Athletics Instructor of Class 103A, Penny Holmes, previously holder of the rank of Captain in the Seventh Legion, stationed at the far end of the Nile, stood and watched the next crop of Angels attempt, and in some cases, fail, to chart and climb a Grade VII path. The difficulty, she observed, was usually either in the moment of inversion, where they would have to transition from ascent to descent in order to negotiate a particularly nasty overhang, or in hanging on at the moment just prior. As this was a class of Paired students, the climb was performed in tandem, and thus, to give them the proper challenge, it was conducted without previously arranged attachment points for their ropes. They had to construct the path as they navigated it, and so, as one drove spikes and tied ropes, inverted, another had to simply wait.
This was, as far as she was concerned, one of the most fun possible activities that she could give them. Were she not shackled to the role of observer and critic, she would be up there with them in a heartbeat. Not having nearly the command over magic that they had, nor having a partner in the climb, would provide almost the necessary challenge. She'd prefer to remove the safety net two dozen meters below for her own climb, to give it the proper stakes, but unfortunately, like letting herself climb the course, it wasn't something she could do. To be exacting, it wasn't something she could do while obeying the dictates of the True Church, which, as far as she was concerned, was an absolute. She wasn't a priest, and so, she had no authority to forgive heretics, and nor did she ever wish to give it an attempt.
Above her (thankfully, none of the students had failed to reach the horizontal climb portion and fallen back to her position on the ground), Alex hung upside-down, fingers and toes in tiny crevices in the manufactured rock face, waiting for Elza to catch up to him and proceed to the next position. They were in the first wave of their fellow students, the others still making their way across the upside-down climbing section, or for the less-skilled of them, swinging back on the ropes laid by their Pairs back to the beginning of the transition to the upside-down section. The expanse of rock, standing inside the hangar-like cavern of the indoor gymnasium, had been crafted by the joint effort of the Guardians shortly before class, so none of them had the opportunity to scout it out, and all of them had the authority to deface it. As such, each of them had been given an array of pitons - nail-like steel rods, but with loops at their ends to snake rope through, and a length of rope, to define their routes as they took them. The course was designed to be difficult enough that failure was a constant, but through the checkpoints created by the pitons, the teams of Pairs would be able to progress through by the end of their hour-long class.
Hopefully.
The two of them had climbed the initial vertical wall without talking to each other, other than arguments over who would lay the pitons, which were frequent and mostly solved by force. Both of them had immense raw magical power, and not-insignificant physical strength, and so they’d both scurried across the upside-down section handily. However, they were supposed to transit in sequence, and thus, someone had to go first, and someone had to wait. So, in this case, Elza was inverted, climbing down, against every natural instinct, while Alex watched her, holding her protective rope fast as best he could.
She was clearly furious at the disobedience of her long hair, hanging down, daring to intrude on her eyes’ efforts to spot the next handhold. Francesca, Alex noticed - one of the few other students to keep up with them, despite the fact that she was clearly using an immense amount of her own magic to keep her Pair, Caleb, from falling - was keeping her long, silver hair oriented down, relative to her body, keeping it both out of her eyes and, frankly, stylish. Aleste and Quint, meanwhile, were closing in, followed closely by Rosaline and Nicolas, those two Pairs working in relative harmony.
Alex watched Elza closely. Was there any way to figure out infidelity through attitude and exterior actions? There had to be. Everything anyone did flooded into everything else they did. But as he watched her, it was obvious that he just did not have the knowledge or experience necessary to figure that out. Sure, she was lithe, her muscles flexing under her uniform, her skirt only maintaining her dignity through the combination of belting and leggings, and sure, she looked like she was ready to devour the course, full of enough intent and fury to just split the rock into magma to secure her own path, but Alex was…
Alex was…
He couldn’t quite finish the sentence, watching her yell in frustration at the rock before her, turn her fingernails into something with obsidian-like hardness and darkness, and claw directly into the surface like it was soft mud. It wasn’t elegant, but it was worth staring at. He was torn between feeling honored at being assigned this, and at the increasingly likely, in his mind at least, possibility that she wasn’t his at all. Julian’s story had been sitting in his head for days now, and he hadn’t shaken them yet. Every time he thought he might, he’d catch Elza staring off into the distance wistfully, or sighing with potential meaning, or blushing without any apparent cause, and Alex would feel like he was losing his entire mind.
It was absurd. It was absurd that he was Paired with her in the first place. They were a terrible match by any stretch of the imagination. And frankly, he should be thankful for the possibility that it might fall apart.
“Come on, idiot,” Elza cried out, suddenly far further in the course than Alex had kept track of, furious that he’d been staying still while she waited, inverted, at the next designated match-point, where they were meant to meet up. Alex would, according to his pride, normally protest, but also according to his pride, he couldn’t allow himself to fail, and so, he followed the line of rope and pitons laid by Elza, to catch up with her. They were poorly laid, driven into the rock with haste and a severe lack of precision. He was pretty sure that if either of them fell, they’d pull them straight out, and have to start over again. But if he fell hard enough to test that, it’d be as much a judgment of him as it was of her.
He kept his eyes, responsibly, on Elza, as he climbed. She didn’t turn around to watch him, so he just had a view of her from behind. He should, in all correctness, keep his eyes on her. It was just an artifact of circumstance that his gaze was headed up her skirt. And that was fine - she was wearing thick leggings, like all the girls in winter, so there was nothing to it.
But he felt his eyes lingering, and he nearly missed his next handhold.
Even if she wasn’t looking, Elza was doing her best to sense him, and did. “Alex, I swear, if you mess this up-“
“I won’t!” Alex protested, while still catching far more of an eyeful than was strictly virtuous.
When he made his way next to her, his fingers aching, he was blushing, and hoping that she didn’t pay attention to that. She looked up - or, down, relative to them, at the turn in the path in the rock face. “There’s a crack three meters forward and a meter to the left. I’m making a break for it, and after that, I’ll put in a piton for you.”
“Wait,” Alex said. “Shouldn’t I go next? You’ve been taking the lead this whole-“
“No,” Elza said, interrupting him, and lunged forward. He was amazed at her speed. She was liquefying and re-solidifying the rock beneath her fingers to generate new handholds, and doing the same, to a lesser extent, with her boots.
He was less amazed when she slipped, right as he was in the middle of securing a reinforcing piton where they’d last met. She screamed, more of a sound of frustration than fear, as she dropped a solid ten meters - Alex hadn’t yet had the time to measure the rope properly - and, pulling the rope taut, yanked the last piton she’d placed out of the rock, suddenly putting all of her weight into Alex, ripping him from his grip.
The two of them fell.
The two of them hung, gracelessly, from their harnesses, a meter ahead and eleven meters below the most advanced of their classmates - in this case, Teresa, who stopped to laugh at them. With a toothy grin, she cocked her head to look around her hanging skirt, back at her Pair, Percy, who, with his huge muscles, looked at ease upside-down as he did right-side-up. “We should try that, Percy!”
Before he finished yelling “No!”, she’d launched herself through the air, flipping around to grab hold of the stalactite-like downward-hanging protrusion that Elza had just fallen off of. She held onto it tightly, with both legs and one arm, using the one free appendage to drive a piton into it. Before Alex and Elza had ascended their safety rope back to the rock face, Percy had begrudgingly caught up to Teresa, and the two of them rounded the corner back to climbing upwards and out of sight.
Elza climbed up the rope, putting her hands on Alex as she went past.
Were those hands on someone else every night?
Every night?
Elza looked down at him. “I thought you were supposed to be good. Don’t keep me waiting.”
Elza, meanwhile, was also agitated. Frustrated, even. It was insulting to be shackled to the progress of another person. She’d thought, at least, that Alex, as the top student of their class, wouldn’t slow her down. But he’d been dropping like a stone, both figuratively and in this case, literally, and weighing her down in both senses.
The two of them made their way back to the beginning of the overhang. Light shone in from the high-up windows of the gymnasium building in shafts, and for most of their current task, they were shaded. Below them, well-padded mats had been laid out by their instructor, but if they fell far enough to hit them, they’d have done something severely wrong. Elza didn’t particularly care about disappointing Instructor Holmes, but she couldn’t stand the idea of being that weak. She needed strength, and that was what she was going to call up with every fiber of her being.
In this case, social strength.
“Come on, you don’t suck, do you?” she said to Alex, who hung a meter or so ahead of her. He grunted what sounded like agreement, and slowly, methodically, worked his way forward. His methods would be insufferable on their own, checking each step, but on top of that, he kept looking back at her. She didn’t know why he was doing it, and the constant observation felt like an accusation.
She hated it.
“Oh for God’s sake,” she said, under her breath, and scampered forward. To move quickly through the upside-down portion of the course took both reinforcement of physical strength in her fingers and forearms, and, though she suspected she’d get scolded if Instructor Holmes noticed, a bit of pure upward force applied to her body. It was easier to fight gravity if you did so directly, after all. She rushed past Alex, snatching the bag of pitons from him as she did. If she had to handle everything herself, she would.
If he could just keep up with her, they would be fine. Teresa and Percy had transitioned to the final upward stretch of the climb, and so, they didn’t have much time left to win. But they could still do it. Elza knew her strength, and by extension, knew what Alex should be able to do, if there was any validity to his ranking and their Pairing. He just had to follow her, to keep up.
Of course, if he could keep up, he wouldn’t be as much of a pain.
She wanted to enjoy torturing him, but that only went so far. This was just pathetic.
Alex caught up to her, and re-tied one of her knots in their rope. “Elza, you need to be more careful.”
“Not if you’re faster,” she said, smiling. Okay, it was still fun to wring a sense of superiority out of what she was doing to the top student in their class - or, if rumors were to be believed, their entire year.
Alex, upside-down and facial features obscured somewhat by the inverted bloodflow, might have been flushed with anger. “Are you- Look!” He gestured at one of the pitons Elza had placed in the rock face. It wasn’t particularly far into the rock, and it was at a strange angle, but the pitons were more of a formality than a necessity. They had actual safety equipment protecting them when they failed, and if Alex would just copy Elza, they wouldn’t fail at all. Alex pulled a rubber-headed mallet off the toolbelt on his waist, and walloped the piton until it was “properly” secured in the rock, about ten centimeters deeper.
“I need you to do things properly, okay?” he protested.
Elza looked back at him, and shrugged. “I need you to not suck, but that’s not happening either.”
Alex growled at her - at least that was a more committed, emotive noise than he tended to make - and crawled up and over her, placing a boot firmly on her shoulder to push himself onwards. That would normally be grounds for a physical response, but maybe, just maybe, he would prove himself.
Somewhere on the upside-down, climbing downwards portion of the route, Alex lost his grip, and Elza sighed, knowing what was coming in a few fractions of a second. The rope pulled taut, and yanked her off of her handholds.
At least the piton Alex reinforced held.
Though that didn’t change the fact that most of their class was slowly, steadily, making their way well past either of them.
The next day, student evaluations were to be posted. This was a public thing - after all, knowing where you stood objectively, in terms of how well you did as judged by your teachers, was valuable, but equally valuable was knowing how you performed relative to your peers. Particularly, when you were part of a group that globally numbered only a couple thousand, your standard was your context. An Angel was an Angel - comparing them to anything else was near-meaningless.
Alexander had certain expectations. Yes, clearly he was not going to be at the top of his class, despite being, consistently, the best. He expected to be dragged down by Elza’s obstinance, and therefore, to likely be beaten by Francesca. Chess would be pretty happy about that, at least, which was something of a positive.
As such, he was more focused on Max.
“It’s gonna be awful, Alex,” Max said.
“You’ll be fine.” Alex grabbed onto Max’s hand, and feeling with the subtle expression of muscle tension and body language that that wasn’t enough, made sure his fingers slid between Max’s, giving him a properly firm grip. Alex had to present himself as solid, immovable, like a perfect statue, and that would give Maxwell something to lean against, metaphorically.
Max leaned against him literally. “I’m gonna be done for, Alex.”
Alex abandoned the clasped hand and moved into a one-armed hug. Max clearly needed it, and Alex, if he could possibly admit it, also might need it. He was the best of the best, but there was no way that in this particular slice of evaluation, he remained as such. Elza was going to drag him down. While her methods clearly worked for her own personal performance, seeing as she’d been ranked quite highly in their previous years, always fighting with Francesca for second place, they were not suited for teamwork. In fact, she seemed to disregard the concept of working together entirely, just expecting Alex to keep up. Which he should have been able to do. He didn’t understand why he had such difficulty keeping up with her, but the more difficulty he had, the more he wanted to attribute it to her just being so… weird. How could he be expected to perform when he thought his God-given Pair might be playing, as Francesca might put it, “tonsil hockey” with someone else?
At least Maxwell was warm, and was pulling him tight with his arms. Thank God for the comfort of friendship.
In front of them, the assembled masses of all four classes of year 103 of the Angelic Academy of Arcadia were assembled, taking a gander at the relatively small sheets of paper that showed how the administration of the Angelic Order of Saint Michael had evaluated their performance, pasted on the outer wall of the Sagan Dining Hall (made for the current crop of Pairs, though a second was under construction), right beside the entrance. The eighty of them were making it rather difficult for the other two hundred and forty Paired students, of the years beyond them, to enter the dining commons, but not a single one of them had the wherewithal to be concerned about that. The other, older students sidled past them awkwardly, trying to find any room in the mass of humanity that was almost magnetically attracted to their results, which were printed in font of such a cruelly small size that one had to be right in front of it to see where they placed.
And one by one, the students saw their results, and passed on to the dining commons, eating in either celebration or mourning. Every now and then, a triumphant yell or a yelp of emotional pain would go out, along with congratulatory or conciliatory noises from their nearby peers, but Alex and Maxwell were far enough on the periphery that they couldn’t even tell who was first in line.
Far ahead of them, a similar scene was playing out with Tabbitha and Elza. The push and pull of the crowd had separated them from Rosaline, but Tabbitha still held fast to Elza like she was the last handhold on the outside of a lighthouse in a hurricane. Tabbitha’s grip was painful - The girl had grown quite a bit in the last few years, and with that came far more strength than she was used to, but Elza ignored it. If pain was the price to reassure Tabbitha, and to make Elza feel like she had an anchor in the world, she would pay it gladly a thousand times over. The other students jostled against them, and Elza wanted to pull herself even further back into the thick layers of her winter uniform to keep away from their touch. Tabbitha was okay, though.
“Come on!” a student from class C yelled, before storming off into the dining hall, a few of their close friends in tow. This was far more effecting than positive results - After all, worries were stronger, systemically, than hopes. Tabbitha’s fingernails dug further into the back of Elza’s hand.
“You’ll be fine,” Elza whisper-shouted to Tab, making a hushed voice carry as much force as she could muster. “You’re strong, you’re smart, you try hard, that’s more than enough to do well.”
“But-“ Tabbitha protested, her voice wavering.
“Tab?” Elza said.
“Yeah?” she asked.
Elza sighed. “You’re lovely, but shut up. You’ve got this. Trust me.”
Tabbitha’s heart, head, and magic fluttered for a few moments, but eventually she settled on the clear and unavoidable fact that trusting Elza was her only valid choice, and did so. Her heartrate stabilized and dropped, and through her arm, Elza could feel a small, but significant amount of tension fall out of Tabbitha.
Thank God.
And so, hand in hand, they made their way to the source of revelation, and the horrors and joys it brought.
Elza let Tabbitha past her, and the taller, if spindlier, girl blocked her vision as Tabbitha scanned the four sheets of paper for her name. And…
Tabbitha squeaked.
Elza, as well as she knew Tabbitha, did not know how to parse this noise.
“Tab?” she asked.
Tabbitha didn’t even turn, still transfixed by the results, and squeaked again, to the complete non-elucidation of Elza.
“Uh,” Elza said, tugging at Tabbitha’s sleeve.
And Tabbitha turned sideways. She wasn’t exactly a wide girl, but she had broader shoulders than most, and doing so let Elza come in underneath her. Seeing as Tabbitha seemed verbally incapacitated, Elza started scanning the list, not for her name, but for Tab’s. Tabbitha saw this, and jabbed a pianist-like finger at the paper. Elza looked under the tip of her fingernail.
“Tabbitha Zadkiel II. Overall: #22, Class, #11. Pair: Maxwell Zadkiel II, Overall #20, Class, #10.” She looked up at Tabbitha, though she had to jab her in the chin with a fingertip to get her attention. “You did great!” she said, proudly. Tabbitha had been displaying steady improvement, and it had already been a great sign to see her in the same class as Elza, Rosaline, Alexander, Francesca, Aleste, and the rest of the more impressive students in their year. But, realistically, she was going to be in the bottom quarter of the twenty of them, or at least that’s what Elza had thought. This was an excellent result, and it flew in the face of those expectations.
Tabbitha squeaked a third time, but Elza knew how to speak her language. This was a happy squeak. Tabbitha leaned down, and shook Elza excitedly by the shoulders, and all was well.
At least, until Elza read the rankings.
It took her a while to find her name, but…
Maxwell tugged on Alex’s sleeve. “Come on, it’ll be fine, maybe you just read it wrong-“
“No!” Alex said, in something close enough to a shout that it made him uncomfortable just to hear it. He was certain he’d scoured the list in his effort to reassure Maxwell, and while he’d kept an eagle-eye on the results, he found Maxwell, down at the end of the first sheet, a fourth of the way down the entire list, before seeing his own name. With each name he saw, the worse it got.
And eventually, he found himself, a half-dozen places behind Elza, in the bottom third.
He stormed off into the dining hall, Maxwell lingering just long enough to read Alex’s position himself, before charging through the crowd to get back to Alex’s side. He held onto Alex’s hand like it’d fall away forever if he didn’t. For all he knew, that was true.
“Alex!” he cried, as Alexander paid little heed to Max’s grip, yanking him forward.
He didn’t slow down until the two of them were shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting in line to receive a main entree of protein, dining trays sliding along stainless steel rails. “Alex?”
“Yeah, Max?” There was a lot in those two words, and in the slight quiver that made it into Alex’s voice as he said them.
“What happened?”
It was painful to hear the question, but contemplating it was far worse. There was something truly horrible knotting in the pit of his stomach, twisting and curling his surety into nonsense. There was only one answer, words he despised saying, but being objectively true, he couldn’t deny:
“I don’t know.”
“How did that… I… I mean, you’re amazing, just…” Tabbitha stammered.
Elza had expected poor results. She’d just hoped that her friends wouldn’t care so much about them. Sure, climbing back up to second place from… fifty-sixth or so was a tall order, but she was smart, she was strong, and she could do it, even if she had to drag Alexander kicking and screaming along with her to do it. She had more important things to focus on for now, but that was a temporary situation. It didn’t matter that her grades and ranking suffered in the meantime.
Rosaline leaned forward on the table, looking deep into Elza’s eyes. She looked away for a moment, before thinking that that made her look more guilty, and instead faced the full force of Rosaline’s gaze. It burned a little. “Are you okay?”
Elza opened her mouth, but was interrupted before she could say anything.
“No, seriously,” Rosaline said. “Are you okay? If you need anything, we’re here for you. We know you’re keeping secrets, but for God’s sake, if you need help, I can ignore that, it’s you, after all.”
Tabbitha nodded, earnestly, tears in her eyes.
Elza sighed. It annoyed her how painful it was to, in essence, tell two of her best friends to just shut up and stop bothering her. They cared. And she cared about them. But they’d just have to hold off a little longer.
“Alex and I just don’t get along. I’m still messing with him, okay? You know how weird this whole Pairing business is. This is just my way of handling it. I’ll be back on top of things soon.”
Rosaline didn’t break eye contact. “Will you?”
Elza nodded. “Of course. I’m just that good,” she said, not knowing if she was lying or not.
But it felt like it.
She had to do something about this.