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CHAPTER EIGHT third time's a charm
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
THE NEWS OF THE WORLD ending was, at this point, nothing new. Nadine had been told this twice before—once, in Diego's shoddy old rented room at the gym he worked at, and again in the janitor's closet at the Dallas Aquarium, nestled in between soapy mop buckets and bottles of bleach. Both times, she'd gone through the whirlwind of emotions that accompanied such a premonition: an unorthodox smoothie of shock, pain, anger, and fear.
Maybe, because of this, one might have expected that she would have been more prepared to hear it for the third time. Maybe she'd learn to reign in her horror. Maybe she would've launched right into the planning stage.
That wasn't what happened.
News of the world's upcoming destruction wasn't exactly something Nadine could brush off, no matter how many times she'd heard it before. It was simply on too large of a scale for her brain to process so nonchalantly, even if it had been something she'd gone through over and over again. Which meant that, for the third time, Nadine was freaking the fuck out.
She sat on the floor with her head between her knees, trying to take deep, even breaths. It wasn't working. Her heart was pounding like a constant burst of thunder, her mouth was dry as sandpaper, and her head pulsed with a steady, agonizing pain. Behind her closed eyelids, she could see nothing but burnt red. She wound her charm bracelet around her wrist again and again.
Again. It was happening for a third time.
Once upon a time, Nadine Vidal had been prophesized to save the world. She'd learned later that this was due to the connection she'd formed with Viktor, and the fact that, as a stranger, she had more of a chance of getting through to him than his dysfunctional family did. That had been the reason the Commission had sent Hazel and Cha-Cha out to kill her. That had been the reason The Handler hadn't killed her parents and kidnapped her to be her own child.
Then the world had ended, anyway. Nadine had been close—infuriatingly close—to talking Viktor down from his apocalyptic concert, but Allison, seeing nothing but her siblings in danger, had intervened. The Moon had blown up. The Earth had been consumed in a haze of fire. And the Umbrella Academy had only narrowly escaped.
Being dropped in 1961 hadn't been fun, but it was almost a fair price to pay to avoid the world's decimation. But, two years later, Five had appeared—and not just to retrieve Nadine, but to also let her know that it was all happening again. And Nadine had gone through it all again, though without that label as the Chosen One (goddamn it, Klaus, it really did stick) to help her along.
But, somehow, she'd done it. With the help of the Umbrella Academy—who, somewhere along the way, had become her family—she'd prevented Viktor from blowing up the FBI building and narrowly avoided nuclear war. And that was supposed to be it. That was supposed to be the end.
