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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Falling in love with Lyra Sinclair wasn't any easier the second time around.
Part of Iris expected it to be simpler, in a way, be it thanks to naivety or wishful thinking—after all, Lyra was still the same person she'd known before it all went wrong, before things got bad—but, for whatever reason it might be, she assumed she'd be used to the process by then.
Long story short, she wasn't.
She had grossly underestimated how emotionally demanding it would be to have all those feelings (for a dead girl, no less) resurface like boiling lava and overestimated her ability to deal with them.
It was different, though. The first time around, Iris was never consumed by the knowledge she'd one day end up losing Lyra, but now . . . now it just felt like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the point of no return that would mark the beginning of their end.
Anything she said or did could be the trigger, even though she'd gone back in time all those years just to erase it, but it would be simplistic to reduce it to a singular event, wouldn't it? It being simplistic also made it more difficult, in a way; if she couldn't figure out exactly what she'd done wrong to send Lyra further down her spiral, then what had been the point of going through all of that? What was she doing back in the past, bending and breaking herself to save someone without knowing where to start?
Iris didn't necessarily want to be so pessimistic about the outcome of her decisions and actions, but she needed things to be guaranteed. She needed to know everything she'd done and sacrificed had to be worth it, and the only worthwhile outcome of the mess she'd trapped herself in would be a living, breathing Lyra, but she couldn't know for sure.
She knew they'd inevitably fall out, sooner or later, even if it would happen under different circumstances than it originally had gone down, but there wasn't even an opportunity to take things slow, take them day by day. Iris didn't know which would be the last; even if she were to succeed at avoiding Lyra's death following the unedited script, the uncertainty surrounding everything else was too scarlet of a flag to ignore.
Iris knew Lyra. That was the problem.
There had been something somewhat endearing about the reckless, impulsive way Lyra conducted herself at first, moving through life while enjoying every moment for what it was, but she'd often take everything to the extreme. She didn't understand the concept of a limit, not even her own, and Iris often lacked the power to convince her into doing something she had already set her mind to and vice-versa.
Lyra had always gotten everything she wanted, when she wanted it, how she wanted it. She'd always had Iris wrapped around her finger, too, but Iris would like to think she'd had the slightest bit of agency when it came to that—for the sake of her ego, at least.
