اوووه! هذه الصورة لا تتبع إرشادات المحتوى الخاصة بنا. لمتابعة النشر، يرجى إزالتها أو تحميل صورة أخرى.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX the gift of time
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
IT WAS RATHER IRONIC, Nadine thought, that both people that had died recently had done so in a living room. It was the kind of ironic thought she couldn't control, one that burst free without her consent. Dark humor. She'd been an expert at it, back during those first few weeks after the Incident, snuggled under the paper-thin sheets of her hospital bed. Puns about death and arms and scars had become a constant to any doctors or nurses coming to check her vitals, and they occasionally popped up for the visitors, too. Even though there was no real comedy in her words—it was merely a coping mechanism, meant to help her plaster on a brave face while she fell to pieces on the inside—most were taken aback by her words. Though, given the fact that she was an eighteen-year-old girl relearning to use her arm, this wasn't so surprising.
Now, though, Nadine couldn't exactly make quips. Not only because one of the people who'd died had been Elliott—Elliott, who'd deserved better, who had died alone and in agony—but because she was practically on autopilot right now. The only reason she'd managed to get through this past week was on sheer resolve, along with a dash of hope that the route to 2019 was at the end of it. But even that was rotting. It was like the Week of Hell. Last year, when it had become nothing but a memory, she'd wondered how she'd managed to get through it. How she'd gone through each day fighting assassins, discovering the truth of the Incident, conning the police, and trying to save Vanya all without collapsing. But now that she was in yet another Week of Hell (she might as well call it 'Week of Hell 2: The Sequel Nobody Wanted'), she recalled that she had collapsed. Just not externally.
This morning, for the first time in days, she'd taken a proper look at herself in the mirror. The face that was staring back was undoubtedly hers, but it was as if she'd stepped back in time. She might as well have been thirteen, fourteen, fifteen again with her still swollen nose and two shiny black eyes. It seemed like it had been years since that fight at the Consulate, and she'd spent a solid minute wondering why she hadn't healed yet.
It wasn't just her wounds, though, that reminded her of her younger years. It was the look in her eyes—hollowed out, like someone had scooped out the life there as easily as a child might dig away the innards of a pumpkin on Halloween. It was her sunken-in cheeks, gaunt from malnutrition. It was the way that, despite her bulky muscles, her bones still somehow appeared brittle, one moment away from snapping.
She couldn't look at that reflection for long. Otherwise, she'd worry that the regression would take her back to the woman she'd been right after the Incident—nothing but skin and bones, more of a corpse or a robot than a real person. She kept thinking she'd crawled out of that stage of her life, but here was proof that, if she did nothing, she'd fall into those old patterns yet again.
