CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
girls can be heroes, too

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IF THERE WAS one place Nadine couldn't stand, it was hospitals. With their acrid smell of antiseptic and paper-white walls, they served as an uncomfortable reminder of the horrors she'd gone through twelve years ago. This meant that upon arrival at the Jackpine Cove Hospital, as Allison followed Cheddar to the perp's room, Nadine had to take a minute to take several deep breaths as nurses and doctors bustled by her. The pad of her thumb traced over her scar, feather-light, and she reminded herself that the girl who'd spent all of those days staring up at the tiled ceiling, counting its blemishes, was gone. Nadine wasn't a youngling fresh out of high school with a broken shoulder anymore; she was almost thirty, continents away from home, and she was so much stronger than she used to be.

It was this reminder—plus her ever-constant worry about Vanya—that drove her to finally follow Allison and Cheddar into the patient's room. In there, a monitor beeped, and the patient—the one who'd apparently also been present at the accident Vanya had been at last night—had his eyes closed. Blood clotted on his face, numerous scratches edging across his skin, and a sheen of sweat glimmered at his brow. Considering how many injuries he'd sustained, Nadine almost felt bad about waking him up, but before she could voice these thoughts, Cheddar was already stepping forward.

"Mr. Luntz? Mr. Luntz, can you hear me?"

The patient—who was apparently Mr. Luntz—let out a groan, his eyes fluttering open. His voice was barely a murmur as his eyes flitted around, meeting the impromptu trio's gazes. He was middle-aged, with the stubble of a beard on his chin, and he was balding, his hairline slowly creeping back. Whatever had happened last night had left his arm in a sling. "Who, um... Who are you?"

"I'm Sergeant Cheddar, and these are..." he gestured over to Allison and Nadine, "these are my... associates. We just have a couple questions for you."

"Am I in trouble?" Mr. Luntz asked worriedly.

"No trouble, nothin' like that. I just... I wanted to ask you about the accident in the Bearskin Tavern parking lot last night."

Mr. Luntz breathed out a sigh. "You're a cop." Cheddar nodded, and Mr. Luntz continued, "You gotta protect me no matter what, right?"

"It's my sworn duty."

Nadine held in a laugh at that comment. There were hundreds of examples of police officers protecting the system instead of the people it was supposed to. Not only in America, but in France, too. She already disliked Cheddar for his rudeness back at the tavern, but seeing him so high and mighty when he was upholding such a system made her jaw clench.

Mr. Luntz seemed to be satisfied with Cheddar's response, though Nadine couldn't see why. He took in a deep breath, readying himself. And then he spoke. "It was no accident."

Nadine's heart rate sped up, and she asked, "What do you mean?" before Cheddar had a chance to. She curled her hands into fists, feeling her palms begin to sweat, and shoved them in her pockets. Her stomach lurched, and she leaned closer to Mr. Luntz, anxious to hear his story.

"This guy... hired us to start a fight. He wanted us to rough him up in front of his girlfriend." At that, Nadine exchanged a meaningful glance with Allison. Was he talking about Harold and Vanya? "He paid real good, upfront. We got drunk. Took it a little too far. Startled to hassle the girl, too." He shook his head, breathing out a sigh. "And then, all hell broke loose."

Allison glanced to Cheddar before speaking. "The guy who paid you, what did he look like?" Nadine knew she wanted confirmation that it was Harold. "Brown hair, light scruff, slight build?"

"Yeah," Mr. Luntz confirmed. "Yeah, that's him."

"Well, that's a... that's a really good guess," said Cheddar, his eyebrows knitting together in confusion. Allison, meanwhile, unfolded the dust jacket taken from Vanya's book and held out the back cover, where the author picture was. Nadine pointedly didn't look at it.

"Is this the girlfriend?"

Cheddar raised a hand at that. "Hey, uh... Just, um... Just a moment." He made his way around Mr. Luntz's curtain and pulled Allison and Nadine aside. His voice lowered to a hiss as he asked, "Hey, by any chance, is your movie called 'Small Town Cop Falls for Hollywood Star's Bullshit?'"

Allison ducked her head. "We're sorry for misleading you."

"I believe the word would be 'lying'."

"We're sorry we lied," Allison corrected, speaking for the both of them, even though Nadine wasn't sorry in the slightest. "But we didn't know how else to get answers." She held up the dust jacket. "This is my sister. And I think the guy that put him in this hospital has her. We have to find her."

"I could get fired for just bringing you down here with me," Cheddar hissed. Nadine was about to say that that wouldn't be such a bad thing, but she realized that insulting him wouldn't be the best way to get what they wanted. She'd never been good at faking her emotions—she always said what she meant—so it was almost excruciating when she clasped her hands together in pleading and let herself look desperate.

"Please," she begged. "We think she's in trouble. We need your help."

Cheddar looked from Allison to Nadine before letting out a sigh, pulling back the curtain. "Answer the lady's question. Is this the girlfriend?"

Unfortunately, before Mr. Luntz could answer, a nurse interrupted them. "Sorry, but the doctor's ordered more tests. You're gonna have to ask him questions later."

She held the door open, clearly ushering them out, and so, reluctantly, Allison and Nadine headed away from the only person who might give them more answers. Nadine looked back one more time and the bed-ridden Mr. Luntz. He'd already practically confirmed that Harold had been the one to pay them to start a fight, but what was the purpose? Why would he want to get beat up? To garner sympathy? It made no sense. Harold already had Vanya's sympathy—she'd fallen for him. It was clear there was something Nadine was missing. And she needed to figure out what it was.

They were sent out into the hallway, where Nadine sank onto a bench and Allison talked to Cheddar about Vanya and Harold. Nadine buried her head in her hands, her nerves flaring up again. She'd been jumpy since the accident, but lately, it seemed like she was always on edge. It made sense—there was a lot she was dealing with—but it also really fucking sucked.

She found herself thinking back to when she'd just started to work at Le Petit Montagne. Beau had offered her the position, as well as a permanent residence in one of its rooms, and she'd taken up the opportunity for the free housing, drinks, and pool, along with a steady job that allowed her to be close to her dad. By day, she worked reception or the bar, trading it out with her coworkers, and by night, she'd hole in her room, taking hour-long showers as if she could scrub her trauma off of her.

Then she'd lay in her bed, staring up at the ceiling—and that was how she'd really refined her Sanctuaries; painting pictures of the blank canvas. She rotated between deep-sea paradises, beaches, jungles, gardens... anything she could create that made her feel like she wasn't really there. She'd stay up for hours, fine-tuning the images, getting little to no sleep when dawn inevitably broke once again. Sleep, especially back then, often proved to be a place of horrors for her, one she had no intent to return to.

But after a while, Nadine started looking like a walking corpse. Permanent bags etched under her eyes, constantly bandaged hands, trembling limbs... instead of gaining muscle, she started losing weight. Her hair was stringy and limp. Her skin was pale as tissue paper, and about as see-through. Nineteen, twenty... two years passed before Nadine looked in the mirror and realized how skeletal she appeared. The masked freaks who'd shot her hadn't stolen her life right then and there, but she couldn't help but think that they were killing her in a different way.

Agonizingly, she began to piece her life together. She started eating healthier, going to therapy, taking pills to help her sleep, no matter how much she loathed it, and slowly, the healthy glow returned back to her face. She gained back the weight she'd lost and the hope that had been gone with it, and it was thus that a healthier Nadine Vidal had been the one who'd met girlfriend number three: Mirabelle.

(Later, Mirabelle would claim that she'd have preferred old Nadine: the bag of bones she'd once been. "At least then I'd know what I'd have to deal with," she'd say. As it was, she apparently wouldn't expect a girlfriend so riddled with trauma that she couldn't get a full night's sleep. Furious at the comment, Nadine would snap back, and that would be the end of it for the two of them.)

But sitting here, now, in the hospital, Nadine thought she was falling apart again. It wasn't the slow undoing from back then; rather, it came all at once, twisting and contorting her until she morphed to the skeleton she used to be. It was the worry about Vanya, perhaps, or maybe it wasn't and it was just another inevitable wave of trauma, or maybe seeing Hazel and Cha-Cha again had done a psychological number on her (which her therapist would certainly believe). Or maybe it was the fact that the world was ending in two days.

Whatever it was, it was filling her body with fissures.

Nadine finally looked up from her hands, her vision spotted with red, when the nurse that had banished them from Mr. Luntz's hospital room returned. She spoke to Cheddar when she asked, "Hey, Dale?"

"Yup?" the police officer responded.

"Have you seen Mr. Luntz?"

"No, why?"

"I took him to X-ray," said the nurse, "and then he disappeared."

"You better let security know," said Cheddar after a moment. "I'll call it in."

"Yeah," the nurse began to turn away, but Allison stopped her.

"Oh, wait, one more thing." She unfolded Extra Ordinary's dust jacket and showed the author picture to the nurse. "Do you recognize this woman?"

The nurse took it. "Mhm. She left with Mr. Peabody this morning."

"Wait, this morning?"

Nadine stood up, breathing a sigh of relief. As of this morning, Vanya, although she'd been with Harold, had been alive and unhurt.

Allison turned back to their trio. "They must've been here when we stopped by the cabin. Maybe they went there." She looked to Nadine, determination in her eyes. "We're gonna go get my sister."

"Whoa, hold on." Cheddar held out a hand, halting Allison and Nadine, who had already begun to head off. "We got a missing vic, and this guy might be dangerous. I need you two to stay here." At that, he began striding off the other way, muttering yet again about Allison, and Nadine exchanged another look with her famous friend.

"So, you coming or what?" she asked her. Fuck Cheddar. Nadine knew that when he saw them, he saw two helpless women that couldn't take care of themselves, but that couldn't have been further from the truth. Allison had spent seventeen years in the Umbrella Academy, and Nadine had taken course after course in order to adequately defend herself. The two of them were powerful, and they were going to save Vanya Hargreeves themselves.

Allison nodded. "Come on."

Nadine couldn't help but take one last look back at Cheddar's retreating form. He was clearly distracted, and he'd almost made it too easy for them to slink off the opposite way. She supposed that if it had gotten rough, Allison could've Rumored him, but considering that the woman had sworn off her powers, Nadine was just glad for their luck.

As they slid into the car, Allison turned to Nadine. "You okay?"

So she'd noticed. "Harold... I don't understand what he's up to. Why he'd pay those guys to beat him up. What he's been doing with Vanya. It makes no fucking sense."

Allison bit her lip, evidently worried about the same thing. "Hopefully we'll find answers back at the cabin," she said eventually. "And Vanya, too. I don't know what's going on, but I don't like it. And we need to get to her as soon as possible."

She gunned the engine, and Nadine leaned her head against the window. God, she needed a drink. Something to take the edge off her worries, to piece her together, at least a little bit. She was disintegrating, from the inside out, and there as the car sped off, the sky darkening from cerulean blue to shades of oranges, then indigo, she thought there was a strange foreboding in the air. A warning. Telling them not to go to the cabin.

But they had to. For Vanya, for the Umbrella Academy, for the world. And Nadine hadn't trained and broken herself and hollowed out for years to give up now. She and Allison were the only ones left. They had to at least try.

Nadine Vidal had always wanted to be a hero. To don a cape, a mask, spandex, to fight crime anonymously, without reward. When she was a kid, there had never been many female superheroes on television—mostly men, with their billowing capes and bulging muscles, here to rescue the damsel in distress. It never put her off. Even as a kid, she was aware of the prevalent sexism in society, and actively worked to switch people's mindsets around what women could and couldn't do. As she stared at her cartoons, watching Superman or Batman kick ass, she imagined herself among them one day. Imagined her name written in lights.

Then came along the Umbrella Academy, and it had been like a confirmation. Seeing Number Three, Allison Hargreeves, fighting crime alongside her brothers rekindled Nadine's hope. These weren't animated drawings—these were real, live people, and one of them was a girl, just like Nadine. She knew immediately that she was supposed to be among them. Knew she was supposed to be Number Seven, the Magician, with her illusions and occasional violence. She knew she was meant for something, something other than mundanity, and seeing the superhero siblings on screen was like every piece had clicked into place.

But, upon her parents refusing to give away their precious baby girl to the on-screen billionaire, Nadine had missed her chance. It was almost torture seeing all those masked kids on television without her among them. But little did thirteen-year-old Nadine know that, nearly seventeen years after her obsession had first sparked to life, she would be amongst the Academy. She would have the chance of being the hero she'd always dreamed of being.

Nadine Vidal was a traumatized, blunt, tactless, brutal twenty-nine-year-old, but she finally had the chance to be someone. And she wasn't going to throw that away with both hands. No matter how terrified she might've been. No matter how tempted she was to just go back to the Academy. No matter how much her gut was telling her something was going to go wrong at the Jenkins cabin.

Even if, later, she'd realize her intuition had been right.

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HAVEN: this chapter is criminally short, and i'm very sorry about that. i just needed everything that happened next to be in the next chapter, which i am very excited to post. i think we all know what's coming :))) i hope you all are ready :))))))

thanks for reading!! <33