Ichigo watched the city around him, moving at a mile a minute and making him and his companions seem slow alongside it as they walked. He almost wanted to shunpo, to keep up with everything all at once. The library stood out among the many modern buildings that lined the streets, it was hardly a challenge to pinpoint the library. The building was old, not overly so but a fair few decades behind the rest of the street.
Together, he walked with the flock, through the wooden doors and into the clearly labelled building. Something about him that tended to surprise people was his love for classical literature, William Shakespeare in particular. That was just what made the whole scene appear so familiar to him, it was rather grounding when compared to streets they had just left behind.
It was made clear that Nudge didn't particularly like books and the others held no visible opinions. Ichigo almost wished that he would be able to look amongst the books but knew that they were running on a tight schedule. They headed straight towards the computers.
They were large machines, clearly, they hadn't been replaced in years, smudged by the hands of many children and all lined up along a table top with a single chair placed directly in front of each. Max took a seat in front of one, mid row, and the others spread to either side of her, taking their own seats.
Nudge worked fast, scanning the web with fast fingers and fast eyes that perfectly matched her fast mouth. It hadn't taken long before she had found the location of another of the buildings where the School would be at work. To someone blissfully unaware of the events that occurred in those buildings, there would be no value to the information. The School building was in Europe.
Before long they left the building.
Angel was watching Ichigo again, as he appeared to be deep in thought. Even in the sleep he himself had induced, one where he should not have been on guard, she had still not been able to breach his mind. The black force she tried to push through pushed back a lot harder, seeming to invade her mind oppressively. She could only hope that Ichigo was unaware of what his mind did to hers. If he knew what he was doing, not only putting up a wall but also a guard that actually acted, that did not speak well of how he would be to react within their flock.
She was hesitant to tell max, if he was unaware she may have ruined what could well be his last chance of finding a place to belong. What she, of course, did not know was that there was no where he could belong. He was a human, a Shinigami, a Hollow, a Quincy and, now, an experiment.
Their initial plan had been to find things that they would not normally wear and purchase them, get some scissors and cut their own hair – the DIY approach to creating a disguise. But then Gazzy had seen a flyer, colourful paper taped to a store window and flapping in the wind where it was not attached. Rather fortunately for them, it advertised a free makeover for anyone willing to allow the specialist team to take complete control over the fate of the customer's interest.
It seemed like the best choice.
The moment that they had spoken their request to those at the address specified on the flyer they had been split up.
Max stood with her arms crossed as they supplied her with clothes, admittedly nicer ones that the tattered, dirty shirt and bodywarmer she had been wearing, along with jeans with even more holes than wear had worn into her last pair. She shrugged on the leather jacket, feeling the warmth of the semi-tight material settle onto her shoulders and the warmth it supplied spread quickly. She was happy to see that the shoes on her feet, the thick-soled boots that laced up to mid-way up her shin, were more suited to combat than the other available options she had seen.
That's not to say that she was entirely happy about the situation as they added highlights to her hair and caked makeup onto her face. It was impractical to keep such a high regard of your own image!
Fang was unresponsive the entire time, Nudge was ecstatic, Angel was enjoying being fawned over, Gazzy had almost cleared the room when his gastric system acted up (again), Iggy was getting fed up of the pity that was given to him due to his visual impairment and Ichigo… well.
Originally the jeans with which he had been supplied were baggy, though not as much so as the trousers of his Shinigami uniform, and allowed an excess of air to pass through to his thin legs. He supposed he was almost lucky he had been deprived of a substantial meal for as long as he had, stupid-of-a-reason as it was, for the worrying depletion of his already slim waist had made wearing the jeans impossible. He had hissed and glared, scowled deeper, the moment that the team commented on it.
Luckily enough, he had soon gotten a tighter outfit, though it was still rather looser than what he would normally choose to wear by choice, not long after. But then there had been the hair and makeup, though the latter they had skipped entirely.
He sat in silence, fiddling with one of the loose threads from his ripped, black jeans and scowling at the glaringly white floor. He had looked up earlier and hadn't been entirely pleased with what he saw. He fought a lot, so seeing his face covered in sweat, blood and mud was not an odd occurrence, but seeing it as it was then was displeasing.
They had provided him with a wipe which he had used gratefully, before realising that he was just revealing he true damage that had been done. He looked tired, like he was about to drop into a deep sleep then and there, with eyes that refused to open entirely and dark circles that stained his skin slightly purple. It was like a bruise.
He had seen the scarring on the failures, he had seen the scarring he had received previously, but he had not been prepared to see, with the amount of blood he wiped off, there was not a scratch on his face. Well, a new one at least.
Still, he was gaunter and his skin was gaining a sickly yellow pallor. His hair was a greasy mess that hung down his face in messy strands that he hadn't noticed with the bleariness of his vision that came with the excessive tiredness he felt. It hung down to his shoulder blades, spiky and uneven as ever but matted with blood. He didn't know whether it was his or if it belonged to the other failures he had shared rooms, sometimes even cages, with before being sent to the room where he met Angel.
Finally, they were reunited, all looking noticeably cleaner as well as different. Ichigo anxiously bit at the ring they had added to his lip and tugged at the dark fabrics that they had clothed him in. He was often considered a punk before, what with the orange hair and the short temper, this would only make things worse. Not to mention that it was strange.
At least there was one major positive, his hair had been cropped to the length he was used to, not to mention washed, and was considerably more manageable and less irritating that way. The rest of the flock looked like themselves to him who knew them by face, they would have to, but they would be unrecognisable to anyone who was not holding a conversation with (or staring them in the face awkwardly for whatever reason) them.
He was glad he had suggested the idea of quote-unquote "makeovers" when he saw the smiles that overtook both Angel and Nudge's faces. He could see them both eventually taking the empty role of "Little sister" that had been left in his life; they would not be replacements for Yuuzu and Karin, but their own thing entirely. But, of course, that would only be if he stuck around long enough for such a thing to occur.
As they were in city and Max had (somehow) came into a bit of money, they planned to spend as many nights as they could get in a cheap motel – anything was better than sleeping in a tree – while still saving money for food, and bird-kids needed much more of that than most.
Food was the first thing on their agenda. It just brought the fact that Ichigo could quite physically not remember the last time he had eaten to the forefront of his mind. He may have been embarrassed at the loud rumbling noise his stomach made is he wasn't so darn hungry, luckily enough it appeared that that sentiment was shared across them unanimously. Ichigo could feel a vague sense of amusement as he realised that, even if it wasn't the only thing that they would ever agree on, it would probably be the only thing that he and fang ever admitted to agreeing on. Overtime he had been forced to learn how to judge characters, a skill that would have been so much more helpful if it had developed sooner, and he could already tell that Fang was mulishly stubborn.
They decided to go to a cheap diner not far from the place where they had gotten their "disguises". As they took their seats at a booth clearly made for a couple fewer people than their party contained a waitress walked over, flashing bright, white teeth as she bore a painfully fake smile, eyes held open through sheer force and red lipstick smudged. Ichigo was too busy pondering, trying to create a story behind what was clearly the result of some kind of stressful situation, to notice that she had begun talking. When he factored in the fact that she was speaking quickly, with a thick accent to boot, in his second language he realised he was probably the one that needed to pay the most attention.
Before long, the waitress set the menus down in front of them and left to wait on another table on their left. Ichigo picked up the menu and skimmed over it before hoping that he wasn't the only one who was planning to order enough food to feed a family of four. Thankfully, he was not.
The waitress returned too long and asked for them to order their drinks first, Ichigo watched the others order a variety of sodas before realising, once again, just how long it had been since he had any decent nourishment at all, really, that wasn't supplied to him via tube. He merely ordered a cold water and sat waiting for it to come, silent, just a fang was, to the side of the conversation held by the other flock members.
It was just before the waitress returned with their drinks that he felt it again: the nagging feeling that was somehow both a push and a pull at the corner of his mind, trying to push through the barrier there that had, no doubt, been supplied by one of the two spirits that lived within his head. He almost laughed at the thought, biting the cool metal again to prevent himself from doing so, it made him seem, for lack of a better word, insane.
As he set the drinks own she smiled again, face contorting uncomfortably around the forced pull of her facial muscles, and asked, with her voice as sickly-sweet and put-on as her smile, "Do you know what you would like?"
They nodded their confirmation and Max began to give her order. It seemed that she had assumed that max was ordering for all of them as, after Max had closed of her sentence with a final "please" she made a subtle move to turn and move away until Gazzy had begun to speak. They all followed, going in order around the table and ordering enough to feed from four to five of themselves (should they have been entirely human). Ichigo couldn't help but think he was the only one paying attention to the way that her face fell, the smile faded slowly and began to sink to a look of shock so extreme that it became extremely comedic.
She left without another word after both Fang and Ichigo had mumbled their orders, though quiet the amount was no less than any of the others. Again, Ichigo sat to the side of the conversation, looking everywhere but at Fang who was doing the same. He entirely refused to acknowledge the similarities that they shared in that moment.
When the woman finally came with their food she was carrying a single order at a time and struggling with even that. It took rather a while to acquire the entirety of their party's orders and the sheer volume meant that they could only just fit it all on the table. Everyone had been forced to rest their hands by their sides once their elbows had been pushed off and was desperately trying not to elbow their neighbour too violently as they cut into their food.
The food itself was greasy. Some bits weren't burnt but were still slightly over cooked and some the opposite. Ichigo felt himself holding back this opinion as it bubbled to the surface in the very back of his mind, pushed away by the overwhelming sense of hunger he felt and the logical reasoning that forced him to rationalise with the scale of their order and how had it must have been on the chef(s).
Of course, it didn't hold a torch to Yuuzu's homemade food that he had enjoyed for years, but he simply could not bring himself to care. He was lost to the world, as were, it would seem, his companions. He really couldn't taste much of what he ate, he could merely feel it falling into his empty stomach, slowly filling it.
Eventually he leaned back, head resting against the flat part of the top of the chair and sighing slightly I a mixture of relief and contentment. Of course, he couldn't be blamed for the relief h felt, he had been hungry for so long that he had nearly lost any sense of the feeling of hunger that was, not to his knowledge, eating away at him. He had quite literally been staring, it was a wonder how he hadn't collapsed from the exertion of escaping, flying and walking.
He hadn't, unsurprisingly after so long, been the first to finish. The waitress seemed to have been watching them all in a sense of awe as the very slim teenagers and children all consumed such a mass of food she was sure should have caused drastic weight gain with no struggle at all. As she saw the boy with the bright hair finish, the last even if it was only a moment after the blonde girl, she walked over to them with hopes of either supplying them with another drink or collecting their payment.
The last time that she left hat table of kids he left with a rather large payment. That payment was also the end of her shift. She left through the back door, walking into the alley behind her and breathing in some of the pungent air that surrounded her. The cold burned her throat slightly. But there was something that burned her throat more. What was it? The cold blade that pushed up against the front of her neck before slowly piercing through it.
She couldn't scream as the blood rose to her mouth and spilled from the corners, hitting the floor with a splatter that nobody seemed to hear. She inhaled once, or tried to, sharply and with no success, before gasping breathlessly and crumpling to the floor. The figure who held the murder weapon grinned and knelt by the side of the dead woman, the dark fabric of their rousers soaking up the blood they had placed their knees in.
There was a cold, quiet laugh that was lost to the sounds of the street before gloved hands brushed across the forehead of the dead waitress. Those fingers smeared blood in a seemingly very specific pattern though it was neither a word nor a legible image. That laugh rang again, lost just as it was before, as the weapon was placed purposefully and meticulously in line with the fallen woman's slender torso. They left, smearing their foot through the crimson puddle with a sense of finality, laughing as they did.
The next morning, when a young employee had come to open the diner for the breakfast option that it supplied, he dropped the keys he held in his hand in an instant, petrified as he stood on the spot too scared to move towards the body n he floor before him, the sicky red/brown substance staining his shoes. With nothing else to do, he screamed. He screamed until his voice was hoarse and he felt as though his lungs were about to burst.
It was horrifying, he was a high-school student working his Saturday shift, but there he was, looking at the corpse. He had known the woman, to worsen the situation. Her once-blue eyes were rolled back into her head and her forehead was stained with a deliberate-looking abstract symbol. Her head was hardly clinging to her body, attached by only a mere bloody, mangled strip of skin and sinew.
Hands shaking, he grasped for the phone in his pocket and tried to press the keys for the emergency number with much difficulty. 911.
He could only stand, shake and sob as he waited for the loud tell-tale blare of the sirens to grown nearer d the law-enforcement officer to rush to his side. Just as they did so, he felt the situation become far too much to bare. He fell into the arms of the officer before he could tell them what he knew, entirely unconscious and shaking even then.
A/N So this is a slightly random tidbit of information from your local (or not so local) British girl that will have no effect on the plot. So, I almost forgot that I was setting this in America and wrote (and clearly changed) 999 instead of 911 because that's the emergency number over here, if anyone was unaware. Also, yes, this will all be relevant to the overall plot and is kind of a start to the explanation as to why I am AU-ing the Maximum Ride that I use. I'm just going to throw a "thank you" in here as well, for all of the reviews, follows and favourite that I have gotten from this story, I really am grateful for them. For now, that's all I have to say.
~We'reAllABitOdd