Work Text:
There’s dried clay under Clea’s short fingernails when she cups Alicia’s face. She twitches but obediently stays, gaze softly terrified. Does she expect to be slapped? Ridiculous. Clea’s cruel, yes, but not violent. Her sister's skin is dehydrated and rustles like old leaves under touch. It’s stiff and rough, not smooth and plain like her sculptures. With clay, nothing is finite. Imperfect or unworthy works can be redone, don’t have to be abandoned. Wishes she could do the same with her sister. Water her (with Clea’s own sweat and Alicia’s very tears), remold her, and harden with fire. (But who will burn this time? There aren’t many more siblings to spare). She prays that fires take Alicia and change her. She prays she’s wrong.
The younger sister makes a sharp hissing sound out of her throat with an expression that Clea can only read as a question: “Do I disgust you?”
Clea snorts, snaps out of her thoughts, and, annoyed at the question, rushes out of the room. She doesn’t look back when she says, “Don’t flatter yourself, this is nothing that real artists cannot see. Follow me. Quickly, little shadow, before I change my mind.”
Clea’s hard love for her little sister smoulders her with humiliation.
The Dessendre manor became a madhouse these days. Nothing runs on its own except self-inflicted pain and guilt, and that doesn’t even require a fully functional house. A shame swollen to cosmic proportions. All of this an absurdist’s dream and Clea’s the only one awake. Aline is too old to let it go and Alicia is too young to work it through. (What is Clea then?). Renoir is simply not there, chasing after the one or the other. Perpetuum mobile.
Clea confronts her mother on one of the early days after the fire, tragedy, loss, attack. Aline is placing Verso’s canvas on a new easel, in a big room with sharp light forcing its way through closed blinds.
“You forgot you had a daughter, Mother.” She starts without an introduction. There’s no need to explain what is already known and Clea hates waiting time; it’s a needless luxury.
Aline does not even turn around, all attention focused on the canvas. Her body’s so weak from not eating (fasting for repentance or starving for attention, Clea does not care) that even placing a chair in front of the painting causes her to sigh. She spares her oldest so much as a side glance.
“Not true, Alicia can hide all she likes, but I could never forget her existence. “
Clea rebukes her mother by staying silent.
It’s not the forgotten daughter I meant.
“Speaking of, go make sure she’s not causing any more damage now than she’s already done”.
“Why can’t you do it, Aline?”. Aline. That’s who she is. She stopped being a mother to her long ago, just like Clea stopped being her daughter, apparently.
“You know I cannot stand to look at her the way she is now.”
“No, of course you can’t.” One way of looking at things is not looking at them at all.
With this, the rebuttal is over.
Clea finds Alicia bedrotten, and the obviousness of it makes her bare her teeth. Unceremoniously, she draws the blanket off the fragile body and comes over to the windows to let the stagnant air out. Alicia only makes a somewhat reluctant moan, but does not change her position, face still visibly wet; a fact Clea chooses to ignore. She’s clutching onto the damn Esquie plushie for dear life and Clea cannot be gentle or loving or tender (was she ever? yes, she must have been once). She has to be strong, for all five four of them, and the price for that is calculated cruelty.
“Have you nothing better to do? If you can’t make yourself useful, at least don’t get in the way of the adults”. To this, her sister looks at her with an expression of both defiance and defeat, a splotch of portraits of younger Clea and Verso. Alicia thinks that if she’s alone, no one can be mad at her. Clea can bear to see her sister alone, but not apart.
“When was the last time you brushed your hair? You’re starting to look like a broomhead, sister dear.”
Clea takes the long-abandoned hairbrush from the tablestand and without approval starts combing Alicia’s hair. She’s not particularly lenient towards tangles and ignores Alicia’s soft “n-no”, when she fights against bewildered locks. Countless times she’s been told, back in their younger days, not to pull her sister’s hair. The work is futile, as her younger sibling will surely resort to hiding in the bedroom again, but right now Clea’s doing her a favour, she’s pulling her together, remolds her without breaking, which, in retrospect, she was never able to do before.
When she’s done, she’s not admiring her work, knowing that looking at Alicia too long will make her notice all the other imperfections apart from the ones that glare at her from under a magnifying glass. Alicia does not thank her, only looks down at her hands, and Clea is grateful. Any more signs of submission could drive her into rage. A quiet voice in the back of Clea’s head wants to tell Alicia to fight her back.
“Now up you go, there’s some dinner left for you in the dining room. It’s cold, but you shouldn’t be picky at this point”. Alicia is hesitant to move, their parents’ room is on the way to the dining room and to go there you have to pass the dogs’ bed and- Clea can read her like one of the books on her shelf. A book she would love to finally close and put in its place.
She wants to say “No one will bring this to you, don’t be mistaken.” or “You’re doing this to yourself,” but what comes out is “You will survive the discomfort of someone having a bad feeling towards you. Even if that someone is your own mother”. I know that because I have done the same.
Inside the Council’s hall, the investigation hit a stalemate. The head of investigation goes through the events one more time, although the uselessness of it all bores Clea to death.
“You don’t have all the facts.” she interrupts. (Which are?) “He loved her.”
The Council looks at her gobsmacked. Clea Dessendre is not the one to blush, but fiery heat is taking over her ears and cheeks. It is not embarrassment, far from it – this is fury, hushed and secret, and because of that, all the deadlier. He loved her, he did, that fool, we all did.
Verso promised never to do anything reckless, when he broke his leg climbing the tree where Alicia’s balloon had stranded. Verso promised never to do anything stupid, before he allowed Alicia to stand on his arms so she could finally see Clea face to face. Verso promised to never let go, when Clea was stitching his hand after he cut himself gathering the red roses from the manor gardens.
In the end, what he did was very reckless and very stupid, and it did save their sister’s life.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
Verso’s left us all a crier.
It seems like even the last promise is broken, as he let them all go, and only they cannot do the same in return.
Clea’s not used to losing things, people. She gets rid of them. But how does one get rid of something they already lost?
She hardens some of her sculptures with fire. Fire was always a fact – a means to an end. (An end. How fitting).
She loves and hates Verso for saving Alicia, but she figures if any of them had a chance of becoming a martyr, it was him (Alicia is too soft and hesitant and Clea is too sharp and resolute). And yet, would Verso have saved her if it were Clea instead of her sister who was burning? Would Alicia have saved any of them? Yes. Yes. Would Clea have saved Alicia? Yes. No.
She burns her little finger on purpose. So stupid, she scorns herself, what are you trying to prove. That she would. That she could. That she understands Alicia when the smell of marred skin becomes so nauseous it takes all of her not to puke, that the sensations are so overwhelming they become nothing but numbness and void, that the decision to stay in the fire is made second by second. When it’s done she’s not any closer to feeling admiration or sympathy for any of her siblings. All she feels is the burn, even after it’s long gone.
Clea does not put a bandage on the finger, she doesn’t care if anyone sees and if her younger sister can do so without, so can she. (Survival requires no rivalry, Clea. Grief is also not a competition). Next time she sees Alicia, she feels a little bit more tender towards her. And if that feeling gets stuck on her longer than she’d like, she lets it, but not begrudgingly.
Clea comes back from the Painter’s Council meeting more vexed than somber. She does not bother to knock on her parents’ room anymore, and not even hearing the muffled sobs would make her hesitate (why bother if crying became a routine now), but she stops regardless when she hears
“I never wanted a daughter.”
And yet you have been cursed with not one, but two, dear mother. And that’s all the offspring you have left.
Clea could do the usual and just walk in and drop the council papers in her mother’s lap. Something to look at. Or she could put them on the floor right there so Aline could stumble on them going out. Ha. Wouldn’t that be a sight, to trip on your own duties. Instead, she takes them to her study to sign herself. She’s outgrown the need to rely on anyone anymore and no good deed ever goes unpunished.
In the room, Renoir caresses her wife’s slender hands. She tries to free herself from his grasp, but he clutches her harder.
“Yes, you always wanted two.”
It dawns on her that if Verso could grow old, he would definitely end up looking like Renoir, the same heavy lines between eyebrows and miles of tiredness under their eyes. Yes, these eyes. These forever glassy, sparkly eyes that would never wander off too far from their loved ones for too long. It pains her to imagine Verso in Renoir (it pains her to imagine it the other way around). Cerulean blue eyes, the primary colour on his face, inherited by all of them.
Alicia, on the other hand, will undoubtedly take after Aline with her auburn hair and god forsaken sappy smile. Nostalgic, faint and slender body only adds to the pigments of romantic escapism that stain them both. If anything, the freckles will likely stay as lively and unorganized as they are, after everything else on Alicia’s face has been sponged with tempera.
We will both grow old, in spite of you not .
Only she, Clea, is the color melange of both their parents' (best) worst features. Sorrow, a color complementary to rage. How limited is the colour palette of the Dessendre family.
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself?”
Renoir would say it’s sadism to constantly direct questions to someone who cannot reply, but why would anyone ever rely only on words to convey how they feel. Certainly not the family of painters.
The sisters stand in a small room in the back of the manor, lifeless paintings and drafts abandoned here and there. Alicia is backed into a corner by the painting stand and like every cornered animal, she will do anything to survive, even if it means clutching the paintbrush she cannot stand to look at anymore.
If only Alicia would fight back, maybe she would finally grow the backbone she’s been missing for sixteen years. Verso would tell Clea off without hesitation. And she would have been glad he did.
“No one will stand up for you, you have to do it yourself. And if you can’t do it with words… well, find something else.”. Or don’t. Your choice.
A long minute passes during which nothing happens (only a flicker of anger, of pain. And finally resolve, but Clea already looks away).
Clea sighs deeply, once again disappointed but not surprised, another lesson in untempered belief that things will change if she forces them to, bends to her will, because she has water and heat, and steady sculptor hands, but apparently it’s not enough for stubborn polymer hearts. Then a splash of paint hits her face like a cold wave.
She wouldn’t dare.
Alicia stands in a fencer pose with wet paintbrush in her hand held like a rapier. Surely, she does not hope to empower Clea in physical combat of any sorts, her painters prowess is also nowhere near close to her own mastery. And yet.
She silently mouths ‘en garde’ which amuses Clea, bringing to life the picture of five year old Alicia playing around with paintbrushes. Silly to the point of pathetic, considering her current state. And yet.
With one swift, deliberate movement Clea smears a half-smile on the redhead’s unburned skin.
“Are you having fun yet, Alicia?”
Against myself, I am.