Archive of Our Own ^beta

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. 

Chapter Text

Leslie’s twenty-one and waking up as if from a dream to a boy beneath her feet, bloodied, whimpering. And she doesn’t know how she got here and she doesn’t know how to get home. This is not the part of town where she’s supposed to go. This is where boys get drunk and girls get drunk and you lose yourself in a haze of liquor, this is the side of town Iris lives in and the bar that she has told Leslie never to go to and this is not, not, not the way things were supposed to go tonight. 

She stumbles home with blood on her knuckles and splashed across her face and it’s so lucky her parents aren’t home because what would she say about this? Hi Mom, hi Dad, my body keeps on doing things I don’t remember and it feels like I’m missing time. What would they say? Oh that’s nice honey. She doesn’t want to go back to the therapist who said, Well maybe you made it up in your head darlingafter the incident with the babysitter when she was six. 

As if pet names would soften the blow. As if they weren’t a reminder of exactly why he did it. 

She blacks out again, coming up the stairs, and wakes up lying in bed with scratches down her arms and her hair better styled than she’s ever done it. Again? she thinks, and steps into the shower to wash off the dirt she cannot see but feel.

It doesn’t happen for another week and then she’s gone and back again. This time she wakes to Iris cuddled next to her and the distinct sense that she’s been crying. She’s clutching a teddy bear in her hands and curled up in her bed.

“Are you okay?” Iris asks, concern written across her face like poetry, like the writing on the wall.

“Not- not really,” Leslie says, and doesn’t speak anymore of it even when Iris starts looking like she’s about to cry. Because Iris is the only thing she has left and Leslie can’t lose her girlfriend on top of her parents. And both Merelia and Lily are more Iris’s friends than hers. If she loses Iris… well. She prefers not to think about it no matter how much her brain tells her to.

The next time it happens it’s the morning of Wednesday and she doesn’t get back till Thursday afternoon, bent over a toilet and heaving vomit as her stomach recoils. On the sink is one of the homemade purging smoothies she used to make when she was twelve and she was always too big for her own self.

This time when she sees it she just cries. This time she knows she isn’t going to get what she wants. What her parents have always wanted. Even in the midst of a war with God and all his angels she can’t catch a break, can’t possibly be something reliable.

There’s nothing left for it after that, so she just cleans herself up till she feels somewhat less like a bloodstained freak and puts on her softest clothes and goes to bed trying not to weep, praying, O God please go fuck yourself. Sincerely, your favorite sinner.

She dreams as if awake.

“Remember when your father hit you,” says a voice on her right side, and she turns to look.

It’s her, age fifteen, dressed all in black and thunder-eyed. She can remember every aspect of this, from the purple ombré to the black combat boots. All of it belonging to a fifteen-year-old girl with a red mark on her face in the shape of a handprint.

Her father’s handprint.

“Do you remember that, Leslie,” says the girl, mouth twisting into a bitter smile. It is not a question.

She nods. What else is there to say? She remembers it every moment that she sees her father. The hot humiliated pain and the shock, lying there on the floor with her eyes open deer-wide. Too shocked even to cry.

On her left another voice, “Do you remember when you almost starved yourself to death?”

It’s her again. This time she’s only twelve, thin as a rake and hauntingly beautiful. Hair done up with precision, every stroke of eyeliner graceful. Each of it hiding the rot beneath.

And she does remember that, she does! Her whole body remembers that macabre tightrope dance she performed for that year. She remembers bloody throat from so much vomit. She remembers getting drunk on emptiness, feeling giddy. Collapsing after running her daily mile, alone in the midst of the woods. The whiteness of the hospital bed.

How could she forget?

And behind her it’s that voice, that voice she hears in nightmares, saying, “Do you remember when your babysitter did horrible things to you?”

Of course, she thinks. She remembers every second. Down to what she was wearing. Down to the smell of his cologne. Down to the pain and the crying and the awful horrible fucking aftermath that nearly killed her, that did kill her for three years. She remembers each lilt of his voice, every groan and moan and the screams and how her parents did not believe her. How they said, if you feel so strongly about him not coming back, that’s fine, but you don’t have to lie like that… How she was slick with blood for days, even though she took four showers that night.

How could she forget? How could she forget?

Except… she did forget. 

She forgot up until two months ago, when the God she’s tried to stop praying to touched her forehead and gave her his blessing that split her apart. 

“Yes,” says herself, before Leslie can say a word, can even answer this self of her she is so ashamed of. Age six, hair buzzed, that homemade cut she gave herself in tears with her father’s razor, because He kept on talking about her beautiful blonde hair and the scar down her scalp where she pressed down too hard and split open her skull. “Yes. You forgot. And I remembered.”

The two girls on each side turn towards her. “WE REMEMBERED.”

She wakes sweating and more at peace with herself than she has ever been before. Rising from her bed, she opens her laptop and googles, “I keep losing time?”

When she sees the results for dissociative identity disorder she smiles for the first time in weeks.

Maybe for once she is not alone. Even when there is no one nearby.