DISCLAIMER: Maximum Ride belongs to James Patterson.

A/N: Tess is not an original character. She's just a very minor one that was in the books and seemed to have a crush on Iggy. So she belongs to James Patterson, too.

-- One Winged Angel --

Part One: Birth

Tess was glad to be out of the cage. But, honestly, being chained to the hospital bed wasn't much better. She'd been transferred to the medical ward of the School a few days ago because she was near her due date.

Tess was pregnant with the child of a boy who had mysteriously gone missing a few months after his family moved to town. She'd thought he was an orphan named Jeff who'd been adopted by Anne Walker, but after being sent to the School she's learned that he is actually an escaped genetic experiment named Iggy. Not that she held that against him. In fact, after spending seven months here herself, she could understand why he would have wanted to escape...

Tess was still only a young teenage girl herself, and when she'd found out she was pregnant she had run away from home. She'd gone to Anne Walker for help, which she realized was a mistake only after Anne had shipped her off to the School.

In her cage in the lab, Tess had heard the whitecoats speculating about whether her baby would be born a human-avian, or if being combined with a normal human would eliminate all the avian DNA. Or if it would be a mutant disaster.

Now, chained to the bed in the medical ward, Tess didn't know what to hope for. That her baby would be born fully human and the School would have no more use for them and send her and her baby back where they belonged as if she were just a normal teenage runaway returning home, or that her baby would be born with wings and air-sacs and light bones and be able to join Iggy's flock someday.

And then she didn't have time to worry about what to worry about anymore, because her water broke and she went into labor. It was a long and difficult birth and there weren't a lot of doctors there to help out, just one old man...

"A beautiful baby boy," Jeb Batchelder announced, holding the baby out for Tess to take.

But Tess was too weak from the birth to even reach out and hold her child. With her final breath, she sighed a single word. It was a strange word that Jeb barely recognized and for a moment he wondered why she'd said such a thing, but he quickly realized she'd meant it to be the baby's name.

Part Two: Reunion

"I know you don't trust me," Jeb said to the flock. Well, mostly to Max. "I'm not asking you trust me right now. I just..." He broke off, sighing. Started over. "I have something. For you, Iggy- something I've kept safe, something I've kept secret from the other scientists."

The bundle in Jeb's arms squirmed and, for the first time, Max realized that it was something alive. Only Angel wasn't surprised, because she could sense the tiny creature's thoughts.

Jeb pressed the baby into Iggy's arms and the blankets fell to the ground as Iggy awkwardly cradled his son against his chest.

Iggy's expression turned from surprise to rage and then to sadness as Jeb explained about what had happened to Tess. Jeb had lied to the other scientists and told them that the baby hadn't survived the birth, that it had been neither fully human nor a perfect avian-human specimen. Technically, only the first part was a lie.

As he patted his son's back, Iggy felt what the others could already see. The baby only had one wing.

"Before she died, his mother named him Sephiroth."

-end-

A/N: One Winged Angel is Sephiroth's theme song from FFVII. The titles of part one and two are Jenova references. :P