This is loosely chapter 78 of the newest book, ANGEL, in Fang's point of view. It doesn't follow it word-for-word, but it is my version of the events during that chapter. THERE ARE MAJOR SPOILERS IN THIS STORY. If you don't like spoilers, don't read, because this is a MAJOR one. Like, it could ruin the book for you.
That is all.
Read away!
There had been a lot of pain in my life, and I had hidden all of it pretty well by burying it, covering it, and letting nobody get close to it. I'd been doing this ever since I could remember, from the days I spent in a cage to when I had left the Max and the flock a couple weeks ago. But nothing I'd ever experienced before was incapable of being wrestled away, like this was. It was exploding inside me, making my hands shake as I helped the others move aside rubble and debris, hopelessly trying to find something, anything, that might indicate that the worst had not just happened.
Angel was gone.
She was gone, and it was my fault. I should have run behind her and Gazzy, making sure they got out before I did. Once we started fleeing the site of the explosives, I stopped thinking about anything but pumping as much speed as possible out of my legs. There were so many things I could have done differently that might have changed the outcome of this mission: I could have run behind them, I could have carried them with me, I could have sent Angel ahead while Gazzy and I turned off the bombs. Why hadn't this occurred to me until it was too late?
The backs of my eyes burned, and I blinked rapidly. I will not cry. I will not cry.
A strangled scream came from somewhere behind me, and I whipped around and got into a battle stance. The adrenaline sent my tears back behind my eyes, where they belonged.
Nobody was hurt or being attacked; it was Max who had screamed. She was now crumpled on the ground, holding something in her lap. Dylan and I stepped toward her at the exact same time; I shot him a look, and he stayed put. Good.
When I knelt beside her, I saw what was in her lap: a small, bloody pink sneaker with singed laces. She clutched it, her fingers going white, and she was crying for the first time since Angel had disappeared.
There was a time when I wouldn't have hesitated to touch her; now, I reluctantly lay a hand on her knee, half expecting her to smack it away. But she didn't. She looked up at me through blotchy eyes and held up the shoe. I took it from her and stared at it, turning it over in my hands. Then I set it back on the ground between us.
Max abruptly stood up and walked away, leaving me alone with Angel's shoe. I stared at it, reliving the events of the past year, wondering how everything had come to this.
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Several hours later, we had explored every nook and cranny of this destruction zone, and still nothing came up. It was dark. I sat on the curb, along with most of the flocks. The only sounds in the night were the yawns of exhaustion and the quiet sniffles from hours of crying. Up to this point, I had been able to control myself, but I was breaking a little more every second.
Maya was sitting beside me. She hadn't been crying like the others, but she had been full of quiet determination as we searched, and when she couldn't stand any longer, she'd plopped down on the curb and put her face in her hands. Now, she kept glancing sideways at me, but I didn't look at her. I raised my head and watched the only person not sitting with us.
Max stood with her back to us, staring down into the crater that led to the tunnel where Angel had met her fate. Her arms were crossed over her stomach, her head bowed. Her clothes were torn, burned, covered in soot, and her hair had black grime mixed in with the blonde.
I slowly stood up. We had so many problems between us right now, but none of those mattered as much as this. The little girl we'd basically raised together was gone, and not even the flock understood what the two of us were going through. We needed each other more than anybody else right now.
I made my way toward Max, and she was too wrapped up in her own thoughts to notice my footsteps. I came up behind her and turned her around, glancing at her face for only a second before pulling her to me.
She wrapped her arms around my waist and put her head on my shoulder. Cold droplets of water landed on my skin, where my shirt had torn. This wasn't awkward at all; it was just us, Max and Fang, needing each other, the way we had our entire lives.
We clutched each other, and it was at that moment that I let my first tears escape into her hair. I remembered what had made me fall in love with her in the first place: the fact that she was the only one I could turn to, and that I was the same for her. But that didn't matter now, because we couldn't be together.
We stood in the middle of a Paris that was much less picturesque than usual, and we embraced. It was all we seemed to be able to do; we could only come together to mourn, not to be happy. Our relationship was in shreds, and Angel had died, but we could still do something that had helped start our friendship in the beginning: cry.
The last sentence sounds a lot like the last sentence of the book. Sorry. I had trouble ending this. It isn't very good, but you know when you have this idea in your head and you have to write it or it'll bother you? Yeah. That's what I had going on with this one.
Let me know what you thought about this-and about the book, if you've read it. I think that if the next book (which will be the last in the series) is good, JP will have gotten this series almost back on track. This one seemed a lot more like the first three- better plot, everyone was more in-character, everything seemed less… random. Most of FANG just seemed random to me, but I thought this book was a lot better. So tell me what you thought!