Noth reached out carefully towards the two weeping children. Perhaps his desperation was still evident in his tone, but he did the best he could to sound level and unbothered; It would do nothing for calming the kids and taking control if he sounded weak or unsure.

“Jean, Helt, please… Look at me.”

Helt’s wet and wary eyes immediately turned towards Noth once he began speaking, but Jean only flinched and seemed to turn herself even further away from him. A slight frown that Noth couldn’t help began to grow on his lips, but he pressed on further, taking Helt’s reaction as at least a first step towards progress. The teen crawled closer on his knees and hugged the poor amethyst boy, patting his back soothingly, and pressing his small crystalline head against his shoulder for comfort.

“I’m sorry if I upset you both, but can you please calm down a bit and listen to me?”

Helt immediately clung on to him, his hands fisting against Noth’s clothes, and his face rubbing against Noth’s shoulder. For a moment the child’s trembling seemed to get worse, and Noth worried that Helt might have somehow been able to pick up on how worried and apprehensive he was feeling, but soon after, Helt separated from him slowly and scrubbed his face against his arms. The small boy gave a few hesitant nods even as he scrubbed, and after a long snort of sucking in his snot, he finally revealed his still lightly wriggling but apologetic face.

“I-I… I’ll listen.”

His little voice was slightly rough and wobbly, and he reached out his hand to once again fist at Noth’s clothes like he was afraid he might get left behind any moment, but Helt still did his best to look up at Noth as if he were doing his best to pay attention. Noth gave him a soft, thankful smile and gingerly patted at Helt’s stiff, shiny hair, and then turned his gaze to what seemed to be the much more difficult problem.

Jean sat with her head hung low and her back arched down. Her voluminous hair covered her face, forming a luscious curtain that wouldn’t let a single bit of light through. Her hands that had previously been fisting at her skirt had at some point migrated towards the floor, and her nails seemed to be trying their best to dig into the old, degraded wood underneath her. It was almost as if she were some wretched but beautiful creature trying to convince the floor to eat her up and take her away.

Noth swallowed and did his best to steel himself against the oncoming trial.

“Jean…”

The girl’s shoulders trembled slightly at his words, but she didn’t give him any other reaction but that. Noth’s eyebrows pulled together a bit, and his knees shuffled him just a slight bit closer.

“Jean, are you alright?”

“...What a stupid question.”

Her words were a tiny, spiritless mumble, but at least she was replying to him. Once again, Noth shuffled a small bit closer to her, with Helt in tow.

“But I don’t think it’s a stupid question at all. Can you please look at me? I want to fix this.”

Noth’s heart squeezed, feeling as if he were somehow lying to the people most important to him. ‘Fixing’ this would probably ultimately mean lying to them in the end if his angel was to be properly appeased. From what he’d heard of the case they’d been making against Ren, they might actually have been on to something, even if some of their arguments seemed to have holes in them. But if Serris was going this far to silence them, it must have meant that they were about to stumble onto something that they really shouldn’t have, right? If not, then why would she be doing all of this? And why did all of this center around Ren, of all people?

Even amidst all this doubt and speculation, it didn’t matter.

What Noth had to do remained unchanged, regardless of his opinions.

Luckily, Noth’s words seemed to shake Jean enough that she managed to at least turn her head in his direction, even if he still couldn’t quite see past her waterfall of hair. This time she didn’t speak a peep in reply, but just her turning towards him alone could be enough for Noth. Once again he came a tad bit closer to Jean, and his hand tentatively came out to pat her head. For a moment it seemed as if she would reach out and slap his hand away, but in the end she simply gave up and let him pet her. The interaction reminded Noth of being accepted by some of the more feisty cats that had roamed around inside of the villa. Eventually, when he felt that perhaps the girl had calmed down enough, Noth slowly swept her hair to the side, revealing her wet and glaring face. Such a hateful look made him want to give up and let time sort out her anger, but Noth had no such luxuries to rely on at the moment, and so he simply gave her what he hoped was a reassuring and not at all awkward smile.

The teen prepared his heart for the nonsense he was about to be forced to spout.

“Jean, Helt…”

Noth reached out and once again took hold of the two children’s hands, returning to how this whole conversation had started. He was no great actor, and he could only hope that if he kept his body and face in as stiff of positions as he could until they grew tired, then maybe they wouldn’t manage to betray him.

“I’m sorry if I made you upset, but please listen to me… I know you’re worried, and I can understand why, but I don’t think what you’re saying is fair to Ren. People can change. I know she’s a bit more childish and not as independent as you two, but that doesn’t have to mean-”

Suddenly Jean smacked Noth’s hand away and threw Helt’s. Her already resentful face grew even more infuriated, and as she talked she began to smack at the floor with the hand Noth had been holding.

“No! You can’t possibly tell me you believe that!”

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“Jean-”

“Jean, please…”

Both Noth and Helt tried to reach out to her to calm her down, but she shook her head like a wild unreasonable beast, not letting a single one of their plaintive calls reach her.

“You heard us! She’s been weird and crazy and acting strange! There was a voice! Twice! Just because you’re acting weird too and she’s suddenly your favourite, that doesn’t mean that you can just be blind to the obvious! She’s clearly possessed!”

Jean’s words shocked Noth. He hadn’t gotten to hear that far into their previous claims yet, and he’d never imagined that that was the direction that their concerns were headed.

“Wha-? You think-”

“Why would you say that?!”

Suddenly a shrill cry rang out from behind the door of the shack they were in. The door swung open, and a small ashen girl rushed in. Her face looked flushed and agonized, and her eyes were freely streaming down tears.

“You… You all left t-to say mean stuff about me? B-behind my back?!”

Her small, pale hands grabbed at the hem of her skirt as if she were going to rip it apart. Her accusatory and hurt gaze swept over every single one of them there, and especially seemed to bore into Jean. It was obvious that she’d been listening to their words, at least from some point on, and had heard what Jean had had to say about her. Noth’s teeth clenched, realizing how much more dire the situation had just become.

The mumblings of his angel just barely caught Noth's ear, but they were quickly drowned out by the shouts of the children.

“Wha- Ren?! How…”

Jean, shocked at Ren’s sudden appearance, was the first to react, possibly due to the angry looks that she was receiving. Helt only sat there in shocked silence, his small hand squeezing on to Noth’s tightly in worry. He, too, was no good in such social situations, and had no clue how to handle such a dramatic scene.

More tears leaked out of Ren’s reddening eyes, and her hands soon came up to wipe them as she spoke.

“I-I can’t believe you’d say such awful things about me… I thought we were friends… I thought we were becoming a family. And you even brought big brother Noth into this, and spoke a bunch of bad things about me… You must all really really hate me…”

Helt, unable to let the poor crying girl be despite his awkwardness, sprung up and tried to reach out to reassure her.

“No, that’s not why we… We did it because we were worried about you!”

Ren twisted away from his oncoming touch, and shot him the most pitiful look that the boy had ever received in his life.

“...And you didn’t try to talk to me about it at all? You just went straight to him about it and left me out? When it was about me?”

Jean, who’d been watching everything embarrassedly as if she’d been caught committing some kind of crime, suddenly came alive. She sprung up and began to animatedly defend herself as if she was about to be taken to jail.

“But you were acting so weird! We were worried what you might do if we talked to you about it! It’s not our fault, we had to talk to Noth!”

Ren’s pitiful look turned into a hurt glare once Jean came back into her sight, and she stopped trying to wipe away her tears.

“...Because you thought I was possessed? Is it because I don’t have a [Gift]? You’re bringing up rumours against me now? I can’t believe you, of all people, would say something like that here in front of us.”

Jean’s eyes widened, and for a moment she looked truly ashamed. However, that shame quickly gave way to a fiery anger, and she quickly doubled down on her words.

“Yeah, I am bringing those rumours up, because you are acting like you’re possessed! If that’s not it, then explain yourself right now! Don’t act like you were never being strange, ‘cause it won’t work!”

Helt tried to stop Jean, feeling like Ren was now thoroughly in the right, but the girl just shoved him away and sent him crashing to the ground. Noth rushed over to check that he was alright, but felt utterly useless in the ever ensuing chaos. Ren stared at Jean, shocked, bewildered, and upset that she would even act like that. Her tears abruptly stopped, and her already pale complexion seemed to take on a bluish hue.

“Really… You’re the one who’s acting weird right now. How could this happen? I thought we were all so super close to each other, so why are you doing this? …Is… Is it me, after all? Is it really me? Were my parents right? Am I the problem?”

The ashen girl sunk down to the floor, looking positively defeated. Jean gnashed her teeth, her unresolved anger suddenly feeling as if it had no place to go. Deep down she felt truly ashamed of how she was acting, but she didn’t want to allow herself to look at how horribly everything had failed, and would instead rather be blinded by her rage. Her gaze turned down to the still collapsed Helt that she’d pushed away, seeing how he was now sobbing uselessly on the floor, and the befuddled Noth, who looked utterly and completely lost. She truly felt like some kind of rampaging monster or criminal now, and she couldn’t help hating herself for it.

Through all the chaos, an ethereal sigh echoed over it.

The angel tilted her head back to look to the heavens, her face filled with wry regret.

Noth’s bracelet began to heat up, feeling so hot that it felt as if it might just melt through his arm and fall off. His head immediately turned towards his angel, and he watched as she slowly walked over to the desolate ashen girl, slumped on the floor. Serris’s hands gently pet the girl’s hair, and she beamed down a sad but loving smile upon her.

As Noth watched, the angel suddenly faded into smoke, and that smoke was rapidly pulled into Ren’s body. Ren’s eyes closed, and for the first time since she’d come into the shack, she finally looked serene. Her eyes slowly opened, and a shining rusty orange colour was revealed, matching perfectly to Noth’s own. As the two pairs of orange eyes met, ‘Ren’ gave him a smile, one that he’d never seen from her before.

And then the world went black.