After a few more iterations, and after being satisfied that Alexander understood the basic principles of living runes, Julian wrapped up the lesson. While he wanted to immediately apply what he’d learned, instead, Alex believed that he’d only have one good shot at this. Once Elza noticed that he was attempting to track her, she’d come up with some kind of countermeasures, and given that she was at the very least on his level right now, he couldn’t trust that he could defeat them. So, he practiced in his own time, using the basic tracking rune for the purposes he’d deceptively told Julian he was going to use it for. He started applying small blood runes to his pencils, his notebooks, and other bits of his personal possessions. He found it basically impossible to maintain more than one at once - not categorically, at least - he could manage it for a few moments, and with greater understanding and training, he was certain he could do more. But one was all he would need. Distance was the big factor for him, as well as the concept of “imaging”: Namely, that by being the one who moved the object, he knew where it should be, and so, his senses might just be reinforcing his own knowledge rather than giving him new information.
He solved that by studying the fine art of reverse-pickpocketing. Telling Max that he needed him to hold onto one of Alex’s pencils would taint the experiment, and so, he made sure to get one of them into Max’s jacket pocket without him noticing. It was difficult at first, but after a few days of this, Alex was confident in his abilities, and ready to give it his all.
And so, he found himself, around twenty-one at night, on the balcony outside of Elza’s room. Their rooms, on the inside, had locks, but their sliding doors onto the balcony were held tight by simple latches. He’d wandered out about ten minutes ago, knowing that Elza would, even on the close end of statistical variance, be returning in an hour or so, and quickly sat down. The apartments were set back on each other, so that none of the floors had a balcony directly above them, like a one-directional pyramid of sorts. So, if anyone on the one floor above them looked down over the edge of their balcony, they might see Alex milling about suspiciously. Hopefully by sitting down he could avoid their line of sight. He was still trying to figure out who was directly above and below them, and the other occupants in the eight apartments surrounding them in every direction-
That was too much distraction from his own mind. He silenced it as best he could.
Right now, his biggest concern was figuring out if Julian was paying attention to him. While he seemed pretty hands-off, barely helping them in classes, and only having cryptic advice for them every now and then, Alex would be strategically inept if he didn’t account for the possibility that Julian might notice him breaking into his Pair’s room. Granted, Julian hadn’t seemed to notice Elza’s midnight returns to their apartment - or, Alex thought, he just didn’t care - and that made him too much of an unknown. After hemming and hawing over it for a few minutes, Alex crawled on his hands and knees over the artificial wooden planks (made of hydraulically treated sawdust, an incredibly durable, waterproof material, one of the prides of the dendro-scientists of the True Church, alongside transparent wood), and slid up to Elza’s sliding glass door, pressing his back against it. The less he needed to extend his magic beyond his own body, the less chance he stood of being detected - at least, he suspected. In his own capabilities, he could sense the use of magic more than he could sense a living being, but frankly, Angels of Julian’s caliber were so far away from his skill-set that trying to estimate his capabilities was inherently fruitless.
Still, he operated on his best known principles, and reached his left hand up to the wooden door handle set into the metal and glass, and let a thin tendril of magic reach out to the other side. He’d practiced on his own, and Maxwell’s doors, reasoning that if those two were the same, everyone was equipped with the same mechanism, and he seemed to be correct. A lever on the inside engaged a latch, and his magic yanked on that lever, popping the mechanism open. Then, with a tentative, gentle yank, he slid the door open, and tumbled backwards inside.
He didn’t know what to expect with Elza’s room. He’d asked Chess what a girl’s room was like, compared to a boy’s, and received a hell of a stare and a dressing down. The differences between the two categories, as far as she was concerned, were far less than the differences between individuals, and so the question was meaningless.
Her room was barren.
No posters on the walls.
No books on the bookshelves.
No instruments, no easels, no piles of notepaper, nothing.
The only evidence that someone lived here was that the bed was, against regulations and expectations, unmade, the sheets a complete mess, with evidence that Elza, inelegantly, drooled on her pillowcase on a regular basis.
He drew himself upright, and to his feet, and nothing served to change that initial impression.
It was less like someone lived here, and more like a vagrant had crashed here for a few weeks. The doors to the closets were left open, and dirt had been tracked in through the balcony door, caked into the carpet.
Something panged deep in Alex’s heart.
This hurt to look at.
It felt like his face was pinching up, brow furrowing, his cheeks making their way to his nose, and his lips pressing together. He didn’t want to think about it. There was the mission, and that was what mattered. He had the rest of his life to help his Pair become a healthy person. He had the next fifty minutes to find a way to track her on her nightly escapades.
He looked around her room, and tried to parse the problem. He needed to find something she would bring with her tomorrow - his ability to make a living rune last through unconsciousness was, well, no ability at all. That would take understanding of programmatic magic, which they were scheduled to be taught next year. So this would take him sacrificing his sleep for tonight, and because of that, he had to find something she’d keep on her person tomorrow… And didn’t have on her right now. He could rifle through her wardrobe, but there was no telling what shirt, jacket, skirt, or (his heart fluttered, despite himself) underwear she might wear tomorrow. They were given many copies, and anything she took with her on a regular basis, like her bookbag, well, wasn’t here. He found himself with a surprisingly difficult problem that he hadn’t thought too much about, having concerned himself with the problem of sneaking into her room and maintaining the rune.
He wracked his brain. There had to be a solution. There was always a solution.
Alex tore his way through her clothes drawers. He made sure not to disturb anything, and the second he saw something overly personal, he slammed shut what he knew was the underwear drawer, but he was looking for something, anything, where she was running out of clothes. A piece of clothing that she’d change out for tomorrow, but wouldn’t have more than one option…
And after he ran through every other option, he returned, inevitably, to the underwear drawer, and crossed himself.
His prayer seemed to get through to God, because when he looked with wide-open eyes, there were many available pairs of bras and panties, but only one pair of socks - the perfect target. While they were well on their way to spring now, they were still in the late bits of winter, and in the climatology of the post-apocalyptic world, that meant that things were still very cold in mainland Europe. And that meant that they all had thick, high wool socks. The girls had socks somewhat higher than the boys, reaching up to their knees, but both had enough fabric to cover everything covered by their tall boots, and Alex knew, through his own experience of the male socks, that there was a particularly thick seam right around the toes of the socks. Blood was a colorful medium, and it tended to soak through things, but if he placed it just right, on the seam itself, it wouldn’t get to the outside of the socks.
Quickly, he snatched the pair, flipped the right one inside-out, and bit the tip of his pointer finger, hard. The blood flowed, and with a wisp of magic, he directed that flow through the air, writing a circular incantation of the Irinaean symbol for the concept of “Live” onto that stitch of wool. As the circle was completed, and the spell came to life, he felt it vibrate in him, like two tuning forks coming into resonance.
Immediately, he felt like he was out of his own body, which he supposed he was. The best analogue he had was being extremely tired, where the mind was desperately trying to dive off into dreams at every available opportunity, but instead of dreams, it was the reality of being a sock. Which was much less interesting, but much more disturbing. With his bifurcated consciousness, he put the sock back into the condition in which he found it, shut the drawer, the door, and then made his way back into his room.
He’d grabbed a good book on the wars with the Union Eternal, back in the early Dawn Age, and he’d do his best to keep himself awake in bed while reading that.
And while also being a sock.
It was going to be a long night.
He’d almost nodded off when he felt Elza put her foot inside him, which was one of the most distinctly unpleasant experiences he’d ever managed to have. He’d kept himself just on the border between being asleep and being awake, having found on previous adrenaline-filled nights (before tests, in those cases) that being as close as possible to sleep was almost as good as actually sleeping, and he’d kept himself awake by registering the feeling of ceasing to exist in the form of a visio-linguistic symbol made of blood on the inside of a sock as an existential threat, triggering a brutal fear reflex every time he was about to nod off to the degree that he’d be unable to maintain it.
Now, he was only the sock by implication, specifically, “implication of concept”, so while Elza was, in a way, inside him, more directly, he was being stretched around her toes, specifically the big toe and the next one down the line, which made him feel strangely wide and deep. The sensation of being “stretched” wasn’t someone he’d been trained for, and for about ten minutes as Elza went through her morning routine, Alex lay, bolt-stiff, awake as a guard on the borderlands, just riding the sensation and trying to keep hold of his own mind through the experience.
And as she started taking the elevator downstairs, shocks of pain ran through him. He didn’t like to use swears, but in lieu of them, the most intense pain possible ran through his mind sans description. He brushed his teeth, dressed himself, and ran through his morning routine as fast as humanly possible to follow her to their morning church service. She managed to reach the pews before he even left the building, and the sensation of his self being so far away from himself felt like, for lack of a better term, death. It just felt so… Wrong.
The closer he got to her, the safer he felt, and when he took his place next to her and Julian in the pews, he felt almost whole again, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was stepping on him, and that he was on the floor.
The service went as it always did. Reminding them of their responsibilities, reinforcing and slightly expanding their knowledge of theology and philosophy in a useful way, but Alex was busy feeling a different sensation, one that, as he ate breakfast with his friends, eyes unfocused, barely managed to contextualize. Thankfully, Maxwell saw that Alex was having some kind of difficulty, and lied about Alex having a headache or something similar (Alex couldn’t quite figure out what he was saying).
He stopped feeling like Elza was stepping on him.
Exclusively, at least.
He felt a little of it, still.
But he also felt like he was the one doing the stepping.
The longer he felt it, the stronger it was.
When he closed his eyes, he could feel the sway of a long skirt brushing against his calves and knees, sliding along the faux-leather of his high boots.
Christ, he swore, in his mind. The less focus he had on his own life, on his own mind and experience, the more he was drawn towards… Well, Elza’s.
As the day wore on, he could barely focus on his classes, and he did his best to try to figure out what was happening. He wasn’t much for conversation, and his answers for his teachers were mediocre at best, but in his desperate searches of the Archives through his wrist Interface, he found a concept that seemed applicable - Spirit Weapons. This was something they were scheduled to learn and master next year, and so, of course, he wanted to get an intellectual, if not magical, head start on it. The principle was based on psychological studies of Twilight-era integrations of technology with human life - specifically, that of the psychology of “driving a car”. In some nations, humans were dispersed enough that walking or public transit were inadequate for bringing them to the locations they required, and “cars” - personal transport devices, powered by internal combustion engines running on oil derivatives, styled for personal identification - were the primary method of reaching the places one needed to be in. They were objects totally and wholly owned by their operators, and it was found that psychologically, they became, in the minds of their operators, part of them. If someone crashed their car into another person’s car, it was rendered in their minds as “they hit me”. The material conditions of “cars” and roads and such were no longer applicable, but there was an underlying lesson to be learned: If a possession was integral enough to someone’s existence, it would become sublimated into them, and become part of their sense of self.
The consequence, right now, being that Elza considered that right sock part of her, and that Alex’s rune, rendering that sock part of him in his mind, meant that their senses of self were beginning to overlap. He’d experienced that for some strange, indeterminate moments in the first night they’d really gotten to know each other, but this was less deliberate, and it was warping his mind in ways he couldn’t quite understand. The first indication was in the first class period they spent together that day - mathematics.
Everything proceeded as normal, except that he felt like he was about twelve centimeters to the right.
He was in his seat, and she was in hers, but he was also about twelve centimeters right and fifty centimeters down, existing somewhere in her right boot, and it made it very difficult to focus on exactly what the history professor was saying. And after that, the mathematics professor, and after that, the general science professor. Thankfully that day was to be focused on theory and not experiments. He was mostly occupied with not being himself.
In fact, he was somewhat occupied with being her.
You see, due to those previously expressed principles, he was not displaced from his own body, but instead, he was both displaced from his own body and from hers, which, in turn, felt like his. He had, due to his own difficulties, no remaining mentality to discern whether or not she could detect him being, well, her, but he could feel her motions, her existence, her physicality more than his own, seeing as one was obvious and the other was surprising to his mind. There was little that could fix this. He was only able to ride the wave, and try to survive. Try to deal with how nice it felt to run his hand through his billowing hair, how that jaw and neck and collarbone felt more well-proportioned than he’d anticipated, and how her hands seemed to hold everything just a bit more positively than he ever could.
Around lunchtime, he told Maxwell that he, due to things he would explain to him later, was indisposed, and needed Maxwell to cover for him, and Maxwell, being a dear friend, did so without protest. By the time they passed into their creative and magic courses in the afternoon, Alex’s sense of self was melting almost entirely away, and he barely maintained cohesion. But he had to push this as far as it would go, or else none of this would be worth it at all.
He needed to know where Elza was going, and so, he had to maintain his link to her.
In their gymnastics class, Maxwell smacked his arm down as it rose along with Elza’s, as she dove into the swimming pool. He’d really have to explain to him, eventually, but Maxwell, the best of friends, understood that Alex was unable to do so right now, and committed himself to just helping. He was surprised at how the one-piece bathing suit felt compared to his own swimming trunks, but he did his best not to think about how it felt nice covering up more of his chest, and how absurd the concept of just trunks seemed in the moment.
By the time they reached dinner, Alexander’s psyche was just barely still intact.
At this point, he felt Elza’s hunger, her thirst, lusted after the same food items and liquids she did, and nearly saw them in front of him, rather than what his eyes saw. In his hazy delusion, his dismissed himself from his friends - he couldn’t stand this, being two people at once - and so, he sat outside the dining commons, alone in the cold, until Elza emerged. He didn’t move.
Until she cast Obscuration.
What instincts he had burned into his mind kicked into gear, and he knew that she was about to bolt, to run, to go somewhere she didn’t want to be seen. And he felt a link to her. He was a part of her, after all, at this point.
And she was running.
He sprinted through the night, casting an Obscuration of his own to hide himself. The tracking rune cut through the perceptual fog, but Elza had nothing of the sort on him. He could follow her, but she could never see that he was following her.
She held a bag of food in one hand, and cast herself out over the frozen lake. The ice had grown thinner and thinner over the last several months, but an Angel trainee could still use the thin layer of ice as a support, and Alex did as he followed her.
They set out into the darkness of the night.
Alex could not think, driven entirely by directives and instincts.
But even if he could, he would have no idea what was waiting for him.