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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO rota fortunae
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
BY NOW, EVERYONE WHO knew Nadine Vidal knew that she was uncontrollable. A volcano, a hurricane, a tornado, whatever—as long as it was a destructive force of nature, wreaking havoc and uprooting lives, specifics didn't matter. You didn't gripe on a volcano for erupting, nor did you yell at a tornado for creating carnage; after all, that was what they were meant to do. Their sole purposes were to ruin, and any arguments on the contrary were, to put in plainly, wrong.
People were a lot more complicated than natural disasters, however. They had no set purpose. No one was pushed out of their mother's womb with their meaning written on their forehead. They'd developed past the rudimentary laws of nature—eat, sleep, shit, mate, and die. Instead of focusing merely on their ancient, animalistic purposes, now they were free to discover their own reason for existing. Whether that was art, dance, or bringing corruption to politics. Whether it was to raise a family, or to garden, or, hell, to see the sunset every day. Whatever your purpose was became your motivation for going on each day. Why, when you woke up in the morning, you eventually got out of bed.
Nadine had always found the concept of 'dream jobs' ridiculous. She'd had one, even as a child, but she'd never believed that there was a point in dreaming of labor. People were not born to serve as slaves under capitalism. They were born, simply, to find their meaning. And, in the end, whatever that meaning was would bring happiness.
Yet, Nadine Vidal didn't always feel like a person. Didn't always believe she was anything more than basic coding. She'd struggled to find her 'meaning' for as long as she'd lived, and yet, she still hadn't managed to uncover it. When she was four, she'd thought it was gaining Mama's approval. When she was sixteen, she'd thought that was Ichthyology; it was why she'd sought to study it in university. When she was twenty-four, she'd thought it was recovering from her PTSD. When she was twenty-nine, she'd thought it was saving the world.
None of them, not even ridding the world of the apocalypse, had actually struck gold for Nadine. Sure, all of those things were what she wanted, but they weren't what kept her going. So, eventually, she began to suspect that maybe she had no meaning at all. Nothing but a primitive coding deep in her bones. This didn't tell her to eat, to sleep, to shit, or to mate, though. No, instead, it told her to destroy.
Just like a natural disaster.
Nadine more often used her fists to fight, rather than her words, but there were a few times where her mouth dealt as painful of blows as her hands might.
This was one of those times.
Okay, Nadine was tempted to lunge across the table, rip Reginald's monocle out, and shove it down his throat, but even the crudest parts of her—the strands of DNA that programmed her to be a fighter, true and true—understood she could not win this war the way she usually did. Like it or not, the Umbrella Academy needed Reginald Hargreeves if they were going to save the world, and Nadine wasn't going to be the one to spoil their chances.
