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CHAPTER ONE bon anniversaire
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
TIME TRAVEL TASTED like metal. Iron, perhaps, or maybe copper, leaving a mineral taste in Nadine's mouth as she fell between timelines, seconds and minutes and months tangling around her like fragments of code. Static raised the hair on her arms and on the back of her neck, and an electric current ran through her, tensing up her muscles and sending spikes of pain through her injured head. Nadine Vidal, defiant, bold, and utterly terrified tumbled backwards in time, slamming past year after year as the world closed in around her. And as she fell, sweat shining on her brow and her heart thudding in her ears, all she could taste was that metal.
(After a while, she wondered if it was mineral she was tasting, or blood.)
It had only been a minute (or perhaps a hundred) since she'd been whisked away from the apocalypse—the very one she'd failed to stop—and she hadn't quite managed to catch her breath. Perhaps it had something to do with the life-sucking beam of energy she'd been suspended by, or maybe it was just the torrent of events that had stacked together, all of them pressed so close that there had been no time to look back on them, to pay attention to anything but the one of the present. The Academy, going up in flames. The shooting at the bowling alley, and then at the Icarus Theatre. Vanya's attack, and then her destruction, which had come alongside the destruction of the world. Gripping the hands of Five and Allison desperately right before she was flung away from them. And now, here. Falling through time, her head still pounding from Harold's assault, a faint ache throbbing at her side.
Then, she was thrust forward. Pulled out of this non-area, this space between time, Nadine went hurtling through an electric-blue wormhole. For a moment (or perhaps a million) the skin on her face was pulled back, her eyes sinking deep into her head. Her entire body curled, as if she'd just been shoved through a tight rubber tube, and then sweet, clean air filled her lungs, and she was falling again. This time, though, gravity took her down.
She landed hard, pain jolting up her side and into her shoulder. She'd almost forgotten she'd dislocated it, in all of the chaos. Yet, despite the discomfort, she was on her feet immediately, rebounding as quickly as if she'd bounced. Her eyes darted up to the wormhole, still swirling and cracking and sending bolts of electricity into the air, and watched the sky warp around it. Any minute now, she knew, someone else would topple out of it. After all, she hadn't been the only one sent back in time, before the collapse of the moon had ended the world. There had been six others with her, all of whom had linked hands and disappeared right before they'd been incinerated. So, predictably, she was expecting them to follow.
Ten seconds passed. Thirty. Not one person fell out. The wormhole just continued to swirl, a blight in the sky.
Nadine's eyebrows came together, and she took a step forward. "Vanya?" she called out hesitantly. When the only reply she was met with was the crackle of electricity, she took another step towards the vortex. "Allison? Klaus?"
