ଓ༉‧.⭒ֶָ֢⋆.
If there was something Iris missed about the normalcy of her regular, boring timeline, it was her mom.
Following the divorce, Iris' mom grew clingier, the phone calls increasing in frequency, but Iris hadn't minded. She knew she was the type of person to thrive in environments where she was needed (case in point: Lyra Sinclair) and had jumped at the opportunity to support her mom through the rough patch, especially considering her father's sudden radio silence.
He'd call twice a year—on her birthday and Christmas—still aloof and unapproachable, and Iris had convinced herself of two things: he didn't know her anymore and was no longer pretending to, and she would no longer try to make a home out of a temporary place. Her home was wherever her mom was—New York, Providence, wherever it might be. He didn't need her, but her mom did, and the divorce hadn't been Iris' fault.
So, to have one of the closest relationships in her life be torn away from her thanks to her own poor prioritizing and lack of proper planning hurt a lot more than it would have had she not been directly involved in it. Perhaps they'd find their way back to each other eventually, with the divorce still being in full swing regardless of Lyra's survival or not, regardless of how Iris' college experience would unfold or what her main focus would be.
In case Lyra survived all of this, now with Iris' divine intervention on repeat, in case the worst thing to come out of it would be a friendship cracked and shattered beyond repair with both parties alive and safe, Iris would still have her mom. She wouldn't have to lick her own wounds in the quiet loneliness of an apartment that meant nothing to her.
She would be okay. She would.
She would have to be. It was the only outcome she'd be content with.
Even with everything going on with Lyra, even with every waking moment of Iris' current life revolving around that one thing, that one person, there was somehow a side of her psyche that held on to an unsuspectingly mundane aspect of her previous life.
With Lyra going through great lengths to avoid both her and her parents, using the excuse that she didn't want to accidentally let slip anything about Iris' new found time rewinding powers (valid by itself, were she not using it as an attempt to avoid confronting an uncomfortable situation, the way she always did), it was ironic that Iris was doing the exact opposite by trying to feel close to her own mom at the same time.
Thanksgiving would be the perfect time to do so, especially when it would be just the two of them alone in that big house. The divorce, albeit not finalized or fully kickstarted—it was mostly empty threats, a cold war brewing between two opposing parties fighting for the right to be right they'd never accomplish and for Iris' support, and general passive-aggression—was already weighing down on the trio, and Iris' dad had decided to spend the holidays with his family.
Naturally, Mama Fox had taken this as a personal attack; with both her parents having passed away years prior and her siblings having their own families to tend to, it was hard for her to not see the sudden decision as an inherently, consciously evil choice. To her, he would simply drop off the face of the planet during a holiday people would usually spend with their families, small personal conflicts brewing or not, and yet he was choosing to rub it in her face she'd be all alone. Iris had been promised the illusion of a choice, the illusion of free will, as Lyra would put it—spend Thanksgiving by herself on campus, sad and lonely, be miserable with her mom while devouring cold takeout in front of the plasma screen, or be surrounded by a large dining table, complete with homemade meals.
There would also be the option to try and convince Lyra to invite her, but she'd completely blown that, so she was ignoring everything related to that hypothesis for the sake of her mental well-being.
It still didn't turn her into the most pleasant to be around, no.
One would expect Iris to be the perfect guest in her mother's house after how much time she'd been devoting to miss her—and how things between them used to be before Iris' great plan of rewinding time to save Lyra and doom everyone else's lives in the process, that is—but, instead, she'd found herself strangely drawn to her bedroom.
It wasn't where she'd spent most of her childhood, with the constant moving around Oregon they'd do back when she was younger and had a happy family that was much, much better at keeping up appearances than they currently were, but it wasn't in Providence, either. In case there was an emergency, she'd still be relatively close to Emelle Bay, albeit not in the immediate vicinity as she always was, which brought her an odd sense of relief.
Still, even after spending so long wanting to grow closer to her mom like she knew the two of them really were, she'd gone for the safest option—self-isolation. The very moment the negative thoughts hit her square in the chest, bringing along an overwhelming tidal wave of guilt and shame for finding some truth in her dad's accusations and mean-spirited comments, she'd retreated into the one place in the house where she was bound to not be bothered and to let those same thoughts consume her. It was a never ending cycle of self-sabotage, the one thing she knew how to do better than anyone else—besides prioritizing Lyra, of course.
Of course.
Maybe her dad had a point when he told her mom she had driven everyone away by forcing them to choose sides. Maybe he had a point when he told her she'd be miserable during the holidays because of that—no friends, no family, no grand meal. She'd dismissed the staff so they could go home to spend time with their own families and, whether she wanted to admit it or not, Iris was all she had left. Iris herself could very well have taken the path of self-preservation by doing something entirely different during her Thanksgiving break, the pile of untouched coursework growing exponentially with every minute she spent neglecting its existence, yet she was there.
She wasn't there in spirit, of course, and it felt like she was the one pacing around the house like a ghost. All her life, she'd never been invisible to her own parents; to everyone else, perhaps, except when they needed a favor or needed her, and she'd always been more than prepared to do what was expected from her.
She didn't want her mom to grow comfortable with this dynamic, one where Iris would drop everything in the blink of an eye to run back to her simply because she had no one else, be it because of the separation or because of her own personality traits, but she also couldn't leave her own mom alone at a time like this. She would never outwardly verbalize it, no, as it would mean admitting defeat to Iris' dad and she vehemently refused to show a single sign of vulnerability (something that had greatly contributed to all the bumps in their marriage, no doubt), but her silent pleas to have some company had wrecked whatever was left of Iris' heart, torn apart by Lyra Sinclair's two deaths and returns to live.
Not that Iris' mom would know this. Not that Iris would be stupid enough to tell her, either, and she was making a conscious effort to keep her mouth shut this time.
Even though they hadn't resorted to eating take-out food for Thanksgiving dinner, something Iris was certain her dad would make sure to bring up at the most inconvenient times just to be spiteful (once a novelist, always a novelist), it was still a barebones dinner when compared to the one people would expect from such a massively publicized holiday.
Wrapped in heavy wool blankets, teeth chattering in a cold room that didn't feel like her own, Iris sat and waited until the day ended. She hadn't missed dinner, though there was a small voice in her head that she should have, considering how badly the burnt, store-bought turkey lasagna had upset her stomach.
Even with a potential case of food poisoning creeping right around the corner, Iris' thoughts still found their way back towards Lyra and how she was coping—coping with the holidays, bundled up with family she claimed she couldn't stand (but would be shattered beyond repair following her death, a detail Iris had decided against sharing during her explanation of how she had gotten there), troubled by the knowledge that, in theory, she had already died twice in multiple timelines and been brought back twice thanks to divine intervention, and frustrated with none of it being under her control.
Iris suspected the latter was the heaviest factor in the equation.
She knew how lonely she'd be if she chose to go forward with her time rewinding plan, but, in her head, having Lyra alive and well by her side would make it all worth it. Once upon a time, they'd both been all the other ever needed (which, in retrospect, was a clear sign of how unhealthy their dynamic had been), but things were different now. They weren't the same people and they hadn't been hardened by the same hardships, so there would be less similarities and an even lower number of identical relationship aspects.
She had also grossly underestimated the heavy weight of her time rewinding powers and how they'd impact the new found weirdness of her life in the present universe. It was an extra factor of stress she definitely didn't need, constantly worrying about what she couldn't and couldn't say, what she should and shouldn't do, and the threat of everything ending the way it did again, with or without her input was constantly looming, the silver glint of the knife of memory never fully out of sight.
Knowing she was supposed to know better and was still bound to screw it all up, even with all the added caution she'd been applying to all her words and actions, fate was the only thing she couldn't fight—if one could call it that. Perhaps it was just fate, but fighting against all her attempts at rewriting something that could only be paraphrased, not have its core nature and ending altered just to prove to herself she really had done everything she could . . . sometimes it was all too much, too much responsibility for one single person to handle all by themselves. Iris didn't want to be pessimistic—after all, she had done all she did because she'd thought there was a high chance there was more she could have done and now she could at least try—but maybe Lyra had been right.
Maybe she was fighting a battle she would never be able to win. It wasn't like Lyra to lay her armor down and give up, but, if things were meant to happen a certain way, who was Iris to decide she was powerful enough to make them any different? Who was she to even assume she had the right to mess up people's lives over something that wasn't certain?
Weren't all of those thoughts ones she should have focused more on before rewinding? She couldn't go back now, even if she knew how; with how much she'd changed the past, she wouldn't return to the exact same reality she'd left behind. For all she knew, Lyra could die sooner, their relationship could implode in a much more violent way . . . there was no way of knowing anything for sure, and it boiled her alive to be trapped with a series of problems with no solutions or tangible guidance to find an answer to them.
So, when Iris' mom timidly approached her to offer her more lasagna, completely oblivious to how ill Iris had been feeling the whole evening—both from the less than edible food they'd gotten to eat and from the side-effects of keeping such an enormous secrets from her mom—Iris couldn't find the strength to pretend to be in the mood for being polite. She was snappy, snappier than she'd ever been, and she knew her mom was the least deserving of that kind of treatment, especially under the current circumstances, but her words regularly shot to kill whenever she felt emotional.
She wanted to speak up. She wanted to explain why she was upset—she was upset because she was in love with a dead girl, a dead girl who refused to let herself be saved, a dead girl who believed and truly appeared to be fated to die no matter how much effort Iris would put into preventing it from happening. Iris herself was destined to chase moths instead of the always present butterflies, the gravedigger who couldn't stop remembering, who could never lay anything down to rest and move on with her life.
That was the greater issue there.
Iris had never known how to let anything go—lost loves, lost friends, memories, her parents' divorce, nothing—and there was only so much weight one person could carry. However, her emotional baggage was the type of baggage she couldn't hand to someone else, as they wouldn't understand, she couldn't explain any of it in a coherent way, and there would always be the nagging terror of worsening and fanning an already catastrophic wildfire.
It wasn't even Lyra's fault. It wasn't.
It was Iris'. It was her responsibility to fix everything, to save Lyra's life, was it not?
If not hers, then whose?
ଓ༉‧.⭒ֶָ֢⋆.
i know it looks like nothing happened in this chapter but think with me for a second. did nothing REALLY happen or do you just want to think that way. many thoughts to be had
also, do we not LOVE the sudden whiplash between the moms of our main characters from one onc to the other? compare iris' mom to harley's and have a laugh with me
by the time i'm hitting the publish button on this chapter for the first time, HIT REWIND is a round 2 qualifier for the ONC. last time, EXIT WOUNDS was a round winner, but i didn't submit for round 3 because i didn't get enough time to finish the novella. oops. let's hope i can finish this one in time to be a Good Girl™
wc: 2302 (docs) // 2280 (wattpad)
total wc: 26352 (docs) // 26039 (wattpad)