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CHAPTER SIXTEEN out of this world
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
WHEN NADINE WAS younger, it used to be her father who would tend her wounds. He would wrap her scabbed hands in bandages, hold bags of frozen peas to her black eyes, hand her tissues to hold to bloody noses. Nadine didn't look at him when he did this. She didn't want to see the disappointment in his eyes, an expression that told her he was getting to the end of his rope. She didn't want to look into his eyes and read his thoughts within their pools: Other daughters don't get suspended every other week. Other daughters don't come home with bruised limbs and bloodied lips. Other daughters are well-behaved, well-mannered, smart. Other daughters don't have superpowers they can barely control.
Maybe he wasn't thinking that, but Nadine feared he was, so much so that she always avoided eye contact. She just let him patch her up, stroke her hair, and tell her she reminded him of a volcano. It was always a volcano, though for a good reason. It was an apt comparison; just like a volcano, Nadine was also bubbling full of magma. Just like a volcano, that magma sometimes exploded, bursting out in a torrent of hellfire that rained down on whoever was closest. Nadine had never figured out if she was born with this heat boiling inside of her, or if her less-than-ideal childhood put it there. All she knew was that she couldn't remember a time without it. A time when her skin wasn't on fire.
Now, Nadine was approximately thirty-one years old (she couldn't say for sure—when you've time travelled, you begin to question when your birthday really is), and still full of the same flame. But it wasn't her Papa that patched her up this time (though a part of her kind of wished it was. Two years had gone by without him, and Nadine still hadn't gotten to apologize). Tonight, it was Molly Hamasaki, who was just as gentle.
There was a bandage pasted to her bruised cheek, stemming the flow of blood from the brass knuckles. She held up Nadine's wrist with one hand and cleaned it using a wet cloth with the other. Her eyes were distant as she worked. Nadine knew where she was. She was in the Consulate, gripping the Swede's arm and getting a fist in her face as a reward. She was replaying it, trying to figure out what she should've done to avoid it. Cycling through it again and again as if she could somehow change things.
Nadine knew this because that was exactly what she used to. A film in her head, constantly being rewound, viewing her shooting again and again and again.
Her therapist had told her it wouldn't help. It would only lead to her being stuck in the past unable to escape. Nadine had told him to fuck off.
He was right, though. It hadn't helped. Nadine had become obsessed, convinced that the shooting was her fault. She'd believed that if she hadn't been so stupid, she could've prevented the whole mess. She wouldn't be a traumatized woman plagued with a never-ending surge of nightmares—perhaps she'd even have been happy. Perhaps she wouldn't have had to drop out of university just as she was finishing her degree and be forced to work at La Petite Montagne.
