Chapter 2
Disclaimer: I don't own Maximum Ride
A/N
Me: Hey people! Sorry it took me so long to update, but this is a really long chapter, almost 3,000 words, so I hope that you'll forgive me and won't strangle me in my sleep.
BFF: Thank you guys for all the reviews! They were really awesome!
Me: No, they weren't just awesome, they were really freaking awesomesauce!
IMPORTANT INFO – Ariel is Angel in this story, she's going by her public name or whatever they called their fake names in the MR series. I just thought it'd be weird to have an angel named Angel.
Max's POV
It's been about two months since Zeph died in that fire. It still haunts me. Sometimes I'll fall asleep and I'll see him burning but I can't do anything to save him, just like the first time. Other times I'll dream that I'm walking down a dark alleyway. I'm scared and I'm alone. Then I hear that maniacal laugh and the demon has me cornered. After that someone appears and the demon slits his throat. I don't know who the person who suddenly appeared is, I can't see his face, but I know he's someone important to me because I cry and scream out his name.
Then I die.
I don't remember the person's name when I wake up, but I'm left with a mild impression as to what it was. I'll just sit there for hours trying to figure out what it was, but I never do.
I sigh and get out of bed. I wasn't asleep, I try not to sleep. I was just resting.
Every angel has their own living quarters. A bed, book self, dresser, and side table. Nothing special. Our clothes are all white or blue. It's almost like having a uniform, but it's closer to a dress code. No revealing clothes, nothing flamboyant, and no high heels, angels are pretty tall to begin with so heels would be simply ridiculous anyway. It might seem a bit strict but I don't mind, who has the time to think about what they wear anyway. Oh yeah, right, humans. Lucky, Nudge would call them.
Nudge is one of my best friends. She helped me a lot after—Zeph. I gulped, forcing the tears down as I was reminded of that night once more.
"It was my fault he died." I said to the empty room with pain in my voice.
"No it wasn't." A small voice told me from the doorway. Ariel.
She came up to me and gave me a bear hug, holding me tight. Ariel is another one of my friends. I don't have many, just Jeff, Nudge, and Ariel. Ariel is a guardian in training. She's like a daughter to me. I'm not a mother or anything, but I feel motherly towards her. It's impossible for angels to conceive. We're thought up by God, like Athena was thought up by Zeus. Well, except we don't spring out of his head. We just—appear.
"You didn't kill him Max, the demon did." Ariel said. What she said was true. Angel Investigators, or A.I.'s as we guardians call them, it's a bit of a running joke, came the day after the fire and inspected the house and—bodies, and they found that the fire had been a special, dark kind of fire. Hell fire. Something only demons can wield.
But Ariel was wrong, it had been my fault. Zeph died because some demon wanted to punish me for something I did. He was out to get me, and Zeph and his family paid the price. What's worse is that I don't even know why the demon had it out for me. Maybe in the war I killed one of his buddies or something? No, that can't be it. Demons don't care about each other. This hate he had for me had to run deeper…
What did I do? Nothing came to mind.
What did I do to drive somebody to kill innocents, innocents that I cared for?
Suddenly overcome by emotion, I tried to hold back a sob, but it burst out and soon Ariel's blue shirt was soaked. She patted me on the back and slowly I calmed down.
The door opened and I wiped away the last of my tears, but I couldn't mask the redness of my eyes.
"Max!" Nudge greeted and gave me a huge hug. Nudge had a knack for making just about anyone feel better. I guess that's why she's such a good guardian. Sadly her happy aura wasn't helping me at all today. "Guess what?"
I forced back my emotions and put on a fake smile, it wasn't that I didn't want to smile a real smile. It was more like I couldn't. How could I let myself have that small pleasure after what happened to Zeph?
"What is it?" I asked, but couldn't hide the false cheer. Nudge gave me a small smile and hugged me in an attempt to make me feel better, and as much as I want to say that it did help, it didn't, it only reminded me of the fact that Zeph would never be able to hug his loved ones again.
"We both got reassigned!" Nudge said happily with a smile on her face. "We're back in business baby!"
I froze for a second and then burst.
"WHAT?" I yelled, almost breaking the sound barrier.
"We got assigned new wards." Nudge replied, she looked like she wanted to say more, but she seemed to, however impossible it seemed, have put a lid on that non-stop talking mouth of hers.
I sat down, soaking in the new information. It was too fast, too soon.
"I'm not ready for this." I whispered. Ariel hugged me around the waist, trying to comfort me.
"Well apparently our superiors think otherwise, but don't worry Max. They said that your new ward will be easier than—" She stopped, shutting her trap again as her brain caught up with her mouth. But I caught onto what she was about to say. My new ward would be easier to look after than Zeph was. I didn't doubt it, but the words she said, or rather didn't say, made me sad.
I didn't want a new ward. I wanted my little ball of chaos back. I wanted Zeph back.
But I knew that would never happen. Zeph had passed on.
I got to my feet without even a hint of enthusiasm.
"Let's go pick up the paperwork." I struggled to say. (Yes, even Heaven has paperwork lol) My throat closed up from emotion, but I fought back and put on an emotionless mask. I needed to stop falling apart. I was a guardian, my job was to protect people, even if I failed once, that didn't mean I was unfit for guarding. I knew several guardians who had failed more than once. I had failed just one human. But that failure hurt worse than being burned in the fires of Hell, because I knew it had been truly my fault that Zeph had died.
I just hoped my next ward wouldn't meet the same fate.
"I already got the paperwork." Nudge said, shoving a manila folder over to me.
"Then let's head for The Gate." I replied and then turned to Ariel. She ran to me and wrapped her arms around me. She wouldn't be able to come with us, she was too young and she wasn't even out of guardian school yet.
"Goodbye Max." She sniffles and I held her to me.
"Goodbye sweetheart, be good while I'm gone." I told her. She replied with a smile that said 'I will' and let me go.
Nudge and I walked out the door. I looked down at the paperwork in my hands, flipped open the manila folder, and gazed down at the photograph on the page.
A teenage boy, probably between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, stared up at me with obsidian black eyes. I felt an eerie tingle shoot through me, not a cold chill, but a warm tingling. It was odd, I didn't recognize this feeling. It made me anxious, this feeling that I was having, but there was something in the boy's face that I found comforting. He made me feel okay about this new feeling. It's nothing to be afraid of. I shook my head confused, trying to clear my thoughts. Of course my thoughts at that very moment decided it was a great time to have a marathon inside my head.
My thoughts were jumbled and incoherent, but one thought in particular kept coming back to me.
There's something special about this boy.
I couldn't pin down what that special thing was, however.
Soon Nudge and I were at The Gate. I know what you're thinking. A giant pair of golden gates, right? Wrong. The Gate looks like a mixture between what humans would call an "elevator" and "subway". Basically it's a normal subway car with all those bunches of seats, except it's pointed straight down like an elevator and the seats are adjusted to accommodate the different angle. Also there were no windows to peer out of, nor was there an entrance or exit. When you get to where you need to go, The Gate will pass the place and then suddenly you're not in it anymore, instead you're standing about ten feet from your destination.
We go to the ticket booth to give the angel in the booth our tickets, which were in our folders, and then he waves us on. The tickets hadn't cost anything, their only purpose was to help angels get on the right ferry down to Earth. There are no tolls for using The Gate, in fact there were no tolls at all, everything in Heaven is free, souls and angels give to each other freely. When one is in need of something, someone else will be happy to give it to them with no strings attached. Humans have tried to do this before, work in the way Heaven works, but it never works out on Earth because some devil is always able to convince a human to be greedy, and then the system falls apart.
The humans don't know they're attempting to imitate Heaven, they are not to know what Heaven even looks like until they become souls, but it's in their nature to try to act like God so they imitate God and his creations without their own acknowledgement.
Thinking of humans and souls reminds me of Zeph again. I haven't been able to see him yet, he's still in transition. Transition is the time it takes to get to Heaven, humans think of transition as Purgatory, but it isn't. Purgatory is almost like Earth, you can touch everything in it, smell everything, taste everything, but it's really just a simulation of what life is like on Earth. It's a second chance. A chance for the person to make different decisions, and the decisions he or she makes determines how long that person spends in Purgatory before going into transition.
Transition can take anywhere in between a second and several lifetimes in human time.
I just hope Zeph's transition is short. I need to tell him how sorry I am.
We board The Gate, well we don't really board it, we walk towards it and then suddenly we're inside it in our seats. The inside of The Gate is white and silver and there's a light airy feeling to the vessel.
I look down at the picture of the boy again and glance to the left of it at his name.
Nicholas "Fang" Walker.
What do you know? The angels had gone to the trouble of finding out the boy's nickname. Though I guess it's far from surprising. The angels in the department that issues out assignments are suckers for details.
Fang. What a strange nickname? But the more I looked through the files on the boy, the more the name seemed to fit. It rolled off my thoughts as easily as Nudge or Ariel's names, and for some reason the name felt like it was familiar.
The boy was a trouble maker. He bit a girl in first grade named Maya and left her with scars from his teeth, that's when kids started to call him Fang instead of Nick. He then became a notorious thief in his middle school years, but kicked the habit after a long discussion about it with his mother. Well, it was nice to know he respected his mother.
After that, in his high school years, particularly in his sophomore year, he got into numerous fights, which he usually won. For some reason that made me smile. Upon realizing this I frowned. Why was I smiling? I wasn't supposed to take delight in the sufferings of any human, and from the pictures I saw, Fang had left one or two of his opponents beaten to a bloody pulp. I wondered what they had done to make Fang beat them so badly. I felt ashamed of myself for having smiled, so I kept my mouth in a flat line after that.
The reason for his rampage of fights during his sophomore year was apparently due to his parent's nasty divorce which had separated Fang from his sister Ella. There weren't very many details other than that.
I couldn't find anything about his junior year.
Recently, according to the file, Fang had become a sort of party animal. He had gone to every high school party with beer since the beginning of the year, his senior year. He'd often get drunk and fall asleep on the lawn of whoever's house the party was at. He'd even been taken into custody once, but he was let go since the police had way bigger problems in their hands at the time than a drunken teenager passed out on a park bench.
I looked back at his picture and felt an incredible sadness grip my heart. He was drinking his life away, if something wasn't done soon he'd become a full-blown alcoholic. I don't know how I knew it, but somehow I knew that his partying and drinking, they weren't just to party and drink. There was something else, there was a reason he was doing these things. After reading all of the other information on him, drinking and partying seemed way out of character. Fang was the loner, the "emo" kid. He couldn't be out to socialize at these parties. He was smart, his test scores proved it, and it was only recently that his grades had plummeted.
I turned to the last page, the information had been gathered about two months ago, I skimmed over the page and I found the reason why.
It was a death certificate.
I read over and picked out whose it was and what had happened to her.
Her name was Maya Johnson. I instantly recognized her name from earlier in the file. She had been the girl Fang had bitten when he was younger.
She was killed in a car accident about two months ago at the start of the school.
Above the accident report and death certificate was a picture that had been paper clipped to the pages.
In the picture Fang and a girl with a pink streak in her blonde hair held one another close. Both were smiling brightly, their eyes glowed with happiness. I took the photo and held it closer to my eyes to see it better. As I gazed at Fang I felt that odd warm sensation course through me, I tried to shake away the feeling, but it stubbornly stayed. It perturbed me, it made me nervous and unsure of myself. Was this an effect of failing Zeph? Or was this because of—Fang?
I forcefully pushed my thoughts of the strange feeling aside and I turned the picture over. I could feel the odd feeling leaving me, replaced by a cold sickness that radiated from my stomach and made me want to puke.
On the back of the picture surrounded by a giant heart: Fang and Maya, junior year
I wasn't the only one experiencing loss.
A/N
Me: So what did you think?
BFF: Fang seems like a very bad kid in this story…
Me: Fang isn't a bad person—
Fang: Thanks.
Me: No prob. In this story, Fang won't be perfect like I wrote him out to be like in The Runaway Case, in this he will be a much more developed character. He won't make the best decisions, and sometimes he'll be a bit of a jerk. But over the course of this story he's going to change and go through a lot of stuff.
BFF: Fang isn't the only one who will be going through some bad stuff. Max, as you know, is dealing with her guilt over Zephyr's death, but something worse than a bit of guilt is going to be knocking on the door soon, and Max is going to have to overcome her fears or else—
Me: *clamps hand over BFF's mouth* No telling! It's a surprise!
BFF: *sighs*
Me: *removes hand from BFF's mouth*
BFF: Max has to overcome—
Me: *hand over BFF's mouth* BFF, no telling. *reprimanding voice*
BFF: Okay, fine. *huffs*
Me: I'll try to update sooner for the next chapter if I can, most of my updates will probably be on the weekends from now on since I'm in school now.
BFF: Ugh, I want it to be summer! How many days till we get out?
Me: A couple months.
BFF: Nooooooo! *sobs* Freedom, I miss you!
Me: You still have weekends off.
BFF: It's not the same!
Me: True.
BFF: *sobs*
Me: Keep reviewing!