Chapter Text
“So yeah, that’s how I nearly ended up losing up two hours of footage with a chess argument.”
Despite just being in her childhood home, Nina’s eyes stumble onto a new location: the middle of a Nandos. With lights so piercingly bright it makes Nina flinch. She turns her head from left to right, trying to find anything she can recognize to seperate this Nandos from the others in the area. And from the oak floors alone, she realizes that this Nandos looks like her usual choice. The chain always seemed to have a location down every block, so a couple months after moving to London, Nina narrowed down which Nandos was the best out of all of them. And it so happened to be this one, a couple streets down from the Thames river. She looks up from her half finished plate, spotting another familiar face on the adjacent end of the table.
One that at least gives her more comfort than her last familiar face; her roommate and borderline clone, Thaf.
“You good?” He tilts his head.
Oh god, that question sucks.
She lets her fear melt off of her, returning back to at least some form of her normal self.
“Yeah, sorry I’m just…” Nina rubs her eyes and leans forward. Breaking the natural laws of physics, her hat stays perfectly upright on her head. “I’m still just up late working on job applications.” She chuckles to soften the blow of the statement.
“I can tell. You know I’m up late too, right?”
“Surprising considering you said two weeks ago that you were gonna fix your sleep schedule.”
“Yeah I did, I know I know.” He snorts. “But I have an excuse, trust me!”
“What is it this time? New video that’s gonna take ten months to make?”
“I just uploaded like a week ago!”
Nina laughs at his defensiveness. “Alright I’ll give you that. But it’s gotta be something big, you wouldn’t just stay up at five every night for like ten days in a row if it wasn’t something major.”
“I would and I have.” Thaf takes a sip out of a brightly colored beverage. “But yeah, Hack’s been up my ass about trying to remake that game I made for him.”
He takes a second to process his words, “Said that I owe it to him.”
“Made as in…”
“As in, when he was younger and…” Thaf’s words trail off into murmurs, Nina stirs the straw of her drink leaving the clinking of ice to glass cover up the awkward silence. “But yeah, that’s why I heard you. And also the dumbbell slams.”
Nina cuts the stirring out. “Wait, what? I don’t even remember slamming them!” Despite her gentleness earlier, the mere act of her moving her hands on the table leaves a set of wooden cracks where they lie.
“You did. Trust me, I could hear it clearly from the other side of the apartment.” He places the fork down, leaving an ear shattering scratch noise to echo along the plate. “You think that Hina did it?”
She pauses, taking a moment to process Hina’s presence in her life once again. Like a fire spreading throughout a highland, or rot plaguing a small piece of fruit.
“No.” Nina takes a shallow inhale in. “No she hasn’t shown up in a couple days, she couldn’t have.”
“Listen.” Thaf leans in closer to her. “I know you. I know you wouldn’t just slam barbells at four in the morning. You don’t like waking me up and you don’t like bothering Hack with anything. I get it. So it has to be someone else.”
He rests back, nearly sending his chair backwards. “Or maybe it is you and you just forgot. Who knows!”
Nina grows more restless. Hands fidgeting under the table and inhales more shallow. The only thing Nina could remember from last night were two things. She was looking for teacher jobs online, and she remembered getting frustrated doing so. Well not even frustrated, just straight up crying in her hands. Thinking that she wouldn’t be a good mentor, maybe even a little bit of thinking about how the future is meaningless and she’s nothing in the grand scheme of things. And the other thing she remembered was lying on the floor, surrounded in a pile of her own sweat and tears. Tired and exhausted both physically and mentally. But everything else, a blur. Absolutely nothing came to mind.
“Hey. Hey!” Thaf taps Nina’s plate. She wakes up from her trance, ungrounded and on edge. “We gotta go.”
“Wait, didn’t we just start eating like… a minute ago?”
“No…? Why did my presence alone speed up time for you? If so, thank me later!” He chuckles.
She still sits there, eyes gazed on the workers shuffling in an open kitchen door frame. Stressed, but content. Serving a purpose in this world that Nina never felt she belonged in.
All that she could do was to stare back at him, without any form of response. He looks back at Nina with an even more perplexed expression. “Actually… I don’t think I want you going out alone.”
“What? No, I'm fine, I’m not tired, I’m not drunk, I’m not dealing with Hina, it’s nothing.” She rises from her chair. “I can walk home alone, it's only noon.”
“But it’s five o'clock.”
Nina darts up and grabs her phone from her pocket, revealing that yes, the time is five rather than noon.
“But, I-I thought it was-”
“Nina. If you really think that it’s noon now, then I genuinely think you might need either intensive sleep or a doctor.”
Sleep practically made all of the alarm bells in Nina’s head flare off instantly, she freezes with her daggers for eyes staring back at the person who even dared to say that word.
“I don’t need sleep. I don’t need it at all. I don’t even a f*cking hour spent inside of my own mind, let alone seven.” Nina lifts herself up from her chair. Thaf moves closer to her, closing off her exit.
“And what do you think will help your mood then?”
“Leaving me alone would be a good start.” Nina shoves past him and walks towards the exit. Thaf soon follows, leaving a plate of empty food and an unwritten check behind at the table. Nina twists and contorts her body to pass several patrons and employees in the pathways of the restaurant. She opens the door with her shoulder, sending the door slamming towards the adjacent brick wall. The glass of the doors shatter on impact, leaving a cascade of the reflective viscera on the sidewalk.
“Nina!” Thaf yells out. He walks through the now completely cleared door frame, trying to avoid any eye contact from onlookers. She says nothing, looking down at her shoes and continuing to walk off. He catches up and walks by her side.
“First off, you probably just cost us five hundred quid from that door slam alone.”
“Like I didn’t know that.” She reaches for a pair of earbuds tucked in her pocket.
“And second, your acting… weird today. Like, more than normal.”
“What do you mean ‘more than normal’? I’d say I’m normal overall.” Nina puts her earbuds in, but as soon as she attempts to listen to music Thaf tugs the left one out of her ear.
“No normal person would have the police called on them five times in two weeks for destruction of public property.”
“And who’s fault is that?”
“It’s yo-”
She cuts him off. “It’s Hina’s.”
“But she’s your responsibility.”
She stops in her tracks, her jaw tightens and clenches. Nina twists her head towards Thaf.
“Do you think I wanted her?” She tightens her fists. “Do you think I would ever want some psychopathic green bean of a woman just following me around?”
“No but,”
“But what Thaf? You know what I deal with. You just deal with it on a lesser scale!”
“No I don’t! This isn’t a competition of how bad one of us has it, I’m just saying you have to control her.”
Nina continues her walk. “If you had Hack constantly screaming in your ear about how no one likes you, or how he would kill a random passerby, you would find it hard to control him too.”
Despite the bustling noise of the city practically surrounding the two in a deafening haze, it seems to go quiet. Nina’s body remains tight and full of frustration, staring down her aggressor of the week with the rage of a drill sergeant looking at her subordinates. Though the blaring noise of a tourist bus cuts this silence like a knife. Nina puts in her earbud and attempts to walk faster to the apartment.
“Controlling her will make your situation better.” Thaf unsuccessfully attempts to catch up and snatch the earbud. “I did the same thing with Hack and now we’re close!”
Music blares out of her headphones, ultimately signifying that she doesn’t want to listen. She reaches the door of the apartment, scanning her entry card to pull it open and slamming it behind her.
She sprints through the pitch white lobby, filled with probably fake plants and bright orange couches that cover any leftover dead space. Nina reaches the elevator and spam clicks the button, with the door opening after around the twentieth time. Despite the crowd of people exiting the lift she attempts to slide through, trying to avoid another confrontation with Thaf. She presses the button for the apartment and slams the elevator doors with her own hands, nearly breaking the cords of said doors in the process.
The lift rises up with speeds equatable to that of a jet engine and in nearly ten seconds, she reaches the 49th floor.
Nina claws the doors open and rushes through the hallway to finally reach the apartment. The door is already pre broken in due to both Hack and Nina’s shenanigans in the past, so she just shuffles under the broken pieces of wood.
Considering the size and beauty of the lobby below, the living room and kitchen space of the apartment seems like a cheap knock off in comparison. Though it doesn’t mean much due to the fact the three live in a luxury apartment complex in the middle of London.
Despite her initial rush, Nina takes a second to both catch her breath and ground herself. But a certain smell cuts through the inhale. The smell of burning plastic and metal. She turns her head, navigating to the apparent source of the smell.
A tall greenish figure no more than seven feet tall stands in the apartment’s kitchen, sitting over a pan with rising black smoke emanating off of it. She leans over the kitchen counter spotting the contents of the pan to be a motherboard covered in olive oil. The creature turns around, spotting the woman staring at his meal like a hawk.
“Nina?” His hostile demeanor melts off as a grin rises on his face. “Wow you're home early!”
“Oh yeah um, I’d rather not-”
Immediately, she gets interrupted with the click of the front door opening. She shoots up and runs up the stairs, trying not to look behind her in any way.
Nina slams her bedroom door behind her, shaking the entire room with it. Despite the thuds and knocks Nina ignores the noise and plops onto her bed, not even bothering to turn on her lights and just letting the residual light from the sunset fill her room. She grabs one of her pillows and plunges her face into the fabric.
Thaf was right. She does need to get her under control. But no matter how much she drinks, no matter how much she keeps her eyes open, no matter how much she attempts to run: nothing works. In all honesty the loss of sleep probably made her appearances even more violent and vivid. But even then, besides all of her circ*mstances, a failure is still a failure. She failed to make herself or anyone else proud, hopping from job to job without any form of enjoyment to herself or any income to make her roommates happy. She failed in helping herself or even attempting to fix her mental state. Everything she touches fails.
She rolls onto her side, head still covered with a pillow. Nina honestly didn’t realize an innocuous face shaped stain of her own tears forming on the fabric.
She wouldn’t be like this a handful of years ago.
Nina wouldn’t be sobbing her eyes out over something she could change or fix. Nina would be toughing it out. Finding new solutions, or simply ignoring it and living her life to the fullest in a world that barely gave her a chance to live a normal life in the first place.
And maybe it’s the blazing heat of the city oozing into the room or the sickly sweet smell of burnt sugar lingering in her nose, but Nina felt like she was finally home. Not in this house, a place that always seemed to fail her no matter what she put out in the world. But a dry, outstretched and destroyed metropolis.
The crackles of dry grass echoed throughout a desolated field, with a cluster of teenagers chasing after a soccer ball. Branches of trees attempt to cover the heads of the group but their lack of leaves barely do anything besides leave faint shadows of what could have been in the grass. And despite the field being located in the middle of the city, the only noise that emanated from nearby was the occasional planes overhead. Though there were two other voices sandwiched in between these two areas.
Parallel to the field rested a metal set of risers, once painted a bright red but eventually morphed to a deep rosewood color from sun exposure. And the only two souls resting upon the seats barely payed attention to the game, instead focusing their attention on orange creamsicles melting in their hands. One, a short blonde girl blessed with the faint pinkness one would expect from an incoming sunburn. And the other, a remarkably tall girl with a hoodie covering hair that could reach the floor if it wanted to, unmistakably the neighborhood oddball Nina. The shorter girl wiped her ice cream palms onto her shorts.
“So I remember telling her that I wanted a pet y’know? I didn’t want that cat to be stranded where it could be hurt!” The girl said. “She ended up folding after that.”
“Aw wait really? What’cha name him?” Nina pried.
“Still deciding on one… either going with Beau or Jackie.” She took a bite of the ice cream. “Beau isn’t a bad name for a calico, right?”
Nina snorted. “I mean I’m terrible at naming things so I can’t judge.” She adjusted her hoodie, letting some of her hair pop out of the opening.
“True. Well in turn, I won’t judge you for wearing your hoodie in thirty five degree weather.” She nudged Nina in the arm with her shoulder and the two laughed.
“I mean… I could tell you about it.” Nina looked down at the risers, soon focusing her attention on her friend. “But I need you to promise, you won’t tell anyone.”
She nodded, putting four fingers up as if she was being sworn in. “I, Rose, your best friend and after class walk companion, will keep your secret to myself and myself only!”
Nina laughed at her enthusiasm. “Okay okay! I’ll tell ya’.” She took an inhale in, grabbing the edge of her hoodie and pulling it down. With a simple lift of her hair, Nina reveals an undercut style shave and a line of stitches rising from the beginning of her neck to her head. Compared to normal scars, these ones were surprisingly more red around the edges.
“You got a-”
“An implant? From what my parents said, I think so.” Nina made her hair drop from her hands. “But I honestly wasn’t told a lot. Was just put under then boom, ended up with this.”
Rose’s once happy demeanor melted off like her ice cream, as she looked Nina up and down like something to be afraid of.
“But aren’t those things kind of… broken?”
Nina smiled in reassurance. “What no! It isn’t gonna malfunction or anything, we got the newer model anyways.”
Rose still looks petrified, sliding farther and farther from her with each second. Nina’s eyes widened with the realization that her only friend was now afraid of her, just for a procedure she didn’t even want in all honesty. She moved closer to her opposed friend.
“Are you afraid of me?”
She doesn’t respond back, moving back further.
“Rose, it's supposed to keep me safe. It’s not gonna hurt you.”
Tears stream down her cheeks. “I don’t want you to get hurt Nina. I don’t want you to end up like dad!” Her body begins to shake, looking as far away from her friend as she could.
Rose’s dad. A detective who recently did a major expose of money launderers in the local government, also a pretty good dad compared to most film detective stereotypes. Nina could remember late night chocolate chip cookie baking sessions with Rose and her dad, distracting themselves from the seemingly average world compared to current day.
It was unknown why he snapped when he did. Maybe it was frustration regarding the incoming doom imposing onto London, or maybe it was some midlife crisis turned psychotic break. What the public did know is that Rose’s dad, forty seven year old Harry Herrington chased his wife and kid out of their apartment with a knife, and was later found dead in his bathroom.
His autopsy was left as a classified document and his death ruled as a suicide, but Rose’s mom avidly stated that it was a malfunction in his cybernetic implant. And the thing is, no one knows why he needed it in the first place. He was intelligent, fit for his age, and was in no need of robotic assistance.
No one seemed to believe Rose’s mom. She was just a woman dealing with the unexpected death of her husband, of course she was going to string some extravagant scenario to justify a sudden loss. But the question still lingered in the area no matter how ridiculous it was. Could a robotic implant, no matter its significance, cause its user to lose it?
But Rose had already made up her mind. She lifted herself off the bleachers, barely keeping herself from passing out. No glances were exchanged. She just ran off into the rest of the park, letting the barely paved gravel roads lead her to her destination.
Nina kept her eyes focused on something other than her best friend ditching her. She tugged down on her hood, trying to cover her face from the unphased teenagers just playing their game. Despite the urge to run back to her friend, to sob and beg for her to not look at her with disdain ever again, she remained there.
Maybe she would come back if she just waited. Maybe she needs a minute to rest, to calm herself. And maybe then, she would treat her like a person rather than a bomb set to explode.
Minutes turned to almost an hour of her sitting there, but Rose never came back.
The field rests desolate of all players with only a single soccer ball resting in the center. As much as Nina wanted to take a break from her emotions to play, she still felt tempted to stay longer. As her eyes darted away from the soccer field, she noticed an oddity of sorts nesting in between a set of rotting trees.
With a faint neon glow and a black top hat, a woman around the size of a light post stared back at Nina. Her eyes were almost completely white and her similarly colored claws dug unknown scratch marks into the bark of the tree.
Nina immediately got hit with a wave of panic, breaths becoming more like gulps from a fish out of water than that of a normal inhale.
The creature broke her silence. And despite the distance between the two, Nina could hear her clearly.
“Oh, Miss Nina?” She softly chuckled under her breath. “It’s such a pleasure to finally meet the head of house.”
The creature moved in closer, with the small details of her form becoming more and more noticeable with each step. Her outfit identically matches that of her regular attire including the top hat. Hands that would normally be dull and thin now sharpen into a tight point at each finger.
Her entire body is left stained with green, white and black colors. And the most notable comparison between the two was not even visible to the naked eye. Their energy. One, a panic ridden teenager. The other, a being who brought an almost unnecessary anger to every move she made
Nina backed up as far as she could, nearly falling off the bleachers. The creature hopped onto the set of seats below Nina, her grin nearly taking up her entire face. She grasped onto the neck of her hoodie, dragging Nina up like a kitten. She yelped and attempted to hide her face with any remaining space she had left in her hoodie.
“Now, before you end up hurting yourself in your own confusion, let me introduce myself.”
“Heyyyy!”
A voice echoes from inside her head. Nina lifts herself off the pillow with tears streaming off her face. She turns her head to the other side of her room.
Hina sits cross legged on her dresser, juggling with Nina shaker cups and protein powders as if she was trying to impress her. She jolts up and drops all the items in her hands.
“Hi Ninaaa!” She smiles with a co*cky grin.
Yeah, she wants something.
Nina rips out her earbuds and wipes off her tears. “What.”
“What do ya mean ‘what’?” She mocks her tone.
“What as in, ‘what do you want from me now’? Or maybe ‘what do you want to bother me with’?”
“Awww, giving me back sass?” Hina pouts. “That really hurts my feelings, I’m gonna cry myself to sleep now!” She hops off the dresser and swan dives onto the bed.
Nina turns around to face the window. Regardless of this movement Hina reverses it and flips Nina around to face her.
“Almost like what you were doing!” She places her clawed hands in her cheeks, tracing the remaining tears and letting them settle on her nail bed.
“Just tell me what you want.”
“Well… so you know Hacky right?” Hina’s face lights up in a rare moment of sincere happiness.
“He’s not into you.”
“No, he is!” She lets go of her face, letting her claws cut her cheeks as they fall. “You're just jealous that you can’t find anyone yourself.”
“First off, I’m focusing on my work life. Second of all, he’s not dating you nor is into you. Making out once does not mean you're dating or anything.” Nina flips around towards the window again. “It’s a situationship at the very most.”
“C’moooon!” Hina shakes her violently. “It’ll only be like an hour then I’ll be done.”
“I’m not comfortable with you taking over my body just to make out with my best friend.” She lifts herself off the bed. “Besides, you’ve switched over like ten times this month alone.”
“That’s an over exaggeration.”
“Oh really?” Nina walks closer to a clean whiteboard, flipping it around to reveal a time table of sorts. The black marker wrote out text reading “Body Switch Time Slots - July 2024”, and a box with the same pen rests under it. Each date has a square filled with either a green or blue marker, and out of the fifteen days that passed over ten of them had a green marker streak. “These are just the ones I wrote down or remembered.”
Hina scoffs. “So? You didn’t set up a rule for switching, I could even make it eleven out of fifteen if I wanted to!”
“I will literally chug an entire bottle of Pink Whitney just to shut you up right now.” Nina flips the whiteboard back around, walking back to the bed and sitting towards the edge.
“There’s a good Supps replacement for that if you wanna chill with me longer!” Hina sits back up.
“I’d rather not.”
“Suit yourself.” Nina goes to her cabinet, grabbing said drink under a pile of winter clothes. She shuffles back onto the bed and uses her teeth to open up the bottle. Hina grabs her hat, fiddling with the velvet like ribbon. Almost as if she was lost in thought. The room goes quiet as the sounds of London echo through thin walls.
“Nina?”
She stops chugging from the bottle, turning back to Hina. “Yeah?”
“Do you ever just… feel jealous?”
Nina chuckles away some of her anxieties. “Well uh… yeah but it’s a normal emotion y’know?”
“No I don’t mean in general.” She puts her head in her palms. “I just… I don’t get how you're not jealous of him.”
“Thaf?” Nina smiles with a faint but hesitant laugh exiting her mouth. “No, no I’m not! I’m not at all I’m-”
“You don’t get jealous of how he’s living his life totally normal after everything?” She buries her hands deeper in her face. “How he’s just, managing so much and reaping the benefits while you just end up with f*ck all?”
“No! Of course not, why would you-”
“And you know what else bothers me, and maybe even you too?” She completely rips her hands away from her face, turning to Nina in destain. “How he doesn’t recognize your issues.”
“Hina.”
“He’s treating it like it’s nothing. Like a minor inconvenience for us rather than a goddamn anchor.”
As much as Nina wants to hop off the bed, to leave the room, to flee from her own mind, something stops her in her tracks. Her body goes stiff with stagnant air leaving her suffocating in her own body, stuck facing the very thing she wants to run from. Hina grasps onto her wrists in the meantime, digging into her skin.
“How he thinks, all we have to do is just make up and we’ll be done!” She cackles, with groans of destain bellowing towards the trail end of her laugh. “Oh how I wish I could! I wish I could just go kumbaya and leave your mind once it for all to go do whatever the f*ck I want!”
Nina hyperventilates even if she’s been through this predicament time and time again.
“Don’t you ever just want to fix that Nini? Don’t you want him to learn how it feels to be truly helpless?”
With shaky breaths, she responds. “I’m not switching over.”
Hina’s psychopathic grin wipes off her face as soon as any variation of the word “no” exits her lips.
“Fine.” She lets go of Nina’s wrists. “Fine! I get how it is. You wanna defend that friend of yours who really doesn’t do f*ck all for you.”
“But let me make something clear for you.”
She rotates her right hand palm side down, then back to face her. Her glance turns back to Nina with her sinister smile returning. Hina snaps her claws together, creating a green spark of static electricity that flickers in rapid succession. The energy flows from her hand down her arm, and eventually leading down to the floor. Each line of energy that flows through the floor makes the ground tremble like a fault line. Nina backs up to her headboard and grips on the wood. And despite her efforts, the ground gives in, sending the bed and her nightstand down into a bottomless void.
She yelps, closing her eyes and trying to keep herself from falling off by putting her body weight onto the end of the bed.
“I only want to make sure your body stays secure.” Hina’s voice echoes along the impossible walls of black depths. “Thaf isn’t harming the vessel, but oh is he getting on my nerves.” Her words come off like knives scraping on the world’s largest plate.
“And you know what lengths I’ll go to to keep myself sane for the next seventy years or so.”
Nina opens her eyes to at least get a scope of how much she has fallen. But the only thing she sees is Hina, claws outstretched and aiming towards her neck. She attempts to pull the claws away from her, but a green neon string of sorts ties her arms down in the matter of milliseconds. Hina smirks as she chokes her prey out.
“I will take your body over, I’ll unleash the same amount of wrath I use against you towards anyone who gets in my way. And you bet I’ll kill someone if it’s necessary, or hell even if it seems appealing!” She laughs, watching Nina’s attempts to squirm away from her. “And there’s nothing you can do besides watch every step I make.”
Hina lets go of Nina’s neck, letting her wheeze and pant. She lifts herself up from her prey and walks to the foot of the bed. “Now, if you don’t mind me. I have some things to plan.” Her hands rise above her head, clasping together and she jumps head first into the black void.
The bed crumbles to an ashy substance in mere seconds, leaving Nina no choice to tumble straight into the abyss.
