8:27 a.m.
The number registered before he was fully awake. His chest tightened and he was already moving off the couch, bathroom, shower running cold before he was fully in it. Seven minutes late. First class. Violette.
The water hit him like a correction. He stood under it for exactly as long as necessary and not a second more, letting the cold finish the work that sleep hadn't started. His body ached in the particular way bodies ache when they've spent a night on furniture not designed for sleeping the couch had been expensive and useless in equal measure.
He stepped out, hair damp and heavy, towel around his waist.
Azrael: "Selena!"
The apartment gave him back silence.
He stood in the bathroom doorway and looked at the empty living room. The couch where he had slept still held the impression of him. The kitchen was undisturbed. The balcony door was closed. The bedroom door was open and the bed was made with a precision that suggested either she had never slept in it or she had woken early enough to erase the evidence.
She had already left. Without a word. Without waking him.
The anger arrived fast and clean. He recognized it, noted it, and let it pass. He didn't have time for it and it wouldn't help him and it was, he admitted privately, not entirely unjustified on her part. She owed him nothing. He had been assigned to her not the other way around.
He grabbed the uniform from where he had laid it the night before. The shirt went on quickly. The tie looked back at him from the nightstand with the particular insolence of an object that knows it has defeated you before. He picked it up. Tried once. The result was structurally unsound. He tried again. Worse. He dropped it on the bed and left it there, buttoning the shirt to the second button from the top and leaving the collar open. The scars on his neck were visible. The long one that ran from below his ear toward his collar, old and pale and permanent. The smaller ones at his collarbone. All of it visible without apology because there was nothing to apologize for and no time to care.
He checked the door was locked. Patted his pocket for the key. Moved.
Arden in the early morning was a different place from Arden at night.
The warm lights and the laughter were gone, replaced by the quiet industry of a town waking up. Shopkeepers lifting shutters with practiced efficiency, kiosks being arranged with goods that caught the early light pastries, hot drinks, small things wrapped in paper. The smell of fresh bread moved through the streets in a way that his body registered before his mind caught up, a pull in his stomach that he ignored because he didn't have time for it either.
The sky above the rooftops was still streaked with orange at the far edges, the blue of morning pushing in from overhead. The colossal tree in the plaza was different in daylight less otherworldly, more simply enormous, its multicolored leaves catching the early sun in a way that made them look lit from within.
He ran through all of it without seeing it.
Ten minutes. The academy gates. His lungs were making their objections known. He pulled the schedule from his pocket while still moving, eyes scanning the paper without slowing.
Class V01.
Violette's face appeared in his mind immediately. Composed. Smiling in the particular way she smiled when she was about to enjoy something at his expense. Fully aware of what time it was and what it meant that he was arriving now.
He pushed through the gates and kept running.
The corridor leading to Class V01 was longer than he remembered from the map he had studied the night before, or perhaps he had misread it, or perhaps the academy had been designed by someone who found directness architecturally uninteresting. He passed two wrong turns, corrected without stopping, arrived at the right door with lungs that had stopped making requests and started making demands.
He pushed the door open.
Roughly twenty students. All black uniforms. He registered this before he registered anything else the particular quality of the room, the density of attention, the way twenty people in matching clothing sitting in ordered rows creates a pressure that twenty people in mixed attire doesn't. These were not general students given black to mark them. These were people who had been placed here deliberately, who had arrived at this room through processes that filtered for something, and they all turned to look at him with the collective attention of people accustomed to assessing things quickly.
Something moved through him that he didn't immediately name. It took a moment to identify.
He had never been glad to see someone wearing the same thing as him.
He was glad now.
Violette: "Azrael. Sit down."
She didn't look up from the board when she said it. Her handwriting on the stone surface was precise and unhurried, the handwriting of someone who has never once been in a rush.
He moved toward the back of the room where the shadows were deepest and the attention would be minimal. Her hand landed on his shoulder before he arrived.
He stopped.
She still hadn't looked up from the board.
Violette: "Next to your partner."
The smile was audible in her voice before he saw it. When he turned to look at her she was already facing him, chalk in one hand, the expression of someone who has been waiting for this specific moment and finds it as satisfying as anticipated.
He looked at Selena.
She was already seated, back straight, hands folded on the desk, silver hair falling in clean lines across her shoulders. She looked exactly like someone who had arrived on time, prepared, and was now waiting with the patience of someone for whom waiting was simply another form of composure. She did not look at him when he approached.
He sat down beside her and leaned slightly toward her.
Azrael: "Why didn't you wake me?"
Her eyes moved to him. Clear. Unhurried. Completely unmoved.
Selena: "That is none of my business."
He held her gaze for a moment. Then looked forward.
She was right. It wasn't. He had no standing to be irritated and he was irritated anyway and he set that aside and focused on the room.
Violette set down her chalk and turned to face them.
Violette: "Partners. Board. Introduce yourselves to the class."
The words landed in the room with the particular weight of instructions that don't leave room for interpretation.
Azrael looked at the front of the room. At the board. At the twenty pairs of eyes that would be looking at him while he stood there.
He had faced men twice his size in a coliseum with nothing between him and the outcome but his own body and the knowledge that losing meant dying. He had been accused of murder in a courtyard full of people who had already decided. He had pressed a stolen knife to a guard's throat on his first morning at this institution and not flinched.
Standing at a board next to a princess should not have been the thing that made him feel exposed.
It was anyway.
He didn't examine why. He stood, straightened his shoulders, and moved toward the front of the room with steps that announced themselves on the stone floor because there was no way to make them quiet in a room this size and he had decided not to try.
Selena rose beside him.
She moved the way she did everything without announcement, without excess. The silver hair caught the morning light coming through the high windows and did what silver hair does in morning light. Her posture was the posture of someone who had been introduced to rooms full of watching people since before she could remember and had long since stopped finding it anything other than ordinary. She made standing at the front of a classroom look like a natural state of being.
Azrael stood beside her at the board and looked at twenty black uniforms looking back at him.
The scars on his neck were visible. The open collar. The hair that was still slightly damp from the rushed shower. He looked like someone who had arrived late and hadn't entirely recovered from it, which was accurate, and he had no intention of pretending otherwise.
He let the silence sit for exactly as long as it needed to.
Then he opened his mouth.