FOURTEEN: COHABITATION

ଓ༉‧.⭒ֶָ֢⋆.

"I can tell there's something bothering you," Lyra told her. It was January now, colder and wetter. "You can talk to me, you know. I think we're way past the point of keeping stuff from each other, right?"

In theory, yes.

If things were real, if the two people sitting in a corner booth at one of the various local diners were the true versions of Iris Fox and Lyra Sinclair, perhaps Iris would have given it some considerate thought. Maybe she would have seriously pondered the idea of sharing what was on her mind, something she rarely did; most of the time, she just sat and listened while other people poured their heart out to her. It was easier trying to deal with other people's feelings and trying to find solutions to their problems than being faced with her own.

These two, though? These two could barely sit in the same room as each other without an argument sparking up, seemingly out of nowhere; though Lyra had always been known to start fights for the thrill of it, she'd been reeling it in ever since that night at her parents' house, the one when it became clear as day Iris could and would revert time just for her sake. It made her think she was invincible, like everything could be fixed with a simple press of a mental button, which only raised Iris' anxiety even further.

Iris pushed a now cold, soggy fry around her plate. "It's a bit more complicated than that. I might know you and be past that point, but you're not. Everything about this—being here, rewinding time, knowing you know about it"—Iris chose to omit the part about fearing she knew how it would end, in spite of her best and hardest efforts to prevent it, and knew she'd made the right call—"and being constantly concerned with the weight on my shoulders is a bit too overwhelming for me. I'm just trying to do my best, and sometimes my best is . . ." She looked around her, failing to find the energy to make a grand gesture, and shrugged. "Sometimes this is just my best. Sometimes I'm moody, sometimes I need time to process everything."

That description wasn't too far off from one she'd used for Lyra once upon a time, meaning the irony of it all hadn't been lost on her, but this Lyra had no way of knowing that. Perhaps that Lyra would pick up on it and they'd share a laugh or two over said irony, but Iris wasn't sure about anything regarding the one sitting across from her, burger barely untouched, so it was best to not assume anything.

It didn't make it any less odd for her to be close to a complete stranger to someone Iris herself knew so well. In a way, they were both strangers to each other now, with Iris barely recognizing the blonde in front of her with her defeatist attitude and pink streaks, the latter being the least of her concerns. She could do whatever she wanted with her hair—free will and all—but there was something deeply bothering Iris about how easily she had dropped the bomb about things being unsalvageable and unfixable. The Lyra she knew would have never stopped fighting like that, would have never accepted her destiny or whatever it was without putting up a fight, no matter how small it was.

Even if she was relying on Iris to always come to her rescue, she was smart, which meant there was certainly a part of her that knew her powers weren't infallible. There would always be margin for error, powered by the unpredictability of stronger forces like the universe and time and the simply complex nature of human behavior.

And just like that, there would always be a side of Lyra hidden away from Iris, much like the moon. Regardless of how desperate Iris was to prove to the world she was the invincible one, capable of changing things that were regularly permanent—the laws of time, its passage, even death—there were things not even she could fix. She could only accept or continue breaking them, saying to hell with the consequences, and trapping herself and countless other people in that cycle of misery.

Knowing Lyra inside and out, all her details and quirks and secrets and traits, meant nothing in here.

Here, it was creepy. It was useless.

Nostalgia was a real bitch.

Iris remembered being younger, a tween, reading somewhere a comment someone had made about a pop (then country) singer, about how someone so young couldn't possibly hold that much nostalgia inside them. Then, she was only a few years older, fast-forwarding to her teenage years, and reading an editor she admired (it was baffling to her how, in the normal timeline, they were literally the same age) comment about how a similar thing had been said about herself and her writing.

Nostalgia for young girls was always described as being blown out of proportion, as something that was always treated as a far bigger deal than it actually was, because teenage girls were just that dramatic. Though Iris was, for all intents and purposes, a teenager in the timeline she was stuck in, she'd lived through things most girls her age hadn't and, even if that weren't true, it didn't stop them from being as colossal as they had felt like to her just because it wasn't an objective fact.

It came from the fact that you felt like you were the only person in the entire world who had ever felt certain things a certain way, to such a degree of intensity you felt like you could die—maybe you were being delusional, maybe you were being fake and dramatic, but why did it matter? Why did it matter that it felt fabricated to other people? If it felt real enough to Iris, if it made her bones crumble into dust just by how badly it hurt to even look in Lyra's general direction because she believed there was something there to be salvaged, why couldn't she have her own echo chamber?

Why couldn't nostalgia matter if you were a girl? Would you forever be damned to coexist with people and a world who only tolerated you to a certain extent, an extent where your suffering was palatable and relatable, but that still didn't allow you to reveal too much of yourself and your vulnerability? You could have all the success, all the friends, the great, promising career, and the money, and still feel like the biggest loser on the planet.

Iris didn't want to jump to conclusions, but she suspected that was what had happened to Lyra, somewhere along the way. After years and years of being ridiculed for the rare times she dared to be vulnerable, after settling for something so mundane it made her miserable simply because she was terrified of criticism, it still hadn't been enough.

People thought you were thriving. You could be mid-breakdown and be so good at faking it that no one could tell how shitty you felt.

Iris thought she did.

She really, really thought she'd be leaving a furious, ravaging Lyra behind when she left, but not even she could have predicted the outcome of every path both of them would follow after then. She couldn't keep blaming herself for it, not any longer, especially now that it was clear she didn't have nearly as much impact than she originally thought, but the claws were sunk deep into her brain.

And, when it came down to it, Iris and Lyra would be nothing but strangers where one of the parties knew almost nothing about the other, and the other had spent years thinking the opposite, truly deluding herself into thinking she knew her better than she knew herself. There were years of shared secrets and secret memories between them and no one to hold them, only one to remember all of them.

And Lyra—stupid, reckless, limit-testing Lyra had had it all. She'd had the entire world at her fingertips, capable of causing earthquakes and tornadoes and swarms of butterflies to swirl around her just with a snap of her fingers or one final breath, and she had thrown it all away.

For what? For whom?

"What you said about things being inevitable," Iris tentatively began. Lyra timidly sipped her strawberry milkshake. "Do you . . . do you really think me doing all of this won't help? Do you think you're doomed, or something? I'm just trying to understand your state of mind. This was never a conversation we got to have originally."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why didn't we ever have this conversation?" Lyra tilted her head to the side ever so slightly, urging Iris to keep enticing her attention. "With everything you've told me about the original you and me—which still sounds so strange, by the way—"—they both managed a chuckle at that—"I figured we'd be the type of people to have these . . . philosophical conversations every now and then. You know what they say about old souls."

"How honest do you want me to be here? Also, can I finish your food if you're not going to? I'm . . . kind of hungry."

"Sure." Iris' stomach growled loudly in response as Lyra pushed her plate towards her. Unlike Iris' fries, the ones on Lyra's plate were still relatively warm, with a nice, crispy texture. "I'd like you to be as honest as you're comfortable with. I might . . . not be the person you left in a different time, a different world, however you describe it, but it doesn't mean I don't care about you. This is still extremely weird to me—the whole knowing I'm supposed to be dead thing and all—but I also . . . well. I'm not assuming it's been any easier on you, either. If you truly cared about me as much as I feel you did, then . . ." She chewed on her bottom lip. "I've been horrible to you. To you and to my parents. Every time I try to make it better, I inevitably fuck things up even further."

There was no amount of honesty Iris was currently comfortable with, especially when she took into consideration the weight of her words and actions in the fate of the universe, not just in Iris' life, and she found it unwise to keep playing with fire. She'd already done far more than she'd promised herself she would, not to mention that every thought and feeling that assaulted her felt more ridiculous and out of this world than the previous one.

All of it had been for Lyra, yes. Her life was literally at stake, which more than gave her the right to be involved, but who was to say her involvement wouldn't be the thing sabotaging all of Iris' efforts? Iris knew enough about self-sabotage to be hyper aware of her own limits, but that had always been one of Lyra's (fatal) flaws. Whenever Iris thought Lyra couldn't push it any further, she would. She'd keep going for stab after stab after stab, long after Iris had been left bleeding on the sidewalk.

It was her life. It was her survival. She deserved to be kept in the loop. But how much was too much information? How far could honesty go before it turned into blind naivety?

"Come take a walk with me once I'm done eating," Iris offered, in hopes it would give her some time to rearrange her thoughts. The old jukebox stuttered just as she finished speaking, choking with all the butterflies trapped inside the glass cage, but no one but her noticed a damn thing. "Some fresh air might be good for us."

ଓ༉‧.⭒ֶָ֢⋆.

diner scene from life is strange you'll always be famous to me

wc: 1955 (docs) // 1948 (wattpad)

total wc: 28307 (docs) // 27987 (wattpad)