A/N: I do not own much of this. The idea was a challenge from Katie3llen (who has changed her name, but remains my friend.) The characters are Patterson's. The Song this was based off of is from the foo fighters (learn to fly) the motivation came from ruby1792 and my friend edwardlover1313. This last chapter is dedicated to you, my patient readers.
Max Pov:
Time changes things. It has made us age, I am now seventeen, Nudge is fourteen, Angel is nine and Gazzy is eleven. Ari is dead, Jeb is my real father, I have a sister, related by blood. We have all fond our families, both metaphoricly and litrally. We have come back home.
That, over everything else, is the hardest to deal with.
This place in the middle of nowhere is full of memories. It cuts open our scars if we're not careful, if we don't pay attention. But it is home.
I remember when we first came back, Fang and Iggy made me stand outside thirty feet from the house so they cound run a search and make sure it was clean. I didn't care if it was occupied by erasers, snakes and worms, it was my home.
Eventually they did let me come in, that was hard. It was quiet the first few days as we got used to the feel of the floors, furniture and our own beds. We kept Jeb's room closed, none of us were ready to re-visit that memory yet.
We dusted the cobwebs away, cleaned the windows, Gazzy and Iggy baught a camera online. They used it to take pictures of the flock, which they framed and hung on the walls. Fang updates his blog from the kictchen table at five in the morning, before anyone but me is awake. I came to recognize that this was how we moved on, by imprinting ourselves on this place, by trying to live our lives normally, the way we did when we were first here.
Fang Pov:
It didn't take therapy, or drugs or a speech to make us go back to normal. We could never get back to normal, we all knew that. So we tried to get past it all, itex, death, pain.
We came home. It was the only thing we wanted to do after the showdown in germany, and I am glad we made it back here. We belong here.
I never knew that this place meant so much, to all of us. But it does, I could feel it when I first walked in the door. All the memories I never had time for, the happy seconds I thought I would never get back, the illusion of saftey- it was here.
This place held our hummanity.
I spent a good week and a half repainting my room, it was hard to walk in and see the paint stripped half off the walls, knowing I was the one who tried to tear it off. Just seeing my room in the state of chaos I had thrown it in, hoping it could be as broken as I was that day. It made me feel the pain fresh again.
There is a brilliant black and white mural now, my bed is black and my closet door is white. I have blackout curtains that make this room darker than clalligraphy ink, no matter the time of day.
I update the blog, keep the movment alive, help it grow. It isn't my fight anymore, I am done fighting. The ironic thing was I never started out fighting for a cause, I just faught for me and for the flock. Never mind that, it is someone else's turn to pick up where we left off, to take charge and do what needs to be done. Max and the rest of us saved the world once, it is someone elses job to save it again.
I wish you all the best, really i do. I am taking my e-mail address off the fansites. It is time for us to get some rest. I think I'll retire, at age seventeen I have been through enough for a lifetime. Maybe write a book, who knows what's going to happen. Life is about living, not always knowing what's next.
That's the fun of it.
Iggy Pov:
In the fall I am going to school, i will not say where or for what. Probably for many things. I hacked into the MaxRide credit card, backtraced the account codes and found a pretty nice sum of money. Since itex is gone and we didn't actually get paid for our suffering and emotional damage I figured we should take steps to ensure...Oh what the heck. I wired the cash into six savings accounts with Nudge's help. We are all set for life.
Things are still as close to normal as we will get. We fly in the canyon, we argue at the dinner table and Max still cannot cook. Somethings never change, somethings always change. You never know which is which.
No Pov:
There were six. Designed to be the best, the strongest. Given a gift people only dream of, skills the like of which were never seen before or since.
Beneath all that they were human. They felt pain, joy, love, greif, hate and hope. They saved us, all of us. Now they bear the scars, live with the consequences. Everything has a conequence, a world saved and soldier made is a childhood lost and a family broken.
Lucky, not all consequences are bad, a family was made, a new kind, out of love, trust and nothing more.
This was their story, how they became one instead of six, how they learned to fight, most importantly how they learned to fly.
-Twilightjunkie1313