When Malleus comments that Leona seems to be enjoying experiences at NRC that he could never have at home (much in the same way as Malleus himself) Leona responds, “At the very least, it’s more relaxing here than with my family.” He also says his country is better off without him going home, and he “can barely stand going home at all.”
Leona says he wishes he could skip out on visiting his family during winter break but “they’d give (him) no end of grief” if he did.
Malleus observes that Leona seems to enjoy life on campus more than he’d thought and Leona responds, “It’s got its pluses. No one from back home can hover over me when l’m on campus, so I can go wherever I please. And as long as I’m here, I can wear what I want.”
Ruggie says that Leona probably gives his family “a lot of grief by never getting in touch” and Leona responds, “They’re so annoying. How long’re they gonna hound my every step?” He says that for family Halloween celebrations he would “just throw a sheet on every year and go as a ghost,” and that they were “a royal pain.”
Leona says that his mother and the grand chamberlain would put up family pictures everywhere on days when they did not have any official business:
“I was glad I wouldn’t have to play along with their stupid self-gratification anymore once I left the palace, but now they keep pestering me to send them pictures every season. Something to put up in the private dining hall, something to put up in my father’s sickroom…I swear, there’s nothin’ more grating.”
Leona concedes to send home a photo of himself in his ceremonial robes and when Ruggie asks why he is actually doing what they want he says that it is his brother’s wife who asked him.
Leona says that, after hanging up on his nephew during a phone call, his sister-in-law called “to give (him) grief,” and when he lived at home she and Cheka “were always making some kind of racket. Never got a moment’s peace.”
Twisted Wonderland Reference Note 