for this voice he can’t destroy to be someone else’s now, someone who wants it. And - and yet -

He likes all the individual parts but the story that's shaping up here, where some wretched damned soul that's been stripped of hope and purpose and name and even most of his memories of who he was before, no longer capable of more than wasting time playing games, gives away literally everything he has so completely that this magic thing recognizes even his voice as belonging to someone else now... yeah, when he steps back and notices the whole picture he doesn't like it very much.

<Should I turn around and go back in the pool?>

<No! ...I'm glad you would.>

But it's not Ashkon that's the problem here. It's just that after all this he wants to still be a person, and after giving up every single choice in his life he's not sure he can be.

But he was doing that anyway. He was just doing it piecemeal, every time anyone asked him anything. Nothing would be better if instead Ashkon couldn't study magic and he went back to pretending he was more than a gaping pit of despair that used to have a futile mission tacked up around it like a bit of caution tape. That metaphor doesn't even make sense, it can't have been preventing him from falling into the pit when he is the pit. Whatever. The point is whatever is wrong with him isn't something Ashkon can fix by not taking advantage of it, and he suspects if there were a version of him that wasn't so broken that version of him would have made a similar offer. Probably.

Ashkon hesitates, but keeps heading for the bus station.

Vague inarticulate affection.

Ashkon laces their fingers together and squeezes, smiling slightly.

Off they go to the relevant magic Arda! This trip is slightly longer mostly because it's a full thirty minute walk from the bus station to the campus of the university in Brithombar. The city is very spread out and relentlessly gorgeous and Ashkon doesn't take the walk very quickly.

Yeah, if they'd passed this up on vague principle that would have sucked. He occasionally suggests looking even longer at specific things that are especially to his liking.

Ashkon is very obliging about that! He starts practicing whistling on the way when they walk through areas uncrowded enough that there aren't in-progress spontaneous choirs of Elves he'd be clashing with.

Awww.

If he does get his head sorted out enough to want to do things he’s not going to pull the rug out from under Ashkon in the middle of studying unless it’s for something very important, on the scale of more fucking hells or conceivably if he were being tortured but maybe not even then. He made an offer. He intends to have been worth trusting. And also he likes this place.

Maybe that is, itself, having something more to him than all the despair and exhaustion.

<<3>

Ashkon presents himself to the Elves who run the school and is brought to his little closet of a dorm room, with the whole wall opposite the door taken up by a spectacular view of a river and the meadow around it where people are picnicking and strolling; there is an intricately carved bed and a marquetry-covered desk and a stunning tapestry on the wall and another one on the ceiling and the floor is glass mosaic and the whole thing somehow coheres without looking busy. He doesn't have anything to put down so after a look around he turns right around to go exploring around the campus.