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Max Doyle ([info]etaequitas) wrote in [info]nosuchplace,
@ 2009-05-10 19:07:00

Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Entry tags:dione castel, max doyle

Thursday: January 24, 2008
Who: Max & Dione
When: Afternoon
Where: The Library
What: Time for searching, and time for apologies.

Normally, Max wouldn’t have been in a library. Today, though, his curiosity got the better of him, and he let the questions take over his mind. If his mother was attacked by a vampire when she was pregnant, he wondered what that meant for him. What if all of the things that happened to him were a result of that attack? The fangs he had as a child and teen, the sensitivity to daylight, and even the skin condition that made him have to protect himself against harmful UV rays at all times? He never was a kid who could go to the beach. Beaches were a deathtrap, according to the doctors his mother brought him to see.

There was no way all of this could be just some coincidence, so Max got up the courage to go to the library and look up some information on vampires. Surely, they had a book or two on those suckers somewhere. He wasn’t going to go up to one and ask them himself. That was out of the question. If he talked to vampire, Max had a feeling he might want to take out all his frustration on one of those son-of-a-bitches, even if it wasn’t the same person who attacked his mom. Even if the vampire was nice, Max would sucker punch the joker.

He asked for help at the circulation desk, and they told him where to look. Max nodded his head and headed down the non-fiction section to look for the right aisle number. He found some books on real vampires, took a few of them, and made his way to a table in the sitting area. He wondered just how much reading it would take before he could find out if what happened to his mother had inadvertently done something to him.

Shutting out the unpleasant thought, he flipped open the first book and started to read.

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[info]audiomorbid
2009-05-10 07:00 pm UTC (link)
Most would assume that Dione had no use for libraries. There were occasionally things there she found interesting. It was a great way to get some music without having to buy it. There were always DVDs she hadn't heard. But since she'd been in the haven, she hadn't been in the library. However, considering how much time she spent alone, reading might actually turn out to be a good pass time.

There was that and the fact that last she remembered Dr. Connelly worked at the library. He'd come to see her for Thanksgiving in need of an emotional pick me up. It would give her someone to talk to. Sheldon's choice to visit her for Christmas had effected her mood, but she'd still spent a better part of the season simply hiding. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, she was emotionally exhausted. Christmas and New Years, no better. Now she was out and running again.

She tapped her way along to the library, somewhat hoping to hear Sascha about. Though she didn't hear him, the woman did go in and wander just a little.

Most of the time, she only tapped the floor, but occasionally it was the legs of chair and if people didn't move them as well. Her hitting people was rare, but it did occasionally happen, especially when everyone was doing something quiet like reading.

"S-sorry," she knew she'd hit someone because that was not a cane against furniture sound. Dione didn't bother to add that she didn't see them, the fact that she needed a cane sort of made that self-explanatory in her mind and talking meant she would start stuttering all the harder.

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[info]etaequitas
2009-05-10 07:37 pm UTC (link)
The cane hit him square in the leg, and Max jerked in his chair at the sudden tap that pulled him out of his reading. He didn’t get surprised too often, but he was definitely surprised this time when he looked up. Max never saw the woman in broad daylight; his run-in with her happened late at night maybe a month or two ago, but he remembered it because there weren’t too many blind people in Elysium.

It was her. Cane and all, Max recognized the girl the nearly scared to death one night on the beach. He never really got a chance to apologize for that, but it wasn’t as if he cared to at the time. He was drunk as hell and stumbling around like a fool that night. It was right after those other girls had been murdered and they held a funeral service for them.

“Hey,” Max said aloud, forgetting all about the book, “I know you.” He doubted she would remember him, and if she really didn’t, he wasn’t going to bring up the exact way they bumped into each other last time. “Well, not personally, but I remember you.”

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[info]audiomorbid
2009-05-10 07:47 pm UTC (link)
The voice was vaguely familiar in that way of her having listened to them without really paying attention. She hadn't really been paying attention to what he had been saying at the time, too scared of what she thought was some kind of homicidal maniac.

"D-do y-you," how they knew each other didn't come to her immediately either. So she assumed it was probably because she often played at the Wine Bar. Being an entertainer meant that people managed to know you without knowing who you actually were. They recognized your face without knowing your name. She pulled her cane up off the floor, seeming as if she might use it as some kind of shield or security blanket.

Dione was constantly nervous, it was just part of who she was.

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[info]etaequitas
2009-05-10 08:33 pm UTC (link)
“Yeah, we . . . bumped into each other once,” Max told her. He didn’t say she was a hard to forget figure, if only because she looked like the easily startled type. With one arm around the back of his chair, he wondered suddenly why a blind lady was in the library. It took him a moment to remember they had special books for that sort of thing, or she might have even been looking for a person.

Tired of reading up on vampires and finding nothing related to his own condition, he decided to flip the book shut and ignore the stack for now. His search wasn’t turning up anything of value, and he didn’t want to spend all day in the library reading boring books. “What are you doing here in the library? Do you . . . ” The question on the tip of his tongue was a hard one to get out. Max wasn’t used to being helpful or even kind to most people. He was going to have to seriously work on this. “ . . . Need any help?”

It was then that he realized he didn’t even know her name. “Oh, I’m Max by the way.” He didn’t outright ask her name because he figured once he introduced himself the rest would fall into place naturally. “I don’t think we got to the whole name part last time.”

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[info]audiomorbid
2009-05-10 09:48 pm UTC (link)
Dione could believe she had bumped into him. She was a little clumsy at times, so she walked into people and objects. If they didn't make anything out of it, she simply stammered an apology and kept going. After all, she wasn't the kind of woman who wanted to try and hold a conversation with others all that much. She was terrified of people nine times out of ten. Not quite finding the words to say anything else, she just nodded in agreement to his statement.

He continued to talk, well rather to ask questions. Dione wasn't really prepared to answer those questions because she wasn't exactly sure why she had come to the library. There were several reasons she could have used, except that when forced to speak, Dione tended toward freezing. An action that always accompanied the deep red of a blush along her cheekbones and her ducking her head away from a person.

Did she need any help? First she needed to figure out what on earth she was doing there. Escaping her house, forcing herself to try and speak with other people, running from her own personal demons. It was quite possible it was all of the above and then some. The question of her name was significantly easier to answer. "Dione," she kept her eyes down. It was fairly obvious she wasn't exactly normal when it came right down to it. Most people didn't have much of a problem at least faking eye contact even if they weren't holding it.

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[info]etaequitas
2009-05-10 10:10 pm UTC (link)
Max feared for a moment she did remember something about him from the first night they met each other. Maybe she recalled his voice. He heard something somewhere about how blind people had the best hearing in the world. She probably remembered his voice, and something about it still scared her. Max wasn’t accustomed to feeling guilty or ashamed, but this time he felt a little mixture of them both welling up in his chest. The girl was so harmless, and he probably scared the hell out of her.

“I’m sorry if I . . . said something wrong,” Max apologized, looking away and casting his gaze toward the table. He could ask her to sit down with him. That was a nice place to start, wasn’t it? Invite her to sit down. Sitting down wasn’t so bad.

“You wanna sit?” he asked, glancing back up at her. His eyes flitted toward the cane she held in a tight grip and remained fixated on the potential weapon. She wasn’t going to whack him with it, was she? Max sincerely hoped not. He wasn’t any good with small talk than she was, and he half-doubted she would take a seat. She probably had something she needed to be doing and didn’t want to tell him about it.

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[info]audiomorbid
2009-05-10 10:45 pm UTC (link)
Dione didn't really remember his voice, but she remembered that conversations usually required two people to hold them. Still she found the words stopped in her throat.

"N-n-no," she tried to reassure him that it wasn't something he'd said. If only she could articulate how much it was not about him, it was anyone who came near her. If she didn't know them already, she seemed to shut down inside herself trying to hide from the possible pain.

When he asked if she'd like to sit, she actually put her hand out to touch the back of the chair, clicking her fingernails along the wood. One hand still held her cane close to her body as if she were afraid someone would take it. Dione did worry that someone would take it and the cane was sometimes all she had. "O-okay," she was all right with sitting down, in no hurry to get somewhere because she didn't know where she was going really. Then she actually did manage to arrange herself to sit down, bumping into the table once. Her motions always reminded people, even when she did manage to look up and appear to be paying attention, that she couldn't see a thing. Nervousness only tended to make her more clumsy.

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[info]etaequitas
2009-05-10 11:52 pm UTC (link)
“Are you okay?” Max suddenly asked, noticing as she bumped into the table. He was confused as all hell and started to think maybe asking her to sit wasn’t the best of ideas. He was running out of things to say, and she hadn’t actually said much of anything to him but her name. He didn’t know what to think, and the corner of his mouth screwed up in concentration as he watched her sit down across from him.

He waited for her to be seated before he spoke again. “Are you usually this quiet?” he asked Dione, trying to sound light-hearted. Max smirked somewhat, hoping this wasn’t going to turn into something very awkward before it even began. He looked down at his books and pushed them aside to provide for arm room on the table. He tried to talk about something, and the first thing that came to mind was why he was even here today.

“I was just looking up some personal stuff in the books here,” Max told her, shrugging his shoulders. “Curiosity’s sake, you could say. Had something I needed to know a little bit more about, but I haven’t had much luck. I’m not a big library go-er. I tend to . . . hang out at home or in the wine bar.” He exhaled a breath of air through his mouth. “So, any reason why you’re here today?”

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[info]audiomorbid
2009-05-11 02:42 pm UTC (link)
Dione rarely seemed to know what to do with herself, especially when it came to having to speak. Those whom she knew had learned to get along with her silence or occasional lapses into stuttering or French. "Oui," she was fine. Walking into objects wasn't exactly unusual for her. It wasn't the smartest thing to do, but she'd gotten used to it. There were sometimes bruises; however, so long as it didn't hurt, she didn't see the need to be worried about it. Sitting at the table, she reached out and ran her fingers over the tops of the pages as if trying to read them. They weren't Braille so that wasn't possible, but it gave her something to do.

"I-I p-play at the Wine B-bar," she was trying to make conversation, certain that she must be an absolute idiot. Dione always felt like an idiot when she talked to people. "I h-have a f-friend wh-who works h-here. Dr. Connolly, Sa-sascha."

Not that he was why she came, but he was as good an excuse as any.

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[info]etaequitas
2009-05-11 06:37 pm UTC (link)
Max did a double-take in Dione’s direction. Did she just say something in French? He didn’t know any French, but there was one word he recognized like most people around the globe: Oui. He always thought it was spelt ‘wee’ or something like that. He watched as she reached out for the books on the table, confused by her actions. She was a strange woman, he decided, or maybe it was just the whole blindness thing he had to get used to. He’d never been around a blind person before, and big differences always made him a little uncomfortable.

At least they were getting somewhere now, even if she was having a hard time speaking. He recalled stuttering from her before and chalked it up to bad nerves. She couldn’t have been scared all of the time. It didn’t look like the girl ever got a break. “Huh, you play there. I don’t remember you from there.” He wracked his brain, but he never remembered seeing anyone perform there. There was music sometimes, but he didn’t know where the hell it came from. Max only paid attention to the beer when he was there. “What do you play?” he asked.

He wasn’t familiar with the name she told him. “Oh, a doctor.” He paused. “Wait, a doctor works here?” Last he checked, this was a library. A second later it hit him that she probably meant the other type of doctor, the ones with the degrees in teaching. He felt really stupid for a moment. “Don’t know her.”

Well, last he checked Sascha was a girl’s name too.

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[info]audiomorbid
2009-05-12 09:21 am UTC (link)
Dione spent a lot of time at the Wine Bar truthfully, it was like her second home. However, she tried not to draw attention to herself that way. Instead, she just played there and went home. Other than a few people who actually knew her like Dante or Sheldon very few people really noticed her. The piano was all she really paid attention to anyway. So even if Max had noticed her, unless he intruded on her thinking she wouldn't remember him. "Piano."

"Monsieur Connolly," Dione corrected blinking at the fact that Max didn't know Sascha enough to know that Sascha was a he, not a she. She assumed that everyone knew Dr. Connolly well enough to know at least that much about him. "Sascha est un homme." Dione lapsed into French without thinking, barely paying attention to the fact that he might not understand a word she said. For her, it was natural to speak French.

She turned a page in a book, rubbing her finger pads over the top of the paper just for the feeling of it.

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[info]etaequitas
2009-05-12 09:32 pm UTC (link)
She played the piano? That was why he didn’t remember her from the wine bar. Max didn’t pay any attention to pianos, let alone the people playing them. Unless she was on a stage singing, Max wouldn’t have noticed her working there on the nights that he attended the place. He simply nodded his head at her answer. Fair enough. Still, it felt like he should say something. Max shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t play anything.”

As for her friend, Max’s eyebrows rose as she stated he was a monsieur not a . . . whatever the French female equivalent was of that word. At least he could remember monsieur was the male form. “Ohh,” Max said, making a wavy hand gesture to go along with it. “So, he’s a dude? Gotcha.” He would leave it at that. Normally, it would have been like him to crack an open joke about the man’s name, but if she was his friend then it might not have been a good idea if he wanted to get on good footing with her.

She threw him off with the last bit, though. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t catch that. I don’t speak French.” Max pursed his lips. “I pretty much only know English. Maybe a little bit of Spanish. But no French.”

He took in a deep sigh and looked down at the book she was touching. “Now, I know you didn’t come here to read that book in particular. It’s not very fascinating.”

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[info]audiomorbid
2009-05-13 09:12 am UTC (link)
Several people spoke French in the Haven, a number of them were people she was passably acquainted with. However, for her it was more a matter of comfort than communication her lapsing into the French language. It was easy for her, familiar, comfortable, and in some ways it reminded her of better days.

"It's o-okay," she assured him. "I d-don't r-read m-much." Dione rarely even handled books anymore. Before her parents died, they had made a point of reading things to her so that she could still enjoy stories, but for the most part, she simply didn't bother herself with it. "W-what did y-you com-me to re-read?"

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[info]etaequitas
2009-05-14 01:29 am UTC (link)
She asked him what he came to read. Max looked down at the table, chewing on the inside of his lip. It was something he’d rather not talk about, but for some reason, it was easier mentioning it to a complete stranger than to anyone he was well acquainted with.

His fingers tapped against the edge of the table, and he leaned back in his chair. “Vampires,” he told her. It took him a moment before he could say anything else. “Found out . . . my mother was attacked by one. When she was pregnant with me.” Max brought his hand to his chin and slowly rubbed it. Once he got started on the story, it seemed almost hard to stop. “I heard vampires are infectious. They can change people, and . . . I’ve always been a little strange.” Here, Max actually laughed a little. “I grew up with this skin condition. I was sensitive to sunlight. I had these sharp teeth, too. Fangs.” Max held out one of his hands, gesturing with four fingers downward as he held his thumb to his palm, even if Dione couldn’t see it.

He was quiet for a little bit longer. Talking about the story out loud sort of made the reality sink in on him—that maybe he wasn’t completely human like he always wanted to be. Maybe it explained these strange powers he had, too. Max shook his head, not wanting to believe it though it stared him right in the face. “I thought maybe what was happening to me had something to do with that attack on my mom. I mean, nothing else explains those things, right?” Max chewed on his bottom lip again. “Nothing else explains being a freak.”

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[info]audiomorbid
2009-05-17 07:38 pm UTC (link)
It was very easy for Dione to be a good listener. After all, there was no reason for her to not be. Even when she was distracted, she was listening. Now she was feeling the sensation of paper under her fingertips and listening to Max tell the story of how his life was changed before he was ever born. It was an interesting story, but she wasn't sure exactly what one should say in response to it. So at first she didn't say anything.

Was he a freak because he was a little different? Not that she knew. Especially not here from what she'd been told. Apparently vampires were perfectly normal here. Dr. Wyatt had certainly seemed normal enough. Dr. Connolly, who played guitar with her and worked in the library, read minds. Irei, Dr. Connolly's friends and her piano student, could apparently hear spirits as well as she could and raised people from the dead. This place was weird all around. Then there was the fact that the harpies, which she had since been told were mythological creatures, had attacked the town. Supposedly there were mermaids in the lake. This whole place was a strong bastion of weird and he was worried about a skin condition and pointy teeth? It just didn't seem like much in comparison.

"I he-hear d-d-dead p-p-peo-p-ple," she still had a hard time articulating the very idea of what she could do. While there wasn't anything wrong with it, there was still something about it that struck her as too odd for her own good. Or maybe it was the fact that every time she said it, she was reminded once again that her brother was really and truly dead, not just occasionally disappearing out of her range of hearing. "I d-don't th-think anyth-thing h-happened to my m-ma-mother."

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[info]etaequitas
2009-05-20 07:52 pm UTC (link)
He had a problem with being self-centered. Despite all of the other things around Elysium, Max still focused mostly on himself rather than on others. For his perspective, a skin condition and pointy teeth were something to be worried about. All of a sudden, it opened up all sorts of other possibilities. Did that mean he was infectious? Could he hurt other people? He thought he saw something about vampire being unable to have children. Did that affect him, too?

Max grew up being the only one like himself. Suddenly being thrust into a world where everyone was a freak only made him more self-consciousness than before. In a weird way, he actually had liked being the only one. The vampirism wasn’t the only thing either. There were his other abilities . . .

Smirking, he chuffed in amusement. “Well, that puts things into perspective,” Max replied. The amusement fell from his face, and he crossed his arms over his chest. His eyes were still focused on the table. “It’s just . . . the thing killed my whole family.” He shrugged as if it wasn’t that big of a deal. “Could’ve killed me and my mom, but somehow she lived.” He unfolded his arms and placed his hands on his legs. “Just her and me.”

Then, he put his hands out on the table. “It’s not just that either,” he said. He brought his hands near hers without touching them, letting his palms hover over them. He channeled the energy to make the air cold, sending out a freezing chill to Dione’s hands. Max wanted to show her just what he could do.

“I can freeze things. Well, I can heat them up too, but I’m better at freezing.”

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[info]audiomorbid
2009-05-20 09:58 pm UTC (link)
Dione snatched her hands back, not hard, but hard enough to make it very well understood she'd felt that. Most people would find that Dione's motions really only had two speeds, either she was taking her time about things in which she absolutely refused to allow anyone to rush her or she was going so fast she couldn't have said what happened.

Surprises were not things she tended to handle all that well. Probably because they had a bad habit of being scary things that could cause her some kind of pain. Therefore, she tried to avoid being surprised. Not always possible when you were dealing with other people...especially other people who don't warn you about things like that.

The fact that nearly everyone in his family was dead was something Dione didn't comment on, even if she did see the similarities in their lives. In her case, it was literally everyone though. There was no one left who shared blood kinship with her at all. A thought which never failed to depress her. Still, she didn't say anything. No, she folded her hands in her lap, a motion a proper lady might make. She still seemed to stare across the table, not so much at him but in the direction of his voice and she made no attempt to leave.

That could be because she didn't want to knock something over or because she was waiting to see where else he would go with this conversation.

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[info]etaequitas
2009-05-21 05:00 pm UTC (link)
Her silence didn’t prompt Max to say anything. He noticed the way she pulled her hands back and took it that she probably didn’t like it. He sat back in his chair and brought his hands to his face. Max hadn’t meant to surprise her, but he had a knack for being anything but tactful. His stories could have been boring her, too. Max mulled everything over in his head, searched for something to say out loud, but nothing came to him. The same silence filling the air on Dione’s end filled the air on his end as well.

“I’m probably a nuisance,” Max suddenly said, cracking the silence between them. He shuffled the books together and moved to stand up. He might have been better off leaving her to her peace rather than interrupting it. “Sorry I held you up,” he apologized, scooping the books into his arms as he kicked his chair back under the table. It was exactly a professional move to get furniture in its proper place, but Max was casual like that.

He felt foolish for telling her intimate things, things he hadn’t told to anyone else since he’d found them out. It wasn’t like he had friends to talk to about these things, anyway. A random stranger seemed like a good choice at the time. He paused for a moment, turning back to look at her. “Nice meeting you again, Dione,” Max said, wanting to go bury his head in the dirt and hide there for a few days. Luckily, she didn’t know him by face.

He turned his back on the table and proceeded to walk off. These books had to be put away. He didn’t feel like reading anymore.

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