A/N: This chapter goes out to Maria, who somehow knew I would be posting this chapter this morning. Hope you checked soon after I posted. Enjoy your party time :)
SIX
Dr. Martinez offered to style our hair for us. I trusted the woman with my life and had very little concern over the state of my hair, so I had no objections to this. I also had little patience for Nudge and the Gasman's melodrama, so the deal was sealed before I even ran it by anyone.
Leader Max. That's me.
Our trip to their place felt different, largely because the paranoid part of me was expecting flying Erasers (who we hadn't seen in three years) to ambush us somewhere over suburban Arizona. Between Fang telling me to relax, Iggy teasing me for being so twitchy, and the Gasman once again serenading us with "Country Roads, Take Me Home," I was ready to punch just about anything I could get my knuckles into.
When we landed, Ella came flying out of the house and straight into my arms, as she always did, before not-so-discretely making her way into Iggy's. Iggy laughed and crouched to hug her properly, since he was, you know, over a foot taller than her.
Gazzy made retching noises. Nudge stared at them longingly and sighed.
"Young love," she whispered to me.
"Hey! Why don't you look at me and Fang like that?" I whispered back.
She wrinkled her nose. "Because you're like my mom and dad. Ew."
Ella made her way down the rest of the line to greet all of us. Total, who'd (to Angel's absolute devastation) opted to stay with the Martinezes in light of his whirlwind romance with Magnolia, predictably launched himself into Angel's arms upon her landing.
"My sweet! How long has it been? I've missed your tender touch."
Iggy huffed exasperatedly. "How has he possibly gotten more melodramatic?"
"You think I know?" Gazzy said back. "Five years later and I'm still adjusting to the fact that he talks."
Dr. Martinez spent the first half hour trying to force me to talk about the article and our next moves. I dodged every question, much to her obvious dismay. Eventually I had to flat out tell her I didn't want to talk about it. Or that I couldn't talk about it. I wasn't entirely sure which. She seemed hurt, but I couldn't process it right now.
The next few hours consisted of haircuts, dyeing lessons, fajitas and—you guessed it—chocolate chip cookies.
It was something out of a sitcom, really—I was parked on a kitchen chair in the middle of the living room with Dr. Martinez hovering over me. What I hadn't known was that Ella was part of the cosmetology program at her high school, making this a far more efficient process than I'd expected.
The potent chemical smell of hair dye had filled the air almost immediately. Iggy, who could literally taste it, had gone through an entire pack of gum trying to rid his mouth of it. He sat across from us on the couch with a grimace…
…Until Ella giggled at him from where she was cutting Fang's hair.
"Don't look so grim, Iggy," she said brightly. "You're gonna look great as a brunette!"
Iggy, whose grand or great-grandparents had to have been straight off the boat from Ireland, turned the deepest shade of crimson I'd ever seen him blush. He opened his mouth to speak but couldn't find anything to say. The Gasman snickered.
"You might have to do this again soon," Dr. Martinez said as she parted my hair into neat segments. "Don't your cells regenerate at a crazy-fast rate?"
"Yup," I said tiredly. "Perks of being a freak. Just another thing to add to the to-do list."
She frowned. "It's really not that hard, I promise," she said softly. "Plus, if it's going to make things easier for you…"
"I know, I know," I said, waving a hand dismissively. "It is what it is. Don't worry about it."
She looked like she was worrying about it, but there wasn't much I could really do about that.
Nudge and Fang were too dark-haired to benefit from dyeing, so styling was all we could really pray for for them. For Fang, that was easy—Ella cut it so short that she used a buzzer at the sides. When she was done, he looked totally different. In a good way.
Dr. Martinez had wrapped my hair in a towel and was "letting the dye set," giving me free reign to advance on Fang and run a hand through his new 'do. I drank in the entirety of his face now that I could, you know, see it.
"Whoa."
"You're drooling."
I shoved him playfully and ran a finger along the side of his face. "Look at your jawline."
"Oooh!" Nudge said. "Max, you're right! Great bone structure, Fang."
"Delightful!" Gazzy agreed in Nudge's voice.
"You sex icon, you!" Iggy cooed. Nudge offered both middle fingers.
But I had eyes only for Fang (God, listen to me. I've gone totally soft). I bit my lip and half-smiled in the way that I knew drove him nuts; he gave me a pleading look like, Don't do that here.
"Blech!" Gazzy spat. "Mom, Dad—keep it in your pants!"
"Ugh, no," Iggy groaned. Dr. Martinez had moved on to him and was expertly working dye into his hair with a grin on her face at our antics. "I was praying it wasn't more sexual tension I was feeling. For Christ's sake, you two—"
I was ready to cross the room and clock the boys when Nudge let out an overjoyed squeal. I spun around and saw her wide-eyed and gaping at Ella, who was grinning ear to ear sheepishly.
"You know how to do cornrows?" Nudge shrieked.
Ella blushed. "I mean… yeah."
"And you never told me?"
"You never asked!"
"Well, I'm asking now!" Nudge said excitedly, dropping into the chair in front of Ella. "Let's go!"
And the rest of the afternoon carried on much like that. Blissful. Peaceful. Borderline happy, despite the circumstances.
It was hours later, just as Nudge was admiring Ella's handiwork and Dr. Martinez was finishing a wet trim of my newly darkened hair, that there was a knock at the door.
All of us froze.
"I'm assuming you weren't expecting company," I said tightly.
They shook their heads. I fought the urge to lay on the ground, pound my fists against the rug, and scream at the unfairness of it all.
"Iggy?"
He was way ahead of me: he'd stopped breathing altogether and was listening intently at the door. It only took a second before he was cursing repeatedly and scurrying to rearrange the living room back to its normal layout.
"It's the fucking FBI," he hissed.
I had a split second to decide between panic and adrenaline.
Another three knocks at the door.
Adrenaline won.
"We were never here!" I whispered to the flock, and they immediately got to work ridding the room of evidence. I looked at Dr. Martinez and Ella, both of whom were pale in the face.
Gazzy looked at the door. Before I had a chance to ask him what the hellhe was doing, he shouted in Dr. Martinez's voice, "Just a minute!"
Nudge was at Dr. Martinez's side immediately, grabbing her phone and deleting our numbers with fast fingers before doing the same to Ella's.
"What do we do?" Dr. Martinez whispered. I'd never seen her afraid before, and I didn't like the feeling it gave me.
"They don't have the house surrounded," Iggy said, throwing towels into the hamper as he moved. "Just two agents at the door. They don't seem threatening, but..."
Yeah. But.
"How are we going to get you out of here?" Dr. Martinez asked.
It was a very simple question, but it seemed to suck all of the air out of me. The FBI was knocking at her door, presumably to question her about her involvement with us—with me, one of America's Most Wanted—and she was worrying about us.
"On it," Fang grunted in response. "Back door in forty-five, everyone."
"You're coming with us," I said to Dr. Martinez.
Fang turned on his heel and looked at me like, Are you absolutely freaking insane? "What?"
If Dr. Martinez was offended, she didn't show it. She shook her head once. "Absolutely not. We can't run, Max."
"But—"
"Thirty!" Fang hissed urgently.
"This is okay," Dr. Martinez continued. "We'll be okay. But—wait." She dashed down the hall and into her bedroom, returning in seconds with a zippered cloth pouch that she shoved into my hands. I knew it was full of money and immediately tried to give it back to her. "Take it. I will not argue with you about this. Now go."
I had no idea how to process this. Our entire lives, we'd been running from threats, sure, but they were always threats that we could fight off—and typically succeeded at fighting off. The FBI was different. We couldn't punch our way to freedom without making our lives astronomically worse.
And now the Martinezes had been dragged into this. Two women who'd put their entire lives on hold to help us. Two women who were our friends.
In the end, though, it went how it always has gone and always will go: self-preservation. Protect the flock at all costs.
"Please," I begged, staring imploringly into Dr. Martinez's eyes, so eager for her to grasp the magnitude of what I was about to say to her. "Please—I've asked so much of you, you've done so much for me with nothing in return, but please, you can't tell them about us. Please. I'll do anything. You have to—"
"Max!" Fang was absolutely furious. "Ten seconds, let's go!"
"Coming!" Gazzy called at the door again in Dr. Martinez's voice. Iggy swiped the trash bag full of incriminating supplies as he hustled toward the rear of the house.
Dr. Martinez locked eyes with me; they were compassionate despite the underlying fear.
"Never," she promised. "Not ever. Promise we'll see each other again?"
"Promise," I said automatically. I had no clue if it was true.
I swiped my backpack off the floor, shoved the cloth pouch into it, and was at the back door in six pressured strides, grabbing Nudge's hand in a death grip before offering one last look at the Martinezes. Fang opened the door and shimmered into invisibility. The affect rippled down the line until we were all completely out of sight.
I'm sorry! I wanted to scream. I'm so sorry. I fucked up again.
Fang led us deep into the woods behind the Martinez's place. We marched silently for about a mile, hand in hand, until Iggy announced lowly that we'd distanced ourselves sufficiently. When Fang shimmered back into view, his jaw was set tight. He dropped Nudge's hand and stalked off a few more paces with his fists clenched at his sides.
Nudge shivered, looking nauseous. "Man, that always feels so weird."
"God dammit," Iggy said with a growl. The back of his neck was still stained from the dye. "What the hell!"
His hair was now a soft shade of chestnut brown; it was the same color Dr. Martinez had put in my own. Iggy's eyes seemed bluer than I'd ever seen them and he actually looked markedly different now that he was a brunette.
"This sucks. This sucks a lot," Gazzy agreed. He and Angel had been the last two up for dye-jobs, meaning they were still just as blonde as they'd been five hours ago, albeit with styled hair. I closed my eyes and tried to count what few blessings I had left.
"U and A," I said as meaningfully as I could.
"Yeah," Iggy said bitterly, unfurling his wings. Ella had kept his hair a bit longer than Fang's. Wisps of it blew in the wind, hiding what I knew was a dejected expression. "Up and away."
Nobody spoke on the flight back. No sky-high concert from the Gasman, no quips from Iggy, no I'm hungry from Nudge. We were home in record time.
We split up wordlessly when we got there. Gazzy reached into the cabinet and grabbed a giant tub of trail mix before trudging into he and Iggy's man cave. Iggy pulled leftover pasta from the fridge and heated up enough for himself and Angel. Nudge collapsed dramatically on the couch, looking more catatonic than I'd ever seen her. Nobody uttered a syllable.
I didn't even have the energy to pretend for them. Life was wringing me out like an old towel. I made a beeline for the stairs and headed straight into Fang and I's room. Fang was directly behind me.
He locked the door behind us and I instantly started hyperventilating. I'd been freezing moments before, but now I was hot—I pulled my sweatshirt away from my neck, fanning myself as the panic swept over me.
"Fang," I gasped. It was the only thing I could get out; I said it over and over. I sat at the edge of the bed and pulled my sweatshirt over my head, leaving me in just a camisole. Even that felt restricting. I twisted my hands in my hair and pulled, trying to ground myself somehow before I completely detached from whatever tendril of sanity I had left.
"They're going to get arrested. They're going to get arrested and it's my fault. It's my fault, Fang. What if they threaten them and they have to tell? What if the FBI is on their way here right now?"
The words were coming out in a pressured sort of whine. I was helpless. I was clueless.
What now? What the fuck now?
I rushed to the window and pulled the curtains closed, then lunged for the door to tell the flock to do the same for the rest of the house. Fang stepped into my path and put his hands on my own, gently untangling them from my hair, expression open and readable: he was worried.
He knew I was blaming myself for the Martinezes. Of course I was. And he knew how guilt tended to drown me like an undertow.
"Max," he said steadily, "you have to breathe."
"I am breathing! I'm so sick of people telling me I have to breathe!"
"Okay, then stop breathing for a second!" he demanded. I was stunned into compliance. "Okay. Now start breathing again. Only slower," he said after a moment.
This was déjà vu—we'd already hashed this out, hadn't we? And here I was again, totally losing my cool.
"Think about what you're saying," Fang said carefully. His eyes were wide. "First of all, Valencia's not going to tell them anything about us. I don't trust anyone, but I trust her."
"They're going to arrest them!"
"Second of all, there's no way they arrest Ella. She's seventeen."
"Okay, but—"
"Thirdly," Fang said, forcing me to sit on the bed, "they have absolutely no proof that we were ever in Arizona."
"You don't know that!" I bellowed. "What if they have photos? They had photos of me in that restaurant, didn't they?"
Whatever brilliant point Fang was prepared to rattle off next died with the hopeful expression on his face.
"Yeah," I said emphatically. "Think about that."
He sat next to me on the bed and looked at his feet. I could tell just by glimpsing at his profile that he was trying to calculate a way to make this all better.
"We have no clue whether or not they have photos," he said slowly. "And it seems pretty unlikely that they would've been able to get photos of us with us not knowing. Iggy would've heard camera shutters or sensed it or something, I'm certain of it. He's basically fucking omniscient at this point."
I heaved a shaky breath. "We're screwed. We're totally screwed. And they're screwed. And it's my fault. It's always my fault."
"Explain to me how this is your fault."
Before the sentence was even all the way out of his mouth, it was obvious Fang knew he'd said the wrong thing, but it was too late. I jumped back to my feet and started pacing again, twisting my fingers in my hair again.
"I'm the one who went for help when I got shot five years ago—and we're pretty sure Erasers showed up looking for me even then. I'm the one who went back again to have the chip taken out, knowing we ran the chance of this happening. Back then, Vector could've killed them. Even so, we barely got them out of there in time."
And the problems hadn't stopped there. When they'd returned to their home after Vector blew up, the outside had been untouched, but the interior had been turned totally upside down. It took months for me to feel even remotely comfortable with the fact that they were living there; even now it felt sketchy.
"And now I'm the one that took us there to get our stupid haircuts!"
"She offered, Max," he said calmly.
"That's not the point!"
Fang stood up, grabbed me by the shoulders, and sat me in front of him in the bed. He was trying to hide it, but it was clear to me that he was exhausted, either from worrying about me all the damn time, trying to talk me down from the ledge, or both.
Let's be realistic here—definitely both.
"You can do one of two things right now," he said with waning patience. "You can dwell on this and keep freaking out about the fact that it's happening, or you can try to calm down and help me figure out what the hell to do about it."
I noticed the tightness of his jaw and the thin line his lips had become and realized all at once that he was stressed, too. But he wasn't falling apart over it. He never did. He wasn't asking for me to reassure him or help him keep it together. He was asking for help figuring out how to keep us safe. He was doing my job, because apparently I'd forgotten about it.
"I know this is a mess, Max. I know we're backed into a corner. I get it. I'm right there with you. I'm scared too," he admitted, but his face showed no emotion. "But how are we going to fix it?"
My brain flipped into an old, foreign setting it hadn't really needed to truly use in years: Leader Mode. And just like that, my breaths came more evenly and the world seemed sharper around me.
I looked at Fang; he had obviously noticed my change in demeanor and was smiling with his eyes. One of his hands found my cheek and cupped it.
"There she is." Relief wove its way through his voice as he spoke. "That's my girl."
A/N: Hey, y'all. Once again, any sort of personal life I could ever possibly have has taken the back burner to Real Life Shit TM; I'm sorry you waited so long for an update. Below is a rant about my current life and inability to cope, please feel free to skip as this is definitely far more than you guys signed up for, but I am currently working on ~learning how to ask for what I need~ so here goes:
I will be totally honest with you guys: I am so tired. I feel like I've been running on fumes since the beginning of COVID. A very close family friend committed suicide out of the blue just before the pandemic truly blew up (the one year anniversary is fast approaching), I've been working absurd hours under absurd conditions for almost a year, and my life still feels like it's falling apart on a daily basis. Working as an RN in a major city at a major, world-renowned hospital (or working "on the front lines" anywhere right now, truly) during times like this is so many things that I couldn't even express—there is no doubt that I'm still pushing away all the shit I haven't processed yet / can't deal with because we are still go go go. My mental health has declined at an astronomical rate, and I know I'm not the only one. Life fucking sucks right now.
Writing fic is honestly one of the few things that I feel like I can still work at that isn't necessarily work. Does that make sense? Like, it's not like reading a book or watching a TV show. It's something that challenges me just for fun. I usually enjoy challenges. I miss writing essays and studying and I love to learn and evolve and work. But nowadays? I am so freaking tired and struggling, really struggling.
This is obviously a website for stories and not for authors to unload their life bullshit, but I am telling you this because it pertains to you and it pertains to how this story progresses.
I am at the classic point of I don't enjoy things I used to enjoy anymore. I'm 100% acquainted with the mental health scene so I know what steps I need to take, but I honestly want to level with you: this story is on the back burner. I am so down on my ability to complete it the way that I want, to fully flesh out the plot I want to get to, to make something I am proud of. I reread Like Lions and am ashamed of parts of it. I'm a perfectionist by nature and always have been, and it is daunting to look at where I want to go with this story knowing that I will never be able to write it well enough to accept.
I am NOT saying any of this to fish for reviews, I have been before and honestly still sometimes am a ghost reader and I totally get that vibe, I am just being completely transparent with you all and am saying I am having genuinely, truly such a hard time motivating myself to continue writing this. I feel like a loser all around in life, whether it be family, friends, career, hobbies… you name it. I am motivated to complete it, but encouragement from you guys and thoughtful responses would help me actually do so.
If you read, thanks for reading. If you didn't – TLDR, I'm a mess, need support, please review if you want to help me actually follow through and finish this story, this is a short update but it is an update.
There is a 100% chance that I delete this A/N at some point in the future when I look back on it and am embarrassed for my disclosures but at this point I can't even be bothered to care.
xo
staphylococci