Chapter Text
Here’s the story she wished had happened:
Iris was in the car. It crashed. Her mother died instantly. It was a busy road. Someone called 911 and she left. She had nightmares about it, and she went to therapy, but there was no permanent damage. Eventually she started to get over it. Eventually it became something that had Happened, something you talk about while drunk that dies in the light of day. Her tragic backstory that was only there when convenient.
Here’s the truth.
It was night. And she was half asleep, half awake. Some indie artist on the radio was singing bubblegum pop about dolls or mad hatters or something equally childlike, lulling her to sleep. She was clutching her teddy bear, the one she hardly ever slept with anymore because that’s what kids did, the one that had comforted her through everything.
Her mother had bought it for her when she’d started getting stabs of pain in her legs that the doctors said would never go away. Eventually the pain spread up to her back and she got used to it.
She never saw that teddy bear again. Not after that day.
A few years ago she had found a feather hanging from her shoulder blades. She had told her mother but all it had produced was an ashy face and squeezed hands. Her mother pulled out the feather from the stem with blank eyed precision as Iris cried and threw it in the trash, the white fluff stained by blood.
That had been her seventh birthday. The feathers had grown into wings, white and a foot long and light-boned. The moment her mother had seen them she’d started to weep bitterly till Iris had known she was the cause of it.
After that she had sworn never to fly where her mother could see. Never to fly at all.
She raised her head from where it was fallen on the pillow in the backseat. “Mommy, are we almost there yet?” she asked sleepily.
There was no answer. That moment was the one the headlights threw their beams upon a figure dressed all in white in the middle of the road and her mother screamed in fear, and her hands clenched and pulled on the wheel and the car swerved and it bounced and flipped and Iris yelled her mother’s name as they flipped over and over again, tumbling off the road with blood flying and bubblegum pop crooning softly and perversely, teddy bear clutched wildly with fear.
They stopped with a crash and a foreboding thump that melted into silence. There was the crunching of feet on leaves and Iris held her breath, the adrenaline still thumping so loud she swore she could hear drumbeats.
There was a gunshot, loud and deafening and the only bright thing Iris could see, then more silence. Iris wriggled in her seat, unable to suppress a whimper.
More crunching of leaves. A hand clad in a white glove that looked more expensive than what Iris’s mom made in a week reached through the broken window and grabbed a hold of her back, eliciting a scream of pain.
“Nephilim,” the faceless, horrible man, the one whose voice she heard every night after that, sighed, “so sensitive.” And with that he caught hold of her wings and yanked till there was a horrible snap and Iris wailed, feeling pain race up and down her body, worse than anything she had ever felt before.
The hand let go of her wing, now stained red with blood. “Don’t speak of this to anyone,” he said, voice a low and rasping hiss. “Or I’ll be back. And it won’t be just your wings.”
That was what really happened.
She crawled out of the car and walked out with broken feet and blood slick down the back of her dress for the next four miles until she came upon the town where her Aunt Beverly lived. In the night, her brown skin lit by moonlight and covered in blood, she looked as otherworldly as the angel that had broken her wings. Her hair black and red in the light. Eyes shining full of tears.
Iris knocked on the door and her aunt took her in.
And even now she still thinks about it. The way that glove pulled. The crunch of the car. The flash of the bullet, the smell of gunpowder. The sight of teddy bears made her want to puke. Once St. Margaret's had played the song that had been the soundtrack to the worst night of her life and she'd felt the twisting in of the knife again. Had hurried into a janitor's closet and cried until the sound of her own sobs had drowned it out.
When Iris walked back into class her spine was upright and the tears gone and her eyes were red but she let them think that she'd just been smoking weed in the girls' bathroom because that's what they thought of her; they whispered slurs behind her back, as if she didn't hear them spit the names of football teams in lieu of her own name. They wore her headdresses on weekends at Coachella and learned about her genocide on Monday.
But she didn't give them the satisfaction of knowing just how broken she was.
Then she'd met Leslie, and she'd had someone who believed in her, and Iris couldn't, couldn't tell her about it, couldn't reveal it.
So she kept the secret, and she kept her vengeful heart, and when she found a book in the library that hinted at what could be, she knew exactly what she was going to do.
Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.
If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.
If I cannot be good enough for heaven, she thought, I will kill God.