you should know the drill. if you haven't read when sparks fly or when they chase us, you should probably go read them. and then go read those two little one-shot thingies, chasing a memory and santa barbara witch trials. because they're awesome and deserve to be read and/or reviewed. and once you've done all that, then you can come read this.
(or not. i can't exactly control what you do.)
(or can i?)
(dun-dun-dun.)
either way, let us once again epically embark upon an epic tale of epicness.
disclaimer: blah blah don't own max ride blah. do i really have to do this?
Wait.
Wait a second.
You mean I'm not going to have a normal life?
How utterly unexpected!
(And by unexpected I mean totally expected.)
Okay, I admit, I thought we were done with the crazy.
I thought Life was gonna be peaceful and normal and, y'know, not crazy.
And it was, for a while.
Life was all nice and let me live it up in Santa Barbara with all my friends,
and we were runnin' around all fun and fancy-free,
without adult supervision,
just doin' what we do,
and it was totally awesome.
But then Life had a violent pregnant-lady mood-swing and decided to. . .
Well, we'll get there.
But as a hint, I'll say this:
Because of what it did, Life pretty much effed up its chances at ever gaining my trust.
Thanks, Life.
Thanks a lot.
You're a bitch.
1. we're baaa-aaaack
I breathed carefully through my nose, making no noise myself but straining my ears to hear anything else that could possibly be making noise.
All was quiet. Dare I say silent. I couldn't even hear wind, or bird chirping, or bug buzzing. Not even the lapping of water.
(This may be entirely due to the fact that I was inside, but let's not assume things.)
My mouth twitched in a frown, and my finger tested the trigger of my gun. Stupid thing wasn't cocked, but I didn't dare cock it. The noise would alert my enemies to my position.
And speaking of, where were my enemies, anyway?
I waited a few more elongated minutes until, suddenly, just beyond my hiding place, I heard a faint sss. My lips curled in a rather wicked smile.
All in one blurred moment, I cocked my gun, rose up, and twisted around, squinting one eye shut so I could sight down the barrel. The red t-shirt marked the figure as an enemy, so I squeezed the trigger and fired.
But he'd heard me cock it, so he managed to duck out of sight before my bullet could hit him.
I cursed under my breath and was about to reload when an arm entered my vision, a gun identical to mine held in the hand. I hit the deck, and the shot went high, anyway, so I was safe.
"Kinda hard to hit somethin' you're not even aimin' at, huh, Con?" I called out as I reloaded my gun.
There was a pause, but then he replied with: "Spark? What the frick, we're on the same team!"
"Uh, no we're not," I said in a duh sort of tone. I grabbed a handful of Nerf darts from my stash and went back up on my knees, peering over the back of the couch. "Didn't you hear? A bunch of us went traitor. I'm part of the Renegades now."
An irritated sigh drifted from the kitchen, where Con was hiding. "Next time, please notify me when you're ditching the team."
"You mean this doesn't count as notification?" I called back, loading up my gun. It was inconvenient that Con was in the kitchen - see, normally, he and Sy weren't allowed in there, because after they'd somehow managed to turn the simple task of heating up a Hot Pocket into the complete and total destruction of the microwave, the oven, and the dishwasher, Iggy had eternally banned them from the kitchen. Forever. But I guess today was an exception, partly because the whole house was free game, and partly because there was little chance of Con or Sy causing another cooking catastrophe. Though I wouldn't be surprised if one of them somehow managed to demolish the toaster using only Nerf darts and a bagel.
. . .I do believe I've been sidetracked.
Anyway.
If I wanted to get a good angle on the kitchen, I'd have to leave my mini-fort and go all the way across the room, where I could hopefully sneak a shot around the wall that separated the living room from the kitchen. I looked around and listened hard, but saw and heard nothing. So, I snuck out from behind the couch, half-crawling across the floor towards the doorway to the other room (which had a clear shot on the kitchen). I was almost in position when all of a sudden the stairs distantly creaked.
Jesusnoit'satrap!
I leaped and tried to ninja-roll over to the safety of an overturned coffee table, but I wasn't quick enough. In all of about two seconds, someone managed to run all the way down the front hall and across the living room, shooting me in the head with a Nerf dart mid-ninja-roll as he passed.
I completed the roll, but dropped right back to my back in frustration. "Friiiiii-iick!" I cried. "Crap!"
There was another sss as Sy tried to slow to a stop. He didn't take into account his new socks, though, and slid across the tiled floor farther than he meant to - he crashed into the open basement door and would've taken a nasty tumble down the stairs had he not grabbed the doorknob.
"Whoa," he panted, regaining his balance. "That could've been disastrous."
"Nice shot," I heard Con say to him. "Almost ruined it with the socks, though."
"Thanks. I think."
"Hey, Spark?" Con walked through the doorway into the living room and looked at me innocently. "How many kills do you have now?"
I lifted my head to glare at him. "Shut up."
"Thought so." He smirked, then lifted his head and shouted loud enough for the whole house to hear. "GAME OVER! Last member of Team Renegade has died! Demons win!"
I sat up and leaned back on my hands, frowning as Sy came back into the room to stand beside Con.
"You know, I really hate it when you guys work together," I said.
Con smirked and spun his Nerf gun around his finger. "Well, when it's to take you down, I'll do just about anything."
I looked at Sy, but he just shrugged. "You turned traitor without me. I felt unloved."
"So you went to Con." I shook my head in mock disgust. "And you call me a traitor?"
He chuckled and came over to help me to my feet. I accepted his aid, but once I was up I raised my gun and shot him on the forehead, making him wince. "Ow!"
"That's what you get for going into cahoots with Con," I said. "You're lucky if I don't put you on trial again for making a pact with the devil."
Sy grinned. "Cahoots?"
"I can't believe you actually thought I wouldn't know you'd left," Con said incredulously. I looked at him and he half-smiled. "Come on, you have to give me more credit than that."
"On the contrary I believed I'd be able to keep doing this time and again," I told him. Then I sighed dramatically. "But. . .you have exceeded my highest expectations."
"Gee, thanks," he sneered.
The thudding of multiple pairs of feet echoed up the stairs as some of the remaining participants of the Nerf war ascended. It'd been a good fight - everyone had decided to play, so we'd split up into two mostly-equal teams: Angels (led by Max) and Demons (led by Con). Angels had been winning for a while, having knocked out a few of our members and kidnapped about half of our dart stash, but then Swift and Shadow had knocked Fang, Joey, Angel, and Nixie out of the game and we'd started making a comeback. After a while, though, I'd gotten into a boring stand-off with Iggy that resulted in us both ditching our teams to form a new one: Team Renegade. We'd gathered various other recruits and systematically eliminated most everyone else from the game. . .with the exceptions of Con, Sy, and, weirdly, Janey (I dunno, maybe she'd been too cute to shoot or something). The unholy trio had then practically destroyed my team in a well-planned basement ambush, and I'd barely escaped with but a single life left (everyone had started with five, and you lost lives depending on where you were hit). I'd fled upstairs to safety, and that's when you showed up, dearest reader.
Way to miss most of the action.
But back to the story.
"So you got her? We won?" Six-year-old Janey, the youngest of the entire group, was first up the stairs, dragging a three-foot-long gun behind her. It was practically as tall as she was, but hell, she'd been sniping people from the backyard for half an hour before anybody had realized what was going on. Maybe that was how she'd survived so long - she'd stayed out of the way.
"Totally," Con said, smirking at her. "You were right, too. She was so focused on the basement stairs she didn't hear Sy go out the window and up the drainpipe." He held out his hand and Janey high-fived it, giggling.
I blinked. "Dammit! That's what you did?" I demanded, rounding on Sy. I'd been wondering how he'd gotten upstairs without my notice.
"To be fair, I was really quiet," he said, smiling. "So you probably wouldn't've heard me even if you'd been listening."
I loaded another Nerf dart and shot him again.
"I can't believe you made us lose, Spark," said Iggy's voice. I glanced toward the basement stairs and saw he, the twins, and Frankie had all joined the party; so had Max, Blaze, Fang, Angel, Gazzy, Shadow, Nudge, and Swift. About half of them were either soaking wet or only partly wet. Apparently there'd been an impromptu pool party after the ambush.
"I mean, come on," he went on, shaking his hair to rid it of excess water. "First you ditched the rest of us to save yourself, then you just go and die on us anyway. Not cool."
"Hey. You were the one who thought attacking the basement was a good idea," I retorted, pointing my gun at him. "So it's your fault we were ambushed in the first place. Besides, they set up a trap for me. You could've warned me when you heard them planning it."
"But I was dead."
"You could have made a dying proclamation."
"No he couldn't've," Frankie said, wringing out a corner of his shirt.
"Not on the floor!" Max said sharply as water spattered to the tile.
"Oops."
"They locked us in the pool room after killing us," Aqua explained, spinning her hat around her finger in an attempt to dry it faster. "We didn't hear them plan anything."
"Yeah, and since you ditched us there was no way you could've been around to hear any dying proclamations anyway," Arthur added, tapping the side of his head to get the water out of his ears.
". . .Dammit," I cursed. They were right, weren't they?
"Guys, guys, it does no good to argue about what could have happened." We all turned as D.J., leading the rest of whoever else had been scattered upstairs, entered the living room and completed the congregation. He grinned and continued by saying, "All that matters is that Team Demon totally won this war."
"Hell yeah," Shadow cried, pumping his fist. "Shotgun on electronics for a whole entire week!"
"Simmer down, short stuff," I said, shooting a Nerf dart at him. It went wide and totally missed him. "Since you were grounded from TV when this started, you've just gained back your regular privileges."
"What? Nu-uh!" he protested.
"She's right, kid," Blaze said. "And if I were you, I wouldn't argue it."
Shadow mumbled something that was probably a cuss, but otherwise let the matter drop.
"So what happened after I got out?" Aliza asked, looking around at the rest of us. "I wanna know why there are suddenly three teams instead of two."
Half a dozen conversations sprung up all at once as others started asking and telling about various parts of the war. Some of the more responsible kids (read: Max and Max alone) tried to get the others to start helping cleaning up, but it didn't get far. There were still Nerf darts and puddles of water everywhere by the time we called it quits and started winding down for the night. (We'd started the war at, like, seven o' clock, and it was now, like, nine.) The only thing anybody really bothered to do was gather up all the Nerf guns and various other Nerf weapons we'd been using, like a few swords and even a hatchet.*
It was during this round-up of weaponry that, like all those weeks ago on our first night in, I ended up in the basement with Sy. The only changes this time were that I was sitting well away from the water while he went diving for lost Nerf darts and the little green plastic discs that about half the guns could shoot.
His head broke the surface again and he shook his hair out, scattering droplets of water everywhere. Swimming to the pool's edge, he dropped four darts and two discs onto the pile of ammo he'd already fished out. "Why am I doing this again?" he asked, looking up at me.
"Because if we leave foam in the pool it will become soggy and useless," I told him. "Do you know how many darts we've already lost out in the backyard because the wind carried them too far? It's annoying having to keep buying new ones."
"What I mean is why am I doing this by myself," he clarified. He smiled and tilted his head. "Don't you want to help me?"
"Not on your life, traitor," I pledged in a black voice. I swept my hand at the ammo pile and knocked a few green discs back into the pool in an act of rebellion.
Sy laughed and ducked down to catch the discs before they fell too far. Then he crossed his arms over the edge of the pool and looked up at me with those dark blue eyes of his.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing. This is just probably the longest we've ever been together without you getting kidnapped," he said mildly. "Or with one of us running away for some reason."
At first I just looked at him funny, but then I realized what he meant. Until we'd started living here with the others, the longest stint we'd ever spent within shouting distance of each other was. . .um. . .like, a few days? A week, at the most?
Wow. How had I never noticed that before? That was so weird, I. . .I guess so much had happened in so little time, it was just hard to put it all into perspective.
"Guess so."
Sy seemed to realize I was about to do some serious thinking, and so he flipped back under the water to continue the hunt for Nerf ammo, careful not to fling water at me with his tail as he went.
We'd moved in to the Santa Barbara house at the very beginning of October; prior to that, it'd been two weeks of flying around Australia in air-shows for the Coalition to Stop the Madness. Prior to that, it'd been the giant hellish mess that was those other two narratives of mine. And prior to that, I'd been attempting to live a semi-normal life with my adopted-but-really-blood-related family.
From boredom to hell to super-hell to this. And. . .what was this, exactly?
It was almost November, and so far, we'd accomplished nothing by living in Santa Barbara. And I guess that had kind-of been the point: after all we'd been through, we wanted normal, peaceful lives. And when I say normal and peaceful, I mean as normal as we can be and peaceful as in not fearing for the safety of our lives on a daily basis. Because believe me, there had been some crazy days this past month. Like the week a bunch of us had smuggled animals into the house to see if Max would notice, and that other weekend when Sy had saved a drowner and been mistaken for a real-life mermaid. (Mermaid, not merman, which just gave Con endless amusement.) Twice we'd had Random Clothing Wars, when tempers had flared as some force of the universe had set up a single day when absolutely everybody needed the washing machine and dryer all at the same time. And we'd even had a house-wide I Love Lucy marathon when we'd realized the main TV's DVR had mysteriously recorded every single episode that had been aired in the last two years since the house had been built.
And that had all been great and everything, but what were we supposed to do now? We had our whole lives ahead of us to do whatever the hell we wanted. I knew it was only a matter of time before Max or some other misguided soul suggested the idea of school, and there was a high probability of us going once it'd been suggested. I mean, what else were we supposed to do? Get jobs? Fat chance, only Con was really old enough for anything good. And not many people would hire kids who'd never been to an actual school.
Besides, it's not like we needed to work. According to Sy, finances were totally fine. He'd explained it all to me once, but I'd only been half-paying attention. It involved something with his mom's savings account transferring to a different account under his name, and. . .yeah, I don't really remember all of what he said. But basically, we had money, and we weren't going to need more anytime soon. (In spite of all of their other evildoings, Itex sure paid their henchmen well.)
So. To sum up, we've goofed off for a month, and we have nothing much else to do.
Well. That is, the others don't.
My family is still in Colorado, and, well. . .technically they didn't know I was available to come home. I'd only contacted them once since I last saw my dad in Miami, before we'd gone to Australia. And that time, I'd just used a pay phone to leave a message on the machine. They knew I was alive and okay, at least. I just never said anything about when I was coming home.
Because, well. . .to be perfectly honest. . .I kinda didn't want to. Not only would it mean a whole bunch of shit to clean up from how Itex had meddled to make sure I couldn't go home, but it would also probably mean abandoning everyone here. My parents' house was a two-story, four-bedroom place, there was no room for all of us.
Plus, Mom and Dad probably wouldn't be entirely thrilled to know that there were multiple pairings living under the same roof. And that I was part of one of those pairings.
I shook my head to clear it of all thoughts of just how bad I'd get yelled at for living unsupervised with my boyfriend. Not to mention all the other teenage guys who were no doubt sex-driven deviants only intent upon. . .well, doing what it is that sex-driven deviants do.
Going home would just screw everything up. But I owed it to my family to go back. They'd missed me, and they still thought I was just their adopted daughter, not the real one that'd been taken from them all those years ago. They needed to know that we were a true family. That's not just something you can say over a voicemail.
And, maybe the biggest reason of all. . .there's simply just a huge difference between physically knowing your loved one's alive and only hearing that your loved one's alive.
I'd have to go back. I knew that. But dammit, it'd been so long. Most people back home thought I was dead, for cryin' out loud. And how could I tell all my friends here that I was leaving them to go back to my real family, and that chances were my parents wouldn't let me out of their sight long enough to see them again?
God, why did families have to be so confusing.
I twitched and jerked back as a stream of water splashed me in the face. I dragged my sleeve across my eyes and saw Sy with his hands held in that way you hold them when you're trying to squirt water at somebody.
"What was that for?" I asked, still drying off my cheeks. As soon as I was done, however, he just did it again. I spluttered and scooted back, wiping water out of my eyes. "Hey!"
"Come on, smile," Sy said, half-smiling himself. "You're not supposed to be thinking about stuff that makes you sad. This house is a no-sad zone."
"What makes you think I was sad?" I demanded. "I could have been thinking about unicorns for all you know."
"Well, if you were, the unicorns were dying."
I cracked a smirk and he returned it. Then, becoming serious once more, Sy asked, "What was it you were really thinking about?"
"Just. . .stuff," I said lamely. "About my family."
"Like what?" he prodded, resting his chin on the arms he'd folded across the pool's edge. His shimmery silver fish's tail lazily beat the water while I thought about an answer.
"Just. . .stuff," I said again. "I can't decide what to do. Whether I should go back or not."
"Permanently, or just temporarily?"
"Either," I said, throwing my hands in the air. "Thing is, I don't know. I mean, I know I should go back, but doing that would mean I choose them over you guys. And if I stay here, that's like choosing you guys over them. I don't see a way where I can have both."
Sy was quiet for a while, but eventually said, "I don't think you have to choose just yet. I mean, it's only been a little while."
I gave him a look. "Like you could go three months without any contact from me?"
"That's not the point." He pushed himself up halfway out of the water, leaning heavily on the edge of the pool. Staring at me intensely, he said, "Tell me something. Is this the first time you've started thinking about this?"
"Well. . .kinda," I admitted, shifting guiltily. Like I could just lie when he looked at me like that. "First time in a while, at least."
"If that's the case, then of course you're not going to see a good way out just yet," he said reasonably. "Give yourself time to think about it. And then when you really come to the point when you don't think there's any way to have both, then. . .we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Okay?"
I shrugged a shoulder. "Better than my plan."
"I didn't think you had a plan."
"Which is why yours is better," I replied, and I flashed him a grin. He smiled.
"That's better," he said, and he leaned forward to give me a light kiss on the cheek. "No more sad."
"Well, maybe no sad, but still mad," I said. Before he could even ask what I was talking about, I pushed him away and he fell back into the water with a huge splash. Quickly, I scrambled to my feet and kicked out at the pile of plastic green discs, scattering them back into the pool.
Sy found the surface again and stared at me. "What was that for?"
"You made me lose the war, Sy!" I laughed as he came back to the surface. "You think I can just forgive you for that?"
"Hey, you turned traitor without me!" he said in his defense. I stuck my tongue out at him and he smirked. "Fine then."
I stopped, recognizing that devilish glint in his eye. "Sy. . ."
He raised his hand, which was suddenly glowing. A huge wave of water rose up, and before I could run Sy threw the water at me and used it to drag me into the pool, laughing and thrashing.
Sy seems to have a fondness for pushing people in pools. Namely, me. And sometimes Con. Normally I'd try to get back at him for it, but this time, I think I'll let it slide. After all, I did initiate combat by pushing him. And he was only doing it to cheer me up (I think), and whether or not that was his intention, it happened anyway. All thoughts about the problem that was my family just flew right out of my head.
And I know that makes me sound like a totally horrible person, but hey, why don't you try thinking about depressing things when someone's aquatically assaulting you with plastic mini-frisbees of death. Seriously, those things hurt like a mo-fo if you flung 'em right.
Besides. I had all the time in the world to puzzle over the depressing stuff. Who said I had to do it right this second?
*yes, there is such a thing as a nerf hatchet. it's called the nerf n-force klaw hatchet. item #19663 on the /nerf site. and yes, i did take the time to look up the various nerf guns on the market.
re-uploading this bitch because this bitch of a site was a bitch and deleted it (like a bitch) because i used the word "bitch" in the summary.
bitch.
