LIKE LIONS

There are winds that wrap and hold me, there are whispers in the trees
I cannot hold all that is sacred, they are holding onto me
Kiss the years that all are dying, kiss the face that makes you stay
They are in your rhythms walking, they are showing you the way
Breath and breath above a sickness shouting threats upon your life
And then we are like lions, we are fool enough to fight
It will cheat you in the balance, taking more than left to live
And then we are like lions, we are strong enough to give

TWENTY-NINE

I'd just finished recapping my blast from the past to Fang and was wrestling my jeans on when the sound of knocking—no, banging—echoed through the house. Fang shot upright and shoved me behind him, crouching down in his classic stance of defense.

I had just enough time to panic at the idea that somebody was still after us before a familiar and distinctively not evil voice echoed through the house. It boomed so loudly that I felt it ricochet against my bones.

"MAX?" Iggy yelled. Panic, rage, and desperation colored my name. "MAX!"

Fang met my eyes. For the first time, I noticed that they were swollen and bloodshot. One of my hands found his cheek and rested there for a fraction of a second; it was a promise, a real promise, to finish this moment—or whatever any of this was—sooner rather than later.

I was still trembling from head to toe and opened and closed my mouth several times as I heard the telltale signs of the flock thundering through the house. It was Fang who answered them.

"We're in here. She's okay," he called, and then he looked at me—drank me in, held me like fine china in his gaze—and said it again. "She's okay."

I'll spare you the dramatic reunion—to be honest, I don't remember it well. There was much crying (mostly Angel and Nudge), apologizing (the Gasman, who thought I had died under the impression that he hated me), and yelling (I'll give you one guess).

We decided to stay at the E-house for the night. We weren't sure what our next moves looked like and we were so beaten to hell physically and emotionally that it was the only thing that made sense. The kids stayed wide awake for a few hours, refusing to let me out of arms' reach and twitchy from stress, but eventually retired to their beds.

This meant it was late—or maybe early, depending on how you looked at it—when Iggy, Fang and I made our way to my old bedroom.

I leaned heavily against my headboard with my feet in Fang's lap. He sat cross-legged at the end of my bed, bouncing one knee anxiously. Iggy had sprawled out on the floor, hands folded behind his head, blind eyes looking to the ceiling.

"So," he said after a long silence. "What the hell happened?"

It was a fair question. I'd given the kids a very vague rundown, partly because I wasn't totally sure how to explain it, partly because it made my head hurt trying to understand it, but mostly because I didn't want to relive it. I thought for a minute about how to even start diving into all of this.

I finally decided on the most important piece of it all: "Well, I'm not going to die."

As one might expect, this was not enough for Iggy.

"Okay, well that doesn't make any freaking sense," he said with a major eye roll. "None of it does. And don't try to tell me that you 'just know' because 'Jeb told you' in a 'weird vision,'" he added brusquely. "I know you still think I'm one of the kids sometimes, but I'm not accepting that bullshit."

His tone made me wince; his face showed that he knew he'd been a little too harsh. Still, he was right—while I'd never actually seen Iggy as one of the kids, I'd confided in him a lot less than I had Fang over our sixteen years. I sucked in a deep breath.

"The Voice could trigger the memories and dreams I was having because it had access to my mind through the chip. When the chip was gone, so was the Voice, which meant that the memories and dreams were my brain's own doing, even though I didn't remember them before. 'Synapses that fire together, wire together,' he said."

"Those pathways had been paved," Fang, whose own brain I knew hadn't stopped spinning since the second I snapped out of my dream sequence, chimed in knowingly. "It's like anything else. The brain forms habits."

Iggy frowned. "Which means..."

"It was pulling things I'd forgotten from wherever I'd buried them."

"They were real memories," Iggy said in understanding.

"Mostly," Fang added. "Some of the memories were mixed with dreams or nightmares. It made it hard to weed out what was true and what wasn't."

"So you're trying to tell me that it wasn't on purpose?" Iggy said skeptically. "That the School didn't somehow plant false memories in your head to screw with you? That even with the chip out, there was no other way to track you or control you or manipulate you?"

"I really don't think so," I said.

"Why?" he prodded. "Why would you ever trust anything any of them said? You didn't trust Jeb as far as you could throw him a week ago."

The accusatory look on his face filled me with unease. The problem was that I had no idea why I trusted anything Jeb had said. It was a feeling deep in my bones that I couldn't explain, like our innate sense of direction or my ability to read Fang's expressions.

"I don't know," I said miserably. Iggy scoffed. "Ig, I really don't. Do you really think I'd keep any of this from you? I want to understand, I do. It drives me nuts that I don't. But I just really don't know." I thought of the look on Jeb's face when I'd aimed the gun at him and felt a shiver tear through me.

There was a beat of silence before he answered me. "I still don't trust him," he mumbled. "I never will. I'm sorry, but I can't."

"And that's okay," I said emphatically. "You don't have to."

Iggy nodded slowly, still looking like he thought the whole thing was a sham. "Okay, but that still doesn't explain the expiration date."

I considered this. It didn't explain the expiration date. I couldn't explain it, either. I thought back to the day it showed up—we'd gone to see Marion Rodgers, I'd almost been killed by an Eraser, and then Gideon Goodchurch had arrived to effectively sacrifice himself for me. I'd gone back to our hotel room, and then I'd had that… vision. When I'd come out of it, my neck had started to burn, and that's when Fang had found it.

So what had triggered it? Not the chip, not the Voice. None of Dr. Martinez's other imaging had shown any sort of hardware in my body. This could be one of the great mysteries of science that Jeb had not disclosed to us, or maybe even one that Jeb had never been privy to at all.

"Wait," I said, a thought suddenly occurring to me. "When I was back at Marion's, there was a minute when the Eraser who pinned me had his hand wrapped around my neck."

Fang gritted his teeth. "Don't remember that coming up in the debrief."

"His hands were way hot," I said, ignoring him. "To a point that I noticed it."

Iggy squinted at me as if he were now certain that I'd totally lost it. "What, so he fingerpainted it on there?"

"Oh, don't be an asshole, Iggy—how the hell do I know?" I snarled. "Angel can read minds. You can smell day-old wet dog in a hotel room." I jerked my thumb at Fang. "He can disappear! None of it makes sense! Nothing about our stupid lives has ever made any sense!"

Iggy glowered at me but said nothing.

"Jeb said it himself: 'the human body can't be told when to mutate.' Maybe they implanted some sort of receptor cells in my neck when I was a baby. Maybe they put matching ones in the Eraser's fingerprints or something. Maybe that Eraser had been slated for that moment for my entire life."

Iggy shot me the driest look I'd ever seen, which, if you've been paying attention for the last few years, you'd know was truly a feat. It was like he was saying, Kids with wings I can get behind, but fingerprints and invisible ink? You've got to be kidding me.

"I don't know, Iggy. Maybe it's just one of those things we'll never know."

"I don't buy it," he said with unease. "It seems too easy. Everything's always a test. They're always watching us, aren't they?"

But a feeling of relief washed over me, and I said what I knew—somehow, just knew—was true: "There's nobody left to watch us, Ig."

For what felt like the zillionth time, I thought of my entire life—from my very first memories in a dog crate with Fang and Iggy in their own beside me, to all the bad things the School did to us, to the E-house, to the last three years, to everything in between. I thought of Erasers, of Vector soldiers, of expiration dates, of Ari—

My stomach turned over. Expiration dates. Ari. "Oh my God."

Fang and Iggy both leaned toward me.

"What is it?" Iggy said. "Are you okay?"

"Ari had no idea."

Ari. Ari who'd never know love, Ari who'd never grow old, Ari who'd never get to live to be anything more than the soldier the School had molded him into. The barely-detectable twitching of Fang's lip indicated that he understood immediately. Iggy was a little slower on the uptake.

"About what? Vector? Isn't he the one who blew this whole thing open for us?"

"No. About the expiration dates." I pictured the sight of him, standing there in front of us in tattered clothes, dripping in blood as he spent his last living moments giving us the information that would save our lives. "He martyred himself that day thinking he was going to die anyway."

The statement settled over the room like a thick fog.

"I know it's not the right thing to say," Iggy said quietly after a long pause, "but I'm glad it was him and not you."

I wanted to be mad at him for saying it so casually, but I couldn't be. Because I was glad it was me and not him, too.

Iggy gave in to the exhaustion and trudged off to bed but not without a reminder that he hadn't forgiven me for leaving them behind without a proper goodbye. I hadn't forgiven myself either and would be surprised if I ever did, but when I told him as much, he just peered hard at me through those unseeing periwinkle eyes of his before bidding Fang and I goodnight.

Fang scooted up the bed and sat next to me against the headboard. He took my hand and turned it over in his own, running his thumbs over my palms, my wrists, my fingernails. Then he traced a fingertip up and down my forearm in a way that made goosebumps break out all over my body.

He must've noticed, because he smiled crookedly. Then—get this—he laughed.

"We're in shock," he said, still looking down at my hands.

"Oh, totally," I said back. I gestured vaguely. "Almost die, yet all I can think about is your hands all over me."

His fingertip found the inside of my elbow and traced circles there. I tried not to squirm. This time, he didn't seem to notice—he was too busy knitting his eyebrows and frowning.

"What?"

He shook his head and still wouldn't meet my eyes.

"Fang. What."

"I…" he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat. "I really thought that was it. That you were dying. That you were dead."

A painfully loud silence filled the room. I didn't know what to say. The entire day had been an out-of-body experience. I felt totally detached from reality. The only thing anchoring me was Fang and the feeling of his hands on my arm.

"I've never felt like that before."

"Like what?" I asked, but he just shook his head. After a moment, he finally looked up. There were tears in his eyes, making his irises dance in the light like the coals of a banked fire. The sight made my chest hurt.

"I thought I was dying, too, Fang. I really did." I took his wandering hand and cupped it in my own, bringing it to my lips and placing a kiss there like some sort of Academy Award winning actress in a romantic comedy. "But guess what? I didn't."

He looked at me again and then reached to pull my ragged t-shirt away from my neck.

"It's still there," he said with a sort of tired fear. "Why is it still there, Max?"

"Maybe it always will be. But it's okay, Fang." I looked into his eyes and tried to channel some sort of reassurance through my own. "They can't hurt me. Or any of us. Not anymore."

Fang looked at me levelly and reached into his jeans pocket, producing a folded piece of paper from it. I looked at him questioningly.

"I found this on the fridge when we were ransacking the kitchen for nonperishables earlier," he said quietly. "I didn't read it, but I figured you wouldn't want to open it in front of them."

I took it from his hand and examined it. It was a clean page from one of Angel's old coloring books—it looked as though it had been torn messily from it and folded with the same haste. My name was scrawled across the front in red colored pencil, right over the uncolored outline of Clifford the Big Red Dog.

"Who…?"

"You don't recognize the handwriting?"

I was surprised for all of two seconds before remembering Fang's stupidly comprehensive memory. "Let me guess. You do."

His face was protected again. He motioned toward the note with his chin. "Open it."

So I did.

Max,

I don't know if you'll ever come back here, but I figured it was worth a shot. Maybe you already took Vector down. Maybe you're in the process. Maybe you're in hiding. Whatever you're doing, if you're reading this it at least means you're alive, which is about as much as I can ask for.

I remember when Jeb left the School with you guys. He told me you had some sort of mission. Told me that I was part of a bigger plan, but that was all he could tell me. I found out way too late that we weren't part of a plan. We were part of a game.

There's nothing left for me here. There never really was anything for me to begin with. But you have your crazy family, the one I was told I was programmed to hate. What they failed to mention is that nobody can be programmed for anything, not even mutants. Rumor has it that we can't even "expire"—but I don't know who to believe anymore. If I'm going out, I'm going out on my own terms, and the number on my neck says it's today, so I might as well make the best of it.

After the raid here, we're headed to your campsite. I could never make up for what I did to you all these years, but maybe after I see you there, you'll see me more like a human being now than a wolf.

I hope you find your peace, Max. All of you. If you haven't yet, I hope you kick their asses and free everyone, all of us, from this maze they've been making us run through for our entire lives. And after that, I hope you get to really live.

Your brother,

Ari

It was riddled with typos and grammatical errors, but the message came through all the same.

"He did know," I gasped, feeling fresh tears spring to my eyes. "He did all of that knowing he might not even die."

And then I clasped my hands over my mouth, turned my head into Fang's shoulder, and tried not to fill the house with the sound of my sobs.

Once I'd cried myself out, it became clear that I'd failed in my attempt to not wake the kids.

"Max?"

Angel pushed the door open, rubbing her eyes with her fists like she used to do when she was little. Warmth gushed through me at the sight of her. "I had a bad dream."

"C'mere," I said, patting the space on the bed in between me and Fang.

The door creaked again. This time, Gazzy and Nudge stood silently in the doorway. I beckoned them over, too. It didn't take long before Iggy followed suit, looking like he hadn't slept at all in the time since he'd left Fang and I.

The six of us crowded on my lumpy queen-sized bed like a litter of oversized puppies, strewn across each other tiredly and comfortably. I listened to them all breathe, appreciating that the five most important things in my life had made it out of this madness unscathed, and that we were whole again. But for the first time, I didn't want to take time and freeze it—I wanted time to move faster; I wanted to see where the future would take us now that we weren't tethered to a miserable fate or a life on the run.

My hand found Fang's and squeezed it tightly. He squeezed back. Then I took my fist and stuck it just above the middle of our pile. Fang smiled one of his million-watt smiles and stacked his on top of mine. Iggy and the kids were quick to follow.

My heart was so full that I felt truly ill. How had I lived my life not knowing it was possible to be this happy, this whole, this unafraid? There was a new silence and serenity to life—I hadn't noticed the constant, buzzing background noise of relentless anxiety until now, in its absence. I was so overwhelmed by this that I somehow produced even more tears. The way I felt was totally foreign, some sort of emotion that I'd never come face to face with before.

Iggy caught on before anybody else did. "What's wrong?" he said urgently. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," I said breathlessly, trying to keep myself from unraveling for the billionth time in the last few weeks. "I'm fine, I just…" I shook my head and wiped my cheeks clumsily. "I've never felt like this before."

"Like what?" Angel asked.

"I don't know," I admitted. "It's just, like… I feel like I can breathe, you know? Really breathe."

Angel wormed her way through limbs and bodies and cuddled up close to me like the way she used to when she was a toddler. I dropped my face into her hair and recognized that floral smell, even through the dirt and ash and dried blood. That strawberry-picking day at this very house two years ago felt like eons away.

"Max?" she said, looking up at me with those big blue eyes of hers.

"Yes, sweetie?"

"What do we do now?"

It was a question so monumental that it totally derailed my train of thought. I turned it over and over in my head. I looked at Fang, whose eyes were unguarded; he looked relaxed, relieved, free. I thought of the sacrifices we'd all made and the sacrifices so many others had made. I thought of the pain and fear and suffering we'd all been through. And then I remembered that it was over—it was all over.

In that moment, it was clear. Painfully obvious. There was only one logical thing to do.

"We live, Angel," I said, meeting five pairs of eyes as I did. "We live."

A/N: Wow. Well, here we are.

What a labor of love this has been. I can't believe it took me almost two years to write it. This story has such a special place in my heart. Thank you all for coming along for the ride.

Not sure if I'll be writing another fic any time soon or if at all, but I'm open to plot ideas. It would have to be post-SOF as the first two books are really the only canon I'm willing to be compliant.

Thanks again to you all, looking forward to hearing your final thoughts.

As always, your favorite gram-positive bacteria,

staphylococci