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Dollie Hawthorne is a natural redhead.
This is not the strangest lie Iris has told Feenie during the course of their relationship—nor is it the biggest, the most insignificant, or the cruelest. It just thoughtlessly slipped out of her mouth one day, simply because she’s practically a professional by now in telling flavorful fabrications, and the words felt so easy for a moment that she nearly forgot it wasn’t true.
The truth is, of course, that Dahlia has always had black hair just like Iris. It’s not exactly common for identical twins to come prepackaged with convenient color-coding, after all; they’re expected to handle all that on their own. Valerie had gotten her some bleach and boxed hair dye for a Halloween costume (she was Kimber Benton, and Iris went as Aja Leith), and Dahlia was so enamored with the red, she never went back, though Iris suspects she mostly just liked that it kept people from mixing the two of them up.
Iris’ roots are beginning to show. Dahlia’s, too. They’ve got it synced up so Dahlia can touch them up at the same time. She takes care of her own first, practiced and efficient, leaving Iris alone with her second-hand copy of The Count of Monte Cristo for hardly fifteen minutes before she hears the bathroom door click open, an invitation.
Dahlia is lounging against the door frame in a black lacy camisole and jean shorts, her hair pulled into space buns and a pale line of bleach running down her scalp. Iris discards her cardigan on the back of her chair before dog-earing her page and getting up to join her sister.
Mom would probably throw a fit if she could see them now. Iris takes her seat on the toilet lid while Dahlia perches on the edge of the tub.
“How’s your nerd book?” Dahlia asks, with all the attentiveness of the average literature major.
“You mean your nerd book,” Iris corrects.
“Tomato, tomahto.”
Iris sighs. “I don’t know. Confusing, I guess. It’s hard to read. Not the prose, more… emotionally. I don’t know.”
“Well yeah, it’s about a guy martyring himself for the sake of his stupid revenge plot. It’s not exactly sunshine and rainbows,” Dahlia says.
Iris idly wrings her hands. “Exactly! All the books you have to read are so depressing, even the ones that don’t even look sad at first. And complicated.”
“Are you reading my notes? I’m writing them for you, y’know. At least skim the Schmoop page or something, I can’t fill in for you every time there’s a test,” Dahlia complains as she wrangles Iris’ hair into sections and gets the bleach ready. “Stop moving.”
“I’m not,” Iris protests. She’s still not used to having her hair played with so much, having worn it in simple twin braids for most of her time at Hazakura and hardly ever taking them out. Dahlia’s plaits are hard to achieve alone, so that’s another excuse for Dahlia to be constantly digging her fingers into Iris’ scalp.
It leaves Iris with something heavy in her gut. Dahlia is always too gentle, like a single tug will shatter her. Even the cold bleach brushing against her head is more shocking than anything Dahlia’s hands have ever done to her.
“Ooh, I’m not moving, my name’s Iris and I’m perfect,” Dahlia mocks.
“Stop it,” Iris says, biting the inside of her cheek to stifle a giggle. Dahlia does that thing she’s done since they were kids—it’s an awkward, aloof little smirk, the impression of which is belied by the soft, sincere crinkle in her eyes.
“Anyway, don’t you literally read scripture all day?” Dahlia says, standing up so she can properly see Iris’ head. “How is that not more boring than a serialized adventure novel? I don’t even care about English lit, but at least my hobby isn’t just ‘philosophy but more annoying.’”
“I don’t know," Iris says again, a broken record. "It helps that the Kurain texts actually explain things clearly. It’s meant to be easily understood even by children. The things in the syllabus is, well… I just don’t have the brain for it.”
Dahlia shifts her weight and a scarlet strand of hair falls loose. “You’re just letting it intimidate you, stupid. This stuff was easy entertainment for the eighteenth century masses.”
Dahlia spends the next few minutes schooling her on the themes and motifs of a book she herself hates, and it doesn’t take much longer for her to brush over every possible strand of black hair with the precision of a surgeon. Iris sets up the pretty vintage stopwatch that Feenie gave her as a gift, while Dahlia tears the shower curtain aside and starts to run the cold water. She stays perched on the edge of the tub, not even flinching at the temperature while she leans back to scrub the bleach out. The hair ties reach out to cuff her wrists and a flag soaked with slaughter unfurls towards the drain, tapering into a stream of pale, watered-down dye.
The bathtub floor is stained enough to invite suspicion. After all, Dollie Hawthorne is a natural redhead, and there are few things other than hair dye that could leave such a foreboding trail.
And then there’s a knock at the dorm room door.
“Hey, Dollie?” A muffled voice says nervously. “If you’re not busy, you wanna study together?”
Dahlia jolts upwards, eyes wide like a cornered dear. She’s standing up before Iris can even blink. “Stay,” she commands, as if scolding a bad dog, her hair slinging heavily behind her as she darts towards the door.
Iris grabs her by the wrist. “Hold on, there’s no hurry.”
“What the hell—!” Dahlia cries.
Iris would much rather go and handle this herself, but inconveniencing herself by washing the bleach out now would hurt Dahlia’s pride more than it’s worth. “Here, just wrap your hair. He won’t question it, promise.”
She slides one of their ragged towels from the rack and offers it over. Dahlia stares at it for a second, worrying her lip, before taking it, her hands conjuring a messy updo like a candy-maker working the hook. The fluffy towel-wrap towers lopsided on her head, but it achieves its purpose in covering up the half-inch of bleached hair peeking through her scalp.
“Don’t let the stopwatch go off,” Dahlia mutters before flicking off the bathroom fan and fleeing to answer the door. Iris holds her breath, curling up in the cool lamplight, trying not to let the stench of chemicals wriggle too deep into her head.
“Feenie? Come on, I asked you to call first before coming over,” Dahlia says, barely audible through the door.
“Sorry, sorry, I would have asked, but my phone died earlier. It’s okay if you’re, uh, not in the mood or anything.”
“Um, it’s fine, just not too long—” she says, sounding like she’s trying not to choke on the caramel-sweetness of her own words.
“Okay, great,” Feenie says. There’s a distant groan as he walks thoughtlessly over the creaky part of the floor. “I like how you’re wearing that towel, by the way. You look like a cute little sundae!”
Iris runs her thumb back and forth over the knobs of the stopwatch while Feenie starts up his usual blissful-ignorance routine. Sometimes she thinks he must be faking it, there’s no way for somebody to be so sweet and earnest as him—but then she remembers Sister Bikini, who was always using at least half her kindness and smarts to try and dance her way out of difficult conversations. But she can’t imagine where a guy like Feenie would have learned to be so guarded.
“Hey, can I use your bathroom really quick? And then I promise I’ll be out of your hair before you can say ‘knife’!”
Iris can barely hear Dahlia’s stammered excuse over the sudden panicked pulsing in her ears. Well, is this it? It’s not like there’s anywhere in here for her to hide. Maybe if she took all the cleaning supplies out from under the cabinet—but where would those go? What about the hair dye?
Dahlia’s voice turns overripe. “Of course, sweetie. Do you think I can show you something first, though?”
It’s an out, Iris knows. She’ll have Feenie turn his back and, what, she’ll sneak out and tuck herself under the bed? The bowl of bleach nearly clatters to the floor as she shoves it haphazardly into the medicine cabinet. She turns off the stopwatch and does a five-second sweep over the room, lightheaded.
“I found a new poem recently, look.”
“Oh! Is it one of your, uh, satire haikus?”
Little by little, Iris elbows the bathroom door open, cringing at the nearly-imperceptible click of the doorknob. Nervous static vignettes her vision as she slides a foot onto the carpet.
“Oh, Feenie, it’s called Senryu.”
“Would you read it to me, Dollie?”
Tightness blossoms in Iris’ lungs as she toes further into the room, eyes glancing off Feenie’s shoulders, preening through the transparent stretch of his gray turtleneck as he swivels like a bent lamp over Dahlia’s desk.
“Of course. Here: ‘Last night, a lover’s quarrel,’”
The problem with Iris’ half-baked plan of sneaking under the bed is that the desk is, well, right next to it. There’s not much elsewhere to hide, and the rapid-fire pounding of her heart is already sure to give her away, so she flounders in the middle of the room for a second before squeezing herself between the gangly clothes drawer and the oversized faux-fur beanbag.
“…This morning, a real one,” Dahlia finishes.
“Aw, man,” Feenie laments, “That one kind of sounds like a bummer. I wish I understood this stuff like you do, Dollie.”
After a moment of consideration, Iris grabs her cardigan from earlier and throws it over her head, carefully tenting it with her hands so it doesn’t get bleach on it. She can just barely see Feenie’s socks from under the ribbed hem.
“Don’t worry about it, darling. I’ll always be here to explain it for you, after all!”
Feenie giggles. “It’s nice of you to take care of me like that. I’ll be right back, okay?”
“Mhmm!” Dahlia’s voice is tense.
The floor emits a chain of protests as Feenie turns and ambles towards the bathroom door. A strange meditative calm washes over Iris as she peeks out under the cardigan to watch her boyfriend’s feet disappear behind the cabinet. In that moment, she’s not exactly thinking about what would happen if she were to be caught—she just holds herself still, a mosquito mounting the water’s surface.
Silence hangs in the air for a moment.
“Oh my god,” Dahlia hisses. “Iris!”
Iris flips the cardigan over her neck to be treated with the predictable sight of Dahlia glaring at her with a mix of shock and outrage. Sad, wet strands of hair dribble from her towel-wrap like half-melted lines of chocolate syrup. She points furiously under the bed, and for a moment her rigid posture is a perfect imitation of the lawyers in those recordings Feenie likes to watch before bed.
“There was nowhere else to go!” Iris whispers breathlessly, not bothering to stand up. She just kind of army-crawls over and wedges herself into the shadow of the bed, panting like she’s just run a five-mile marathon.
“Sweet Mother,” Dahlia curses again. Her hand goes to rub her eyes, then falls to cover her mouth.
“You’re laughing,” Iris accuses. “Be quiet!”
“Get under there!” Dahlia says, grabbing her blanket and thwapping it against the floor like a whip.
A horribly-timed warmth bubbles up in Iris’ chest. She shushes her like a little kid, the breathy staccato of her voice betraying her.
“You’re not even taking this seriously!”
Iris muffles a manic giggle behind her palms. “Neither are you!”
And then the door opens.
Iris can’t help the sharp gasp that escapes her mouth, but in her defense, she doesn’t waste a second before lurching fully under the bed. Her arm grazes a discarded swiss roll wrapper (one that’s decidedly not her own, thank you very much), but blessedly, she keeps herself from rolling on top of it and causing any more ruckus.
“What’s up? Think of something funny?” Feenie asks sweetly.
“Oh, no, just—just thinking about that poem,” Dahlia says, terrible liar that she is. “Which, speaking of, I really do need to get studying, so, um…”
“Hey, don’t worry about it, sweetie, I get it! That Count of Monty Python guy isn’t gonna read himself! I’m already gone!”
“Cristo,” Dahlia corrects as a quiet afterthought.
“Kiss bye-bye?” Feenie begs.
Iris, shameful as it is, has to cover her mouth again. Whether it’s out of amusement or horror, she can’t even tell. The awful, rock-like feeling she gets in her stomach while on a date with Feenie has long grown indistinguishable from the low flutter that a poet might compare to love.
“Of course!” Dahlia says, too cheerful.
Iris watches their feet shuffle a little closer to each other, hole ridden socks and nude painted toenails not quite touching. Feenie lets out a quiet “oh”—evidently Dahlia has pivoted to his cheek at the last minute, not wanting to sully her lips the way she used to do with that man. She’s only spoken of him once, but Iris has inferred enough about what he did to not feel too bad for privately celebrating his death.
She doesn’t say another word as she practically shoves Feenie out the door. Finally, she closes it with a heavy click. They’re alone again, but Iris isn’t laughing any more.
She hesitantly crawls out from under the bed and winces at the overhead light. Dahlia turns away from the door like it’s branded her, tearing the towel from her head with an almost animalistic snarl.
“How much do you think I’d have to pay him to leave me alone forever? Like, a fiver and a bag of Sunchips? Because that’s about all I’ve got.”
“Once we get that necklace back, you can leave him,” Iris offers.
Dahlia runs her fingers through her hair, making it tangle up like red yarn. Her steps are languid as she plops onto the bed, a transparent overcompensation for the tremble in her hands. It was a close call; far too close for comfort. It's not like this is just some game, easy as it is to mess with this boy’s whole world like it’s a Barbie Dreamhouse. Iris is afraid that if she doesn’t figure this out soon, then this little bubble of bizarre peace is going to blow up in their faces. She stands to sit next to her sister.
“Why him?” Dahlia sighs.
Heat licks her cheeks like telltale flame charring a fireback. “You’re the one who picked him.”
Dahlia glares at her, but the gesture is already aborted by the time they make eye contact. Iris sinks as far into her shoulders as she can, cowering at the half-hearted disapproval of her reflection.
She groans and looks away. “Do you have any idea how annoying you are?”
“Lia, I really don’t know what you mean,” Iris murmurs.
Dahlia’s nails skitter against her leg, an annoyed tic. She knows, she does, she has to. Iris tastes flesh as her teeth find their way into the inside of her cheek again, reinventing the same scars that she’s been making there for years.
“…Don’t call me that,” Dahlia says finally, “it’s embarrassing.”
There are a lot of things about Dahlia that nobody knows, except for Iris.
Feenie likes to show off the gorgeous bento boxes his sweetheart makes him every day, but he doesn’t know the only reason they’re so tasty is that Iris and Dahlia have an unspoken competition over who can cook up the most elaborately impressive meals. Iris is happy to cut her perfectly-spiraling tamagoyaki into heart-shaped pieces, but then Dahlia will respond by spelling out Feenie’s name by arranging thin slices of ham on an omelette.
Dahlia still keeps her hand-me-down wooden Magatama in an old cigar box. It has a nick in the back from when one of the older Sisters stole it from her and chucked it into the stream that runs behind the Fey estate.
When they were kids, Dahlia hated it when anyone called her nicknames. She didn’t think it was fair to Iris, whose name was harder to prune. She named herself Melissa Foster after a superhero character that Iris came up with who could make anybody fall in love with her with a single touch.
But Iris has a lot of secrets, too.
For the first year after she was sent to the temple, she would write these fake letters to Dahlia and then made Sister Bikini write fake responses back. It only came to an end when Bikini started driving them down to a counselor once every two weeks—Iris insisted that they just play Restaurant forever, but eventually she was convinced to let the counselor look through the unsent letters. When the woman pityingly told her that she would have to learn to live without her sister, she turned around and lied to Bikini that the counselor was trying to make her live with Mom again, and then they never saw her again.
She’s in love with Phoenix Wright. He’s silly and sweet, harmless in a way that Iris has never experienced before or understood the appeal of. She likes his pretty smile and the awful romantic platitudes he spouts out like a gumball machine on the daily. She knows he still sends letters to his childhood best friend, even though he’s never gotten back a response before. Iris looked up the man’s inbox one day and sent him hate mail.
But more than she could even begin to love Feenie, she’ll always care about Dahlia a thousand times more.
It's not like she's clueless as to how this is going to go down. Dahlia will lose her patience eventually, no matter how much she tries to stave off her anxiety or hold off the consequences of her adolescent diamond heist. Some new threat will come along eventually, and she’s already half-buried in her own grave at this point, so what's one more body for the count?
Iris isn't good with words and her arms are too weak to hold a dictionary in one hand. Ask her why she's chosen to stay after everything that's happened, and she'd do anything to show you the answer: she'll gladly swallow a crystal ball, hide a corpse, or scream until her throat goes raw. After all, there's no way to know your limits until you test them. It's hard to say exactly how long you can hold your breath underwater if you haven't tried to drown yourself. There's only two proven truths in Iris' life, the first being her devotion to the Channeling Technique, and the second being the fact that Dahlia is the hardest person in the world to love, but there’s nothing easier in the world than loving her.
When she heads back into the bathroom to finish dying her hair, Dahlia follows her without words.