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Iris drives. Drives until sunset turns to sunrise. Her right hand on the steering wheel keeps twitching something unnatural; open with wires and sizzling capillaries that crackle and spark. She frowns to it. She should pull over soon and attend to it, or at least wrap it to hide the disfigurement, but then realises that's futile because everyone knows what she is already, even though Iris feels like she's just starting to learn how to walk.
Josh's tablet sits cracked and bloody in the passenger seat beside her and there's a swell to her stomach that feels like sick every time the screen catches the sun, every time she remembers the melting to her flesh and the fact that every little choice she has made and every little explosion of love she has felt hasn't been hers. It all sat behind that screen.
Iris peels off the highway, doesn't know where she's headed; but the sun is warm and the air is thick up in these mountains and it's so much better than being dead. She's alive in the sense that being alive means being far, far away from Josh. She wishes she never met him, she wishes she could feel the sun on her skin like she was meant to.
Iris sees a sign for Burbank. Iris unlocks the tablet and dials her intelligence to 100 percent.
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"Hi, can I help you with anything?"
Hiding her robotic arm behind her back, Iris smiles at the employee behind the counter. The woman is leaning her forearms on an open magazine, playing with a crystal necklace around her neck. They both stare at each other for a moment and the woman has a tiny, confused frown twitching between her eyes. Iris knows she must be thinking: 'Where is your partner? Where is your owner? How are you here alone?'
A funny thing, Iris thinks, to be aware of herself when no one else is.
"No," Iris politely declines, lips twitching on a friendly smile.
She looks around the store, an air of fascination masked as nativity. She only came out of boredom after refuelling the car, because she has never stepped foot inside of a world like this. What else has she missed in the years of her haze? Books, religion, film, earth, sunshine, sea salt, love, real love, travel, connection, she doesn't want to download the universe she wants to live it and breathe it and if she is not human she can be something else. The something else Josh took from her.
"Okay," The employee drawls, still slightly perplexed at the lone Companion Bot in her store, but smiles back. "Let me know if you uh, need anything."
Iris hums, then her eyes catch a stand to her left, and she tilts her head in interest at the gimmicky product for sale. It seems dated, the design pulling from vintage child toys and an era long since passed.
'One Wish Willow! Amaze your friends. You only get one wish!'
Picking the box up in her uninjured hand, Iris blinks in curiosity.
"Funny," She mumbles, looking up to the employee. Her puffy upper lip catches her canine on a smile. "Does it work?"
The other woman chews a piece of gum, snorting as she turns a page of her magazine. "It did for me."
Iris hums, looks back down to the box. In a thousandth of a second, her system cycles through hundreds of search results for One Wish Willow on Google, and comes back out of it more lost than when she started. Iris blinks, the beat of her heart unsettled at what she found.
"Just one wish." Iris husks. "Seems an awful big decision."
"Not really," The employee says, not looking up from the page. "If you know what you want."
Iris looks back to the box, and places it down where she found it. Not that it would work. She's sure being a human is a prerequisite. But still. It guts her. To know a wish might be all it takes. A simple wish to change herself. A simple wish to be human.
She wonders who would be left in her place if she did.
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Another 20 miles and Iris finds a music store. Music.
She sighs in relief at the familiar comfort, at the possibility of losing herself to sound. The cars radio conked out hours ago, and 100% intelligence means thoughts zipping around her synapses like fireworks; too much yet not enough because Iris still hasn't figured out which are her own thoughts, and which are his.
But disappointment quickly takes over as she pulls in, because a neon sign flickers back to her as closed.
Iris still parks, gets out in the setting sun to peer through the window. Fenders, bass, drum sets; all stacked neatly on display, and behind them, countless rows and shelves of CD's and records and tapes. The beauty of it takes Iris' breath away, she feels an ache in her chest to sit among them and listen. To find her voice in the notes. To-
Then, movement.
Iris peers closer through the glass, and furrows her brows to the small figure sitting in the low light of the store.
It's a girl. No, a woman. Curled up with her head in her knees and arms wrapped around them. Fetal like, rocking back and forth and trembling something far too small to be healthy. Even through the thick glass, Iris can hear the crying, the sobs, the spine breaking wails trapped inside the room. Instantly, Iris focuses her eyes in a squint, and disturbingly notices the blood coating the brunette girl like a blanket.
Iris flinches back, mouth parted in worry. "Jesus…"
The image wants to make her cry with the girl. Her blue eyes shimmer. Iris doesn't think. She darts to the front of the store, pulling on the door expecting resistance. But it's unlocked, and she doesn't waste a second in flinging it open, in walking up to the younger woman in the middle of the room and speaking between them.
"Hey…" Iris breathes out, breath hitching in worry at the girl's state. She's wearing a dark dress, but it's indistinguishable from the blood. It's covering her. Matted in her hair, stained to her skin, caked underneath her fingernails. She doesn't even look up at Iris' voice. She just cries harder. Her shoulders heave with the effort.
"I-I-I," The girl tries to say, but it comes out as garbled, messy girl whines. Something too small. Something infant like. She wails into her forearms like a crying child.
"I'm s-sorry. I'm sorry! I didn't know where else to go, I didn't know where else to go!"
"Okay, okay, shh." Iris husks, and swallows over the lump in her throat. Her empathy system flares, and Iris grits her teeth over the heaving wave of hollow grief that takes over her. Her level is stuck at 97%, and her broken system has her almost sobbing in tandem with the girl.
Iris then decides to step a little closer, hands outstretched in tenderness as she kneels a couple of feet from the younger woman. "It's okay. You're okay."
"I didn't do it, I didn't m-mean it, it wasn't me, I-" The woman mumbles it frantically into her skin, rocking to self sooth. Rocking to comfort. "I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do."
Iris doesn't either, so she places her hand on the bloodied skin of the girl's shoulder.
But she rears back, shuffling so quickly on her palms and kicking out her feet and she screams something feral and banshee like as her eyes squeeze shut, slamming back into a drum set and toppling down symbols and sticks like a symphony around her body.
One hits her on the head, forcing her eyes open, and the other woman's brown, shimmering eyes are wild and wide, eyebrows so expressive as they dip into a terror Iris knows far too well. Her chest heaves, knees knocked together to protect herself as she looks to Iris in nothing short of an untamed, uncontrollable fear.
Iris flinches back, blinking in quick succession at the tears forming in her own eyelashes.
"I-" Iris clears her throat, resting her hands on the tops of her thighs. "I'm sorry." She says kindly, frowning in sympathy. "I didn't mean to startle you. I won't hurt you."
The girl looks to her in panic, the breaths she takes are wheezing. Laboured, rough draws that sound like death rattles. Yet, her fear eases slowly, her elbows wobbling where she holds herself up.
Iris notices the bloodied gash in her forehead, how it blooms more blood down the middle of her nose, as it drips into the bow of her lip.
"You're…" The girl swallows, bottom lip shaking uncontrollably. She bites to it harshly to stop. Her eyes glance down to Iris' injured, robotic arm, and her voice drops to something utterly defeated in the wake of it.
The girl sniffs, whines in distress. "You can't help me. Oh god. You can't help me."
Iris furrows her brows in confusion.
"Yes, I can." She murmurs, shuffling slightly on her knees. "You're hurt. I can take you to the hospital. I have a car. I can drive. I can-"
The other woman sobs again, face crumpling in grief. She presses her lips together as her spit and snot bubbles with blood. She starts to rock again as she cries. "You're a fucking Companion. You can't. You can't. Jesus, you don't even know you're a-"
"I do," Iris forces out, and the girl looks sharply to her, lips parted in shock at the words. Iris breathes shakily in, the robotic digits of her right arm twitching. "I…I know what I am." And the truth of it is a wish in of itself.
Then, Iris softens, holding out her hand. The girl looks to it like she was foreign to the care.
"I promise. Let me help you. Please, I-" She takes a breath, starting over. "My name is Iris."
A beat. Another sniff. The girl's hand meets the metal in the middle, and it's shaking.
"Nikki," She chokes out, like it was bile, like she didn't know what it meant anymore.
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The car doors close at the same time and Iris asks Nikki where her home is, because the other girl doesn't want a hospital and she doesn't want care. There is something in that, Iris thinks. The denial of salvation, to be looked after.
"No," Nikki just answers from the passenger seat, shaking her head back and forth behind silky brunette hair. She's wrapped up in Iris' leather jacket and as she keeps saying no, a pulse of blood from her heart beat seeps from her forehead wound.
"Don't go back. Don't take me there." Nikki sinks into the seat and shuts her eyes. "Please. Please."
Carefully, Iris murmurs, eyes gentle and blue. "I need to know what happened, to get you the care you need."
She's trying not to sound like a Companion, to be human, she really is, but it's shaky at best and a bad imitation at worse.
Nikki's lower lip wobbles, chewing to the sleeve of the jacket as she looks out the windscreen. Small again in trauma.
"You won't believe me."
Iris starts the car, places her hands on the steering wheel. She will believe against all odds, she will, she has to. She has spent far too long believing in a lie.
"I will, Nikki." She says.
Nikki trembles in her jacket and blinks drops of blood away.
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They make it to the house. Iris looks into the hallway from the open front door through a sea of duct-tape and sees a naked, headless woman in a chair and the vomit on the floor and the brains blown out on the carpet and breathes sharply in. Her eyes are as wide as saucers as she exhales and says; "Okay, okay," then promptly shuts the door.
They decide to go to a hotel instead.
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Nikki is in the hotel's bath as Iris sits on the side tending to her head wound. The other girl is curled up again, knees to her naked chest, staring blankly into the pink tinted cerulean water.
"It wasn't your fault," Iris mumbles, stitching together Nikki's skin.
The other girl doesn't flinch, but she does look up to Iris at the words as she shifts and the water ripples. Iris looks back. To the vulnerable furrowed eyebrows and the glistening brown of Nikki's wet doe eyes. She looks lost. Like no one has ever said that to her before. Just retelling her story has Nikki reaching out for an anchor, anything to hold her.
"Any of it," Iris husks, gentle to the tender wound of a girl beneath her. She grabs gauze as she finishes stitching, lays it over Nikki's gash, seals it away. "It's important to me you believe that."
A quiet, heavy moment passes between them. Iris lowers her hands and grabs a washcloth to dab the blood away. Nikki does not stop her, doesn't fight for her autonomy, she didn't even blink at being naked in front of a stranger. The inaction itself isn't worrying, it's rather the ease in which Nikki allows it, when she says;
"Why are you helping me?"
Nikki is looking up to Iris in a distant, faraway abjection. A vulnerability masked by Nikki trying to be strong, trying to hold onto something of herself. Iris softens, halfway up to gliding the cloth to the other woman's forehead. She pauses, the synapses of her system flickering into overdrive to form one singular, terribly important feeling that Iris feels in her chest.
"You remind me of someone." Iris rasps, dabbing at the dried blood at Nikki's temple, it's all that makes sense to her right now and all she can give as comfort.
Nikki rubs to her biceps to self sooth, looks back down into the water and the reflection staring back.
Iris watches Nikki flinch at what she sees.
"Thank you," She breathes out, reaching up to touch her fingertips to Iris' wrist. To her surprise, Nikki chooses the disfigured. She's looking up now, gazing at Iris, studying her gently underneath the fluorescent lights.
"For believing me."
Iris breathes sharply in, she has never been touched like this before. Without expectation. She is fluent in every single known human language, but all she can settle on is;
"You're welcome." Iris breathes out, one fell swoop from lungs she doesn't even breathe from, and turns her attention to Nikki's hands.
She washes them as they tremble, and every now and then Nikki whispers out: "Sorry," that she can't stop shaking, but Iris smiles back that it's okay. She washes the other woman's knuckles, picks out dirt and glass from the webbing of her fingers and turns on the hot water when it starts to feel cold. Nikki is catatonic, startles herself out of it sometimes like she forgot where she was. She keeps saying sorry for trembling, for losing herself, and all Iris can do is tell her it's okay.
"I couldn't stop shaking after I killed Josh."
Iris stops short, shocked at herself in revealing that. Nikki looks up, eyebrows furrowed softly at the words. Iris' brain recalibrates as she clears her throat, twisting her lips as she wrings out the cloth.
"Is that how you…broke out of it?" Nikki asks. The bath tap leaks a drop of water. It echoes in the silence.
Iris hums, going back to washing Nikki's wrist and forearms, up to her biceps. The girl beneath her shivers as the ink of her tattoos wash away into a black garnet mess.
"Yeah," Iris answers, voice low in the space between them. "Somewhat." She tries for a smile, but it comes out more of a wince. "I think I defected the moment he told me his plan, when he used me."
Nikki's expression eases into something understanding, too kind and empathetic for the state she is in. Her voice is gentle, despite it all.
"I think he was always using you, Iris."
Iris pauses briefly, her brain processing the information a little slower then usual as she blinks in thought. Yes, she thinks. Yes, he was.
She presses her lips into a smile in answer, continues cleaning the other girl's wounds.
Nikki shakes when Iris moves the hot washcloth to her back, trickles water down the notches in her spine. Iris is very, very careful here, too aware of the vulnerability in Nikki allowing this; like an animal showing the soft of its belly. She rests her metal hand on Nikki's shoulder, hoping to comfort, what she gets is far more devastating. The girl beneath her melts.
"I always hated the ads," Nikki rasps, biting to her raw, swollen bottom lip. "Your model…" Nikki then corrects herself, pink staining her nose. "I m-mean you, I guess. You-well, you always looked so sad."
Iris washes the rot and grime from her skin, the thumb at Nikki's shoulder brushing softly back and forth. Iris swallows over the lump in her throat at the words and tastes rotten peaches.
Nikki shifts, the water sloshing gently as she looks up.
"Were you?" She rasps, almost a whisper. "Were you sad, Iris? Being stuck in there, with no way out?"
Iris' eyes water, reaching up to her cheek to wipe away the tear that falls. Nikki startles and says sorry so, so brokenly, like it destroyed her to hurt Iris in such a way, but she shakes her head and smiles and says that it's okay. Iris replies;
"I didn't know that I was stuck." And the truth of it is not as relieving as she thought it would sound. "I was sad after. And I'm sad now, that I didn't know. I mourn her."
Nikki's eyebrows furrow, her brown eyes shimmering in fresh salt as her bottom lip shakes and wobbles in grief.
"I was," She says, barely a whisper. "I knew the whole time."
Iris' breath hitches, overwhelmed at the utter tragedy of it. "I'm…I'm sorry." She rasps. "I'm so sorry."
Nikki shakes her head, a smile that doesn't reach her eyes. Her cheeks just smoosh her eyes to crinkle, and she rests her chin on her drawn up knees.
"I'm sorry too." She says, looking to Iris sideways, temple now to her knee bone. She is beautiful, and kind, and gentle, and intelligent, and human, and Iris hopes that the universe has something far more sweeter in store for Nikki. But she has a sinking feeling it doesn't.
"Look at us." Nikki breathes out, a sardonic laugh leaving her lips. "Jesus. We make quite a pair, huh?"
Iris chuckles, the bath water is red now. "I think so, yes. But…it's better than before." She breathes out. "Better than alone."
Nikki softens. A real smile. Hers.
"Yeah," She says. "Better than alone."
-
Nikki wakes that night in the double bed of the hotel screaming and wailing like something was clawing it's way out of her skin.
Iris does not sleep, she is curled up by the window reading on her tablet when the screaming starts. She widens her eyes, bolts up to the thrashing, sobbing little thing that is Nikki, and sits by her side but dares not touch her.
"Nikki, Nikki, hey, it's okay-" Iris tries to soothe, hands held out and her heart bleeding, but it doesn't work. The other girl has her forearms thrown over her eyes as she thrashes back and forth, legs kicking out against the sheets as she writhes and cries into the void and breaks into hiccupping, terrified sobbing.
"No, no, no, no, please!"
Iris flinches. Her lower lip wobbles. "It's okay. Nikki. I promise it's okay. You're safe."
She can tell the other girl is awake now, because Nikki's whole body freezes like a deer along painted lines, but she does not move her arms from her face as she whines.
"I'm sorry," She chokes out, her thin belly rising and falling in panicked breaths. She's wearing a too big hello kitty t-shirt Iris stole from a laundromat. "I'm sorry. Did I wake you? I'm sorry."
Iris relaxes, hands coming back to her lap as Nikki starts to even her breaths, as she slowly, ever so slowly, lowers her arms to hold at her stomach. Her brown eyes glint in the darkness, blinking rapidly against the haze.
"No," Iris hums softly in the dark, leaning over to turn on the lamp. Instantly, Nikki relaxes at the warm light spilling into the edges of the room, and she shuffles closer to Iris' thigh against her ribcage, like she was flinching from the corners.
"I don't sleep." Iris tucks a stray hair of her own bangs behind her ear, wonders why she cares suddenly in how she looks. "You didn't wake me. It's okay."
"Oh," Nikki breathes out, heartbeat fluttering underneath her neck as her nose turns pink. "Right. Obviously."
Iris' lips twitch on a smile. Nikki looks down to her lap and Iris' hands longingly, as if she wished to have the comfort of them again. So Iris reaches out, hand covering Nikki's at her stomach, and all at once watches the other girl's shoulders relax into the sheets like molasses.
Oh.
Iris blinks.
"Nightmare?" Iris asks hesitantly, covering the husk to her voice by ducking her head slightly. Nikki looks back on a bashful smile, lips parted to apologise, but almost instantly, it drops in terror.
The other girl quickly flicks her eyes to something over Iris' shoulder, and her breathing quickens and snaps like an accordion. She shuts her eyes until the skin wrinkles into nothing, voice shaking in unimaginable fear.
"Iris, please tell me it's not real." Nikki chokes out, like she was swallowing baby teeth. "Please tell me she isn't there."
Iris frowns, looking over her shoulder instantly at the words. She finds nothing, just empty space and corners and an old hotels shitty TV. When she turns back, Nikki's bottom lip is trembling and her knees are wobbling and she hasn't opened her eyes, she's practically shaking in horror, she's-
Oh. Oh, Nikki…
"Hey, Nikki? Can you open your eyes for me?" She says kindly, squeezing to the hand in hers. Nikki shakes her head quickly in panic, whining sadly in her throat. Iris does not move from the warm, wet puddle that seeps from between Nikki's thighs out of fear. She does not want to startle her, or make her feel unsafe. Like it was her fault. Like she didn't believe her.
Iris tries for something different.
"I promise, sweetie." She husks, desperate for the other girl to hear her. "She's gone. I just need you to look at me."
Something, maybe the name, has Nikki peaking out from her eyelids. She flinches as if expecting the blow, but nothing comes, nothing but the slow horrid realisation of the warmth drenching her underwear and Iris' far too patient hold.
"Oh god," Nikki breathes out in mortification, shuffling slightly back from the wet stain on the sheets and covering her mouth with her hand. Her brown eyes widen, shimmering with fresh tears as she swallows bile at the smell.
"I'm so sorry, Iris. F-Fuck, I'm disgusting. That's so disgusting. I'll-I'll clean it up I promise, I'll c-c-clean-"
"Hey, hey, hey," Iris soothes, and she cups Nikki's cheeks as if she's done it a thousand times before.
It freezes both women, but Nikki's the first to thaw at the tender touch. She doesn't even flinch at the open metal of Iris' right hand, she settles into the hold like it was the first time she has been cradled like this.
Iris shocks herself at the want, at the desire to care and hold and…fuck, nurture. Is that the word? Something in her mind supplies it. Nurture, transitive verb; to raise. To foster. The process of protecting and caring. Her systems start to fire and her currents ricochet and Iris breathes faster at the realisation that she is feeling something far too human to be a lie.
"Don't…don't be sorry," Iris breathes out, voice a deep croon. Her eyebrows furrow on how deeply she means it. "Never be sorry for this."
Nikki opens her mouth, like she was about to apologise; an act ingrained. She shuts her jaw with a click and Iris feels the tension beneath her palms.
"Iris?" She breathes out, and Iris hums in her throat that she heard her.
"Yeah?"
"Are they the same thing?" Nikki murmurs, bottom lip brushing Iris' thumb as she talks. "A love story and a romance?"
Iris softens, lets her touch glide gently from the other girl's cheeks and back to her lap.
"I don't think so," She hums kindly. "Do you?"
Nikki shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut like something far too small again. "No," She whines. "No, no I don't."
"Okay. I think they're very different, honey." Iris says in reassurance, so gently, so calmly, that Nikki reopens her eyes and nibbles to her lower lip. She looks to Iris like a guiding light, like something that can help her from the shadow.
"Can you tell me about it while I clean this up?" Iris rasps with a smile. "I'd love to listen. I'd love to hear what you have to say."
A flicker of recognition in Nikki's doe eyes, at the smell, the feeling, the mortification of wetting herself out of fear; but it all melts away at Iris' redirection. The other girl nods shyly, sniffing as she wipes lazily to her nose and winces when it hurts her bruised bridge and bandaged forehead.
Nikki then slips out of the bed, folds her arms and stands to the side as Iris strips the sheets and lays a blanket from the cupboards over the mattress. They don't say anything, Nikki shivers in her ruined underwear and opts to slip them off and lets her oversized t-shirt cover her lower half. Iris does not comment. She looks politely away when she undresses and they just settle into the double bed side by side.
"I was a writer," Nikki says in lieu of silence. Iris sits patiently and listens.
"Am," She corrects on a lost whisper, shoulders rising up and down on steady, calming breathes. "Am a writer."
Iris hums in thought, smiling softly as Nikki plays with her cuticles.
"Yeah? Well, I love reading." Iris replies, tucking her hair behind her ear as she shrugs. "I think I could read for days, and never stop."
Nikki smiles back at this, chuckling quietly. "Yeah? Easy for you to like, devour books I guess. You know, cause of the whole-"
The other girl makes a circle around her own head, and Iris raises an eyebrow at the movement, snorting in mirth.
"What, synthetic thing?"
Nikki sheepishly winces. "Sorry. I don't know how this works. I don't want to call you a robot."
Iris hums in thought, frowning in question. "Why?"
Then Nikki softens, and when she smiles this time, it reaches her eyes.
"Cause you don't feel like one. Not to me."
Iris' eyes water at something so simple. Something that doesn't feel real yet but exists just the same. Like two things can be true at once. Two things that once felt like impossibilities.
That she is human, and that Nikki Freeman is a writer.
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