Juggling everything was challenging, but Elza was managing better than she'd expected. Honestly, she'd thought that the life of being Paired would destroy her, tear down everything she was and everything she wanted to be. Hell, she'd wanted to run away from all of this - she expected that that was the only viable option she had. And it sucked, immensely, that it didn't work out. Despite planning out her escape, despite planning out assistance, despite pushing past all her fears and frustrations and that gnawing sense of unreality, it all went to shit. Of course it did. But she was coping remarkably well, by her own standards. Sure, she was doing poorly in classes with her Pair, but not to the point that they were failing - Alexander would just have to learn how to keep up with her. And while her mind was in far too many places at once, eventually she'd get back on track with her academics, and even if she was a bit malnourished, she'd get back on track with her athletics tests.
And eventually, she'd get her social life back on track. She knew that she was pushing her already stressed relations to their limits, but she still had a little wiggle room, and if they could just wait a little bit longer, endure a little bit more of her ignoring them - or, to be honest, a lot more, she could get her grip back on it all.
And when Elza took a bit too long processing prints in the photo lab, found herself alone, and then, upon leaving, found her path blocked by Rosa and Tab, two of her dearest friends, she knew she'd miscalculated slightly.
"Can we talk?" Rosa asked.
"Please?" Tab added.
Elza winced, and nodded. The three of them went back into the darkroom, the intimacy of dim lights and isolation from the outside world, with the calming and obscuring sound of running water constantly refreshing the chemical baths. She set down her stack of finished prints in one of the enlarger alcoves - for the uninitiated, light projectors that turned small, high-density negatives into human-readable positives via long exposures, blocked off by black curtains.
"Elza?" Rosaline asked.
Of course she'd be the one to talk. Maybe Tabbitha was just too shy, or maybe Tabbitha better understood that sometimes people just had to hide things from their friends, but she expected this from Rosa. "Yeah? What's up?" she said, making sure to phrase things as if there was no obvious problem.
Rosaline sighed. Clearly this was pushing her a little, but Rosaline was a skilled leader. So Elza would let her keep going. "You've been avoiding us at dinner for weeks now, and we're worried."
"We miss you," Tabbitha chimed in.
"You shouldn't worry," Elza said. Committing to showing up, and staying there, would be bad.
"Why not?" Rosa asked. "I talked to some people about-"
Elza's blood boiled, and she rushed forward, grabbing Rosaline by the collar. "You didn't."
Behind her, Tabbitha was growling. Even in the low light, Elza could see her breath, the temperature sucked out of the ambient air. Tabbitha might not have had a knife at her throat, but she might as well have. For all the good it would have done either of them.
"Sorry," Elza said, letting go of Rosaline. "You didn't tell anyone else about me, did you?"
"No," Rosaline said.
"Well," Tabbitha said, suddenly cute, having switched off her latent violence.
"Oh?" Elza asked. She'd never hurt either of them, but if they told the wrong person to look into her...
Rosaline sighed. "We asked Alexander to keep a close eye on you."
"Oh," Elza said. She hadn't noticed... which either meant he wasn't trying very hard, or he was annoyingly good at being a little snitch. Which she severely doubted.
"But," Tabbitha added, "he stopped talking to us." She came up close to Elza. "El..."
Elza's frustration was briefly abated as she looked up into Tab's pleading eyes. "Yeah, Tab?"
"We just wanted to make sure that you're okay, okay?" Tabbitha said.
"That's fine," Elza said. "I am. Now, can we move on?"
"No," Rosa said. "We're your friends. We need to know what you're up to, especially if you need to hide it from everyone else. We can help you."
Elza winced. "No, you can't."
"What?" Rosa protested. "How can you know that if you won't even tell us what's going on?"
Elza gritted her teeth. "I just know, okay? Now leave me be. I still spend time with you, I still love you both, neither of you should be prying into my shit, okay?"
Tabbitha squirmed at the harder swear out of Elza.
Rosa shook her head. "But if you're-"
"Shut up." Elza said, flatly. "Stop digging. If you should know, I would tell you. Now, stop doing whatever the fuck this is before I start getting actually mad at both of you. Okay?"
And with that, Elza pushed past the both of them, and ran out of the darkroom, leaving her prints behind.
Back in the photo lab, Rosa and Tab slipped Elza's assignment into her locker, making use of the small gap between the door and the wall.
"That was awful," Tabbitha said.
"Yeah," Rosa said, holding Tab's wrist. "It was. I'm sorry, but we've got to keep digging, even if she won't tell us anything. Even if she doesn't want help, we need to keep her safe. You know how this can go."
Tabbitha nodded. This wasn't Elza at her worst. This wasn't even top five.
And when she tried to remember "How this can go", imagining the worst...
Well, it came back to two and a half years ago, in the height of the summer of Year 12, 292AA, Lailah VII. It was in the middle of history class on a sweltering day, and Francesca had just received a folded up piece of note paper from Elza, who sat at the desk just across the aisle from her. She'd been looking particularly grumpy that day, though considering Francesca's persistently threatening state, it took a keen eye to discern that. Francesca's expression brightened, and she quickly flipped the paper over and started dashing out a note on the other side.
"While freedom was portrayed as a virtue by many societies of the Twilight Age," their professor said, tapping on the chalkboard, "it was one of the greatest mistakes of the time to exalt it above all else - to consider it a virtue in and of itself. Freedom without direction, or, perhaps, from direction, only causes suffering."
Francesca, giggling to herself, slipped the note across the aisle to Elza, who snatched it out of her hand, unfolded it, and snorted a bit too loudly at its contents, in her best attempt to stifle a laugh.
The professor cleared his throat. "It seems that right now, one of us is lacking somewhat in direction. Elza, would you like to come to the front of the class?"
Rosaline, who was watching from further back in the classroom, halfway expected Elza to say "no" to the obvious non-question, but thankfully, she didn't. Elza stood up, and dutifully walked down the aisle to the front of class.
Most other people would have faced the class, but she stayed facing the blackboard.
"So, Elza Zadkiel II, were you facing the situation of General Serge Cervert, what would you have done?" the professor asked.
Elza shrugged, still not facing the class. "Disbanded my armies and walked away," she said dismissively.
"And how," the professor said, tapping a piece of chalk on the blackboard, the sound of stone on stone ringing in everyone's teeth, "would that have improved the situation, if at all?"
"Does that matter?" Elza said.
"Yes," the professor said, smiling. "Even without being an Angel, you have a responsibility to use power to create the best possible outcomes in the world."
"I don't want to command people. Their lives are their choices. What happens if, as a general, I tell them what to do and they don't do it?" Elza asked.
"That doesn't matter. In this scenario, magic is not yet accessible, and even if it were, you do not have the proper training from the True Church. You do not have the power to render change in the world on your own. The only way to make things better, rather than worse - to minimize suffering - is to subjugate others to your will. What would you tell them to do?" the professor said. The corners of his mouth turned up at every word, knowing that he had the moral high ground over Elza.
Elza, finally, turned to face the class. A scowl was burned into her face. "If they don't listen to me, they die, got it." She waited for the professor to contradict her, and he didn't. No one seemed to take this as scandalous, and that seemed to frustrate her further, even if that was just how things worked. "I don't have the right to tell them how to respond. The world is just about to end, right?"
The professor nodded. "They don't know that for sure, but yes, basically."
"Then how in the-" she paused, barely cutting off a swear, "- do I tell them what to do with their lives? Everything's about to change, forever, and we all know it. It's impossible to know the right thing to do." She was seething. Through the calmness of her words, well-practiced phrasing, everyone could feel the anger.
"But the question still stands," the professor said. "You have the potential to improve the situation. As a woman of faith, would you tell them to protect their people, shore up France against the incoming disaster, or would you send them into Antarctica, attempting to mitigate the source of the disaster?"
Elza closed her eyes, and clenched her fists. "I told you. Neither. They all make their choice, I don't have the God-damned right to-"
"Don't take the Lord's name in vain," the professor interrupted.
"Don't ask me what I want if you won't take my answer," Elza snipped. While most of the students, and the professor himself, couldn't sense it, the most adept among them could feel the air crackling just a bit around her, as intuitive magic pierced, for brief fractions of a second, the barriers she'd been trained to put up.
The professor squinted at her. He hadn't sensed the outpouring of magic, but he'd at least picked up on the disobedience. "Answer the question, Elza." The "or" was entirely unstated. None of them really knew what the "or else" of authority constituted for an Angel student, but the harder any of them pressed against it, the more frightening it felt.
And Elza, fists clenched so tightly that her fingernails drew blood from her palms, said "No," and stormed off, barging through the classroom door.
Silence hung over the class for a few moments. This was not part of the script. A bit of disobedience and rebellion was expected, but straight up rejection? Leaving?
The professor decided that the best way to handle it was to just ignore that it happened. After all, if Elza showed up to the next class, or even the next day of classes, what was one moment of rejection in the grand scheme of things? Nothing, that's what.
But a few minutes later, when Elza hadn't yet returned, Rosaline raised her hand in the middle of the professor's pontificating.
"Yes, Rosaline?" he said, eyebrows raised skeptically.
"I'd like to check on Elza and bring her back," Rosaline said. Bringing her back wasn't a priority - making sure she was okay was the real priority, but Rosaline knew she had to sell this. Tabbitha, sitting next to her, threw her hand up. "Me too!" she said, and Rosaline instinctively nodded. An opportunity to have Tabbitha along was not something she'd ever reject.
The professor regarded them skeptically, but eventually, nodded. "Go ahead. If you're not back by the end of class, get notes from Alexander or Aleste." Both of them looked up from their notebooks, which they'd been scribbling in furiously, and nodded. Their responsibilities were, chiefly, to themselves, but that didn't preclude them from helping their classmates. After all, while their grades and rankings were solely their own in the statistics of it all, their classmates kept track of who they helped, and as such, the evaluation of their skill was also influenced by what impact they had on their fellows.
Tabbitha and Rosaline burst out of the classroom. It was only through a panicked, nervous outpouring of magic from Tabbitha that the door didn't rebound against its hinges and slam back into its frame. The two of them, over the course of the next half hour, did their best to find her. They checked Elza's bunk, the libraries, the places she'd been known to hang out when she wanted to be alone, and the found nothing. Despairing of the lack of a lead, Tabbitha proposed a magical solution.
Both of them knew the general feel of Elza's magic. They could imagine, clearly, how it felt when she was working miracles on the world around her.
And so, theoretically, one could plug that feeling into second order abstraction magic and attempt to replicate it. With such a strangely abstract yet specific feeling, it would be nearly impossible to accomplish work with it, but it perhaps they could create a sense of resonance - vibrating the frequency of the magic itself, and hoping to find something else that responded to the broadcast of that resonance, and produced the same signal back - almost certainly, Elza herself.
It was forty-five minutes later, well after the end of class and the beginning of the next, that the two of them attempted it. Rosaline failed to do it herself, but in her failure, she could clearly feel that Tabbitha had succeeded.
"Rose?" She said. She only went that far with nicknames when they were truly alone. Or when she was truly afraid.
"Yeah, Tab?" Rosa said.
"Can you walk with me? I think I can find her, I just can't focus on moving and triangulating at the same time," she apologized.
Rosa hated that anyone would make Tab feel bad for accomplishing that much, but apparently not accomplishing enough. "Of course," she said, putting her hands on Tabbitha's shoulders. "Let's go."
Together, they ignored the looks of off-duty teachers, of Sisters of Mercy out for walks while their children were in class, of janitors and groundskeepers making their way from task to task. And Tabbitha's steps, one foot after another, led them across campus, up the main road, and across it, to the Empty Quarter. The buildings were still under construction, but the process was going slowly - it would be years before the structures that already existed were pushed to capacity, and so, there was plenty of time to finish the facilities for whatever future generation of Angels would double the available forces of Christendom. The dormitories for the Christened and the Confirmed were already being expanded, two walls worth of windows being replaced with wax paper and construction workers during class hours, but the larger facilities required for the Pairs, still a few years beyond them at this point, were the real focuses of construction, consisting of nearly a doubling of the physical resources of campus.
But for now, that entire section of campus was a ghost town.
And that's where Tabbitha, and to a lesser extent, Rosa, felt that Elza was.
It felt like a pulse - that feeling, disconcerting, of having your fingers on an essential vein, where from moment to moment, you felt an impulse, something that told you that life existed here - and that if you stopped feeling it, it no longer did. It might have been a part of their classes, but that feeling, of the flow of blood in a human body, distressed Tabbitha, and now she had her metaphysical finger on a metaphysical pulse, and she was damn near close to having a panic attack just from that act of analysis. The only thing keeping her grounded, as they walked across campus, each step longer and quicker than the last, was Rosa's hand gripping hers tightly.
But with each footstep, she felt the possibility that it would stop.
It crashed against the walls of her soul, like the ocean against a wavebreak, the closer they got, the harder it slammed. It was entirely possible, even likely, that no one other than the two of them could feel Elza - after all, most of the staff was barely trained in magic, and few others had had their souls resonate in quite the same way with Elza, like tuning forks ringing out to the same notes, if not to the same amplitude.
Another had.
But that wasn't for this moment, even though she felt it, further away, full of unspoken fear.
Rosa and Tab were stopped, for a moment, at the locked door of one of the future Pair dormitories, the walls and doors installed before the rest of the infrastructure.
Rosaline shattered it, and wordlessly, they dashed through. The erratic pulse of Elza's magic felt... strange. They needed to find her. It would be better to find someone with expertise, someone with more training to help her, but they both had the sense that they did not have the time.
Chain link fences, built on the same model they'd been for hundreds of years, going back to well into the Twilight Age, blocked off the stairwells. Rosaline tore them down, forming a heat knife just past the edge of her fingernails, and sliced through the thin steel wire. A firm kick knocked the wireframes down, and she pulled Tabbitha through. Together, they stumbled up to the fourth floor - with each step, the spiritual pressure coming from above felt more and more obvious.
A room above, down the hall to the south, felt like the center of the world.
And more than walk to it, they fell into it.
Pushing the door open gently, fearfully, they saw Elza.
Her feet weren't touching the ground.
Rosaline swore.
Or at least, she would have. The words, upon leaving her mouth, were swept away in the whipping wind, all meaning blown away to nothing.
The two of them tried to catch Elza's eyes, but she wasn't looking at them. She wasn't looking at anything - not anything they could see, at least.
The air warped around her.
She warped around the world.
Something was terribly wrong.
Her mind was a furious nail driven into the fabric of reality, and all things, the building, the school, Rosa and Tabbitha, her body, the superstructures of magic, they were all pinned in place and drawn forth by the tension of that one, immovable point.
"ELZA!" Tabbitha screamed, the noise just barely piercing the chaos.
And to their mutual horror, she caught Elza's attention. Her eyes were upon Tabbitha, who rose off her feet. Rosaline lunged, holding onto her, and she felt reality grow just a little less real as she held onto her. It felt like her skin was melting, and where it did, so were the barriers that held her self in place, like a plastic bowl failing under thermal load, buckling, ready to let its contents flow outward.
[Why are you here?] Elza asked. Not with words, but... intent? None of them had the words to describe it, much less understand.
"Please," Tabbitha pleaded. What she was pleading for, she had no idea, nor did any of them, other than the vague sensation of needing a return to a world they all understood.
Rosaline understood where this was going. A disconnect from the physical world. The nigh-suicidal feeling Elza was bleeding out to them, that none of this fit, that none of this belonged, that everything, every inch and ounce of it, was wrong.
Where the immense pressure Elza was exerting on reality was going.
Elza was turning demonic.
The three of them knew how this went.
Elza's definitions of self would collapse, and reform, free of reality's shackles, and create something anew. Something where the limitations of the physical were no longer necessary. Where the limitations of the self were no longer necessary. Where all that remained was purpose.
What purpose that was, none of them knew.
But it lay there.
Waiting.
Waiting for Elza to pour herself into a new mold, to become something more than she'd ever been before.
The intensity of the meta-reality of it all was intoxicating, indoctrinating, a beauty beyond beauty, a power beyond power, how could it not be what man was meant to be?
And at the corner of her mind, at the corner of their mind, as they all were drawn into the vortex of magic she formed in her depression and anxiety and panic and inescapable conclusion that she could not escape from any of it, a voice spoke.
"Come home."
It was none of them.
But it spoke beyond them.
In their minds, past their senses, directly to their souls.
Tabbitha leapt, crashing into Rosaline, and then, with Rosa in her arms, directly into Elza, tackling out of the air, out of the space she occupied more solidly than anyone ever stood upon the ground, the three of them rolling and crashing into a pile of wooden planks covered by a canvas tarp.
The two smaller girls - even smaller at the time, Tabbitha having hit her growth spurt well before the two of them - were encompassed and shielded by her back and arms, and Tabbitha wept into them.
And while neither of the other two could articulate just why they were doing so, or what had just happened, they wept too.
But they had crossed the abyss.
Whatever Elza had called, it had turned from them.
For now.
The air calmed and cooled.
And all was still.
That, as much as anything, was what Rosaline and Tabbitha wanted to avoid.
They'd said it before, and they knew they'd say it again, even if they hated the prospect, but...
Never again.
More than any of their classmates, they knew they could lose Elza.
And she’d done too much for them.
They would never let that happen.