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Iris hasn't been scared of the dark since she was a kid. Even then, she wasn't scared of it the same way others were. It wasn't the monsters that she feared, it was the unknown, and more than that, the possibility of never knowing what was there. In some way or another, bringing things into the light has been her personal mission for a long time.
Lately though, it's what she sees that scares her. Shadows spied out of the corner of her eye. Or the glint of something reflective drawing her gaze to the nearest surface; that makes her instinctually shudder at the reminder of what it represents. She escaped the Mirrorverse months ago, but she still feels a not entirely irrational panic at the sight of any mirrors. They'd covered up or taken down the ones in the apartment, but out in the world, she can't avoid it. So she sucks it up and carries on. The problem is, this keeps carrying on too – her almost seeing things. Things that she hopes aren't really there. Some strange manifestation of her trauma would be better than any other alternative.
She gets better at ignoring the reflections, but the visages nag at her. They throw her off whatever she's doing when she spots them. Sometimes she flinches from them and that gets concerned looks from the team, but no one says anything much once they work out what she is flinching from. A quick 'Are you okay?' perhaps, which she appreciates, but she doesn't want to talk about it. Now she's back. Now is the time to do. To live her life like she was afraid she might not get a chance to.
Then the itching starts, nothing much except for what it drags up - the fear that somehow maybe she never escaped. Absent-mindedly she finds herself scratching her arms and it takes an annoying amount of attention to not do so. She gets a medicated cream from Caitlin and swallows down the fear. Because if it's true, how could she prove it? What could she do differently when this life has every appearance of the one she yearned to get back to? Instead, she tries to unravel what's going on with what's she's too long avoided. Maybe the hallucinations are because of her time in the Mirrorverse. Maybe she needs to face them head-on, if it's possible with how briefly they appear.
The next time she sees one is when she's investigating a story lead, in a darkened construction site for a stalled hotel development. She turns sharply to try to catch it and that's when she feels the sense of something too close – Amunet's shards zing past her only a hair's breadth away. Iris stumbles to one side, overbalancing and falling toward the large mirror which is mostly covered by plastic sheeting. But there's that visible slither shining bright like a beacon before the impact of Amunet's projectiles fracture the surface. Amunet is prattling on in the background and Iris is fumbling for her phone only to see it smashed on the ground, dropped in the chaos.
There's no panic button. No one is coming to rescue her. Amunet has her powers, her weapon, and Iris has nothing but a construction pole she could make a dash for. Except Amunet is scowling at 'a spot of bother' and Iris sees the shards stuck in the mirror. Glancing back at it, paying more mind to it than she really wants to, she notices the mirror is now intact around the shards. The cracks are there further out, but the mirror is strangely smooth around the foreign objects.
She's scared then - not of Amunet, she can take a round or two with her any day - but of the unknown. Of the way she couldn't help but stumble towards the mirror after that first shock, drawn to it. As if it were natural to seek it out, rather than something she normally avoided. That's when she truly realizes it's what's in the mirrors that has been haunting her, like she had haunted her life for weeks.
Without her precious metals, Amunet isn't much of a match for her. A dirty fighter, but one Iris can put up enough resistance to put off. Amunet flees with a few extra bruises, and Iris should find a phone to ring Barry, or Cisco, or someone, and tell them about this. She doesn't. Instead, her gaze lingers on the shards in the mirror as her breath comes hard and fast, trying to recover from the brawl. The shards fall suddenly, clattering to the ground, and Iris flees herself. Wanting the night over and some normality.
She'd tried to ignore the weird occurrences before and that hadn't worked. She'd tried to rationalise, explain it away, but that hadn't worked either. Refocus. Figure it out. Something is missing, something that she needs to make sense of the unexplainable. She escaped the Mirrorverse but that connection is clearly still there, not severed as she'd hoped. Mirror Iris was supposedly destroyed by Eva, killing her own creation ruthlessly when she refused to do her bidding any longer. But she came from Iris in part too, however unwillingly. What if she isn't completely gone?
She tells Barry, even though she can't seem to find the right words to explain what's happening to her. Of course, he understands her, despite not understanding what's going on. He's never been a stranger to the impossible after all. The team runs tests. Cisco theorizes. Caitlin frets and runs yet more tests. There are no results that show anything remotely useful. The Mirrorverse is an uncharted place, less understood than the Speedforce. Answers aren't going to come soon, if at all. They even call up the Legends for a Constantine consult, who mentions an unusual halo to her aura. The prism filter shows nothing though, and she isn't sure if she should be relieved or not.
The reflections she sees come and go, and nothing really seems much different once she gets used to the idea. Once she gets more or less used to facing the mirrors again. Things get back to some kind of normal. And then she's backed into a corner with the latest big bad breathing down her neck. They're fast. Faster than Barry, and there's nowhere to go. Except there's that tug inside her, like a whisper of gravity, that says, there's here.
She backs up against the wall, desperate to put more space between her and Godspeed. Before she knows it, she's sinking back into the mirror. The wind is knocked out of her at the sensation of falling, and falling further backwards, her hand reaching out futilely to the diminishing pinpoint of light that represents the real world. It feels not unlike so many times before when she has jumped into the unknown, but here there is no Barry to catch her at the end of this journey, no sight of what she falls towards.
Eventually she lands, with no memory of actually landing. Falling until she glitches into this realm, standing on her own two feet like it's nothing. Except it's not. Her breathing is ragged with the sheer panic at being there again. She'd fought so hard to get back to them all. Watching helpless, her words not able to reach them, with a twisted parody of herself out there living her life. A shard of bitterness strikes deep within her, the push back against what was and what she wants to be. And then she is falling again. This time out through the veiled mirror still covered in their apartment hallway - onto her ass this time and that'll bruise.
They do more tests. There are no more answers there, same as before. Not unless she gets them. Another kind of test is what's necessary, of her powers. No one has called them her powers, not until she does. There's no avoiding the fact Mirrorverse changed her, and while she can't change what happened, she can change what she does with it. Barry doesn't like pushing her, but she pushes herself. To no avail. Every day she grows more frustrated she can't seem to trigger the visions, or anything else demonstrable, when she tries so hard. Willpower isn't enough, something is still missing.
Cisco gives her a wry sympathetic smile when he hands her a modified design of his old Vibe goggles, designed to stimulate fear receptors in the brain. Every time she'd used her powers significantly she'd been in danger... After that, things get a little easier. She discovers she can project mirror images from one mirror to any other reflection, like a ripple sent across dimensions with a single touch and a pinpoint focus. She has to really want to, which is still tricky to get around her mixed feelings about using mirrors in any capacity. As much as she hates it, she needs to do it too. To understand this part of her. To explore that unknown so that it's under her control. Eva used her powers to hurt, under the guise of liberation; Iris intends to do so much more. She's always tried to do what's right, to be a hero in her own way. This is just another resource to help her achieve that. To help the team and the people she loves stay safe just as much as the city, as the world and their single miracle universe that's left.
They install a large mirror in one of the empty workshops – dubbed the Drawkcab lab – that's surface is scanned into the computer system automatically to reverse the images. She starts wearing the largest shades she can, a decent size reflection always available to her to make use of. Eventually Cisco develops some improved goggles - as well as some faux Aviator sunglasses as a stylish spy alternative – that more easily allow her to tap into her abilities to reflect whatever she is seeing wherever she is.
There's more than a small thrill at getting to be the daring first one inside on missions where Barry can't just bluster in and rely on his speed. She's used to using her words to her advantage, but now it's her sharp eyes following the clues at the speed of light, her observations literally showing them what is important, in a fraction of the time. It's...different. It can't replace what she does the rest of the time - what it feels like to write an expose or a well-crafted article - but it adds another dimension to her life. One more thing that she shares with Barry, Cisco, Caitlin, and Cecile. One more thing she'd share with Nora too.
It' remains hard to travel between mirrors, which she's almost grateful for since she'd prefer not to anyhow. There's the sickening almost compression when entering, followed by the feeling of falling that doesn't stop until she exits. All the while resisting entering the Mirrorverse properly, resisting that tug back to somewhere she doesn't belong that somehow still thinks she does. An unwelcome pull that she pushes back against vehemently, meaning her exit is never controlled and comfortable. As an escape route, it's forever a last resort, because she never gets rid of that fear she won't come out again. That it will be asking for one escape too much.
For that matter, she never gets used to how using her powers feels. The amped-up state of adrenaline and the uniquely fueled focus it affords. She isn't certain Barry understands it, energy thrumming through him constantly as it is. For him, slowing down is the problem. Cisco must get it though, and perhaps Caitlin by now with her having some control of Frost's powers at times. Everything is so full-on when she uses her powers. Time doesn't slow down then but she's hyperaware of everything around her, mind reeling at each possibility, ready to do what she has to. A peak that comes with a corresponding low after. Exhaustion, headaches, shaky hands that someone presses a sugary drink into, stat.
Some days – the days when she wishes she could just turn it off, not see so much, not feel itchy when she tries to ignore it - she understands why Cisco gave up his powers. She's not sure she has that choice, given where hers come from. When she looks in the mirror these days, she doesn't see only herself. She doesn't just see her image that was abused by Eva either, or the echo of mirror Iris she's grown to accept may exist in her. There in the glass is a woman who, against the odds, didn't break. The expected fracture reflected back on the mirrored reality. A break that created something else, each shard a possibility, a new path to see herself another way.