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CHAPTER THIRTY tsar bomba
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
ON THE WAY to the cabin, Nadine couldn't help but feel like there was some sort of warning in the air, telling the duo to turn the car around and head back the way they came. She'd dismissed it as her own nerves, told herself she was just worried about Vanya. And yet, she still felt it run down her spine during the entire duration of the trip, and when the car pulled up to the cottage in the darkness, the feeling only amplified. DANGER, the cabin seemed to proclaim, written in bold, red, capital letters. GET OUT OF HERE. GO, BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.
But it didn't know who it was talking to. Nadine Vidal had always been a rule-breaker, a rebel who sneered at authority. Who was brazen, and wild, and a force to be reckoned with. She'd spat in the face of Death, defied the will of the universe, kept her head high and her hands tucked into fists. She was almost thirty years old, and although there were still times she faltered, stumbled over her own feet, she held strong. Kept her back straight. She never fell without getting back up again.
Back at the hospital, Nadine had thought she was crumbling. Everything that had happened this week had gorged fissures into her skin, her body turning into a mosaic of cracks. But this wasn't a sign she was dissolving back to her old self, at all. The world was ending in two days, and perhaps Nadine had been shedding the old her. Slipping out of it like a coat to make room for the new Nadine Vidal—who wasn't perfect, by any means, but who was gallant, and brave, and who had made it through one of the worst weeks in her life. Who could open her heart, a little, instead of closing it off.
Of course, this revelation didn't take away any of the fear, the foreboding that still accosted her. But it allowed her the courage to slide out of the car. To start to make her way to the Jenkins cottage.
...The Jenkins cottage that was rocking. Nadine drew to a temporary halt, her mouth dropping open. Everything from the chairs to the wind chimes to the lights was swaying, as if it had been caught up in a strong breeze. A strong breeze that had apparently not affected anything else.
"I don't know," Nadine responded, furrowing her brows. "I've never seen anything like this before."
"We should get closer," Allison suggested, and Nadine nodded, clenching her jaw. Her fists tightened, but she stepped forward nonetheless, and that was when she heard the music.
Violin music. A haunting melody that perfectly set the mood of this eerie night pumped out from the cottage, quiet and mournful. Though it may have been uncanny, Nadine still breathed out a sigh of relief at the sound of it—for there was only one person she knew that played the instrument so beautifully, and that was Vanya Hargreeves. They'd finally found her, finished their seemingly eternal cat and mouse. Nadine quickened her step. Her hair was battered in the wind much like it had been when Five had first arrived, and her skin prickled. For some reason, it felt to her that there was power in the air. A faint, staticky feeling that coursed through her when she used her own abilities, or when she had been around Five's time vortex.
