Ever since the fateful day, they'd fallen into a sort of routine. He would bring her breakfast, and as they ate they would discuss the details of how they were going to ruin Phoebus' wedding.

She blushed to think back to it – her startled into waking, looking for the source of the crash to find him there in front of her barely clothed. He was…

Dare I even think it to myself? It's so beyond what I thought I knew of him… He's… attractive.

She knew since the day she had tried to move him that he wasn't the brittle waif she'd once thought, but then she just assumed he was overweight. His robes didn't exactly accentuate his form, and she would never have stared anyway. She hoped.

He is actually rather trim. Doesn't exactly have the rippling six pack I'm sure Phoebus has… It's more of a natural slenderness. Pleasant, actually.

She felt horrible that it had altered her opinion of him in some way, because it made her seem so shallow. But between that and the fact that she'd woken up to him trying to escape, for goodness' sake - she found the prospect of sleeping in the same bed had lost the fearful component. It wasn't clearer to her than in that moment that he was utterly harmless, and she was getting substantial regular meals and an extremely comfortable place to sleep out of their little arrangement.

The urge to leave and wander the streets again was strong, but she didn't want to face up to Clopin just yet. She knew he'd seek her out as soon as anyone that recognized her passed her whereabouts along, and there would be far too much to explain (such as her sleeping in the bed of someone who had captured her for sex, but ended up not being as horrible as she once thought, where she ended up sleeping with them anyway, but platonically – it made no sense even to her) – but she had told an urchin she found on the steps of Notre Dame to tell him she was safe.

Scheming with Frollo was actually rather refreshing for her – she had taken all the despair and rolled it into energy for this new project. That he was going to help her was really the piece de resistance – he was in a perfect position to help her, and she felt a bit smug about the fact she had someone 'on the inside' to help her get this small payback.

She only very faintly felt bad about what she was doing to Fleur-De-Lys because, in the midst of all her thinking, she'd realized that the poor girl wasn't particularly nice but was also probably caught up with Phoebus in her own way – and she was the one that was to spend her whole life with the lying cheat anyhow, so she really only could pity her.

After a few days of this she thought Frollo had developed a sense of comfort with the routine, and was noticeably more relaxed in her presence. There was a lull in conversation between them as they ate breakfast together one day, and her curiosity got the best of her.

"Frollo, how did you become a priest?"

He glanced at her, and then looked out into space contemplatively.

"It… was a long time ago," he began hesitantly. "I always did love to learn. Science fascinated me. I was the last child of my family so I never dreamed to inherit much – all I wanted to do was study and honor the creator of such a marvelous Earth anyway, so it seemed like a natural fit. And it was."

She mulled over his answer.

So he just sort of… happened into it.

"Was?"

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye and she felt goose bumps on her arms. "I've always loved the pursuit of truth, wisdom… Reading, I never tire of." He gestured around the room. "I consider myself very lucky to have the life I have."

"What's inside them?"

He scoffed at her. "What isn'tinside them? Great works such as Daes Irae... the Golden Legend. It was impressive they were able to provide it in so many languages. Philosophies to justify how we live our lives, how we write our laws. The Lord's word, of course…"

She wanted in to this mystical world of the educated. "Can you read me one?"

He eyed her warily. "I suppose… There are so many, though."

She recognized the beginning of him brushing off the request but refused to give up so easily. "Which is your favourite?"

He seemed uncomfortable to share the information but finally said "The Daes Irae has been a personal favourite for some time."

He fetched what she assumed was a copy he had written out by hand for his own reference from his bookshelf. It was well-used and she tried to imagine him sitting in his bed in the wee hours of the morning, poring over it by candlelight. He smoothed it out.

"It's in latin, but I've translated it on the side before, so I'll read it in both. That way you can hear how it was meant to sound, and then what it actually means." And he did exactly that – starting with a latin stanza, then giving her the equivalent translated.

It flowed so nicely, she thought. Such cadence, hidden in the markings on the page! Even more striking was the change it made in him – he was putting quite a lot of himself into the narration, she thought, to bring it alive, infuse feeling int oit. He was rarely so animated and passionate as she'd seen him when moving towards the topic of literature. Clearly, it was his element – and hadn't he basically said it was why he joined the priesthood?

She couldn't help but think as he read out the stanzas, "… I sigh, like the guilty one, my face reddens in guilt: Spare the imploring one, O God…" that perhaps he saw some of himself in the poem in some way. It brought her mind back to what had brought her to this majestic place, and the strange friendship they seemed to have jigged up out of the ruins of that escapade.

It seemed so long ago, even though it was really rather recent – and she thought it would appear crazy to anyone on the outside looking in that they were on talking terms at all. She surprised herself by feeling a bit fond as she looked at him, reading aloud at her request, his favourite literary work, and pushed down the discomfort at what it might mean.