When Francesca opened the door to her apartment that night, she immediately knew something was wrong. The air coming from inside the apartment was significantly warmer than the air outside, and she couldn't identify what that strong smell was. On top of that, she could hear something sizzling - just from the sound, she could imagine flesh bubbling and melting away.
Not good.
She gritted her teeth. Whatever it was, she would move forward, and move through it. She'd pushed herself to and beyond her limits, and pulled herself back, though not without some damage - her white hair was proof enough of that. And she wore it proudly. So if Caleb had cracked under the pressure of training and killed someone - unlikely to be Cassandra, their Guardian would turn him into a miscellaneous assortment of bones and gore before he could even scratch her - and was searing the flesh off their corpse. Probably Percy? He'd always been stern with Caleb, trying to shape him into being a stronger person, though now that Francesca had been burdened with the task of handling Caleb, she figured she'd have a better chance of turning him into something useful.
That is, if he hadn't murdered anyone.
She strode confidently into the apartment - don't let the enemy know that your guard is up, let them think you're vulnerable - and looked, casually, into the kitchen.
There stood, almost two meters tall even hunched over a cooktop, Cassandra.
Cooking.
It looked like some kind of steak in a mushroom sautee - an almost unbelievable luxury, if she wasn't one of the top flight of Angels - along with highly buttered and seasoned brussel sprouts and baby potatoes in a second pan, both burners being fueled by a low-level stream of magically generated heat.
Francesca had not seen Cassandra cook before. Or for that matter, do anything that could be considered culturally "domestic". Somehow, it was more unsettling than seeing Caleb charge up the oven's heatsink to roast a human leg, which she'd been imagining. That would have been fairly easy to deal with - while he was a good five inches taller than her, that just made chopping him in the throat and blocking his airway easier, and with that disruption, she could have had him dead on the ground in minutes. Seeing Cassandra cook, though-
"Set the table, Francesca," Cassandra said, noticing her. Something in the tone of Cassandra's voice worried Francesca just as much as seeing her, well, out of character. Francesca leapt into action, or at least, attempted to. It turned out that she, in fact, knew nothing about all of this, or even what "table" they'd be using. She ran over to the coffee table in the living room, and fiddled with it, assuming that somehow it could be converted into a dining table.
Cassandra swore, and Francesca hoped it wasn't at her.
It was.
She came over, keeping a shard of her mind manipulating the heat of the oven, shuffling the pans, stirring the pot of gravy, and started assisting Francesca, releasing several latches that allowed the table to stretch vertically. Francesca expected some kind of ridicule - that was Cassandra's way, and she was entitled to that - what good was power, after all, if you didn't remind others that you had it? - but got none.
Instead, Cassandra directed her to the location of the chairs, napkins, and utensils strewn throughout various storage closets in the apartment, and within a matter of minutes, the living room had been converted into a dining room. Within a half hour, two glasses of wine had been poured, along with two glasses of ice water, set alongside plates and silverware and napkins, all laid out immaculately. Cassandra quickly corrected deviances of single degrees the the alignment thereof - Francesca was impressed by her ability to pick that out at a glance, the skill of an Angel beating out her embarrassment at having failed the authority of her Guardian.
As for why they were doing all of this... Well, Francesca didn't want to ask. They were clearly skipping out on the dining commons - which as far as she was concerned, fine. She usually bounced around from social group to social group, and the ones that she'd preferred had been assembled in Class A, so it all seemed above board - but people were getting awkward. Teresa and Aleste, and their social groups, were still relatively fine, but they were her third and fourth choices to spend time with, respectively. Alex was strangely withdrawn - she'd known him to have his quiet periods, but she could usually tease some kind of amusement out of him and his friends. But now, she couldn't get a rise out of him for the life of her, and that had neutered his group of friends - Sure, Gabriel and Max could talk up a storm without Alex, but she could rarely care about that. And Elza? Since... Well... Francesca didn't know when the ice would be broken between them again. Elza responded to her with violence, which would be fine, if she wasn't so damn distant. Elza just seemed like she was trying to get as far away from everything as possible, and unfortunately, Francesca was part of "everything". As for Elza's friends? Tabbitha was always fun to tease and antagonize, but without Elza moderating things, Francesca was pretty sure that Rosaline would rip out Francesca's throat for it.
It left her without options, or at least options that she found fun.
She would have loved to just have dinner with Cassandra. Picking the brain of such a powerful Angel would be enlightening on an educational level, and on an entertainment level? The stories she must have of combat and glory would be incredible to hear. On rank alone, there were only maybe fifty Angels in the entire world that were Cassandra's peers, though of course, Alex and Elza had to have one of them as their Guardian, and only three Erelim-class Angels that could surpass her - Johan Rome Netzach I, the Ordinator of the Angelic Order of Saint Michael, of course, along with James Camael VII and Remelle Ananiel I, the greatest living heroes of the True Church. She and Alex had snuck around quite a bit in the deep stacks of the Archives to find out more of their exploits than what was relayed through True Church propaganda, and while the stories they found of their adventures couldn't be taken as absolute truth - after all, they weren't officially published through the True Church - they lit quite a fire under the two of them.
The place settings were not indicative of that.
Neither was Cassandra telling Francesca to "shut up" when she started to ask a question. Once everything was set up, she ordered Francesca to sit down at a particular seat at the table, and admonished her when her hands weren't folded just right on her lap.
"You'll look inattentive and distracted. Pay attention when he walks in, and don't let him feel like he's anything less than the most important person in the room. Do you understand?" Cassandra asked, leaning close enough that even with the supremely cold feeling of Cassandra's entire being, Francesca could feel the heat of Cassandra's panic on her face. A strand of Cassandra's jet black hair fell forward, and brushed against Francesca's nose, sparking a brief moment of unsureness - instinct prodded her to brush that strand back behind Cassandra's ear, but every bit of propriety screamed at Francesca to never, ever do anything like that. She briefly considered informing Cassandra of her unkemptness, but thankfully, she figured it out in the space of a few seconds, and fixed herself.
Francesca nodded.
"Good. Don't embarrass me," Cassandra said, and in that moment, the front door swung back open, rebounding loudly against the rubber stopper on the opposite wall.
A few strides later, and David Ananiel II, swept-back brown hair and sharpened eyes, stood before them, the only authority that could possibly stand above the two of them, his right arm draped around Caleb's sheepishly shrugging shoulders and awkwardly sunken neck.
"Clearly," David said, chuckling, "he's just incapable of understanding his place in God's plan,", before taking a vital, hearty bite of the meat hanging off his fork.
Cassandra smiled. "If I may-"
"Yes?" he said, sharply.
Cassandra's smile grew a little harsher. "Geoffrey's youth doesn't excuse his sloppiness."
"No," David agreed, a bit of the juices of the steak running down his cheek in a blood-like rivulet. "He's only a few years younger than us, isn't he? I can't expect everyone to keep up with us, but I'd think that someone appointed as a Guardian at that age would present as something more... professional."
"I think he's pretty cool," Caleb said, stuffing his mouth with a well-speared slice of potato.
Silence.
"Oh, really now?" David said, his voice ichorous. "How so?"
Francesca knew that tone from dozens of teachers and authority figures - it meant that there was no possible correct answer, and they were just handing you a shovel to dig yourself into a deeper hole. Caleb, for his part, seemed oblivious to this - maybe he'd just stayed on everyone's good sides until now.
"Well," Caleb pondered, "I dunno."
David frowned. "An astute observation. Continue."
"Huh?" Caleb said, fork frozen in the air.
"You didn't answer the question," David said.
Caleb, unwisely, laughed. "I said I don't know, I don't know what I don't know."
Francesca winced, and across from her, she saw Cassandra digging her nails into the tablecloth, hard enough that both her knuckles and nailbeds were discolored.
David also laughed, and Caleb took this as a good thing, smiling back at him.
"Are you stupid?"
"W-what?" Caleb said.
"Are you stupid?" David asked. "Answer the question."
Caleb shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "I, uh, don't think so, sir."
David sighed loudly. "Then why don't you know why you feel the way you do?"
"I-" Caleb began.
"Shut up," David whispered, with enough force to knock Caleb back in his seat. Francesca kept her eyes focused on her meal, though suddenly she wasn't feeling very hungry. "Let me educate you, because apparently, you haven't been paying much attention." The words were sharply enunciated, in that way that was considerate for the hard of hearing and those who weren't entirely fluent in your language, but condescending for anyone else. "You feel things for a reason, child." The word "child" sounded like it disgusted David to even be in his mouth. "You should be able to understand why you feel what you feel. If you are unable to do even that, do you know what will happen to you?"
Caleb was tearing up at this point, but even he knew better than to look away from David. "No, sir."
David leaned forward, resting on his elbows. "You'll die. Slowly, painfully, as your magic turns everything you believed was "you" inside out. Do you want that?"
Caleb's tears ran down his cheeks, and he only just barely managed to squeak out his words. "No, sir."
Francesca was being stretched to her mental limits. Well, not her absolute limits - she liked to think that she could withstand any assault, emotional, intellectual, physical, or magical - but she'd been stretched far enough that she mentally retreated from the conversation, from watching Cassandra's anxious reading of David's interactions with Caleb, occasionally chiming in to try and manage David's simmering anger, from watching the two of them try to mold and fire the misshapen clay of her Pair.
Instead, she found herself thinking about, of all things, Elza.
It was no comfort.
While she kept her social contacts isolated, for strategic purposes, and therefore would never mention it to the others, she did talk, frequently, with Elza. It was one of the human interactions she actually valued, similar to Alex, and she'd been worried, from the moment she saw them Paired, that she'd have both of them ripped away from her by each other. A cruel enough fate that she'd admire anyone who dreamed it up.
But still, she was starting to be concerned. Something was going wrong with the two of them, even if she couldn't figure out what it was. She'd figured that Elza would recover over the weeks, but instead, things only seemed to escalate. Their duel had been the most angry she'd seen Elza be in quite some time, and that was... Ugh. She didn't want to think about any of this. It was too complicated. They lived in a hellscape, beset by demons and monsters and societies that promised false hope. They fought to preserve the existence of mankind. They fought to keep any of their stories going. If the True Church failed, or even faltered, none of Francesca's concerns would matter. The existence of her emotional state was contingent on the continued existence of the True Church. And as such, it was her responsibility to push as much of this out of her mind.
Maybe Elza had found Alex as a confidant. It would be strange for either of them to open up to each other, but she couldn't discount the possibility.
She had to find out more.
"Francesca Zadkiel II," Cassandra said sharply, and Francesca shuddered.
"Yes?" she said, trying to get back into the moment. Beside her, Caleb was sobbing. Not a terribly unusual sight, if she was honest. He was pathetic, and their Pairing felt like an insult.
"Pay attention when my Pair speaks," Cassandra said, and David, for the first time in what felt like hours, smiled warmly.
"Thank you," he said. "Now, are you paying attention?"
Francesca was annoyed at having to show deference to someone other than her own Guardian, but she did, anyway. "Yes, sir."
"You've done well. But you're focused too much on your classmates. Beat this idiocy out of Caleb, and once you have, show him the proper deference owed to your male superior."
Few statements could have been worse.
But she felt Cassandra's eyes upon her, and Francesca nodded.
"Good."