A/N: I can't wait until the end to say this: guys. The fact that you are not just reading but are also reviewing has me CHURNING out pages of this story. I am nervous. I am excited. I am loving writing in a way I haven't in so, so long. God, I am so grateful. Okay. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.

SIXTEEN

"Laaaaaaaaaaaadies and gentlemen, it's time for the one, the only, and the very long overdue event of the year, guaranteed to get you out of your seats, out of your shirts, and out—of—your—minds!" Gazzy boomed in a vaguely familiar announcer voice into the half-eaten granola bar he was gripping like a microphone. "It's the first annual, never-before-seen, sure to be wet-n-wild, Flock—Polaaaaaar—Pluuuuuuuunge!"

Gazzy mimicked the sound a roaring crowd might make and swooped erratically through the air. One of his stripey, dark greige-ish wings almost took out Iggy, who veered sideways to throw him off course.

"Good Lord. How much UFC has he been watching?" I murmured to Fang, who was actually laughing out loud. "As soon as we get home, remind me to cancel the ESPN Plus subscription."

"Oh, no, you don't!" Nudge soared from above like an asteroid, nearly smacking me clean out of the sky. She pulled up at the last minute right in front of me, hovering, arms crossed firmly over her chest. "You took my social media, you took my junior prom, and you took my spot on the varsity basketball team, but you will not take my Conor McGregor, Max!"

It took an Academy-Award-worthy amount of self-control to refrain from slapping my forehead and sighing heavily, even though it was my fault for being surprised in the first place. I've known the kid since the day she was born, but I still can't figure out which Mean Girls cafeteria lunch table Nudge belongs at.

You think I'm kidding? Ask her about makeup. Then ask her about cars. Then computers. And then, ask her about Hogwarts houses. You'll need a neck brace from the whiplash.

We were cruising at a lazy pace searching for a stretch of deserted beach on Chesapeake Bay, trying our best to forget the stress of the day. With much trial and error, we'd figured out over the years that sometimes the immediate discussion of big decisions wasn't the most constructive way to get things done. So now we did shit like go swimming in November instead of talking through minor crises.

Hey—you've been warned before. If you wanted normal and sensical, you picked the wrong YA mutant sideshow.

Iggy barrel rolled in the air and coasted on his back with a dramatic hand palm-up over his forehead. "Oh, Conor!"

Nudge's head snapped in his direction like a dog responding to a shock collar. She tossed me a this conversation so isn't over look that she absolutely, one hundred percent learned from me, and then launched up to Iggy, thumping him harshly with her wing. Gazzy shouted something in an Irish accent, and I turned away, smiling.

Angel led the dive to an isolated cove of sorts, tucking her pearly white wings in for so long that I nearly had a heart attack. She landed and looked up at me with a cheeky grin, because she didn't need to be able to read my mind to know she'd scared me shitless.

Nudge and Angel dumped their packs and pulled their t-shirts and jeans off immediately, running headlong toward the ocean in sports bras and bikini-cut underwear. Iggy and Gazzy followed suit in just their boxers. Weird? Maybe for some families, but we hadn't exactly packed our beach bags for this year's season of Survivor: Recombinant DNA Edition, and, honestly, based on what I saw during my trips to the mall this past summer, modern swimwear made our undies look like colonial garb. I don't care how hot it is, ladies—nobody needs to see that much of your ass.

There was that, and then the fact that we'd grown up as lab rats, of course. Modesty had been quite low on the Crap That Matters list, and we'd never really gotten around to re-prioritizing that one.

Fang and I landed last. My boots hadn't even fully touched the sand before I was cupping my hands over my mouth and shouting at the others, "Don't drown, please!"

Fang started brushing some sand off a large, flat-topped boulder near the craggy sea wall and smirked boyishly. "You do realize they're all teenagers now, right?"

I chucked my backpack with maybe a little too much force at him and bent to unlace my boots. "Not all of them."

"Well, the eleven-year-old has gills, so."

I threw a boot at him this time.

I folded up my socks and stuffed them into my other boot. It was chilly but not frigid yet, so I let myself appreciate the cool sand between my toes. The sun only had an hour or so of life left in it, which meant I had about forty-five minutes before I turned into a miserable Maxcicle. I stripped my windbreaker off and let my wings relax against the back of my shirt a little bit as I plucked my way across the sand to Fang.

He was sitting cross-legged on the far side of the boulder, facing the shore. He pulled two Cokes from his bag and held one out to me wordlessly.

"Ugh, yes." I settled across from him and accepted the proffered can. "Beauty, thy name is high fructose corn syrup."

"We should do it."

I paused with the soda halfway to my mouth. "Do what?"

"The mission. With the FBI." He looked out at the water. "I like this. I want this. Forever, and uninterrupted."

I peered over my shoulder, following his line of sight, and we watched together as Nudge tackled Gazzy into the crashing surf. Not far from them, Iggy swept his hands through the water at a fast-moving Angel with a wide, Christmas-morning grin.

The beach memories flooded in: Fang and I's first kiss, Fang's near-death experience, my botched attempt at removing the chip, countless other sunrises and sunsets and everything in between. Good, bad, ugly. Just like our lives.

"If we do this and it backfires," Fang said after a long while, taking a sip of Coke for dramatic effect, "I'll never forgive you, you know."

I glared at him. He grinned. I leaned forward and shoved him, but he only grinned wider.

"Asshole."

"But if we do nothing," he continued, ignoring me, "ter Borcht will just come back when we least expect it and fuck it all up again."

I nodded. "Alas."

He crushed the now-empty can in his fist and bobbed his head like he was seriously considering.

"High risk, high reward," he said.

"Sounds nothing like us."

Fang's gaze flitted over my shoulder and back, his eyes growing mischievous, glinting like a sharpened knife edge in the sun. It was a look I was only used to seeing on his face in the, um, bedroom, and my pathetic little adolescent heart jerked a little.

That split second of distraction was my downfall. Because instead of thinking, Gee, let me investigate why Fang is looking connivingly over my shoulder, I just sat there like the lovestruck teenage girl I was. Man, you get me out of the clutches of evil and in the blink of an eye, and all situational awareness goes to hell like that!

A hand grabbed my shoulder and tugged me back. I nearly lost my balance on the rock but managed to whirl in time to catch the eye of one very evil looking bird kid: Gazzy.

His grip was stronger than I remembered, his arm more muscular. I knew all too well that he was growing like a weed, but often times I forgot just exactly how much he'd bulked up in the last few years.

I tried to shake him off, but he was persistent. I glowered at him. "What do you think you're doing?"

Nudge, Iggy, and Angel were making their way up the beach behind him. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Fang shuck his t-shirt off. I frowned.

Gazzy was stone-cold serious. "It's called the Flock Polar Plunge, Max."

"It isn't called anything, because it is not even a real thing," I said dangerously.

"I mean, it's definitely a real thing," Iggy argued.

My eye caught Angel, who was chewing her bottom lip to keep from giggling.

I shrugged my shoulder again, harder this time, and managed to break free of Gazzy's grip. I wasted no time rising to my feet and backpedaling a couple of steps—directly into Fang.

Whose arms came around me tightly, locking in the front around my waist.

"Don't you dare," I seethed, but it was too late.

Iggy had made it all the way up the beach and was eyeing me with the sort of insidious glee he got whenever he was going to make himself laugh at my expense.

"No, no, no, no," I said sternly, trying to plant my feet firmly in the sand with little to no success. "It is freezing! This is not funny!"

"Not funny yet," Iggy corrected. And then he lunged forward, grabbed me by the knees, and lifted me off the ground.

"Cut the shit, you two! I am not kidding!"

Angel and Nudge were doubled over with laughter. Gazzy ran alongside Fang and Iggy as they carried me toward the water, talking into a fake microphone again.

"Real-Life-Icarus and Fnefarious Fnick team up for a one-hit K-O on Max the Merciless—"

"Hey!"

"—Max the Machiavellian—"

"Gazzy!"

"—Max, the Most Miserable, Mundane, Mind-Numbing Mutant in Maryland!"

Well, you can't say he's not creative.

"Tune in live to see her salty demise!"

I was still thrashing in their arms, swinging back and forth like an off-balance rotisserie chicken as they walked, but by now I was cracking up as I begged them half-heartedly to stop.

Iggy's feet hit the water first, kicking freezing-cold ocean and seaweed up at me as he waded in. Then he and Fang stood across from each other in knee-deep water, dangling me parallel to the shore. They swung me a few times for momentum.

And then they launched me into the Atlantic Ocean.

I plugged my nose a second too late and surfaced hacking like a chain smoker, one hand over my chest to prevent my lungs from breaking out of my sternum from the force, the other hand outstretched and flipping them the bird.

"Man, I didn't know you could shriek like that," Gazzy said with wonder.

"I didn't shriek!" I choked. Then I felt a vice grip on my ankle and... shrieked. Gazzy looked at me pointedly.

Fang's dark head popped up from under the waves, a dopey grin splitting his face in half and warming me from the inside out. He shook his head from side to side like a wet dog, spraying ocean water from the thin tendrils of his hair. I splashed him angrily and he laughed.

Pissed as I was, I really did love that laugh.

"It's the Flock Polar Plunge, Max," he said, as if that were any sort of explanation. He shrugged innocently. "He did guarantee that it would get you out of your seat. And your shirt," he added with a pointed look at where my thin henley had attached itself like cling-wrap to my torso.

Normally, I'd kill him for saying something like that in front of the others. But as Gazzy started making overelaborate wretching noises and Nudge laughed even harder, my eyes honed in on a couple of straggling water droplets cutting their way from his breastbone to that stupid little V where his abs met his obliques.

Then there was another tickling feeling along my ankle.

I shrieked again, this time at where I could just make out Angel's blonde curls under the breakers. "I'm gonna kill you!"

We joked around like that for a while, splashing each other, doing handstands in the shallow water, and pairing off for games of chicken. Fang and Angel refereed, and Nudge and I managed to beat Gazzy and Iggy not once, but twice. The second time might've only been because Nudge blindsided Gazzy with one of her wings, but, hey—if you ain't cheatin', you ain't eatin'.

The sun started setting over the horizon, which I took as my long overdue cue to drag myself back to shore. I was exceptionally waterlogged since I'd, you know, gone swimming in my clothes, so I wrung my hair out and peeled my t-shirt off, making a beeline for where Fang's sweatshirt was balled up next to the rock we'd been sitting on.

There was a stupid grin on my face, but I didn't even try to wipe it off. I couldn't remember the last time we'd goofed off like this. My heart felt full. Whole. Like maybe, for once, things were actually going our way.

I had just discarded my jeans and was pulling on a pair of sweatpants when I heard footsteps approaching me from behind.

"You're not getting laid for months after that little stunt."

A loud, sputtering laugh that did not belong to Fang met my words. I whirled, feeling my face burn, as Iggy howled with hysterics.

"Oh, kiss my ass!" I hissed, throwing a jagged shard of driftwood at him.

"What the heck are you clowns giggling about up there?" Nudge called from the shoreline.

"Nothing!"

I wrung my soaking clothes out a final time and crammed them into a plastic baggie. Iggy's laugher eventually died down and he wiped his eyes dramatically.

"You lovebirds," he said, pulling his t-shirt back on. "You keep me young."

We did, eventually, talk as a group about it all. It was largely the exact same discussion we'd been having for a week, now. Fang was satisfied now that we legally had an out at any point in the process, although I could tell he would rather we took our new papers and got the hell outta Dodge. The rest of the flock was just as resolute as I was, though: it was time for ter Borcht to go, and for Gideon Goodchurch to come home.

Our meeting the next day at FBI HQ was quick and uneventful. Leo explained that his task force needed time to put together a more succinct plan, but that we'd likely be moving forward with Operation Shepherd in the next thirty to sixty days.

This caught me hilariously off guard.

"Wait. Two months?" I blurted.

"Probably closer to one. Now that we know for sure Goodchurch is there, it's more time sensitive," Leo said. He cocked his head to the side like a confused dog might. "Why, were you expecting longer?"

"You made it seem like you wanted to be over there, like, yesterday."

"If it were up to me, we would've been, trust me. But there's a reason they don't let me make the snap decisions," he said with a wry grin.

"Oh, we know all about snap decisions," Iggy said, pointing an accusatory finger my way. I pointed a different finger his way. "Max is the Queen of Impulsivity."

It took every single bit of willpower in me not to fire back that he was the Duke of Douchebaggery. Every single bit.

"With the way you guys live, I'm sure it's necessary. In my line of work, it's borderline suicidal." Blessedly, before Iggy could make any snide comments about my own history with borderline suicidal tendencies, Leo cleared his throat. "Anyway, there's no need for you all to stay in DC while we prep. We'll have to stay in touch, obviously, but that can easily be done by phone or Zoom, so if you'd like to go home, you're more than welcome to."

Home? The word hit me in the chest like a softball.

Home. I pictured our house by the Canyon, with its 1970s wallpaper and chipped siding, empty and lonely without us. The wraparound farmer's porch, the cluttered entryway lined with sneakers and mittens and raincoats, the Arizona winter nights that were no doubt creeping in uninvited. Iggy's favorite ponderosa pine. It was a place I was certain we'd never go back to, a loss I had mourned deeply and completely.

Here was Leo, resurrecting it in front of my eyes.

"Oh, Max," Angel said, eyes bright with joy. "Can we go home?"

"You mean we can just… go back?" said Iggy.

Leo smiled broadly. "Sure can."

"It's safe?" Fang asked.

"No more or less safe than you left it."

"Can I get a cell phone?"

Leo glanced at Nudge and then at me. "Uh. I don't—"

"We can discuss this later, Nudge," I said, because I was positively not going to have this blowout in front of a federal agent.

"Ma-ax," she whined. "Come on! You're being paranoid!"

"Nudge." I used the no-nonsense Leader Voice I so rarely needed nowadays. "Later."

I don't know how or why, but she shut her mouth and dropped the issue, and since I appreciate a win when I can get one, I did, too.

While we went back to the hotel to collect our things, Leo pulled some strings to get a private plane to take us back to Arizona. Say what you want about our government being corrupt, but knowing someone on the inside was working wonderfully for us, and since we'd spent so many years getting fucked over, I was gonna ride the high for as long as I could, thank you very much.

Two hours later, we were at a military base just outside the DC area with our backpacks, standing on a landing strip and gaping up at the aircraft before us.

It was one of the hardest things I think I've ever done, stepping into that death trap. It was a small one—a private FBI jet that Leo had somehow wrangled for us—and the thought of being vacuum sealed into anything was enough to give me the heebies, but a manmade bird? That was then, by some type of "physics" or "engineering" (read: witchcraft), going to cross the continental United States at thirty-five thousand feet and six hundred miles per hour? Can I get a hell the fuck no?

I'd like to say I volunteered to be the first because I'm the bravest, but that would be a flat out lie. All jokes about bragging rights aside, I'd never seen the others so collectively freaked before in my life, and since I'd been a pretty shitty leader as of late, I knew I owed them one.

So instead of worrying, instead of ruminating, instead of thinking about it for a second longer than necessary, I simply climbed the staircase and put one foot in front of the other until I was over the threshold.

And then I smothered everything else down, plastered a smile on my face, turned around, and talked the rest of them off the ledge.

Angel and Gazzy took the least amount of pursuading—after a short, quiet exchange, Gazzy adorably grabbed his sister's hand and they stepped in together. It was one of the incredibly rare moments that reminded me that they were, deep down, just children.

Nudge took a little longer. It wasn't until Iggy's fingers ghosted along her shoulder that she seemed to unfreeze, dragging her eyes up from the jetway to look at me. I winked at her, she smiled, and she boarded the plane. Iggy hesitated behind her, but just barely. I reached forward and squeezed his fingers tight, he nodded once, and then he got on, too.

That just left Fang—so where was he?

I peered down the staircase and into the setting sun. It sprayed the sky like a crushed blood orange, violent and beautiful and loud, and I took one breathless moment to drink it all in. Fang was about halfway up the stairs and doing the same thing, his back to me, hair whipping in the gusts that had kicked up along the airfield.

His name was snatched from my lips by the wind, but he turned anyway, face as open as an ocean and maybe just as deep. It was all written there, clear as day. Worry, in the notched skin between his eyebrows. Fear, in the tightly wound muscle of his jaw. Peace, steady on his broad shoulders. Love, even louder than the sky.

He finished climbing the stairs and eyed the threshold. One of his hands took mine, and the other cupped my cheek. When he smiled, the rest of the world could've turned to ash and I wouldn't have noticed.

"What?" My voice was shaky, so I gripped his hand tighter to ground myself.

He shrugged, dropping half his mouth into the crooked grin I'd come to know and love (and resent). His eyes shimmered like hot coals at the heart of a dying flame in the light of the sunset.

"Just admiring the view."

I snorted and rolled my eyes, shoving him playfully.

"Hey," he said, gently tugging my chin back from where I'd looked away. "I'm serious. Let me look at you."

There was no doubt in my mind my face was turning as red as the sky behind him. "Here I am."

He studied me like he was seeing me for the first time, like my face held the answer to all of life's unsolvable problems. Then his gentle fingers, softer than snowflakes, traced my brows, my nose, my lips. They parted under his touch.

When he spoke, his voice was just a hoarse whisper, but it made goosebumps break out all over my skin.

"You are my whole world."

Five little words—that's all they were, really—but he said them like if they were the only thing he'd ever be able to say for as long as he lived, it'd be okay.

A black SUV rolled to a stop not far from us. Leo and two other agents I vaguely recognized piled out of the back, smoothing down their ties and tugging up the zippers on their FBI-issued windbreakers, totally oblivious to our moment.

It passed, as moments always do. I threaded my fingers with Fang's. "Let's go home."

I gave him a kiss on the cheek and turned, leaving the sky, the city, the rest of the world, to burn behind me.

A/N: I love you all so much. For real.

To respond to some of the sentiments in the reviews:

1. I, too, would love to hear Iggy's prerehearsed ricotta speech. And honestly, I guarantee you if I opened a fresh Word doc and flipped my brain to Iggy mode, it'd write itself. That alone would be way too niche to post anywhere. But I guess, theoretically, he's been accumulating knowledge about cooking - and, as a result, ricotta - since the day they landed at the E-house and why on earth is he even so good at cooking anyways and omg I've got a great idea for a one-shot, guys

2. Thank you for the praise of my OCs - namely, Leo. He was one of the very first parts of this story I ever wrote - looooong before the hiatus - and I am so glad you finally got to meet him. He's fun to write, if only because it's so easy for the flock to fuck with him, and I've had a blast watching him evolve into what he's become without me meaning to.

3. Thank you for the validation of my filler chapters, because it was MUCH needed.

4. To pan: homie, I feel like I'm getting my groove back, too. Also, never forget that you're the only reason this story still exists. You checking in held me accountable!

10Bluebird11, welcome back!! I remember you fondly and it's so lovely to see you're still around!

M.G, your long review breathed life into me. Guest - thank you for giving me your time. microsoftcum, I appreciate you.

xoxoxo