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.
*****
Sometimes, walking away is the sca...
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Meeting Lyra's parents for the second time in her life should be easier.
In theory, that is; after all, she'd already been through it and knew exactly how they'd react to her in their first encounter and every other that followed suit, but that wasn't Iris' reality.
The anxiety suffocating her whenever she was around the Sinclairs was far too strong to ignore and, while she could blame it on first-meeting jitters for the night, she feared it would never truly fade away. As long as she remained in this timeline, perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop and cement the fact she would lose Lyra no matter what she did, forever damned by the narrative, or by fate, or whatever it was, she'd also be worrying about their impending grief.
If she failed at the one thing she couldn't get wrong, they would have to bury their daughter for the second time, unbeknownst to them; at least the ignorance surrounding that was a blessing in disguise, but there was a nagging voice at the back of Iris' head, an evil little gremlin grunting in her ear, that insisted that parents always knew. They would always know something wasn't quite right, and the constant plague of déjà vu Iris was experiencing would pass along to them.
They probably wouldn't be able to place it as well as she could—she had created an alternate reality all by herself, after all, but that wasn't the kind of thing you got to brag about during dinner or cocktail parties, really—but déjà vu by proxy didn't sound like the most fun someone could have, especially when it came to losing someone. Especially when it came to losing someone as dear to them as their own daughter. Lyra could bitch and complain about them all she wanted, but those were the two people in the whole world who had ever loved her more than Iris herself had, and Iris . . . well.
Iris was still attempting to put all that love and heartache into words, finally coming to terms with the fact that the heartbreak had settled in long before Lyra died. It had crept up on her on its toes, as silently as a fox mid-hunt, and had been waiting in the dark, anticipating the perfect moment to strike. Lyra's death had been the catalyst for the pain to explode out of Iris' chest, but it had always been lingering, patiently waiting.
Grief was patient, until the moment it wasn't. It was one of the slowest, most silent ways to kill someone, too—like drowning, Iris found. Drowning had always been known as a silent killer, stealing people from the world and turning them into foam, tossing it around its waves, and, if someone wasn't paying close attention, no one would even know.
Lyra had just vanished, and no one had been able to do a thing to prevent it or save her. Maybe they hadn't paid enough attention, or maybe they hadn't tried hard enough. Maybe the currents had been too strong, maybe they hadn't wanted to be caught by the riptide, too, but had Iris known . . . had she known Lyra was in the water, she would've jumped in right after her.
