What It Means To Be King

Chapter 65: Sometimes They Thought You Knew Everything

Leo was a person of great curiosity. This curiosity was not enough for him to get into people's business, but enough to make him want to know everything about how the world works when he was younger, and after meeting Shao Long, how people work. He'd learned how to read at 2 and a half years old and ended schooling at 9 because he deemed the school to be too slow for him. He started studying neurology extensively at 12 when he realized that the most unknowns were at the brain rather than the rest of the body, and got a PhD for it at 13. He studied how the brain works, its potential diseases, potential abilities, potential everything. 

Dyslexia was also one of his studies. 

A/N: I dug my own grave when I gave Anubis dyslexia, didn't I? Like What Was Worth A Heart didn't teach me a lesson about researching....

Leo understood dyslexia, but there were more about dyslexia that was unknown than what was there to be learned. It wasn't as common as some people say, he had trouble observing the pattern of real dyslexia people since a large percentage of them didn't realize they had it in the first place. Like autistic people, dyslexic people may just look dumb in the eyes of the public, so long as they weren't so profound. At the very least, autism has a pattern in people's facial features. Dyslexic, on the other hand, wasn't as subtle. 

It took a very long time for Leo to realize that Anubis had it, for a multitude of reason. One being his disturbingly powerful memory and apparent lack of difficulty with numbers. Anubis was good at calculating, maybe not as good as Leo was, or maybe as fast as Shao long was with the calculator. They hadn't had the chance to try answering algebra questions because Shao Long always backed off whenever the idea was mentioned. Anubis had no problem solving them when voiced verbally, and that proved that his auditorial processing was superb. Truly, it was impossible to notice his symptoms, until he picked up a pencil. 

Anubis, at 11 years of age, had a very unique way of holding a pencil. Don't get him wrong, he'd seen a lot of people holding pencils in ways they should not be doing, and could write beautifully, but Anubis held a pencil like he was unsure if he should be doing it at all. That, and he had more hesitance holding the damn stick than holding a knife. There was no firmness in his grip, he looked like he barely had any control over the tip, and that he had better use of throwing the thing to a cockroach to kill it, than write an actual sentence. 

Which he did not do, of course. 

At that time, Leo thought it was....strange. Fuck it, being friends with Shao Long and Anubis made him rethink a lot of his life perceptions, and sometimes those doubts were only just them being weird instead of him being the one who's weird. So he didn't give it much thought. Anubis was smart, he struggled a little to catch up when Leo was talking about science, like everyone else does, but nowhere near as badly as the rest. He never repeated the scientific words Leo said, but could acknowledge it when it was spoken again. His memory was good, his speed of comprehension was good. 

But then there came a time where Shao Long claimed that he mispronounced a word, on false beliefs. Shao Long was a little slower at learning new languages, but could still beat a large number of his peers. Still, that doesn't exclude him from having difficulties pronouncing some words. And when he claimed that Anubis pronounced a word wrong, Leo had half a thought that if any of them were dyslexic, it would be Shao Long. Until he saw the look of horror on Anubis' face, and saw how he stared at the word long and hard, as if it would speak its correct pronunciation if he looked at it hard enough, even long after Leo proved to Shao Long that Anubis had indeed, spoke the word correctly. Apparently, Anubis didn't hear him, and continued to think about it the for the rest of the days, mumbling to himself the word at least a hundred more times before Leo forced him to pay attention.