Birds of a Feather

Who: Arienne and Max
Where: Max's House
When: Evening

The ball hadn't been as bad as Max had been expected. He'd socialized, deflected questions, and garnered curiosity without overshadowing the man of the evening. A man like him had to blend and change to fit the environment in order to survive. In order for no one to suspect a thing and he hadn't messed up at all. He flirted when flirting was called for, discussed politics and current events when the conversation turned that way. He was quite proud of himself at the end of the evening.

Okay so Arienne had to remind him to stop jiggling his leg or fiddling with his cufflinks but Max considered that a non-issue.

It was Sunday and there wasn't much to do that day. He supposed he'd get a phone call that evening about someone who needed a talking to but until then he was in the parlor with the radio pumping out the shows as he polished his collection of blades. He thought he heard thunder earlier, enough that it had him poking his head out the window but it wasn't curious enough for him to open his window and do more investigating.

Max's place was where Arienne wound up. After playing her part at the disaster, after screaming and sobbing over her mothers cooling corpse, she had eventually answered questions then been allowed to leave. And when she did, she went straight to her brother's house, walking there with the blood of their mother still splashed across her chest. She'd removed her necklace--that was safely tucked away. She had plans for that. But beyond that, she still had blood on her person, and she walked to his door, and slipped inside without knocking. She toed her sandals off, and went in search of him, padding silently through the darkened home before she saw light in one of the rooms. Heading there, she stopped in the door-frame and stared at Max for a long moment.

"Mother's been killed." she said, voice soft. Light.

He hadn't heard the door open, nor Arienne's footsteps until she hit the creaky floorboards outside of the room and he looked up when he saw the movement in the door-frame. He should probably have a better security system in place but he really never saw the need to. Max put down the cleaning rag and turned off the radio, only now being able to make out the darkened blood splashed across his sister and he wondered if she finally let her curiosity get the best of her when she said that their mother was dead.

Their mother was dead.

It hadn't been what Max had expected to hear. Perhaps it was because to him, their mother was this never moving figure, always there, always would be there, over their heads frightened of him and controlling of her. "Did you do it?" he asked her, his voice equally as light as he stood to get a better look at her. The blood spatter didn't seem quite as right but blood spatter also depended on how it was done.

"No." Ari said, shaking her head. She stepped properly into the room, and the mud on her skirt from where she'd been on the ground was more apparent, even if it partially blended with the earth tones of the pattern there. "We attended the vigil this evening." she explained, frowning lightly. "Pipes rained down from the sky." she told him. "One struck her here." she said, making a motion to indicate her mouth and jaw. "I believe she was dead before she was impaled to the ground."

That was definitely not the answer Max was expecting and he took her by the shoulder and turned her around, doing his own check for any injuries. She was covered in blood and mud, so if there were any, they wouldn't be particularly clear until she got cleaned up. "Pipes rained down from the sky?" he asked. It sounded like a child's tale, something made up to cover the actual truth. How could pipes rain down from the sky in the middle of the park?

Ari didn't try to stop him from inspecting her for injury, she had imagined he would do so. He was protective, and technically, if she'd been even slightly positioned differently she could have died outright. "They did. It was quite...interesting." she said, thinking about it. "There was this odd sound, and then suddenly there were pipes everywhere. and they fell so hard, they went clear through people. They embedded in the ground...it was a massacre."

So that must've been the thunderous sound he heard earlier but hadn't investigated. "That wasn't my call," he said. Which meant it was not a mob-sanctioned attack. He couldn't speak for the Syndicate but something like that didn't sound up their alley either. He stood in front of Arienne, looking down at her and pushing hair out of her face as he considered the look on her face and the sound of her voice. The similarities between shock and detached fascination were fine lines, especially depending on the person. "Are you cold?" he asked. She wasn't clammy and he doubted she was going into shock, but this was not only her first dead body, but it sounded horrifying and while him and his sister shared similarities, they'd never been tested in quite a manner before.

She smiled. It was a sweet sort of expression. "No." she answered. "Maximilieno, it was fascinating." she told him. "You should have been there, it was...steel rain, and there was so much blood everywhere, and people were screaming and panicking and dying everywhere. Mother's teeth were broken, and her eyes were open." she said. She'd never been quite this open with him before about the fact that she could quite possibly be just as fucked up as he could, but she had come here with the intention of sharing this, at least on some level. Nothing would top that moment she had with Nathaniel, when he told her she was beautiful with the blood splashed across her, but still. Max should have been there, he would have reveled in it as well.

Max would have reveled in it, from the sounds of it it sounded magnificent and there was a moment of regret for not going to investigate. He watched her speak of it, the excitement in her voice, the way her eyes lit up despite the horrific situation that she'd just been through. He still wondered if there was any sort of shock in there, or if the shock of what she'd been through had already passed. The idea of Arienne having the same... 'condition' as himself was something that he both found comforting in that he wasn't alone, but also there was a small burst of sadness there that she could not escape it. Time enough for thinking of that later though. "How do you feel about seeing Mother like that?" he asked her, his head tilted curiously. His first body was one that he'd killed himself and he'd been much younger. He wondered how different Arienne's experience was.

"It's hard to describe." she said, moving to push herself up onto the countertop. She put her feet in the sink, and turned the water on so she could wash the mud and blood mixture from her legs. "I didn't so much see it happen, it just...happened. The first I knew of it was the splash, and then I looked down, and there she was." she paused there, truly thinking it over. "I know everything seemed to slow down, to stop. I knew people were around me, screaming running--I almost was knocked to the ground. But I wasn't a part of that. I didn't scream. I didn't feel the need to flee, either."

So she had experienced shock. A detached sort of shock but there was shock nonetheless. People reacted to trauma in different ways but Arienne had a reaction even if she said that she didn't feel like part of the trauma. She was in her own world for those moments. "Had you two been in reversed positions, that would've been you," he said, leaning back against the counter with the sink separating them. He reached into a drawer and grabbed a dishrag and handed it to her to help with her cleaning, studying her face. "Father knows you're alright? He's already been dealt with?"

"I know. If I was standing half a foot to my left I would have been hit as well." she added. She picked up the hand soap from the side of the sink and rubbed it into the cloth he gave her, so she started to wash herself. "No, I haven't spoken to him. I wanted to come here and share this with you. I imagine he's been contacted." she said. but she didn't sound overly concerned about it.

"You can stay the night if you like," he offered. "I might have to go out though." Their mother dead from this attack, their father would be out for blood and who a better bloodhound than him? Even if it wasn't an attack on the family itself, there'd been family casualties. "Are you sure you're not hurt?" He peered in the sink to get a look at her legs and feet. Besides a few understandable scratches, there was no blood gushing anywhere.

She smiled and nodded. "I'm certain." she told him, setting the cloth down, and she shut the water off, focusing her attention on him entirely. "Is this what it's like for you, brother?" she asked. "everything slowing down, stopping. The world halting in it's tracks, for a few moments?" And sure, she'd had Nathaniel there to share it with her, something that she couldn't tell Max yet. If she ever got to. She didn't know if he would understand. She had to protect Nathaniel, even if part of her did want to tell him about it. About being able to share something like that. Like she'd come here tonight to share it with him too.

Max reached out to pluck at the dirt clumped on the end of her skirt, half thinking about if he had anything around that might fit her. "A long time ago it did," he said, crumbling dirt into in the sink. "It's a little different when you commit the act than when you witness it. You've made the decision to take a life in one case, you witness another doing it in the other case. When I killed my teacher, it was the first time I'd ever seen blood, let alone the amount that I got that time. I was fascinated by the fact that I'd done that. At first there was this... this rush. This adrenaline burst and everything was bright and sharp and clear. Then it slowed down as I realized that 'I did this'. When I've been in the hazes... it comes a little closer to that. I'm no longer in control. To a certain degree." But then, Max also processed emotions and feelings differently. He couldn't be sure at the level of detachement that was meant to be felt at. "Everyone also processes things differently. What I might feel in an event, you might feel differently. The beauty of the human brain."

"I never felt like I lost control." Ari said. "Just that everything was in this...hyper focus." she said. "Like it was all so narrowed down." Narrowed down, and then there was Nathaniel. He'd brushed his thumb against her skin, through the blood there. Looked into her eyes. She had to pull herself from that moment again and focus instead on her brother. "I've never felt anything like that before." she admitted. "I didn't feel anything like sadness, though, about mother. While aware I am meant to, that wasn't the case."

Max caught the brief loss of focus and wondered what she wasn't telling him. It was something that had him concerned and he filed it away for study later. "You've never been in that sort of situation before either. Your first body. Give it time to settle before we decide that you're following in my footsteps." He smiled at her fondly and gave her another rag to dry her feet off with. No use in tracking mud and blood through the house when it wasn't from him. "How do you feel about mother?" Even if Arienne didn't like the woman, their mother was more a fixture in her life than she'd been in his and Max was saving his own processing and contemplation for later.

She began to dry her legs off, though she paused to smile back at him in the same fond manner. "I'm not." she assured him. "I don't plan to create bodies." she told him, though she didn't sound as if she was discouraging him from it or that she was looking down on him because he did. "I didn't feel a drive like that. I just...didn't mind." she said. Which was nothing to say about the blood and what that had done, but she also was intelligent enough to know that it was because it was blood, and she had a fascination with that. Not the corpses, or the death around them, nothing like that. Just the blood. It was opportunistic of her, yes, but she didn't feel the urge to go out and find herself a victim to drain. She rested her chin on her knees, considering his question more and she kept her eyes on him. "I feel this is going to force me to alter my plans." she said. That was how she felt about it. She was going to have to adjust her strategy on things accordingly. "How do you feel?" she asked.

He took the dishtowel and tossed it across the room into the trashbin as he considered her question. How did he feel? "Intrigued," he said, not looking at her despite the fact that she was studying him. He was contemplating and processing, assessing this new information. "I'm interested to see what will happen next. Not only have we had our first death in the family, but there's also someone out there who is causing quite a lot of trouble. I'm intrigued to see how everything changes." There was a rogue out there with an axe to grind about something and so far seemed indiscriminate but how that progressed remained to be seen. Finally looking at her, Max held out a hand to help Arienne down from the counter. "Staying here this evening? I have something that should fit you for bed. We can figure out other clothes later." Her dress was irrevocably destroyed from all the mud and gore.

"I would prefer that, yes." she said. Actually she was considering asking Max if she could stay at his place indefinitely should things heat up all the more at home. Which, she assessed, she could bring up now so he would have time to think about it. "I was thinking," she said, taking the help down. "If the streets are about to run red with blood, and things are going to be all the more dangerous at home and otherwise...if things get to be too much at home, would you consider allowing me to stay here with you? No one really connects you with the family anymore, it would be a prudent option in the name of safety."

Max looked at Arienne, contemplating what she'd say. He was sure their father would have none of it, and what kind of story could be told that she was living with some man who was unrelated to her. Not to mention his work, and sometimes that work was brought home to the basement. Then again, there was also the comfort in knowing that she was close by and he could keep an eye on her. "Perhaps," he settled on. That was really the best he could do, since he assumed that she'd like some answer in this moment. "Let's just work with tonight and see what tomorrow brings, hm?"

Arienne nodded. "I suppose we shall." she said. And tomorrow would be undeniably interesting.