A/N - Last chapter - aaaaaangstbucket. D: I added dry humor this time, but I'm afraid it's going to be more and more angst towards the end of this chapter. Read it anyway, though. xD More POV alternating, I'm afraid. Bear with me here - I seriously cannot imagine what it would be like to be Fang and therefore cannot do his point of view well...forgive me!

Life of a Winged Teenager

Chapter 21

FANG

It was past midnight by the time Michelle –you know, it's funny. We don't know what to call her, so we just call her 'Michelle' casually, as opposed to something like "evil overlord of death"- dragged me into what I assumed was the Itex headquarters. I had been blindfolded, kicked, elbowed, dragged by my ear and shoved into a plane, and I had still managed to maintain my dignity by staying strong and silent.

Always, always take a page from the emo book.

But it wasn't the time to be laughing. To keep me from seeing where we were going, I had been blindfolded and tied up, then knocked out and stuffed on the floor. And how did I know this? Well, I woke up in a shoebox from a several-hour flight, only to be dragged, again by my ear –well, at least it was the other one this time- into this new building.

She was clever. On every side of me, there were guards even taller than I was, and they were like freaking bricks, so I didn't manage to get a glimpse outside their box around me to see if there were any mountains or landmarks, anything.

But I knew one thing – the weather. It didn't feel cold, and although the sky was dark, it wasn't a slate grey. We weren't up north this time – we were somewhere tropical and humid. No, tropical wasn't the right word. It was damp and wet and denser than how you'd picture a tropical island to be.

Not like I had any time to notice that. Once my ear was released, we were inside. The little procession didn't stop, it just kept going, and I still couldn't see any of my surroundings. Damn it! I internally swore, and kept walking. I was doing this for the flock. I was doing this for Max.

I figured something out while we were walking, though. The place was absolutely huge. Being a not-really-short-but-moderately-average woman, Michelle walked very fast to make up for it. And if we walked long and fast, then this place was as big as the Itex we'd destroyed.

Yeah, must be nice to have your Itex headquarters destroyed and then poof up a new one in the middle of nowhere. Asshole.

Suddenly, we had stopped, and the guards around me disassembled to stand behind us at the door. Well. It's always good to know you're trusted. I looked at where we were standing, and we were in a huge warehouse somewhere. There was a whole hell of a lot of machinery, like an assembly line.

Temporarily forget the fact that being a bird kid, I have never actually seen an assembly line.

"What's this for?" I asked blandly, motioning around to the general blandness of the room. If this was the garage and I was supposed to live here, I didn't see any newspaper on the floor or a water bowl with my name on it. I glared.

"You mean you didn't know?" she asked quizzically. "I mean, I always knew that you weren't exactly the brain of the flock, but this…"

"Get to the goddamn point," I growled.

She rolled her eyes. "I told you earlier that I could use your skills for Itex. As in, you are now against Max and working for me." I nodded. "But that's not all. How am I supposed to beat Max just by having you on my side? Alone, you're equally matched. But she has the flock, and I have to rebuild my Eraser army now that she's killed them all."

I looked at her, nodding emotionally. "And how does that make you feel?" Slap. Ouch.

She rolled her eyes again. "Your job, Fang, is going to consist of thinking up the designs and all plans for the monsters that will be fighting Max. The three monsters that I kept by my side at the battle, those fleshy things –geez, I don't even know what they're called- were all killed."

She sighed blandly. "And because Jeb bailed on the mission and we have absolutely no idea where he is now, we need someone like you to make the designs. So here's the deal. We can make anything you design. But it needs to be stable. It needs to be able to kill. And if you waste my time, I'll kill you, and the flock's expiration dates will show up."

It's amazing how heartless a person has to be to say that all without flinching.

"What the hell am I supposed to do?" I didn't know the first thing about making monsters, let alone making phase numero quatros of gigantic-hulk-hellish-thing.

"Look, all you have to do is draw it. Design it. It shouldn't be too hard if you remember what those things look like. Just make one, but one that's able to kill Max." Perhaps she forgot one little detail. If I was making the thing to save Max, then why in the hell would I also make it to kill Max?

Nevertheless, she grabbed a pencil and paper from one of the desks and thrust them into my hands. "Take these and get working," she ordered. "I want the design in two days. Forty-eight hours. Get it? And if they're not done by then, I will kill you, and the expiration dates will show up on the flock." She smiled smugly. I wanted to kill her.

"You know, I think you need a new threat. You're getting a little repetitive," I said wryly. Slap. Blood in my mouth tastes even better the second time.

"Just get to work," she snarled, and left the room, her guards following her. The door closed behind her, leaving me alone. Tonight, I wouldn't sleep. I was as tired as hell, but I needed to get this done. If I did it this way, Max would have a chance of beating it. If her expiration date showed up, she had no chance.

I pulled up a chair and started sketching the outline of the last hulk that we had fought. Time to get down to business.

MAX

"For the last time, I do not have to be in a wheelchair!" I exclaimed furiously as the abused nurse pushed me down the hall. I thought I heard her give a sigh for the hundredth time, and I wanted to throttle her. "You don't understand! We people with wings tend to heal faster!"

"The doctor says you aren't allowed to move around! Your 'air sacs' were damaged, and so were some of your other internal organs! If you walk out of here now, you could bleed to death!" I gave an indignant huff as she pushed me roughly back into my wheelchair.

"The doctor doesn't know jack shit!" I struggled furiously, but she held my shoulders to the wheelchair. "This is just a misunderstanding! You'd know that if you'd just freaking release me!" The chair just kept going, with me stuck in it.

"The doctor knows more than a fourteen year old girl who has not had years of medical training!" she said, exasperated. "Do I have to sedate you again?" I crossed my arms, not unlike a petulant child. "I swear to god, I have never met anyone so hard to wheel down the hall!"

"No! I don't have to wear this stupid sling anymore! My arm is all better! Examine it with your X-ray or something, but I-am-fine!" I looked around to see Nudge walking down the hall with another tired-looking Nurse. She started to remove it on her own, to which the nurse fought with her.

"I don't need it!"

"You keep it on!"

"I don't need it!"

But then I heard other voices. Angel came out one end of the hallway, looking furiously up at the doctor that had treated us and insisted that she go on crutches. She looked straight at him, and his eyes went blank. "I will now remove the crutches," she said in an ominous voice.

"You do that," the doctor said absently.

"Why did you knock her out like that?" Gazzy practically screamed to a fairly young male nurse. Said nurse was carting Ella on a stretcher from the lab down to her bedroom. Hey, why did Gazzy get to walk without this stupid wheelchair?

"I get nervous at the sight of blood!" the nurse replied with a frown. Gazzy rolled his eyes. "Then what the hell are you doing working at a hospital, you idiot?" The nurse flinched away as Gazzy growled menacingly at him, dropping the stretcher and Ella in the process.

She smacked onto the floor and her eyes fluttered open. In an instant, she was up and in front of the nurse, totally prepared to snap his neck with a karate chop. "You knocked me out just because you saw my blood?" she shrieked. Her hands instinctively jumped up to wrap around his throat in a choke hold.

The entire hallway was in chaos. Many had stopped to witness Ella killing the male nurse, and strangely, no one had run over to help as she continued to strangle him. It all looked very funny. Gazzy was trying to pry Ella off the poor guy, who was getting his neck ripped off.

Eventually, Gazzy managed to pull her away. Nudge was getting more and more upset, her eyes always traveling to Ella. Iggy, even in the hospital, was oblivious of Nudge without meaning to be, like he didn't really realize he was breaking her heart.

Eventually, we were all wheeled into Iggy's room. Once again, he was asleep. He was always asleep. I never saw him awake anymore. I had been in a hundred times in the past few days, but that didn't make it any better.

It had been three days since Fang had gone away. Three stinking days of not seeing him and not knowing where he was, and three days of still loving him and wanting him to come back. Why had he left me? It became more unclear with every passing day.

Iggy and Nudge sat on either side of Iggy's bed, and I saw a spark in their eyes as they both grabbed one of Iggy's hands in the silent message that neither one of them was leaving any time soon.

We sat like that for hours. I have no idea how long we would have continued to wait if something hadn't interrupted us. But a few hours later, when we were all still sitting around Iggy's bed and talking quietly, a doctor popped his head in the door.

An alarmed look crossed over Ella's face, but I brushed it off lightly. "Hello, Ella? I need to talk to you," the doctor entered the room. Okay, that was really weird. "It's just that your X-rays showed some questionable objects in your back-"

"No, they didn't!" Ella interrupted. "There's nothing in my back. You can go now."

"…But this looks like there are other bones structured into your back, mixing with your other bones! It almost looks like you have something hidden in your back. It's very similar to what the flock has-"

"No it isn't!" she shouted, and tackled him to the ground, snatching the X-ray from him and tearing at it. "See? Nothing similar about this!" She gave a shaky laugh and stuffed the X-ray inside her jacket.

The flock was over sitting next to them by now. "Ella, is there something going on here?" I ignored her paranoid shake of the head. "Ella, tell me what's wrong now." I gave her a look, and she relented.

"I didn't want to tell you," she whispered. "I didn't want to tell you, ever, because it's something you never had to know, and it's something I don't want anyone else to know." She stood up and pulled off her shirt –I covered Gazzy's eyes- and turned around.

There, on her back, were foot-long scars, but not just any scars. Those were like the lines I had on my back, the lines that my wings came out of. But I could never truly fit my wings into my back, just scrunched up against my back. "A-are those…" Nudge's eyes were wide.

"Yes," Ella replied. And then her eyes scrunched up, all of her muscles tensed, and the slits in her back started to open. Out of them slipped two long, feathery, angel-white wings, as long as Nudge's were.

"Start explaining, now," I said hoarsely. Ella took a deep breath. "Well, I've always had these. Like, my whole life. But I wasn't supposed to, it was this big mistake. I would have wanted to be human, so they injected me with something that hides my wings when I want them hidden, so that I can pull them into my back by realigning my bones."

She let out that breath and then took in another one quickly. "I don't use my wings, not ever, and I have no idea how to fly. But I couldn't even tell you because no one is supposed to know that I have wings, or they might come after me, too, and I just wanted to be a human."

"But you weren't at the School!" Gazzy piped up. "You weren't at the School with us when the scientists were experimenting on us, so how do you have wings?"

"I was born with these," she answered simply, and that shocked me. I was the only one I knew of who had been born with wings. Jeb had told me that you can only be born with wings if you have a parent with wings and were born from a human mother. And as far as I knew, Dr. Martinez didn't have wings.

"Impossible," I countered. "I'm the only kid that was born with wings, because I was born from your mom and…Jeb, who has wings." I looked down at my feet. Everyone in the room gasped. It was like I was on one of those bad sitcoms. Nudge, Gazzy and Ella had been the ones that hadn't known about Jeb, or my hiding him in my mother's shed.

"Why didn't you tell us?" Nudge screeched. "Jeb has wings? That's like, wicked cool!" she thought on it for a moment. "But also creepy. I can't picture a grownup with wings. Or Jeb actually flying," she added as an afterthought.

"Okay, back to Ella and her wings that she didn't tell us about!" I shouted. "Ella, the thing is, that's impossible! I'm the only bird kid with wings, unless your dad had wings. So who was your dad?" I was near hysterics. If it was who I thought it was, there would be hell to pay.

She looked down at her toes. "Okay, here's the thing…" she began. "You're not going to like it, Max, because, well…"

"Who is it?" I whispered, deathly quiet.

"Jeb," she said quietly, and then there was chaos. The entire room buzzed as Angel jumped in the air and shouted, "I knew it!" and Gazzy replied, "Well, of course you knew it, but I predicted it!" and Nudge buried her head in her hands as she realized that now that Ella had wings, Ella could be with Iggy, and there was no chance for her.

But I was barely concerned with any of that. "Jeb is your father and you didn't tell me?" I screeched. "That means that we're whole sisters, and that you lied to me! Geez, how many times did Jeb have to screw our mom before he got the picture that she hates him now?" I raged.

"Why do you have a problem with that?" she was hurt. "I always wanted to be your whole sister, and now you know I am? Aren't you happy too?" she was close to tears by now.

"I didn't mean that!" I said, exasperated. "It's just that you didn't tell me! What other secrets have you, your mom and Jeb been keeping from me? I feel like I don't even belong to your family, yet I'm hiding stuff from you, too!"

"What 'stuff'?" she asked, confused.

"Stuff like the fact that Jeb is currently hidden in your storage shed because he still loves our mom but she kicked him out of her house!" I exclaimed. "And I'm the one trying to get them back together when I have no idea how, and frankly, it grosses me out!"

"You hid…Jeb…in our storage shed?" she seethed.

"What, you're not calling him 'Daddy'?" I hissed angrily.

"I told you I was sorry!"

"No, you didn't!"

We were glaring at each other, and in the awkward silence, everyone else was staring at us. "So what will you do now?" I sighed. "Are you going to go back to your perfect life, where you hide your wings every day like a coward?" I glared at her. "Just because you don't want to live the life we do? Do you think we want to live this life?"

"No! I want to go with you! If I have a chance, and I can help you, then I should at least try! I won't leave you alone! I'll go with you, once I learn how to fly!"

My head was swimming. So much had happened in just a short time, too much. By now, the others had gone back to Iggy's side as he slept, and were talking quietly amongst themselves. "What changed your mind?"

"Iggy did," she replied. "I love him, Max. I want to go with him."

I was surprised that she had actually admitted it. "Ella, Iggy is with Nudge. You know that."

"I know," she sighed. "But she was the one that stole him from me! And I know he likes me just as much as he likes her…I don't just want to give him up for her."

"Whatever," I shook my head. "I don't want to get involved.

"Hey," said a voice from under us, and we looked down to see that we were still sitting on the doctor. "Could you girls please get up? You're crushing my spine."

I got up and went to sit down by Angel. How did things go so wrong?

FANG

I would have been proud of myself, if I wasn't against Max and everything I believed in. Not that I wanted to be evil, god, no. But I had done such a good job on making the design, that I thought I was the awesomest thing in the world. Yeah, awesomer than fried Twinkies.

…Never mind. I had been thinking for two days, two days straight. And when I looked at the clock at the end of the second day, it was ten minutes until I had to present my design, and I had nothing. And I knew what that meant. If I had nothing, I would fail, and Max and the flock would get expiration dates.

And I couldn't let that happen. It was that they were too young, but it was also because even if they were eighty years old, I couldn't let anything like that happen to them. I didn't want that kind of blood on my hands. I wanted them to live as long as possible with no help from me.

So in the ten minutes that I had, I drew the outline of the hulk. I figured out how to make it bigger, stronger, more muscles and more powers. I knew it would be harder to kill, but Max could do anything she wanted to.

When the time was right, I'd really pretend to be on Michelle's side. I'd pretend that I'd crossed over, and she'd take me with her to the battle. And just in the right moment, I'd kill her again.

"I like it," Michelle had said when she'd seen it. "I like how you went for making it less like a hulk and more agile. And that you gave it speed." She gave the diagram to one of her assistants. "Make it work this time. I want everything to be perfect." She smiled an evil, blood-chilling smile.

"Good job, Fang. You can rest and eat now. Enjoy the calm before the storm." And she disappeared, just like that.

I knew one thing for sure. When the time came, when the storm came, I would make sure to kill her. I would do it for the flock, I knew I could. And when I did, humpty-dumpty wouldn't be put back together again.

MAX

"And Nudge gets…forty-five points for the use of the word 'synergy [1]'," I declared, writing it down. "Her E was on a double letter score and she got a triple word score for the Y." I smiled at her, and she bowed. That's right – we were playing scrabble. Iggy was currently lying on his back, and one of the doctors had found an old rotating scrabble board.

The entire game depended on whenever he rolled over in his sleep. Whoever had the most points when he did would be the winner of the game. So far, Nudge was in first place, with Ella close behind her. I wondered how Nudge knew how to spell so well, judging from the fact that she'd only been to school once in her life, and that was to fifth grade.

"Dang, that even beat Ella's 'opuscule'," Gazzy said, impressed. "That one was worth thirty-two points." Ella tried not to look all competitive and like she was going to rip Nudge's head off, but she was doing a poor job of it.

All of a sudden, Iggy groaned in his sleep –as he tends to do, and it's highly annoying when you're on watch at three-thirty in the morning- and rolled over to his right, knocking the scrabble board off his stomach and landing straight on top of Nudge and I. Gazzy cheered and Ella cursed, but Iggy didn't wake up for a thing.

But the cheerful mood in the room was shattered when the monitor beeped, and when we looked up, he was flatlining. Nurses and doctors poured in to the room, but his heart had stopped. It seemed surreal, and before we knew it, we were being pushed away.

Ella's hand was ripped from Iggy's, and Nudge's hands were torn away from Iggy's face. Both girls had tears pouring down their cheeks, and for the first time, they clutched at each other, having been enemies only a few minutes earlier. I held Angel and Gazzy close, and they both looked scared and wide-eyed.

I needed Fang more than ever. I needed him to be there for his brother, but I also needed him to be here with me. I wanted to hold him again, and know that everything was going to be okay, but it wasn't. Iggy's heart had stopped beating. He was going to die; he was already dead.

"Iggy, don't," I choked out, with my hand on his leg, the only place I could reach. For a moment, the machine started up again, and I thought we were safe. I thought he would live. In that second, I became optimistic again.

But then the machine started flatlining again, and it was real this time. I only saw death on his face, and he was so close to death. His heart had stopped and failed him again. And I couldn't help it. "Iggy, no!" I screamed.

This was the end, I was sure of it. I grasped his hand tightly as I waited for an answer that wouldn't come. After all we'd been through, could he really die?

The tears on my face, the pain in my heart, they all said yes.

[1] This is seriously my favorite word. It has been for a few years, and I just remembered it again today. "Synergy" is the word for when the planets line up. Not the best definition, but the word itself is awesomeness, no? xD

Thanks for reading! Hope you forgive me for all that drama and stuff. Now, if Iggles had just decided between Nudge or Ella BEFORE he decided to flatline on us...

~Rachel