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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN the flaws in the code
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
WHEN THE WORLD ENDS, it takes everyone Nadine Vidal ever cared about—and those she hated, too—with it. Of course, Armageddon doesn't care enough about Nadine—who is a mere speck, a clump of dust in the air in comparison to the apocalypse's magnitude—to solely take out people that have somehow wormed their way into her life; it takes out everyone, people across all continents that she'll never get a chance to meet. They all disappear in a haze of fire, old and young, spending their last breaths either staring up in horror at the mass slowly twisting its way towards the Earth's atmosphere, or blissfully unaware.
(Those are the lucky ones. Who didn't spend their last fragments of life in terror.)
When the world ends, it doesn't take out Nadine Vidal, because Nadine Vidal is already dead. Twelve years ago, she succumbed to the call of the void, her life snuffed out of her in an instant, her eyes open and glassy. Her body, face plasticized and arms folded neatly over her chest, is encased in a coffin, and she's therefore buried deep, deep, six feet underground. Her gravestone reads something cliché, a poem in French, and people lay flowers on the freshly dug dirt and then forget about her, leaving her body to be eaten by maggots in peace. Then everyone else dies, and Nadine's grave really goes unnoticed then. Perhaps, as nature begins to take back the planet, flowers begin to grow out of the once-charred grass, lining her broken grave (which is chipped and fading, the words nearly undecipherable now). Perhaps her corpse, which has been stripped down to a skeleton at this point, appreciates this.
(Corpses get lonely, too. Trapped in their boxes for all eternity.)
At least, that was how it was supposed to go. As everyone in the Commission knows, time travel is immensely complicated; one wrong move and the butterfly effect ripples out, twisting and turning fates that were once stagnant, held in place like glue. This is one such case, and it's a peculiar and frustrating one for everyone involved. It goes like this: Nadine Vidal was destined to die just three days after Hazel and Cha-Cha cornered her in that alleyway and attempted to shoot the brains from her skull. A car, crashing across the road would plow right into her, sending her broken body tumbling across it until she'd land flat on the street, her eyes half-closed and gummed together by dried blood.
Hazel and Cha-Cha, and by extent the Commission, didn't know this, otherwise they would've called off the said attempted shooting in the first place, merely letting nature take its course. Unfortunately—well, fortunately for Nadine—all they knew was that Nadine Vidal was an anomaly, and as such, she was supposed to be eliminated. Which was how they came to that alleyway, their guns poised and their masks planted on their heads, concealing their identities. It was how Nadine Vidal found herself faking her own death, consequently passing out from blood loss, and being dragged to the hospital to get her broken shoulder pieced back together. It was how, three days later, on the day Nadine was destined to get her spirit shaken loose of her body, she was instead in the hospital, in recovery. Feeling like pure shit, but alive.
