A note before we start: Be warned, this chapter has a bit of coarse language in it. It's nothing extreme, but I just wanted to put a warning out there for decency's sake. And to all the people who reviewed: thank you! You all just made my day!

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Chapter Three: We Are All Different. Esp. Ig.

Ever since he had learnt enough under Jeb's tutoring to begin to form a coherent thought, Iggy had been thinking a lot about abbreviations. He liked abbreviations, for he supposed, in a way, he had almost abbreviated his life, turning it from a long, dark tunnel into a short, bright tube for the rest of the world to include in their vast matrix. He never paused to wonder where that other tunnel had gone, the long dark one with nothing but pitch-blackness throughout and at its end, or whether it really was gone at all. He already knew the answer and he thought about it now, adopting the guise of the happy-go-lucky other Iggy so the fact wouldn't hurt as much, just be a trifling concern that wouldn't cause a body any harm. No body, perhaps, but definitely a mind.

He had ruined the tunnel that was otherwise known as his life. He had covered it in lies, covered the evidence in feathers taken from hawks at midnight. It was true, he did shrug off Jeb's niggling doubts and concerns but that was only because he was afraid to face them himself. But Iggy had been long acquainted with the fact he was a coward. Sometimes, when he lay up in the early hours of the morning waiting for the flock to wake up, Jeb's concerns still gnawed at him, like the moths that bit into his thick covering of feathers if he forgot to replace them for a while. But, come sunrise, the birth of a new day of lies and deception, Iggy could always force the doubts into a drawer at the back of his mind and lock, bolt and barricade it shut. Mentally and emotionally, he was probably even stronger than Max in that particular regard.

Not that she would ever find out, of course. If Jeb didn't blab… Iggy shifted uncomfortably in the hard, wooden seat that seemed to be the Martinez's preferred architecture when it came to sitting around the table and quickly shot a glare into the corner where he could hear Jeb's breathing rasping over the moustache he had newly grown. "Don't say a word, Jeb."

A sharp intake of breath, the crackle of aging bones curling into worried little fists. "Iggy, this can't go on. You realize that. It's better for the flock to accept the truth than…"

Flames flared inside the hollow shell shadowed by lies that he was, so quickly Iggy lost track of what he was doing. "Shut up!" the exclamation tore from his lips as he hurled himself over to the corner, the world briefly becoming a blurred miasma of black and grey shadows before he skidded to a halt. In his limited peripheral vision, he was just aware of the blur of creamy-white that was his right wing flicking forward.

Jeb's sighing as he took in measured, even breaths became a hiss of shock as Iggy rotated the muscles in his wing, a long spur of white bone lifting out of the covering of feathers and slamming into the wall just short of Jeb's right shoulder. The woody thwack of the impact and the vibrations that surged up his wing and caused it to shake told Iggy that the wall behind Jeb was wood panelled.

Iggy expected Jeb to become mad, or maybe shout, and cringed, yanking his bone-claw out of the wall and taking a few scared steps backwards as his bone-claw automatically flattened and hid itself back in the fluffy primaries, feathers stiffened from fear rustling as his wings automatically rose and swept around to shield himself from a person who, despite the help he had given, was still a whitecoat and therefore still had expectations…

"You're a stain, a mistake! You shouldn't be here! You were never supposed to be here!"

And the sadistic voice of another whitecoat, one of the ones who supervised the tests. His swearing as he dragged the limp, bloody corpses of several Erasers from the arena where Iggy had been made to fight hammered at his mind's eye.

"Bloody bat freak, you'd swear it was him against the world… little fucking idiot, why'd you have to go and kill two of our best fucking Erasers, eh? Two!" he screamed at Iggy, huddled in a corner, membranous wings drawn up and around in a shielding cocoon, body trembling under the weight….

Of the accusations that returned in his mind's eye to bear down on him again, even as he stood, nine years later, in front of a whitecoat whom Iggy couldn't for the life of him tell if he really had deserted Itex, or was just pretending. But Jeb's voice, when he spoke, was kind.

"Iggy…" Jeb sighed and Iggy stiffened as one of Jeb's veined, callused hands came to rest on his shoulder, a gesture of comfort that, however much he had longed for in his time at the School, felt nothing but uncomfortable now. "I know it's hard, and I know you're going through a lot of complicated decisions right now..."

"I was born because of a complicated decision," Iggy said tightly, his own hands curling into fists. "Remember?" Iggy mimicked Marian Jensen's voice in the operating theatre, the skills of which he had picked up from the Gasman. "You're a stain, a mistake! You shouldn't be here! You were never supposed to be here!"

"Iggy…" Jeb sighed, and, evidently seeing there was nothing short of reincarnation that was going to wash away Iggy's secret just by a few small words, let his hand drop. "Just think about it, okay? Make your decision about when you see fit to tell the flock."

"How do you know I'm going to come up with the right decision?" the plea that seemed all so real in the fluorescent light of the Martinez's kitchen dropped from Iggy's lips like a stone, weighted down by all the secrets he had accumulated and hidden over the years.

"Well, when the time is right," Jeb sounded like he was choosing his words carefully. "You need to come up with a decision that will be best for all of us. And not just you."

Iggy's teeth gritted, Jeb's veiled accusation only deepening the shame and guilt he felt at keeping his true self from the others. Not for the first time, he felt himself being torn two ways – towards what Jeb had distantly referred to as the right decision aka revealing his true self to the flock, and another way towards the open desire to protect himself from the world's ire - a feeling he had grown accustomed to so much he was able to overlook the reasons for it. "But if I do make "the right decision"…" Iggy's face screwed up into a grimace as he pictured the result of that unpalatable conclusion. "How can you be so sure Max will take it well? Don't you remember? She's a…"

"A chiroptophobiac." Jeb nodded while Iggy stared at him blankly, both at the meaning and what information it contained. "A person with an irrational fear of bats. It was written in one of her old School reports after a failed test involving vampire bats. Do you remember?"

"Yes," Iggy whispered. He did remember. It was only after the test that Max revealed the statement that had forced him to warp his life beyond recognition. "Bats. I hate bats." "How… how could she? She didn't look that ruffled…" Max must be stronger than he gave her credit for, he realized with a rush of affection for the flock's leader, if she was able to walk away from being subjected to a phobia without a batted eyelid.

"Sometimes people feel they have to hide certain things for their own gain," Jeb said quietly. "So she is not that different from you, Iggy."

Iggy clenched his fists. "So that's it? You're persuading me to reveal what I really am to a flock led by a leader who has a fear of bats! How is that going to help me, how?"

"Iggy…" Jeb began, but fell silent as Iggy whipped up a hand; panic clenching his heart as footsteps suddenly scuffed on the carpeted stairs leading out from the kitchen and a callused hand slid along a varnished wood banister.

"Someone's coming!" Iggy hissed at Jeb, willing him to remain silent, and quickly scooted towards the far end of the table, the furthest he could get away from Jeb without being openly conspicuous. Iggy was just able to slip the mask of confidence – a stark contrast to the guilt and fear that forever shadowed his heart – on as the person entered. Iggy recognized Fang's heavy footsteps and saw his sillouehete as a swaying blur in his peripheral vision. Fang's distinctive way of leaning into his left leg with each second step made him easy to hear and recognize. "Hey Fang," Iggy called, friendly but with just the right amount of fake hostility towards Jeb injected into his voice. Lowering his voice, he added "Don't look now, but we've got some unwanted company," he jerked his thumb behind his left shoulder towards Jeb, breathing rasping in the corner.

A dark line Iggy could only assume was Fang's eyebrow raised in the pale white oval that was his face. "Aren't you making breakfast?" he avoided mentioning the presence of the whitecoat, but Fang was like that. If he couldn't get rid of a problem, he ignored it.

"Gimme a minute," Iggy yawned and ran a hand through his already rumpled, just got out of bed hair. His fingers stiffened in panic as the nail of his ring finger discovered a small patch of dried blood leftover from the sacrifice of the hawk near his temple. Heart pounding, Iggy fought to keep his voice even as he completed the statement for Fang's benefit. It was easy to make the panic in his voice sound like indignation. "I just got up, jeez! You can't expect me to prepare a king's banquet in a minute!" as he babbled, Iggy managed to scratch of most of the dried blood and conceal it under his nail, hiding the offending finger in his pocket. Tres casual. If there was one thing Iggy prided himself on, it was the ability to cover up evidence.

Fang grunted, clearly unimpressed by Iggy's little rant and moved over to the kitchen bench. "I'll scramble eggs."

"Oh no you don't!" Iggy got up out of his seat and hared over to where Fang was just about to open the refrigerator. The resulting rush of white and black shadows that was all he could see disorientated him, so much he nearly echolocated from the strain. Iggy grabbed Fang's wrist to distract himself from all prospects of unintentionally revealing his secret and redirected it from the fridge. Iggy burst into a lecture as he led Fang to the table and plonked him firmly down in another one of those extremely hard wooden chairs. "The last time you ever scrambled the eggs, they looked like they'd been barbecued which, trust me, isn't the look you're going for with any egg. Nope, you'd better let Iggy, Masterchef extraordinaire, handle it."

"Fine, Masterchef extraordinaire." Fang said dryly, but didn't make any move to repeat his actions as Iggy got up and made his way to the white double-rectangle in the sea of differently hued black, white and sometimes grey shadows that was what he could see to be the kitchen. As he walked over to the fridge, he happened to pass Jeb. It was a small pass, but Jeb could be surprisingly quick when he needed to be and grabbed Iggy's shoulder.

"Iggy…" he whispered so that Fang couldn't hear, breath tickling the side of Iggy's face. "Now would be a good time to tell…"

Iggy wrenched his shoulder from Jeb's grasp as flames licked at him again. "What do you want, old man?" he snapped and, satisfied that he had managed to convey his refusal without revealing the information to Fang's ears, went off to scramble the eggs.