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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN i call shotgun
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
NADINE'S FIST SLAMMED against the punching bag yet again, sending it swinging back with the force of her touch. Sweat ran down her flushed face, and her knuckles throbbed, but she didn't quit, merely continued to strike the punching bag, her chest heaving, her eyes narrowed in concentration. Her spine was straight, her knees bent, and as the leather bag came swinging back to her, she hit it with yet another blow, her foot coming up in a high arc. Her hair, which had been pulled into a tight ponytail, was beginning to let wisps of hair escape, which clung to her sweaty forehead and tickled the back of her neck.
Her shoulder was healed now, although she still felt a spike of pain in it sometimes. Overexertion, her doctors told her, but she didn't pay attention to half the shit they spouted anyway. When they sat her down to tell her about pain meds or mandatory exercises, she'd lean back in her seat and attempt to form a scene around her. Sometimes they were half-baked, warps of images hovering there in the air like a portal had been cracked open, and sometimes she managed to spread them all around her, vanishing reality's surroundings completely. She didn't care if they told her to rest or what not to be doing with her arm. All she cared about was readying herself. Preparing for when those masked lunatics came back.
Nadine was nineteen, and her shooting had snapped something in her. Suddenly, she was shifting her lifestyle, going on runs at five in the morning and taking class after class on self-defence. Often, she'd find herself going down to thegym and running on the treadmill until her legs burned, or lifting weights until her body felt like it was about to crumble. The best installation, though, had to be the punching bag in her basement. Nadine could spend entire days down here battering at it.
Between punches, flashes of the muzzle of the gun pressed to her head or the grinning faces of the cartoon masks flared to her mind, edging her on. She hit harder, feeling her knuckles bleed under her boxing gloves, kicked it with as much strength as she could muster, trying to make the images go away. It had been a year, and therapy, prescriptions, and time had all proven to be a bust when she attempted to forget the incident. Every day, she relived it, crystal clear, and every day it proved to be the fuse that egged her on to train harder, longer. She slept with a knife under her pillow and a bat beside her bed, her fists clenched even in sleep. If she could, she would've slept with one eye open.
"You planning on killing yourself, there?" a voice called out, momentarily startling Nadine and launching her into defence mode. She spun around, fists at the ready, only to find her father staring back at her, polishing his glasses on the corner of his shirt. He was speaking English, as they usually did now (Nadine wasn't bad—she'd learned it in school—but Beau had wanted to polish it off, to give her something to do), and Nadine's heart rate calmed at the sight of him.
