TWENTY-SEVEN
That's the end, right there. Nothing more to tell; life was mundane from there on out. Just regular family stuff. Couldn't have even made a sitcom about it, it was so boring.
Oh, I guess there's one more thing. That pesky old expiration date. Yeah, still slated to die in four days.
The next morning, Fang and I crept out of the hotel to catch the sunrise. My night's sleep had been interrupted by night terrors—dreams of Marion Rodgers' head exploding, of Jeb and Anne's corpses, of Ari's mangled face back on the day after Thanksgiving. To make matters worse, I was still pretty sore; all of this was more manageable than the immense amount of stress pumping through me every second.
We sat in comfortable silence and split a steaming cup of the hotel's complimentary hot chocolate. It was just like a million years ago, after everything with Angel. Dog tired, beaten to hell, and sharing a sugary drink.
We were free this time, though, and hell if that wasn't something.
We settled side by side, shoulder to shoulder on a thick branch at the top of a pine tree. It was almost Christmastime, but the weather was milder than it deserved to be for mid-December, just as it had been all season long (thanks again, global warming). I took a pull from the hot chocolate and then took a deep breath of morning air. The sun was preparing to rise over the White Mountains in front of us. Our raptor vision allowed us a perfect view of the early bird snowboarders making their way up the lifts.
Just another day, to the rest of the world. Life going on as planned. Absolute insanity to think that our entire world had been flipped on its head and the rest of humanity had no idea. I stretched my legs in front of me and sighed.
"Still doesn't feel real, does it?"
Fang grunted in response.
"I can't believe it's over. And we all made it out alive. And that it really wasn't all that hard. Then again, I guess he was baiting us that whole time. What a bastard." This garnered a half-laugh from Fang. "What?"
Like the infuriating dimwit he is, he shook his head.
"What's your problem?"
He cast a look of mild annoyance sideways at me but said nothing. He had a white-knuckled grip on the branch between us and a pained expression on his face.
Since I couldn't think of a reason for Fang to be this pissy, I was intrigued, but I also knew him well enough to know that he wouldn't open up unless he wanted to, so I ignored him and took another big sip of hot chocolate—and spilled it all down my front when a shock rippled through me.
I cursed under my breath and tried to brush the burning liquid off my shirt with my free hand. Fang yanked the hot chocolate out of my hand and glared angrily at the horizon. This was a true Fang Mood like I hadn't seen in a while.
"Okay," I said, crossing my arms over my chest and leering at him. "Something's up. Spill."
"You were tortured. And you still haven't talked about it."
The words fell into the chilly air before us, solid and final. Tortured? A feeling of unease crept from my stomach to my chest and settled heavily there.
"I wasn't tortured," I said.
"You're an idiot."
"Excuse me?"
"You were tortured," he repeated. "That was torture, what he did to you."
"He tased me, he didn't waterboard me."
"Oh, so now it was just a taser?" Fang challenged, propping the hot chocolate against the trunk of the tree and turning to face me. "Now that you've had a night's sleep to shove it back into the corner of your mind somewhere that'll keep it at bay?" He looked like he wanted to say more but instead set his jaw and looked back out at the horizon.
"I was not tortured, Fang," I insisted. "What the hell are you talking about?"
Fang said nothing in response. Instead, he reached down, snapped a twig off the branch, and in a swift, fluid motion, pointed it directly at me.
Before my brain could string together a thought, my body reacted: I jumped so drastically that I lost my balance on the branch and let out a strangled yell of surprise.
Fang grabbed me before I could fall out of the tree. My heart was racing and my breaths were coming in short gasps—no, I was hyperventilating; my vision was blurry, my periphery was black, suddenly, I was back in that building, on that cold floor, and Silas Scythe was across from me, mouth fixed in a malevolent grin as he electrocuted me again and again—
"Max."
My eyes opened and drank in the reality around me: Fang. It was Fang. We were in the woods, drinking hot chocolate and enjoying each other's company. His hands were still on my arms, only now he was rubbing his thumbs in circles on my biceps reassuringly. His face was a mix of emotions that were no longer foreign on his features: sadness, worry, unease.
I was still gasping for breath. "Sorry," I managed, "sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't—I didn't mean to—"
"Stop," he said softly.
It took a few minutes, but eventually, the forest stopped collapsing on me. I forced myself to breathe, trying to focus on Fang's hands and the sound of the birds in the distance.
All at once, Fang's anger was totally justified: he was right. For so many years I'd been so focused on compartmentalizing everything, on putting one foot consistently in front of the other, that I'd chronically failed to deal with anything even remotely traumatizing. The same was true now.
I wanted to be furious. The fact that I was like this—broken, or scarred, or whatever—was positively enraging. I'd never be a normal girl, and I'd never grow to be a normal woman. I'd live my entire life in the echo of all of the terrible things that had happened, and this incident was yet another brick on the wall.
I wanted to scream, to jump into the sky and throw my wings open and fly until I couldn't anymore. Two things stopped me:
1. I was so, so tired. What would screaming do? Or running, or crying? Nothing would change. This was life for me. For all of us.
2. It was so easy to forget the most important piece of this puzzle: we were free.
"I'm sorry," I forced out.
"Stop," Fang said again, but it was impossibly gentle. I looked up at him and felt some of the unease melt away.
"I didn't even think," I said. My voice was weak and scratchy. "I just reacted."
"I figured."
"Then why—"
"Max. You were tortured. You need to stop playing it off like it was nothing."
I looked away and sighed irritatedly. "Does it even matter? It's over. We won. We're moving on."
"I've seen you a lot of ways," he said, and I knew he was thinking of brain explosions and flashbacks and experiments at the School. "I know how tough you are." He stopped for a moment before adding quietly, "That's how I know how bad this was."
I sighed again and leaned back, letting his arms slide off of me. His hand found the branch again and squeezed lethally.
"To just stand there, knowing I could've stopped it…" He shook his head.
"Don't do that. You know did the right thing."
He gave me a pained look. "I did what I had to do to get us out of there."
"Exactly. Which was the right thing."
There was a long pause where neither of us spoke. Then Fang said, "How bad was it? Seriously."
Whatever twisted expression came to my face seemed to be enough of an answer for him.
"You had nightmares last night," he said. I didn't have to make eye contact with him to know he was giving me his calculating, squinty-eyed stare. "I know you know that. But do you know what you were saying?"
Well, that certainly got my attention. Mostly because I had a few solid guesses, none of which were particularly tough-leader of me.
"'That tickles?'" I deadpanned.
Fang didn't smile. "You keep asking for someone to kill you."
This sent a legitimate shiver through me. Because I remembered thinking it, remembered willing it to be true any time Scythe had his finger on that button. I bit my lip and looked away.
"Not just once," he continued. "And not like you're joking. You're begging."
"Well, I certainly love drama," I said weakly.
"Max," Fang snapped impatiently. "I've never heard you like that before. Ever."
An uncharacteristically warm breeze blew through the pine, carrying with it the scent of a nearby Christmas tree farm; I inhaled deeply and tried to let the scent fill me instead of the dread that was trying to.
"Shoving this into the back of your mind and not dealing with it isn't healthy."
"That's rich, coming from you."
Fang very obviously stifled a frustrated groan. I was totally out of gas and he knew it, but it wasn't enough to get him off my back.
"What do you want me to say, Fang? That it was like every single part of me was on fire? Like every single one of my cells was being torn apart molecule by molecule? What good does that do either of us? It was awful. Unbelievable. And I don't want to think about it now, or later, or ever again. Is that all right with you? Or do I need to submit a dissertation for you to review?"
Well, that certainly shut him up. He looked back out over the horizon and neither of us said anything for a while.
"There is something else," he said after the sun had risen.
"Here we go," I muttered.
He turned so he could face me. One of his hands found the tree behind me. The other found my cheek as he leaned in close. The air around us shifted; we had drastically changed gears. I felt my breath hitch.
"Is this it?" he asked, voice husky, dark eyes imploring as they stared into my own.
"Is this what?"
"You know," he said, licking his lips. "After."
I was instantly transported back to the Martinez's bathroom the morning before my arm surgery what felt like a decade ago. The night before, he'd pinned me to the ground and crushed his mouth to mine and my entire world had exploded. After, I'd told him. As in, We'll talk about this after. We'll deal with this after. We'll be whatever we want to be after.
Yes, I wanted to say, watching the way his eyes surveyed me, the way his lips moved ever so slightly. Yes, this is after. Yes to everything. I thought about everything we'd done over the last month and suddenly felt exhausted. We'd been go, go, go for weeks on end, and now that everything was over, all I wanted to do was find a warm bed and a warm shower and live in peace indefinitely. Or, you know, until I dropped dead.
But there was one more thing I had to do before I could close this chapter and move on to whatever time I had left.
"Not yet."
It took three and a half days to get to Arizona. Don't ask me how we made such good time. Adrenaline, maybe. Or maybe it was the absence of the theoretical weight that had once been on our shoulders. At any rate, it was convenient. I kept close to the Gasman and Angel and barricaded my thoughts from the latter.
Nudge and Iggy took their turns grilling me about when I was going to spill the beans about my expiration date, but thankfully kept their voices soft.
"I swear to God, Max, if you don't do it today, I'll do it myself," Iggy had said threateningly as we'd crossed the border into Arizona. "This is not fair to them and you know it."
"I'm going to tell them. Tonight. I'm not a monster, Iggy, just—do you have any idea how hard this is for me?" I'd retorted.
"Yeah, I do," he'd whispered back sharply, "because it's even harder for us."
The Martinezes home was deserted but looked in no way ransacked, which was incredibly reassuring to me. They'd told us they were heading north to an isolated part of the canyon to the home Ella's grandmother lived in. The problem with the Grand Canyon is that it's, you know, grand, so it took a few hours of divide-and-conquer flight to find it.
It was the Gasman who eventually hollered, "Over here!"
My heart picked up the pace. Part of me had prayed we'd never find it, that this flight would never end, that this day would never end, but I obviously knew this hope was naive. The lump in my throat that had been there for the duration of the flight felt even larger now. I tried to fathom the moment I'd look at Angel and the Gasman and tell them the truth I'd hidden from them for so long—a truth that would shatter the new sense of safety and happiness they'd found.
It was that instant precisely that made the decision for me: the most cowardly and unMaxlike decision I'd possibly ever made.
"Guys," I said shakily. Iggy was the first to turn; he gave me a look as if daring me to do what he thought I was going to do.
"Max…" he growled.
"I…" I pressed my hand to my chest and heaved in a deep breath. The world was dizzy around me. Was this it? Was I dying? Or was this just a symptom of my world falling apart, of ruining the lives of five people I cared about more than myself?
"Max?" Nudge shrieked. She turned to face me and started to fly my way as quickly as she could.
"I love you all. I love you all so much." My voice cracked and I struggled again to get a breath in. "And I'm so sorry."
Fang's voice was threatening. "Max?"
It was pathetic. It was unfair. It was treason of the highest degree. It would leave a sour taste in their mouths for the rest of their lives—it would leave Angel and the Gasman asking why I hadn't thought it was important enough to tell them myself. They would never find closure. They would never understand.
Fang will explain, I convinced myself. He'll know.
Fang. A pang of agony shot all the way through me, but this was no aftershock. It was the feeling of my soul severing in two. I turned and drank him in, thinking of all the things we could've done, we could've been, and the life we could've had together after. He was furious—he knew exactly what I was going to do.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
That was all I could bear. I put my head down, poured on the speed, and let the air whip by me, leaving my heart and everything that made me Maximum Ride behind.
The E-house was surprisingly not the disaster zone I thought it would be. The Gasman and Iggy had described it as looking like a warzone, but it was really only the cabin that had been decimated by their exciting escape from the Erasers so long ago.
The stilts holding the arms of the E in place were as strong as ever, and the sun was setting over the mountain-laden horizon to the west.I thought back to the first time I'd laid eyes on this place, this safe haven we'd been granted after ten years of suffering in a laboratory. It was the first time (and one of the only times) I'd ever cried of happiness, and it had literally brought me to my knees.
Life carried on in a series of snapshots—as each moment passed, I felt more and more like I was watching a scene of a movie, like I was seeing myself from above as I went through the motions. I'd sobbed harder than I thought possible the entire high-speed flight and was now no more than the shell of who I'd been.
I walked briefly around the perimeter of the house and found no signs of anything even remotely suspicious. I touched the faded siding, felt the grime against my hands. I'd pinned Fang or Iggy against it hundreds of times during morning spar sessions way back during a time we'd never needed to actually fight for our lives. The training had done us well enough—we were alive, after all.
The interior of the house had been raided by Erasers, likely—all of Jeb's paperwork had been taken from the closet and our cabinets, bureaus, and desks had been rifled through—but they'd taken no interest in our personal belongings. I walked through the kitchen, the living room, the girls' bedroom, fingering items that brought back visceral memories: the music box on Angel's dresser, the tubes of preteen-grade lipstick on Nudge's vanity.
The boys' room looked very much lived in, which made sense, considering that the Gasman and Iggy had left in a hurry all that time ago. There were no signs of explosives—maybe the Erasers had taken them for themselves—but empty glasses sat atop various surfaces of the room, and likely-dirty socks and boxer shorts littered the floor. The bunk beds were unmade, although Iggy's bunk on the bottom was somehow neater than the Gasman's, who could see.
There was a desk along the wall opposite the bunk beds. After he'd left, we'd moved Jeb's computer in here for the Gasman to use. We hadn't had internet, of course, but the thrift stores had a surprisingly comprehensive repertoire of games available (in CD form, like we used to have back in the Dark Ages).
I pulled open the lone drawer and mindlessly surveyed its contents: mostly knickknacks and doodles with a few ancient sheets of notebook paper thrown in, most with my handwriting on it from when I'd taught Nudge and the Gasman varying levels of math. At the bottom was a very dog-eared copy of Braille for Dummies!; the smile it brought to my face was immediate. I could still remember Jeb bringing it home with an eager grin on his face. Iggy had thrown a fit, but after I'd talked to him, he'd agreed to let me help him learn—but no one else.
The right side of the room was a little more organized but a little less decorative. While Gazzy and Iggy's side had assorted posters, trinkets, and other indiscriminate clutter, Fang's had nothing but his bed and a small corkboard, which had exactly three things pinned to it: a ticket stub from the one (and only) time we'd snuck out of the house into a nearby town to see The Hobbit, a stick-figure picture Angel had drawn of the two of them, and a photo of the flock—the only one that existed. The six of us were standing on the shore of the nearby lake, wrapped in towels and laughing at something Iggy had said. Fang's smile was radiant.
The bedspread was plain and black. Fang's old Walkman (for all you Gen-Zers out there, that'd be a CD player—seriously, everything was on a CD) sat on top of it with the headphones still plugged in. I popped it open. American Idiot. Green Day. Suddenly, I was giggling.
"You laugh, but that thing won a Grammy. And a Tony, actually."
I nearly jumped out of my skin and whirled around to see a very windswept Fang standing in the doorway.
"What the hell are you doing here?" I'd intended for it to be threatening but missed the mark pretty dramatically. My voice was too raw to be intimidating.
His eyes searched my face. I realized I was crying. "I was in the neighborhood."
I could barely breathe. "How did you know?"
"Lake Mead was too close of a fly. Everyone would've followed you there. This is the only other place that really means anything." He seemed to notice that he was standing in the only bedroom he'd ever known and started to look around. "It all started here."
I watched as he went through the same motions as I had, opening drawers and admiring trinkets. He stood at the foot of his old bed with a blank look on his face.
"We thought it was going to end here," he murmured, touching the flock photo on the corkboard. "But it was the beginning."
I don't know how I got there. I don't know what was said. But the next thing I knew, we were sitting on Fang's bed and he was holding me to his chest more tightly than he ever had before. One of us—I'm not sure which—was trembling so badly that we both were shaking.
I couldn't even guess how long it went on for. The feeling of total loss, absolute hopelessness, and devastation coursing through me was unbearable. Maybe it was defense mechanism, maybe it was indifference, but at some point, the feeling leeched away.
I pulled away from Fang gently and met his eyes. There was more trapped behind them than we had time to discuss. So, in the absence of those feelings of misery, I did what was tried and true, what I'd done for most of the years of my life: I acted impulsively.
I kissed him.
What started as a proclamation quickly dissolved into a plea. Our lips moved feverishly. Fang's hands found my back and pulled me even tighter to him. I wrapped my arms around his neck and fisted my hands in his hair. His fingertips dug into the soft skin beneath my folded wings. Our breaths came quickly, but neither of us stopped long enough to catch our breath.
His mouth found my neck and I sighed lowly from somewhere deep inside of me. My hands found his triceps and squeezed, likely leaving nail marks in his tanned skin. I laid back on the bed and tugged him down on top of me so forcefully that he almost didn't have time to brace himself.
"Wait," Fang said hoarsely. He was hovering over me with a look of pure vulnerability on his face.
I stopped clawing mercilessly at his arms. "What? What's wrong?"
He shook his head and leaned in so closely that our foreheads were almost touching, never breaking eye contact once. And then he said it.
"I love you," he breathed.
"I know," I said back.
His eyes widened in bemusement and he chuckled. "You know?"
"I know," I confirmed.
He gave me a crooked smile and shook his head again, only this time as if he were saying, I can't believe you. He cupped his hands around my cheeks and pulled his lips to mine, kissing me chastely, sealing his words there for me to bring along wherever this expiration date took me.
He pulled back about a centimeter. We were trading breaths, panting like animals, and looking at each other like we were the only things left in the world.
"Guess what?" I whispered.
Fang grinned. "What?"
"I love you back," I said.
For a split second, Fang's smile almost faltered—I caught the moment that he corrected it. Even in times like these, he was a creature of habit. Good ol' reliable Fang: don't let them see your weakness.
"I know," he breathed back.
He leaned back down to kiss me, moving from my lips to my neck to my ear and setting my whole body on fire in the process. It was only when his cheek brushed against mine that I noticed the tears.
Part of me wanted to stop it all to comfort him—stop the frenzied way we undressed each other, stop the sounds he made when I touched him, stop the feeling of his lips on my body—but the other part of me, the part of me that had been fighting a nonstop war since the day she was born, the part of me slated to die, wanted to settle in this moment, in the depth of his eyes, in the feel of his skin, and think one thing only:
I'm alive.
A/N: This chapter felt really unnatural to write, mostly because Max is very out of character (on purpose). It's been written for over a week now, but instead of editing it I just keep staring at it trying to figure out what's wrong. What's wrong is that it's supposed to feel uncomfortable and forced; Max is sort of having an out-of-body experience here, detaching from reality.