Julian was, of course, the Guardian of both Alex and Elza, so Alex's primary task in talking to Julian was to find a circumstance in which he could get a few words in that Elza would never hear. Luckily for him, due to Elza's elusiveness, this proved easy, though Alex still spent several days observing and recording Elza's schedule just for tactical sureness. She was inconsistent in returning to their apartment after morning classes, after lunch, and after evening classes, but she never turned up immediately after dinner. In fact, there was a solid half-hour between the end of dinner and her showing up, no matter what other variables were in place. Julian didn't consistently show up, either, but reliably Alex could get fifteen minutes of being alone with Julian in the apartment, and on a good day, he'd get a half hour. He didn't know how long a conversation about Elza could take - Julian rarely spoke directly to the two of them - but he'd rather gamble on more time rather than less.
So, during a week of wrapping up dinner early (to the disappointment of gossipy Gabriel and ever-friendly Max), Alex found himself aimlessly fiddling around in the kitchen, pretending to clean, when Julian entered the apartment about twenty-six minutes before Alex's earliest record of Elza landing on the porch.
He sensed Alex, and waved at him through a wall. "Good evening, Alexander," he said, and kept walking towards his room, as if he expected no reply. Alex knew that if Julian crossed the barrier into his room, the door would close nigh-instantaneously, and between Alex's need for politeness and Julian's evasiveness, conversation would never happen.
"Guardian Julian?" Alex said.
Julian stopped. "Just "Julian", please." He sounded a little perturbed, and Alex marked the fumble in his mind. It couldn't be good to make a social faux pas with someone of such high status as "just Julian". But still, he had to charge on.
"Can we talk?" he asked.
Julian walked into Alex's line of sight, and bowed, "Of course. What can I help you with?"
Internally, Alex winced. This would be the first major test. If he failed, he still had time, but he'd prefer to be optimal. "Can we talk somewhere private?"
Julian cocked his head. "Isn't this private?"
Alexander tried to keep expressionless. "Not enough."
"No?" Julian said.
The direct question was exactly what Alex didn't need. But he'd still prepared a line of response. "What if I don't want anyone in my year to hear? It's kind of embarrassing."
Julian thought this over. "I could produce an insulating layer, or some kind of perception barrier, but- Ah, it'd be obvious that someone was saying something that they didn't want to be heard, wouldn't it? Come with me, Alexander."
Julian walked through the kitchen, beckoning to Alex, who dutifully followed. What else could he do? With a burst of magic, Julian kicked the sliding door to the balcony open, and stepped onto it. He gestured for Alex to come close.
"Hold on to me, Alexander."
Alex wasn't someone to question an authority figure, but Julian frightened him, as someone who, as far as he knew, shouldn't be alive, at least from what he knew of the Second Antarctic Expeditionary Force. "Um," was about all he managed to get out.
"We're going to fly," Julian said, by way of explanation, and Alex's eyes went wide. For that, he could hold on for dear life in a heartbeat. Julian towered over Alex by a half a foot - Alex liked to think that this was because Alex was still in the middle of his growth spurt, though he wasn't entirely sure of that - and Alex tucked under his arm, gripping onto Julian's coat. With a blinding flash of light, Julian summoned his wings, feathery limbs wider than he was tall that pressed more against the magical underpinnings of reality than the air, and he pulled Alex tight to him, with strength far beyond the capabilities of his gaunt arms, and-
Took into the sky.
The ground faded away.
Alex had imagined the sense of flying a dozen dozen dozen times, and dreamt it perhaps even more, but this was something without control or authority. Instead, it was just that the ground was no longer beneath him, and that if Julian chose to let go, there was a non-zero chance that the force of gravity would turn him into something approximating tomato paste.
Appropriately, Alex screamed.
Thankfully, Julian dampened the vibrations of the air around them, muffling the sound to anyone beyond the two of them. "I reacted the same way, my first time," he said, over the roar of rushing air. "Thomas, my Guardian, took me flying because I said, in my hubris, that if I just knew what it felt like, I could figure out the magic in a matter of minutes." Julian smiled wistfully. "He believed in teaching through demonstration."
Alex would have found this a meaningful and perhaps clever anecdote if his system wasn't so suffused with adrenaline and primal, mammalian fear that he didn't regain narrative thought until they'd landed.
Julian, politely, watched Alexander to see if he'd stop hyperventilating and regain control of his autonomic functions. And when Alex had enough self-control to look up at him, Julian held out his hand for Alex to grab on to. His bony hands grasped firmly, and with strength that had to have been magically enhanced, he pulled Alex to his feet.
Alex hadn't had the constitution to figure their direction or destination when they'd been flying, but now, he walked up next to Julian, who leaned on the edge of a balcony, and looked out over campus. From where they'd landed, they could see the major lines of the Academy of Arcadia - the cross of road and rail that held every major academic and logistical building on campus, and the lawns and knolls beyond. They were high up enough to see over the tops of the domes of the magical training grounds, of the five-story Pair apartments and similarly-tall youth dormitories. High enough even that they could see the curve of the the Halley Bridge leading into the City of Arcadia, over kilometers of water that served both as social and security isolation from the rest of the world.
He blunk.
"We're on Saint Michael's Basilica, aren't we?"
Julian looked out over campus, and nodded. "Correct."
Alex didn't like questioning authority figures, unless, of course, he felt that he was more correct than them, thus rendering him the authority figure in that particular case. As such, he had to ask- "How is this more private than the apartment?"
Julian leaned forward onto the balcony. "I find this space relaxing. You can see anyone coming, any anyone who's looking can see you here."
Alex didn't get it. "How is that relaxing?" He couldn't quite articulate it. "Like, eyes are on you."
Julian nodded. "Exactly." When Alex didn't respond, he continued. "Think of it this way. If you are attempting to mentally practice for a magic exam, are you less likely to be bothered if you hide yourself away, or if you bury yourself in a book in clear view at the library?"
Alex knew that when a superior phrased a question this way, they were probably playing with your expectations, but he had to follow his heart anyway. "I'd hide myself away."
Julian smiled. "Sure, that'd lower the likelihood of you being found, but if a friend of yours found you, they'd surely ask you how you were doing, what you were up to, and if they could help. But if you were clearly and obviously focused on a book, it would be rude to interrupt you - After all, would you interrupt someone in the middle of reading?"
Alex shook his head.
"Exactly. And here," Julian said, "No one is close enough to casually interrupt us, but everyone can see that we are engaged in conversation in a place that it would be difficult to get to. Therefore, coming to speak to us would be interrupting us."
"Huh," Alex said. He couldn't argue with that. "That's... pretty clever."
"Glad you think so," Julian said. "It was actually a subject of discussion in the Twilight Era - It's easier to manufacture headphones that sit over your ears today, but at the time, headphones that unobtrusively sat in your ear canals were also manufactured. They were considered to be less of a strain on your ears and head, and were less visually striking, and therefore, more desirable. However, it was found that for those desiring privacy, the conspicuous nature of large headphones made people attempt to engage with them less. The debates were interesting to read about - though considering that everyone involved is dead and none of it mattered in the end, for them, at least, it may be a bit depressing to look over now. So, what was on your mind?"
Alex was intrigued by the mention of Twilight Era technology, and wanted to pry Julian for a bit more information about it, but he had more important things to get to. He couldn't just ask Julian directly - that would make the situation too obvious, and while he wanted to get to the bottom of this, he'd rather figure it out himself than get his own Pair in trouble with the authorities for... whatever all of this was. Some pointless indiscretion, most likely, albeit one that seemed fairly worrisome.
"Hypothetically," Alex said, staking out a conversational space, if not quite knowing where he was going.
Julian nodded thoughtfully. "Hypothetically."
"Well, what if-" Alex thought about saying "my Pair", and figured that that was far too close to reality - "one of my fellow students kept sneaking off, keeping away from their friends, making sure no one knew where they were spending their free time, and people were starting to get concerned about it?"
Julian raised an eyebrow. "Are you concerned about it?"
"Yes," Alex said. He tried to imbue the word with a sense of finality, so that Julian wouldn't pry as to any personal connection he might have to the situation. Apparently, it worked.
"Is it frequent?"
"Every night," Alex said.
"Hm," Julian said, and thought it over.
Alex, after about half a minute, couldn't stand waiting in silence any longer. "What do you think I should do?"
"Sit back and observe," Julian said. "The correct course of action depends on the evidence, and you likely don't have enough."
Alex tensed. "Sir, forgive me, but that isn't very helpful."
"Why not?" Julian said. "What did you expect of me?"
Alex looked out over the campus. He'd seen these buildings thousands of times, though before from this angle. Julian had seen everything Alex had, but thousands more times. "I was hoping you had some relevant experience, sir." He felt incredibly uncomfortable coming into conflict with Julian, and so, couched his statements in deference and honorifics.
"Ah," Julian said, and took a deep breath. "While it may or may not be relevant, I can tell you about a similar situation that occurred in my class, when I was your age. Would you find that helpful?"
"Yes, sir," Alex said.
A tension seemed to fall out of the air between them, and Julian relaxed almost imperceptibly. Almost. But it was enough for Alex to pick up on it, and for now, feel like he was fitting into some kind of script. "Well, it wasn't a direct parallel, so I'd like you to keep that in mind, but there was a student in my class who kept sneaking off. We'd noticed it mainly in her taking off early during lunch periods, but she also displayed symptoms of sleep deprivation, signifying that something more was going on."
Alex was a bit afraid to hear the answer, but he had to ask. "Symptoms like... what, exactly?"'
"Irritability, a tendency to respond to things with sudden intensity, being overly violent, having difficulty focusing on things. That sort of behavior," Julian said offhandedly, describing, as far as Alex was concerned, Elza almost perfectly. For that matter, he was describing her attributes that, according to her friends, had been amplified in recent weeks. Maybe they were on the right track.
"What was she doing?" Alex asked, and then, his words running into each other - "And what happened to her?"
Julian pulled his gaze away from the campus, focusing his eyes directly on Alex. He couldn't help but make eye contact with Julian - it was like those brown eyes, average in the extreme in description, sucked him in with sheer intensity and presence. He had no clear way of describing what was happening, besides just that Julian commanded his attention.
"She was maintaining a carnal relationship with someone other than her Pair," Julian said. "Not that Pairs of her, or your, age are recommended to engage in that sort of activity, but that was particularly forbidden. She'd managed to get away with it by means of it being someone from another class - C, if I recall correctly - which managed the audience to which the two of them needed to maintain the lie. As for what happened to them... Well, in the short term, in response to their activities, both of them, and their Pairs, were subjected to intensive re-education. In the long term, they're all dead now."
Alex gasped.
"To be clear," Julian added, "they didn't die because of that. They died years later, in the field. Though," he said, cradling his chin in the crook of his right thumb and forefinger, "I suppose that everything in their lives led up to their deaths, so that isn't entirely true. Is that helpful?"
Alex barely held on to enough composure to nod, and Julian smiled, as if his task had been accomplished.
His mind looped, hearing Julian's words over and over again, throughout the rest of the day. As he studied for his classes, as he lay in bed, as he listened to Elza sneak back into her room yet again. It made sense that for romantic indiscretions, one's Pair would also be held responsible - after all, the purpose of the Pairing was to control and shackle those tumultuous emotions, and so, if they ran amok, something had failed not just in the one, but in both of them. He hated the idea of failure, and vacillated wildly between the potential shame of failure, and frustration with being held accountable for the actions of someone so unapproachable, so uncommunicative. It wasn't like Elza was making any of this easy- he hadn't had much of a chance to keep her in line. At least, one that he could reasonably be expected to succeed at.
And at the same time, he couldn't help but imagine the other side of things. The idea that those lips that had kissed him were coming home each night with the taste of someone else on them. He shouldn't even be thinking about that sort of thing, and he wanted to blame her sudden, unwarranted physicality for pushing his mind in that direction, but his mind was his responsibility. That she could open herself to him - spiritually on that night healing the maleficus, and physically during the Dance of the Pairs, and then just open herself up to someone else - it rankled him. He shouldn't have experienced any of that. She put that in his mind, in his life, and it should be something special.
While he was thinking, over and over again, of all this, he heard her start to snore, and even that bothered him. The idea that she was sleeping so soundly while he had to worry because of her - it clawed at him. He had to know if any of the other Pairs were starting to get physical - maybe if they were, that might indicate that she was progressing along the same path, just without him. Or maybe if anyone else had started doing that sort of thing before the Pairing. It was explicitly forbidden, but clearly, according to Julian, it happened. And if it was something that still happened, it was possible that Elza was doing that sort of thing. His mind raced with the possibilities, he wanted to get up and start jotting down notes, he wanted to do something, anything about this, and-
Alex, mercifully, fell asleep, to fears and nightmares.