Having finished composing her letter to Christina and the family that she had made for herself alongside Manfredo, thanking them again for the kindness that the pair of them had shown to those who shared her circumstances enough to be in danger from the Templars, and also keeping the pair of them abreast of the current goings-on in Roma, Maria wondered again if she should include anything about Aeon. True, the man was a fellow Treasure Guardian, but telling Christina and Manfredo about him might lead to them wishing to meet the man for themselves, and Maria didn't know just how that kind of thing would have worked out.
Still, there was a great deal that she didn't think would have been possible without Aeon's help – foremost in her mind was the rescue of Leonardo, at least given everything that Ezio had told her when he'd gotten back from doing just that – since the man in black seemed to be an army unto himself when he'd made up his mind to take a stand.
Truly, she was in perfect agreement with Ezio: it was a good thing that none of the Templars had managed to convince Aeon to take their side in the conflict that the Assassins had had with them for so long. Deciding that she would sit with her decision awhile, since it wasn't as though she had a particularly strict schedule with regards to her correspondence with Christina and Manfredo where they still lived in Firenze – not even Savonarola and all of the madness he had stirred up being enough to press them into leaving the place where the pair of them had been born and raised – Maria set aside the letter she'd been composing so that it could dry, and the stoppered up her bottle of ink so that it wouldn't.
Making her way away from her desk, Maria left for the gardens of the Rosa in Fiore; spending time in such a place always seemed to help with getting her thoughts in order.
~AC: Bro~
Once he'd managed to assemble the higher-ranks of the Brotherhood, his uncle, La Volpe, and Machiavelli among them, Ezio had found the consensus as to what was to be done with the man in black – Aeon, who had aided them a great deal during the time they'd all spent in Roma, or else faced with the Borgia in those other places where their corruption had emerged – had been cleanly split. Split in a way he'd almost been expecting, given how well he knew the men on each side of the divide, yes, but it was a troublesome thing all the same.
La Volpe was entirely in favor of welcoming Aeon into their ranks with open arms, while Machiavelli argued that such a mysterious man – deliberately so, since he'd all but refused point-blank to give anything more than his name to the Brotherhood no matter how closely they'd worked together – should be prodded to open up more completely before he was offered such.
"Basta, we've all heard both sides," Uncle Mario said, sounding like even he was getting slightly fed up with the arguments – as politely-phrased as they were – that had been going on almost since the subject of Aeon had been brought up in the first place. "Ezio, what do you make of all this? You've worked with the man the most out of all of us," the man said, and he smiled slightly.
It seemed that his was to be the deciding vote, after all.
"While I can't deny that we don't know much about Aeon's past but what the man himself has told us, what I've seen during my work with him tells me that he does genuinely have our best interest at heart," he said, knowing that Machiavelli wouldn't be entirely pleased to hear such a thing, but also knowing that he couldn't very well deny the contributions that Aeon had made to the Brotherhood's efforts in Roma.
Well, not with any degree of truth, at least.
"Vero," Uncle Mario said, nodding with a pleased sort of expression on his face. "All of your reports have given me the impression of a man who, reluctant as he is to talk about his past, is genuinely invested in the ideals that all of us here have dedicated ourselves to upholding."
La Volpe flashed a smug grin at Machiavelli almost before Uncle Mario had finished speaking, but when his uncle caught sight of that, he gave the leader of Roma's thieves an unimpressed sort of glare.
"Sí, well I suppose I won't be able to argue any of you out of your current positions," Machiavelli said, still sounding dubious about the whole thing. "Still, I would have my reservations about this course of action noted."
"Bene," Uncle Mario said, nodding respectfully back at the man. "Then I suppose that's all we have to discus at the moment. Nipote, would you stay for a moment?" he asked, just as Ezio had been turning to leave.
"What is it, uncle?" he asked, wondering just what in the world his uncle could have wanted with him in particular.
Machiavelli seemed to know, if the interested expression on his face was any sort of clue, but for the life of him Ezio couldn't think of what might be on his uncle's mind at the moment.