My Single Step
a Maximum Ride fanfic
A/N: Cue the seemingly random oneshot! This was something I wrote for an English class, and I really liked it so I switched around a few things and here we are. I picture this as happening back before The Angel Experiment, while the flock was still safe in Colorado; but probably after Jeb disappeared and presumably died. Max's dreams weren't always nightmares...so read on.
I'm climbing. I snatch at a branch a good two feet above my head, swing, and am launched upward. My hand slips; I stumble, twigs snagging at my shirt and in my hair, but I hold on and get my footing back. I recommence my journey skywards.
Ever since I was little I've loved this: pulling, reaching, the thrill of total guesswork and knowing that one misstep will leave me feeling sorry for not being safe. (But that doesn't happen very often regardless.) And yet I go higher anyway. In my dreams I always do, of course. But in reality, I just go as high as the atmosphere will allow me to go, whether in the inky expanse of the night or in the blinding glow of the day.
And here, this tree extends as high as I want it to. Even stories and stories up in the air, my arms still come nowhere close to encircling the rough bark of the trunk. The tree's own arms feel alive as I grasp them with my hands. They shudder as I leave them behind, falling away like the bridges I've burned. And finally, finally, there's nothing more to reach for; not because I've run out of room, but rather I've achieved an altitude that's enough for now.
This is no ordinary tree. No figment of the mind is ordinary, especially not the inventions I've conjured up for myself. You see, this is my place: my tree, my bridges burned, my marginal insanity manifested. Each element of this master design is an agent of my escape from reality, from all laws of physics and logic. Here, the rules are made to be broken. And that's something I do quite well.
Though the night is dark, it allows me to see better than any human and to think as clearly as the tiny pinpricks of light that have snuck in through the ebony canvas of the sky. Even as I watch, that sky deepens, and changes hues, from stark black into navy and finally to deep violet. The holes are patched and the pinpricks fade as clouds smokier than ash itself gather to converse in grumbles and growls.
I watch as rapt with interest as if I were watching a fireworks display, and I hug my knees to my chest perched on my final branch hundreds of feet from terra firma. There need not be sulfur and magnesium to entertain me tonight; my focus is on the white-hot spears of unpolluted electricity that are being shocked down to earth out of the clouds.
I am the highest point for miles and miles, as far as I can possibly see, and yet the lightning will not strike my tree simply because I do not will it to do so. This world, my world, is so purely alive. I can hear a distant flock of birds singing a warning with the call of the gusting wind, and if I focus acutely I can make out their smoky shapes wheeling in the air. Although the rain does not come, my own animal instincts say to get under cover – but that would mean going back and facing reality: something I'm not at all willing to do yet.
I'm not ever ready to face the music, and I dread the day when I will be prepared. Because that will mean that I'll have lost all my senses of hope and imagination. I try to tell myself that I should leave soon, get back to my own flock; but the thought is halfhearted, and my body doesn't obey.
Instead, I stand up. I turn and face the hovering storm. I take a breath through my sharply sensitive nose and mouth that tastes and smells like pure life—rain and lightning and pine needles and molting feathers—and I allow myself a small smile. I take one step, a single solitary step, out into nothingness; into the next chapter.
Because in this world of mine, there either has to be something to hold me up, or I must learn how to make myself fly.