Chapter Thirty-Six
Nice, Luna. And Rose and Ella. Love Eragon! The books, movie was also good, but didn't compare to the actual books. And yes, Saphira and Arya are AMAZING. Dr. M's date will come up, don't worry… Hehe.
Thanks, LilyHasWings!
Queen of True Love-yeah, sorry, I left my computer at my dad's for a while, so hopefully this is soon enough. Thank you!
Oh, no problem, pinkcatheaven… Yes, I'll say it one more time. Love CSI! Haha, enjoy the chapter.
Maddy-niice… but thank you. That sounds like something I would do. Have done. But nobody knows that…
TulipBook-yes, short, to the point and easy to understand! If only everything could be like that…
LovelyNBlue-glad you liked it! Hope I didn't screw up too badly with Fang, but I think they needed to have some "boy time" as my mom calls it.
So, indescriable destruction, or Rose, whichever you prefer, I am very glad you liked Fang's POV! As for the next MR book, I am looking forward to it! We've all tried writing fax and stuff, but it really only started at the end of MAX so we'll see if we actually got it right or not. Plus I'm looking forward to the whole 'holy crap WTF' scene where the prediction comes in. I think it will be very action packed/tense and AMAZING. And I don't think Fang will die. But thank you!
Sky-Angel14-I think she might!
StandardAngel717-don't explode! Haha, hope you like the chapter.
Sometimes, washing dishes is extraordinarily tedious. You're just about ready to smash every single gosh darned plate into tiny pieces, that is, unless your thinking about other things besides smashing plates. For me, I just relished the small chance of having my mind to myself (a rare chance) and to think things through.
I was mostly worried about Iggy and Nudge, though. In one sitting we had watched both Ig lose his sight, and Nudge nearly die of heat. I don't want to go into details, all it did was bring back memories for me, but I had to stay strong for the others. Which was pretty hard because every time I remembered that first month, I really wanted to find a really strong rope, barbed wire, and Iggy's two whitecoats. Let your imagination figure out the rest.
Sometimes it sucks to do the dishes because my mind has a tendency to wander. Generally to a select few choices.
1. Itex/the School/Saving the world from eternal doom. All that crap.
2. Fang.
3. Where Iggy and Gazzy are and what they smuggled away with them.
4. Fang.
5. Fang.
6. And recently, this slot had been filled by past recollections from the videos Jeb had oh-so-helpfully provided.
I didn't really feel like dealing with anything in category one, or thinking up punishments for Iggy and the Gasman, and decided that if Fang really did take up three categories, that was enough thinking for now. Not to mention the fact that he took up seven through eleven, too, and eleven was all I allowed myself.
Fang. God, watching the latest clip from the E-house had been hilarious, although Fang was furious when he found that there was a camera in his Black Hole. Well, until a moment after we had adjusted our eyes to the dark room flooded with light from the floor to ceiling windows, which gave me a minor headache, and Fang had bolted into the room, quickly turned, moved down the door at lightning speed, and a second later was sitting with his back to the door.
His room had twelve locks. Ella found that hilarious.
Then his door had nearly fallen off the hinges as something rammed into it, and he darted away to push his bed in front of it, then place his feet on the opposite wall to hold the entire contraption shut.
"FANG! YOU ARE A DEAD MAN!"
Fang had just laughed and pushed a dusty bookcase onto the bed. The door had stopped shaking.
"OF ALL THINGS, UNICORNS! I SWEAR TO GOD…!" There had been some muffled thumps, an 'ow!' and some loud swearing, courtesy of Iggy. Fang had taken a moment of relative peace to throw a shoe at the opposite wall, and after a moment, my voice was heard.
"Does this have anything to do with the massacre in the hallway?"
"Maybe!" Fang called back, pushing another shelving thing onto his bead.
"Any explosive activity?"
"Not yet!"
I had taken my time, but eventually had flown out my window to look in Fang's next door. My mouth dropped open. He rolled his eyes, and abandoned pressing against the door for a moment to open the window.
"Max?"
I whirled around, falling off my little mental cloud immediately and brandishing the knife I had been scrubbing. And nearly took Fang's head off, he ducked just in time, holding his hands up.
"Oh. Sorry." I carefully placed the knife on a drying towel and pushed myself to sit on the countertop, looking into his eyes. Infuriatingly, he had grown more, so we were now of the same height. I had to sit on a freaking counter to meet eyes with him. And I couldn't help staring. Black hair fell carelessly in front of his eyes, also dark, dark, black, but with strange flecks of amber. At the moment, they held depth that no ocean could compete with, but they seemed to be blocked, as per usual and more familiar to me than my own. His skin, olive toned but pale, scarred with shallow and barely visible indentations…
"See something you like?"
"What?" I jumped, nearly falling off the counter in the process, but grabbing onto his shoulder until I balanced. "No, of course not you pig. Where're the others?"
"Playing tag. In the woods. Nudge wants us to come." And his eyes, letting down their guard for a millisecond, sparkled with something.
"Well, thank you for freeing me." I grinned, hopping off the counter and grabbing his hand. I was nearly done, anyway, and I'd finish the dishes when I came back in… Or maybe not. I put it out of my mind. You may have noticed that 'doing the dishes' is not on my list of things that tend to occupy my mind.
"Nudge is it!" Ella called out to us, waiting at the edge of the woods and bouncing back and forth in excitement. "And it's hide-and-go-seek tag. She's counting!"
I bolted through the woods as fast and silently as I could, but you see, in Arizona, they just don't really have the woodland opportunities that they do, say in Colorado. Meaning the trees don't provide very much cover. I checked under a fallen log, but Total and Angel were already squished down into the mud, as was Iggy in a hollow tree and Ella, nearly disguised in her brown clothes in a thorn bush.
"Ninety-eight! Ninety-nine! I'm gonna count to one hundred and one because it's like the Dalmations! Just so you know!"
Damn. I sprinted in the opposite direction as Nudge, deeper into the woods where the trees were taller, and did a flying leap into a pine. Quietly, I landed feet first on a large branch, and began scrambling upwards until I reached the very top. As I said, not very much cover and tiny branches, but I hoped the height would provide enough distraction if Nudge even bothered to look…
"You better not ruin my hiding spot."
I could help jumping; darting backwards and slamming into something harder than the air it appeared to be.
"Fang!" I hissed, sliding off the tree branch to now hang like a koala. "Don't do that!"
"What?" He whispered, still invisible, and I felt his warm breath on my ear. "Breathe?"
"You know what." I sniffed, flipping back up so my back was against the tree trunk and I was sitting upright. I still couldn't see him, but the hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I had a sudden realization. Slowly, I lifted my hand, palm outward, and reached forward. Within inches from my face, I came into contact with something, and brushed my fingers down between his eyes, along his nose, across his lips, tracing him. He leaned closer, and I held his head carefully between my two hands, feeling his jawbone and working on hand to the back of his neck. Before I could consciously process the thought, I had leaned forward, closed my eyes, and replaced the hand on his lips. My fingers knotted in his tangled hair, and I could feel his doing the same to mine. Somehow, it managed to still look decent when I couldn't remember the last time I had ran a brush through it.
Against my lips, I could feel his face stretch into a grin, and couldn't help doing the same.
"Will this ruin your hiding spot?" I asked him, breaking away momentarily, but keeping my hand on his where his shoulder should be.
He laughed outright and shifted closer to me, sitting side by side on the branch. "Maybe. Does it matter?"
I put my hand on his knee, looking directly in the spot I knew his eyes would be in. Smiling, I shook my head. Slowly, with me still staring, the dark eyes slowly began to fade into existence, and a moment later, I was looking at Fang again. Before he could disappear again, I ducked in to quickly peck him on the lips and leaned away again. He smiled softly, meeting my eyes, and just for a moment, letting the guard down so I could look into the only eyes that could make the ocean look shallow.
"Okay? Who wants to be that Max and Fang are hiding together?"
We both started, but remained silent as we listened to what was going on. Iggy had spoken, Nudge must have found him and the others, judging by the number of footsteps.
"Five bucks." Ella announced. "Wait, five cookies. I don't have five bucks."
"Besides, cookies are more valuable." Angel piped up. "In my opinion."
"Do you know where they are?" Gaz asked his sister, yawning. "I don't want to stumble in on them making out or something."
"Do you even know what making out is?" Nudge asked dubiously. "I mean, seriously?"
Iggy and Ella were both laughing loudly at that.
"Do you?" Gazzy retorted, by the sound of it, hitting Nudge. Fang and I looked at each other, and an instant later, he had turned invisible again and flown to another tree. I smiled to myself, holding on to the feeling of his hand in mine… It felt empty now, without anything to hold.
"No." Angel pouted. "Mind blocks, remember? Maybe we could start mouthing off, really bad. You know? Max would explode."
"Yeah, what was that one she absolutely forbade us to ever, ever, ever say?" Gazzy asked loudly while I boiled inside. "Started with an f, didn't it, Angel?"
"Yeah, and had something to do with chickens!"
"No… chickadees."
"Geese!"
"Ducks."
I was gonna kill Iggy, if he didn't die of lack of oxygen as he and Ella collapsed.
"Or we could swear in German." Nudge supplied. "I learned how to. Or in Arabic, Swedish, Polish, or Greek!"
"No," Gazzy said thoughtfully. "I think the duck one should do it, but we still haven't decided on whether they're hiding together, 'cause I really wasn't kidding about what I said earlier…"
I saw Fang peep his head up, and I held up three fingers. Count of one. Then I went down to one finger.
"Have a little faith." He called down, as much as he could with his sore throat.
"We're not that perverted." I piped up, flopping down to hang back and forth from my knees. "That's Iggy."
"I mean we may be-" Fang began, mimicking my movement in the opposite tree.
"Immature-" I supplied.
"Compulsive-"
"Lacking in the manners department-"
"Rude-"
"Mentally instable-"
"Tired."
"Obnoxious."
"Infallible-"
"Ooh, good word choice." I laughed. "Uh… crazy?"
"You're the one with a Voice in your head."
"Oh, like you don't have one." I scoffed.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, you just don't admit it."
"Of course."
"It's true!"
"You wish."
"Fine." I grumped, swinging back and forth. "You don't have a Voice, but you have dancing unicorns."
"They were eaten."
"But you had them."
"Psh."
"You have dragons! After all, they ate the unicorns, correct?"
"Dragons are so much more cooler than a Voice."
"You would know."
"I would."
"Of course, because you're so all-knowing."
"Did I mention we were truthful?"
I threw a pinecone at him. "Yeah. Truthful for bumblebees."
"I refuse to be part insect."
"Fang!" I buried my head in my hands, still swinging back and forth. "How could you?" I wailed. "You're insulting Mr. Bumble!"
"Who's-"
"Don't you ask who Mr. Bumble is!"
"But I-"
"You should know who he is! I mean, a world leader, bumblebee, and my imaginary friend! How could you not know who Mr. Bumble is?"
"Lunacy." He rolled his eyes.
"Exactly! So don't you start harping on insects!"
"How can he be a world leader if he's imaginary?"
"That is just the might of Mr. Bumble! He's so…amazing…that…"
"Max." Fang said solemnly. "It would be problematic if you choked."
I couldn't respond I was laughing so hard, couldn't flip myself upwards, so I just dropped to the next branch.
"Are they always this…?"
"Yes." Iggy stated solemnly. "Pray for their souls."
Ella began some sort of chant, a drifting moan passing over notes solemnly and began to sway back and forth, Iggy joined in after a moment, looking just like the priests in the hunchback Disney movie Ella had us watch. Hunchback of Notre Dame I think. And we worry them. Psh.
So I have an idea for the next chapter, so hopefully I'll update sooner. Anyway. Back to school! Yeah! Not. Haha, anyways, you guys keep me as sane as one as insane as I am can be… Not that that made any sense whatsoever.