A/N WHAT? Did that really just happen? Did I really just post three chapters in one day? Apparently so. :P Enjoy! Oh, and I need to make a small disclaimer: I've used a quote from Harry Potter in this. I do not in any way own Harry Potter. Not in the slightest.

It was evening when we finally tripped through the front door of our house in Oregon, Nudge's wheelchair getting stuck momentarily in the little ridge of the threshold. If it had been big enough, we would've gone to Mom's house, but there was no way that place was gonna hold two scientists, one all-human teenage girl, and eleven genetically-enhanced kids (count them – seven human-avian hybrids and four miscellaneous subjects. Kokoe was happier under the bushes in the yard than inside the house). Besides, Total had clearly been waiting for us.

'Have you any idea how worried I've been?' he shouted indignantly as we all crammed ourselves through the door and into the hallway. 'Beds empty! No note! Car gone – could've crashed – out of my mind with worry – did you care? – never, as long as I've lived…'

I stared at him, completely bewildered.

'What? Total, I-… What?'

Ella leaned over my shoulder from behind me.

'I think he's quoting Harry Potter,' she told me in a not-so-quiet whisper.

Total bobbed his small black head.

'I got bored while you guys were away, okay? Sue me. But seriously, what happened?' he asked, trotting after us as we moved through to the living room. 'You all look ready to fall aslee- woah.'

He'd spotted Nudge.

'Yeah, there's quite a lot that you need to get caught up on,' I said, slumping onto one of the sofas.

Over the course of the next couple of hours we recounted everything that had happened over the last few days. Different people took over telling different parts of the story, filling in the various gaps in everyone else's understanding of what had gone down inside the School: Fang explained how he'd been taken up to the aerial deck, one floor above the one where Holden and Star had been searching for him; Holden related the story of how the fire that eventually reached Nudge and Jeb had started; between the three of them, Ratchet, Dylan, and Kate told us all about their journey to The General's office and how they'd managed to apprehend her; Jeb jumped in to tell us again about everything Nudge had done to keep us all safe, how determined she'd been not to leave the control room until she'd finished her job despite the dangers of staying. Hearing the full story, it left me pretty stunned to see just how interwoven everyone's parts were – everything could so easily have turned out entirely differently.

Ella briefly went over the night out in the desert when she was kidnapped by The General (I refused to call her my mom in that context; they were most definitely not the same person), then it was Mom's turn. Slowly, shakily, she told us what it had been like before the tone had rung out through the grounds and collapsed the mental adjustments that had been made inside her head.

'It wasn't like there was a part of me trying to fight it all,' she said, gazing down at her clasped hands. 'It wasn't like I knew what I was doing was wrong but just couldn't stop myself. I didn't remember who I was before, I didn't know that the person I was being wasn't me. For those fifteen years, I was that person. I thought that everything I was doing was right, I believed without doubt in the necessity of all my actions.' A deep crease was visible between her eyebrows. 'Then I heard that sound and suddenly it was like my whole personality flipped – I remembered everything that had happened before the School took me, everything I'd done as The General. The things I'd been so sure of a second before just disgusted me.

'It's difficult to get my head around. I've lived fifteen years of my life as a different person.' She looked up at us, her eyes scanning the faces in front of her. 'I can't believe everything I put you through. I am so, so incredibly sorry.' Tears welled up and spilled over onto her cheeks, and Jeb reached out to grasp her shoulder.

'It's like you said though, Valencia: you lived fifteen years of your life as a different person. During that time you might have been her, but she isn't you. It wasn't you who did all the things you remember doing.'

If I could have gone back just over a week in time and told the past-Max how unbelievably glad I was to have Jeb around, she probably would've punched me in the face to try and snap me out of it. But I was. I reckon that ever since I'd found out that he was alive, the first time he told me that I had to save the world back in the School all that time ago, there had been a little part of me tucked away somewhere that never stopped praying he was actually still on our side. Finding out how much he'd risked to try and help us, how he'd stuck around to make sure that my mom was saved, made that part of me – the part that was still ten years old and thought Jeb was the best thing in the world – jump up and down in triumph.

'There's still something I don't understand,' Fang said from the back of the room, and all heads turned questioningly towards him. 'Not too long before…' The corners of his mouth tightened slightly. 'Not too long before I left, I got a message. Said I had to help save the world.'

'That was me,' Jeb said, nodding slowly. 'I knew what The General had planned for the flock; she'd told me about her intentions to break you up permanently.'

Mom winced at the memory and I shifted a little closer to her on the couch.

Jeb cricked his neck to the side, grimacing as he considered his next words.

'I suppose I thought that it would serve as a reminder for you if you did leave,' he said. 'I hoped that you'd recognise a broken flock would never be strong enough to achieve what needed to be done.' He shrugged. 'You helped save the world by coming back.'

Star somehow managed to frown and raise her eyebrows at the same time.

'You sent him a message to try and get him to come back before he'd even left? How do you come up with this stuff?'

Her words lightened the atmosphere a little, and a few smiles broke out. Mom looked at Jeb, a trace of amusement replacing the guilt that had been there before.

'It feels like a strange thing to say, but thank you for being so good at going behind my back.'

I think that being back at home was just what we needed; like I mentioned before, hanging around in that hospital was kinda like being stuck in a time warp, where everyone just sort of floated around in a weird not-quite-there way. Getting back to the house meant that we were forced begin functioning properly again.

For the rest of the evening, everyone spread out into different rooms and took some time to get their own bearings back. Despite the fact that so much awful stuff had happened to us all, the tension of the last couple of weeks was fading, and every so often a laugh would ring out through the house. It was strange; it all seemed so normal after the insane things that had gone down. Life goes on, I guess. Seeing as Mom was still technically the head of the School, she had been able to give order for all experiments conducted on human subjects to be discontinued. Even as we got used to being back, the labs and offices and testing rooms belonging to the School, Itex, the Institute, and the Doomsday Group were all being shut down or turned into shelters for the subjects they'd created. It was early days, and of course there were probably large numbers of genuinely horrible people still working in those places who needed to be weeded out, but it seemed as though all that scientific knowledge might actually start to be used for good instead of evil.

One of the best things about being back in the real world? Plumbing. The showers in the hospital had been fine for their general purpose, but being able to shut myself away in one of the bathrooms felt like just what I needed that first night back. With the hot water pounding down on my head, unwinding all the tension in my muscles, all I had to do was close my eyes for it to seem like, just for a while, I was the only person in the world. Not to self: "me time" can be a good thing. A very good thing.

Once I was out, I cleared the steam from the mirror and pulled my fingers through my hair to try and get rid of the knots in it. My non-Eraserified reflection did the same, and I slowed slightly as I thought back to the times when I hadn't been so lucky to see my own face reflected back at me. Those times are done, I thought, touching my cheek in an echo of my panicked actions whenever Eraser Max had appeared in the past. Done.

I'm really not the kind of person who draws a connection between having a shower and things being washed clean for a fresh start at life. But if I were the kind of person to do that, I totally would've done it just then.

Even though I had spent the whole day feeling exhausted, I found myself completely unable to sleep that night. By around eleven o'clock the house was pretty much silent, but I was totally restless, pacing around my room until I heard a soft knock at the door; when I opened it, I was met by the sight of Dylan standing in front of me.

'Hi,' I said, taken aback. He'd kind of been avoiding me for the past week, so seeing him at my door wasn't exactly the first thing I'd been expecting. 'What is it?' Then I noticed the backpack he had slung over one shoulder, and my eyebrows furrowed questioningly. 'Um… Going somewhere?'

He gave a small smile.

'I reckon I am. C'mon.'

And with that, he turned and walked away from me towards the stairs. I stayed in the doorway, frowning after him as I tried to figure out what he was doing; when he realised I wasn't behind him he turned back for a moment and gestured fervently for me to get a move on. Glancing around as if might see some clue as to what was going on, I sighed and rolled my eyes before following him along the hall and down the stairs. He stopped by the front door and spun around to face me.

'Dylan, what is this? What's happening?'

He was silent for a moment, his gaze searching my face. When he answered me, his voice was calm:

'It's time for me to leave, Max.'

'What?' The word came out much louder than I intended it to, and I froze as I listened for any movement upstairs. Grabbing Dylan's arm, I yanked the front door open and pulled him outside with me, closing the door as quietly as I could behind us. Coldness seeped through my socks as we stood there on the front path.

'It's going to rain any minute,' he said, looking up at the sky.

'I don't care. You're leaving? Why?'

Dylan dragged his eyes away from the dark clouds and looked down at me, his head cocked slightly to one side.

'I need to move on. It was right, what you said in that house in Reno; I don't really understand what love actually is, so how can I say that's what I feel for you?'

'I never said that,' I cut in. Thinking about Reno felt like looking over memories from years ago.

'No, but you might as well have,' Dylan replied smoothly. 'And you'd have been correct. I mean…' He rubbed at the back of his neck, suddenly looking uncomfortable. 'What Fang did, back in the holding cell… You said it yourself, it was for you, not me. He did it for you. He was willing to give everything up to not get you, to let you be with someone else. I can't get my head around it. Like, when he stepped forward I should've said something; I shouldn't have let him do it. But I was frozen.

'For a while I was afraid that I didn't do anything to stop him because there was a part of me that wanted to see him gone, out of the picture. But I realised that it was because I couldn't understand what was happening, couldn't even begin to get into the same headspace as him. It totally threw me.' He sighed and looked at me, his eyes narrowing as he thought through what he was saying. 'If that's love – and I'm pretty sure it is – then I really don't understand it at all. I think there's a lot of stuff that I don't understand.'

Rain began to fall then. It was the kind that went from zero to sixty in about three seconds, and suddenly we were being soaked in a downpour. Barely able to care through the surprise I was feeling, I crossed my arms and stared at Dylan through the rain.

'So, what, you're going on some kind of journey of self-discovery?'

He laughed.

'Something like that.' Taking a step closer, he reached out to take my hand. 'The thing is, Max, I still feel like I love you; no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise, it's not going away. Staying when I know that you don't feel that same would be too hard.'

'I'm sorry.' It was all I could think of to say. And I was sorry, in a strange sense of the word.

Dylan gave an easy smile and let go of my hand, not looking at all like someone talking about how the person they had feelings for didn't feel the same way.

'It's okay. You know, if you'd fallen for me then you'd have been doing exactly what the whitecoats wanted. Not really your style, is it?'

I grinned at that, shaking my head.

'So where are you going to go now?' I asked, blinking rain out of my eyes.

He shrugged.

'I'm thinking I might go around some of the different branches of the School as they're disbanded and stuff; maybe I'll start my own group.'

'Sounds like a good plan.'

Dylan nodded and bent slightly to look directly into my face. His expression had morphed into one of anxiety, and for a moment before he spoke I was worried.

'Max, this is ending on good terms, right? Everything with us, I mean.'

I shook my head in feigned exasperation, giving him a light shove.

'Don't be stupid. Of course it is.'

A smile spread across his face and he held out a hand for me to shake. Rolling my eyes, I stepped past his outstretched arm and pulled him into a hug; after a few moments he drew back, walking backwards down the front path so that he was still facing me when he lifted a hand in parting.

'See you,' he said, his voice raised to be heard over the rain.

'See you,' I echoed, then as he turned to leave I called after him: 'And hey – good luck.'

He laughed and gestured upwards at the clouds.

'In this weather? I'm gonna need it.'

Turning away from the house, he took a few quick, long strides along the sidewalk, and then he was pushing off into the air, his wings whipping out to propel him through the night sky. What with the rain and the darkness and all, it wasn't long before he was out of sight.

I opened the front door quietly, trying to squelch as little as possible as I stepped back inside the house. Once the door was closed behind me, I stood in the hallway for a moment, going over what had just happened in my head; it didn't feel like a sad thing, Dylan leaving. It felt right, for him and for me.

As I headed towards the stairs, I caught sight of a figure standing by the big glass doors in the living room. Tensing, I crept quietly towards the doorway, trying to make out who or what it was. Drawing closer pulled the silhouette into sharper focus, and I relaxed a little as I realised who it was: Fang. During our week in the hospital, the two of us had kind of skirted around each other. It wasn't avoidance, exactly – we still spoke and stuff – but it was like we didn't really know how to be around each other all that well. Everything felt a little awkward, as if it had some kind of added pressure hidden behind it.

He didn't know I was there, didn't know that I'd seen him. I could turn around and go quietly up the stairs, and put off whatever talk was waiting for us until some other time. It was tempting.

But hey, a week ago I'd finally fulfilled my stupid destiny and saved the world. I'd faced more stomach-churning emotion in the last few weeks than I had in my whole life before that. I could deal with a bit more. And I was done running.

'Hey,' I said, walking into the room.

A/N I know I've made you all wait a long time for some kind of resolution/talk/whatever between Fang and Max, but stay tuned, 'cause it's coming! (Review and it might come faster! :D)