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CHAPTER TWO clap when you land
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
SINCE SHE WAS thirteen, a hot spring instead of a volcano, a spark instead of a wildfire, Nadine Vidal had been obsessed with the Umbrella Academy. It'd been easy to determine the cause of the instant connection between the girl and the teen superheroes on screen—they were all deemed impossible. Nadine was impossible from the first time she'd made that spider appear on her teacher's head, and all of these kids were impossible every time they threw a knife with inhuman accuracy or loosed a monster from their stomachs. For the first time in her life, Nadine had found people like her, which made it hard for her to be torn away from the screen in a middle of an interview or a live broadcast of a crime scene. It was only a matter of time before she built up a considerable collection of paraphernalia papering her walls and shelves.
"They're like me," she'd tell her father, who'd often take a break from work to sit next to her and watch whatever rerun she'd have playing. "I didn't know there was anyone else like me."
Beau had to admit he hadn't thought there was, either. When he'd been blessed with his miracle girl thirteen years ago, thinking she was some kind of blessing from God, he'd thought it'd been him and him alone. Even when Nadine started demonstrating her bizarre capabilities, he thought it was a fluke. An error in the program, something that wasn't supposed to be there. But now, sitting here and watching kids Nadine's age teleport or control people's minds, he realized he'd been sorely mistaken.
Somehow, Hargreeves had known. He'd told them that Nadine would grow up to be extraordinary, and he'd gotten it right on the nose; Nadine was extraordinary. And she was also dangerous. And she needed to be protected. Which was why Beau never regretted his decision to keep his daughter instead of selling her off to be paraded around like a circus animal. As he watched the superhero siblings on screen, foiling robberies and bomb threats, he often thought that they were like donkeys. Nudged forward by a carrot on a stick. They looked happy, but were they really? Beau didn't know what went on behind the screen.
Nadine didn't care, though. Well, that wasn't exactly true. She often thought of the Umbrella Academy as some kind of sanctuary, much like the one she formed on her ceiling. Except this one would be real. This one wouldn't dissolve when she told it to.
Which made it all the more special. And all the more impossible for her to comprehend.
Nadine was thinking of this obsession now as she sat on the plane. The flight was nearly eleven hours, allowing for plenty of time to think of what to say when she came and knocked at the Academy's doors. As she stared out the window, watching the sky, blue as a robin's egg, and the fat clusters of clouds that sat below her, she wondered which of her heroes would be the one to open the door. Would it be the durable Luther, or the knife-toting Diego? What if it was the celebrity Allison or the apparently drug-addict Klaus? Or perhaps it might not be any of the siblings at all; maybe the door would be opened by Pogo, the manufactured chimpanzee that had gained human intelligence, or Grace, the robot Hargreeves had built to act like the superheroes' mother.
