Chapter Text
It started when a bunch of freakishly strong, wolf-people attacked her home, and one of them carried off Angel in a helicopter. Max took her family of flying bird-kids to go and find her father, and rescue her baby sister.
The wolf people were called Erasers, and they were led by a f*cking huge Alpha named Ari. Ari kidnapped the other members of her flock and took them to the School, a testing ground for the whitecoats — the scientists who created them. The flock escaped, but the Erasers chased them down into the New York subway. Max snapped Ari’s neck.
Jeb, her dad, then told her that she’d killed her brother.
Max and the flock had saved Angel, except Angel had enhanced her freaky mind reading powers, into mind-control. Max had barely had enough time to process that she’d had a brother and that she killed him, and that Jeb was basically a demon wearing human skin.
Oh, and besides Angel’s growing Jedi powers, the rest of the flock started developing bizarre mutant abilities. Oh, and Max took the flock to Disney World. Suddenly the Erasers stopped attacking, and Angel vanished. Ari reappeared, somehow, and he asked Max to come with him if she wanted to see Angel again.
Yes, Angel was safe; she agreed with Itex but disagreed with their methods.
Yes, Ari was alive — not cloned, because the whitecoats fused his neck back together. Oh and they grafted wings to his back so there was that. Also he wore suits now, instead of going shirtless.
Fang tried to fight off Ari, and got his face almost ripped in half for it. He screamed at her not to go. Max didn’t want to endanger the rest of the flock, but she needed to go see Angel. It had to be a lie.
She told Fang to protect the rest of the flock — Iggy, Nudge, and Gazzy. Then she got into a car and left with Ari, her brother whom Jeb told her she’d killed.
After dying, Ari had lost a lot of weight, and got a haircut (an undercut, to be specific – long on top and short on the sides). That didn’t make him any less menacing.
“Don’t go too far,” he said, “I don’t want to have to clip your wings.”
“You’re joking, right?” Max asked him.
Ari shifted his weight from foot to foot and looked down at his leather shoes. “They told me to use garden shears,” he said.
Max took a step backwards, stunned. He had to be joking, right?
His hands went into the pockets of his slacks. He was a head taller than her, but he hunched his shoulders in an effort to make himself look smaller — an impossible feat considering just how large he was. Max had seen rage twist his features, hatred, even murderous glee when he’d tried to kill Fang with his bare hands. He fixed her with his grey puppy-dog eyes, matching his light grey hair.
“Alright,” Max said, heaving a sigh. The fight left her. She only needed to comply until he led her to the white coats who would lead her to Angel. And besides, she wasn’t in the mood to fight Ari, in a crowded mall.
“How long are you gonna be here?” He reached into his pocket and fished out a leather wallet. He flicked out the credit card that was given to him, before slipping it back into his pocket. Max had to wonder where he learned to do that, if he saw it in a movie.
“I think I’ll need to look around for a while,” she said, her face flushing. Her life was basically a sitcom now — Shopping with Sociopaths.
He grumbled under his breath. “Don’t take too long,” he said, “I want to eat at the food court.” His hand rose and massaged the back of his neck, before he sauntered away. With his tailored suit, his hair, and his attitude, and the scar under his eye, he looked like a bored playboy spliced with a tormented war vet, not that Max would ever tell him that.
He’s not so bad, at least when he isn’t trying to kill me.
While Max went shopping, Ari sat on one of the leather couches and whipped out his Game Boy so that he could play Pokémon. There was no way to sit comfortable in that chair, even without the f*cking wing-grafts, so he spread his legs out and slid downwards until the seat cushion supported the back of his head. If he hadn’t taken painkillers about two hours before, he would be standing up and walking around the store like an overdressed inventory guard. Now at least he could think away from the pain.
The whitecoats would’ve been scolding him if they could see him now, but he just didn’t care. Every once in a while, he took a whiff of the air, and knew exactly where Max stood in the store. They didn’t need a gang of five or six Erasers to watch one f*cking girl.
A woman cleared her throat. Ari glanced up and saw some slu*t in a short dress glaring at him. He wondered what she wanted, until she glared pointedly at his legs. Ari sat up, but the woman just shook her head and turned down a different aisle. He could smell the silicone injections in her tit* and ass.Stupid bitch, he thought, irritated. He hadn’t even been blocking the store.
Ari took a deep breath and tried to calm himself down. He picked up the Gameboy and tried to return to his ‘Happy Place’. But the woman’s scent still burned in his nose, and all but concealed Max’s scent. Ari saved his game and lurched to his feet.
Maybe it was nothing, but sh*t like this agitated him. If Max left him, he would probably kill that silicone bitch and let Max know about it. That would really get her for not listening to him.
Ari strode towards the changing rooms. Some sort of clerk at the front of the rooms stood up and blocked his way. Ari stared down at her from his nose. “Sir?” she said, trembling like a leaf. She was short, and she reached down to the walkie-talkie clipped to her belt.
Ari reached for his patience and he pointed down the empty narrow corridor. He flashed a smile. “I just want to check on my sister,” he said.
The woman eyed him warily. “Oh-Okay,” she said, before scurrying to the safety of her desk.
The whitecoats told him to choose high-end stores, because that way, Max wouldn’t be mixing around with ‘the common riff-raff’. The rest of the stalls were empty, and Ari stepped lightly to keep his footsteps from making noise on the carpet. Slow jazz played from the speakers and the air smelled like crushed violets.
He knew which stall she was in, and relief settled over him like a pressure blanket. Ari peered through the seam of the door.
Max was oh so special, so beautiful, genetically engineered, destined for great things. But the fact remained that she was more fragile than he was. Ari learned from a tv documentary that bird bones were hollow.
Ari had seen naked bodies before. In the lab, on metal tables. In p*rn. And sometimes the Erasers — the other ones — they would try to f*ck each other. It would gross Ari out, maybe because he was born normal (unlike them), before Jeb abandoned him to the white coats. Or maybe he was just a puss*; that’s what the other Erasers whispered behind his back.
Max’s body was different from a corpse on a table, or a big Eraser bitch. Her breasts were smaller than in p*rn. She picked up a bra hanging on a hook to the side of the stall, and the bra pushed up her breasts.
Ari blinked. He shifted his waist; when he swallowed, he noticed all the water had evaporated from his mouth. Her hair was long and light brown, not like his or Jeb’s silver.
Ari knew that Max was not his mother, but if he thought of the word ‘mother,’ he thought of her, at least before their father stole her away. She was really pretty, with gold brown eyes like a hawk’s. She used to be really nice to him, but that was before she got her own fake family.
Ari never told anybody that he remembered Max that far back; when he told his whitecoat ‘therapist’ that he still remembered how much the gene-splicing hurt, her face went blank and she told him that it was impossible — that four-year-olds couldn’t form memories.
Max turned to face the wall-length mirror. Her wings flared slightly; they were attached to her shoulder blades and swooped up and down towards the floor. Her feathers were the same color of her hair — a light brown, dappled with blonde spots.
Ari wondered what it would be like to fly with her. Not for the purpose of killing her, though. He watched falcons fly on the tv once, and knew that they would lock talons with each other when they were fighting — or mating. He remembered Max then when he watched it, and he remembered the falcons now as he watched her.
Ari would never have that. Fang might have that, but not him. Ari’s back itched. Even with the painful wing-grafts, he couldn’t f*cking fly like that — he had the grace of a f*cking refrigerator soaring through the air.
If it weren’t for those f*cking wings, she would just be another girl. The white coats wouldn’t want her, he wouldn’t have to hunt her. If he could just take garden shears to her wings, her fake family would abandon her — even her fake boyfriend, Fang. Even their father would abandon her because she would be broken. Then, then Max would only have Ari left.
Ari felt a shock run through his body at the thought. He took a step backwards and glanced down at the apex of his trousers. His teeth ground together.
The whitecoats had him dressing in a suit and tie in public, because they wanted to look like a legitimate organization. The stupid pants did nothing to conceal his boner. Ari stifled a curse as he walked out of the women’s changing rooms.
When Max walked out of the changing room, she thanked the clerk behind the desk. The woman gave her a really bizarre look, which Max forced herself to ignore.
Everywhere she went, she felt like a freak. If some pervert installed cameras in the room, she could be on the evening news tonight. Or it could just be that people don’t wear jeans and beat-up sneakers inside these boutique stores.
Ari wasn’t where she left him, but pacing the store. He looked agitated, so Max guessed that his pain medication had worn off. When Max told him she was ready to go, he snatched her clothes out of her arms and started touching them with his big hands.
Max went so hot, she thought she would burst into flames. “Hey!” she cried.
Ari paused and glanced up at her. Then he said, “You chose some godawful ugly clothes.”
“You — you took me to some godawful, expensive store,” she countered lamely. Yeah she wasn’t firing on all cylinders today. “I told you we need to go to a department store, then I could buy like a six-pack of underwear.”
Ari reached into the bundle of clothes. She’d tried to conceal it from him, because mentally he was just a child, but he had in his fist a piece of lacy underwear. He held it for a moment, so close to his face that at the back of her mind, Max heard a voice going He’s going to sniff it.And if he sniffed her new panties, she just wouldn’t know what to do about it.
He wore a rapt expression on his face, like when Iggy smelled suntan lotion off of a girl at the beach. He was here, but his body and head were going elsewhere.
Ari shook himself like a dog and strode over to the sales register. In a daze, Max followed after him. The receptionist scanned everything, and when Max saw the price on the register, her eyes damn near popped out of her skull. Without blinking, Ari handed over the credit card.
Max eyed him, stupefied. Did he even have a concept of money? Did the whitecoats have any concept of money?
As they walked out of the store, Ari turned to her. “Here,” he said, shoving the bag into her chest. He leaned over her, his nostrils flaring, and said, “Don’t ever make me wait that long again.”
Maybe the old Max would’ve had a smarmy answer for him. Maybe the old Max would’ve spit in his pretty face or kicked his ass. But she didn’t.
