Beta-read by Tokoloshe Monster.


When they did come for me, it wasn't anything like the last time. It was a thousand times worse.

The door slammed open. Before I could throw a punch or shoot a glare, there was a meaty hand over my mouth and a needle in my neck. My heart turned over in my chest.

The Eraser pulled it out and I twisted free, kicking and biting. My knees hit the ground and I crawled into the corner. I had to brace myself against the walls to get up and stay that way.

"Bring it," I snarled. Or—tried to snarl. My tongue was a slab of useless meat that flopped in my mouth. And apparently God had decided that standing wasn't all it was cracked up to be, because my legs chose that moment to give out.

The Eraser who had injected me snorted. "Hey—Magda! It's down!" It wrapped a hand around my arm and yanked me up. I tried to pull away, but my muscles didn't even twitch.

Oh, no. Oh no oh no oh no.

I tried again. Nothing.

Tears would have risen to my eyes if my body wasn't being completely useless. I tried to scream but I couldn't even open my mouth. They could do anything to me and I couldn't even fight back. I was a flesh sack, a puppet, ready to be thrown around or cut into a thousand pieces. If they slit my throat or wrists or femoral arteries I wouldn't be able to do anything but lie there and bleed out like a cow being slaughtered. My heart didn't even have the decency to race at those thoughts. It was plodding along steadily, completely unaware of how screwed I was.

Another Eraser walked in, pushing a wheelchair. The first one strapped me in, and then we headed off down the hallway.

All I could do was glare straight ahead as they wheeled me into the elevator. And then glare at the doors. I didn't even know what floor we got out on—the control panel wasn't in my line of sight, I couldn't get my eyes to focus on it, and we were out in the hallway before I could try to turn my head to see it. The hallway itself was full of whitecoats, and I ended up being pushed behind a small group of them for a while as they wheeled away an empty gurney bed. As they headed away I caught sight of the rust-colored stains on the white bed.

We stopped in front of a white door that looked exactly like every other white door in this godforsaken hellhole. The room behind the door was more of the same—a recovery room. I had been in them a few times, when I was a kid and had gotten too beat up to be a usefultest subject. At the School, they were all about efficiency. So they'd dump me on a bed with a lumpy mattress and scratchy sheets, pump me full of Ketamine so I was too woozy get up, stick an IV in my arm, and have some whitecoat with a three-Eraser guard come around every few hours to pour OJ down my throat and make sure I hadn't died yet. I'd never stayed in a room for longer than twelve hours, but Iggy said he had been in one for a whole day after they had accidentally blinded him when they were trying to improve his eyes. He said there had been a kid who died in the bed next to him in-between whitecoat visits. They had choked on their own vomit, or puked up too much blood, he couldn't tell which.

A recovery room meant that you were messed up enough for death to be a logical next step, and my stomach twisted as I saw the bed by the window.

Nudge was lying in it, her inner arms stitched together with black twine. The sunlight made it easier for me to pick out the angry red scars underneath the twine. A whitecoat was hovering over her, hooking up a long plastic tube to the needle in the crook of her elbow.

"You have the other one?" the whitecoat asked, not looking up. "Bring it over here."

They parked me over by Nudge's bed and the whitecoat frowned. He dropped the plastic tubing onto the bed and grabbed a pair of scissors, cutting around my arm to remove my sweatshirt sleeve. He was so close that his stubble was scratching my face, but he didn't seem to notice. It was like I was just an extra-large blood bag, just a sack of meat. Even the cruelty of the Erasers would be better than this.

The whitecoat tugged off the cut sleeve of my sweatshirt and stuck a needle in my arm, hooked it up to the tubing. He cranked down Nudge's bed so she was practically lying on the floor. Only then did he seem to notice that I was about as responsive as your average corpse.

"Christ," he muttered. "It'll take forever to get the blood transferred with that heartrate." He glared at the Erasers. "What were you thinking?"

"Well, this one's hostile—volatile—"

"Get out," the whitecoat said flatly. When they did as he said he stalked to the end of the room, muttering something that sounded like one job intermixed with a lot of frankly unnecessary swear words. I tried to keep my eyes on him—and mostly failed—as he grabbed what looked like a marker. I didn't get a good look at it before he slammed it against my neck.

My heart exploded. I could feel it thudding behind my eyes like I was in the middle of a fight. The world turned crystal-clear as my blood started flowing down the tubing, down to Nudge.

The whitecoat let out a breath. "Finally." What, was he terrified he'd lose a test subject?

I shot a glare at him, only slightly distracted by the godawful stabbing sensation that had started up in my hands and feet.

Wait.

Very carefully, I flexed my calves—they cramped like hell, and I fought to keep my face from twisting in pain. I swallowed, hating how dry my mouth was. I blinked. Tears rose to my eyes, and I had to blink more to get them to go away. I could move again. I could fight back. I could try to get out.

Even though I was strapped down seven times over, trapped in a huge building with dozens of doors and several hundred Erasers between me and what was outside, and hooked up to Nudge by a tube in my arm, it felt like I was thousands of feet in the air with wings spread wide and the wind whipping through my hair, rustling my feathers, freezing my face. I was that much closer to freedom.

I had to fight hard to keep the tears down as the whitecoat gave Nudge and me a once-over. When he spun on his heel and left, a couple bubbled up. I let out a shaky breath and rubbed at my face with my remaining sleeve. And then I leaned forward as far as the straps would let me and unfurled my wings. It wasn't even by an inch, but to be able to move them—I had to get free. I had to. I couldn't go the rest of my life like this, locked in a cell or a cage, only seeing the sunlight through Plexiglass if I saw it at all, never knowing what time of day it was. I'd go crazy. I'd—

I'd try to kill somebody.

My eyes fell on Nudge, half-asleep and all alone. What had happened? Why had she done this? Didn't she know that as long as she was alive, she had to fight, or had she not spent enough time in the School to learn that lesson? Jeb had impressed it upon all of us—but maybe only Iggy and I had been the ones to learn it. Fang…

Fang was my brother. And I loved him. But for him to want to leave Ari behind…

If I had been in the same position I would have charged in the second I saw the building from above. Why would Fang turn down the chance for revenge? Ari was our family, the second-youngest member of it, and whoever had done what they had done to Fang was a sick monster who deserved to die—why not kill two birds with one stone?

…That was a pretty bad metaphor. But still.

The sheets shifted, and I turned my attention to the bed just fast enough to see Nudge blink her eyes open.

"Hey, kiddo." My throat ached. "What happened?"

She pressed her lips together and shook her head. Carefully she edged herself up into a seated position, clinging onto the siderails of the bed for support. Her head wobbled on her neck, and her eyes were unfocused. Still she unfurled her wings for balance and sat as still as a statue. Her mouth moved.

"What?"

"Five minutes," she whispered. "Gimme… five minutes."

She shivered, her bare forearms dimpled with gooseflesh. They had cut her sweatshirt short, too.

"Why did you dothis?"

Again she shook her head, and I could feel my teeth grinding. Nudge was my little sister—I had to look out for her. But I couldn't do that if she wouldn't talk to me.

And yes, I did recognize the irony in that statement.

"They'll be back soon," I hissed. "To unhook me, because there's only so much blood I can give before I run dry and they don't want us dead—just alive enough so they can use us. We have a half a handful of minutes to talk and I swear to God, Nudge, if you kill yourself I will drag you out of Hell to do the job again with my own two hands. You're my family; you don't get to quit on me. What. Happened?"

Nudge let out a whistling breath and pushed herself off of the bed, landing on unsteady feet. She stumbled over to me in my wheelchair, and started tugging at the straps covering my arms. After a long moment of Velcro peeling away from itself, I was free. I ripped off the other straps myself and stood, my head spinning. Blood loss—never fun. But it wasn't like I could just tug out the tube. Nudge was in a worse state than I was.

She grabbed my wrist, her fingers icy, and tugged me toward the door.

I dug in my heels, covered her hand with my own. "Nudge. Explain."

She spun to face me, her eyes looking too big for her face. For a moment she just gaped like a fish, but finally she swallowed and started talking. "We're getting us all out of here," she said, determined and ungrammatical. "They put me in with Gazzy and Angel and we've got a plan. But we have to run. Okay?"

I pulled the door open. "Let's go."

"Elevators," Nudge said. But she hesitated. Finally she took the needle out of her arm and reached over to do the same to me, wrapping the tube around her wrist like a bracelet.

We headed out into the hallway, sticking close together, and made it exactly three feet before Nudge walked straight into a busy whitecoat. "Oh, crap, sorr—"

She froze.

The whitecoat's eyes widened, and she put a hand to her earpiece. "Code re—"

I punched her in the throat. She stumbled back, choking, and I leveled a side kick at her ankles. She went down. I yanked her earpiece out and stomped on it.

"Okay," I said. "We should start—"

Alarms started blaring, in spite of my fantastic tactical decision to wreck that earpiece.

Nudge took off at a sprint down the hallway, banging into the wall and looking like every step was killing her. She twisted around to shout. "Erasers!"

Sure enough, two had rounded the corner, pushing a caged mutant on a trolley. The poor thing was shaking like a leaf, but I didn't have the time to rescue it. I headed after Nudge and together we skidded around the corner and down the hallway. It was full of whitecoats holding clipboards and Erasers dragging mutants, all with somewhere to go.

This… this was going to suck.

I snapped my wings out and balled my hands into the tightest fists I could make, and then I charged.

Not three steps in, an Eraser tried to block my path. I ducked as best I could and kept running, feeling it rip open my shoulder. Nudge shrieked, but the pounding of her feet was steady.

Another Eraser snatched at me, grabbing at my arm. I poured on the speed, wrenching myself free. My wrist screamed in protest as I sprinted away, and I cradled it to my chest, probing at it as best I could.

Dislocated.

We hit the end of the hallway, and alarms started blaring.

"Left," Nudge panted.

I nodded. As we ran, I fixed my wrist. It popped back in with an agonizing pain that whited out the world for a moment. I stumbled and fell. Nudge skidded to a halt and grabbed me by the back of my sweatshirt, trying to pull me along.

I pushed myself up and started running again. My thighs burned, but I could barely feel my lower legs. Black dots swirled in front of my eyes and I bit down on my lower lip.

Keep going. I had to keep going.

We rounded another corner and nearly ran past the elevator doors. Nudge skidded to a stop and slammed her hand over the control panel. When she pulled it away the panel was covered in blood.

Her eyes widened. "The stitches…"

And then the Erasers caught up to us.

The elevator doors slid open and the two of us stumbled back in. I slammed my hand on the "door close" button as Nudge hit the one labeled B5. We were fast—of course we were fast. But we weren't fast enough.

An Eraser shouldered its way in through the closing doors.

This was really going to suck.

Nudge let out a breath and balled her hands into fists. But Nudge was wrecked. I shoved her into the back left corner and spread my wings, putting my body between her and the Eraser. "Bring it," I snarled.

The elevator started going down.

The Eraser brought it, snapping out a punch at my head. I ducked away but could only go so far. The blow glanced, leaving me seeing stars. I stumbled, grabbing at the railing. I braced myself against it and snapped out a kick.

The Eraser let out a breathless little scream—I'd hit it in the 'nads. It doubled over and Nudge hit it in the back of the neck with both hands.

I pushed myself off the railing and took a careful step as the Eraser sunk to a knee. If I could get a good kick to the ribs in, this would be over. But the goddamn elevator was too small for me to get in the right spot, even with my wings pulled in.

And just like that, the moment passed. The Eraser shot back up, blood streaming from a bitten-through lip, and dealt Nudge a vicious blow that smashed her against the wall of the elevator. She hit it and slid down it to the ground. She left a trail of blood on the wall.

I saw red. I launched myself at the Eraser and grabbed its neck with both hands. I wanted its eyes to bug out, its face to go purple. I wanted it to feel like I felt when I was pinned up against the wall, watching my family go down one by one.

But of course, it outweighed me by an easy sixty pounds. It took a few baby steps forward and I was forced into a corner. I pushed up, my fingers biting into its neck, my deltoids aching. One of us had to give, and it wasn't going to be me.

It was me. The brute leaned forward and my arms gave way for a half-second—just long enough for it to slam a forearm across my throat. I stomped on its instep and twisted free as it cried out. When I didn't have that awful pressure on my throat I shouldered it into the corner I'd been trapped in. It shoved me and I stumbled.

I hit Nudge. The two of us hit the ground. The Eraser bared a mouth full of bloody teeth and reached for the control panel—

And then it let out an unearthly shriek and sunk to its knees, hands clapped over its ears. I fell back, getting as much distance from it as I could. It was convulsing, letting out cries that only got rougher and weaker. After a moment of this it went limp, and Nudge pulled herself up to rummage through its pockets. The elevator doors slid open as she held up a plastic card.

"For the rooms," she said, but all I could focus on was how she was shaking so hard that her voice trembled. When she stood up her knees gave out and her head thudded against the wall. I half-tripped over an unconscious Eraser as I lunged to help hold her up.

She took a deep breath. "I'm okay. Can you drag the Eraser out while I go get Gazzy and Angel? I don't think I could handle that."

"Go get 'em," I said, and gave her the best grin I could muster.

She nodded but didn't smile as she headed off down the hallway.

I slammed the door open button a few times as I got to dragging. Adrenaline was keeping me from feeling the worst of the pain, but definitely not all of it. My heart was going rabbit-fast and my arms and legs ached. And my head was pounding, which wasn't helped by the fact that half my vision was dark. I lifted a hand and probed gently at the area around my right eye. Yeah, it'd be a while before thatgot better.

I gave a one-eyed glare to the Eraser and kicked its prone body out of the way. Screw it. I could kick just as much ass without my right eye.

On my way back into the elevator I stumbled and fell, banging my head against the wall.

The spike of pain was more intense than getting punched in the face by an Eraser, more painful than slamming my shoulder back into its socket. I yanked at my hair, trying and failing to distract myself from whatever was going on inside my skull…

And then, just abruptly as it had started, it stopped. I was left half-curled on the floor, sweating and shaking. When I pushed myself onto one elbow my stomach lurched, and I could feel the tingling sensation in my mouth that meant I was about to vomit. The stink of blood and metal, made worse by how small the elevator was, didn't help. I took a deep breath to steady myself and stood.

The doors of the elevator began to slide shut.

I slammed my hand on the door open button, my heart racing. Down here, in the lower basement levels, it was quiet. Only a few floors above us were the shrieking alarms and the whitecoats. I couldn't go back there. I couldn't leave my family.

"Max!" Angel skidded into the elevator, breathing hard. She was covered in a cold sweat and her eyes were glittering like ice at night, but she wasn't bruised or scarred, thank God. A little panic was nothing in the face of endless needles and electric shocks and radioactive dyes. I dropped to my knees and hugged her tight.

"Angel," I whispered.

And the Gasman was right behind her, his eyes wide and his face pale. I extended a wing and pulled him into the hug too. He threw his arms around my neck and squeezed hard for a moment before loosening his grip.

"We've gotta go," he said. "Nudge, are you okay?"

Nudge came in. Her wrists had been wrapped up in what looked like strips of sheets, and she was holding two half-gallon bottles of OJ. She passed me one, and I stood to take it, tapping it with hers. "Bottoms up," I said, and started chugging. The sweet, sweet sugar rush kept me from worrying about the possibility that it'd weigh me down later. When about a quarter of the bottle was gone I turned to Nudge. "They had me on the seventh floor."

She nodded, face drawn, and hit that button. "Me too."

We started downward again, and I glanced at Angel, who was wiping her face off with her sweatshirt. "You okay, sweetheart?"

She nodded.

"No she's not," Gazzy protested. "She used her power to knock out the Erasers. And it hurts because something about this place hurts her brain, like—"

Angel kicked him in the shin. "I wasn't the one who slammed my head into the wall for an hour!"

"She wasn't asking me! And besides, I didn't—"

"Guys, stop it." I grabbed both of them by the backs of their sweatshirts and pulled them apart. "We need to work together. Now apologize."

Gazzy groaned. "Sorry for snitching on you, Angel."

"Sorry for kicking your leg," Angel muttered. She turned her face up to me. "But, Max, we—"

The elevator stopped, its doors sliding open, and I was greeted to the same blindingly white hallway that I'd been "escorted" through three times before. I glanced down it, looking for any signs of life—walls dented from kicks, blood splattered on the floor, doors that might have been weakened from being slammed into. floor was as lifeless, as—well, an underground prison in a mad science laboratory in the middle of the Dead Mountains.

Nudge had been here, though, and I hadn't noticed. How many other mutants were locked behind doors that made them completely anonymous, just waiting to die?

Angel gasped. "Iggy!" She sprinted out of the elevator, towing me by the hand, stopping in front of RHB01.11.

I froze, my eyes locked on the black marks. Iggy had been one cell over from mine, for God knew how long, and I hadn't even noticed. I hadn't been able to help him, or break out. I put my jug of OJ down and slammed both hands against the door. "Iggy! Iggy, we're getting you out!"

Nothing.

Nudge reached past me to swipe her stolen keyboard, and the door swung open.

Iggy lunged at me, eyes narrowed and teeth bared. I threw my arms up in front of my face. His fist hit my elbow, sending me stumbling. I grabbed at his arm to steady myself. All I did was drag him down with me. We hit the ground hard. Before I could try to wriggle out from under him, he wrapped his hands around my throat and started squeezing.

I thrashed around, bucking and kicking, but I couldn't shake Iggy's grip on my neck. "Ig," I gasped, and reached up. His skin was fever-hot underneath my hands. His ears were practically burning. I got a good grip on them. And then I curled up hard, smashing our foreheads together. It felt bad. Not death-migraine bad, but bad.

But it worked. Iggy's fingers went slack. "Max? Oh, Jesus, I'm so sorry—" He scrambled off me. "Christ… I heard the door open and I thought…" He reached with shaky fingers for a cut on his forehead that had opened up.

Nudge tapped his shoulder. "Iggy…"

He spun to face her and ended up landing hard on his butt, his legs tangling with mine. "What the hell?"

She just stared at him, eyes wide, like she was a deer and he was a speeding van.

"We're breaking out," I told him. "We've got Angel and Gazzy."

"Hey, Iggy!" Gazzy shouted from down the hall, inside the elevator. "I missed you, also hurry up!"

Angel took a step forward. "Is a hug okay?"

Iggy didn't say anything, just spread his arms wide. Angel launched herself at him, wrapping her arms and wings around him so tightly I half-expected to hear ribs cracking. He squeezed her back, and I slugged him on the arm. I didn't trust myself to hug him, not just yet—I remembered the look on his face when he charged at me.

What did I look like when they had locked me up? When they had drugged me?

Angel flinched in Iggy's arms and wriggled free, her face somber again. I tapped her on the head. "Which cells are Fang and Ari in?"

She stood. Iggy and I scrambled to our feet. She brought a hand up to rub her temple, gnawing at her lip. After a moment she dropped her hand and shut her eyes, her forehead scrunching up. And then she opened her eyes.

"They're not here," she said, her voice hitching. "I don't know where they are!"

"What do you mean, you don't know where they are?" Iggy snapped. "They've got to be here somewhere!"

"Angel?" Gazzy called from the elevator. "Angel, what's wrong?"

I had to swallow a few times before I could even start to speak. "Okay. Three floors below us, six above us, and how many more above that? If Ari wasn't in the cage rooms then we can skip those, check the lower basements, check the testing rooms… recovery rooms…"

Iggy finished the thought. "Surgery rooms."

I picked up my jug of OJ and took a slug. It felt like blood in my mouth… wait, no, that was probably the actual blood in my mouth. I swallowed it anyway and sighed. "Let's go, guys. We'll start with the lower basement levels." Delay any meetings with Erasers for as long as we could.

"Actually," Nudge said. "When… when the whitecoat talked to me… She said… she said that…"

"Spit it out," I said. "Come on."

Nudge frowned. "She said something about how I wasn't "like" something else, 'cause I was holding conversations. And then she had me moved from here to the fifth. So if I hadn't been talking they'd have put me, like, on a lower level. Fang and Ari probably just shut up their faces when they got caught…"

"…And got moved to the middle," Iggy said. "The sixth floor. Good job, Nudge, now let's go get 'em." He headed off to the elevator.

I grinned. "Nudge, you're a genius!"

Her shoulders hunched. "…Yeah." She slouched off, following Iggy.

Angel caught up to her before I could. "Was that why—"

"I don't want to talk about it!" Nudge shrugged her brown-black wings open and hugged herself with them.

I felt my stomach sinking as I followed them into the elevator. Sure, Nudge had done what she had done to get to me. And so far it had worked. But what had that whitecoat said to her to make her think that nearly killing herself was a good idea? What had they done?

Back in the elevator, the smell of dried blood overwhelmed me. But what made the stink worth it was seeing Iggy lift Gazzy up in a tight hug, Gazzy throwing his arms around Iggy's neck.

"I'm gonna murder every single Eraser that laid a hand on you or Angel or Ari," Gazzy said. "And then I'm gonna double-murder them for taking the bombs."

"Don't do anything too reckless," Iggy said, but he still smiled. "Good job getting me, though. You kids are going places if you keep your heads on your shoulders."

I grinned too. The Gasman was a trooper—the way he watched out for his younger siblings reminded me of myself. And I'm a pretty serious fucking trooper. And now that home was gone, Ari and Angel would need all the help they could get.

"We'll all need help," Angel said. "But…"

"But what?"

"How do we know if we're getting the right kind?"

"If somebody's a whitecoat," I said, "they're the wrong kind. They blinded Iggy trying to 'help' him see better. They nearly killed us trying to 'help' us get stronger. The right kind… the right kind is like what I did for Ella, that girl back in Arizona, like how Dr. M and Jeb helped us. They were helping us because it was the right thing to do, not because they were sick freaks with a scalpel fetish."

Angel nodded, but Nudge's feathers rustled as she wrapped her wings tighter around herself. Iggy reached out and tapped one, but she just shrunk away, bumping into me.

Angel hit the button labeled B6. The elevator lurched into motion, and I was vibrating with nervous energy. Being enclosed with four other kids in a tiny metal cube stinking of blood was bad enough, and I wasn't exactly excited about the fight that was coming when all of us had to get out of the School. But more importantly—I was only a few moments away from Fang and Ari. I could tell Fang I was sorry, properly, to ask him if he was okay without having to cut myself short because there were whitecoats and Erasers in the room. I could let Ari know that I was here, that we were going to be okay, that Jeb might be dead but I wasn't planning on kicking the bucket—like, ever—and that we were going to get out of this, going to be okay, going to stick together…

The doors slid open with a ding. I grabbed the keycard from Nudge's hand and set off down the hallway toward the door separating me from the last few missing members of my family, stumbling a little because my stupid swelled-shut eye was messing with my depth perception.

I swiped the keycard and opened the door.

Fang was crouched in the corner, eyes narrowed, but when he saw me he stood and crossed the room in a few steps. For a second we just stood there. I more or less registered the pale yellow bruises on the right side of his face. He didn't seem to be holding himself oddly, which was good—no sprains that hadn't healed up. But my eyes kept going back to the smooth gray fabric that covered his chest.

I tore my focus away from it and met his gaze. He gave me a small nod and another sweep, going from my bad eye to my relocated wrist, which had started to bruise, finally lingering on the puncture scab on the inside of my elbow. Feeling him watching me was reminding me of exactly how much hell I felt like. Despite all the OJ I drank, I still was a wreck—which was complete bullshit, by the way, that stuff was supposed to boost your immune system—and Fang's steady stare wasn't helping. He was making me remember that I had a body. He was stopping me from pushing away the pain.

I just wanted it to stop. I stumbled forward, closing the gap between us, and wrapped my arms around him. Even as my eyes squeezed shut I could hear the sigh he let out, feel his fingers lightly combing through my hair. He pulled me closer to him with his free hand and we just… rocked. For a moment. It was nice.

And then I remembered that I had, like, responsibilities and shit. That there was a world outside of Fang's body heat and really, really good finger-combing. "Where's Ari?" I mumbled. "Gotta—gotta find him."

Fang's fingers stilled. And my heart skipped a beat.


It's only fair to give credit where credit is due.

The elevator-fight scene was partially inspired by Captain America: The Winter Soldier, insofar as I saw CA:TWS and thought "wow, an elevator sure is a place to have a fight scene!" It was really fun to work with characters who were caged in, trapped in a small space. It made things more physical. Aside from both fight scenes taking place in elevators, there isn't much similarity. Originally it had two Erasers, but then I realized that given Max and Nudge's current condition, it's lucky that they even survived one for as long as they did.

The blood-giving scene was in part inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road. In a previous draft, things were much closer to Unwind, because it was Gazzy who had done something to end up needing medical assistance. I'll let you guys use your imagination to fill in the blanks.

Iggy choking a ho was not cribbed from Mockingjay, except it kind of was… a friend and I were talking about the movie while or shortly before I was writing the chapter and she mentioned that the first one ended on Peeta choking a ho and it bled over here. Clearly, due to the heavy amount of foreshadowing and allusions to other works of media present in MRNB, this means that Iggy and Max are going to get straight married and have two children. You heard it here first, folks. ;-)

I'm pretty sure that this borrowing makes me a bit of a hypocrite because I've said frequently how much I hate it when people write out scenes from movies, shots that work BECAUSE they're visual, etc. Or maybe it doesn't, because "just having a thing" in MRNB as a thing that's very separate from how it appears in its own canon… IDK. How about you guys tell me how you felt about these things?