Hey, guys, here's a new story. I got bored one evening and came up with the idea of this one. It's kind of strange, but it seems like something that I'll probably enjoy writing through to the end :) I hope that you like it, and don't forget to review!

I do not own any of the work of James Patterson, and I do not own Maximum Ride. However, I do own individual copies of all the books which I can say that I own the right to read, and the right to create from the characters and adapt their personalities and attributes as I see fit.

Max, Fang, and Iggy are 17.

Ella is 16.

Bang.


Sunlight drifted through the window of the small, run-down house. In fact, it was very small, and very run down. Very. This solace held a secret which had been overgrown and overshadowed by the very weeds and ivy which had nearly encompassed the shack altogether. This was why Max loved it so much – it was discreet. It was a long-abandoned cabin which was located high in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and Max didn't blame the people who'd owned it before for leaving it. No running water, and no electricity, and not to mention the frigid temperature they'd all become accustomed to enduring in the harsh winter months. It had been made out of logs, traditionally, but the inside was lined with plaster and white-washed paint which had long since, you know, not been white. It wasn't very big, either, just two bedrooms, a living room, washroom, and a kitchen. No shower, and no toilets, although there was a washbin which one could always fill with water heated on the wood-burning stove. In the summer, they always bathed in the Lake, but in the winter, they'd take turns in the old tin. There was a fireplace, too, which mostly brought cold air in.

It had been three years ago today that the scientist, to whom she and her friends had owed their lives, rescued her and Fang from Itex. Dr. Louis. He had been one of the greatest minds in the institute, having graduated college at the age of eighteen and then beginning his job the following year. He was bright, funny, and the only father she and her family had known. He taught them everything.

Nowadays he was, well, buried in the yard, not far from the house. Iggy liked to say he was like their guard-ghost, to which Max always was quick to give him a disapproving sideways glance. However, the prospect of having a ghost about did give them something to blame situations such like losing one's favorite pen on, or like being unable to find the other shoe to a pair. They missed him. Lou had died only a year ago from what they all assumed must have been pneumonia, which he must have contracted after the hypothermia he had originally caught saving Iggy from a frozen lake. They didn't like to talk about it – it was an unpleasant memory for the four of them.

After Max and Fang had been rescued initially, Dr. Louis had put his life on the line of fire (literally) trying to get the pair to somewhere safe, and somewhere nobody would ever find them again. If someone ever did, Louis would have gotten into some really deep shit. And also, as he had reluctantly informed Max alone, she would probably have already become the mother of her best friend, Fang's, children. This, also, was an idea which she didn't like to talk about, nor think about in any way. The thought of every being forced to do despicable things with scrawny, fourteen-year-old Fang was…repulsive, to say the least. Max felt especially indebted to the doctor for this very reason.

Iggy and Ella had come after four months of being hidden in the basement of Louis' house. Iggy had lost his sight due to a night-vision-enhancing surgery which had gone terribly wrong. Louis didn't go into details of how exactly it was that he came across his nearly-dead body, but the point was that he had, and now Iggy was alive due to the genius of the doctor. Also to the dental tools which he'd conveniently had in his car, but that, also, wasn't something the man had really gone into detail with. When Iggy had been stable, Louis had gone out searching for a place where he could raise these three teenagers into individuals who could pass for normal human beings. That place he found, with his own bizarro-crap ways, was incidentally this cabin, and that was how they got there. El had come two months after Iggy. She'd been an experiment discarded at birth that'd been picked up by another woman because her wings had been terribly deformed. She would never fly. The woman, another doctor that Louis knew at the Institute, had raised her on her own until they'd been found out. El had been thirteen at the time, had been smuggled out by the cover of nightfall, and long gone by the time the helicopters and men in white monkey-suits arrived. Lou said she'd probably have been killed by now.

All this playing over in her mind in vivid color made Max's brain hurt. She rolled over in her bed as she listened to the birds outside singing and she tried to calm down and relax. The bed was warm, the pillow was soft, and she was safe. She pulled the covers closer to her body, but was soon met with the obstacle of her bed-mate, his midnight black wings outspread right in her face. Fang.

"God, woman," he groaned sleepily, pulling them back.

"Get your own blankie!"

"This is my blankie."

"Leggo!"

"Urgh!" With an angry huff, she sat up in their old mattress and shoved him off the bed altogether, now too awake to even go back to sleep.

Fang remained on the floor, huddled in a ball with his eyes closed tight. "Shove off."

She picked up a brush, which had been sitting on top of the wardrobe, and ran it through her hair. Pausing by the mirror, she examined her tanned face, brown eyes, and bedraggled hair which she had cut herself with the kitchen scissors. Through her peripheral vision, she could see Fang bare-chested on his back on the floor, wings askew, rubbing his eyes with his hands.

"I'm making breakfast," she announced, pointedly making her way through the door. "Also," she added, turning back around halfway down the hall, which wasn't very long at all, "put a shirt on."

"…You like it."

"Asshole," she said as pleasantly as she could muster.

He flipped her off, but she couldn't see him as she waltzed off to the very tiny kitchen.

Already at the table and reading an old and probably stolen newspaper, El looked up at Max with a half-awake glance. The mumbled something like, murnin', and continued drinking her cup of cheap coffee. Since she'd grown up in an actual household with a woman she had called "Mom", she wasn't as well accustomed to getting up with a skip in her step. A full grown bear bursting through her thin window probably wouldn't even wake her. El was not a morning person.

Iggy was at the stove flipping something else, but, however, it was a few pancakes. And thankfully, he wasn't flipping off anything, because Iggy was blind. It wasn't long before one of the flapjacks did end up on the floor with a satisfying splat, but this was mostly due to the fact that he was laughing hysterically. For no reason.

Iggy was a special child.

"Speaking to your imaginary friends again?" Max asked him, sharing a look with El and slumping down in one of the old and outstandingly splintery chairs. "Ow! Frickdammit."

"No, actually," Iggy responded, grabbing a plate, stacking three pancakes on top of one another and drizzling them with syrup…flawlessly. "I was making you breakfast. Because I love you – my dearest darling Max."

He placed the plate in front of her and handed her a fork. She stabbed the pancakes harder than was necessary.

"You're full of shit."

"So I've been told."

Ella gave Max a smile. "You're in a good mood today."

Max scowled and turned her attention back to the blind kid cooking food on a hot stove. "So why were you giggling like pygmy pony?" she asked Iggy.

"I remembered something that Fang said the other day when you and El were out doing what women do," he wiggled his eyebrows and turned the stove off, a mound piled a good foot high above the plate on the counter.

"Grocery shopping?"

"Yes, women buy food, and men stay home and do manly things…like raid your underwear drawer and adorn the mantelpiece with your thongs."

The glare on Max's face probably could have killed a litter of newborn kittens.

Noticing the silence, Iggy grinned. "Well, it was nice knowing you," he said. He twirled the end of the spatula around his index finger and looked thoughtful for a moment. His mouth opened, and it was a brief second before he finally said something, with a grace of a smile across his lips. Max had sprang up from her chair, muttering something incoherent about, "stupid morons…sexist pig…gluttonous goons…", and snatched her undergarments from the hooks where they normally hung old socks on at Christmas next to the fire place. "Hey, and what were you and Fang doing last night? There was lots of grunting and, oh, what was it…the shaking of a mattress…"

Her eyes narrowed, and her fingers tightened venomously around her Victoria's Secret underwear.

"Iggy, this would probably be a good time to shut up," Ella advised him, receiving another plate of pancakes from her blind compadre.

At this moment, Fang walked out of their bedroom, still not wearing a shirt, and gave Max a kiss on the cheek. "Good morning, darling," he said huskily.

"Would you believe Fang attacked me?" she asked, an exasperated tone in her angry voice.

"No," Iggy said, smiling like an idiot.

"That he put me in head-lock for absolutely no reason at all other than to prove he was stronger?"

"Nope."

"That he and I were playing with Cootie-Catchers?"

"Ooo," he tsked, pointing in her general direction, grinning yet again, "I like that option. Fang, what was your fortune?"

Fang shrugged. "Dunno," he said, "I picked green, and the answer was 'maybe'."

"Well if that's not vague..."

The both nodded.

Max took this opportunity to shoot Fang in the head with a thong, and put her now empty plate in the sink. "Well, gentlemen, I'm going to go bathe. Don't follow up. Nice speaking with you."

She started towards the door, knowing that all of her shower things were securely fastened on a pulley in a large tree, and her towel should be hanging up on a high branch, but Fang grabbed her about the waist and held her back.

"Buddy system?"

"Pig?"

He playfully stroked her face, absolutely loving how much taller he was than her. "But we had so much fun last night."

Max gave him an annoyed look and, quicker than he could even dodge, she kneed him hard in the gonads.

"Shirt. Put one on," she sweetly, satisfied with him bent over painfully and spewing an assortment of colorful swear words, she opened the creaky front door and started out towards the specific tree where she had kept all of her things in a water-tight bag. All of them had decided that it would be way easier than bringing all of their things every time they went to wash up, and since there was nobody looking for them anymore, they also figured it was safe. The only thing she ever thought she'd run into would be bears, but they were even a rare sight around the cabin. This could have been due to the fact that Iggy spent most of his time working on explosives which always made lots of noise, but thankfully not very much flame. However, there was that one time when he managed to catch himself on fire, but Max and Fang had agreed he deserved that one.

Nevertheless, when Max located the specific tree a good five-hundred yards away from the house, she quickly lowered the green pulley, which was hers, and slipped out of her clothes. The water in the lake was always crisp and cold, and didn't smell like fish, contrary to popular beliefs about lakes. Max was just glad she didn't always smell like wet dog. However, Iggy had once pointed out that if they did in fact smell like sea food all the time, they probably didn't notice anymore. This in itself was a little sad, she'd admit.

There was a dip in the lake floor near the bank where Max usually sat and washed herself. She liked it because she could place the shampoo and conditioner on the side of the bank while she washed her hair, and she didn't have to get out and face the cold mountain air just yet. Even while the lake was cold, it was much colder once you stepped out of it.

Twenty minutes later, she was dry, clean, and smelled of pine.

"All clear!" someone yelled.

"Wha–?" was all she could muster before the other three came crashing down the hill in their swimsuits, careening into her and landing them all into the cold water. Still fully clothed, she yelled and kicked while Fang and Iggy took her by the wrists and ankles and threw her back into the water while she tried to escape. Ella just watched, laughing at her misery.

"You will all pay!" she yelled while treading water a little farther in.

Iggy couldn't see, but will still laughing with Fang as Ella sprang onto his back and knocked him, too, into the water again. Max tackled Fang and rubbed mud from the lake floor into his black hair.

Everyone was smiling. It was almost hard to believe that just a few years ago, three of them had been in the worst situations imaginable.

"Do you think it will last?" Max asked Fang later that night as they lay in their queen bed once again. A single candle had been lit in the old fashioned lamp on the table next to it. They'd shared ever since Lou died, because she used to get nightmares that only Fang could seem to comfort her from. The two of them had always had some sort of unexplainable connection which they both silently assumed could only come from the conditions of their childhood. They now slept in the room that Lou used to occupy, and while it was a little creepy, Fang always liked to tell Max to imagine that he was only gone on a long trip, and he would come back in a few years. It seemed to help the pain.

Now the two were sitting cross-legged on the small mattress just talking the way they always had. They were the leaders, it had been unofficially decided.

"I don't know," Fang said truthfully. "Chaucer said that all good things must come to an end."

"Since when do you read Chaucer?"

"I'm full of surprises."

Little did they know, Fang was right. Not everything is perfect forever, and they were about to all understand this very soon.

Call it foreshadowing.

Max was silent for a bit, and fingered the frayed edge of the thick wool blanket they shared. "It's only a matter of time before someone finds out about this place," she said. "What do you think will happen if that does happen? Do you think they're still looking for us?"

Fang shrugged and lay back into his pillow, with his knees propped up underneath his folded legs. "Probably. I mean, they were always saying that we were the most expensive and successful projects they ever had at the Institute."

"Or even in the Itex branches."

"Yeah."

They were both quiet for a while, and finally Max, too, lay back in their bed and put her head on her best friend's shoulder. "I'm so glad we got out," she said after a few moments. "I can't even imagine what our lives would have been like had we stayed."

"I'd probably be dead," Fang said quietly.

Max gave an involuntary shudder. She put her hand in his and squeezed it. "Let's not think about that."

"Okay. What should we think about?"

"We'll just focus on now. Keeping all of us safe."

"Okay."

She let go of his hand and crawled under the blankets, and he did the same. They moved to their set places on the bed, their backs facing one another and their wings slightly out, overlapping. "Goodnight, Fang."

"Goodnight, Maximum."


I hope you like it so far! There's more to come.

Please, please review!

~Steph

Please review!