Like Sky by SomeKindofAuthor

Disclaimer: I don't own Maximum Ride.

Summary: Nudge asks Iggy to dance despite the fact that neither of them really know how, and a two-bed hotel room does not the most romantic of dance floors make. But through the song they find their way. For V-Day. NudgexIggy.

"Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Let's dance, Ig!"

Nudge grabbed Iggy's hand and propped him up off the hotel's bed. At any other time Iggy would've been annoyed by Nudge's total disregard to his Personal Bubble. But with Max and Fang out to buy supplies for the next few months on the run, and Angel kicking Gazzy's tush in the Game Room, Iggy was bored as anything. So he let Nudge pull him from the couch and hold his hands in hers.

But he was not going to dance.

"I don't know how," was Iggy's lame excuse. It wasn't like the whitecoats led the little mutants free from their dog crates for lessons in Ballroom Dancing or Hip Hop every Wednesday back at the School. And during the Flock's brief stint in High School there had been a dance, but the Flock hadn't gone because Max figured that the Flock plus a thousand odd teenagers cramped into a hot, sweaty, odorous gym couldn't be good. For their claustrophobia or their noses. Iggy agreed, and because of that reason, on the night when five hundred enthused girls in blistering heels and five hundred regretful guys in asphyxiating tuxes traipsed to the school gym, he stayed home to listen to the Gasman describe the latest Pokemon episode. Well, that reason, and the fact that Iggy didn't know how to dance.

"Neither do I! Well, I do in theory." Nudge sounded beyond thrilled that both she and Iggy were novices at the Art of Dance. "But I love this song and I kind of feel like thrashing my limbs about in a rhythmic fashion."

"Is that how you dance, then?" Iggy asked, amused. "Just… wave your arms and legs and hope that you're on the beat?"

"I think so, yeah," Nudge replied thoughtfully.

"Does it have to be this song, then? No offense, Nudge, but 'Fergalicious' isn't something that I can dance to." In fact, it wasn't a song that Iggy liked to listen to. As "Fergalicious" as the singer claimed to be, Iggy favored other artists. Particularly actual bands. Particularly bands that could spell.

"Before two seconds ago, you didn't even know how to dance, and now you can't deign to dance to the fabulous Fergie?"

"Well… yeah."

"All right. Hmm…" Iggy heard the song change to Escape the Fate, and he grinned.

"Y'know, Fang's going to kill you when he finds out that you've done more than just admired his iPod from afar."

"Fang will have to deal with the fact that I have needs too and sometimes I just want to—Oh My Jeez, Iggy! I love this song!"

Iggy cocked his head in the direction of the music. "This isn't Fergie." It wasn't Fergie. The song began with a guitar strumming along with strings bowing in the background. The song didn't appear to belong to any of Fergie's sisters-in-pop either.

"Nope! It a song by Red Jumpsuit Application or something or other—"

"Apparatus, Nudge? Red Jumpsuit Apparatus?" Iggy smiled. Yeah, he'd heard of them. He hadn't heard anything by them that was so slow or so cheesy, though. He recalled the first words "When I see your smile, Tears run down my face, I can't replace…" and thought how something dramatic and romantic like that was so like Nudge.

"Yeah, that's it. When I stole Fang's iPod a few weeks ago, I set it on random shuffle, but I ended up listening to just this song over and over again because it is just so amazing. I would just fly for hours and not do anything but listen and let my mind trail off... Okay, I've decided. We can dance to this."

"By following your instructions? I don't think I can flail my arms and legs in time to this. Too slow."

"Nope. There's an entirely different set of rules to dancing to slow songs," Nudge instructed. "You kind of… um… here."

Nudge stepped closer to Iggy; he felt her body heat. She placed her hands on his arms, then changed her mind and circled her arms around his neck, linking her hands together behind him. Color flooded his mind as she touched him. Nudge's color. He grinned because he liked the color; he liked the fact that he could see it, if a little indirectly; and he liked how close Nudge was to him.

"Yeah," Nudge said softly, almost startling Iggy with the contrast to her earlier dynamic self. She seemed to recover as she gave Iggy his task with a slightly more animated voice. "And then you put your hand on my back. Not up there, kind of… yeah… and I rest my head on your chest. And then we sway back and forth, and we kind of spin while we're at it, too, and move around on the dance floor. Or, in this case, the small space between the two beds."

All right. He could do this. Iggy Ride: Master of Moves, Lord of the Dance, Conqueror of Rhythm, Boss-man of the Beat—

"Not so fast Iggy! Ow. Rhythm, Iggy, rhythm?"

Iggy's face suffused with red. Judging from the oven his face felt like he concluded that his cheeks were a nasty shade of red akin to that of a tomato. That coupled with having just thrown Nudge across the room with his tad-too-fast spin, led to a feeling of humiliation, even if they were the only two people in the room.

"Then help me," he asked of her, impatient with himself.

"Fine. I'll lead, okay? Just stay with me."

Iggy reluctantly let Nudge place his hands into position on her body, and grudgingly let Nudge take the lead as she started the dance again. At first, his pride resisted her attempts to sway to the beat, but eventually he let go. He relaxed. He let himself give into the metronome and soon it stopped being Nudge forcing Iggy into moving with her, and it became natural for him to just dance.

"Nudge…" Iggy murmured into Nudge's hair. Without directions from Nudge, Iggy found himself resting his chin on her head. It just felt right.

"Yep?"

"How do you know this? How to dance?"

"I watch a lot of TV. It's funny because when this happens, when a guy and a girl dance like this, the camera always shoots it like they're the only two people in the room—in the world even, and I've always wanted to feel like that: like I'm the only girl in the world, like I'm so special to the guy that I'm dancing with that he can only see me."

"Sorry," Iggy muttered. Guilt stung him. He wanted Nudge to get what she wanted from this moment, to feel satisfied with the moment when the guitar strung its final chord.

"For what?"

"Well, your first real dance, right? And it's with me. In a cramped hotel room. With music playing from an iPod, and I don't even know how to dance. Not the stuff of dreams."

"Oh. Yeah." Iggy kind of liked the way she said that. As though all of the flaws in the moment that he'd just listed didn't really matter. His lips quirked into a small smile, reacting to Nudge's words and reacting to the spreading warmth in his tummy area that he received from them. "Funny, though," she continued, "I wasn't thinking about any of that, really. I… I completely forgot where we were. It kind of felt like sky."

"Like sky?"

"Yeah." Iggy kept swaying with the beat, but everything felt slower. As though each moment was a camera's still shot. Nudge was speaking slower and softer, too, as she answered his questions. He wondered if she was tired; he'd never experienced such a relaxed Nudge before.

"Like sky. Know how when you're up there, for miles until the edge of the Earth it seems like there's only this intense blue? In front of me and around me and above me, surrounding me, enveloping me… protecting me. I feel like, I dunno, like there's nothing here, in front of me and around me but you. You're like sky, Iggy. Is it weird that I forgot there was a song playing?"

"Weird."

"Hunh."

The song ended.

Their bond lingered for a few seconds after the final note sang, but then Nudge reluctantly broke from Iggy.

"Thanks for dancing with me, Ig," Nudge said, and Iggy heard a hint of Nudge's old bubbliness surface, and with disappointment he realized that Nudge was reverting back to her old self. The moment was over. Another song started, courtesy of the Random Shuffle feature. Some screamo band that Fang liked. The guttural shrieks sliced through the room shredding the remaining seams of their moment. And Nudge was bouncing back fast, scatting to the song's beat even though she didn't know the words and couldn't scream professionally.

"Fang's taste in music is so weird. And he chastises me for downloading Natasha Bedingfield onto his iPod, but he's got stuff like this? Catchy chorus though. Bum, ba, duh-dum, bah, dum, da, dum, da-ah—"

"Nudge." Iggy had decided suddenly, although it wasn't really his decision. His mouth had come to the conclusion before he had, interrupting Nudge, but he was all too happy to follow his tongue's initiative. "Put that song back on. The one we just danced to."

"You liked it?"

"Yeah, I did."

"Oh, cool, well, ask Fang to borrow his iPod one time, they're pretty darn good. I love that one song of theirs, Justify. It's kind of angry, but it's so full of emotion that I—"

"Actually, Nudge, I—" Deep breath. Mantra of self-motivation. She likes you. Or—at least, she can mildly tolerate you close to her. She liked the dance, though. She liked the dance. And for now, that's enough. "Nudge? Would you like to dance with me? Again?"

Pause.

Iggy's hands fidgeted; his fingers were nervous for him.

"I'd love to Iggy."

Iggy let out a prisoned breath. The Nudge from their moment was coming back; he could sense the transition as she turned the song back on and the opening melody wafted through the room. Nudge clasped her hands around his neck, and this time Iggy didn't need her lead—he knew exactly where to go.

"What's this song called, anyway?"

"Your Guardian Angel."

A/N: I had to take a break from EllaxIggy. That girl is killing me. So I wrote this. Let's call it a V-Day present to Nudge and Iggy. Aww… I just love them acting all cute and adorable without all the heavy romance stuff. So, I suppose this could be categorized as fluff, except that it's not so sappy. It can't be sappy, as they're both pretty clueless about how they feel. Clueless fluff.