Eventually Noth and his father had to split up and head for bed. The teen was left in a sentimental mood after this emotionally charged night, and when he finally got into his room, he couldn’t help how sombre everything felt. He stripped off the fancy outfit he’d been wearing and changed into his pajamas, all the while thinking deeply about what he was going to say, and then flopped down onto his bed like he always did.
“Serris?”
The teen called out into the air, but for some reason his angel still hadn’t even entered the room.
“Serris, come talk to me about it. Please?”
There was no response to Noth’s words, and for a while silence ruled the room. It took almost 5 minutes of quiet worrying before the teen suddenly felt the bed next to him dip a little bit under the weight of his angel.
<...You promise you’ll listen to me?>
“Of course I will.”
Noth rolled over so he could get a better view of her. Serris may have been sitting right next to him, but it seemed like her eyes were desperately avoiding looking anywhere near his direction.
“Do you think I should?”
Those words seemed to ignite and explode something inside of the angel.
In a flurry of emotion Serris jumped up from the bed, her robe whirling from the sudden movement.
Her angrily narrowed eyes looked almost wet.
Even as she glared at him with her shoulders shaking, Noth still just stared impassively at her. He could see how the angel was only getting more and more upset from that he wasn’t replying, and eventually he decided to quirk his eyebrow and mutter out a response.
“So that’s why you’ve been pouting and gotten so upset? It’s because you think I should be mad at you and I’m not acting like it?”
When his angel turned away and subtly hugged herself, Noth continued.
“...Do you… want to be punished or something? You never struck me as the type to care so much about something like this. I would have figured you’d just shrug and giggle like always.”
From her profile the teen could see how her bottom lip was quivering. His words must have truly hurt her. Maybe she wasn’t completely wrong, maybe Noth did want to hurt her a little bit. Perhaps in the back of his mind he did take her deceit personally. He sighed. Making the angel who’d already become a part of him cry wasn’t something he should be doing. If she couldn’t tell the truth to him, then maybe that just meant it was all up to him to be the honest one. They’d never get anywhere if he just stubbornly copied her, after all. But that didn’t mean that he had to be completely nice to her about it.
“Huh. Alright. Well, before you just assume that I hate you now, why not at least try and ask me about it once?”
His angel sent an uneasy glance toward him. She muttered under her breath that that's exactly what she'd been trying to do, but a moment later after a soft little sniff, she quietly did as he asked.
<...Are you mad at me now?>
“I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t upset me a little bit.”
Serris immediately paled and flinched. Her gaze turned away from him once more. But when Noth started talking again, she quickly looked back his way.
“But isn’t it silly for me to hate you of all things? I mean, you keep things from me constantly, how is it such a shock to know that you’d kept yet another big thing from me? That would just be unreasonable at this point. Sure, maybe you’ve helped me with impure intentions, but why should I have expected you to have gone through all of this for me without some kind of reason?”
Before the teen could even blink after uttering his last word, his angel was upon him. Her hands were firmly holding his head, and her face was right in front of his own. The look in her eyes seemed to burn, as if she was looking at some injustice she had to correct. And yet, despite that smouldering gaze, there were still clear traces of the tears she’d started crying.
Noth had never been stared at so passionately before, not even by the angel in front of him that was currently doing it. And that was saying quite a lot, considering that Serris routinely gave him quite the passionate stares. He’d grown accustomed enough to her hiding the truth from him that he could tell when the woman was doing her best to convey her honest thoughts. At the very least, the link that they shared seemed to be trying to send the same message to him. Why not trust her on this one? The teen raised one of his hands, placing it over one of hers on his head.
“I believe you. It’s not that I ever doubted you when you said that you loved me all those times. I was just upset to hear that someone who seemed to love me so much had been using me without even asking me. You know I would have done it all willingly if you’d only told me, right?”
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Serris’s burning gaze settled down a notch as she looked away and hesitated.
<...I didn’t want that for you. Turning you into some kind of assassin and forcing you to live an even more abnormal and unhappy life than you’d already had forced on you… No, even more than all that, I was scared for you to learn what disgusting thing I actually was. I wanted to stay as an amazing and beautiful angel of mercy in your eyes for as long as I could, instead of this… evil and repulsive vengeance monster.>
Noth’s brow wrinkled when she called herself a monster. Had she chosen that wording because he knew how he felt about it? He knew she could be quite crafty in the ways she manipulated him, but he really wanted to believe in the angel right now. She was baring her true thoughts to him, this was no time to be suspicious.
“You’re not a monster! You’re nowhere even close to one in my eyes.”
The teen used his free hand to turn his angel’s face back towards his direction. Once she was fully looking at him again he cracked a cheesy smile for her.
“I should know, right? I’m now a [Heavenly Monster Slayer] after all; I should be an expert at this kind of thing.”
Serris couldn’t help but slowly break into a fit of giggles at that.
Noth waited until his angel seemed to have gotten most of the laughter out of her system, happily smiling at her all the while. He was pleased that she still had the ability to laugh like this with him. How awful would it be if their relationship had stayed in some odd frigid state for the rest of his life? It would be like losing all feeling in one of your limbs, even though you still had full control over it. When Serris finally wiped all the tears off her face and flashed him a smile, Noth decided it was time to ask the important question that he’d been holding off. If she was feeling a little bit better like now, perhaps the likelihood of her answering would go up.
“Serris, tell me the truth about what I’m about to ask, ok?”
The teen’s words immediately made the angel flinch. Her face visibly tensed up like she knew what was coming. And yet, despite this reaction, she did her best to give a slow and stilted nod.
“What does the God-dess want with you once it’s satisfied? I was told that the end goal for most of the angels of madness is to cause a major calamity, but you’re not the same as them, are you?”
Serris’s eyes grew wide, and she slowly shook her head, but no other response was given.
Noth wasn’t going to give up on getting his answers that easily, however.
“So then what? Instead of something big, the God-dess just uses us to take out a few dozen monsters and then she just reabsorbs you? That seems like something that could have just been accomplished with a big enough calamity anyways.”
Once again Serris shook her head, but this time the look on her face had morphed into something more uncomfortable and complex.
“No? No, what? No it couldn’t have been accomplished with a calamity?”
The angel’s head shook even more vehemently than the other times, and when Noth gave her a confused look she made little jerks to the side with her head, as if trying to tell him to go back.
“...No she won’t reabsorb you?”
Her reply this time was a barely noticeable nod.
Noth thought hard over what this might have meant. Serris wouldn’t be absorbed like all the other angels at the end? No, that wasn’t quite right, not all angels got absorbed, some of them merely died and alerted the God-dess to a bigger problem. But Noth hadn’t asked ‘What happens if we fail’, he’d basically asked ‘What happens if we succeed’. Could it be that the price of her specialized existence was to die no matter how well they did? How could that make any kind of sense?
But something in Noth’s mind kept yelling at him that he was forgetting something important.
How had the conversation with the prophet about angels gone again? He’d told him about prophets, angels, their functions and their ends, and then… Wait. The old man had started telling him about how angels met their end, and then said something about how there was a type of angel that was different from the others. Then he brought up angels of madness, didn’t he? They’re somehow different from the others? Do they not simply die or get reabsorbed? But then what?
And yet further, his mind was still screaming at him that there was yet another important forgotten thing.
What was it? Who could have said it, and how could it have possibly connected to all of this? Was it the prophet? No? It couldn’t have been anyone else, could it? The only other person who’d ever possibly be able to tell him about something from this topic would have to be Serris, but it was so rare for her to want to tell him anything about herself. But then again, if there were so few times, couldn’t he remember all of them easily enough? What could she possibly have revealed about herself that could r-
And then Noth remembered.
She’d once told him that they were linked.
If one of them dies then both of them die.
But hadn’t she told him that she had a failsafe?
Hadn’t she told him that even if she died, he wouldn’t?
…What was the failsafe she’d told him?
Something about having another form to work with if she dies?
But what does that even mean?
Does she turn into a different kind of angel if she dies?
Or maybe does she become just an ordinary version of an angel of madness?
...What does she turn into?!
Knowing how she’d only been answering in head shakes, Noth tried to think hard on how to phrase his question. Once he settled on what seemed like the best way to ask it, Noth grabbed hold of his angel’s shoulders and spoke with a great intensity.
“Do you have a second form because you’re supposed to die at some point?”
Serris gave a small, reluctant nod.
“Is your second form the regular version of an angel of madness?”
When his angel shook her head, the teen scowled. So it’s not a reversion to the usual angel of madness? Well at least that means her end goal wasn’t to just give up and create a calamity. Perhaps that’s a good thing. Hindsight being 20/20, Noth felt silly having even thought that was an option; Why have her pick off a specific subset of humanity just to kill off a big patch in the end anyways?
“Alright. Is it the form of a different angel?”
But once again Serris shook her head.
What? But if it’s not some other kind of angel then what could it be that she transforms into? It couldn’t be just a person or something, right? No, she said that whatever her second form would be would make things ‘really fun’. But then what could it be?! Noth was starting to get frustrated with how few possibilities his mind was thinking up. Eventually he just threw his hands up and decided to ask.
“Jeez, then what the hell is it?!”
Oddly enough, with an awkward and uncomfortable look on her face, his angel replied to his cries this time.