Time heals all wounds. When you have the power to rewind it, you begin to wonder whether it's too much responsibility for one person to hold.
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Sometimes, walking away is the sca...
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Lyra took her sweet, sweet time emptying her pockets, delaying the inevitable for as long as she could, and she did a great job at acting blissfully unaware of Iris' inner agony. Whether she was aware of how Iris was feeling or not was to be decided—Iris was starting to believe maybe she didn't know this variant of Lyra Fox as well as she had known the genuine one, or even at all—that was still to be decided, but it wasn't like she could do anything about it but wait.
She was still curled up in her worn out couch, tugging at a loose string escaping from the fabric of her cardigan in a feeble attempt to distract herself before her mind went haywire and ruined everything any further.
Iris missed her mom. It was one of those childish thoughts that would assault her out of the blue, now that their relationship was completely different than the one she'd left behind when she chose to rewind time so far back to the past. In this universe, they were fine, just mother and daughter, and Iris was the only one who felt the difference, hanging in the air like a missing limb.
After falling out with Lyra and truly believing she'd left Emelle Bay tucked safely inside a drawer she would never open again, moving all the way across the country and settling in on the East Coast, Iris and her mom had grown closer. With her mom's house in Providence, Iris knew she'd always have a safe place to fall back on in case she needed that extra support, which proved to be a more frequent occurrence than she'd ever considered.
With a house in Providence and an apartment in New York, Iris had successfully put enough distance between herself and Lyra to convince herself it was exactly what she needed to heal from the implosion of their friendship and the could-have-beens and all the almosts. Keeping that cold distance had been easier than devoting active time to missing Lyra, even though it had been one of the most painful things she'd ever had to experience. Lyra's death had been worse, uglier, but at least Iris had her mom then.
The kitchen in Providence had seen her weep and heave for oxygen, with nothing to hold on to but her mom's warm embrace as they both sat on the floor. Iris had had to mourn various things all at once—the girl she'd lost, the relationship they'd had, everything they could have been—and had to cradle the heavy weight of her grief in matchstick arms.
And yet, she'd never felt more secure, more protected than she did in that massive house, sharing the space with only one other person.
But that was then. That was another timeline. In this one, Lyra was still alive and things were different; with Lyra alive, a major source of heartache had effectively been erased, and Iris and her mom had, regrettably, not grown as close.
In the quiet of the darkest nights, Iris missed her mom and the tight bond they'd formed through hardships and shared grief. It tugged at every muscle in her chest, ravaged her insides, and it was a cruel reminder of everything she'd had to sacrifice just to keep Lyra safe and alive, but maybe there were necessary sacrifices.
