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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Going for a walk had sounded like a much, much better idea in theory.
The weather had, somehow, returned to its usual surly state, like not even Iris' intervention could mess up things that bad (and the weather changes on the night she met the Sinclairs for the second time had been just an accident, a fluke), and walks by the shore were greatly advised against.
Though it wasn't raining by the time Iris and Lyra got out of the car, the harsh gusts of wind slamming against them nearly knocked them off balance. Lyra did a much better job at remaining upright on her feet, despite being thinner and smaller, whereas Iris wasn't nearly as graceless. While trying to fight against the strength of a natural force to close the door on the passenger's side, forever the passenger seat princess that she was, her boot landed the wrong way on a muddy puddle and she barely found the time to hold on.
Lyra would have laughed, in a different time. She would have chuckled, at the very least, but, this time, Iris got nothing of the sort in return. If anything, Lyra looked up at her over the hood of the car when her head suddenly dipped out of her sight, as Iris struggled to not look like an idiot with mud all over her jeans. Once it was settled Iris hadn't slipped, fallen, and cracked her head right open, Lyra locked the card and tucked her hands into the hands of her coat.
Then, she continued to act in unthinkable, uncharacteristic ways.
She waited.
Lyra Sinclair never waited for anyone and had never done so, in any version of reality, so the fact that she'd held back instead of sprinting down towards the sand and the wild ocean down below, miles away from the top of the cliffs, instantly made alarm bells blare in Iris' head.
Iris didn't know exactly where Lyra had fallen from—if she had fallen at all, if she might add. The information she had about the circumstances surrounding Lyra's mysterious death was limited, and she had nothing necessarily tangible to base her theories off of; she knew Lyra had drowned, but no one had told her a thing about everything else.
How had she drowned? Why had she been by the coastline under such dire weather conditions? Had she been up on the cliffs? Had she been simply walking along the shoreline and gotten swept up by an aggressive wave?
The fact that she didn't know—and would never know—the answer to any of those pressing questions was like a permanent itch underneath her skin. Her main goal was to keep Lyra alive, anyway, and none of that should matter (why would she be worrying about how Lyra had died if she succeeded in keeping her alive? Wasn't that the whole point of the ruination of humanity by the cold hand of Iris Fox?), but her undying curiosity was putting up one hell of a fight.
