This isn't a chapter, it's mostly a long apology and metafictional chitchat about this work, and I'm really sorry for that. If you hop on down to the "***" you will find some reading material that's not me endlessly talking about my past life.

I'm not gonna ask you to reread what amounts to more than 140, 000 words of backstory, because God knows I can't bring myself to and I wrote it. So I'm gonna tell you two stories instead: the metastory behind this fic, and The Story So Far.

The metastory is a little personal, and if you're new to this fic you should probably skip it. Scroll to "This is the second half of the story".

OK. So.

This is... kind of an apology and explanation, about the circumstances that produced this fic.

In December 2008, I was fifteen and deeply involved in the Maximum Ride fandom on Maximum-X. There was effectively no moderation at the time, which meant that I and a bunch of other people who posted a lot had the run of the site. I wrote a lot of silly fanfiction for these people. One of them was named Killarney.

In the last couple days of the month, Killarney and I were shooting the shit, and she gave me a silly prompt: Jeb/ter Borcht mpreg.

I wrote a quick drabble, then posted it to the thread where we'd been chatting.

The idea wouldn't let go.

I had just come off a very long project - Echo Flux - and I didn't want to get caught up in another. I assured myself that this one was only going to last maybe 20 chapters. And unlike Echo Flux, it would be humorous.

Things are never that simple.

On the 2nd of January I posted a longer version of the original drabble. For the next three months I posted a new chapter every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and for about a year afterwards produced about a chapter a week. I reached 70 chapters in under a year.

I wrote almost constantly - most of my memories of the second semester of junior year are of writing this fic, and I worked on it nearly exclusively for many months. The little crackfic grew and grew - I wrote, I planned, I researched the (slim) scientific backing, and for the first couple of years I kept a running hard copy. (This made it much easier to thumb back and forth looking for a reference while typing chapters.)

I worked steadily for a long time, and I did something that makes it all very painful to look back on now.

I let it get too personal.

When I started writing, I had just come off a rough breakup with my first girlfriend. I was living with undiagnosed depression and undergoing a gender identity crisis. I was starting to crack from the pressure of trying to juggle that emotional stress and portray a normal facade to the people I went to school with. In some aspects, it only got worse as I continued writing.

What began as a silly humor piece became a way for me to exorcise my demons. I couldn't talk about what I was feeling to anyone - so I put all my sadness, all my anger, all my fear of and longing for healthy relationships into this fic. I had a deep emotional involvement with something that had once been just for fun.

Eventually I came to a kind of crisis and did talk to someone about the multitude of things I was feeling, and around spring 2011 things began to get better. As I established a happier real life, I didn't need to use this fic as an emotional pressure valve anymore. And when I went on medication, I lost the feverish need to write.

I can't go back and pick out all the plot threads I established through the first three years of this fic. There's a lot to pick through, and it all reminds me of a terribly painful time in my life.

Also I hate, hate, hate rereading my old writing.

However. I want to finish this thing.

There are also some relevant notes for those who knew me when this fic first got going - I'm now in college at CU Boulder, I rent a house, I'm learning how to function as a bill-paying adult. But the most important to know is that after a lot of gender confusion and angst and woe, I now identify as male.

That's the end of the metastory, although there's much, much more I could say - I mean, if you want to ask about Maximum Ride fandom, I have a lot to tell.

This is the second half of the story:

This story is continuing in a different document, provisionally titled "A Favor" because that was my working title. It will be a complete reboot and will, at most, equal this draft in length. It will follow the Maximum Ride series until the end of the third book.

If you are new to this fic, do not read the previous chapters. If you already read this fic, fine, reread it. But please understand that I consider it at best highly flawed and at worst I want to beat my past self with his precious hard copy.

Of important note if you're new and you do reread this fic: there's some sexual content and cursing, but I really don't think it warrants an M rating. So I've moved this fic down in rating to T. If you believe this is incorrect, let me know. The reboot will also be rated T, and any sexual content will stay congruent to a PG-13 movie.

Here's where we're starting from if you want a quick brush-up. If you were just here for the "dude, what happened to you?", hop on over to the reboot. This is to refresh memories because, honestly, it's been five years.

The time is late April 2005. Maximum Ride is about 14 and living in an E-shaped house in Colorado.

The place is Death Valley, California, in a secret lab called the School which is funded by the US military and partially controlled by Itexicon. Later the action will move, briefly, to Virginia, Florida, and Germany.

There are four main characters for now. Once Max enters the picture in a few chapters, her flock will also be on the scene, and I expect you know them pretty well.

Right now, the four people you need to know are these guys, in rough order of introduction:

Roland ter Borcht. An odd combination of hidden romanticism and going way, way too far for your work. He is the best geneticist of his day, and was recruited right out of medical school by Itexicon.

Jeb Batchelder. Forced to abandon his daughter and give up his son, he's beginning to suspect that his policy of wilfull obliviousness in order to protect his children may have gotten him in far over his head in government skulduggery.

Beauregard Reilly. Intern under Jeb in the Animal Testing department. In a couple years he wants to leave his job, go back to school, and get his doctorate.

Kyle Ferris. The "straight man" to the mad-science comedy that is life at the School. A skilled hacker - his day job is in Information Technology, and he specifically works on interfacing the mechanical supercomputers with biological components.

Kyle is the only OC. Reilly has a bit part in The Angel Experiment, and given that you read the Maximum Ride books, you should recognize Jeb and ter Borcht.

OK. Thank you for reading so far. If you keep scrolling you will find a piece of previously unpublished miscellany from this 'verse!

I chose this one as a coda to this draft because it's about closing a particular era of one's life.

And about new beginnings.

"***"

Better Living Through Chemistry

"You feel like you're ready to leave?"

"Sure, Dr. Weissman." Reilly jingled his car keys - God, it was good to have them back. Smiled. "If you'll let me go."

"I just want to be sure." She smiled back at him. "You've made great progress during your time here. I'm... glad to see you ready to face the world again."

"I just hope the world's ready to face me."

She nodded, still smiling. "You have my card - just call if you need to talk. You'll be seeing someone where you're going?"

"Sure." He put his sunglasses on. "I gotta get going. See you."

"See you."

She walked off towards the main building, and he watched her go for a moment before getting in the car. The air inside was musty, and he cranked the window down. Get some fresh air flowing.

The last time he'd been in this car... fuck but it was forever ago... Kyle had been driving.

He remembered that - Kyle's hands white and steady on the steering wheel, a long night drive and the sun coming up in the morning over the mountains.

Their favorite radio station - Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, and all - and his own voice calmly, sanely, rationally, fucking logically telling Kyle how he could use Subject Eleven to save the world.

His wrists duct-taped together when he wouldn't stop scratching his hand where she'd bitten him, makeshift-handcuffed to the door when he started trying to beat on Kyle in a fit of sudden rage because dammit he just didn't understand.

There was a dry brown stain on the passenger seat.

Gonna have to clean that up sometime.

He started the engine - for having sat in a garage for so long it started right up. She'd probably run just fine, too. He patted the dashboard affectionately. Meryl was a good car. Damn near almost as old as he was, too, and she still ran fine. Testimony to good... well, not American, but good engineering.

Hadn't he wanted to be an engineer, once?

He pulled out of the parking space, drove up into the sunlight, turned onto the main road going south towards the School.

...Nah. That was Kyle's thing. Reilly liked biology and chemistry, Kyle liked physics. Reilly liked squishy things that gave you a little leeway when you were fiddling with them, Kyle liked things that ran on equations where if you fucked up one number you were shit out of luck.

He flipped down the sunshade, swiveled it over to keep the light from glaring in his eyes. It was still pretty early, not much past nine, but the sun was only going to get higher. He'd call Kyle's phone once he got to Darwin, the first place he was confident there was a working phone - say hi, maybe get him to jump a little. Hi fuckface, I'm outta the nut hut and coming home to you. Bake a pie or something.

Then again... when it got down to DNA and all that shit, or surgery, Reilly's line of work could be annoyingly precise too. And Kyle talked about his computers, his programs, almost as if they were living things. You had to be delicate with them sometimes, rough sometimes. Like dogs, he'd explained it once. You trained them up and then they did what you told them to.

Come to think of it, would they be expecting him back?

He adjusted his sunglasses, squinting against the light.

They'd probably be expecting him. Probably. He'd never really said he was leaving for good, but man... he'd been gone almost half a fuckin' year! More than that. He ran the math in his head. Yeah. Six months, almost to the day - half a year.

Damn, but he'd been gone for a long time. They'd have brought the Voice into operation by now. (He wished he could've been there to read off the inaugural transmission. You can't win 'em all.) Elsa would be almost three already. Huh. Jesus.

He'd missed Thanksgiving by a while, but if he stepped on the gas and the wind was right, Reilly could still make it "home" for Christmas.

It was good to have a solid handle on time again. Knowing what day it was, remembering what had happened yesterday... yeah, that was pretty rad, to tell the truth.

He turned up the radio - still tuned to his favorite station - and stuck his arm out the window for a minute, letting the sun warm up the back of his hand. It was still a little chilly out - well, for the desert, anyway - but more than likely it was going to get hot later. Good. He was cold a lot lately. Some kind of weird side effect, maybe.

Would anyone back at the School have missed him? He had to wonder. Kyle would've - it takes guts to help commit your best friend to a mental asylum, even for a while. Prescott, probably not. Harrison wouldn't have noticed he was gone. Jeb and Roland and Elsa... yeah, they'd have missed him, though there was no telling whether Elsa would even remember him.

It was nice, knowing he'd been missed - meant he had somewhere to go, if only for a while. Doctor Weissman had gently suggested that he start looking into medical schools to attend, and he'd caved. So he was just dropping by, really - visiting. After that, back to school.

He looked out ahead of the car, into the desert. Same as always - sand, some scrub bushes twisting up out of said sand, blue sky, and the mountains in the distance. Two turkey vultures riding a thermal, far enough away that they were just dots against the sky.

Once he got a little further down the road... the land was flat enough he was sure he'd see the School glittering faintly on the horizon. Well, he'd see Darwin first, being that he was coming down from the north, but... still.

A road sign came up on the right side of the road and slowly passed him - NOW ENTERING DEATH VALLEY followed by the elevation. Thrilling. According to the road sign, he was almost home.

No sign of even Darwin yet, though. Maybe a twinkle on the horizon, but that was probably just heat haze tricking his eyes. He had good eyesight, but when the desert was determined to fuck with ya, as Kyle would have put it, the desert was determined to fuck with ya.

It was going to be good to see Kyle again. He'd get the chance to make a proper apology, rather than an indirect one over the phone - there was no way to say "thank you for committing me" over the phone and sound honest. Or at least that was how Reilly felt about it.

There was a lot to look forward to, really. "Stay on your meds," Doctor Weissman had told him when he'd said he felt ready to leave. He was a fairly reasonable person, after all, and that was the only advice she'd seen fit to give him before letting him go - and he did plan to stay on his meds. Too much of a hassle going off them again, he figured.

What was it Kyle had said to him in high school - or sometime, and he thought it had been Kyle, though it could've been someone else...

Better living through chemistry. Life is better with complex chemicals in your system - after all, aren't we just complex chemicals ourselves? In us they're all cooperating to make a whole, though. What harm could adding a few more do? The body's a very adaptive system.

That had all been a very long time ago, though.

He turned up the radio, taking advantage of a few miles more of radio coverage. It wouldn't start fizzling out until he'd passed through Darwin, but if he remembered right there was a dead spot somewhere on the highway here.

Sweet staticky silence - yeah, right about here. You could practically hear the wind on a vulture's feathers in the silence where the radio suddenly wasn't.

He checked his mirrors, looked out ahead of him past the faint mirage of water on the road. No cops in sight. No other cars.

He stepped up the gas. The road was pretty ruler-straight out here. He'd see someone coming a couple of miles before they passed him - plenty of time to slow down.

The car was surprisingly well-behaved. Had someone been taking care of it while he was... gone? Probably. Who?

He decided he didn't much care. There was a lot of road ahead of him, and he had places to be.

Just not at any particular time.