Iris couldn’t tell you how long it had been, but she could easily tell you how time seemed to drag and how each day became harder to deal with. As much as she tried to remain optimistic her spiral only grew as the distance between her, and Cas seemed to become a bigger problem each day even though she hated to admit it to herself. No matter how many times she told herself this was a temporary situation, that soon he would walk through those doors it was becoming exceedingly hard to believe that hope as it began to slip away alongside the time passing. 

The promises to eat, to make an effort were long gone and lying to the new King became second nature to her around it. Especially as she had caught on to just ordering for the sake of it knowing he could check what was billed to the room, but lately his attention was so focused on running a country she doubted he would have noticed. Selfishly she wished he would, that he’d put everything down to visit and tell her it would be okay, but she knew that was something she could never ask. Nor did she want too as she kept telling herself that what he was going through was worse, that he now had a whole Kingdom to run, and they looked up to him. She was minuscule compared to everything else right now and her thoughts would just lead to her feeling guilty for even wishing he could drop it all for her. 

Sleep still evaded her and she was finding herself feeling lethargic everyday with barely enough effort to get out of the bed if only to go call Cas of an evening, even then her excitement dwindled finding it hard to talk to him everyday knowing she was probably going to be stuck here longer. The silence of the hotel room felt like a roaring voice in her head, pounding away taunting her as each hour passed. Iris knew she couldn’t be selfish, that she shouldn’t be wallowing because she was alive at least but her mental state was fluctuating with motivation at such a low point and her darkest fears coming for her.

Suffocating by feeling so isolated the nightmares consumed her on a regular basis, inner thoughts and the darkness she felt in her heart creeping over her keeping her at her low point. The urge to leave had been increasing each day and there were days she sat on the sofa staring at the door of her room, fixating on the same spot as she battled against herself between leaving and not. Iris couldn’t tell Cas how bad it had gotten, that she had considered doing something very bad just to feel something again. 

Today had been no different from the other days, time dragged, and she knew it was nearly time to call Cas but a part of her didn’t even want too. Hearing his voice, feeling a brief flicker of happiness to only settle on the realisation that no, nothing had changed she was still a rebel with a death warrant on her head that Cas had yet to remove. [color=f49ac2]“Is there any point? He will probably fall asleep on me again.”[/color] Muttering bitterly to herself as she toyed with the phone, shaking her head she decided she would take the chance to call Masie. Yesterday she had spoken to her friend to find it improved her mood, her friend had a way about her enticing a smile and she had said she would call again today. For some reason her friend had made her promise, so she opted to dial that number instead of Cas. 

[color=f49ac2]“Hey Maisie…”[/color] Trying to sound somewhat happy as she leaned against the kitchen counter, but the next voice she heard was not her friends. No, it was a voice that often haunted her dreams of a night and she swallowed hard as he spoke. 

“Hello, Iris [i]dear[/i].”