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 could give up on herself all she wanted, but Iris wouldn't.
Iris wasn't sure whether that made her selfish or selfless—and, truth be told, she didn't mind too much, not when another person's life was at the epicenter of her inner conflict—or how morally correct she was being by deciding two could play at that game, but she wasn't willing to give up just yet.
She would just have to find enough strength to fight for the two of them and hope that, at some point along the winding, troubled road that was her relationship with Lyra, she wouldn't have to anymore.
She hoped both sides would pull their own weight until it was clear Iris had accomplished her goal and Lyra would no longer need external forces to keep rescuing her like some damsel in distress. Lyra would never accept to be perceived as such, something Iris was painfully aware of, but it didn't stop it from happening, and it certainly wasn't stopping her from needlessly endangering herself.
So, a whole year went by, with Iris creating more and more ramifications of a timeline that should have never been messed with from the start.
Even with all the mistakes she was bound to make, were she not Iris Fox, she also found it confusing and contradictory how Lyra's words and actions seemed to fight each other for dominance.
Though she was adamant on telling Iris she didn't want to be saved, going as far as begging her to stop doing what she was doing, and occasionally reeling back her most reckless and impulsive tendencies, there was also something increasingly more erratic about her behavior. Between driving way beyond the speed limit and drinking to the point of collapsing during random house parties, Iris couldn't tell whether Lyra was testing her own limits or how far Iris would go to prove a point—how badly she was willing to twist the boundaries of reality and everything that should be a certainty just to keep her alive.
And Iris would take the bait every single time, like the lovesick fool that she was. She and her stupid, naive little heart, and her stupid, naive little dreams about being a successful fixer in hopes it would get Lyra to love her back the way she wanted her to.
Most of the time, it hadn't come to that—yet. Most of the time, Lyra had been fine, albeit with a few close calls along the way—too close for comfort, like she knew she was keeping Iris on her toes by dancing so intimately with death as though they were old, passionate lovers in every lifetime—but there had also been occasions when Iris had been forced to rewind time and bring the timeline back to where she wanted it to be.
It grew more painful every time she had to do so, complete with never ending nosebleeds and suspicious sightings of swarms of butterflies and moths, like something was tearing her insides apart, but it was a needed sacrifice. She was paper thin, torn into shreds, but had to pull herself back together.
