Iris gave not a glance to Diana as they left. She began driving to the site of the electrocuted girl, then realized something, and returned to the scene of the first death where the girl was dumped into the river. There was a stretch of dirt where she had been deposited, and Iris Timelined there.
The host aura carried the girl wearing the blue jacket, and before it deposited her, Iris checked the state of the air around the girl. It was no different than if she were carried normally, albeit by very thin hands.
Iris frowned, then checked the states of the dirt beneath the host aura. It exerted no pressure nor weight. As she realized what it was, she tugged at the host aura and attempted to reveal it into corporeality again, and in the next instant -
- a meathook was refined into the real and shot towards her -
- a gust of wind blasted Olivia out, and a second later Iris launched herself out, but not in time to avoid the hook from cutting deeply into her arm; flayed muscle leaked from her wounds as she shouted expletives, seeing Timeline lower itself out-of-range and the meathook shrivel its existence as Kairos returned to her back.
"Shit, are you okay?" Olivia gently applied pressure to her wounds, and Iris winced.
"S-Sorry."
"Hey, you saved me when I wasn't in danger and didn't save yourself when you were." muttered Olivia. After verifying Iris would be alright, she whispered to her: "Dummy."
Iris sighed, though she still felt guilty. Screw her own health; she had almost caused harm to Olivia. But she felt always forced to temper her care for another, so that she could not be made to feel dependent and allow another to make better her emotions; even as Olivia did do so for Iris, regardless of whether Iris allowed this intrusion into the self.
Eventually time passed, and a Flickendecke patch sealed her wounds. She tentatively went back to Timeline again, filtering out host auras for now.
The girl's carried corpse entered, and Iris frowned. "…wait. God damnit, I just realized -- I was so caught up in the exhilaration of finally reverting that god damn corpse death stamp, I didn't stop to consider that being able to revert it meant she wasn't killed here." Iris winced, and using her wind, carved the girl's heart out. She grabbed it.
"Thank you for not doing it like Natasha would."
Olivia mimed punching the poor little girl straight through the chest and out the other end, and Iris burst into laughter, then remembered she was recording and tried to stifle it.
"N-Not laughing." said Iris.
Olivia snickered. "You already know we have to re-record this one, so you can laugh."
"I already told you I'm not laughing." Iris turned away. "…which isn't the same as me saying it's not funny."
"I remember we went out once, and this family sitting across from us had this kid who kept staring at Natasha. Trying to figure out her gender or something. She told me that if he looked one more time she was going to punt his ass into the Milky Way."
Iris reverted the heart along the path it had once beat. This led her out of Timeline and further up river, until it shot underground; Iris parted the dirt for it and it buried itself.
"He didn't have the blue jacket yet." said Olivia. "Still needed to get it."
After a few days, the heart unearthed itself, then moved to the other side of the river; it shuddered unnaturally there, indicating that Kairos had reached the edge of the death stamp. Iris was frustrated, and tried to focus further to breach beyond this stamp, but could not; another arbitrary limitation that paused and enraged her. She breathed and tried to calm herself, but the difficulty of this case was truly frustrating her, even worse because she knew what she would do on a regular case: she would go over to the owner of the jacket's apartment and threaten to punt his ass into the sun if he didn't speak to her.
She remembered Thomas, and tried to keep herself a presence of steel. Regardless of the host's range, this proved that he was likely with her at time of death; the precision of the cuts could only be possible close-range. She had noted signs of a slight struggle before death, albeit as lopsided as one might expect.
She launched herself & Olivia over to the other side of the river. "K-Kairos: Timeline." She crouched down to focus, her cloud cover flickering as Kairos crawled off her back.
The girl's corpse entered a minute before her death. She paused, then turned, and in her impatience Iris tried to tug more of eternity towards herself, until Timeline skipped and the corpse's bracelet fell off her right arm moments before she was slashed apart. As Iris reached for it, it reverted away from her hand, then smacked her in the face, then disappeared; Iris winced and saw Olivia realizing the same.
Though her endurance would increase as time rolled on, Iris tended like many hosts to express exhaustion in ways typified by her Revenant. The eternally weaving legs of Kairos would slow, and occasionally small clouds of rain would sweat upon her back or events around her would randomly jut forwards then backwards.
Iris sighed as she rolled out of Timeline, forced to temporarily lower all abilities of Kairos. "J-Just leave..."
Olivia grabbed the camera so Kairos wouldn't erase it, and rushed off as the grass behind her swelled. It was a particular bad bout; the river overflowed and receded in drought, then froze and shattered. Bits of dirt around Iris decayed, then reappeared, then decayed again.
It was fifteen minutes before Olivia tentatively returned. "You okay?"
Iris rolled her head to the side. If she turned her head right then she saw the land as it was fifty years ago; to the left she saw centuries-old saplings. "…m-mostly." She pressed herself up. "C-Can't really drive in this state."
"It's okay, I'll drive."
Iris tiredly walked with Olivia back to her truck. Her keys were locked inside (for she never used them), so Baal ate the driverside window and its tongue lapped the key into the ignition as they sat inside, and Olivia drove.
Iris leaned back and closed her eyes, but Olivia gently shook her. "I still need you to stay awake. Okay?"
"…o-okay." muttered Iris. "I need... noise, something, music."
"How about my voice?"
"M-Maybe if you shriek like a banshee."
"Call me that again and I'll haunt you while you sleep."
"Sorry, I should have known that succubus would be more appropriate given the way you dress." Iris did not say so as to not be blasted with projectile vomit.
But she did ask Olivia if she could talk more about where she had grown up, for Iris liked to hear about other people's childhoods. She had already heard of the Walker, who had always walked throughout the neighborhood in the same outfit, who seemed not even to smile as if his walking was penance. There was the Gardener, who could always be seen alone outside, never gardening, yet somehow with his garden trimmed regardless. And there were several other such legendries around the neighborhood, if only constructed in Olivia's mind.
"But out of all the men I saw, it was always in their ability to be outside freely and alone. Something I obviously couldn't have."
"Was that what interested you in being a host?"
"A little bit, and because I was still pretty flaky with my sexuality. I don't remember if I ever felt any legitimate desire for men. Ugh, just saying that sounds gross. But I thought that maybe becoming a host would help me solidify that identity, so, in a way, maybe I did choose to be a lesbian, unlike Viktoria who was forced into it."
Iris thought Olivia was about to say more. She did not, but she could tell that Olivia was purposefully not venting about her so as not to bother Iris. She did not talk often about her problems, for a certain amount of her identity was fixed upon that silence of the self; she defined herself by the ability to nurture, which naturally made her own life secondary to the needs of others.
"Sometimes I feel like Natasha had the desire to prove herself to Viktoria; that she desired her approval over everything else, and Viktoria exploited that dependence. Maybe you saw some of that, too."
Iris had not, and she suspected that Olivia had not an iota of evidence for this claim; so she was confused why she had made it, but she would not numb another's fantasy.
What Iris did not know was that to some extent Olivia pitied Natasha, which as discussed before, precludes empathy, and yet she pitied precisely because she preferred this distance. No more understandable did Natasha become to Olivia's mind, but it was not understanding that Olivia sought. To her, this was a version of Natasha that was still good to Olivia, one reality could no longer pull and play away. Something had ate away at Natasha that Olivia could blame on Viktoria. The complexity of what had occured between them was secondary to Olivia's own desired memories, and so she reduced away its living colors.
"Now, I've talked about my home life before... I mean, I told you about how Viktoria thinks I have daddy issues, so I just fed her dumb shit about how I wish my dad was still around and shit like that." Olivia laughed. "I love my parents. They're... I mean, straight, you know, but... I guess my mom's technically bisexual."
"What do you mean by 'straight'?"
"I don't know. I just feel like they have a much lower threshold for relationships, you know? I mean, I know I've mentioned before they have a good marriage, but... I remember finding an old journal of my mom's, dated back to before she had me. I didn't have very long to read through it, and I only read through it once. But I remember that, for example, my mom had a miscarriage before me and they buried it, which explains why she would sometimes leave the house for a few hours in October.
Before that, she had written about a woman named Elena, who my mom was once in a relationship with. She said that she had run into Elena that day and they decided to have drinks, as she felt curious how Elena was doing, although as usual it was my mom who did almost all of the talking. She said that Elena seemed put-off by her now, which she felt was ironic, because it had been Elena's own intensity that had frightened her away years ago. She almost seemed afraid of what it might mean for herself if she was able to reciprocate that passion, although she rationalized it in many ways; or at least I felt I could tell. And that for many years, she hadn't thought of Elena because of that, and then she trailed off into writing about her upcoming marriage, although I noticed that across the final lines there were stains of what looked like her tears."
Iris was tired, and she closed her eyes.
"I hadn't thought of it for years until I noticed something, while we were watching television as a family. My dad had his recliner, and his pillow was set at an angle towards my mom. I asked him why, and my mom told me that he does it so that, if he falls asleep, then his head rolls towards the direction of my mother. And seeing that odd thing accepted as if it was a genuine act of romance disgusted me, in a way, even as I do love my parents."
"…think she felt a bit cheated?" muttered Iris.
"I'm not sure she's aware that her life is lacking in some way. And maybe it's better she be able to continue herself, because… otherwise she may regret that the person she chose isn't the one who she loves most deeply. And one of the reasons I used to... I just can't stand being with someone who doesn't improve themselves. I guess it was that acceptance of mediocrity that upset me more than the reality of parents' marriage. I just can't stand the way so many people refuse to improve their lives."
"Can most people choose to be more than their circumstances?"
"I already get enough discussions about free will with Naomi, and if you choose to put me into another I'm putting us into a tree."
Iris snickered, but she was still exhausted, and with the affliction of sleep did not care to debate. She listened barely as Olivia said more about her family life, yet she seemed most focused on her mother, who she said had the same electric effect on men, and women, that Olivia herself had.
Oddly, she felt sympathy for Olivia, for she could tell that such things ran in her family. Her parents' marriage had replicated itself into her desire to control life and her own relationships, in that attempt to be beyond her own circumstances; the hope that she as a lesbian and a future generation might do better. Unlike her mentor Naomi, she could not view the universe as an empty thing; the imbuement of the world with romantics, narrowly defined as they were to Olivia. She could not understand the reality of the love depicted above, and so she had decided to reject it.
"I feel we contain the fragments of other people we've met and varnish them through our own personalities, attempting to reconstruct the greater from only what slices of existence are accessible to us. That frightens some people, because it means that perception plays a far greater role in what we call reality than objectivity does. But is that perception less real? If I can imagine a different version of someone, is that not reality? And I think there's comfort to that, because it's what allows me to file off things like suffering and regret from my memories, to remove blame from myself and people I care about, and my own anger at how she left me."
Iris realized that she had fallen asleep, and an integument had briefly formed over her reality; whether she had confused her own thoughts with the outside emanation of words she could not be sure. She had dreamed some lately of Olivia, of Natasha. Occasionally she was Iris's protege and Iris her mentor. Usually her eyes were spaced too far apart, or her parka oddly shaped. She felt guilty over such dreams, for she worried that it indicated she would forget Natasha's appearance; yet these are simply the types of odd alterations that dreams make.
But she would allow such dreams to imprint on herself, if only to have more time with Natasha in that false sense; she hoped that such memories would eventually become something she had rather than something she had lost.
In a few minutes Iris felt the truck park at their hotel, and was slightly awake. Though she had long driven with Phantom, she missed when she had to be driven around by others, falling asleep to the nodding headlights and rhythmic rolling of wheels, feeling her mind lose itself to the hypnosis of night driving.
As she looked over to Olivia, she noted she had not yet turned the truck off. She seemed in thought, and still they sat in silence for a minute longer. Olivia looked to her, then handed, then retracted Iris's car keys, as if to fake remembering that Iris did not need them. Still they sat in silence, and Iris thought to mention one of the aforementioned dreams. In all of them Natasha had always worn her parka: she had never been quite able to paste a different outfit or age upon her, and she thought to ask Olivia if she was able to. But in the fraction it took for such a thought to become considered action, it receded, and she did not ask Olivia further, though in the fluid of both their eyes, there was still that aching for a beyond home's face.