Disclaimer: Tragically, I don't own Maximum Ride or any of its characters. Not even Iggy. Sigh.

One-shot. Something to get you through the wait for Pyromaniac. Prompt: What if...Iggy hadn't been chosen for the night-vision experiment?

-Summary-

Every Wednesday night, it's the same. For one hour, we lie there and pray and wish and wonder, hoping against hope and reality that she'll come back. And praying that she won't. But don't tell her that. After all, it's not her fault she's blind…

- Watch Hour -

We slept together every night since the day Nudge left. It had been a Wednesday — at least, that's what we thought it'd been. So every Wednesday, it was the same.

I went to bed first, spreading my blanket out on the living room floor and curling up, waiting. Then came Angel. She always slipped down the stairs in her soft, beat-up bunny slippers, a small blanket and more than one stuffed animal cradled in her small arms. The toys were arranged around her head and mine, and she snuggled up to me, holding her blanket close.

Gazzy was usually next, though sometimes Iggy came before him. All he carried, as opposed to his sister, was a ratty pillow and a couple blankets. He sprawled down next to Angel. Iggy sauntered over with nothing more than a plump pillow and flopped down beside me, casually putting his long hands behind his head. He scrutinized the ceiling every night, as if he found something new and inexplicably interesting with each glance.

As weird as this sounds, that habit of his really relieved me. He was making use of his eyesight, realizing how precious it was, and just how close he'd come to losing it. I know that the whitecoats almost picked him for their night-vision-enhancing procedure.

And I don't know how things would have turned out if it had been Iggy, but I don't do that "what-if" thinking. Not much, anyway.

Fang was always the last of us to come. He didn't bring a pillow or a blanket, just his silent, brooding self. He stretched himself out next to Iggy, turned his head the other way, and didn't say a word.

None of us did.

But the empty spot next to the Gasman didn't go away, not even when we tried to ignore it. The moonlight filtered through the windows, illuminating Nudge's absence. It was an unspoken rule that, at least on Wednesday nights, she didn't exist. Not between us, anyway. For one hour, we'd lie there and pray and wish and wonder, hoping against hope and reality that she'd come back.

And praying that she wouldn't. What would we do if she did? We had no idea.

But don't tell her that. After all, it's not her fault the whitecoats chose her.

This night, though, we broke the tableau. And thank God we did.

Angel was the one to do it. She picked up a stuffed rabbit, plopped it on her stomach, and told it, "It's been almost two years already."

I sighed and closed my eyes. What do you say to that? What was I supposed to say?

"Do you think she's ever gonna come back?" Gazzy whispered in a monotone voice. I opened my eyes and turned my head towards him. He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling just like Iggy, and if it wasn't for the tense way he was pressing his hands flat against his stomach, I'd have thought he didn't care whether or not she came back.

"I don't know," I said.

Iggy shifted by my side, but kept his piercing gaze on the stains on the ceiling. "What if she does?"

"Then we act like nothing's wrong," I said. "We show her that we're happy to see her, because it's the truth."

"But…she abandoned us," Gazzy muttered. His hands pressed harder against his stomach. "She left without saying goodbye. Right after…"

He didn't need to say it. Almost two years after Jeb died, and it still hurt. Nudge left…right after our father did.

"How were we supposed to know what was going on in her head?" Iggy's tone was sharp, almost defensive. "We didn't know what she was going through."

"Yes we did," Fang suddenly snapped. "We were just too scared to do anything about it."

"Scared!" Iggy repeated incredulously. He turned in Fang's direction, his bright blue eyes drilling holes into the back of the other boy's head. "Why would we be scared of her?"

"Maybe we weren't scared of her," I interrupted. "Maybe we were scared because it could have been any one of us."

The only sound after that was the noise moonlight made as it pounded on our ears.

"It was…" Iggy cleared his throat and drew in a sharp breath. I heard him grind his teeth. "It was going to be me."

"Iggy."

"You know it! It was!"

"Oh, stop wallowing in self-pity," Fang said waspishly. "So what if it had been you, huh? What if it'd been you instead of her? Would you be gone?"

Iggy clenched his teeth. "No! …I don't know."

"Yeah, we don't know. No one knows, okay? But it was her. So leave it alone."

"I can't just leave it alone!" Iggy surged to his feet, balling his hands into fists at his sides. The shaft of moonlight hit him right in the face, making his eyes glow like two neon globes of sky blue. I felt a chill go down my spine. If it hadn't been Nudge, would those eyes have been any less bright?

"She's gone, Fang!" Iggy nearly yelled. "For two years now!"

I saw Fang's chest heave with an irritated sigh. His eyes fell shut.

"Come on, Iggy," I said tiredly. "Just lie back down."

"I don't want to," he muttered resentfully, but he did anyway.

I blew the breath out between my teeth and tried to push away the tight feeling in my chest. This hadn't happened before. But it was nearing two years since Nudge's disappearance, and the flock's façade was wearing thin. I guess you could say it was broken, by now.

Gazzy sat up all of a sudden and drew his little knees up to his chest. Resting his chin on them, he stared ahead as if the living room wall wasn't there at all. "We should've kept looking for her," he said quietly. "We shouldn't have given up."

"We didn't give up," I said. "We still haven't given up. And we looked as hard as we could, kiddo, you know that."

"Over a year of searching, and we didn't find anything," Gazzy said thickly. He sniffed and wiped a sleeve across his nose. "Nobody knew how to tell her apart. She must've been hidin' really good if no one could pick out a blind girl from the rest of them. She really didn't want us to find her. We…we tried our hardest. We did, didn't we?"

I've lived with the kids long enough to know that when they asked something like that, they were looking for nothing more than confirmation. Being careful not to mess up Angel's display of stuffed animals, I sat up and rubbed Gazzy's back. I could feel him trembling beneath my hand.

"Yeah," I said soothingly, trying to keep the grief out of my own voice. "Yeah, we did."

We sank into our own little pockets of thought, letting the tense air settle and become so quiet that I could honestly hear the family of crickets chirping beneath our front porch. It was late, so deep into the middle of the night that even the stars can't block out the sky's shadow. I spared the living room's clock a quick glance. Well, I was right there. It was almost two in the morning.

Angel's soft, timid voice startled me out of my musing. "Max?" she whispered.

"Yeah, honey?"

"Do you…do you think maybe we could wait a little longer tonight?"

I blinked and stilled my hand on Gazzy's back. Once upon a time, we'd waited whole nights in the living room, just waiting to see if she would come back. She hadn't, of course, and so we had shortened our watching to an hour. Oh, we were always on the alert for her, for a creaking porch step or fluttering wing. But waiting in silence in the living room was depressing. Too much to bear.

That Angel was willing to start up the overnight-pattern again was something I'd been expecting, but not for a while. I thought that the younger ones still hadn't gotten over the disappointment fruitless, sleepless hours brought, but I guess I was wrong.

I forced my lips into a smile. "Sure."

No one said anything. The crickets living under our porch were the only ones who protested. But then, nothing could get them to shut up, short of us going out there and standing right over their home.

Ten minutes passed. Not a word passed between our broken family. And then…

"When she comes back, I'll bake her a cake," Angel said. "A big one, with lots of chocolate and pink frosting roses and everything. She used to like pink, I think."

A thick, heavy pause. Then a slow grin spread over Iggy's face. "Want me to help you with that, Angel?"

Which was as close as he was going to get to saying that if Nudge came back, he wouldn't blame her for leaving. Not right away, anyway.

"Yeah. You're always really good with cooking."

"What will I do?" Gazzy asked through a watery smile. I felt my spirits lift a little. He'd stopped crying and was shifting himself around on his bottom to face us.

"Ummm…" Angel bit her lip and played with her stuffed rabbit's ears. "You can…can…"

"Help me make fireworks," Iggy supplied. The promise of fire and big, colorful bursts of light made him and Gazzy perk up immediately. Happiness warmed their faces and chased away the grief that had been threatening to overwhelm them. "Yeah. We'll hold a giant show right in front of the house."
"Just don't set the house on fire," I said, feeling like a grumbling old lady, "and I'm all for it."

"You sound like a grumbling old lady," Iggy commented.

"Thanks."

"What about you, Max?" Gazzy asked. "What are you gonna do when she comes back?"

I leaned back and tapped my knees in thought. "You know, I have no idea."

"Just as long as you don't cook. That's probably what drove her off in the first place," Iggy joked, with only half the bitterness that had been in his mouth earlier.

I narrowed my eyes at him to let him know he was pushing it. "Oh, ha-ha. Very funny. Okay, Gazzy, I'll…provide friendly support. Whatever she needs me to do."

They didn't laugh at me as I expected them to. Apparently, providing "friendly support" was as good as baking an extravagant cake or setting off an entire fireworks display. Probably even better, I thought.

It was in play, but we'd all decided what we would do if Nudge found her way home. Heck, maybe she would show up, and we really would do all those things. The only one who had yet to say anything was…

"Faaang?" I prodded verbally. He was still lying on his back, his head turned away from us.

"Fang?" Angel called in a murmur. "Won't you be happy when she comes back, too?"

He didn't reply. His hand was up in a "stop" motion, and the look in his eyes when he turned back to us made ice form in my stomach.

"Fang?" I asked warily. "What is it?"

Fang shook his dark head and raised a finger to his lips in a "shh" gesture. We all went completely silent, letting the absolute quiet wash over us.

Absolute quiet.

The crickets. They weren't…

I felt the blood drain from my cheeks and met Fang's eye. He nodded slowly, knowing that I had made the connection.

"Erasers?" I mouthed at him. God, please don't let it be the Erasers…it can't be…not out here, where we're so isolated…

Fang shook his head and rolled his shoulders. He didn't know. I heard Angel restrain a whimper in the back of her throat and climbed silently to my feet with Fang.

"Stay here," I mouthed to Gazzy, Angel, and Iggy. Iggy shook his head furiously and was up and on his feet in the space it took me to blink, and Gazzy and Angel had followed a second later. I grimaced at them, but didn't take the risk of speaking.

The trip from the middle of the living room to the window seemed to take hours, even though it couldn't have lasted more than ten seconds. I pressed my forehead against the glass and peered out, hackles raised. My hands were tight fists at my sides. I was ready to rumble.

My breath fogged up the window for a moment. When it cleared, and I looked out again, I couldn't see anything remotely resembling danger. The grassy hills and trees stretched out far beyond me, illuminated by the moon's half-light, but I couldn't detect any movement.

The crickets still hadn't picked up their chirping.

I frowned and shrugged at Fang, who was standing next to me and staring out the window. His face had gone utterly still. It looked like he was carved of marble, that's how quiet and motionless he was. He wasn't even blinking those sharp, dark eyes of his.

My frown deepened. He could see something I couldn't, but he didn't look worried. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say that look on his face was one of…

In an instant, he had rushed from the window to the door. His hands were at the locks faster than I could register, and it was only when he yanked the door wide open that I felt panic and fear clutch at me again.

"Fang —"

"I heard you talking inside."

I froze. That voice. I'd heard it run on and on in nonstop chatter before, comforted it into smooth tones when it had shaken with fear or tears, endured its tortured strains as its owner screamed blood, sweat, and pain…

"Can I…come in?"

Angel and Gazzy tumbled over their own feet in their rush to get to the door. I let them push through, feeling numb, watching detachedly as they dissolved into tears and sprang past Fang through the doorway.

"No way," Iggy breathed, and he was gone too, making his way onto the porch at a slower, more disbelieving pace. I heard sobbing coming in through the doorway, little girl-and-boy sobbing, little Angel-and-Gazzy sobbing, and someone else's sniffling. Her sniffling.

Nudge. Say the name, Max. Nudge.

"Nudge," I gasped, and reality came crashing down on me. I ran like the floor was on fire beneath me, like if I stayed a second later in that house, I would die. "Nudge!"

And there she was, standing on the porch with Gazzy and Angel clinging to her, soaking her ratty clothes with their tears, with Iggy standing and staring at her with the biggest, most unbelieving grin I had ever seen on his face. She trembled and cried and laughed all at the same time, her thin limbs shaking with happiness.

"I'm sorry," she choked through her tears. "I'm so, so sorry, guys, I'm so sorry I left, I'll never do it again, I promise, I swear, I swear…"

I can't even begin to explain how happy I was in that moment. My family was back together again. Nudge, gone, vanished after almost two years, was back, safe and unharmed. We weren't five anymore. We were six, just as it should have been. When Nudge lifted her sightless eyes and somehow, impossibly, she met my gaze, I knew she meant it. She wasn't leaving again.

I didn't know why she left in the first place. Maybe she was scared, scared that we wouldn't look at her the same way again. Maybe the grief of losing her eyesight and then Jeb had been too much for her. Maybe she knew she wasn't going to be picked for the experiment and held resentment for the way things turned out. I didn't know. At that moment, I didn't care. She was back. What more could I ask?

Someday we would ask her. Someday we would ask her why she thought we weren't enough. And we'd help her get through her pain, help her overcome her blindness. But not today. Not that night.

I knew we'd never have another watch hour again.

And with that thought, I stepped forward, out of the house, away from the disappointment and grief, and walked into my family's arms. Six again. Finally.

A/N: Reviews make my world go round. Leave a comment or two, let me know what you think. ;)

-Kimsa