Chapter Text
You left her.
Nudge hugged herself around the middle like she could hold her resolve together with her hands. The guilt sunk into her with every passing day, becoming more and more a part of her routine until she couldn’t separate it from her actual emotions anymore. What made it worse was the swing backward, the delightful reverse impact of the guilt that perpetuated the cycle.
You can do whatever you want.
She’d persuaded everyone but Fang to put on the sweatsuits and helmets the agents found for them, haphazard slashes down the back for their wings. The little room would’ve worked for a normal family, but six wingspans took up more space than they’d anticipated. It was cramped to say the least, and the small courtyard outside the window didn’t do much to abate the cabin fever.
"A test? Seriously?" Gazzy grumbled.
Iggy shook his head, a sardonic smile on his face. "Nothing ever really changes. It's just different uniforms."
“I'm tired of tests," Angel whined, her curls comically puffing out from under the edge of her helmet.
Fang noticed it too. He reached over and pulled her hair into two braids, flipped through in the middle so they'd hold without an elastic. He didn't speak.
One one hand, Nudge found it silly that they were being such sticklers with the toiletries. On the other, she wouldn't put it past Iggy and Gazzy to come up with a way to make hair ties dangerous to the whole facility. Nudge dug her knuckles into the slots between her ribs.
"Even normal kids get checkups," Nudge offered weakly. "This is just a checkup for superheroes."
Iggy sighed. Nudge didn't validate him with a reaction.
Fang was even sulkier than usual. He had only uncrossed his arms to fix Angel's hair, and they'd gone right back to defensive positions immediately afterward. Morale was not high. Nudge bit her lip and evaluated the situation.
There was an 32-hour expiration date on the Flock's tolerance for restrictive situations. Whether it was an undesirable bedroom setup, a shared bathroom with not enough sink space, or having to share a backseat with three sets of wings to accommodate, they didn't have a high tolerance for discomfort. They'd left it behind when they escaped the lab. Now that they'd had a taste of mountain air and legroom, none of them easily gave it up. They were at the 48 hour point now. Any slight, no matter how small, could set them off.
Fang did not take the time apart well. If he was any indication of how Max was doing back on the plane, the guilt Nudge was battling deserved to win. He hardly slept. He was a shadow to so many, but not to them. Nudge knew when he woke up and when he pretended to be asleep. She knew the sound of their breathing when they were really unconscious. Fang had pretended for two nights in a row.
Nudge had spent a lifetime doing as Max did. Most of the time, that was all that stood between her and predators. Max’s path was the safest one, the right one, the… boring one.
What Nudge didn’t want to acknowledge was that there was guilt before, too. It took a different shape, of course, but the idea of following Max forever had become a bruise in her mind Nudge avoided thinking about. She didn’t want to take orders for the rest of her life. What would the point of freedom be?
And so she swung back and forth between regret and delight for two days. After they told her where she was going, she started to lean toward delight, which made the guilt worse.
Max would know what to do.
"Show them the truth," Nudge said, her tone even. "Go all out. They'll be documenting the whole thing. There's no point in hiding what we can do at this point."
"Of course there is," Fang argued.
"No, we have no secrets anymore. Itex has us entirely mapped out. SHIELD has access to our files, and you know it. We looked through them on the plane. They know more about us than we do. At this point, the best we can do is show them our bark isn't bigger than our bite."
"Perfect, they'll know how strong our muzzles need to be to tame us," Fang countered.
He stepped in front of Angel. On instinct, she fell back, lurking in his shadow, one hand coming up to hold the worn hem of his leather jacket. She was behaving far younger than she actually was, but that was nothing new.
"We don't know enough about SHIELD to trust them," Fang said. "Jumping from one shady organization to another won't keep us safe. Secrecy isn't safe, either, but it's all we have. Showing our hand only makes us easier to control."
There was a beat of silence. Nudge forced her expression to stay neutral. He had never changed. Worse, he had never rebelled. Nudge felt an unexpected pang of bitterness toward Fang for trying to enforce rules that had never really helped them. She very, very narrowly held back what she wanted to say. When Nudge looked toward Angel, she caught her petting her own shoulder.
“We get to vote for ourselves now,” Nudge protested.
Fang’s eyes widened. He didn’t answer her, so she continued, looking to Gazzy and Iggy for support. They both watched her as if she were a stranger.
“I think we need to decide for ourselves,” Nudge explained. “We can give it a week, right? We can do anything for a week.”
Deciding for themselves. A non-unanimous choice, for the first time in god-knows-how-long. Iggy angled his head and Gazzy mimicked him. He looked toward his sister, which Nudge followed. Angel looked like she was falling squarely on the guilt side of the spectrum. She had a curl wrapped around her finger and was pulling at it so hard her fingertip had gone red.
Nudge dared a glance at Fang, who was scrambling. He was biting his lip like he did when it was Max’s turn to talk in a Flock argument, when he was cooking a good response to shut her down. He’d do it to Nudge if she lost her advantage, and they were scared enough to accept any leadership at this point. Nudge saw the future clear as day if she didn’t make her point and quickly .
With a perfectly even tone, Nudge asked, "Why is Maya so happy?"
"She's stupid," Gazzy grumbled.
"Max's clone is stupid?" Iggy retorted gently, effectively silencing him.
"There's a version of Max that chose Itex," Nudge explained. "She has a family just like us, but she's healthy and alive and loyal. They have something worth fighting for."
"Are we seriously defending Itex right now?" Fang muttered in disgust.
"No, we're assuming risk," Nudge explained, impatient. "Nowhere is safe entirely for us, but SHIELD already has access to all our secrets and they haven’t hurt us yet. Maya and the Erasers are clean and fed and safe because they have resources. All we have is us. What they’re asking of us is to validate their intel, which will happen eventually anyway. In exchange, they look after us for a little while. We have more to lose by betraying their trust than we do by showing them something they already know."
"We didn't survive this long by trusting people," Gazzy put in. "Nobody cares about us like we do."
Nudge's mask of tolerance slipped, an edge emerging in her voice.
"Don't you wish that wasn't true?"
Gazzy pulled his feet up to rest on the edge of his bunk. Angel released her grip on Fang's jacket. Fang blinked like he had never considered the possibility in his life, like whatever argument he’d been having with himself had hit a scratch.
Nudge struck while the iron was hot.
"We've been looking after ourselves for so long because we didn't think anyone else would, but that's not true. There are people who can make us safer, even if it's transactional. We scratch their backs, they keep us from being Eraser food. We can't be hungry kids in the woods forever. Eventually, we need to become something else. All of us."
Nudge had never seen Fang looking quite so off-kilter. He and Angel both had the same look of panic, like they’d both just realized they’d left the stove on back home. Angel’s voice came out hesitant.
"What are we supposed to be now?"
Nudge shook her head. "I don't know, but don't you want to find out?"
The trials were nothing new. In fact, at times, Nudge had to suggest new tests based on what Itex used to have them do. Not just flight speed and acceleration assessments on a football field, but stopping distance, horizontal drift, and vertical launch power (with and without jump-starts).
At the tail end of the flight test, Angel landed with a soft crush of turf, taking a few quick steps to regain her balance. She looked to Nudge as soon as she'd stabilized. There was a pleading, hopeful look on her face, both foreign and familiar. It hit Nudge with that same ache that it was how Angel looked at Max.
Iggy and Gazzy flanked her right side, a few meters behind her, but not so far that they couldn't protect her if needed. On her left, trying to fade into the background, Fang sulked, but maintained his usual position as the second. While Iggy and Gazzy chatted with each other, Fang just waited, listening, observing. Nudge felt a new appreciation, and a new irritation, for the strength of the structure they formed. Even in Max's absence, the hierarchy survived. What if they really weren't capable of standing on their own? Not just without their leader, but without each other?
Nudge felt the truth as strongly as she felt gravity, as smoothly as she felt airstreams slipping over her wings. They had to change to survive. She also felt the gut-punch that accompanied it, the fear that lived inside the threat of change. Who were they without the roles they filled? Who was Nudge when she wasn't bound so tightly to her history that she couldn't breathe?
The guilt came back. Who was Max when she wasn’t being the leader? That was a question Nudge knew the answer to, but only because she was more observant than Max ever gave her credit for. She saw what happened to Max after she met her mom. Max sometimes looked lost now, like Angel when she was uncertain, like she was looking for someone to help her make the choice that saved the day. No one ever did.
She felt no strong pull toward leadership, no fear at the idea of being overruled like she knew Max did. She was just like the rest of them, stuck forever in the role she'd assumed so long ago she probably couldn't remember doing it. Whenever Max became their leader, whether it was after Jeb abandoned them or when they escaped Itex or when they first met, fresh off life support in those cages, she had no way of knowing it was the only person she'd ever get to be. When she'd first comforted Nudge or saved her food for Angel or bitten a whitecoat, she'd unintentionally sacrificed any chance at being protected. Unlucky Max.
Gazzy and Iggy had broken the door lock and Nudge hadn’t wasted a moment looking at the files. SHIELD, like Itex, was so obsessed with cybersecurity that they overlooked simple things about people. One of the tablets the agents had used to take notes was left undocked. Unlike the computers, it didn’t have lockout procedures. It was easy enough to look at the spots on the screen where the passcode had been typed in and mimic it.
Nudge was alone in the interior of the testing room with the tablets. A soft violet glow illuminated the walls on the edge of the gym. Nudge sat down on a weight bench and skimmed through the tablet’s contents. As she’d suspected, the tablet was configured to upload to a cloud and wipe when docked. The head agent had been distracted. Nudge watched him taking notes, and he kept setting the tablet down and forgetting where he left it.
Nudge clicked through the files and pulled up the compiled reports from the cloud. When only five files appeared in the folder, Nudge frowned– one was missing– before remembering there were only five of them now.
Max was on a plane somewhere, surrounded by SHIELD agents. Fang was withholding his skills from the team on the ground because he didn’t trust that SHIELD was full of good guys. Nudge gave them the benefit of the doubt because the alternative meant they’d abandoned Max in enemy territory.
They had to be good. There had to be someone out there who was good.
Nudge tapped on the first of the files. For all her reluctance, Angel had listened, exposing not just her strengths but also her weaknesses to the scientists. They'd documented that she perfectly heard thoughts made of words, meaning she couldn't directly sense feelings or eavesdrop on animals or interpret other languages. They'd also discovered what Nudge had long ago, that Angel's eavesdropping wasn't like regular eavesdropping in that thoughts couldn't give away location like sound. She couldn't track you by hearing you think.
Most frighteningly, she had low-level hypnotic abilities. She could suppress executive functions in other people, but had limits on how many and for how long. Her mind would always be her greatest asset, but she was only seven. A point in her favor-- no material tested could stop her. A point against her-- she couldn't talk in other people's heads. As far as her physical modifications, she was the weakest flyer, slowest runner, and most easily exhausted Flock member. There was a reason they spent a decent chunk of their time looking after her.
Itex would've killed her if not for her telepathy, Nudge realized with a sick feeling. They'd eased up on her testing ever since discovering what she could do. She would've suffered the same fate as those other little girls if she hadn't been able to do incredible things with her mind.
Gazzy's file was much shorter. He had more follow-ups, a more complex case than Angel. They'd noted impressive memory skills (Angel had the same callout, until it had been modified when they realized she was reading the mind of her memory tester). They had noted his gastrointestinal 'talents,' but had also noted it was at his request. There was a line about run-of-the-mill superhuman strength, which gave Nudge a giggle. Most impressive, and also offered up by Gazzy seemingly unprompted, were his mimicry skills. Someone had drawn a line between memory and mimicry.
Iggy was next. His notes were a mess. Whatever he'd shown his testers, he'd stunned them. Kinesthetic memory, a complement to Gazzy's skills. Nudge wasn't alone in observing the perfect alignment. The tester had made a note at the bottom to assess whether one of the boys had adapted to better match the other's skill set. He remembered everything he'd ever touched, smelled, or eaten. Nudge giggled, biting her nail. A unique sort of curse, to have perfect scent-memory and be best friends with the Gasman. He was the most agile flyer of the group, with a perfect score on the dynamics test. Max was right to call him the ballerina.
Nudge flipped to another page and frowned immediately. Fang's file was barely a skeleton. They'd called his temperament cold and detached. There were notes on how silent a flyer he was, but he was not noted as the stunningly silent force Nudge knew he was. He'd ignored her advice and played weakness.
Of course he had. He liked to call Max stubborn, but he was just as bad. He couldn’t manage to trust anyone, even if it could save him.
She frowned and swiped onward. Her own results appeared. Glee sparked in her chest and she sat up straighter.
She was the fastest of the whole group. Her own name, highlighted with multiple words ending in -est, was a first. Being slotted a few rows down from Max's name for her whole childhood left no room for things like that.
Nudge wasn't only noted as the fastest. She was the fastest at solving math and statistics problems, the quickest to pick up languages verbal and programmatic, the friendliest. Nudge skimmed down the list of notes and lingered on the final sentence.
Leader-- intuitive intelligence. Consider clearance.
Nudge laughed out loud, a bright, short cackle. She covered her own mouth gently, fingertips resting on her teeth. So much for being a chatterbox.
The idea of change delighted her. No more being stuck as a middle member of the Flock, neither making calls nor being protected. Max was the leader because she needed to be, but they weren’t little kids anymore. They weren’t safe in the mountains, either, and even then there had been threats. Clearly, there were people out there who were intent on using the Flock for their own selfish purposes. The world would not let them be invisible. It was time to own that.
Once everyone was showered, which took a minute in the shitty travel-size shower, Angel crawled into Nudge's bunk. The boys had gone to get late-night snacks from the break room down the hall. Nudge had negotiated for a more comfortable space for them that afternoon, but they were still vetting the houses they'd be sent to. It was an easier argument than Nudge anticipated.
Angel was still tugging at her curl anxiously. Nudge patted the spot on the mattress beside her, and Angel scooted closer.
“Hear anything juicy?” Nudge whispered.
Angel sighed shakily.
“It’s just so loud ,” she explained. “I got used to you guys. I could pick out your thoughts from across the house if I wanted. There’s so many people here and I don’t know what matters and what doesn’t.”
Nudge bit her thumbnail.
“Okay, you’re off eavesdropping duty for now.”
Angel looked relieved. She pulled her feet up to her chest and hugged her knees.
The boys came back, arms laden with snacks. Fang had his leather jacket on, despite the late hour. He always wore it when he was anxious, barely a degree off from a security blanket.
Nudge screwed her eyes shut and exhaled slowly. She always made an effort to stay tapped into the emotions of the Flock, but more weighed on her ability to get it right now. She was no longer providing decision support to Max– she was calling the shots. She couldn’t even lean on Fang to help, since he wasn’t even on board with her plan. Deferring to him like Max sometimes did would mean he became the de facto leader, a position he clearly expected to fall to him.
Nudge couldn’t explain why she was so certain, but there was no doubt in her mind that failing to adapt would be the end of them. It was no longer enough to be a prize in other people’s games– the Flock needed to learn to play, and Nudge was prepared to make the necessary moves.