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Verso doesn't so much open his eyes as realize that they are already open. That he has eyes, that there is something to look at. It's not a return to consciousness, but a gradual fading into existence. It is the slow rise and swell and breaking of a wave, first a faint sensation, then a thought, and then a return of self so convincing that he realizes suddenly that he exists again.
He is sitting on edge of Lumiere's harbor, legs dangling over the sea, and his first real thought is to push himself off the edge, into the water. He is tired. He has made choices that he doesn't think that he can live with, and so the realization that he is now alive again is a crushing one. Verso plants his palms on the harbor, ready to push himself off into the water, no thought at all in his head except that he needs to go back to the nothingness of not existing, when someone sits down behind him.
"You should probably wait a moment," Maelle says. "There's nothing really there, yet."
He ignores her and pushes, because his sister—no matter how complicated and twisted that word is, between the two of them—is the last person he wants to see right now. A good, hard shove sends him falling off the harbor's edge—
And splashing into a bare few inches of water.
He stands in the puddle for a few seconds, too confused to even react, then turns back to see Maelle with her hands over her face, stifling laughter. "I'm sorry!" she says. "I'm sorry, but I did try to say something."
The world behind her is nothing but grey fog, and Verso turns in a full circle, looking around and behind him and seeing nothing but that same vague lack of color. The only bright thing in the world is Maelle, and when he looks back at her again he forces himself to really look. A moment ago, in his mind, they'd been fighting their way through the end of his world, duelling for the right to decide what would happen to the canvas that only one of them could ever leave. He'd won, and sent her home, sobbing, and the world had dissolved.
And now he is here again. Standing in a puddle while Maelle laughs at him.
She pulls her hands back from her face, drying tears, and Verso is met with another shock as he realizes it's not the face he expects to see. Still Maelle, but scarred and pale. One eye is an empty socket. Her face is older. She is older. Twenty, perhaps? A little more? It's a shock. He is still carrying the adrenaline of their last fight, and she has moved on.
"If you don't mind keeping your unchecked suicidal urges in check for a conversation," Maelle says, leaning down and offering him a hand. "It's… been a while."
Verso doesn't move to take the offered hand. "What is this?" he asks. "The canvas—"
"Gone," Maelle says. There's a shadow of pain on her face, just for a moment, as she says the word, but she banishes it with a shake of her head. "This is something new."
Something new. Verso, despite his decades roaming the continent, has seen very little that is new. The Dessendre family and the tangled knot of their grief has defined his life and his goals for sixty years, frozen in one endless moment that none of them seemed to be able to move past. Verso doesn't know what to do with this.
"A new canvas?" he asks.
Maelle nods. "We're… trying something different. Painting together, instead of fighting."
Verso raises his eyebrows, unimpressed. He doesn't have a lot of confidence in her family's ability to do much of anything without fighting. "How's that going?" he asks.
"Slowly," Maelle says, gesturing around them, to the misty harbor. Unfinished, Verso realizes. Barely begun, in fact. There is nothing in this whole world, yet, except for himself, Maelle, the edge of the harbor, and six inches of water.
(Except… is it his imagination, or does the harbor stretch out a little farther than it had when he'd tried to jump?)
(Is there a hint of color now, in the sky overhead?)
"How long has it been?" he asks. "Why do whatever this is now?"
"Seven years," Maelle says. "And as for why…" She hesitates, one side of her mouth twitching up into a smile. Verso has never seeen this face, with its burns and scars, smiling. Of course, seven years is a lot of time, and Maelle wears Alicia's face more easily now. She must have painted herself a voice, when she came here, to be able to speak with him, but her face seems to almost fit her naturally now. There's less obvious pain, and when she says, "Clea had a baby," there's a hint of real laughter around her eyes.
"Clea," Verso says. "A baby?"
"Not so much a baby anymore," Maelle admits. "Etienne just turned five, and he's at the age where he's asking questions about everything." She gestures with both hands, and a slim volume appears on her lap. Even looking up from below, Verso recognizes it at once as Gustave's journal. Maelle says, "I… kept writing in it. Or I started writing in a new one, I suppose. The original was lost when Verso's canvas was destroyed. But for so long in there, it was the only thing that kept me going. Imagining that one day his apprentice's would read it. Imagining… that we would get him back, and he would read it." She traces her fingers over the book's cover, and sighs. "When I went home, it didn't change anything. I still wanted him to be able to read it, someday. It was more impossible than ever, but it didn't change how badly I wanted it to be true."
The water has risen as they've been talking, and it's up to Verso's knees. Any farther, and he's going to start looking really stupid.
Without a word, he climbs back up to join Maelle. They sit side by side, but keep an awkward bit of distance between them. A gulf that holds the seven years she's lived since they last spoke, and the empty, angry hurt that Verso has not had time to let go of yet.
"I wrote down everything that happened in the canvas too, of course," Maelle says. She opens the book and pages through it, keeping it tilted so that he can see, but doesn't otherwise do anything to show she's noticed that he's climbed back up onto dry land. "So I wouldn't forget. And that's what Etienne found."
"Not exactly easy reading for a child," Verso says.
"He liked the parts with Esquie," Maelle says. "And I don't blame him. I like those parts too." She pauses, then explains, "But he had questions. And he asked Clea, who didn't want to talk about it. And then he asked his father, who had no idea."
"Is he a painter?" Verso asks. "Clea's… husband?"
"Oh no," Maelle says. "A banker. None of us has any idea what Clea sees in him, and his family thinks we're all mad."
"They're probably right," Verso says, and Maelle shrugs acknowledgment.
"Probably," she agrees. "But Papa almost came to blows with his father over the wedding, and when Maman heard his mother's opinions on art she looked at me across the dinner table and rolled her eyes." Maelle demonstrates, widening her one good eye in dramatic reenactment. Verso, even with secondhand and incomplete familairity with Aline, still recognizes it as her can you believe this expression. Maelle says, "It was the first time I felt like we'd been on the same team since the fire."
"Sounds like you needed a common enemy."
"The in-laws have kept us very busy since tensions started to ease with the Writers," Maelle agrees. "They're so… sensible."
Verso can only imagine how poorly a sensible family of bankers would mix with the Dessendres. There is nothing at all sensible about waging a sixty year war inside a painting.
"So," he says. "Little Etienne started asking Clea and the sensible banker about your journal. How does that get us here?"
Maielle doesn't answer right away. Instead she looks down at her painted journal, as much a copy of the one she has at home as he is of her brother. She fidgets with the pages, and opens her mouth twice to start explanations she doesn't quite finish before managing to say, "He talked to Clea. Clea talked to Papa and Maman, and they talked to me, and… it's been seven years, Verso." Now she does look up at him, fingers going still on the journal. It strikes him suddenly how close they are in age, now. She's not a teenager anymore. She's growing up, growing away from her time in Verso's canvas.
It's what he wants for her. Right down to the smile in her voice, and the easy way she talks about her family. But it hurts a little, too.
"So much has changed," Maelle explains. "And… we decided to try painting together. One canvas, with all of the Dessendres working together, instead of trying to hurt each other. Etienne's first canvas, too. And when he kept asking and asking, about Esquie, and the gestrals, about—even about the fractured Lumiere, and the nevrons, the continent—we decided there was nothing else we could paint. A new beginning. For all of us." Again, that smile. "Well, Clea decided, really. She's not a good person to have as an enemy, but when she makes up her mind about something, that's it, there's no changing it. And she decided that her if her son had to see all this, he was going to see it better than she ever did. That's how we ended up deciding to repaint it together. All our memories. No one person could ever hope to copy a canvas exactly, but with all of us together, we're going to find the parts that matter."
And she looks directly at Verso, as if she really wants him to know that the parts that matter isn't just everyone else in Lumiere, but him, too.
He fumbles for words, desperately shifting directions. "But the canvas is gone," he says. It's not the first time he's mentioned it in this conversation, but it feels worth repeating. The canvas is gone, and so is everyone and everything on it.
And yet…
Here he is.
And here is Lumiere's harbor.
Here is a breeze, the first stirring of the air around them, carrying the scent of mingled saltwater and rose petals. The bittersweet smell of a gommage.
"There was so much more than Verso in that canvas, at the end," Maelle says. "Papa and Mamman fought in it for so long. I lived there. Even Clea…" She trails off, shaking her head. "Between us all, we can recreate it. Not exactly as it was, but the essence. The people will be right, even if the world isn't exactly the same. And that's what matters, anyway."
"You're finally bringing us back," Verso says. "You just can't let go, can you? None of you can."
"Maybe not," Maelle says. "But grief isn't about letting go forever. Shoving the memories into a little box and refusing to look at it ever again. Grief is what makes the memories shine the brightest, and we never let this place shine. We fought over it until nothing was left."
She looks at him.
Seven years, Verso thinks again. In Lumiere, before the last Expedition, there would have been new parents making the difficult decision over whether seven years with their children could ever be enough. There would have been thirty one and thirty two year old men and women that would have given anything for seven more years of life.
In the right context, seven years can mean everything.
"This is an apology," Maelle says. "And another chance for the world we should never have destroyed. We'll repaint it. We'll show Etinne what it means to really paint. Show him the beautiful places. And then, when it's all in place… we'll leave."
She says it without breaking eye contact. She says it like she means it. The Maelle of seven years ago, the one fresh in Verso's memories, never could have said it with so much honesty.
"Why are we here?" he asks, because he doesn't know what to say to this. "Why are we sitting here, having this conversation in a world that barely exists?"
"Because," Maelle says. "I… none of us were sure if you would want to live here. At the end, you were so ready to go."
At the end?
No.
He'd been ready to die for years before that.
"And you've been hurt as much as anyone here," Maelle says. "More than most. If you don't want to live in this canvas… you don't have to."
Verso looks away. There's more to look at now than there had been a few minutes ago. He can see the edges of Lumiere's buildings starting to solidify through the fog. He asks, "Will there still be nevrons?"
"They're too much a part of this world now to take them away," Maelle says. "Besides, where would Monoco get his feet if there were no nevrons?"
She asks it teasingly, but it half takes Verso's breath away. He's not sure what he wants for himself, but… he does know that he wants his friend to wake up in this new world, and to have the chance to go running into battle with the stolen foot of some unsuspecting nevron.
"What about the monolith?" he asks.
"There will be no number on it, in this canvas," Maelle says. "But—yes. It will be here too. Maman's contribution. Holding the world up."
"The original canvas didn't need the monolith," Verso says.
"And this isn't the original canvas," Maelle says. "It's something new. Something with more scars than what Verso painted at the beginning, maybe, but…" She touches her face, a little self consciously, and says, "Sometimes, scars show that you've healed."
Verso lets out a breath. "And… immortality?" he asks.
"None of that," Maelle says. "So the next time you try to throw yourself off the harbor, you'd better mean it."
They both look down at the water again. Even from here, Verso can see that it's deeper now. Deep enough to be able to make a choice that matters.
For a long time, he's silent. Considering the waters below.
Then Maelle says, quietly, "I'd really like you to meet Gustave. And Etienne."
A part of Verso thinks he'd like to meet them too.
"Well," he says at last. "I suppose—it's one life. It wouldn't be so bad. So long as you don't paint my father back onto this canvas."
Maelle's expression twists. Clearly, seven years hasn't been enough time to forgive everything that had happened. But to his surprise, she says, "He's a part of this world too."
"Lucky me," Verso says dryly.
"You know you can beat him now, though," Maelle says. "He knows you can beat him."
And he won't be immortal anymore either. More than that, there's nothing left in the monolith for him to protect. There's no reason for him to wipe out team after team of expeditioners. He'll just be… kind of a prick.
"Alright," he says. "Let's see what happens in this new canvas."
Maelle leans back, resting her weight on her hands, and sighs. "I really wasn't sure," she says. "But I'm glad you'll be here. The world just wouldn't be the same without you."
They fall into companionable silence.
Around them, Lumiere paints itself in. On the distant horizon, the monolith looms over them, blank and clean, almost sterile without its painted number. In the East, the first sunrise brightens the thinning mists around the city, and for the first time on this canvas, the people of Lumiere begin to wake.
Tomorrow comes.