Alex took Tabbitha and Rosaline's concerns about Elza seriously. He took everything seriously. Of course, between Elza roping him into some light treason, and seemingly trying to kill one of his closest friends, and being his Pair, and, uh, kissing him, she warranted close examination. And, just like he'd promised Tabbitha and Rosaline, he had been keeping a close eye on her. Right now, he was watching her, annoyed at the slow progress of the decomposition reaction they were studying in their chemistry lesson, feeding more energy and fuel into the hydrogen burner, making it spark and sputter with unexpected inputs.
He unfolded a piece of paper he'd been palming, as Elza's attention was consumed with trying to contain the sudden, explosive growth of material from the mercury thiocyanate. He'd presented his argument to just be patient to her, and she'd rejected it, and now, just as the other Pairs were slowly producing strange, snake-like growths from their reactions, Elza was trying to keep things contained.
[No], it said, simply.
Alex looked over at Rosaline, at the next scientific workstation along the way, and she nodded back at him. He'd been engaging in a rather long conversation, taking place over multiple classes and days, establishing a baseline for Elza's behavior. The specific question, in this case, was "So, to be clear, she's not normally that violent?", referring to the duel with Francesca. It was a valid, worthwhile question - for all Alex knew, she'd just been hiding hyper-violent tendencies well enough for him to not notice in any classes they'd had together.
Shortly, he was slipped another note. [She can be rough, yes, but that was something else. Do you know if anything is going on with Francesca that might inspire that?] Rosaline asked.
He scribbled hastily, constructing a note and passing it while Elza was looking away. [Nothing, and I know Francesca very, very well. This is equally as unusual for her. But I trust her to be reasonable.]
"Hey, Alex?" Elza asked, trying to get his attention, and Alex flushed, doing his best to act as though he wasn't talking behind her back.
Professor Gill, a mundane member of the True Church, watched her with tired eyes. "Remember kids," he said, generally, "this is mercury. Don't handle it directly. The fume hoods will handle any off-gassing, but please use your magic rather than your hands."
She quickly pulled her hands, which were only a quarter of an inch away from grabbing the cascading tendrils of the reaction, out of the line of fire, and deployed her magic to corral it, though bits fell out of the experimental apparatus and onto the table, and just kept reacting. Alex jumped in, using his mind first to snuff out the extraneous reactions, and then, to try to sap some heat out of the reaction and slow it down. Together, they managed to get it under control, and Elza smiled at the professor. And then, Alex.
"Okay," she said, on their way to their next class, "That was pretty smooth."
Alex should have done something strategic, should have taken the upper hand, but the whys and wherefores dropped out of his mind and instead, he only had a "Yeah?" to respond with.
Elza smiled at him, and nodded. "I'd have just tried to contain the mess, but you stopped it at the source." She prodded him in the chest with an outstretched finger. "Clever boy," she said, before putting enough paces between them that they didn't have to keep talking. Of course, it helped that the compliment had stopped Alex dead in his tracks.
The next day, while Alex was carefully applying what was supposed to be three drops of the precursor to some Twilight-Era rocket fuel to, well, another precursor to it, Elza smiled at him.
"You know," she said, and his eyes swiveled around to focus on her, rather than the eye-droppers and vials, "You're pretty cute when you're like this."
Alex wanted to say "Like what?", but instead, he twitched, squirting the equivalent of twenty-three drops of precursor #1 into precursor #2, starting a vigorous fire, the off-gasses of which immediately shattered the glass vessel meant to contain it, sending fragments flying halfway across the classroom. One of them stopped just inches away from Caleb's neck, while a fire comprised of what remained started burning through the table. The heat of it made Alex lean back on his stool, and he shielded his face with his hand.
Caleb, alarmed, responded by manipulating a stream of water from one of the resource wells throughout the room towards Alex and Elza's table, which would, in theory, have been a good course of action, if there hadn't been an unsecured sheet of sodium there, which promptly exploded.
But that explosion only existed for the merest fraction of a second, vacuum gaps forming at strategic points throughout the reaction, stopping it, and the collapse of which drove a wind that snuffed out the initial flames. That was Elza's handiwork, which she reminded him of several times a day for the next week. That, as far as Alex was concerned, was Elza's fault. If he wasn't so busy trying to figure out why his Pair was so relentlessly weird, he'd have been able to fix things himself, well before she'd done so.
In mathematics, Alex slipped a note across the aisle to Maxwell.
[What I'm getting at is - Do you think Elza is weird?]
A few questions and answers went out, and with them, Max slipped Alex his response.
[We're all weird, Alex.]
Another hand-off. [Yes, but have you noticed anything in particular that would meet Rosaline's criteria?] Alex had, after a few days of confusion, pestered Rosaline for further definition as to what strange or noteworthy behavior on the part of Elza would consist of. Rosaline had initially struggled with coming up with an objective set of criteria, but the two of them had eventually settled on was "actively potentially heretical" - after all, "actively heretical" would be too obvious and too late, and "potentially heretical" was too common - if it wasn't, what would the point of a confessional even be? That had cleared things up for Alex, though Maxwell and Tabbitha hadn't seemed to "get" it.
"Alexander?", Instructor Fournier asked, in that particular tone that said very clearly that you'd missed at least three previous requests for your attention. Alex opened his mouth, not even sure where he was going with it, but Elza responded first.
"Fifty three," she said, and Alex didn't know what she meant fifty three of, but by the way Instructor Fournier smiled and nodded, it was evidently the correct answer for whatever was going on. Elza elbowed him, and whispered "Aren't you supposed to be smart? Step it up."
Across from them, Francesca, who Elza had been pointedly ignoring, leaned forward across their shared desks, while Caleb watched the teacher draw a graph on the chalkboard. "Yeah, Alex, stop sucking so much," she said, smiling. This relatively normal ribbing resulted in Elza not saying another word for the rest of class, and being uncharacteristically quiet for the rest of the school day.
All in all, Alex had no idea what to do with any of this.
In three weeks, she hadn't stopped disappearing from dinner, and hadn't stopped coming back to the apartment deep into the night. Julian hadn't seemed to notice, and if he did, he certainly didn't care. Whatever was happening wasn't affecting Elza's performance: In fact, she was consistently doing better than him in every subject they had. Alex, for the sake of his own sanity, attributed this to his own lack of focus, brought about by trying to figure out what was going on in Elza's head. It was infuriating that, for all his efforts, they worked together worse than any of the other Pairs. He'd thought, just maybe, that the strange link between them formed by their healing of the maleficus would have given them a competitive advantage. However, it was fading, and even when it was strong, they never seemed to be on the same page.
He'd explained this all to Maxwell in bits and pieces several times, but tonight, hanging out after dinner on one of the grassy knolls of campus, staring at the icy stars, he laid it all out.
Maxwell thought it over. "Nothing's wrong with wanting to be left alone," he said. "Didn't you tell me that?"
That was true, but it didn't help.
"I don't know what she's doing, Max, but whatever it is, it's worrying her friends, and it's worrying me."
Maxwell stretched out on the cold grass. "Maybe just ask her what she's doing?"
Alex shook his head. "If she's trying to hide something from her friends, she's not going to just tell me."
"Well," Max said, "Why don't you just ask to spend more time with her?"
Alex blinked.
"Like, Rosa and Tab asked you to keep an eye on her. And as her Pair, shouldn't you be doing, I dunno, most things with her?"