So here it is, my first fanfic. Set sometime after book two, after the Flock has been experiencing a bit too much peace and quiet. But we all know these guys can never catch a break. Enjoy!

When we first found out that Iggy had a gambling problem, there was a lot of blame floating around.

"You should have known, Gazzy," Nudge said. "You guys are like, best friends. I mean, he had to have mentioned it before. Guys talk about that stuff, right?"

Gazzy shook his head and looked at Nudge with irritation. "Not all of us are as talkative as you, Nudge. Besides, are you sure he didn't say anything to you? You've been following him around like a puppy lately," he said, a smug smile crossing his features.

She shook her head hurriedly. "What? No! I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't been following him around! You're crazy. Come on." She was in full blown panic mode, and pointed at Fang. "You're his other best friend, and you're as old as him. He might have tried to shelter Gazzy, but not you. You can't expect me to believe he didn't say anything to you."

Fang shook his head impassively. "Nope. Not a word of it. His two favorite topics are food and girls. In that order. Gambling never came up," he said.

There was only a moment of silence before Nudge turned her attentions to the youngest member of the flock, pointing an accusatory finger at Angel this time. "You read minds. How on earth did you not see this coming?"

Angel shrugged. "I don't know. I guess he never thought about it," she said, smiling as if all was well. Out of all of us, she was perhaps the only one who didn't grasp the situation. To her, gambling was something that you did on the weekends, it was when adults went to casinos and played games with all the bright lights and fun noises. In my mind, though, I kept on picturing Iggy going downhill, spending all his money, unable to enjoy life because in his mind, he was always waiting for that next fix. He was an addict. My stomach churned as I pictured any of our flock ending up like that, homeless and desperate. I'd tie Iggy up and send him to rehab (Did they have that for gambling? They'd better) before I let that happen to him.

"He must have thought about it. Addicts don't just drop their addiction when they come home. It wouldn't be an issue, if that were the case," Fang said. I gave him a reprimanding look; we weren't going to gang up on Angel and make her feel guilty… even if she was the one who could have stopped this before it got to be a problem.

"I heard that," Angel said, lower lip trembling.

"Sorry, honey, it's just… you're sure he hasn't seemed off lately?" I kept my tone gentle, not wanting to scare her off.

"Nope. He's been normal, just like you guys said. Thinking about food and girls. Even some stuff that's kind of gross," she said, wrinkling her nose. I could almost feel the smoke coming out of my ears. I was going to have a talk with Iggy about keeping his inappropriate thoughts in check when Angel was around. That is, right after the talk about his gambling.

"And what about you, Max? You're the leader, why didn't you pick up on it?" Angel asked, her expression all innocence.

"I…guys… come on, let's not make this a blame game. Obviously this is nobody's fault." I knew I was backtracking, but I didn't care.

"She's right. It doesn't matter, anyways. But how we handle this does matter," Fang said.

I relaxed. It was good to know I had someone to back me up.

"We could take away all his explosives, just until he stops. I'll keep them safe," Gazzy said, looking a bit too excited about the prospect.

"Or we could threaten to only eat crappy takeout until he gives it up. We won't keep anything to cook with in the house, so he'll either starve, or eat terrible food like the rest of us," Nudge said. I wondered for a moment if she had forgotten that we were only trying to fix Iggy here. I certainly didn't intend on suffering because of his stupidity.

"How about no. I was thinking we could stage an intervention."

"Do you even know how to do that?" Nudge asked, crossing her arms in front of her skeptically. What was this, the Spanish inquisition?

"No, but I've made it this far in life by bluffing my way through it. I don't see why this should be any different."

"What's the plan?" Fang asked, leaning forward and resting his arms on his knees. We were ready for action.

…

Maybe I should back up a bit. It had been a year since we'd come to live with my mom, and my sister, Ella, in Mesa. And damn, had it been a peaceful year. I don't think I'd ever appreciated how nice it was to live for more than a few hours at a time without having the ground ripped out from under your feet all the time. When we'd gone days without a disaster, it had been enough to make us all a little paranoid that something bad was going to jump out and kill us at any second. When it had been weeks without any disruption, we were in a hazy sort of nowhere zone where we almost wanted something crazy to happen, to just break the tension. And when it had been months, suddenly, that had stopped mattering.

At some point, we'd started to enjoy living life in a house, with warm beds and food, with a parental figure and a normal, human sibling living there with us. And so after a year (a year and 15 days, I should add; yes, I've been counting. It doesn't make me paranoid. It makes me unique), we had completely sunk into the rhythms of everyday life. We got up anywhere between 8 and 10, had breakfast, did chores, read books, watched TV, played games, pranked each other, flew, had a family dinner with Ella and my mom, then wound down and went to sleep anywhere between 10 and midnight (sometimes later, especially for Fang, who liked to stay up checking his blog at all hours of the night). It was predictable and stable and wonderful, all wrapped up together and stuffed into a warm layer of pastry. Scratch that last part. I'm hungry, and Iggy's not here to cook for us.

Anyways, I thought we were doing pretty well until yesterday, when I'd stumbled across Iggy's internet history. It was with innocent intentions, I swear- I just wanted to delete whatever filth he'd been looking up so the younger kids wouldn't stumble across it. He had us help him most of the time, but when he really wanted to keep something to himself, he was a pro at using the voice commands and all the fancy disability features. And inevitably, when he was trying to keep something a secret, it was because he was looking up something gross- what he did with it was beyond me, given that even disability features weren't going to help him see anything. But I was hard pressed to forget the time that Gazzy had asked why Google had given him the search suggestion, "hot Indian babes." Not my idea of a fun conversation.

So this time, I'd been clicking away and deleting his crap, when I had come across several related websites, all about treatment for gambling addiction. This in itself wasn't enough to cause any worry. I'd deleted them along with the rest, and gone to the boy's room to see if I could find Iggy and ask him what was going on. But he was gone. Gazzy and Fang were in the other room playing video games, so I decided to do some snooping. For the common good, of course. Like the NSA does. Right. That eases my conscience a bit.

I searched around his bed, ignoring the filthy clothes and bottles full of chemicals that no doubt had some explosive property- I was extra careful with those- until, under all of the other odds and ends, I found a small duffel bag. Black and ominous, I'd never seen it before. So what else could I do? I opened it, breaching all standards of privacy, and found a bag of money. A freaking. Bag. Of. Money.

Once I was able to stop myself from shaking, and had pushed past the urge to throw the bills in the air and make it rain, I rummaged through the bag. I had no idea how much was in there, but it had to have been in the thousands. They were mostly in wads of twenties, though there were a couple of hundreds in there. And they weren't new, nor were they wrapped up all neat and orderly. So probably not a bank robbery, then. That was one worry I could cross off my list. But still, that was a lot of money. Sure, we stole a lot back when we were on the run, but a.) that was to stay alive, whereas this clearly wasn't, and b.) we never had this much frigging money- if we had, maybe we could have bought ourselves a yacht or something, used that to hide from the white coats. Think about it; who would expect to find a bunch of bird kids on a millionaire's yacht? Certainly not me.

In one of the side pockets of the bag, stuffed in as if an afterthought, was a pamphlet advertizing for, get this, a gambling addiction support group. It was local. And it met every Monday night.

After thinking about it, Iggy had been missing from dinner every Monday night for the past month, at least. He'd been gone a bunch of other nights too, but those would have been his gambling nights, or so I deduced. Call me Sherlock.

Faced with this irrefutable evidence, we planned our intervention. We kept my mom out of it; she'd probably treat the situation like she was an adult and we were a bunch of kids. Even though it happened to be the truth, we didn't react well to authority figures exercising their power over us. A parental order for Iggy to stop gambling would have just about as much effect as me threatening to withhold his daily ration of spinach. None.

Fang would be the one to rope him in, while Gazzy and I would secure the exits. Nudge and Ella would be there to really dig deep into his emotional juices (whoa, that sounded way grosser than I meant it to be) and get him talking. Angel, of course, was there to read his mind and tell the rest of us what was really going on in there. Everything was in place, complete with my mom being out for a day of shopping. And just to be sure that we were getting through to him, I'd stockpiled duck tape and rope behind the counter in the kitchen.

This was Intervention, Avian American edition.

…

"What's going on?"

Fang had shut the door behind Iggy, and I stood nearby, waiting to guide him to a chair- the extra sturdy one we'd selected for the occasion.

"We just want to talk," I said, then gave Ella and Nudge a nod. That was their cue to move into place.

Once Iggy was seated, they took their places on either side of him.

"Have you been alright lately?"

"You've been acting kind of weird, haven't you?"

"Do you like us anymore?"

"I think you're being selfish."

"Definitely selfish."

"You need to face the problem head on, you know."

"She's right. I read that somewhere. Don't avoid it."

"Confront it."

Iggy seemed confused at the rapid fire Nudge-Ella commentary going on around him.

"Uuh, care to explain? Anyone? That is, other than these two?"

"Iggy, we know everything," Gazzy said, joining the circle. Fang and I took up our positions closest to the door, in case he tried to run.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Iggy said, though I noticed that he had broken out in a sweat. Good. I mean, not good. Or maybe kind of good. I don't know. At least we were getting somewhere.

"I found your money. The whole bag of it," I said. If he hadn't been blind, he would have been staring straight at scary Max, all arms crossed and angry eyebrows. As it was, my hard work was for my benefit alone.

"Uuh… It's not what you think," he said.

"Right. Oh, also, I know where you've been going these past few Monday nights. And a few other nights too, I think," I said.

Iggy really looked panicked now. "Alright, fine, guys, come on, don't be angry. I didn't mean for it to get this bad… I just… it's all so new and exciting. To have that sort of power, it's awesome. And the money, too, isn't that awesome?"

"No," I said.

He shrugged. "Fine, I can return the money, if you want. But the rest of it… no harm done, right? I've made contact, and I swear, it'll be totally normal from here on out," He said.

"Made contact?" Nudge asked. She looked confused, and so did Angel, but I pushed forward.

"It's not going to be normal, Iggy. You're an addict." I said. There, it was out in the open. A moment of silence followed. In our special episode of Intervention, Avian American Edition, this would be where the dramatic music would come to a climax, and then we'd have a commercial break.

Instead of being treated to an advertisement for dish detergent, I watched Iggy burst out laughing.

"Addicted? Are you serious? Besides, are you a professional or something? When did you start diagnosing people?" he asked.

"Iggy, it's not just her. We're all worried about you," Gazzy said. I could hear the emotion in his voice. Iggy softened.

"Come on buddy, you've got to believe me, I'm not addicted. It's just… I've never had this sort of power before. I mean, didn't you do the same thing when it first started happening to you?" he asked, looking to where Fang and I were. Even though he was blind, he always managed to target people in a conversation as well as any sighted person could.

"Uuh… gambling?"

Everyone in the room paused.

"Wait a minute. I don't get it," Ella said, looking at Iggy, then at me, then back to Iggy. Alright, so we hadn't told her the extent of Iggy's problem, but she knew enough to help us in her own limited way.

"Neither do I. You think I'm addicted to gambling?" Iggy said. Shock number one of the day was about to hit us.

"Well yeah… aren't you?" I was getting ready to feel pretty stupid.

"Nooo. I'm not. Never gambled in my life."

Boom. And there it was. Just give me my dunce cap and I'll go sit in the corner.

"Then why did you have a pamphlet from a gambling support group? And why had you googled gambling addiction a bunch of times?" Fang asked.

Iggy rolled his eyes. "Guys, I think you're forgetting one important fact. Let me enlighten you." He paused for effect, leaning forward. "I'm BLIND. Unless that pamphlet or the internet had suddenly developed Braille, I haven't been doing much reading in my spare time," he said.

"Then what was it all for? And if you haven't been gambling, then where did all the money come from?" I asked.

Ella timidly raised her hand. "Guys, I think you've got the wrong idea. If I had known what you guys were doing, I would have explained it earlier," she said.

Iggy nodded. "Thank you. I've got someone on my side at least," he said.

"I helped Iggy with the reading stuff. And I've been walking with him to the bus stop every Monday night to take him to the gambling support group," she said.

"Wait, I thought you said you weren't addicted to gambling?"

"I'm not. I just…"

"He's in love with a girl who is."

It all clicked into place.

"Oh." I said. All my energy rushed out of me with a whoosh. Oopsie daisie.

"I've been going to visit her. And I was doing some research on what she's going through, you know? She's so awesome," he said, looking dreamy. Nudge looked like she was going to puke.

"What's the money for, then? Did your girlfriend give it to you?" Fang asked.

Iggy shook his head. "No. She's kind of gambled herself into a hole, and I wanted to help her out of it. I wasn't going to give it to her. I'd just spend it for her, get her food, that sort of thing. I wouldn't let her gamble it all away, I swear," Iggy said.

"Then where did it come from?"

Iggy looked guilty again.

"Tell them Iggy, or I will," Angel said, remarkably stubborn for all of her seven years.

Iggy sighed, then opened his mouth to deliver shock number two of the day.

"Guys, I got a new power."

There it is! More to follow, hope you enjoyed it- and reviews would really be appreciated. :)