whirlwind | tyler owens

becoming tatum finch

Alice Tatum Finch was never the same after the fatal day that she had lost her older sister. The young teen didn't want to go by her first name anymore, it sounded different, more bitter, now that her older sister wasn't there to call her anymore sweet nicknames. Alice Finch turned into Tatum Finch, trying to say goodbye to who she was before her sister, now just becoming an after.

The once shy and soft-spoken girl tried to have a personality shift, wanting to completely erase the girl than who she used to be, hoping her pain would go away too. Tatum tried talking to more people in school, tried even giving the football players a chance. Even though she physically looked like a different girl, wearing makeup and ribbons, her pain was still the same.

Tatum thought that taking a step back and cutting off every reminder of what had happened would somehow heal the aching heart inside her chest, but all it did was make it worse. The girl, in a fit of rage and sadness, ripped up all of her tornado notes, cursing the nature for taking away her only friend. Addy was all she had, the only person that understood her odd quirks and why she was so quiet, her only sister.

The now seventeen-year-old watched with teary eyes as she lit everything storm related on fire in her backyard, acting as if she burned it to ashes, her grief would burn away too.

But the only thing she felt while watching her books and papers burn was remorse. The wind suddenly picked up, flinging some of her research out of the fire, Tatum immediately going to stomp it out, trying to recover whatever she had left.

Why couldn't she just let it go? 

And that's when the understanding came.

Addy wouldn't want her sister to hate and fear the very thing she gave her life chasing. The tornado may have taken her away, but Tatum can't cast all of her anger onto some phenomenon of nature. The wind funnel doesn't have feelings, it doesn't purposefully take the ones you love the most out of some kind of malicious intent. Plus, her older sister knew the risks, and yet she still longed and searched for more.

Knowing that Addy would hate for her younger sister to give up the same passion that she had passed down, Tatum understood why her sister accepted the risks of chasing something so dangerous.

Addy had wanted the experiment to work so bad because she cared so much about others; she wanted to stop the very thing she spent her life researching so she could diminish the damage that came with it. Tatum wanted to finish what her sister had started, wanted to fix the formulas so that this time it would work. Maybe she couldn't protect her older sister, but she could definitely protect someone else's older sister now, and maybe thousands more if she just got it right.  The younger Finch now began burning with a new passion that day, taking her grief and forming it into determination.

But the girl knew she couldn't do it by herself. The only people that understood the same passion and grief had moved away, trying to forget the same incident and turning their passion for storms into something safer.

Kate Carter had moved away immediately after losing her friends. Moving to New York to work as an operations officer at the NOAA, the woman wanted to forget her past in Oklahoma and start over again, especially at a safe distance far away. Tatum had tried to contact Kate, knowing she couldn't perfect the formula without the older woman who came up with the equations in the first place, but Kate had blocked her number, trying to erase all ties.

Javi Rivera was also a dead end. Sure, he worked as one of the top partners in Storm Par, a company that analyzed tornadoes and wanted to figure out how to also weaken them, but he still refused to talk to the younger Finch, still seeing her as nothing more than an annoying kid. After doing some research into their company, Tatum wanting to know more about the team before reaching out, found out that the company's intentions were ill and corrupted.