Right people, this is a warning.

This is very dark- well, I think it is- so if you like to read K+ fics, don't read this. It's rating is for a reason. It is descriptive. Just an advisement. And, seen as I've pre-warned you, you can't say that I didn't.

Oh, god.

I'd failed everybody; I'd promised them I'd never let this happen again and now it had. There was no way I could get them out, not this time. Every other time, we'd slipped through, but this… this was impossible.

No, half of me cried desperately, it wasn't going to end like this, not now, not any time soon. I'd get us out again, just like all the other times we'd been at death's door.

You know you've sunk so low that you can't go any further when you start lying to yourself. Everything I was saying, it was all lies. Lies, lies, lies. I was sick of them- I'd told so many that I couldn't remember what it was like not to live with the constant fear that someone would see, would realise it was all a set-up, all fashioned from plastic to make them feel better; when in reality it couldn't get any worse. I'd failed everybody so many times, but not like this; I had corrected the mistakes I had made, covered them up, and papered over the rifts I'd made with my miscalculations. But this wasn't going to go away, because everybody knew. They knew I couldn't get us out, that it was all in the hands of our enemies now; they made the rules, and because of me, we had no choice but to obey.

I was so stupid. So vain to think I was better than them, that they could keep on attacking us, keep on trying to capture us but we'd always slip through their nets- one cocky, arrogant mistake, and I'd cost us our lives. I'd been so certain, I had failed to see them closing in with fortified webs, slowly blocking every escape until there wasn't the slightest hope of freedom. They destroyed everybody we could every hope to help us- Jeb, Dr. Martinez, Ella, everybody- sealed our escape routes, set us against ourselves until we were no better than average animals.

We were at the School.And we weren't going to leave it, ever again. Not alive, not dead.

They'd sealed us in. There were no doors, no windows, no escape routes. Just a plain, white room, eight metres by seven metres wide. I couldn't get us out, and my flock knew it. They knew I was responsible for it- if I'd taken the necessary procedures, like I had done for almost eighteen months, we wouldn't be here; we could have run, could have escaped before we even ended up here. But I hadn't, and we were all going to pay for my mistake.

There was no Ari to save us, to rip open the bars of our cage and set us free, no Angel playing a traitor to knock out the executioners with an iron bar. She was here with us, in a room with no opening. In the room that we would die in.

They had paralysed her; she wasn't my Angel anymore, she was just the shell, the little girl she'd been- just turned seven years old- sucked out and destroyed.

And it was all my fault.

Eighteen months of being hunted, and I'd thought, just because we'd blown up Itex that I didn't have to stay awake and keep watch two months later, when we'd seen nor heard anything about Erasers, Flyboys or the School for weeks. I'd been wrong.

Only now did I realise that Itex wasn't the leading company that experimented on humans; too late did I realise it was just a front, to ensure that if anyone did ever find out about their work, it wouldn't be destroyed because everyone would think it was someone else. Rather like a king, having one of his servants impersonate him, so that any assassinations would be unsuccessful. I realised that only when it was tool late, when we were already locked up in the room with no exits and they told us.

All because I fell asleep and didn't hear them coming, didn't wake up soon enough to stop them attacking, using the element of surprise and capturing us for the last time. I don't know how they found us, or how they managed to get so close without us realising, but they did. Maybe I wasn't the only one who had relaxed a bit after two months undisturbed by them.

But we couldn't stop it now; everything was set in place, and we didn't have enough strength to stop the stone rolling anymore. The place they kept us in, it bled us dry of energy, keeping us alive enough to feel every bit of the torture they inflicted upon us, but not enough that we could even begin to make a plan. Itex had been bad enough, with the experiments, the real organization was far worse; it didn't just carry out experiments on blood circulation and stamina, it tested your endurance for pain; it delved into your vilest memories and darkest secrets, exploiting them and making them real. The white-clad people who worked here were not people; they were savage monstrosities that enjoyed inflicting pain. They planned complex physical and psychological traumatic experiences to test upon us- everything that we remembered about the School was forgotten in the few short weeks that we were at Venix; the real company for human genetic experiments. We didn't wish for death, we screamed for it, craved it, begged for it until our throats were dry and our voices hoarse.

They made our nightmares become reality, because I'd fallen asleep. They left us screaming in the dark, dripping water our only companion, the unstoppable, unceasing drip. I grew to hate that drip. It seeped in my thoughts and warped them, and I could hardly remember how to think when my head was filled with that drip, drip, drip.

I'd thought the School was hell on earth; the worst thing imaginable that could happen would be for us to be taken there. I was so wrong I was almost right. Venex was beyond any human or mutants capability to imagine. It wasn't hell, it was far worse.

Half of the experiments carried out where for research, to see what could be recombined with human genes, the others… the others were too see if they could erase the pain receptors in human's bodies, but also to see what the absolute, maximum amount of agony a person could endure before they lost their sanity. We were old experiments, useless for anything but the pain-endurance section of the organization.

They inflicted upon us not just physical, but mental pain too. Those few weeks I spent there made me realised that people didn't have to cut, stab, hit or whip you to hurt you. They could use the people you were closest to as well.

They brought Jeb into our prison first.

Don't ask how they got in, because I don't know. One minute they weren't there, next, blackness, and then they were. So there was a door, but it wasn't visible, and none of us could examine the walls for ridge because we were chained by our wrists and ankles to the walls.

I think they wanted to see how bonds you form with other creatures affected you when they were hurt, if seeing them in pain caused you to feel some measure of it.

I did- every ounce of the pain Jeb felt was echoed on to me.

They brought my father into our room, all of the flocks eyes fixated upon him and his two captors. They tortured him, right in front of us; forced us to watch as he writhed in agony on the floor, in complete knowledge that next time, it would probably be one of the flock. The white-clad, expressionless people monitored our heart-rates as Jeb screamed, cried and eventually stilled- reading the numbers produced by the machines we were all connected to. None of us said a word as Jeb's limp body was carried away, but all of us had tears cascading down our cheeks, even Fang, but I don't know if that was because he'd just watched as the first man to treat us as actual people die, or because he knew one of us could be next. It turned out a flock member wasn't next.

My mother was.

I remember screaming as my eyes connected with hers, crying as I registered her look of resignation, of horror that I would have to witness her death. I yelled, straining against the iron bands that prevented me from rushing to Dr. Martinez's side as they forced her to drink clear liquid, even when she was choking from screaming at the same time. Ella followed her mother. I won't say what happened to her, you won't want to know.

"Max?" Nudge whispered, her usual vibrancy lost, my heart broke into small pieces, healed, and shattered again. "I just wanted you to know… I love you, Max. You were more of a mother to me- to all of us- than our real parents could ever have been." The others were nodding in agreement, and I looked around wildly. "No," I said, shaking my head, desperation colouring my words. "No, stop it, don't give up. There's always a plan, we just need to find it that's all."

"There is no plan, Max," Iggy stated, looking grey with defeat. "Face it, they've won."

"No!" I yelled looking at each of them in turn. "You mustn't believe that, Fang, back me up." But he didn't say anything, just looked at me with a foreign emotion on his face- was it pity? For me? Fang had always had expressionless eyes, but now… now they looked empty in an altogether different way. He'd given up, I realised, they all had. And I couldn't make them believe that we could get out of here, because I didn't believe it myself.

We were all going to die. After four years of happiness, of feeling normal, then eighteen months of being hunted, always tense, waiting for danger. Now it was all going to end, and we couldn't stop it. Because of me.

There were never any lights on, in our prison; the only way I could see was by the meagre light above us, emitted from some form of grate high above, that was also the origin of the dripping water. We were always shrouded in darkness, and I felt like it was just me there, nobody else. The endless hours of solitude made me do the one thing I'd tried so hard not to do; think. That's the problem when you're waiting for death, it gives you limitless time to think, and reflect upon everything you did in your life that was a mistake.

I kept seeing it; everything I'd done wrong that would have been so easy to do right, now that I looked- really looked- at the pictures laid out in front of me. I saw it all, and every time I did, another piece of my heart was sanded away- soon all I'd be left with was a gaping cavern where it used to lie. After Ella, they took Angel several estimated days later. We didn't see her for another week.

I remember, we all screamed her name as the darkness blinded us, we screamed for anything and everything, aiming our faces at the merciless camera fixed high on the wall, knowing that they would see, would hear us begging to have our Angel back.

When she cam back, she was different. She hung limply in the white-coats- but I really shouldn't call them that; they are far superior to white-coats- arms, didn't move as she was laid on the floor. Then they told us what they'd done.

They knew she could read-control- minds, so they'd taken out the part of her brain that gave her that ability. But an unpredicted side effect was she couldn't think at all anymore; she hadn't just lost control of everyone else's minds, she'd lost hers too. I had strained against my restraints, wanting just to hold my baby, the cry as I watched her close her eyes and not reopened them, wanted to scream as they carried he away. But most of all, I wanted to comfort the rest of my flock as they watched her die.

I didn't do any of those things. I couldn't.

Angel was gone, and all I could think was that another was going to follow. They'd killed my baby girl- every time, they'd threatened to, but have never actually been able to do it. Now they had. This was actually happening.

The Gasman was next. I'm not entirely sure what happened to him, but it hurt him, a lot. For a nine-year-old, he was tough as anything, but he had a point where he just couldn't do it anymore, so he let go. I could feel everybody's eyes on me, accusing and absolutely true; why can't you save us, Max? They seemed to yell at me. Why did you let this happen? I didn't know- all I could think was who was going to die next. I had a feeling I would be last.

Fang.

They didn't kill him then, just tortured him. There were only us four left, and we felt the pain enough for Angel and Gasman to have been there. We were forced to watch as he was punched and kicked to unconsciousness by two white-clad people, then we watched as they chopped his wings off.

When they did, I was looking into his eyes, and he wasn't, for the first time, keeping anything from me. I saw every bit of the pain he felt as they hacked at his wings, held spread out by chains; he didn't make a sound at the beginning, only closed his eyes and bit his lip so hard his mouth rapidly reddened with blood. It was only till later on that he allowed tears to run down his face. That was the second time I'd ever seen Fang cry. He didn't sob, didn't utter any noise at all, just carried on crying until he fell unconscious and he was taken away to have the gaping holes in his back stitched up. And so I found out that even Fang, who was stronger than me, than any of us, could reach a point in pain that he couldn't master the tears anymore; and hacking into the muscles and tendons, blood vessels and feathers of his gorgeous wings had tipped him over that point.

They took away the remains of his beautiful wings, but they left most of the purple-black feathers, so prominent against the bitter white of the floor that we couldn't ignore them.

He didn't day anything when he got brought back, only looked at me- but he didn't have his mask anymore, it was as if somebody had stripped away the first layer of his body, revealing what he looked like underneath. I'd never seen the Fang before me, and that was when I realised; Fang had never really opened up to any of us, only shown us a little, but not all, of what he felt. He looked broken, like somebody had torn away a part of him; but now, I suppose, with Angel and Gazzy and his wings gone, they had.

Iggy just seemed to… close in on himself, shut down and not restart after Nudge bled to death from the gunshot to her stomach and multiples slashes created by the vicious whip they'd used on her- they released him from the wall chains and he held on to her tightly, trying and failing to stop himself crying. The way he looked when she stopped breathing… it tore more pieces of me apart. I probably would have resembled slashed ribbons if you could have seen my soul.

Then it was just me and Fang left.

My flock, gone forever. All my fault. All… my…fault. All because of that stupid mistake. And everybody I knew was paying for it.

We talked, me and Fang, more in those last few hours than we ever had before. He told me how he'd lived in the six years before we'd met, about the 'flock' he'd been part of; of Lilia, the girl who was a combination of human and tiger; orange and white stripes lining her skin like delicate tattoos; of Shift, who heard the thoughts of dead people; of Celina, who was an marine-human combination- she could hear at pitches used by dolphins-too high for humans to hear- and could swim faster than the speediest human Olympic swimmer. They'd all been 'retired' years ago, long before the two of us had ever met. He never knew why they just kept him alive. We laughed, we cried before we lost the will to do it, and frankly, it was one of the best experiences of my life, sitting there talking- really, actually talking- to him. So when they came in with two bottles filled with bright blue liquid, we were happy, and ready for whatever they made us endure. We'd accepted that we were going to die, and we were okay with it.

They made us both drink a teaspoon of whatever the stuff was, and then, after our coughing fits and vomiting blue liquid and blood, told us what it was; drain cleaner. They told us it would slowly dissolve our insides, and we would probably die within the next few days. Even with my eyes blurry with pain, I didn't care.

They came back the next day, and we drank two more teaspoons- to speed the process, they said. I still didn't care. I was going to be with the flock again, and enduring this hollow, unceasing pain was worth it just to see them all again. They unchained us, and I wrapped my arms around Fang, fully expecting him to push me away. He didn't, only slid his arms around me. We stayed like that for an eternity. Days, weeks, years… they all slipped by. Time seemed pointless now, what did it matter anyway? It just something humans had invented. Then I felt Fang's arms go slack around me, and I looked at him. He didn't move, even when I shook him.

I stopped shaking him, and laid my head on his chest, feeling a little sad that he had died before me, and that we weren't going together. Hours, minutes, seconds passed.

Then I just… grew tireder, heavier until I couldn't hold my own head up.

I let myself slip…

Slip of the edge bordering my mind, tumbling into the mixture of light and dark beneath me.