This is pre Maximum Ride books. An unrecorded scene, if you will, at the School before we officially meet her in The Angel Experiment. Max is eight in this. Or around eight, since Max says they don't really know their real ages... anyway. So, I'm a bit hesitant to put this under romance. If you know the perfect combination to post this under, feel free to tell me!

Heartfelt thanks to the wonderful Kissy Fishy, beta extraordinaire! Her ever awesome critiques know no bounds. :)

Claimer: I claim the right to disclaim Maximum Ride. Chew on that.

For a while, I mistook Fang for a thorn bush.

And now that I've floored you with that opening statement, allow me to explain.

When I was at the School, I saw things in black and white. I still do, actually, but I now know the place where black meets white can be fuzzy. I had a simplistic view. Black were the, ironically, whitecoats, dark as night. White were the experiments, suffering and tried. But for some odd reason – well, I'm a teen with wings, so my way of looking at things will always be slightly skewed compared to others – I didn't call it black and white.

There were thorn bushes… and there were roses.

Thorn bushes were the type of people who were selfish and cruel. They thought only for themselves and had hidden artifice in all they did. Their thorny hatred came in varying degrees of sharpness. Subtle and quick, huge and painful.

Even at a young age, I understood that white wasn't always pure. It was still white, but stained. No one, not even those suffering under whitecoats, could be white. Yet, the tortured experiments were the roses. Good, clean, simple roses – with thorns under all their starving delicacy. For as pathetic and poetically sad a starving cat/human hybrid was, she still had her claws, her honed thorns. If anything, the hybrids hated more intensely than the whitecoats, who simply hated us because they had created monsters. The hybrids hated whitecoats because the whitecoats brought them into a world filled with pain – pain given to them by their makers.

It was so simple in my head.

Somehow, Fang was a thorn bush without any conscious thought on my part. Though he wasn't a whitecoat.

Maybe I associated the quiet, intense way he sat in the corner of his cage with the silent, focused way the whitecoats would stand over us with their clipboards.

I didn't pay attention to Fang, to be perfectly honest. Not at first anyway. I was centered on puzzling out why Jeb's thorn bush-y-ness showed signs of blooming roses, surviving experiments, fighting whitecoats and Erasers and helping the other avian experiments like me named Nudge, Angel, Iggy and the Gasman.

The only reason I realized, consciously, that he wasn't a thorn bush was because of an experiment.

"So, what do you think the results will be?" a pimpled male whitecoat asked the Special Woman Whitecoat we rarely saw. Except on days of pure pain.

SWW bent over to peer into a cage, her pencil skirt tight.

"Well, they're all avian," she said distractedly, "but different birds. The results are up in the air." She gave a look to the pimply whitecoat a look. "Hence the experiment."

I shrunk back into a corner of my cage as she walked by, fear sharp on my tongue.

The pimpled whitecoat barely looked chastened.

"Do you think they can work together as a team?" he demanded, almost vibrating in place with impatience. "I mean, a good percent of the experiments are human – "

"98 percent."

"Yes, yes, I know," the pimpled whitecoat dismissed. He trailed after her and almost bumped into her when she paused to look at Angel.

I was at my bars in a flash, face pressed against them. Don't. Not Angel.

"The experiments are part human, but they have wings and we're not even sure how many bird characteristics they have," the SWW said. "So it may not matter that one has crow DNA and the other has eagle. Again, hence the experiment. Don't you have anything better to do?"

The pimpled whitecoat stuttered and tripped over himself as he left.

The Special Woman Whitecoat sighed when he was gone and examined her clipboard. I tried to look reassuringly at Angel, but the SWW was standing in the way. I felt so helpless. It was burning me from inside.

I bit my lip and shrunk into a corner of my cage as the woman came toward me. I was scared. I was too young to even hide that fear.

I felt a hand brush against my own and looked quickly at the cage to my right with wide eyes. It was the black winged boy, who I kinda remembered naming himself "Fang."

I blinked at him, but his face was a perfect blank slate.

Maybe I had imagined the brief, comforting touch.

So caught up in my thoughts was I, that I only just noticed the SWW opening my cage. As soon as her arm was in, I bit her as hard as I could and delivered a kick to her face.

I was scrambling out of the cage, panting, Nudge and Angel's cheers in my ears, when the Erasers grabbed me.

I kicked and lashed out with all my puny strength. "Let me go! Let me go!" I shrilly yelled. "Let me go, you – " A word tumbled out that I'd heard an Eraser call a whitecoat once under his breath. The SWW gasped.

"So uncivilized!" Like anyone can be civilized in cages. The thought was bitter. "Take her to room 302. Grab experiment 10542 while you're at it. And put a muzzle on her!"

"I'm not the dog here!" I managed to scream before one of the Erasers who'd lined the wall clamped a hand over my mouth.

I was eight, small, underfed and skinny. I could barely fight off one Eraser, and even then it wasn't fighting so much as squirming.

I was hauled, struggling and albeit muffled bellowing, down a white hall. Without having time to do anything, I was suddenly thrown head long into a dark room. I landed hard on elbows and knees. A second later, before I had time to get up, someone else was thrown on top of me and I hit the floor completely with their weight on me.

My chin hit the floor with a crack. I yelped, pain shrieking through me.

All this took three seconds. In a flash, the weight was off me. Before I could leap to my feet, the door was slammed shut.

A dull red light flickered to life. A window at the other side of the room showed a barely discernable outline of whitecoats.

I snarled at them from the ground, tangled hair falling in my face.

I could vaguely see one of them scribbling something.

"You're proving them right."

The rough voice snapped my head to him. Fang was crouched, still, against the wall, his black hair looking like it was streaked with blood in the red light. His ebony wings arched over him, almost encasing him in their inkiness.

"What?" I sneered, trying to act unsurprised he was talking at all. Fang never spoke. Never said anything. Never made a sound when being experimented on.

My sneer was ruined by my missing tooth. My eight year old fists felt weak. Anger and frustration boiled in me. I hated them.

"You're proving them right," he repeated, voice low and scratchy from lack of use. I had to strain to hear him.

"Explain," I said, and crossed my skinny arms over my chest. I glanced warily around the Spartan room. It was bathed in eerie red light, with nothing worthwhile to see. I snapped my attention back to him.

"They say we're animals," he said, monosyllabic. But I heard the same anger undercutting his voice that was unhidden in mine. "They say we're not even human, with wings on our back."

I was silent, and pulled my wings around myself without thinking. Almost as a security blanket.

At his words, I was tense but calmer than I had ever been before. I felt a spark in my heart start to burn. Because this entire thing they were doing to us was wrong.

I kept my eyes on Fang, even though I heard the click of a door opening behind me, the snarl of an Eraser.

His eyes met mine, blazing. Though there was hate in his eyes, Fang's voice remained flat.

"They doubt we can work together because we have different bird DNA. They think we're more animal than human."

As if attached to the same muscles, Fang and I smiled at each other. A very small smile, almost wild, but a smile all the same.

"Let's prove them wrong," Fang whispered.

The gravelly laughter of an Eraser crawled up my back, slimy, and I turned around slowly.

"Hello, chickens," the Eraser growled. "I prefer well done, but raw will do."

I didn't even look, but I knew Fang was by my side, noiseless.

"Oh, dear, Fang," I said in mocking distress. "Do my eyes deceive me?"

"No, Max," Fang said with a feral humor that darkened the room. "They really did let the dog out of its kennel!"

The Eraser's jaw dropped. Saliva dripped off one of its fangs.

"What do you think, Fang?" I asked lightly. "Should we put this dog down for the darling whitecoats?"

Never had an experiment talked this way before. And the danger that filled the air, filled me, made it all the better. They won't know what hit them.

"Yes, Max. I think we should."

I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye and grin. How could I not? I was probably about to die and was feeling a bit crazy.

Fang smirked at me.

I didn't know that that would be the first of many smirks to drive me up the wall. I didn't know a lot then.

"On three?"

"On three."

"Three!"

We fought. And we won. Not out of skill, but because they underestimated us. They thought us too animal to work together like "pure" humans. That would ever be their downfall. Call us freaks, call us mutants, call us experiments, but we are not animals.

Such a simple event in the history of things. But it changed the entire course of my life, my becoming more than just a fellow experiment with Fang. Before, to my eyes, Fang was all darkness, fierceness and bite. He was a thorn bush, a whitecoat in disguise. And I was wholly grateful while at the School that he was an experiment and not a whitecoat. Together, we faced the darkness together and won.

Only after we'd escaped the School did I register, consciously, that he wasn't a thorn bush.

He held a crying Angel after one of her nightmares. While he held her with no expression on his face, he was anything but emotionless. Eyes are the window to the soul, after all.

And when he kissed Angel's forehead and told her he loved her, my perception of him changed completely.

Yes. I mistook Fang for a thorn bush. But sometimes we mistakes flowers for weeds.

And sometimes roses for thorn bushes.

Basically, the moral of the story is: Don't judge a book by its cover, kiddies. :)

I can't remember how much of the School we get to see in MR. We hear about it, they get captured from time to time but, from what I remember, you don't really see into the years when they were kids trapped there. So I kinda did my own thing.

It's purposefully dark (though certainly not as dark as some fanfictions out there), because if we scrape away all the glamour of Maximum Ride, it's just that: dark. One of my problems is that JP doesn't deal with the psychological – or physical – problems the Flock is sure to have had after the School. Only claustrophobia, nightmares and fear of doctors/hospital/needles are what they seem to suffer from. While that is realistic, there would definitely be more problems with them if they were real. Max wouldn't be kick butt, for one. She wouldn't be so tomboy, tough and loving for those she cares about. She'd probably be more insecure and jumpy and twitchy and scared than being tough and… well. Being experimented on? Think about how scarring that is. Think about it. *shudders*

I could go on for a while. I have problems with the contents Maximum Ride, but I still do love it. It's a light, fun read. :)

R&R, please!

All my platonic and non-creepy love,

SS