Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

.before

It had started as a doodle in the margins of his workbooks when he was young.

Big eyes, striking facial hair, metal hand.

Over and over again, any time Verso was bored, just one more drawing. More detailed each time. Better each time.

And then there had been his painting classes. Portraiture. Anatomy. Practising again and again in a way that left Verso’s mind numb with boredom - until he brought the same face back. Warm eyes, hours spent hunting for the exact right shade for them. A faint smile captured in the corner of a sad mouth. Verso could have spent hours working and working to make sure he got it right.

Learning how to draw hands. Stripping it back to something metal and skeletal to make sure he understood how it all worked together. It had started with detailed studies at first, but in his free time he started to pull back: it’s not just a hand, it’s an arm. And it’s not just any arm, it’s his arm.

Now, even as Verso thinks about turning away from painting, this man is the only thing left that he still wants to draw.

It takes some time to come up with a name for him, this man that he’s carried in the sketched-out hollows of his heart for years. Clea laughs every time she sees it (“Another one, Verso, really?” ) and Alicia watches with wide-eyes and asks for stories about him. 

It’s something he can weave easily for her now: he’s brave, he’s gentle, he’s kind. Brilliant. An engineer, actually. It’s a world away from their reality, but when he hears their parents arguing and reads grim updates about The Writer’s Guild there’s an element of escapism in picking up his sketchbook and drawing yet another version of him.

Puberty hits hard and unexpected: the sketches become lewd and poses become dubious and before Verso knows it he’s hiding his sketchbook underneath his bed and hoping that nobody finds it. He spends hours perfecting the curve of the man’s bicep or the hard planes of his chest and abs. Anatomy practice, right? Even when he’s focusing for so long his vision feels like it might blur, he tries to justify it to himself - practice, skill development, anatomy lessons. Something fully innocent, not just a case of projecting everything he’s ever wanted onto the page.

When he’s sixteen, he gets hold of a small blank canvas barely larger than a postcard. He hides it away from his parents in his bedroom as he starts to paint.

“Who is it?” Alicia asks, peering over his shoulder even as he tries to push her away.

The deep hazel of his eyes and the dark black metal of his arm are already swirling on the canvas. Verso looks down at them, heart racing, happy with his art for the first time in years as he bites back a smile and says the name as it finally comes to him: “Don’t you see? It’s Gustave.”

*

.after

Generally speaking, Verso knows better than to visit Lumière these days. The city’s too depressing: it holds a heavy mixture of old memories and new superstitions, the city-dwellers trying to make sense of the senseless. It’s the painful echoes of something he’d rather forget. Seeing familiar walls in unfamiliar ways makes him want to drag his fingers across the inside of his own skull - memories that aren’t his own, memories that are, and a town that once felt like home while he’s never even been to the real thing. Verso doesn’t need a daily reminder that he’s a living echo of another man’s life. He’ll stick to the Continent.

That had been the plan, anyway, until she came. The news of her arrival hadn’t taken long to reach them: Alicia. Flesh and blood and walking through the canvas, apparently. Clea had whispered the details to him, and made him promise to look out for her. It isn’t a promise he’d needed any persuasion to make.

Years pass in irregular visits, watching from the sidelines as Alicia - no, Maelle - lives a whole new life. New losses. New pain. New hope. Losing her replacement parents, ending up in the Lumière orphanage, Verso can’t help wondering if Aline’s hand is still lurking in there somewhere. Even their painted world has its own perverse cruelty.

Today, it’s a sunny day. The cobbled streets of Lumière are dusty from the heat, and Verso is no-doubt out of place with his fur-lined coat, his hood pulled up, pretending he isn’t sweating up a storm underneath all his layers. It had made sense at the time, a disguise, but in retrospect he’s already made the decision to keep this particular detail away from Monoco.

It’ll be a quick visit, regardless. Just a chance to check in and see what foster family has picked up Maelle this time - just a moment to hope that perhaps she’s found somewhere peaceful to rest and grow.

He hears the sound of her laughter before anything else. Young and carefree. He remembers that (but he doesn’t remember that, those memories aren’t his) from growing up in the Dessendre family home - before the fire, before the canvas, before the nightmare, there had been light, hadn’t there? There had been something more than the jagged remains in Verso’s mind.

He sticks to the shadows for now, and stays half-hidden behind a nearby building. Leaning against the cool brick, he can still get a recent vantage point from here. It’s good enough to see a streak of red hair as Maelle runs down the street, followed fast by two other kids. God, how old is she now? Eight? Nine? It’s passing quicker than Verso can keep up with.

“Lune!” she shrieks. “Lune! Look at this! I did it!”

There’s something in her hand, some kind of folded contraption, and Verso really would be interested in finding out what it is that has Maelle so excited - but then he is there.

Him.

Verso’s fingertips cling onto the brick wall he’s hiding behind, while his blue eyes lock onto the smiling man standing a couple of steps behind the woman that must be ‘Lune’. He looks like he’s wandered straight off of Verso’s hidden canvas. Wild hair. Soft smile. Those wide, impossibly coloured eyes. Handsome enough to make Verso forget how to string words together even within his own thoughts.

How is he here? Why now?

Maelle runs straight to him and he scoops her up, spinning her around before planting her back on the ground. The other kids catch up with them a moment later, and the painted man kneels down on the ground to take a look at the half-crushed item clutched in Maelle’s hands. “Did you make this?” he asks.

“It’s a boat,” Maelle crows happily. “We made it from paper. We’re going to launch it from the harbour and it’s going to go all the way to the Continent, Gustave. Lune said so!”

“I don’t think those were my exact words…” Lune protests, though she looks as if she’s trying not to laugh.

Lune. Gustave. Maelle. Verso can’t remember how to breathe as he watches over them, his gaze attached firmly to Gustave and Maelle. Gustave takes the paper boat from her and examines it carefully, turning it over in his hands while Maelle watches him with all the sincerity of someone undergoing an official exam.

“Then let’s go down to the harbour,” Gustave says, looking up at the group of kids with a bright light in his eyes as they hang on his every word. “We’ll get this to the Continent and back.”

Cheers erupt from the kids and they take off running down the street without giving Gustave a chance to say anything else. Maelle is the only one who hesitates - and even that is only for long enough to take the boat back from Gustave. “Go,” Gustave says, shooing her away to follow after the other kids.

She runs twice as fast.

Gustave watches them go, smile on his face, while Lune stands at his side and knocks their shoulders together. “She’s going to hold you to that, you know,” she says.

“Oh, I know,” Gustave laughs. “I’m regretting it already.”

Verso stays where he is, hidden in shadow and watching as they amble away after the troop of children. His mind is buzzing, memories that aren’t his own bubbling up unprompted while he runs over every detail of that face, those eyes, those lips. The canvas never stops throwing curveballs.

He doesn’t know what to do with this one.

*

.before

“Verso,” Gustave laughs as soon as he walks through the door. “You’re back.”

The sight of him is a balm that makes the rest of the outside world fall away - fights with his parents, the pressure of his painting training, the pull towards music instead of his parents’ dream. When Gustave watches him with those warm, hazel eyes, all of that life seems a little more distant. A little less relevant.

They’re in Gustave’s workshop, because of course they are. Workbenches, tools, crazed diagrams and inventions that Verso doesn’t quite understand litter their surroundings. There are books, too, a request from the last time he visited. Gustave had said he got bored when he had to wait for Verso to come back - and he’d been laughing as he said it, but Verso had heard the truth all the same.

“Of course I’m back,” he says. “I missed you.”

He always misses him. 

Every time he leaves the canvas, he wishes there was a way to take Gustave with him: he’d love it, the outside world. The secret canvas Verso has painted for him is so small, so limited. He doesn’t have the endless creative abilities of his mother or the limitless imagination of his father. Even the canvas he’d created as a child had been guided by Clea. He hadn’t needed to hide that one either. There had been nothing to be ashamed of.

But Gustave…

Gustave hikes himself up to sit on the edge of one of the benches, his hands fidgeting. Verso watches the metal prosthesis, the arm he’d spent hours pouring over, as it moves in this version of reality. Fluid. Easy. “How have you been? Out there, I mean,” Gustave asks. “Is it all… Is it okay? Are you okay?”

They’d been talking about his father the last time he’d visited Gustave. Festering arguments and smothering expectations.

Verso steps closer and comes to rest leaning against the workbench beside Gustave. He folds his arms over his chest and tells himself that he’s not trying to hug himself. “He keeps talking down to me. He says I’ll ‘understand more when I’m older’.” He shakes his head. He’s eighteen now and it feels like he already understands everything, far more than papa ever will. “I don’t know what to do.”

Gustave’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder - expected, but needed. Since the moment Verso took Gustave out of his sketchbooks and breathed him into a canvas of his own, he’s been the only steady, understanding constant in Verso’s life. The only thing that is unequivocally his, even if he hates himself for thinking of it that way. He leans into Gustave’s hand and closes his eyes to soak in that simple, gentle contact.

“You’ll do what’s best. You always do,” Gustave says softly. His thumb moves back-and-forth slowly on Verso’s shoulder.

“Best for who?” Verso asks. He knows that he’s whining, and he knows that he’s doing it so Gustave will comfort him, and yet he doesn’t know how to stop himself.

“For you,” Gustave answers firmly, before he seems to walk his own confidence back, “I hope, anyway. We talked about it last time, didn’t we?”

Verso wonders how long it’s been for Gustave since his last visit, time slip-sliding strangely in here. A couple of days for him outside of the canvas can be weeks or more inside - and Gustave is the only person in here. No gestrals, no other creations, just Gustave in the tower he created for him: a home filled with a well-stocked workshop and soft luxuries and a forever-beautiful sunset on the horizon.

It’s probably not enough. He doesn’t know how to make it better on his own - and if he thinks too hard about it, the guilt gets to be too much.

“We did,” he agrees, remembering their conversation all too clearly. “You’re right. You’re always right.”

“Of course I am.” Gustave shoves happily at his shoulder, but he stops when Verso reaches for his hand.

Gustave lets him hold onto his hand, lets him stare at that charming face, lets him talk until he’s running out of words - a sounding board and a friend all in one. At times like this, with Gustave’s soft attention and compassion focused only on him, Verso wants to kiss him so badly it feels like he’s waiting for the inevitable: he holds himself back, tells himself he knows better than that, and waits.

The outside world feels like it’s missing something these days.

Verso is starting to understand how Painters disappear.

*

.after

Every time Verso visits over the years, hiding in the shadows, Maelle is a little bit older and a little bit more like the Alicia from his stolen memories. She’s a little happier too, he thinks. She smiles and laughs easier, and she teases Gustave so merrily it sounds like an echo from his own teenage years.

And there’s Gustave. Checking in on Maelle means checking in on him too, and Verso can’t even pretend that that’s a part of the task that he hates. He yearns for it, the way he used to yearn for Gustave’s claustrophobic canvas.

The mystery endures. It makes no sense for Gustave to be living here in this world - but Verso has no one to ask. He can’t approach Renoir: after how things with Gustave’s canvas ended in his memories, he has no desire to put Gustave onto his painted-father’s radar. No, as long as Gustave stays here in Lumière and keeps himself away from the Continent, he’ll be safe. Or as safe as anyone can be in this ruined canvas.

Today, Verso’s arrived on a festival day - not the gommage, but something gentler. There’s a bonfire burning in the centre of town, and there are stalls lining the streets to sell a mix of sweet treats and galettes. As tempted as he is by the rich scents, Verso keeps to the edge of the celebrations.

As usual, it isn’t difficult to track Maelle down. Once he’s found Maelle, Gustave isn’t far behind. They’re standing side-by-side, wrapped in warm coats. Gustave has a deep red scarf wrapped around his neck this time, and despite all the time she’s had to grow Maelle still barely reaches his shoulder. How old must she be by now? Thirteen, something like that?

Shrouded in the dark, Verso positions himself close enough to hear the soft rhythm of their conversation.

“Sciel said there’s going to be fireworks at midnight,” Maelle says as she stares into the rippling flames of the bonfire. The orange light dances uneasily on her face despite her excited smile.

“Pictos, actually,” Gustave corrects. “We’ve managed to tweak a couple of them. It should be quite a show.”

“Taking time out of your busy schedule for frivolous entertainment?” Maelle asks. “How did you persuade Lune to let you do something like that?”

Gustave chuckles, and Verso is left closing his eyes to drink in the sound of it. God, he remembers that warm amusement - the way he used to place his hand against Gustave’s bare chest to feel how his laughter would rumble, the way that touch would only make Gustave laugh even more. He’s left in the dark, listening in, drowning in an intimacy that isn’t his.

But it isn’t this Gustave’s memory either. From what Verso can tell, this Gustave is entirely of this world, this Lumière, and that doesn’t make a single bit of sense.

“Oh, you know,” Gustave continues. “... I may have convinced her it would be useful on the Continent.”

“Ah. The Expedition.”

“The Expedition,” Gustave repeats gravely.

“You’re still planning on signing up?”

“Yeah, if they’ll have me…” Gustave says, self-deprecation on his lips. “My gommage is a few years away, Maelle, but it’s coming up fast. What else can I do?”

Verso can’t listen to the rest of the conversation, no matter how much he wants to - he knows that he needs these details, but the thought of Gustave landing on the Continent is buzzing too loud in his head.

Expedition after Expedition. How many of them had Renoir cut down now? How many of them had Verso himself helped Renoir to destroy?

Verso stays in the dark, breath heavy, throat tight, and stares at Gustave and Maelle where they are lit only by the flickering flames of the bonfire - he imagines Gustave landing on the Continent with his Expedition, the disdain that would rot on Renoir’s face at the sight of him. A swift death or something drawn-out. Verso bites his tongue, hard, and tries to will back the nausea roiling in his stomach.

No. Not him. Not Gustave.

Not this time.

*

.before

Verso has finally turned twenty. His parents had presented him with new paintbrushes and unspoken pressure. Some books from Clea. Sheet music from Alicia.

At the awkward party in the evening, mingling with officials who are more his parents’ friends than his own, he’d smiled and listened politely and had talked in vague terms about his plans for the future every time they had asked - and, the whole time, he’d been thinking of the hidden canvas in his room.

“You should go,” Alicia had told him once the wine was flowing and the true adults in the room had been woozy enough to start slurring their words and reminiscing about old fights with the Writers. “Don’t worry about it. If anyone asks where you are, I’ll cover for you.”

She’s older than she should have to be, always has been, growing up fast in this household. Verso isn’t sure how much she knows about his secrets, surely too young to grasp it all, but he’s grateful for the excuse all the same, practically tripping in his haste to get away.

In the canvas, in his workshop, Gustave has a paper party hat on his head at an awkward angle, and he lets off a party popper as soon as Verso walks into the room. Paper streams burst from it and float down in multi-coloured trails around them, the smell of quick explosive lingering on the air.

“How long have you been waiting to do that?” Verso asks.

“Longer than you’d think,” Gustave answers happily. “You said you’d be back after the party. I thought you deserved, you know, a real celebration after all that.”

“A real celebration,” Verso repeats. He looks down at the paper streamers now lying on the ground. There are some tangled in his hair as well. “Is that what this is?”

“Well. Sort of…” Gustave gestures helplessly, and Verso just aches at the sight of him, as he has on every visit for years now - humble and flustered and trying his best. Did he paint him this way? Or is this all Gustave himself, something that’s grown organically from the spark Verso gave him? “I was going to bake. I was . And I actually did, technically, try. But then a few days passed here and you weren’t back yet, and… Well…”

“You ate my birthday cake.”

“I ate your birthday cake,” Gustave confirms. He grimaces and reaches for another popper, offering it out to him in his metallic hand like it’s some kind of peace offering. “Sorry. Time differences. I’ve been trying to track it, but it’s… hard. Harder than I’d realised.”

Verso hadn’t been able to get away from the party as quickly as he’d hoped - and with the stretching elasticity of time here, that adds up to days rather than hours. Knowing Gustave’s gift for underselling every hardship, it might even have been weeks.

Verso steps closer to him, into his personal space, soaking in his presence in the way he’s allowed himself to do for years now. They’ve been growing up together: Gustave nothing more than a sketch in his margins at first, then something painted and real. Someone aging along with him, a teenager first, a man now. With time stretching as it is, Verso can’t allow himself to wonder how long Gustave’s been waiting in this canvas for him. An individualised eternity.

“Was it a good cake at least?” he asks, while he thinks of the extravagant monstrosity at his birthday party - no expense spared for the Dessendres, of course. Clea had looked as if she’d pull a muscle if she rolled her eyes any harder. He takes another step towards Gustave, deep into his personal space this time.

Gustave leans against one of his workbenches and puts the remaining streamer down on the countertop, but he isn’t trying to get away from Verso. He never does: he allows Verso to orbit him eternally, never pushing it further, never taking what he actually wants.

Verso has been telling himself for years that he can’t share his first kiss with a painting. Every time he’s thought about it, every time he’s imagined Gustave’s sweet mouth, every time he’s clutched himself in the dark, he’s very firmly forbidden it - even as opportunities pass him by in the outside world because no matter how tempting they might be they’re not him. Nothing compares.

Tonight, so close, Gustave’s shy smile on his face, he’s left wondering why he’s been holding them apart for so long.

“Honestly?” Gustave answers, but the words are barely a breath. Distracted. “It was terrible. As it turns out, engineering and baking are two very different skills.”

Verso smiles and, his heart racing, lets his hands come to rest on Gustave’s hips. He’s waiting for the moment that Gustave tells him he’s misinterpreting this, that he’s got their friendship all wrong, but instead Gustave lets out a long, shaking breath like his own nerves are getting the better of him.

“I’ll bring one next time. We can share it,” Verso promises, barely following the thread of what they’re talking about, faintly thinking about if he’s really going to paint a cake of all things into Gustave’s small canvas but what he’s really thinking about is how pink Gustave’s mouth looks, contrasted against his dark facial hair.

Gustave’s hands start to slide up his arms, slow at first as if he’s not sure if he has permission and then more confidently once Verso doesn’t tell him to stop. They come to rest on Verso’s shoulders, holding him close, and Gustave dips his head in close - not enough for any real contact, but their breath is shared and Verso doesn’t think he’ll ever get a clearer invitation. This is right there if he wants to take it.

“Happy birthday, Verso,” Gustave whispers, a fraction of a smile on his face.

Heart racing, hands clenching tight to Gustave’s hips, Verso closes the distance between them - his first kiss, their first kiss, something soft and gentle in the middle of Gustave’s workshop. Gustave leans against the bench and sighs in contentment against Verso’s lips, and Verso knows they’ve both been waiting years for this. 

It’s real. With the pounding of his heart and the sweet taste of Gustave’s mouth on his, this can’t be anything but real. Verso’s hand sinks into the soft hair he’s been drawing for years, and he smiles into their kiss - content for the first time in years.

He thinks, unapologetically, that life in this small canvas is better than anything that exists outside.

It’s getting harder and harder to remember why he’d ever want to leave.

Chapter Text

.before

The tower truly has anything that a person could want to keep them warm, fed and entertained.

The workshop on the top floor is where Gustave spends most of his time, tinkering with useless inventions and scrawling new theories onto his blackboard. There’s a balcony that circles the entire top of the tower: sometimes in the morning he’ll take a coffee out there, bask in the sun, and stare at the endless clouds that roll around him as the sky changes, pinks and purples to a satisfying blue. Nothing but peace and silence.

Further down the tower, there are his living quarters. They’re ridiculously luxurious, all things considered. A four-poster bed, a well-stocked collection of books, a bathroom with a claw-footed bath for the days when he wants to hide in the heat and listen to nothing more than the sound of his own heart beating and the water lapping at his skin.

Descending further, a kitchen, a pantry, a library with a roaring fire and deep, comfortable armchairs. His greenhouse. He’s sure Verso would find a way to create more for him if he asked - and that’s precisely why he doesn’t ask. Every time he needs something, a little frown appears on Verso’s face, the one that says there’s more going on in that head than he ever lets Gustave know.

So it’s fine. This is the world. If he wants to go any further, he has books to read.

He’s curled up in his library now, the fire flickering in front of him. His eyes are lingering on the flames rather than the words of the open book, thoughts running restlessly in his head.

It’s been nearly a week since he last saw Verso.

Hardly unusual. Life in the tower is a series of long waits punctuated by the flurry of Verso’s visits: the laughter, Verso’s charm and snark, and long talks late into the night. It’s the boredom of eternity with the sparks of Verso’s presence thrown in, and that is what Gustave knows he has to learn to move on from. He can’t live only for Verso’s visits. He can’t.

In his seat in front of the fire, he runs his mechanical hand over his face - because there is one major complication to the renewed vow that he’s going to learn to become his own person. 

Last time Verso had visited, it had been Verso’s birthday. 

Last time, it had been their first kiss.

Fumbling and a little awkward. Gustave doesn’t know how it’s possible for a god to be awkward, but Verso had managed it - and, no, despite Verso’s repeated protestations, Gustave won’t be downgrading him from ‘a god’ any time soon. He literally created this world.

But that kiss had been a week ago, and then Verso had had to leave, and now it’s been days and even though Gustave knows it’s not unusual, even though Verso’s explained the Painters’ world to him before, even though he knows Verso has an entire life he has to take care of out there… Well. It’s difficult not to overthink it. One kiss and then the man goes missing.

“Stop it,” he murmurs to himself over the flickering of the fire. “That’s enough. You’re overthinking. Stop it now.”

His brain refuses to obey. He wonders if he can persuade Verso to paint him a new one, but that would require Verso to ever fucking return so that’s probably out the window.

He closes the book in his lap with a loud snap. “Absolutely not. No pining,” he warns himself aloud, getting up from his seat without a clear idea of what he plans on doing. Something. Anything.

He returns his book to its spot on the bookshelf and starts to head for the spiral staircase - maybe up to the workshop, or down to the kitchen to see what the pantry might be able to conjure up this time. Anything to keep his mind occupied and out of Verso’s world.

He heads to the top of the tower and his workshop. Through the large windows, over the balcony railing, he can see the burning of stars against the velvet navy sky - messy, impressionistic things. They are telling him in yellow-gold blotches that it’s too late to be awake. They’re urging him to bed.

He ignores the hint entirely, turns on a lamp, and stares at his calculations on the blackboard instead.

Mixed in between the numbers and data and formula, there are diagrams too - the mechanics of his arm from the last time he’d taken it apart to see how it worked, an experiment he has carefully dodged mentioning to Verso. The last thing he needs is Verso starting to worry about what he gets up to when he’s left alone in here. He’d been curious. The canvas had taken Verso’s initial painting and transformed it into something alive, something that works organically: of course Gustave had wanted to pick it apart and look at the pieces.

He’d put it back together again afterwards, no harm done.

No harm, but a great amount of knowledge, and that is what had set him along the next line of enquiry. The entire right side of the blackboard has exploded into intricate diagrams and careful equations: he has delicate metal parts that he needs to ask Verso to paint for him the next time he’s here.

Verso has explained it to him before. The canvas, his whole world, is apparently a small one. Limited. There’s only so much chroma it can contain before it starts to collapse in on itself - so there is a delicate balance to be maintained. For everything that is added, something else has to be removed. The month that Gustave had wanted to learn to swim and asked for a pool, Verso had had to erase the greenhouse in balance. Once Gustave had firmly established that he missed his plants and the greenery, the pool had to vanish.

Every addition has an equal and opposite subtraction, chroma transformed from one item to another. 

If he wants these parts, he’ll have to give up something else in exchange.

And that’s nothing but a formula. Verso sees it as art - he waxes lyrical about painting despite turning to music instead, and he can talk for hours about his parents’ theories. Chroma and pictos and all the rest of it. Gustave looks at those balanced cheques and sees something different. He sees an engineering problem waiting to be solved.

Now, he stares at his chalked-up scribbles long into the night, and lets his brain work throughout the long hours of eternity.

*

.after

Gustave’s head aches in the way that it always does when he first wakes up. A pounding in his temples like there’s too much stuffed in there. 

Bad dreams, Sophie used to suggest when he would wake up like this.

Changes in air pressure, he would tell her.

Now, it’s only Gustave waking up by himself and willing the headache away - only him rattling through his quiet life in Lumière, alone, feeling as if there’s a hollow shape at his side. But he’s used to being alone, he thinks. He’s had to be.

It’s a packed day today. He’s at a pivotal point with the lumina converter research, not quite enough to get their way to a working prototype, but close enough that he thinks they might be able to get the science out of his mind and into something that works in practice. With Lune helping out, this might not be a pipe dream any more.

It’s cold outside. He wraps up warm for the walk through the watery winter sunshine to the lab, hands in his pockets, shoulders turned in. It’s first thing in the morning, but there are still a handful of people milling around on the streets. He smiles and nods and mutters pleasantries without really taking any of them in. Manners on autopilot, that’s all.

Until it’s not.

Until his steps falter between one pace and the next.

There’s someone he doesn’t recognise here on the streets. Or maybe it’s someone he does recognise and shouldn’t. His temples give another throb of pain as he stares at the man: dark hair with streaks of white. Strange clothing. No, not strange. Out of place. It’s an expeditioner’s clothing.

But it’s his eye that Gustave’s attention is drawn towards. There’s a scar dragged over it, black and grey, and the sight of it makes Gustave’s heart clench with a sickening sense of wrong. He’s been on the receiving end of puzzled stares at his arm before, he’s used to being the humiliating subject of burning curiosity, but this is different. That scar isn’t supposed to be there.

Scratch that.

That entire man isn’t supposed to be here. A stranger? In Lumière? Not possible.

Across the street, Gustave locks eyes with him. The eyes staring back at him are a particular shade of blue, striking. And it’s a colour Gustave knows deep in his gut without knowing why.

They stare at each other for the duration of one heartbeat, another - and then the man bolts, feet pounding on the cobbles.

Gustave follows without thinking, paying no mind to the strange glances from the others in the street. He needs to speak to this man: he needs it.

The stranger knows the streets of Lumière as well as he does, maybe better, as he cuts through side-streets and down alleyways with eerie ease. Gustave stays right behind him, barely closing the distance, powered on only by the clawing, burning need that’s started burning in his chest.

The stranger pivots into an alleyway and starts scrambling for an iron ladder at the side of a building, one that would ordinarily lead up to the beautiful gardens and paths on the upper part of town. Losing patience, Gustave stops running and pulls his pistol from the air instead, a shimmer of white particles in the air as it takes shape.

“Stop,” he pants, his aim holding steady. “Stop running.”

He doesn’t know if he’ll shoot him if the stranger keeps moving. He doesn’t want to find out.

The stranger’s hands are still locked onto the lower rungs of the ladder, his foot raised on the first step, when he gives a groan more of frustration than fear. He turns to look at Gustave, and their eyes meet once more - and there’s that feeling again. The upside-down unreality that threatens to tear everything Gustave knows apart.

“Who are you?” Gustave asks. His aim doesn’t waiver. He takes a step forward when the stranger won’t speak. “I asked a question.”

“I don’t think I can answer it,” the stranger says. He hasn’t released his grip on the ladder, and he looks up as if he’s considering bolting again. Maybe he’s weighing up Gustave’s aim versus his own speed. “I can’t be here.”

“At least we agree on something,” Gustave agrees. He can’t be here: a stranger in Lumière with its dwindling population and hollow streets is an impossibility. A stranger in expeditioner’s gear is another mystery altogether. “If you try to climb that ladder, I will shoot you.”

The stranger looks back at him, curiosity on his face and something darker still. “Really?” He tilts his head and turns almost fully from the ladder. “Wouldn’t that be something.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Verso,” the stranger - Verso - says.

Gustave’s hand tightens on his gun. He knows that name: he can’t know that name, but he does. He’s aware of Verso watching his face so closely now, like he’s reading every micro-reaction on his face, but he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Even with this unfamiliar familiar name, Gustave still doesn’t know who he is. He doesn’t know why he knows him so well, why the very sight of him makes his throat want to close up with emotions he doesn’t understand.

“What happened -” The words falter before they leave his mouth. He swallows hard, shakes his head, and tells himself that his gun-hand isn’t shaking. “Verso. Your eye, what happened to you?”

It isn’t the question he should be asking, but it’s the only one he can focus on right now. That painful mark on that sharp face - it shouldn’t be there. Why does that hurt so much?

Verso watches him, head tilted to the side. “Who are you?” he asks. It doesn’t sound like it’s a question directed at Gustave. It doesn’t sound like it’s directed at anyone at all, but it’s enough to prompt Verso to finally push himself away from the ladder.

As he walks towards Gustave, Gustave finally gets a better look at his face: it’s a face he knows better than his own, as impossible as that is. It’s scrawled on the back of a thousand memories he no longer has, an ink-deep smudge inside his veins; looking at that face feels like a thousand years of grief, and there’s no context for it. There’s only the feeling of his heart breaking into pieces all over again.

“What happened?” he asks, rasping the words, feeling them fail him.

Verso shakes his head. “I don’t know, mon coeur.” His hand twitches as if he’s about to reach for Gustave’s face, his cheek, his hair, something, but the movement aborts before it gets too far. His hand falls back to his side. “You can’t be here. You’re not possible.”

“Come back with me,” Gustave asks, trying hard to focus on the current moment, their logistics. “Please. I have questions. So many questions.”

“I don’t think I have any answers.” Verso’s eyes are bright and his body is wired like a hare about to bolt. He glances at the ladder again. “You weren’t supposed to see me.”

“But I did. I did,” Gustave says. Reluctantly, he lets his gun fade away, relying on his words and the desperation he can see reflected in Verso’s eyes. “And that means you have to come with me to the workshop. You owe me that.”

You owe me everything, he thinks, pain and resentment and sorrow without knowing why.

Verso looks at the entrance to the alleyway. “Will there be anyone else there?” he asks.

“Just me and you. I’ll make sure of it.” He can block the doors and make his excuses to Maelle, his apprentices, Lune, anyone that happens to drop by. This is more important, for once, than even the lumina converter that still requires his painstaking adjustments.

Talking to this man, understanding anything and everything he can about him, it suddenly seems like the most important investigation in the world.

*

.before

Another week passes in isolation.

It could be worse. Gustave continues his work on calculating what would be needed for the upgrade for his arm, making elaborate, sprawling diagrams on the blackboards of his workshop and tweaking parts on the inside in a way that accidentally leaves sparks flying while he hastily works to make it stop. It feels blasphemous, in a way. Tampering with Verso’s original creation. Then again, he’s not sure if there’s a single part of him that isn’t Verso’s creation. It’s not as if the arm is special.

After two long, quiet weeks, Verso reappears when Gustave is out on the balcony at the top of the tower. Gustave’s half-way through throwing pebbles over the edge, watching them sail out into the setting sky, safe in the knowledge that they’ll somehow find their way right back to the beds in his greenhouse downstairs. Nothing ever truly vanishes, not here.

He hesitates at the sound of Verso’s footsteps behind him, but he decides to keep on throwing the stones right up until the moment Verso’s arms slip around his waist from behind. He feels the gentle press of Verso’s mouth against the nape of his neck, and something in him collapses, utterly and completely. His eyes shut and he leans into the welcome warmth of Verso’s body, hating just how desperately he’s missed him. It’s been worse, hasn’t it, since the moment Verso kissed him. The isolation has been sharper.

“You seem busy,” Verso observes, breathing the words against Gustave’s neck as if that act alone isn’t some kind of declaration of war.

Gustave doesn’t try to fight his smile, soft and lazy. “Well, of course. These stones won’t throw themselves,” he points out. “I’ve got a really packed schedule up here, actually. Not sure I can fit you in tonight…”

He can feel Verso’s amusement pressed against him, a smile against his neck, a chuckle rumbling through their chests. He lets his remaining pebbles tumble from his hand over the railing, plunging down into the swirling clouds below. With his hands free, he slowly turns around in Verso’s arms until he can actually see him again - and he’s as striking as he’s been for all the endless years that Gustave has known him. Effortlessly charming.

Gustave leans against the balcony’s railing to get a better look at him, taking in the confident glow in his eyes, the slight flush to his cheeks. “Something’s happened outside,” he guesses. “Something good?”

Verso reaches up to brush some of Gustave’s hair aside - and it gives him a thrill to have Verso finally touching him like this, his heart racing. The ease of it. For him, their first kiss was weeks ago. For Verso, it must have been maybe a few days at most. He doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse.

“I had a concert,” Verso says. “A real one. People bought tickets, Gustave. They actually paid to come and see me play.”

“Of course they did,” Gustave agrees as if it’s inevitable. He slides his arms up around Verso’s shoulders, his heart hammering like he might be told to stop: he’s wanted this for years, the heat of his attention. The reality makes it feel like he’s dreaming. “So why aren’t you out there celebrating?”

Verso laughs like it’s as easy as breathing, and this time Gustave knows Verso is looking at his mouth. “I came straight here,” Verso admits. “You’re the only one I want to celebrate with.”

Gustave's heart is beating so hard it feels like a physical wound in his chest. He smiles and knows it doesn’t look half-way genuine at all. He tries to sound casual as he asks, “No pretty girls? No after-parties?”

There must be. He can imagine the sweeping ballrooms he’s read about in the novels of his library: how could anyone look at Verso and not want to hang on his every word? How could anyone see him on stage with a piano and not do everything they could to get him alone afterwards?

Even the memory of their long-ago first kiss feels distant and fractured - what can he offer Verso, trapped here in this canvas? How could he possibly compete with the honeyed world of the gods?

But Verso has that teasing smile on his face, the one that promises something wicked. “I don’t want any pretty girls, Gustave,” Verso promises. He steps so close that Gustave’s no longer sure if it’s his own heart beating so loudly or Verso’s, chest-to-chest. “Why would I want them when I have you waiting at home for me?”

And there’s so much that Gustave should say in return, mind swirling, heart jumping, but Verso is leaning in again before he gets a chance. Slowly, carefully, taking his time again so that Gustave can object, but nothing could be further from his thoughts. He closes the distance himself and they kiss again, finally: weeks of yearning for Gustave, mere days of desire for Verso.

Gustave sinks into it, opening up without question and letting Verso taste him. He hadn’t known it was possible to need someone so badly when he already has them in his arms; he hadn't known that even a kiss can hurt if he wants it too badly. Verso’s hand slides up from his hip to cup his jaw, quietly holding him in place.

The other hand isn’t so well-behaved. It reaches for his waistband, then neatly pulls his tucked white shirt free. It allows Verso to reach under the fabric, his hand cool on Gustave’s bare torso, and that sensation leaves Gustave breaking their kiss, a moan hiccupping against Verso’s lips - overwhelmed all at once by contact alone, so much all at once.

Verso’s attention turns to his jaw, then his neck in the absence of his mouth. “I’ve been thinking about getting my hands on you for days,” Verso murmurs against his skin, hot breath and soft lips. “Even on stage. All I can think about is you.”

Gustave wants to laugh, but all that can come out is a hot puff of desperate air - because he can feel Verso’s hand mapping out every inch of his torso, fingers dragging through the faint trail of hair he’s found under Gustave’s clothes. “I hope I was suitably inspiring,” he breathes.

“Distracting,” Verso contradicts - a smirk against his neck, and the next kiss against his neck comes with the promise of teeth.

Gustave closes his eyes and lets himself smile at the impossibility of ending up here, on his own balcony, in the hands of his own personal, delicate god. “I can only apologise,” he snarks, filled with false sincerity. “I promise to be less distracting in future.”

“Already failing on that front,” Verso muses. His hand slowly makes its way down lower, back to Gustave’s trousers, now toying carefully with the material there. “Can I…?”

Gustave barely knows what he’s asking for, just that the answer is: yes. Unequivocally, emphatically yes. He nods, light-headed, and leans more of his weight against the balcony’s metal railing purely to hold himself up and stop his knees from buckling as Verso deftly opens his pants and slides that confident hand inside.

“Forget ‘a few days’. I’ve been thinking about this for months,” Verso breathes against his neck as his hand closes around Gustave’s cock. He pulls it free and gives an uncertain stroke, one that leaves Gustave groaning.

I’ve been thinking about this for years, Gustave thinks, but he bites his bottom lip rather than say the words. He doesn’t want Verso to think about how time passes in his world - he’s already seen the look Verso gets on his face when reality sinks in too fast and too much, and that’s the last thing he wants right now.

Verso pulls back from his neck, putting enough distance between them to simply look at him as he starts to stroke him slowly - looking at him with that hunger in his eyes, as if Gustave is something worth devouring. Art itself. Verso is drinking him in, heat and fire in those blue eyes, and combined with the slow-building heat from his hand it’s all too much.

Gustave’s gaze breaks away from Verso’s eyes so that he can reach for him as well, tugging Verso closer by his belt loops and then opening his trousers up hastily - because if Verso gets to do this then he does too. He hears his name breathed out in need on Verso’s lips as he reaches for him, his heart hammering with unreality as he adjusts to the way Verso feels in his palm. It’s almost like when he touches himself, thinking of Verso, but this is the real thing, right here in front of him.

Verso kisses him again, or Gustave kisses Verso; it’s getting messy, grunts lost in desperate contact as they breathe together. Gustave’s mechanical fingers sink into the soft mop of Verso’s hair, clinging tight as Verso’s hand works him perfectly. The balcony railing is digging into the small of his back, pinned against it, and time itself seems to have simultaneously slowed down and sped up: he’s drinking in every moment and it’s still going too fast.

It’s the first time for both of them, Verso hiding it better than Gustave, papering over any nerves while Gustave feels like he’s coming apart, but it’s good, it’s so good, so much better than any vague scene he’s read in a book or any desperate fantasy he’d allowed himself on his many lonely nights.

The release hits him in an unexpected rush, spending himself in Verso’s hand and losing it over Verso’s stomach. Verso is the one moaning as he breaks their kiss, returning to Gustave’s neck as Gustave continues to stroke him through the end - and Verso comes with his teeth hard against Gustave’s neck, leaving behind a bruise and a memory that Gustave knows will linger long into the next morning.

In the aftermath, they stand on the balcony, breathing heavily. Gustave leans against Verso’s shoulder and feels Verso’s arms wind around him, holding him close, the ghost of Verso’s mouth pressing softly against his hair, again and again. He hears it - feels it - as Verso deeply takes in the scent of him.

“Can I stay the night?” Verso asks, trailing his fingertips along Gustave’s spine through his shirt and breathing the words into their silence.

Gustave really does laugh this time, lost in the turmoil of getting everything he wants. They’ve had sleepovers before, Verso spending the night on the chaise-longue or both of them forgoing sleep altogether to spend long hours talking nonsense to each other instead - but this is different. He knows it is.

He raises his head from Verso’s shoulder and looks him in the eyes instead, searching that melancholy face as if he could find everything he needs there.

“Stay forever?” he suggests - joking, pleading, needing it all at once.

*

.after

Once he has the stranger - Verso - in his workshop, Gustave realises that he isn’t quite sure what to do with him.

In all fairness, Verso doesn’t really seem as if he knows what to do either. He’s standing in the centre of the workshop, arms crossed over his chest at first before he seems to decide to take a closer look at the items and tools spread out over the workbenches. It’s nothing more than scrap metal and failed experiments so Gustave lets him look all he wants.

“I remember all this,” Verso murmurs - quietly, to himself, no other audience. “All your research. Your ideas. You were always smarter than me.” He picks up one of Gustave’s tools, a spring-loaded calliper, playing with it once or twice before setting it firmly back down on the bench. “Him. Smarter than him,” he corrects himself, incomprehensibly.

Gustave tilts his head to the side, silently prompting for any explanation about that particular comment. Nothing is forthcoming.

“You know, I’m running out of ways to ask who you are,” he admits, leaning against the wall near one of his blackboards. It spreads across the full wall of the workshop, white chalk adorning it with wild theories and diagrams.

“And I’m running out of ways to avoid answering,” Verso says with a half-smile. “So why don’t we try something else?”

Gustave really should find him aggravating. Lies and half-truths and avoidance. There’s something in his aching head that tells him this man is dangerous, but it’s buried under everything else - it’s buried under the desperate need, overriding all other instincts, that tells him to make sure that Verso is safe.

“You didn’t have to come here,” Gustave points out. “If you’d wanted to, you could have run off.”

“You had me at gun-point.”

“Yes,” Gustave agrees. “But I don’t think that means much, not to you.”

Verso’s eyes are unreadable as they stare into him after that statement. “What makes you say that?”

Good question. Really good question, actually, and it’s one of many things that Gustave doesn’t understand right now. He smiles instead, self-deprecating, as if this is all a joke instead of something that’s making his mind scream in pulsing agony. “Well. I’m not a great shot,” he suggests.

Verso stares him down for a long, painful moment. Those eyes, that particular stunning blue, Gustave has seen it before - he knows that he has, and equally he knows that isn’t true. It isn’t. Not here.

Not here? he asks himself, but there’s no answer to that from his treacherous mind either.

“Something tells me that isn’t true,” Verso murmurs.

“But,” Gustave interrupts - he’s got to get back in charge of this somehow, “What I mean is that you’re here because you want to be. You’re not in this workshop because I marched you here at gun-point. You’re in Lumière for a reason. What is it?”

“I heard it’s lovely at this time of year,” Verso answers without missing a beat. “I’m taking a holiday.”

Gustave sincerely hopes that his flat stare manages to convey every ounce of disapproval. “We’re not going to get very far like this,” he complains.

Verso’s eyes are glinting as if that’s exactly the point. He wanders away from the workbench in order to start patrolling the blackboards instead, running his fingers along the base and disrupting the fine layer of chalk dust. “I don’t understand. This is just like your tower.”

He’s talking to himself. Again.

And Gustave’s head is aching. Again.

He tries to fight back the flinch but he’s not quick enough: Verso’s eyes are back on him again, pinning him in place. That blue gaze is incisive enough that it feels as if it’s taking every single piece of him apart. The ache in his head throbs like the flaking of dried paint and he presses the base of his metal hand against his temple, willing it to please, please, quiet down in there.

Verso watches him the whole time - questioning, worried, and silent.

“Who are you?” Verso asks eventually, stealing Gustave’s line of questioning but breathing it out to the world at large. It’s certainly not meant for him.

Gustave shakes his head anyway. “You tell me who you are, I’ll tell you who I am,” he suggests. “Seems fair.”

He knows who he is: he’s an engineer from Lumière, he’s lived here all his life, he loves his sister and Maelle and his apprentices and this workshop and why does all of that feel wrong now? Why does it feel like his own world is shimmering around him like melting watercolours?

“I’m starting to think that neither of us have the answer,” Verso says, as he stares at him like a drowning man watches the shore.

And, damn it, Gustave hates that he’s right.

*

.before

Gustave gets one week, one beautiful, perfect week, before Verso has to leave again.

He knows it makes sense. The whole wider world is out there waiting for Verso, and he can’t deny them his company - more than that, he knows it isn’t fair to keep Verso from his life out there. His family needs him, as complex as they are. His friends. His piano and his concerts. There are layers upon layers of good waiting for Verso in the world beyond; sometimes, Gustave thinks that what Verso truly needs from him is a reminder of how good his life out there could actually be.

He’s back in the greenhouse, prodding at wilting plants and trying to convince himself that perhaps there’s a green-thumb buried somewhere under all this metal. Once he finishes his latest research he might have a bit more luck keeping the formerly-lush plants down here alive without Verso’s help - but, for the time being, he’s got at least a week before he can expect Verso to come back.

And that’s fine. Absolutely fine, and expected. He’s got a long list of research to be getting on with, and tasks to be completed around the tower. He’s even got some new books to read after Verso renewed the chroma of the last lot.

All of which is to say that he is absolutely not going to spend the full week lying around thinking about Verso’s hands on him, or the sweet taste of his smile, or the quiet, content relaxation on Verso’s face when he’s asleep in his bed. Gustave has far more important things to do than sit at his window, staring at his endless sky and pining over his missing creator.

All the same, kneeling beside his plants, a smile winds its way onto his face as he hears the sound of someone moving up above - light footsteps wandering through his library.

He gets to his feet and hastily bounds over to the stairs, swiping his hands over his clothing to try to make sure he’s half-way presentable. It’s been less than a day since Verso’s departure: it’s far too early for him to be back already. With the time difference, only a few hours will have passed in Verso’s world at most.

“Did you forget something?” he asks as he opens the door and rushes inside - only to stop abruptly, smile freezing then falling from his face.

This isn’t Verso.

Standing in his library, looking just as startled as him, there’s a teenage girl. Short. Young. Red-headed. Her blue eyes are wide in surprise as she stares at him like he’s the intruder here.

He should speak. He really should say something, but his hand is clinging so tightly to the door handle that there’s a genuine worry he might break it.

Still staring at him, suddenly the girl laughs, shaking her head in triumph. “I knew Verso was hiding something in here,” she says in wonder. “I just didn’t realise it was someone.”

Gustave, unsure on what else to do, gives an awkward wave, the fingers of his mechanical hand wiggling. “Hello,” he says. “...I’m someone.”

Somewhere out there, he’s sure Verso must be laughing at him - after the panic, anyway. There’s really going to be a lot of panicking.

The girl looks perfectly calm as she waves right back at him. “I’m Alicia,” she says. She settles down in his armchair with the same sense of confidence that Verso always carries with him, the perfect poise of knowing she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be. She’s right at home without needing any invitation.

“Yes, well… Make yourself comfortable,” Gustave says. He follows her example and sits in the other armchair - his back straight, his hands placed awkwardly on his knees, then over his chest. He doesn’t know how to be around anyone other than Verso, how to simply exist, but judging from the twinkle in Alicia’s eye he doesn’t think he’s doing a particularly good job of it. “I’ve heard about you, you know. Alicia. You’re Verso’s little sister.”

Alicia sinks into her seat, perfectly comfortable there, and nods quietly.

She doesn’t make any motion to leave, and Gustave doesn’t make any attempt to make her.

For the first time in all the decades he’s spent in this tower, he has a conversation with someone other than Verso.

And he knows it’s a risk, he knows Verso will be worried, he knows there’s so many ways that this could go wrong - but he feels more real now than he has in so many long, endless years.

Chapter Text

.before

Time outside the canvas drags so slowly. A day can feel like a century.

Verso understands it. He’s seen Gustave’s chalked-out calculations on his blackboard; he’s listened as Gustave theorised about time dilation and watched him map out time ratios. One day in Verso's world used to mean a minimum of one week in the canvas, but as a canvas ages so does the gap. Two weeks. Then a month. Eventually one day will be a year. In the future, it might be decades.

But it’s returning to regular business in the outside world that’s becoming more and more of a chore - no, it’s a waste, every second of it. Visiting his friends is an ordeal, as all he can think about is how much he’d rather be listening to Gustave’s nonsense stories instead. On some level Verso knows it isn’t right. He knows that he loves his friends dearly, that they’re musicians and writers and artists he respects, and yet all he can do is rush back to his apartment as soon as they’re done with dinner, key rattling urgently in the lock. Every time, he rushes to the hidden cupboard he stores the canvas in, and he’s inside before he needs to waste another breath.

The tower is warm and inviting in a way that the Dessendre Manor has never been for him. He takes a deep breath as soon as he arrives, taking in that comforting scent. It’s a mix of those red flowers growing in the greenhouse, the ever-present oil and dust from Gustave’s workshop, and then Gustave himself. It’s the scent of home.

There’s something else in the air tonight, something singed. Verso wanders down the stone stairs of the tower until he reaches the floor with the kitchen, where he can lean against the doorframe and watch his genius disaster of a boyfriend wafting smoke away from the oven. Gustave isn’t quite swearing but he’s incredibly damn close to it as he belatedly rescues something from the oven with his metal hand and plonks it on the sideboard. It sits there in a loaf tin, blackened like an unexploded bomb, as Gustave stares mournfully at his creation.

Verso’s heart aches at the sight of him.

“At least your cooking’s improving,” he says to announce his presence - and, god, the way Gustave’s face brightens at the sound of his voice is the kind of sight that keeps Verso trapped here. How could he ever leave when he can make Gustave’s eyes light up like that? How long has it been for him this time?

Gustave manages to rein it in enough to turn back to his creation and give the lump of coal a good prod. “You’re very welcome to try it,” he offers.

“Mm, tempting.” Verso pushes away from the doorframe to wander across the kitchen as if he’s really eager to get a good look at that monstrosity. He thinks it may once have had ambitions of becoming bread. “It looks…”

“Careful with your choice of adjectives.”

“...Rustic?” Verso suggests. He rests his hand on the small of Gustave’s back: now he’s standing close enough to see the way he’s fighting back a smile, to drink in the way he’s trying so hard to look offended.

He leans in and kisses Gustave before they can start mourning his ex-bread. It’s soft and light, the burn of their facial hair brushing, and he feels the way that Gustave immediately sighs against him as if Verso’s granted him everything he’s been waiting for. There’s the scent of charcoal around them and, still, all Verso can think is that he might be the luckiest man alive.

He pulls back to brush the back of his fingertips against Gustave’s cheek. “I missed you,” he says, as he always does.

“I missed you too,” comes back, just as soft.

The moment is broken before it can settle in, the ever-burning hunger diverted as Gustave abruptly pulls away. He nudges at the bread one last time before he crosses the kitchen to lean against the counter on the other side - putting space between them.

“But there’s something I should tell you,” Gustave says, “And you’re not going to like it.”

Verso leans against the opposite counter and crosses his arms over his chest. There’s a long, weighted pause, so Verso nods to show that he’s listening.

“I had a visitor last month.”

Ah. Gustave’s right.

He really doesn’t like the sound of that at all.

*

Verso’s been avoiding the Manor these days. He shouldn’t be, really. From the way his mother gushes any time he visits, he knows that he should come here more often - but there’s something suffocating in these halls. The ever-present smog of paint and industry.

It’s why Verso moved to an apartment in the city: claiming he’d needed to be closer to potential audiences and patrons if he was going to take his music seriously, it had really been a feeble stab at independence. From the indulgent look in his parents’ eyes, they’d probably known that already.

Returning now, walking these halls, he finds that almost nothing has changed. There’s still the distracted sense of genius-at-work, and he’s able to walk in without challenge.

He finds Alicia holed up in her bedroom, pouring over a manuscript on her typewriter. When he walks in, she glances up at him - first in surprise, before her expression settles into something more amused. “Well that didn’t take very long.”

Gustave had said a month for him. With the time slipping, that could mean anything.

“That key was supposed to be for emergencies,” he points out.

“It was an emergency,” Alicia insists. “You were keeping secrets.”

“With good reason.” That’s the truth of it. And that’s the reason why his heart is hammering in his chest. He’s kept that canvas out of sight for years now, the only thing keeping him sane in this world. He can’t lose it. “You can’t tell anyone.”

“I’m not going to tell anyone, Verso.”

“Not our parents. Not even Clea.”

“Especially not Clea,” she protests. She looks up at him, teenage defiance and sincerity mixed together. “I promise. No tattling.”

They’ll take him from me, Verso thinks, You have to be careful.

But he knows her. He trusts her, as mad as that may be. She’s only a teenager but she’s always been smarter than him, hasn’t she?

With a relieved sigh, he settles down into an armchair in the corner of her room, allowing his gaze to roam over the manuscript she’s been working on.

“You know, I do have one condition,” Alicia says as she tilts her head and looks over to him. “You have to let me visit again. A lot. Gustave was nice.”

Verso looks down at his hands as if that does anything to hide the smile that wants to break its way onto his face uninvited. He doesn’t remember the last time he smiled, really smiled, outside of his canvas. “He’s really something,” he murmurs.

He can feel her looking at him, those eyes so much more insightful than their years. “Be careful in there,” she reminds him.

She’s been going to the same ethics lessons that they always drum into a Painter’s head when they’re learning their craft: Verso remembers those from the early days too, long essays to read and discussions to indulge in. None of it had ever made sense to him at the time, but now he thinks about the way he feels when he has to leave the canvas, as if he’s forgotten how to breathe out here in the unpainted world, and he wonders if maybe they had a point.

"You too,” he warns her, before he gestures at her own work-in-progress. “Come. Show me what you’re working on.”

They don’t talk about Gustave or about Verso’s painting for the rest of the afternoon, but it swirls like ink in water in Verso's mind, forever calling him home.

*

.after

“So you met him?”

“Yes.”

“And you talked to him?”

“Yes.”

“And then you ran away?”

“... Yes.” Verso lies on his back beside Monoco, both of them staring up at the stars. He’s been defining his retreat from Lumière as something tactical: he’d slipped out of the workshop while Gustave was otherwise occupied, he’d made a very rushed trip to spy on Maelle and confirm that she was fine, and then he’d left for the Continent again before Gustave had a chance to catch up with him. Perfectly tactical. No use in wasting more time than necessary being interrogated by someone who doesn’t even understand the questions they’re asking. 

He groans and throws his arm over his own face, blocking out the sky above them.

Monaco gives a thoughtful grunt, which is usually a sign that something terrible is about to come out of his mouth. “Maybe he likes cowards,” Monoco says. There it is.

“I’m not a coward,” Verso protests. “He didn’t even know who I was. And he’s swimming around up there in my brain, but those memories aren’t mine. He isn’t mine.”

Monoco is quiet for a few moments, before Verso hears the sound of his bristles moving on the ground and knows Monoco is looking at him. “Do you want him to be?” Monoco asks.

Yes, Verso could answer, and, Forever. 

He remembers what it feels like to be so in love with that idiotic man that he wanted to marry him.

And those memories don’t belong to him at all.

Those feelings don’t either, even when they’re rooted so deep in his heart that he wouldn’t dare to call them fake. It’s yet another part of his life that’s an elaborate illusion, but even now he can’t stop thinking about the indescribable colour of Gustave’s eyes or the fragile way he’d clutched to his own temples in that workshop, racked with a pain neither of them understand.

He hates it.

So it’s easy to swipe at Monoco instead. “That sounds like a question only someone who wants a fight would ask,” he challenges.

Before long, they’re lumbering to their feet, and he can lose those memories in the promise of violence and the bruises his friend leaves behind.

*

After his initial slip-up, he’s smarter about sticking to the shadows when he drops in on Lumière. He doesn’t do it frequently enough for it to be a problem, and he keeps his distance every time he’s in the city - he doesn’t let himself get drawn in by Gustave’s sad eyes again, doesn’t allow himself to accidentally end up in a chase through the streets, and absolutely does not end up being held at gun-point a second time.

He watches Maelle growing up. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. She becomes more and more like the girl in his memories - in Verso’s memories - and less and less like the Alicia he remembers from his own childhood, burned and silent and aching. Watching her is a double-vision that he can’t quite iron out.

Gustave is even worse. Even from a distance, it’s impossible to miss how he’s suffering - with the glazed, distant looks, and the constant barely-hidden flinches of his headaches, it leaves Verso frustrated that nobody else from Lumière has noticed and intervened.

Then again, how would any doctor or even the most talented picto-wielder help with this?

But the worst part, the part that leaves him fuming as much as it chills his blood, is when he checks in on Lumière the year Gustave turns thirty-one - and finds that the idiot truly has signed up for the next Expedition.

It’s stupid. It’s reckless. And as much as Verso has made a vow to stay out of sight and avoid Gustave as much as possible, that vow vanishes as soon as the news sinks in.

He finds Gustave on the streets of Lumière. It’s half-way to twilight and he’s only just locked up the workshop and started making his way home, working too hard, too obsessed. He must be too focused on his own rash thoughts as well, because he doesn’t react to Verso’s presence until Verso has already broken out of the shadows, grabbed him by the arm, and shoved him hard against the wall of the nearest alley.

Verso holds him firmly, staring at Gustave’s face - and how has anyone in Lumiere failed to notice that that face has barely aged a day in all the years he’s lived in this city? He’s in the same painted suspension as Verso, which only makes him shove a little harder against Gustave's shoulders.

“Ah, mon ombre.” Gustave sounds content for a man currently pinned to a wall and unable to escape. His eyes are lit up. Perhaps Verso isn’t being intimidating enough. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

I missed you, Verso thinks as he studies that face - a face he’s seen and hasn’t seen soft and laughing and in love, when these days it's twisted in pain and frustration.

I missed you too, he hears in Gustave’s voice, a yearning he knows has never been for this version of him.

His eyes narrow. “You signed up for the Expedition.”

“I did. We leave next year,” Gustave confirms. “One year of training. Finishing our preparations. And then…”

“Quit,” Verso tells him. “I don’t care what you have to say to them. Do not get on that boat.”

Gustave finally shoves him away, no longer content with staying pinned in place against the brick wall. Even with the clenching of Gustave’s jaw and the burning of his eyes, Verso finds that he misses the heat of him as soon as he stumbles back a step - and he hates everything that that says about him.

Gustave starts to speak a couple of times, a few abandoned lines of questioning before he lands on something simple: “Why?”

It’s barely a question. It’s a demand, and all Verso does is shake his head. “Stay here. You’re safe here.”

“I’m not. No one is. Some day soon, it’s going to be my number up on that Monolith, and living out my last days in Lumière is not going to help us against the Paintress. It’s coming soon. Whether I’m here or on the Continent, you know it’s true. I’m going to gommage.”

“No,” Verso says, feeling the truth of that word sink in as he says it for the first time. Not knowing why. “You won’t.”

The silence feels so sharp it’s like breathing in shrapnel. Gustave looks as if he might draw his pistol again. “What does that mean, Verso?”

His name. Gustave’s lips. It’s not the time to focus on that, but it’s been years since he’s got to hear it - years since they stood in Gustave’s workshop together and he was able to marvel at him in real-time. The sound of it still makes his breath shiver, just for a moment, until he really does think that Gustave might swing for him.

“What does that mean?” Gustave repeats.

Verso doesn’t know, doesn’t understand it at all: all he understands is that Gustave is different, he’s special, and nothing’s going to happen to him if Verso can keep him safe. Just like 'nothing' has happened to Verso for all these long years.

He feels some of the truth on his lips, but he knows better than to spill it - telling Gustave won’t help. It will only spur him onto the Continent even faster, and Verso already knows who will be waiting when they land.

It can’t happen.

“It means,” he spits, “That if I see you on the Continent I will drag you back here myself.”

There’s a vicious stubbornness on Gustave’s bitter face in response, like he might start laughing in hysteria.

Strange.

There are so many foreign memories of this impossible man floating around in his head - and yet he’s never seen him look like that before. Bitter, angry, broken.

There’s still something new to discover: something horrifying, even now.

*

.before

The moonlight pouring through the window of Gustave’s bedroom is painting his bare skin in blue-cream hues. Verso is sure he could never have captured that colour on a canvas; he can’t take credit for it. He trails his fingertips over Gustave’s shoulder, propping himself up on one arm, and it’s still not enough. This visit has been nearly two months already, and it’s still not enough.

“Are you awake?” he whispers, as he leans down to brush the words gently into Gustave’s skin.

Gustave’s sleeping on his back and his face is slumped side-ways on the pillow. His nose scrunches as soon as he hears the question, but his eyes don’t open. “No,” he mumbles on a sleeping-sigh. “What is it? Are you okay?”

Verso presses a kiss against his chest, lingering there while the white sheets pool gracefully around their waists. He can't sleep. “Do you know they say Painters leave a piece of their soul in every canvas?” he breathes against Gustave's skin. “I think I know where mine is. It’s right here.” He kisses right above Gustave’s heart - he can feel it beating beneath him, strong and steady, slow and peaceful with sleep.

“Mmm,” Gustave agrees sleepily. “That’s beautiful. And sappy. And definitely worth waking me up in the middle of the night.”

Verso can see the smile on his face all the same, and the way his sleepy eyes have started to open up for him. “You’re such a grumpy old man,” he complains.

Gustave’s arm curls around him, mechanical fingers stroking through his hair, as he smiles to himself and says, “Your fault. You painted me this way.”

He’s a nightmare. And Verso loves him so much it hurts.

“Here,” he promises, as he rolls on top and slides comfortably between Gustave’s parted thighs for the second time that night, “Let me make it up to you.”

They sleep in late after that, curled up in one another until the night turns back to day and the moonlight pouring through the window turns to the honeyed sun instead. Verso wakes up to a delicate cup of coffee being placed onto the cabinet beside their bed - Gustave already fully dressed, mobile, and looking as if he’s been up for hours. Starting to prop himself up against the pillows, Verso reaches for the cup and thinks that he could sit here and watch Gustave’s morning routine for days.

Gustave, as always, is here to pour cold water on that idea.

“You have to go home today,” he says, the real reason Verso couldn't sleep last night. “You said so.”

It’s a decent point; Verso even remembers that it felt important a few weeks ago. He’s got a concert waiting for him on the outside and he can’t risk missing it - if nothing else, people will notice.

But the bed is warm, his coffee is hot, and Gustave is smiling at him. “... I could probably stay another couple of days,” he suggests, sinking down further.

All it gets him is an affectionate roll of Gustave’s eyes. “Absolutely not. You’re going to go, and impress everyone out there with your playing, and then come back here and tell me all about it. I’ll be right here when you get back.”

“You’d be right here if I stayed as well,” Verso points out.

“Verso.” He loves the way Gustave says his name - there’s a softness to it. Affection. His name doesn’t sound like that from anyone else’s lips. “You’ve got to go. Enjoy your coffee. Get dressed. Then head out. It won’t take long.”

Not for him. He only has to stay out of the canvas for a day or so at most - but in here? Weeks will go by. Maybe months. Gustave will be rattling around his tower all alone, and Verso will be stuck missing it. He'll miss weeks of him in a single day.

He presses the edge of the coffee cup to his lips without drinking, his mind chewing over the absence instead, until Gustave leans over to prod the middle of his forehead with one firm, metal finger. “I can see you overthinking it,” Gustave says. He taps his finger twice against Verso’s forehead. “It’s going to be fine. And you need a break. Go and see Alicia, if nothing else. Tell her I said hello.” He sits down on the edge of the bed again, watching Verso fondly while Verso fights back the urge to yank him back down to the mattress. “Besides, I have some projects I’ve been ignoring in the workshop. They deserve a little attention.”

Verso rolls his eyes, but when the time comes he listens and leaves the canvas just as he’s told - and this time it hurts.

It’s getting worse.

Leaving the canvas is like a hook being thrust through his chest and yanking him back into reality. The tower is ripped from him, its warm sunlight and soft scents, and he’s thrown back into his own body. His own small, feeble apartment.

His knees buckle. Before he’s adjusted to the cold colours of this world, he crashes to the ground, palms flat against the floorboards. His chest heaves like he’s forgotten how to breathe, ugly gasps for air as his limbs tingle, pins-and-needles a buzzing torture throughout each one.

His stomach aches as if something is being ripped from him, and he dry-heaves in response. He wonders how many days it’s been since he ate.

His lips are dry. Cracked. With a shaking, uncooperative hand, he reaches for the jug of water he left beside the canvas, pouring it into a glass then starting to drink greedily. His head throbs with each swallow of the liquid, but he doesn’t stop.

It’s getting worse each time he comes back.

And soon, he knows, he won’t be able to justify coming back at all.

*

.after

The mist is thick over the beach when Expedition 33 lands. There’s a cold chill that sinks deep into Verso’s bones from where he’s watching, carefully obscured behind one of the boulders.

He knows how this goes, after all.

He knows exactly what comes next - and all he’s here to see is who steps off of that boat.

He’d warned Gustave a year ago, threatened him, but he’s not enough of an idiot to believe he’ll listen. That would be far too easy.

All the same, he still has hope. Only a speck of it, true, but he wants to believe that Gustave might have listened to his warnings. Maybe he’s tucked away back in Lumiere, dreaming of the tower they both lost.

Hope dies as soon as he hears a familiar voice as the Expedition starts to disembark. It withers faster when a second voice joins it - both of them quiet, hushed, but he’d recognise them anywhere. Gustave. Alicia: Maelle. Here on the Continent.

From his hiding spot, he thuds his head back against the rock and it’s only the general hushed hub-bub of noise from the ship that disguises the sound. He breathes out, slowly, and tells himself that he can work with this: he’ll ask Esquie to drag Gustave home, then he’ll proceed with Maelle to the Monolith. He’ll find a way to make it work, somehow. An excuse, a story, something that might make sense to the Expedition. If he convinces Esquie it’s a game, he might even agree to swoop in like an oversized monster and snatch Gustave away before anyone can stop them. Verso can swoop in afterward like a saviour to keep the Expedition going…

Verso manically spins plans and tales to himself as Expedition 33 disembarks onto the cold, dark beach.

Perhaps one of those plans would have worked - but that noise interrupts them.

The tapping of a cane.

The steady, unhurried beat of footsteps as he approaches.

Verso freezes behind the rock and holds his breath, praying to anyone, maybe even the Paintress, that Gustave and Maelle are out of sight.

From the wider beach, his father’s cane stops moving and settles into stillness. One of the Expeditioners starts talking. Verso breathes out his thanks that at least it isn’t Gustave.

“You - you’re old. How did you… How did you survive the Gommage?” The poor man doesn’t even know those are his last words, but Renoir deals with him with a bright, brutal finality.

And all hell breaks loose.

Nevrons crawling out of the dark; panic and screaming from the Expedition as all discipline vanishes into the night; the flash of light and stink of death as they dwindle in number: it’s all Verso can go to slip from shadow to shadow and clear the way for Maelle. His promise to protect her rings strong in his mind, keeping him moving - and as she falls to the ground from an attack he barely deflects for her, he knows that getting her out of here is the only option.

But Gustave… He’s standing there. Dazed. In shock.

Out in the damn open.

Verso needs to retreat and stash Maelle somewhere safe - but that means leaving Gustave. The impossibility of it builds like fire in his bones as he kneels at Maelle’s side, his eyes on Gustave alone.

He’s stumbling. Aimless. Verso’s hand clenches on his weapon. “Get out of here,” he mutters, to himself or to Gustave. Both of them.

And it doesn’t matter.

The cold, calculated beat of Renoir’s cane returns. A beat that turns his stomach as it descends decisively towards Gustave’s vacant form.

“Run. Run,” Verso mutters to himself. But Gustave isn’t moving. 

He isn’t doing anything, until his eyes settle on Renoir - and then his hand moves to his head, steadying his temple like he’s trying to hold his own thoughts in place. Verso recognises that gesture, knows all the pain the very sight of Renoir must be putting him through, but he needs Gustave to push through it. He can fall apart once he’s out of here, just as long as he actually gets out of there.

“Well,” Renoir says thoughtfully, stopping a few paces away from Gustave. He looks at him like he’s studying a statue in an art gallery. A particularly rare relic on display. “You’re a long way from home.”

*

.before

Time tumbles by. Years on the outside, with cancelled concerts and forgotten friendships and missed family dinners. Reluctant days in the outside world are punctuated by long, indulgent months in the canvas with Gustave. It works together. They work. For each visit, he transforms part of the tower into something new for them: a beach, a river, a farm, a fairground, something to break up eternity and show Gustave a slither of the wider world.

And if Verso's limbs in the outside world feel less like his own, and if the shock of returning hurts more and more each time, it’s a sacrifice Verso is more than willing to make. The canvas is home. The outside world feels more like a dream every day.

Shortly after his twenty-fourth birthday, he’s sitting in the corner of Gustave’s workshop, listening to Gustave mutter to himself as he fiddles with some adaption or other he’s been making to his arm - he’s been cagey about it for months, dodging any of Verso’s questions about what he’s working on. It’s not as if Verso can make the slightest bit of sense out of the diagrams that Gustave scrawls on his blackboard, or the notes he makes for himself in his rushed handwriting. All the same, Verso can sit here quietly and flick through one of the books from Gustave’s library, listening to the sounds without any rush.

The peace is punctuated by Gustave’s shocked triumph. “I did it,” Gustave exclaims, rushing around the workbench and grabbing Verso by the arm. “Come on. Come with me.”

He drags Verso down to the kitchen, ignoring his questions, and plants him in a seat at the kitchen table. The excitement in his eyes is infectious: Verso can’t stop looking at him in wonder, asking himself what that impossible brain has cooked up this time around.

“Watch this - watch,” Gustave tells him giddily, as if there’s any possibility that Verso could look away from him while he’s like this, effortlessly magnetic. 

Gustave takes an apple from the bowl on the counter and places it on the table between them. Intense focus on his face, he holds his mechanical hand over it - and the whole arm starts to shake. Red electricity starts crackling up and down the arm like lava flowing through the joints, desperate to escape. 

And Verso loves Gustave, he does, and he trusts him, he truly does, but everything about this is insane.

He barely has a chance to shout Gustave’s name before the red lightning bursts out of his palm, twisting in the air to become a shimmer of paint and unreality.

Beneath his palm, the pigment begins to fade from the apple. Its shape melts as if it’s forgotten how to hold itself together, loose and dripping into a puddle on the table. Gustave grits his teeth and another red blast charges from his arm, a pulse down onto the colourless blob - and it pulls itself back together, a swirl of new colour forming around it, a reminder of a new shape.

When Gustave steps away from the table, panting like he’s been running, there’s a perfectly formed orange sitting where the apple had once been.

Verso stares at the fruit. And then back up at his insane boyfriend.

“Ta-da?” Gustave tries. He waggles his hands to look especially impressive, which prompts a volley of sparks from his mechanical fingertips. With a grimace, he shakes the hand like that might be enough to fix it. A few more sparks fly in response.

Verso reaches out for the orange. He runs his thumb over the texture of its skin: it’s as real as anything he’s ever conjured into this place. “You can paint?” he asks, as he feels his mind in free-fall, every lesson from his childhood ripped into pieces one by one.

“No. No, definitely not, nothing like that,” Gustave says. “I can’t make anything from scratch, not like you. But the pigments - chroma - it’s all matter, isn’t it? And I can rearrange that. I've been working on it for years. Finally got somewhere.”

“So you can re-paint,” Verso rephrases.

He looks up from the orange and finds Gustave watching him, worry on his face. “It’s nothing like what you can do,” Gustave explains. “I nearly fried my arm just changing one little thing, but it’s… It’s a start, I thought. If I can make it work, I can make changes to the tower myself, maybe. I can surprise you.” He pauses, head tilted to the side like he’s not so certain of this any more. “...Are you upset?”

Delicately, Verso puts the fruit back down in its place and gets to his feet. He walks around the table until he’s close enough to take hold of Gustave’s mechanical arm, the aftershocks of that red electricity leaving a static charge around it. It makes his fingertips tingle.

“Gustave,” he says calmly, staring into his eyes. “This might be the hottest thing you’ve ever done.”

He gets a second of stunned silence before Gustave is shoving at his shoulder in protest, laughing the whole time - his wild genius. Verso lets him get away with it for a moment or two before he grabs him properly, laughing through Gustave’s protests, until a sound elsewhere in the tower makes them both fall silent.

There are footsteps down below.

Slow. Heavy.

There’s someone in the glasshouse.

Their mirth vanishes as they pull away from each other, sharing a worried glance. “Alicia?” Gustave suggests quietly, but Verso shakes his head. It can’t be. He’d made her promise never to come here without prior warning, unwilling to risk her turning up unannounced and finding his corporeal body in a withered mess outside. If Alicia visits, it’s only ever by appointment - which means there must be someone else down there.

He keeps Gustave behind him as they descend to the lowest floor of the tower: Gustave’s greenhouse, his red flowers flourishing thanks to a little help from Verso’s chroma. The flowers are blooming in long, crimson slashes along the beds, their scent thick and cloying in the air.

Verso’s footsteps hesitate as he starts to enter the glasshouse.

His father is there already.

Renoir takes his time walking along the path between the flowerbeds, exploring the space Verso has made for Gustave alone. He doesn’t look right in here, with his shirt and waistcoat rumpled, his pocket-watch gleaming. His eyes leave the flowers and settle sadly on his son.

“How…” Verso struggles to word his next question in a way that doesn’t sound rude. Before long, he gives up. “What are you doing here?”

He wants to tell him to get out, or he wants to tell Gustave to run, but the words won’t form. His father’s never been a threat before: he’s been a source of heavy expectations or parental disappointment; the authority to rebel against in his teens or the wise mentor to point him in the right direction, but never this.

He’s never felt dangerous.

Renoir is quiet. His gaze sweeps over Verso, evaluating, but his eyes end up resting on Gustave, a half-step behind him. Verso tries to gesture for Gustave to stay back, but it doesn’t work - of course Gustave doesn’t listen, at his side. Steady support.

“I thought I should come and see what it is that’s occupying so much of my son’s time,” Renoir says. He gives a benevolent nod towards Gustave. “Or who, perhaps. It’s a pleasure to meet you, son.”

He holds out his hand for Gustave to shake, and as much as Verso wants to tell Gustave to ignore it the words won’t come. 

Gustave side-steps past him and takes Renoir’s hand firmly. A slightly hysterical laugh wants to bubble up from Verso’s chest as he wonders if this might be Gustave’s first ever handshake. He’s had decades locked up in this place. There's been no need for formal introductions.

Gustave gives Renoir his name, his expression warily twitching between a smile and a grimace. Their introduction is polite. Mannered.

Verso doesn’t think he’s imagining the way his father’s gaze dips to the fading mark Verso left on Gustave’s neck the night before. It had felt sweet at the time, something to leave behind on his skin. Now, under Renoir’s calm attention, everything starts to feel a little wrong.

Renoir releases Gustave’s hand and gestures around at their surroundings. “It’s a beautiful canvas,” he says, holding Verso’s gaze. “Your best.”

“That’s not saying much,” Verso says. “I didn't make many.”

Renoir tilts his head in acknowledgement, but he looks around at their surroundings. “It’s efficient work. Talented - adapted over the years. Adjusted as needed. Iterative work. A small canvas, but well-used. Bright colours. Strong chroma. Your mother would be proud,” he says. His gaze lingers on Gustave a moment longer, clouded concern on his face, before he looks back at Verso. “But we should talk. Not here. Are you willing to meet me outside?”

Verso’s heart races - he doesn’t want to agree. He doesn’t want to go out there and see the mess that is waiting for him. He doesn’t want to look his father in the eyes out in the real world and tell him that it’s worth it, all of it, for the man standing at his side.

He can’t take his eyes off of his father, but he feels the brush of Gustave’s hand against his arm. Confirmation that he’s there. Right there with him.

Without comment, Renoir gives a gentle nod. “I’ll meet you outside, Verso,” he says firmly. “Don’t take too long. Gustave, a pleasure to finally meet you.”

And he’s gone. A flurry of chroma and petals. A sick feeling in the pit of Verso’s stomach.

Gustave’s talking. He’s saying his name, calling for him, that sweet concern and quiet, solid bravery. There’s a ringing in Verso’s ears that stops him from answering. He doesn’t remember how to breathe.

Gustave calls his name again from a thousand miles away, but instead of answering Verso reaches for him. Pulls him as close as he can get and hides his face against his neck. He feels the burn of stubble against his face and breathes in as deeply as he can: Gustave smells like home. Like peace.

Gustave’s arms wrap around him and they hold each other tight - and Gustave’s still speaking, still promising him that it’s going to be okay. It’s a conversation with his father, nothing more. Just a conversation.

Verso wants to believe him.

“I’ll come back,” he promises in whispered words against Gustave’s skin. “I promise: I’ll come back.”

Gustave nods. Dazed. “I know, sweetheart. I’ll be here.” His fingers comb through Verso’s hair, soft, slow, easy. Verso can’t let himself ask when he’ll get to feel that again. “I’ll always be here, Verso.”

Verso kisses him, then. He imagines Gustave’s canvas boxed up and put into storage with the rest of the Dessendres’ dusty, abandoned projects. Imagines Gustave trapped in this tower for eternity, left to rot. It won’t happen. He can’t let that happen.

Gustave kisses him back like he always does: like they have forever on their hands. It’s Gustave’s gentle lips and the broken exhale he gives when Verso tastes him deeper, needing to commit every detail to memory.

When they part, Gustave rests their foreheads together. With every ounce of sincerity in his voice and faith in his eyes, he says, “You’ll be okay.”

Verso takes him in: the colour of those eyes that he could never quite capture; the stubble perfectly dusting his jaw; the sharp cut of his cheekbones. That brilliant mind. Subtle snark. Kind, open heart. He's the most beautiful thing Verso’s ever created, and yet everything that makes Gustave who he is is so much more than what Verso painted. He’s so much more than a product of a paintbrush. He’s everything.

“I’ll be back,” he vows, their hands interlinked one last time.

He drinks in the sight of him, faithful and trusting, and lets himself fade out of the tower and back to the other world.

Crashing back into his body is like jumping in front of a speeding train. The fiery ache ignites in his limbs; his body is already on the ground, and as he rolls over his stomach churns, retching up nothing onto the floor.

His own stomach fights him. His mind rebels at his return, fingernails clawing on the inside of his skull. He tries to throw up again, but there’s nothing but empty bile while his hands shake.

It takes a moment before he realises someone is holding his hair back for him. Someone’s warm hand is resting on his shoulder. His father’s quiet, understanding words promise he’s going to be okay.

It reminds him of when he was young. A boy with a stomach bug tucked up in bed. His father would sit at the side of his bed and read him stories while they waited for the illness to pass. A lifetime ago.

“You’re okay,” Renoir promises now. He heaves Verso up from the ground, deceptively strong even outside of their painted worlds, and helps him over to his bed, dragging him more than Verso wants to acknowledge. His own legs barely remember how to move. “You need to rest, that’s all. You’re going to be okay.”

Renoir’s hand presses against his forehead to take his temperature; his palm is too hot against Verso’s skin, and the pressure is too much. He tries to push against that hand but his arms won't cooperate. It’s like they’ve forgotten they’re his in all the time he’s been gone.

“Please,” he breathes, his mouth struggling to form the words. “Don’t take it from me.”

Him, he thinks, Don’t take him.

Renoir pats his hand gently. He looks back as Gustave’s small canvas where it’s lying, dormant, on the floor.

“It’s a beautiful piece of work, son,” he says, before he glances over his shoulder thoughtfully, “And he’s a charming man.”

Something that should be shame lances through his stomach, but it doesn’t take root. He knows what this looks like from the outside, but he’s long let go of the notion that there’s anything about Gustave that isn’t ‘real’. Verso’s life is everything that happens in that canvas. Everything out here is just a waiting room.

Renoir crosses the room and kneels down on the floorboards to get a closer look at the canvas. It’s barely the size of his hand, and it makes Verso’s skin crawl to see anyone else anywhere near it. Even with Alicia, her visits have always been supervised.

Now, he’s struggling to push himself upright in bed again - but the world is spinning around him and his damn body won’t listen to him. Too disconnected. Mind lost in the canvas.

“It’s like keeping a goldfish in a teacup,” Renoir murmurs. He looks from the canvas to Verso, disappointment on his face. Disapproval, even when it’s softened with understanding. “It isn’t fair to him.”

No. It’s nothing like that, Verso wants to say.

But all he can do is shake his head and scramble messily to sit upright on the bed, legs like lead. “I won’t go back,” he promises. He doesn’t know if he’s lying. He doesn’t care, because he’s looking at his father’s hands.

He’s looking at the scissors in them.

They’re big. Heavy duty. And they’re not from Verso’s apartment, which means Renoir brought them here deliberately. It means he came here knowing exactly what he needed to do. Someone told him. 

Verso’s stomach clenches like he’s going to throw up again. “Alicia?”

A small nod from his father confirms it. “She was a little upset,” he says, a Dessendre underplay. “She tried to visit her big brother. Instead she found you collapsed on the ground, lost in the paint. She told me everything.” Verso's stomach drops at the words. “Years? Years in there. And you never told us?”

Verso swallows hard against the urge to throw up again. “Since I was sixteen,” he admits, just a whisper. Sixteen. That canvas has been his life for all that time; the man inside it has been the only person that’s ever mattered. “Don’t destroy it. Put it in storage. Or hang it in the manor, I don’t care. I won’t go near it again.”

He’ll find a way. He knows he will - he promised Gustave he’ll come back. The next time he does, he’s not leaving.

And from the heavy look in his father’s eyes, he knows it.

“I’m sorry,” Renoir murmurs. “One day, you’ll understand.”

Verso’s body won’t listen to him. His limbs won’t move how they need to, and he’s slow - too slow.

The blade arches down, and it rips into the canvas like a stab-wound through the paint. The ripping of stitches and the cracking of paint echoes against the frantic beating of Verso’s heart as he watches the scissors tear apart the only place he wants to belong.

The canvas is left in shreds. Pretty ribbons of an ex-painting barely hanging onto their frame.

Verso stares, hollow, at the place where his heart used to be.

A slashed canvas in his father’s hands.

Gently, Renoir wraps the canvas in a white sheet. He ties it up with twine in careful, efficient knots. He must have brought that with him too, but Verso can barely register the clinical preparations that were made. He’s staring ahead. Seeing nothing.

When Renoir stands up, he carries the canvas with him - he’s leaving Verso with nothing, not even scraps to try to patch together like an amateur surgeon. There’s that feeling again: the world hollowing around him. Bleeding out.

"Verso -"

“Get out,” he whispers.

“Verso, I’m sorry. It had to be - “

“Get. Out.” He won’t look at him - and he can’t look at the parcel that he’s carrying, the shredded remains of Gustave’s world wrapped up like it’s nothing. “Don’t come here again.”

He hates the shake that threatens his voice.

He hates that his father listens without a word.

And, as he closes his eyes, he hates the clawing, echoing sound of silence: the memory of Gustave’s warm laugh nothing but a ghost fading in his ear.

*

.after

“Your chroma,” Renoir says, head tilted to the side as he evaluates Gustave on the blood-stained beach. Gustave is standing there: dazed, shocked, unresponsive. His friends dead all around him. “There’s something wrong with it, isn’t there? Something underneath.”

Across the beach, Verso starts to run. Dodging nevrons. Jumping over dead bodies. Faster than he’s ever needed to be.

“There’s something foreign underneath. Can you feel it? Art reworked into something new,” Renoir muses, fascination in his voice. He steps closer. Cane cracking hard on the ground - and Gustave flinches, stunned, but barely moves back. There's blood splattered over his face. His friend's blood. Shock is still sinking in deep. “What do you think will happen if we peel the top layer away and see what's underneath?”

Verso arrives two seconds too late.

He arrives in time to see his father’s power whisper through the air in front of Gustave. Red chroma ascends into the air as every illusion starts to peel away from Gustave’s mind, from his face.

Gustave drops to his knees hard: head bowed, a pained groan in the darkness.

And across the beach Renoir meets Verso’s eyes, cold and challenging. Balance restored. This canvas’s pigment floats back to Aline, while something impossible remains behind.

Chapter Text

.before

Eternity has passed since the sky tore open and the sun disappeared.

Verso had vanished from the canvas in a flurry of petals and chroma as he always did: following after his father this time, a chilled conversation no doubt in their future. In the silence that settled, Gustave took a breath, and started tidying up: sweeping up dirt and petals, trying to convince his heart to stop racing so fast, forcing himself to believe that the wait wouldn’t be any longer than usual. All he needed to do was occupy himself for a month or so, and then Verso would return and tell him everything that had happened out there. Nothing to worry about. Only time.

But he had still been clutching the broom, sweeping petals from the greenhouse path, when the tower shook.

The foundation itself shuddered beneath his feet, but it was more than mere stone.

The air itself was shaking. The breath in his lungs.

Dropping the broom, Gustave ran to the windows. Usually from here, he could see the endless rolling clouds and the mixed-paint swirling of the fathomless sky. But today the clouds themselves started to flicker.

And he watched, helpless, as the sky ripped in two.

The clouds sheared away, replaced with void. Black nothing. An abyss where the sun once shone.

The rip continued, cracking its way through the sky like a rusted saw, and as he mapped its trajectory Gustave’s stomach turned. It was coming for the tower.

The crack continued, and his world ripped apart.

And after that - 

After that, it’s hard to untangle all those centuries lost in the dark.

*

.after

Gustave floats gently towards consciousness.

That, in itself, is more than he had been expecting.

The pillow beneath his head is soft. Silk sheets cloak his body. A lamp on a wooden cabinet casts a warm light through the room, and as he lies there Gustave struggles with the urge to start laughing.

He lies on his side and brushes his hand against the softness of the pillows. He runs the silk green bed sheets through his fingertips and curses himself for never appreciating this when he was in Lumière: the ridiculous luxury of a real bed. After a long journey on the ship for Expedition 33, sleeping on rocky currents in a swinging hammock seemingly designed for seasickness, this may be the softest bed he’s ever known. 

And after a long eternity in the dark, in the slashed remains of a broken canvas, a simple bed is a tether to reality he can barely understand.

He sits up, sharply, at that thought. The world spins around him as it struggles to keep up, and the last dregs of sleep - or unconsciousness - vanish from his eyes. He takes stock.

He’s in a bedroom. Specifically, he’s lying in a four-poster bed. The room is gloomy, save for the lamp that’s doing its best to fight off the shadows. It’s fighting a losing battle against the dark hard-wood panelling.

Gustave nods to himself as if he can make this all make sense: he’s in a bedroom, and wherever it is that must be a long way from the beach. From Renoir. From Verso.

With a groan, he makes himself get up from the bed. His body aches. He’s still dressed in his Expeditioner’s gear, although someone has taken the time to take off his boots. From the amount of dirt and dried blood he’s left behind on those once-pristine sheets, Gustave would guess he had been more-or-less dumped straight on the bed before whoever rescued him ran away.

His mind keeps trying to throw Verso at him. Memories from before. Memories from Lumière - of the Verso-but-not-Verso that had visited him over the years. The Verso-but-not-Verso that had been on the beach.

It doesn’t make any sense.

He shoves his feet back into his boots and straightens up again: he’s alive, that’s good news. He’s uninjured, that’s good too.

But he’s not sure where he is or how he got here. And from what he remembers of the beach, the rest of the Expedition didn’t make it out like him. He swallows: he thinks of Alan. Tristan. Margot. Lucien. The names are endless. His mouth is dry and he's not sure if he knows how to keep breathing. The dried blood still crackling on his face might belong to his friends.

And Maelle?

His breath stutters. Maelle. Alicia. Same and different.

The bedroom door creaks as he leaves the bedroom and spills out into a silent hallway. Cold tiled floors in ornate patterns stretch in both directions, and Gustave can see closed doors lining the halls. From the sheer scale of the place, it might even be larger than the opera house in Lumiere.

Don’t think about it, he tells himself. He picks a direction and starts walking while he tries to keep his mind blank. Empty. He should be used to that, shouldn’t he? After the abyss, after the darkness, there’s something about the stubborn presence of this place that keeps his mind turning - too much stimulation all at once. Too much happening. Too much to be afraid of.

The beach. Renoir. The flakes of Aline’s paint floating from his face, from his mind: not-Verso shouting something furious at his father before Gustave lost consciousness.

Memories are flooding back and he wishes he could leave them buried. He wishes he could close the open wound of his mind all over again – but when has he ever been allowed to have what he wished for?

Verso, he thinks again, before he shuts that down completely.

He reaches the end of the hallway, artwork liberally decorating the walls now, but he’s distracted by the red carpet leading down a flight of stairs. It opens from his narrow hallway into a broad grand entrance hall, implausibly large.

And there’s someone at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for him. Smiling. Unburned.

“Gustave!”

Maelle starts to run up the stairs for him, barrelling into him in a full-speed collision that leaves his ribs aching. Gustave’s arms close around her, slow at first and then tight. She’s alive. Thank god, she’s alive. He loses his face in her hair and breathes in deep, as he listens to her talking to him - something about waking up here alone, just like him. Thinking everyone was dead, just like him.

It’s only when she pulls back from their hug and looks directly at him that her expression sobers into wary confusion.

Her gaze travels back and forth over his face, hunting for details, and she shakes her head. “Gustave?” She squints like she’s trying to make sense of what her eyes are seeing, tilting her head to the side. “What happened to you?”

*

.before

Gustave is used to the sound of his heartbeat. His breathing. The rustle his own clothing makes when he moves through the nothing at the edge of the world.

There are small scraps of his world that survived the rip. Floating chunks of the rooms that once formed the tower - they move, aimlessly, through the darkness, their gravity sometimes passing close enough for Gustave to jump from place-to-place. It’s risky. One mistimed leap and he’ll be left floating in the darkness until the next time he’s close enough to painted reality to climb back aboard. Weeks or months of sinking through the gaps between the paintings

He’s been holed up in the corner of the kitchen for a while now. Months? It’s a decent scrap. Large enough to take a few paces. There’s food here, Verso’s magic lasting to keep the cupboards stocked, so at least he doesn’t have to waste the energy in his arm trying to repaint something worth eating. If it leaves him sleeping on the tiles of the kitchen floor, that’s the least of his worries.

Sitting on the ground with his head thudded back against the kitchen counter, Gustave looks up at where there used to be a ceiling. There’s an endless blackness above him now - miles in the distance, beyond the abyss, he thinks he might be able to see the satellite scrap of his workshop swirling. From his last calculation, it will be at least another year before it drifts close enough for him to try and jump ship.

Another year on the kitchen floor. He closes his eyes, hugs his knees, and listens to the sound of his own breathing.

If he’d had any mercy, Gustave thinks Verso would have painted a way for him to die.

He’s already tried that route. Already failed.

There are no tears left in him, and his throat gave up on screams or shouts decades ago. There’s no one to listen, not in here. Not in the scraps.

Only the sound of his own heart beating for eternity.

The sound of his breathing when his lungs can’t quit.

While his eyes are still closed, he hears a swirl and quiet rush from the darkness - and a second set of breaths joins his own. His eyes snap open, his head shoots up: for the first time in centuries, there’s someone else in this ruined canvas with him.

Her face is warped, covered with the kind of burns that scream of agony even when healed, but he could recognise that girl in a thousand worlds. “‘licia?” he asks, the first syllable lost in the cracking pain of his voice. When was the last time he bothered speaking? How many years has it been? “Alicia?” he tries, stronger now.

He scrambles to his feet, joints aching from his hours or days or eternity sitting on the floor. She looks up at him, those pale Dessendre eyes forever recognisable - even behind the scars. She’s years older than he remembers. A little taller.

He checks his face, self-conscious, as she stares at him. He knows he’s older too, though the years won’t show on his face. His beard’s grown in, but even that is limited - even in the scraps, the canvas keeps him within its set parameters of perfection. If he’s going to fall to pieces, the paint will make sure he does it artistically.

She opens her mouth, but it’s only a sound that comes out - an open vowel, nothing more.

The mass of burned skin winds down her throat, keeping her quiet, and as he takes it in all Gustave can do is reach for her. She sinks in towards him, desperate and fragile as she clings to him so tightly it makes him want to ask when the last time someone hugged her had been. He rests his cheek against the top of her head and he stares at the crumbling remains of his fragment of the kitchen as he listens to the sound of her muffled, hitching breaths.

There’s something hollow in his chest already.

Deep in his gut, he already knows.

“Alicia?” he whispers. “Please. What happened? How did you get here? Is Verso…”

He can’t say it. His throat closes so abruptly around the rest of the question so it can’t come out: if he doesn’t ask, he doesn’t have to know. His world’s been ripped apart once already. He won’t survive it a second time.

Without letting go of him, her weightless head resting against his chest, Alicia twists her hand towards the air beside them. With a ripple of chroma, black, inked letters inscribe themselves onto the kitchen counter.

I need your help. I’m sorry. I didn’t know who else to ask.

He swallows around the lump in his throat, but it’s already growing too painful. To keep his hands busy, he strokes his fingers through her hair. “What happened?” he asks, hearing that ugly rasp break his voice. Alicia lets her last message fade and replaces it, hurriedly, with a new one.

Papa broke your canvas. Verso was sick. He was dying. Papa cut it up so he couldn’t come back, and he hid the pieces in storage. I think he thought that one day he and Verso might fix it, together.

He stares blankly at the words on the counter. He’s been in storage. Packed up. Parcelled. Stashed and left to gather dust. All the years he’s been floating through this abyss, unable to die, unable to live - all those years he’s been sitting on a shelf in the Dessendre Manor. Forgotten.

The inked letters fade slowly, replaced by another set.

It didn’t work. Verso never came home again after what we did.

Against his chest, Alicia’s breathing is starting to shake. She burrows closer to him, as the words begin to shift again. When they form, this time they're so faint they're hard to read.

Until the fire. Until he came to save me.

There’s a ringing in Gustave’s ears. A screaming, deafening ringing that tells him the void is coming again. The fire. Alicia’s scars. And his brave, noble Verso, too loyal to ever truly abandon his family.

“He’s gone, isn’t he?” he whispers, too numb to look away from Alicia’s inked words.

She nods without raising her head from his chest, and he feels the world breaking all over again.

*

.after

Maelle takes him to an ornate mirror in an unnecessarily lavish bathroom so that he can see why she keeps staring at him so strangely. There’s something about the claw-foot tub that reminds him of his old home, inspiration for the tower, but he ignores it in order to reluctantly pay attention to his reflection.

It could be worse, he tells himself as he breathes out slowly.

He’s still recognisably Gustave of Lumière: with his Expeditioner’s uniform, dried blood on his face, and his facial hair showing that it’s been a day or two since he was able to shave. He looks like himself, the version of himself that toiled endlessly with Lune in preparation for this expedition.

The issue, unfortunately, is that he looks a great deal more than that too.

He makes himself take slow breaths as he stares at himself in the mirror and sees a man that doesn’t fit in with his surroundings. Like a permanent trick of the light, there’s something deeply wrong with his colour palette. 

His chroma doesn’t match the colours of the world around him - it’s too deep, too rich, his skin and hair practically glowing with an expensive sense of hyperreality. It’s as if his art doesn’t match with this canvas any more: it’s like a shifting collage in real-time. He’s grafted into this canvas, but he doesn’t belong here. In his reflection, his eyes look back with shimmering flecks of gold leaf shining in their depths.

Gustave tries not to think of Verso in his teens, picking out the most expensive art supplies he could find in order to paint his own private, special canvas. He tries not to think of the hours Verso must have spent making him perfect. In Gustave’s own world, he’d never stuck out before. He’d matched his surroundings. Pasted into the playpen canvas of two children, it’s only now that he looks different - and with Aline’s cover-up stripped from his face, there’s nothing to make him blend in any more.

There are cracks, too. A network of thin spider-webbed lines through his face, the signs of a hasty repair and aged paint. The colour is as close to a match of his skin tone as it can be, but it’s not perfect. They’re not exactly scars, but he runs his fingertips across the deepest one where it slashes straight across his cheek. He can’t feel anything there, but chroma doesn’t lie. He’s a broken canvas, and now it shows.

“It’s not too bad,” Maelle says as she stands beside him, watching him examine his own face with growing confusion. It must be bad if she’s being sincere rather than taking the opportunity to snark at him. “It’s just… different. The colours are kind of pretty, really. Like you’re glowing.”

He might be struggling to find his bearings in a world that still feels too big and too strange, but he’s still with-in enough to side-eye her in response to that particular remark. “It must’ve happened when that man attacked me,” he guesses aloud.

That man, as if he doesn’t know exactly who it had been. As if that man hadn’t been some version of Maelle’s father.

He should tell her the truth. He knows that, and he will. Soon. First, he needs to figure out how on earth to do that in a way that won’t make her think he lost his mind the second he stepped onto the Continent.

He turns away from the mirror. When he looks down at his own hands, he realises that even the black metal of his arm looks darker and deeper compared to the colours he’s used to from Lumière - he looks away sharply, and looks at Maelle instead. 

“Have you seen anyone else in here?” he asks.

When she shakes his head, he tries not to let his heart sink. He tries, ineffectively, to persuade her to stay behind in the relative safety of the building, but she ignores him completely. From sixteen years in Lumiere that’s entirely unsurprising, but it leaves him with a growing sense of unease all the same as they approach the broad doors of the Manor.

As they step outside, they enter a world that should be underwater. Red coral and soft sand coat the ground beneath their feet, and the door behind them is nestled in what seems to be a cave. Long strands of something like seaweed stretch far into the sky above them, while rock formations stretch into obscure shapes and bubbles of water float restlessly through the sky. Something that might even be an inert mine is half-buried in the ground before them.

Walking cautiously ahead of Maelle, Gustave is fighting to keep a smile from his face despite their situation - because this place, this world, it’s so large. The landscape ahead of them disappears in crooked, confusing twists and turns, and the expanse of it all seems endless. Even with layered, confusing memories of thirty years in Lumière, Gustave feels like he might lose his mind at the thought of being free to take off running: he could dash as fast as he wanted in any direction, just run and run and run until his legs can’t take him any further.

Maelle’s hand lingers on his shoulder to keep him in place. “Where are we?” she asks.

He could answer her, an informed stab in the dark from his preparation and research on past expeditions, but he’s lost in the distraction of their surroundings. All the same, his head tilts to the side in wary curiosity. “Do you feel that?” he asks.

Maelle looks around, spinning on the spot to take in the sight of more of the lush red coral at their feet. “What?”

“We’re being watched,” Gustave says.

He can’t explain how he knows it, but he is intimately aware of the feeling of a certain pair of eyes on him. He knows what that observation feels like, and now it makes him scan the cove around them with his heart already starting to race in preparation. There’s no one in sight, but that means nothing. This expansive world has too many hiding places.

He takes a step away from Maelle, and turns slowly as he tries to find any sign of movement. With a deep breath, he braces himself for Maelle calling him all kinds of crazy if he’s wrong about this. 

“Verso!” he yells. The name echoes through the cove, bouncing off of rock formations. No doubt every nevron in a mile radius must have heard that. Red crackles through his arm: not his overcharge, but paint longing to be reworked. Power. “Get out here. Now.”

Maelle, stunned in place, is staring at him like he’s gone absolutely mad. “Gustave? Did you happen to hit your head at all on the beach?” she asks, shifting her weight back and forth where she’s standing a few paces behind him. When he doesn’t answer her, his gaze still scanning their surroundings, she takes a breath. “Who’s Verso?”

And isn’t that exactly the right question?

Gustave doesn’t answer her, not yet: his gaze is stuck on the shadows as someone finally steps out of their hiding spot. Heavy boots. Winter coat. Those pale blue, piercing eyes are the same ones that Gustave has stared into for hours - but the grey scar is new since his memories of the tower. The cautious, guarded expression, that’s new too.

It’s Verso and it can’t be Verso. Gustave isn’t sure if he knows how to handle that. He isn’t even sure what that means.

Verso steps out from the shadows like a man summoned to the gallows. None of this makes sense, and Gustave can’t even blame the headaches from Lumière any more: his head is clear for the first time in three decades. He can remember everything, full sprawling centuries. He remembers his soft years in the tower, isolated and loved; he remembers an eternity in the dark, forgotten, left to rot; and he remembers a quiet, solitary life in Lumière, a new identity like a kindness after all that had come before. 

And none of it, not one single moment, can explain how Verso is standing in front of him now, entirely unharmed.

He swallows, hard, and warns himself to hold it together. Now isn’t the time. The beach had been shameful enough, his complete descent into shock.

But when he tries to make himself speak, tries to form a single question or sentence at all, nothing wants to come out. Empty syllables on his tongue.

“Let’s get back inside,” Verso interrupts, looking between Gustave and Maelle as if he’s still convincing himself that neither one of them is going to attack him. “It isn’t safe out here. You just summoned every nevron in the area looking for a good fight.”

He breezes past Gustave like there’s nothing more to say, and Gustave feels the situation slipping through his fingers again. It’s like being back on the streets of Lumière and holding this Verso at gun-point and still not feeling in control of the situation. There’s nothing he can do but follow Verso back into the Manor, avoiding Maelle’s questioning stare and hoping like hell there are some answers waiting within.

*

.before

Alicia has pulled back from their hug, and together they’re sitting on the floor of the scrap of the kitchen that remains. Cross-legged, facing one another, there’s just about enough room for them both. Their knees are almost touching.

“So you want me to come with you into Verso’s other canvas?” Gustave summarises, hollow. She nods at him with those pale blue eyes, so similar to Verso’s. “To help you rescue your mother and father?” Another nod. “Because they’re losing themselves in a canvas now too?”

There's an irony in that, isn't there? It doesn't help.

Alicia paints her words on the floor between them now.

Seeing you would help.

Alicia offers him a watery smile, as much as she can through the pain and the scars. The inked words reshuffle.

You’re his heart. You’ve always been his heart. It’s why this canvas was never destroyed.

She reaches out, her hand on his chest, and he’s left fighting the tightness in his throat again. He blinks through bleary eyes and tells himself he’s done with crying. He’s done.

You can’t destroy a canvas while the painter’s soul is still in it. He’s still here.

Her fingers tap against his chest, right above his heart. 

Gustave pushes away from her and scrambles back until his back thumps against the kitchen cabinet. His eyes stare ahead, unseeing, their surroundings blurry in front of him. His hand presses against his own chest and he wishes he could feel Verso there too. He wishes he felt what Alicia feels, but there’s nothing. He’s nothing. Alone and hollow.

If Maman could see you, she’ll know part of him is still here with us. She’ll remember.

Gustave wants to tell those smudged words that he doesn’t care what Aline wants, and he sure as hell doesn’t care about Renoir. He’s still in the void of Verso’s loss, fresh as a wound even when he hasn’t seen that sad face for centuries now - and it’s become as hard to imagine a world where Verso is here as it is to imagine a world where he’s gone. For years, Verso has been both the shadow and light of his mind. His night and his day. All he can think about. All he can rage over.

And now there’s truly a gap in the world where he should be. An abyss.

He doesn’t want to think about what Verso would want. He doesn’t want to think about anything any more.

Please.

The single word etches into the floor between them, while Alicia stares at him - and her eyes are so like Verso’s eyes, pale and piercing. She grunts and reaches out for him again, her hand clutching hold of his metal one this time.

I don’t know how to do this alone.

His fingers close around hers softly. He won’t cry; not here, not in front of Verso’s little sister, not when there’s another canvas that needs to be saved and Verso’s legacy that needs to be protected.

He won’t say it aloud, but in all his endless dreams of being rescued from this wasteland, it’s always been Verso’s hand pulling him free; Verso’s arms around him, Verso’s voice as a whisper promising him it’ll all be okay. He spent the first few years in this place convinced that Verso would come for him any day now; he’d been convinced that if he only waited long enough then one day they’d get out of here together.

But now Verso’s gone, and Alicia’s here.

It’s not supposed to be like this.

*

.after

Once they enter the Manor with Verso, Verso walks through the hallways like he knows exactly where he’s going - like he’s walked these halls before.

“Is this your home?” Gustave asks, walking a half-step too fast to try to keep up with him. He’s still left almost falling behind.

Verso’s distracted, checking on locked doors as they go past, rattling the door handles. “Not exactly.”

“But you brought us here, didn’t you?” Gustave’s expecting some kind of answer. Even an acknowledgement would be nice, but it’s feeling more and more as if Verso can’t even look at him. “After the beach? I passed out, but I know you were there.”

Verso rattles another door handle only to find it locked as well. “I was there,” he confirms, distracted. “I brought you here afterwards. It’s safe.”

Gustave walks behind him as Verso keeps searching every inch of the Manor. Sometime soon he’s going to run out of doors. “And that’s it? No other explanation?”

Verso finally glances at him again - a sidelong thing, there and gone again. Barely more than the corner of his eye.

“Nothing? You don’t have any questions for me either?” Gustave continues into the silence. He wishes his heart would stop racing. “What happened? What did Renoir do to me?”

All it prompts is a chuckle, something dipped in bitterness. “‘Renoir’,” Verso repeats. “So you do remember, then.”

Gustave swallows. He makes himself nod. “I remember,” he breathes. Verso finally, finally stops his mad journey through the manor. He stops checking every single doorway, and turns to face Gustave instead - and now they’re standing close. So close that Gustave can see every minor difference from the man that haunts his memories, the man stamped into his heart. The scar across Verso’s eye is the main one, but that’s just the attention-grabber. There are so many more signs of a hard, painful life written out across his face, nicks and scratches. Even the white in his hair is different. Gustave wets his lips and fights back the scared pounding of his heart as he repeats: “I remember everything.”

Verso looks at him, but he won’t meet Gustave’s eyes. Instead, his gaze is drifting over the rest of his face like he’s drinking in every detail: the two of them, standing together, lost in the returned sight of something long gone. Verso’s hand twitches like he’s about to reach out for him, and god Gustave longs for that contact - but the movement is diverted before it lands anywhere. Verso’s hand rests on his own hip instead, and he frowns as if he’s making a conscious effort to do so. “When you say everything…”?”

“Stop playing around,” Gustave complains - and he can hear himself whining. He’s play-complaining as if they’re at the top of his tower and Verso is teasing him over nonsense again, like this tension might collapse into helpless laughter and Verso’s mouth on his neck, promising to make it all better. The tone in his voice is an echo of a century ago, and he has to clear his throat to get rid of it. “I remember before. Before all this. My canvas. My tower. All of it.”

“Lumière?”

“I remember that too,” Gustave confirms. He gestures vaguely towards his head. “It’s, uh, pretty full up here right now.”

Verso tilts his head to the side in acknowledgement. “That sounds familiar,” he murmurs. He snaps his gaze away from Gustave and looks over the balcony, down to the sweeping hall beneath them. “Whoever else is in the Manor right now, he doesn’t want to show himself - and that’s fine with me. We should sit down. Talk.”

“Talk,” Gustave repeats in relief. Verso holds his gaze for a moment with the expression of someone waiting to be kicked in the gut, then turns to lead them through the Manor’s strange hallways.

As he follows Verso, Maelle catches his arm - there are a thousand different questions in her eyes, unsettling confusion he understands all too well. “I’ll tell you everything,” he promises, before he nods after Verso, “But, first, I think I need to do this alone.”

She doesn’t like it. She tells him that much, and even if he smiles along he understands that sentiment all too well: she’s his ward and his sister and all-but his sister-in-law, all of them at once. When he kisses her forehead and promises her he’ll be fine, she’s muttering something about stabbing Verso straight through the heart if he tries ‘anything funny’, whatever that means. The rush of affection he feels for her has the weight of several lifetimes at once.

As he’s following Verso through the hallway, he hesitates as he catches sight of a small set of artworks on the wall. It’s a cluster of canvases, all of them by different hands. Landscapes. Fantasy figures. Nevrons.

And him. His tower.

In the centre of the collection, it’s a minuscule canvas compared to the others. Barely the size of his hand, though it sits in an ornate gold frame now. But he sees a portrait of himself on the balcony of the tower, the clouds rolling into the distance behind him in a pastel-coloured sky. His eyes are downturned, but there are flecks of gold shining in the irises. A set of tools are clutched in his mechanical hand, and it looks as if he might be half-way through adjusting his arm with them, like the painting came into being in a single snatched moment. The canvas is small but the attention-to-detail is perfect. 

It’s hours of work. Days.

Gustave doubts he’s ever looked that artistic a single day in his life, and the thought alone - of all that Verso must have wanted for him -  makes him want to throw up. Or run. Or start screaming and never, ever stop.

He doesn’t notice when Verso backtracks and approaches him again. He barely responds to his presence as he settles at his side. 

“She wanted it on display, I think,” Verso explains hesitantly into the quiet. “Here, at least. Like she was making up for past mistakes. You know, I used to be obsessed with that painting when I was a kid in Old Lumière. I would stand and stare at it for hours, before…” He trails off without finishing the thought. Shrugs like it means nothing. Moves on, practically muttering to himself now. “I thought it was beautiful.”

Gustave swallows around the pain and drags his gaze away from the painting, a hollow replica of his home. He wants to ask Verso what all of that means. A childhood in Old Lumière, in this manor. ‘She’. There’s almost too much there, his mind spinning, and it’s a relief when Verso gestures for him to continue on with him - perhaps there are answers waiting for him, somewhere with this empty reminder out of sight.

He follows Verso to the Manor’s library. It’s a sterile place: it’s dark with no windows, just stacks and stacks of books piled haphazardly, some of them on shelves but some of them left in tall piles on the floor instead. There’s no fireplace. No cosy armchairs or couch. No reading nook designed just for him. Gustave tries to keep his mind in the present, not in long evenings spent by the fire with a book in his hand and his head in Verso’s lap.

Looking at Verso now is a bucket of cold water over his head. Verso’s arms are crossed over his chest and his face is guarded. He keeps looking at Gustave and then ducking his head again: looking down with a wince, deep in thought, unable to speak yet.

“C’mon,” Gustave says. He leads them over to the writing desk and pulls out the chair, gesturing for Verso to take a seat. In the absence of anything else, Gustave ends up leaning against the desk itself, trying to make himself comfortable as he takes in the sight of Verso sitting in front of him: looking alive, looking healthy to some extent, looking absolutely impossible.

For his part, Verso seems to be staring at him the same way. In the darkness of the library, Gustave is sure his odd palette must stick out even more, the perfected glow Verso left behind on his skin. He clears his throat, and Verso seems to finally snap out of it - enough for him to lean forward in the chair, anyway, and rest his arms on his legs before he asks, “You’re really okay?” he checks. “Renoir said he’d removed Aline’s paint from you. That’s all. He promised you wouldn’t be harmed by it.”

“So you spoke to Renoir.” Gustave catches onto that, because he’s not sure if he can answer if he’s ‘really okay’. No, he’s not. Not remotely. “I presume that’s why we’re not currently dead on the beach?”

Verso’s gaze settles on Gustave’s hands, studying every joint. “I talked him down,” he says. “I made him see there was no reason to kill you, and that he should let us go.”

Gustave blinks, stares and waits. Politely. Silently.

Because there’s more to it than that. There has to be, but Verso doesn’t seem like he wants to share.

“And then he just let us go. Easy as that? He killed everyone else on that beach, my friends, but you said ‘please’ and he listened?”

Verso shrugs while still studying Gustave’s hands, his gaze only glancing up at his face for a second or two at a time. “Well. I’m his son,” he says. “Sometimes that means something.”

“Ah.” For all that Sophie used to claim he was naive, Gustave does at least know bullshit when he hears it. “That does actually take me to my next question.” He waits until Verso looks up at him this time, and then he holds his gaze. He looks into those pale blue eyes and drinks in as much of that cautious, familiar gaze as he can. His fingertips burn to reach out and touch him - maybe to sink into his hair and find out if it’s as soft as he remembers: he holds onto the feeling instead, and tries to let the wrongness of it all sing true. “Who are you, really? Because you’re not my Verso. I know… I know what happened to him.”

The question must sting to hear as much as it hurts to ask. He sees it in the faintest flinch that passes over Verso’s face, the way his gaze dips away from him again. He wants to apologise so much it leaves him physically biting the tip of his tongue, holding that old urge in. Not yet. Not until he understands.

Verso stands up from the desk chair and paces towards the bookshelves instead, with a bitter chuckle that sounds like it’s breaking something on the way out. “Don’t worry, I know I’m not the real thing,” Verso says, like it’s a joke that’s lost its punchline. “Let’s say I’m a shoddy attempt at a replacement. But I don’t think she got it quite right, did she?”

It sounds like a challenge - Gustave has the impression of Verso standing with his arms outstretched, handing him a knife and telling him exactly where to stab.

He doesn’t rise to it.

He stays leaning against the desk and runs his hand over his face as he tries to think this through, even when he can feel Verso’s barely-contained energy crackling by the bookshelves. “‘She’,” Gustave repeats. He’s quickly worked out that the real information he gets from this Verso will be the accidents that slip through the cracks. “The Paintress.” That’s Gustave from Lumière. He nods to himself, slowly, as another eternity of memory works out how to recontextualise that information. “Aline.”

The puzzle pieces start to slide slowly into place - he’s starting to figure out what’s happening here, but he doesn’t have it all yet. There are gaps in the painting and it feels like he’s staring through them into space, missing the conclusions he really needs.

And then there’s Verso: not-his-Verso, standing there in the library like he’s bracing himself for a punch to the gut, eyes defiant all the same. Bracing himself for the pain and yet knowing he can take it.

Gustave takes a breath and looks at Verso, trying to take him in without the weight of his own expectations. Not as a version of his Verso, not a copy, not a replica. Just a stranger that somehow saved him from his father, though he won’t tell him how. Won’t tell him why.

This Verso won’t tell him much of anything unless he drags it out of him, or steals scraps of truth from the crumbs he drops accidentally.

This is the Verso that wanted him to stay safely at home in Lumière - safe in his painted-over cocoon. It’s that, maybe, that convinces him this Verso isn’t a threat. He might not be forthcoming with the truth, but Gustave doesn’t believe he wants to hurt him. He doesn’t want to believe that any version of Verso ever could.

“Well. Verso,” he says, with a huff of air like he can force normalcy to reassert itself if he only tries hard enough. He pushes himself upright from the desk and wishes he didn’t see the way that Verso flinches back from him, braced for whatever is about to come next. “You might not be giving me the details, but I do think you saved my life. Somehow. And, to be honest, I think you’ll probably save it again before we’re done here. And again. Whatever comes next… It’s going to be messy, isn’t it?”

Verso smiles. It’s not pleasant, and it’s not happy, but it’s a smile at least. “That’s one word for it,” he agrees. They need to leave, so Gustave tries to gather himself enough to head for the door. They need to reunite with Maelle, and Gustave needs to navigate that whole mess, and then figure out if there were any other survivors from their Expedition -  but Verso is lingering by his books, stroking his fingertips over their spines like he’s trying to sink into them through the titles alone. He isn’t quite looking at Gustave as he says quietly, “You know, you aren’t the only one with questions.”

It’s enough to make Gustave hesitate. Pause. He looks over his shoulder, half-way to the door.

“Your canvas was destroyed. Cut into pieces. You died. I saw it - he saw it.” Verso knocks his knuckles lightly against the spines of the books on the shelf, looking at Gustave and then away again just as fast. His jaw clenches and his face twitches as Gustave lets him fight with whatever he has to say. “But you’re… you, aren’t you? Not a copy. Not a replica. The real thing.”

Slowly, Gustave nods. Given all he already knows about who this Verso is and where he came from, it doesn’t feel like the right answer. It’s so much more complicated than that, than real and right and copy, but he sees the bitter flicker of pain on Verso’s face as soon as he nods. It’s too late.

“Can I look at it?” Verso asks, before he shifts restlessly as if he isn’t sure what to do with himself. “At you. Your chroma, I mean. I saw it when I brought you here, but I didn’t want to overstep. It’s - different.”

Gustave tilts his head to the side but he doesn’t argue with him - he holds his hand out instead like an offering. Verso steps forward and reaches for it uncertainly, but his hand is unnaturally hot when he takes hold of Gustave. Verso runs his fingertips across Gustave’s palm, along his fingers, a thorough examination. Lingering on the repaired cracks in the paint. Slow, like he doesn’t want to miss a single detail. Quiet, like he’s barely daring to breathe the entire time Gustave lets him touch him.

Verso turns his hand over and looks at the back as well. His knuckles, still flecked with dirt from the beach massacre. He traces one of the repaired lines across the back of his hand, all the way up to his wrist, and Gustave struggles to hold himself still. To keep himself quiet.

“It’s beautiful,” Verso ends up breathing, his eyes darting up to Gustave’s and then down again just as fast. “You’re - I mean, the chroma. It’s different chroma, isn’t it? From a different canvas? That's why it looks like that.”

Quietly, Gustave nods. He doesn’t know how to explain it in words. His own hand looks so real in Verso’s palm, but there’s something more to it. Something richer and brighter all at once, like there’s something golden inside him that this canvas can barely contain, threatening to spill through the cracks. It’s almost a relief when Verso drops his hand and steps away again. Almost.

“You survived,” Verso guesses hesitantly after he coughs to clear his throat. “When he cut up the canvas, you survived that?”

Gustave hesitates: he thinks of the sky vanishing above him and he wants to explain that survive doesn’t feel like the right word at all - but he can’t form the words. It feels like standing on the beach again, rooted to the spot, danger on all sides even when the only danger is this dark room, this strange Verso, and the questions he doesn’t want to think about. The lure of the abyss.

“I don’t remember much of it,” he claims, while his thoughts scream at him for lying.

“They left you,” Verso says, and it isn’t a question any more. “They left you there for years. He left you.”

Gustave wants to tell him it's fine, that Verso didn’t know. He wants to claim that it wasn’t so bad, but every time he thinks of the void it feels like it might swallow him whole all over again. It was thirty-one years ago, and it was yesterday, and he doesn’t know if there’s any difference left between the two.

“Painters,” Verso spits, and it’s a joke and a gut–punch all at once. The red electricity in Gustave’s arm wants to crackle in response, but he holds it back and just watches Verso while Verso won’t watch him in return.

“Gods,” Gustave offers.

Verso shakes his head to himself, something painful and ugly curling in the corner of his mouth: Gustave won’t allow himself to cross the room and reassure him. He won’t allow himself to tell Verso it’s all going to be okay, both because it won’t and because he’s not allowed to do that any more. Not to this Verso, not in this place, not in this shredded mess of a life he’s accidentally been painted into. 

All that bitter sorrow on Verso’s face, he feels it hanging in the air around them. He doesn’t know if he’s strong enough to keep it out.

*

.before

Clea would help, Alicia had promised.

Patching one canvas onto another. It’s a tricky task, not often attempted. Crashing two worlds together. Hoping the larger one doesn’t swallow the smaller world whole.

Left alone in the scrap of the kitchen while Alicia makes preparations, Gustave doesn’t know if he cares any more. If this is it, the last moment he has before the world implodes, at least he can take solace in knowing it ended trying to help the people Verso loved. He tries to cling onto that, as he paces as much as he can on the fragment of floor he still has left.

Weeks pass. He loses track.

And there’s no warning when it happens, the world turning on its axis. Tipping him back into the black once again.

Pitch black. Nothing.

The abyss.

Until - 

Chroma. New, strange, curious. Gustave floats in the darkness as it surrounds him, little petals picking at his skin.

“She’s taking an interest at least,” comes a voice. Stern. Female. “This might work, you know.”

“It’ll work, Clea,” says Alicia’s voice. She sounds weak, but he can hear her, here. Somehow. “You know it will.”

“A piece of her heart: another fragment of Verso’s soul. If anything can lure her out of  the monolith, that’ll be it,” Clea agrees. A frustrated sigh echoes through the black. “There’s something very wrong with this family, you know.”

As they’re talking, the chroma is tickling against his legs. His arms. His hands. It starts to swirl and cluster around the fingertips of his metal hand - red electricity surges through it in response, chroma whispering to chroma.

“Careful,” comes Clea’s voice into the abyss. “Don’t provoke her. Just… Let it happen. Don’t throw your little sparks around.”

“Clea…” Alicia sighs.

“If he’s going in there, he needs to blend in. He’ll stick out like a sore thumb if we can’t make the chroma match, and then where will we be?”

The strange chroma keeps going as the sisters talk - it’s crawling over his skin. He’s trying his best to stay calm, to focus on the voices, the plans they seem to have, but as the petals reach his face, his eyes, his mouth, he can’t help the panicked heaves of his chest. He can’t stop himself from thrashing, frantically, as he tries to brush it away.

“Alright then, he’s nearly done,” Clea says, unaffected. “Your turn next, Alicia. He’ll be waiting for you inside. Are you nearly ready?”

The voices fade.

The abyss beckons.

And Gustave is repainted - he wakes up, unknowing, in Lumière.

*

.after

Gustave clears his throat, and wipes his hands off on his trousers like it’s a way to reset himself. “Alright, I think we’ve been maudlin for long enough,” he declares - and, really, he quite likes the bemused surprise on this Verso’s face as he interrupts their latest descent into introspection. “Let’s start again.”

Verso pushes himself away from the bookshelves and follows him through the library as if he’s being drawn slowly, gently in on a fishing line. “Just like that? Starting again?”

Gustave shrugs and tries to pretend it really is that easy, that his heart doesn’t break at the sight of him. “I’ve never met you before. Sort of. And you’ve never met me before. Sort of.”

“There’s a lot of ‘sort of’ going on in there.”

“Work with me,” Gustave complains, fighting back the fond smile that wants to find its way onto his face. “Here goes: Hello. Nice to meet you.”

He holds his hand out for Verso, and gives an impatient hand gesture when Verso doesn’t react immediately. Playing along, indulging him, Verso gives in and takes his hand. They shake firmly, like it’s all a business deal that’s ready to go through.

“My name is Gustave de la Tour,” Gustave says, while he feels the warmth of Verso’s hand spreading through him from the faintest contact. This may have been a mistake.

The warmth isn’t just Verso’s hand. It’s in his eyes too, the disarming, amused glint to them as Verso finally looks at him. “You’re giving yourself a new surname?”

“I might as well. I didn’t have one before,” he says. Verso is still holding his hand, and they’re not even shaking any more. With a fond smile, Gustave nods towards him. “Your turn.”

The way Verso is watching him is too much all at once - because they’re strangers, they are, but there’s nothing distant in the look on Verso’s face. It’s soft. No, not soft. Reverent.

Gustave clears his throat and gestures with their joined hands. “Your turn,” he repeats firmly.

“Hello,” Verso says. It should be illegal for him to pitch his voice like that, quiet and intimate like it’s just for him. “I am Verso de la Peinture.” He’s making fun of him, gently, and Gustave hates how much he likes that - how very much he’s missed it.

Verso’s thumb brushes over Gustave’s knuckles with the same gentle care he’d give to a priceless jewel. Like he’s something breakable. Like he doesn’t have the blood of his friends still staining his skin and the weight of this canvas on their shared shoulders

Verso’s eyes linger on him, too much and too sincere all at once. For a new beginning, it still feels heavy with what came before. 

“It’s nice to meet you too, Gustave de la Tour.”

Chapter Text

.after

Verso finds himself watching Gustave far more than he means to. Endlessly. Helplessly.

When they leave the Manor, Noco trailing along with them too, his eyes are on Gustave. When they start walking miles across the Continent, he hangs back to watch Gustave and Maelle talking together, bumping shoulders and sharing smiles. When they’re fighting nevrons, fear sinks deep into his bones and he focuses on Gustave far more than he focuses on himself.

It doesn’t help that the nevrons themselves are drawn to Gustave too, drawn in by that strange chroma or perhaps by the golden shimmer of his skin. They focus fire until it’s all Gustave can do to keep parrying the blows. He ends each battle bloodied and the sight of his face splattered with blood and covered with cuts is enough to remind Verso that he’s failing, again, at keeping him safe.

‘Safe’. Has that ever been an option?

They make camp for the night. “We should reach the Indigo Tree tomorrow,” Verso promises them both by the fireside. It’s alarming how easily they followed him, really - how easily they trusted him in the end with only Gustave’s memories of an entirely different version of Verso to vouch for him. He could be leading them in the complete opposite direction. In all honesty, he has half a mind to do so. “If there are any survivors from your Expedition, they should be there.”

“They will be there,” Maelle insists.

“They’ll be there,” Gustave agrees quietly, though his eyes linger on Verso for a few moments, holding his gaze - both of them are well aware that they might find nothing more than empty, aching grief at the tree, a dead end in a world full of them.

It’s all a detour, really.

They need to make their way to the Paintress, and Verso has a razor-wire tight-rope of promises to walk.

On the beach, he’d promised his father that he’d bring Gustave to Aline; sword drawn in front of Gustave’s shattered form, he’d spun promise after promise, lie after lie. Claims that Gustave would break the stalemate: this new, strange chroma might be enough to tip Aline’s war with her husband in her favour. There were other promises that he doesn’t want to think about: his voice shaking, his grip tight on his sword, a plea for Renoir to let him live and a promise that this would be the last thing he’d ever ask of him. The look in his father’s eyes, remorse and pity, is still haunting him.

But there had been more hollow promises after that. Dragging Gustave and Maelle to the Manor half-conscious, he’d stared the hollow-faced Curator down and spun a familiar set of lies: he would take Gustave to Aline, they would face her down together, and this would break the stalemate. It would tip the balance in this Renoir’s favour and end their eternal war.

With Gustave waking up and knowing exactly who he is, Verso is spitting out even more oaths every hour: Yes, he’ll help them find their Expedition. Yes, he’ll help them find the Paintress. Yes, he’ll help convince her to leave the Canvas. 

Yes to anything that Gustave asks for with those soft, helpless eyes, now genuinely sparkling with flecks of gold.

It’s maddening - and Verso feels the trap closing in more and more with every second that passes.

He’s left staring blankly into the fire as he tries to figure out how to thread this needle. How does he save his mother, unpaint himself, and still ensure that Gustave lives safely and happily ever after?

It’s enough to make his head ache. It isn’t helped at all when Gustave comes to sit with him. Verso’s spine stiffens and his shoulders straighten - and he feels the way he tilts towards that light like he’s hunting for it. As ridiculous as it feels, a flower to the sun, he doesn’t fight it any more.

Gustave is real. He’s sitting beside him looking like a golden, haloed saint from a medieval painting, and yet he’s as real as Verso is. It’s impossible.

“Here,” Gustave says, passing over a bowl of something that might pass for soup. “Eat up. It’s been a hard day.”

That’s painfully true. “The nevrons. They’ve been non-stop,” Verso agrees. “That arm of yours. Its upgrades. Would it work on them?”

Being able to re-paint them into something harmless might help ease the way, but Gustave only flexes his fingers where they’re currently clutching his spoon. “Not yet. I tried it out back in the Manor. It still works - but it works specifically on chroma from my canvas.”

“Ah. And the only chroma that we have from your canvas is…?”

“Me. Exactly. Or my workshop, I suppose, but that’s back in Lumière. So unless I feel like re-painting my own arm, we’re stuck for now. If I had a couple of years of trial-and-error I might be able to recalibrate it to tune into this canvas properly.” Gustave gives a self-conscious grimace. “Never thought I’d be wishing for more years of solitude.”

Verso holds back a sigh as he looks at the cuts and bruises still decorating Gustave’s cheekbones. “They’re targeting you,” he points out.

At least Gustave doesn’t deny it. He shrugs and starts eating his own dinner. “I stick out,” he says. “If I was a nevron, I’d probably want to attack the funny-looking glowing man as well.”

“You’re not that funny-looking,” Verso protests. Gustave knocks their shoulders together as he smiles down at his soup. “You should hang back. Stay in the reserve team. Let me and Maelle handle it.”

Gustave doesn’t even do him the courtesy of looking up at him before he’s shaking his head. “There’s only three of us. Until we meet up with the others, there is no ‘reserve team’,” he says, “And if you think I’m going to sit around and let my baby sister fight our battles, you don’t know me half as well as you say you do.”

“I can hear you, you know,” Maelle complains from the other side of the fire. “The fire isn’t sound-proof.”

Gustave smiles and gestures for her to shuffle closer - and Verso doesn’t know how much he’s told her, not exactly, but it’s enough to make her gaze linger on Verso curiously as they talk.

She’s not Alicia, but she’s not only Maelle, not any more. 

Verso doesn’t know where that leaves her. Somewhere between the two.

They talk and joke and Verso wants to believe in the smile on Gustave’s face; he wants to believe that he really is this happy and settled so quickly, and that all of the rest of it is gone - no more heartache, no more betrayal, no more trauma.

From the lightness in his tone and the teasing of his sister, he could believe it.

It’s only the haunted, broken echo on his face later that night when Gustave thinks they’re not looking that leaves Verso aware, more than anyone, that they’ve got a long way to go.

*

Verso had expected to find the Indigo Tree devoid of survivors: he’d braced himself for a fresh rush of grief for Gustave and Maelle, and had readied himself for how to convince them to keep moving even when this damn Canvas keeps insisting on taking more and more from them.

He hadn’t been prepared to find a lone Expeditioner at the foot of the tree. She’s crouched at the base, arms wrapped around her knees, eyes staring ahead in blank horror as the seconds tick past.

He vaguely recognises her from his trips to Lumière - and the trio of joyful shouts that echo around the tree as soon as they spot each other quickly confirm that she’s one of them. He hangs back, watching, as Maelle surges forward and Gustave follows after her. 

There are tight hugs and whispered confessions of relief - and, oh. That’s new. The burning jealousy that springs up when he sees her arms around Gustave.

He hadn’t felt it during his old trips to Lumière, this unexpected bitter twist in the centre of his chest, but that had been different.

This time, it’s Gustave. The real thing. Not a re-painting. Not a copy. It’s the same man that used to wait for him (not him) in his tower - the same man who lived and died without meeting another living soul in his canvas-prison. Verso hates the bitterness that ignites in his chest. He hates the feeling of inadequacy and the immediate worries about Gustave turning his smile on someone else. He hates it, and he can’t stop it.

All he can do is stand back.

They introduce the newcomer to him as Lune, and she shakes his hand while she watches him with narrowed eyes. “You’re from the Continent?” she asks, head tilted to the side in curiosity. “You’ve been here this whole time?”

Thankfully, even at a time like this, he’s not the most interesting mystery she has to solve - she’s diverted back to the question of Gustave’s odd chroma before Verso has to summon an answer. Verso can only silently thank him for drawing her analytical mind back to himself.

“It’s fascinating. If we ever get back to Lumière, I’m locking you in the lab until we work this out,” Lune says, prodding at Gustave’s arm while Verso reminds himself very sternly that he has no right to tell her to back off.

For his part, Gustave is smiling fondly and going along with it, even when Maelle joins in the teasing. He looks so happy to be surrounded by them all that even the scowling monster at the back of Verso’s mind learns to quieten down for a moment or two. In all the darkness that’s coming, if there’s something that can make Maelle and Gustave smile even for a moment Verso will take it.

Reunited with the survivors of the Expedition, things get even more complicated. Verso knows for a fact it would have been easier to lead Gustave and Maelle to where he needs them to go if he had stayed firm about bypassing the Indigo Tree and sticking to their own mission. Adding Lune to the mix is another factor that he doesn’t know how to counter-balance.

He blames Gustave’s puppy-dog eyes for this, actually - and he also fully blames his past self for painting them like that in the first place.

“We need to talk,” Gustave tells Lune. “Do you have a minute?”

Lune and Gustave leave him with Maelle at the foot of the tree as they retreat a short distance - still in sight, but not in hearing distance. Verso tells himself that that is completely fine and completely normal: it makes sense that they would want to catch up without any eavesdroppers.

He just wishes it didn’t curdle like milk to be excluded.

He just wishes he could stop himself from thinking that Gustave probably wouldn’t have cut the original Verso out of this particular conversation.

“So,” Maelle chirps up beside him where they lean beside the tree, “Are you actually able to set someone on fire by staring at them too intensely? I think there’s a picto for that…”

He tears his gaze away from Gustave and Lune’s tense conversation in order to glance at Maelle at his side. She’s smiling, but it’s forced.

“There’s absolutely a picto for that,” he agrees, “But I wasn’t staring.”

She rolls her eyes so hard that she may in fact cause herself some damage. “It’s okay if you are,” she says. “He stares at you too, you know.”

He’s not blushing. Verso is over one hundred years old, he has bigger things to worry about, and he’s absolutely not blushing. He looks up at the Indigo Tree where it stretches above them instead. “What do you think they’re talking about?” he asks - half as a diversion, and half because he needs some insights from someone who might actually know the history between the two of them.

“Oh, you know…” Maelle sighs. “All our friends are dead. Gustave’s from another world. The Paintress is actually our Maman.”

Ah.

Perhaps Maelle does know everything.

He turns to look at her sharply, frozen on the spot against the Tree.

“I don’t know if I believe him yet,” Maelle says uncertainly, “But I know Gustave believes it. And there really is something different about him now. Just look at him.”

Verso glances back towards Lune and Gustave’s tense conversation. There’s an uptick of rising tension and volume from Lune in particular, the strained tone of heated words even if he can’t make out what’s being said. It makes him dig his fingernails into his palm as he reminds himself that Gustave can fight his own battles, quite literally. He’s lived a whole life in Lumière: he’s no longer the sheltered, quiet man he remembers from the Tower.

Well. He is and he isn’t.

Untangling that particular nightmare might take another lifetime.

“And then there’s you,” Maelle muses - her voice is quiet, but it’s still more than enough to drown out the tension of Gustave and Lune’s conversation. “Appearing from nowhere. Following my brother around. It doesn’t make any sense, but I know that he trusts you. More than he trusts anyone. More than me, maybe.”

Her gaze isn’t quite hostile, but it’s half-way there. Verso knows Alicia’s eyes all too well; he’s seen her in all states, in all emotions. His painted sister, the sister in his memories, and now Maelle.

And he knows that the look currently in her eyes usually means that she’s contemplating something dangerous. Perhaps weighing up if her sword is needed.

It’s as painful as her words: the claim that Gustave trusts him.

The knowledge that perhaps he shouldn’t.

“I won’t let anything happen to him,” he says, and he hopes he isn’t lying.

“I know,” Maelle confirms. She tilts her head towards him with a smile that’s all teeth and menace - something that’s uniquely Maelle, nothing Alicia to it at all. “Because, if you do, I’ll deal with you myself.”

He could laugh at the thought of being threatened by a sixteen-year-old, but he knows his sister: he knows she means it.

Lune and Gustave rejoin them before Maelle can get much more specific with her threats - but they bring with them their own layer of frost in the air.

Verso tries to catch Gustave’s eye to check in on him. Gustave’s too busy looking intently down at his own feet, his arms crossed over his chest. It’s like witnessing a portcullis fall in real-time.

“From what we can tell, there’s a gestral village nearby,” Lune says into the stretched silence. “If we go there, that’s our best bet for finding a way to cross the ocean now that our ship’s destroyed.”

And this is exactly the moment that Verso should speak up and let them know that he knows exactly how to cross the ocean: he could take them straight to Esquie without any further questions.

And the rest of their mission could take a matter of days.

They could all be free in less than a week.

He’s still looking at Gustave as the moment passes. He’s looking at that worried frown, at the way Gustave is mostly focused on his own boots and nothing else. He’ll tell himself that that’s why the moment slips by uninterrupted.

As they start trudging onwards, following Lune’s navigational skills while Maelle begins to interrogate her about what she knows about gestrals in the area, Verso hangs back until he can fall into step beside Gustave. Their steps fall into sync. Their breathing, too.

He shifts his pack on his shoulder and manages to bite his tongue to stop himself from offering to carry Gustave’s things for him. Gustave doesn’t need his help, and that isn’t even what he came over here for, but it’s difficult to hold himself back.

“Is everything okay?” he checks in when it seems like Gustave doesn’t want to be the one to start talking for once. He nods over at Lune and Maelle. “Seemed a little tense back there.”

Gustave looks up at him, finally, like he’s pushed himself out of his own thoughts enough to realise that there’s someone beside him. Like always, the weight of his attention is as powerful as a steam train - he meets Verso’s gaze and offers a smile that doesn’t remotely meet his eyes. “A little tense,” he agrees. “But it’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Honestly? I’d rather talk about literally anything else,” Gustave admits with a laugh, as if this isn’t the sound of a key turning in a lock. Verso’s stomach clenches. Of course, Gustave is allowed his privacy. He’s allowed his own secrets - but he wouldn’t have kept them from the other Verso. If Verso was that version of himself, Gustave would have wanted to talk. He’s sure of it.

The conversation drifts in another direction, and the pleasant flow of Gustave’s company is almost enough to make Verso forget the white in his hair, the scar on his face, and the thousands of little signs that mark him out as different from the old-self he’s supposed to be.

When the conversation lulls, even for a few moments, the cheer fades from Gustave’s face and it’s like the real him underneath leaks out - the expression on his face is hollowed-out and haunted. There’s something ancient and exhausted in him, even if Verso only ever gets to see it out the corner of his eye.

It’s a relief, fifteen minutes later, when a set of nevrons attack. Blood and chroma are a more familiar language to him these days.

*

He spends most of the night unable to rest, watching Gustave instead - if he’s obsessed with the gentle rise-and-fall of Gustave’s chest, with the quiet confirmation that he’s definitely still breathing, Verso doesn’t think anyone can blame him.

Across the camp, Lune’s eyes are trained on him from where she too is resting on her bed-roll, unsleeping. She’s already tried an interrogation or two, but he’s so far been able to slip through the maze without answering too much. Her questions alone are evidence of what Gustave must have told her during their private conversation. She’d questioned him about previous Expeditions, about immortality, about the Paintress, all of it.

Gustave. Radical honesty. 

From what Verso can see, the main outcome is the breaking of their trust in Gustave’s sanity: it’s convinced both Maelle and Lune that he might be losing his grip on reality.

It’s a powerful argument for the need for delicacy when it comes to their particular truth.

In the morning, they set out for the gestral village. It’s easy enough to lead them through the protective maze. The last time Verso was here he had Monoco with him, and he feels that absence at his side now.

The trees and grass gradually turn red as they get closer to their destination. Excitement is building in the group: hardened Expeditioners, trained fighters, and yet they’re giddy at the thought of meeting these fairy-tales. Lune starts genuinely smiling whenever she catches eyes with Maelle or Gustave - and Gustave himself seems to be snapping out of his thoughtful haze more and more with every sakapatate they encounter. 

Gustave’s talking more with the other two, starting to share lore and stories about the gestrals in that quiet, appreciative tone of his. If Verso is hanging on his every word a little bit more than someone who has spent decades around gestrals really needs to do, Gustave doesn’t call him out on it.

They enter the village through its large wooden gates, with Verso hanging back a step or two behind the others. Lune points out details and whispers observations into Maelle’s ear, while Gustave takes in their surroundings with a disbelieving smile on his face. He glances over his shoulder, eyes glinting, to catch Verso’s gaze with a grin as he points at one of the larger gestrals half-asleep on its feet.

Verso steps over to stand at his side as Gustave takes in the sight of the village in front of them, his hand resting at the small of Gustave’s back before he can think twice. His hand fits there, perfectly. “You’ll need to head to the Chief’s House,” he explains, ducking in to speak near Gustave’s ear. It’s not loud enough to warrant it, but it’s worth it for the split-second unexpected flutter of Gustave’s eyes. “Right ahead. Explore first, if you need it. Do you think you three can handle yourselves for a while?”

Gustave looks at him, eyes still bright, smile still on his face. “You don’t want to come with us?”

Golgra would absolutely challenge them to a duel if Vero shows his face - and he doesn’t quite think his pride could handle the bruise of losing so badly in front of Gustave quite yet. He shrugs, and his thumb traces back-and-forth over the leather of Gustave’s coat. His hand is still resting at the small of Gustave’s back - and, until he’s told to move it, he’s chancing his luck. “I’ve got some chores to do. Things to pick up around the village,” he says. “I’ll meet you back at camp, unless you need me here?”

The amused skepticism on Gustave’s face suits him. “Don’t worry about us,” he says. “Go and do your gestral chores. We’ll be fine.”

Verso doesn’t kiss him on the cheek when they say goodbye - because he’s not that Verso and this is not that Gustave. The thought flickers through his mind all the same.

They part ways, and he winds a path through the chaotic sprawl of the gestral streets until he finds exactly who he’s looking for: the cobbled-together excuse for a hairdresser in this place. It’s a large, hulking creature that hangs out on one of the winding corners in the village, a dozen different dyes tucked into pockets around its body. Merde, it’s impossible to tell how it acquired them, but it’s responsible for the jigsawed decorations of all the gestrals that are scattered across the Continent.

He has firm instructions for it this time: it has to look right, after all. The gestral murmurs its own commentary on his pickiness, but it listens and goes along with it.

Staring in the mirror when the job is done, he has to pretend it doesn’t make his skin crawl. There’s still another step to take. He needs to make sure he doesn’t back down just because it’s difficult.

No, he just has to think of the haunted look on Gustave’s face when he thinks nobody’s watching him. That’s enough to make him follow through with this. Deep, steady breaths.

He takes the gestral’s mirror with him, claiming he needs some privacy for this - and, while the gestral grumbles about it, a promise that he’ll come back and fight it later seems to calm it down. He’s able to find a shadowy corner in the village and sit down, breathing slowly, as he takes in his reflection. The refreshed dye helps, most of  the white in his hair now hidden other than a couple of selected strands, but there are so many scars mottled over his face. Signs of a life on the Continent. Expeditions and nevrons and his father, they’ve all left their marks over and over.

He breathes out, slowly, and focuses on the scar that slashes across his eye.

He’s been fighting back his own healing for decades. The canvas wants to return him to perfection - it’s always wanted to soothe away every blemish, and he’s never allowed it to happen. He’d thought that he needed it, a reminder of the fight with his father. A reminder of why he had to turn away from his family and strike out on a different path.

He doesn’t need that reminder any more, he tells himself. He can let it go.

He grits his teeth together, stares at his reflection, and finally allows the canvas to wipe him clean.

*

There’s a new Expeditioner in the party by the time Verso rejoins the group at camp that evening. Sciel introduces herself, bold and bright, as a Champion of the Gestral Arena - she gives a little flourish that is somewhere between a bow, a curtsey, and something that’s entirely gestral. She talks with him freely, none of Lune’s cautious restraint, but Verso can tell when he’s being sized up. He gets the feeling Sciel could snap him in two over her knee if she wanted to - and healing from that really would be a pain.

But it’s difficult to focus on all of that, really.

Across the camp, Gustave is staring at him.

Not quite a glare - it’s too stunned for that. He’s just standing and staring, non-stop.

“I take it you found what you needed at the village?” Verso tries to ask Maelle and Lune as they all sit together around the fire. It’s flickering between them all, the smell of dinner brewing starting to build in the air.

“They found me, do I count as ‘what you needed’?” Sciel asks.

“We found some leads,” Lune confirms, after an amused glance in Sciel’s direction. “They think Esquie might be able to take us across the ocean. The Esquie. Can you imagine?”

Oh, he can imagine that alright.

“Have you ever seen Esquie?” Maelle asks him. It’s hard to tell in the firelight, but he’s sure there are more white hairs starting to thread their way through all that red. “You’ve been on the Continent for years, haven’t you?”

“Decades,” he agrees. “Esquie is… complicated.”

“So he’s real?”

“Oh, he’s very real,” Verso confirms. “And very, very dangerous.” He starts to get to his feet, gesturing over to where Gustave is currently trying to bore a hole through the side of his head with just the power of his eyes. “I’ll be right back.”

He tries to tell himself that the look in Gustave’s eyes is a good thing, a good sign, but he can’t quite get there. All the same, he wears a smug smile as he crosses over the camp to wear Gustave is loitering. He gestures towards his general appearance and wonders if he ought to try one of Sciel’s bowing flourishes to really sell it. “What do you think?”

The answer is a heavy sigh, and Gustave’s hand on his arm. “We should go somewhere private,” Gustave says.

They find a spot a little further down the cliffs. Gustave’s hand is gentle on his arm the whole time, quietly ushering him to follow him as if there is any possibility that Verso could break away.

At the cliffside, Gustave drops to sit down on the edge with a huff of air, his legs dangling. A small gesture is all that it takes to get Verso to drop into place beside him.

They turn and look at each other. Heartbeats passing. Verso feels the rake of Gustave’s gaze over his face, but - as always - it’s hard to focus on much when Gustave is this close to him. He’s trapped looking at the small frown on Gustave’s face instead, the little wrinkle of concern between his brows. How can frowning look good on someone?

“Verso,” Gustave murmurs. He reaches out to push some of the newly-black strands away from Verso’s face, pushing them back behind his ear. Verso wonders if Gustave knows that he can’t even breathe when he touches him like this. “Your hair…”

“It’s white. I’ve always dyed it,” Verso explains, “And it always fades. Since we were in the village, I thought it was time to get it fixed up again. A little touch of vanity, that’s all.”

He tries to smile like he can brush it all away and force it to be non-important. Gustave runs a strand through his fingers like he’s trying to feel the black dye itself, and that alone is enough to make Verso’s heart race - but it’s nothing compared to the soft brush of Gustave’s fingertips against his cheek, tracing his missing scar. 

They’re there so briefly before Gustave pulls his hand away that it’s almost like Verso imagined the touch: but he can feel it like a brand on his skin. He remembers this, the gentle feeling of Gustave’s hand on his cheek when they used to kiss in the tower, slow and hungry. He remembers being touched like something delicate and worthy - and he knows those aren’t his memories to taste, not really. He's a voyeur in his own mind.

“And your scar?” Gustave prompts, even quieter than before.

“It’s…” He breathes out and wets his lips. “It was a relic from my father. A reminder of the price I paid to stand on my own two feet. The canvas has been trying to heal it for years, but I always felt like I needed it. I needed to see it every time I looked in the mirror.”

Gustave doesn’t interrupt. That frown is sticking around on his face, careful concern, but he doesn’t jump in to say anything yet.

Verso clears his throat. “And, now, I don’t need it any more. I don’t need a reminder.” He brushes his hand over his face, running his fingers over the smooth skin where the scar used to be.

It doesn’t quite feel like his face any more, not after all those years with that mark.

Gustave takes a moment to make sure that Verso has said all he wants to say. “Verso,” he asks, “Will you be honest with me?”

“Always,” Verso says, while wishing that wasn’t a lie.

“This. All this.” A small flick of his hand manages to encompass the newly black hair, the healed scar, all of it. “Is it because of me?”

Verso wants to tell him not to be so full of himself. He wants to claim that a man can indulge in some self-care and maintenance without it being in any way related to the dead love-of-his-life returning from the abyss - but it feels empty even as he thinks it.

He looks down over the edge of the cliff-face instead of at Gustave’s gentle, holy light. Down at the bottom of the cliffs, he can see the sea churning and the waves crashing against the rocks.

The words, when they come, are like shards of mirror against his lips. It feels like they leave him bleeding. 

“You look sad,” he admits, hating how juvenile it sounds as much as he hates that it’s true. “When you’re by yourself. When you think no one’s watching. You look broken, and I hate it because you don’t have to.”

He’s the cause of it. He knows that - and he knows if he voices that thought that Gustave will be gentle with him and will assure him it’s not true. Gustave might even believe that. He’d be wrong.

“You look at me and you wish you were looking at him,” Verso admits over the cliff-edge. It’s easier to talk into the dark. “I don’t blame you for it. I’m used to it. And with everyone else I’ve hated it, but…”

He hates it with Gustave as well. He can’t even form a lie to deny it. He remembers the way that Gustave used to light up just from the sight of him, that not-him, Gustave’s smile igniting the second he appeared in the tower. He wishes more than anything that that reaction could belong to him instead - but he knows better than that. He knows it isn’t that easy.

“I thought it would be better if you could look at me and see the real thing.” He flexes his fist - clenching it tight, then releasing the tension. His voice dips down so soft it’s hardly audible any more. The words shred his throat but he makes himself say it anyway. “I can be him.”

He makes himself look up from the darkness to meet Gustave’s eyes again - soft and open, waiting for Gustave to take what’s being offered.

“For you,” he admits. “I can do that.”

The offer sits between them, fractured and gleaming.

Gustave moves hesitantly, his hand reaching out for Verso’s until their fingers tangle together. He doesn’t break eye contact as he shuffles on the cliff-edge so that they can more easily see eye-to-eye. His other hand, the mechanical one, reaches out to brush against Verso’s cheek - not just tracing the path of the absent scar any more, but all of him.

“Verso de la Peinture,” Gustave says, so mock-sternly that it makes a surprised hiccup of laughter jolt out of Verso’s chest. That stupid name. After the laughter, the smile remains frozen on his lips, too shocked to leave. “Please. Listen to me very closely.”

Verso could tell him that it’s impossible for him to do anything other than pay attention to Gustave: Gustave has been literally designed and painted to steal every drop of his attention and every limited cell of his brain power. When Gustave speaks, there’s nothing Verso can do but hang on every single word.

It just doesn’t mean he always agrees with him.

“I do not need you to be anyone else for me.” It’s slow and careful, like this is a school lesson they both need to learn, like Verso is one of his apprentices in his workshop. “I don’t want you to dress up and pretend to be someone you’re not. If I’m - If I look  -” Gustave pauses and swallows. He offers a smile of his own, helplessly hurt, and then presses onwards. “It’s okay for me to look ‘sad’. I’m working through it. Slowly. And I’ll get there, I will. It’s not something you need to fix. I’m not something you need to fix.”

Verso’s mouth feels too dry to let himself speak.

I’m not trying to fix you, he wants to say. He’s trying to fix himself. He’s trying to turn himself back into what Gustave actually wants - 

But, it turns out, that might not be what Gustave wants at all.

“If you want the scar, bring it back,” Gustave tells him, before he chuckles at himself. “I can’t believe you managed to back me into a corner where I’m supporting your messy coping mechanisms. You’ve got me arguing for deliberately keeping a scar around for years.”

“Nah,” Verso interrupts, finally finding his voice in the face of Gustave’s teasing. At least here he feels back on solid ground. “You just think it looks cool.”

Gustave’s gold-flecked eyes are soft and understanding for a moment longer: lingering on him, letting him know everything else that they’re not saying. Verso holds his gaze and nods almost imperceptibly - and that’s when Gustave slumps backwards onto the ground, lying there with his legs still dangling off the side of the cliff.

He gives Verso’s hand an ineffective tug, the physical version of whining, until Verso relents and lies beside him. They stare up at the stars together, lying side-by-side, legs swinging back-and-forth over the side of the cliff. Their hands are still entwined.

The stars are different here than they were in Gustave’s canvas. The constellations have changed, but so too have their appearance: here, the stars twinkle like far-away sparks of glitter. In Gustave’s canvas, they used to burn. 

Verso wonders if Gustave has noticed. He wonders if it bothers him.

They lie together without a word, no sound other than their breathing. Eventually, even that syncs up. They breathe together for as long as it takes.

Gustave’s hand twitches with a gentle nudge of contact. “Can you tell me about Lumière?” Gustave asks - and, for a moment, Verso thinks that they’re back to tactics. Plans. Weaving his way through multiple conflicting objectives. “About growing up there? What was your life like?”

Not tactics, then. Something more painful.

The past.

His past.

He turns his head from the night sky to look at Gustave instead, his profile perfectly illuminated by the silver light of the stars. Gustave deliberately hasn’t turned towards him - he’s letting Verso look instead. From the centre of camp, he can hear the girls laughing and joking together as they start serving dinner, and he thinks for a moment that he could lie here watching Gustave forever and never, ever grow bored.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Gustave says into the quiet stillness, “But I’d like to hear it, if you want to share.”

Unable to deny Gustave a thing, Verso tries to tell him something he might want to know - a happy family, a peaceful childhood, rebellious teenage years. He tells him about summers spent skiing, and his terrible attempts at dating in his teens, and learning the piano under his Maman’s wistful gaze.

With Gustave listening, the stories don’t feel fake. His past doesn’t feel like an illusion.

It feels like it’s his.

*

The dye will take its time to fade, but by the following morning, Verso has allowed his scar to come back - it splits its way back onto his face while he’s sleeping, and he isn’t prepared for the rush of relief he feels when he sees it marring his reflection in the water as he’s cleaning up the following morning.

That relief is nothing compared to how he feels when they finally track down Esquie a few days later.

He’s allowed the others to take the lead on the way here, keeping quiet about wrong turns that add hours to their travel time: it’s time that he gets to spend walking with Gustave and Maelle, or trailing them from the back of the pack as he listens to Lune and Sciel talking to each other about their own theories on what might be waiting for them all when they track down The Legendary Esquie.

The loud bubble of joy that spills out from Esquie at the sight of them all is enough to inspire its own echoing chime of amusement in Verso - and he doesn’t even mind the quest to take on François, that eternal bully. If anything, it’s worth it to see that look of confusion on Gustave’s face, so he stands back to let the others deal with this particular threat.

Before long, they have Esquie on their side, rocks in their pocket, and a route plotted through the quarry up north. 

He keeps Gustave and the others away from Stone Wave Cliffs, a sick knot in his stomach at the thought of that place. Too grim, too dark, too dangerous. Locating florrie by himself while they’re sleeping away in camp is easier: in-and-out before any of them are even aware he’s gone.

As the days pass on their journey, he finds the others opening up to him a little more - Lune still interrogates him at every chance she gets, and Sciel still teases at every available opportunity, but the more he watches them with Gustave too the more he realises that that’s just what friendship looks like for them.

Every day, there’s a little more white in Maelle’s hair.

Every day, there’s a little more lightness in Gustave’s shoulders.

Verso will gratefully accept each tiny step of progress. He soaks up every scrap of attention he can get, feeling ridiculous for every moment of it but unable to make himself stop.

He can’t stop himself from watching Gustave with the others either: the quiet way he takes care of them; the louder way they tease and love him back. Gustave had once been painted as the ideal friend by a lonely, tormented teenager - and it’s obvious now that Verso watches him. Gustave is someone who should always have been surrounded by people, should always have been at the heart of a family, and Verso can only hate his original self a little bit more for the situation he caged him in instead. Selfish. Stupid.

Sitting by himself at the edge of the camp, he forces himself to breathe out again. No use thinking like that. It’s not helpful. He needs to do something more than that.

As the regular sound of the camp’s evening echoes around him, he finds a spot nearby with just the right amount of space. A flick of his hand is enough to summon his piano: it looks out of place here, sitting on the grass near the cliff-edge, but then again it looks out of place everywhere on the Continent. It belongs in the Manor, but it will never see that music room again.

“Is that a piano?” Maelle asks at right about the same moment as Verso sits down and lets his fingers flourish against the keys.

“I thought you could do with some entertainment,” he suggests, pretending that his eyes don’t settle on Gustave for a moment longer than they should. Pretending that he isn’t just taking a quiet moment to show off. “Everyone’s been so gloomy.”

“Yes. We’re marching through the unknown to our certain death. Can’t imagine why everyone’s under the weather,” Maelle agrees, but her head is bouncing automatically as he starts to play.

It’s livelier than anything he would usually play. Before long Maelle has been able to draw in Sciel - and under their power it’s not long before Lune is dragged to her feet and then Gustave doesn’t stand a chance. 

The four of them partner up into folk dancing that Verso has seen on the streets of Lumière on festival days: with hands joining, arms swinging, feet skipping, it’s a tangled mess from all of them other than Sciel, who looks effortlessly graceful as she leads them all through it. Gustave and Maelle as a pair, then Sciel and Lune, though they swap and switch partners as the songs trickle onwards.

Verso slips effortlessly from song to song. He knows them well enough that he can look up and watch the group as they’re dancing - and he can see Esquie behind them too, spinning happily in place, dancing along with his friends as they hop and jump.

They’re laughing. Gustave has his hand on Maelle’s waist, both of them giggling hopelessly as they get their half-remembered steps wrong and bump into Sciel and Lune, throwing everyone off beat.

“Merde, I’m terrible at this,” Gustave laughs to himself.

Maelle shakes her head and straightens up again. “You’re fine. I doubt Verso’s noticed,” she says, although her eye contact with Verso betrays the lie. She knows who he’s been watching this entire time.

He’s hardly hiding it. He needs that smile on Gustave’s face.

He winds it up when they’re all too tired to keep dancing. Gustave comes to sit with him on the piano stool, leaning against Verso’s side as he tries to catch his breath. The others start to drift away, Lune and Sciel reminiscing about old dances from their school days while Maelle’s gaze merely lingers on Verso and Gustave for a moment longer - but whatever she’s thinking, she decides to hold onto it for now.

It leaves him and Gustave together, side-by-side, as Gustave nudges him with his elbow. “You play beautifully,” he says.

Verso thinks of hours in Gustave’s tower together: playing pieces he’d written for Gustave, about him, while Gustave closed his eyes and listened.

He thinks of those memories, belonging to the other version of him, and tries to overwrite them with this one instead: playing something fast and messy for Gustave and his friends just to watch him laughing hopelessly as he tries to keep up, sweat shining on his temples from the exertion.

“It’s all practice,” Verso says. “It’s been a long time since I had an audience.”

“It’s a shame you can’t join the dancing,” Gustave says. His mechanical hand spiders over the piano keys, pressing a few in a discordant flurry. “Something tells me you’re good at that too.”

“That’s all practice as well.” Verso smirks and finds his own amusement echoed in Gustave’s eyes.

“Wait here,” Gustave says.

He gets up from the piano and Verso watches as he crosses over to the record player that Lune dutifully sets up in camp every night. They lost most of its records after the attack on the beach, but along the way they’ve picked up bits and pieces. Old records forgotten and scattered over the Continent. It’s one of those that Gustave wrestles out of its sleeve and places on the machine, setting the needle into the groove.

A familiar song bursts to life. Slow. Sad. Mournful.

Gustave turns back to Verso with a hopeful shrug. “Not quite as lively, but…”

Verso knows what’s coming next before Gustave even holds out his hand. All the same, it makes silly butterflies dance in his stomach like he’s a teenager all over again when Gustave holds his gaze and gives a polite, exaggerated bow. “Dance with me?” Gustave asks, as if there’s any chance of Verso being capable of turning him down.

His hand takes hold of Gustave’s, wrapping tight around his metal palm, and he lets Gustave lead him up from the piano stool. They take a few steps away on the grass to get some clear space and then Gustave gently draws him closer. Their hands remain entwined, now resting between their chests, while Gustave’s other arm wraps around him to hold him close.

Verso is actively, painfully concentrating on trying not to die. He might be immortal, but demonstrating his ability to resurrect after a self-induced heart attack from wanting something so badly isn’t going to be something his pride takes flawlessly.

He settles in beside Gustave, his spare hand coming to rest on Gustave’s hip. He’s not sure which of them is leading at this point. Both of them. Neither. They’re rocking in place, turning slowly in time with the melancholic music. 

With his face half-hidden against the wild waves of Gustave’s hair, Verso allows his eyes to close. He breathes in deeply. Gustave smells different from how he remembers: there’s the smoke from the fireside and the dirt from the Continent and the tang of his blood from their battles, but Verso still thinks he would recognise him anywhere.

He relaxes into the soft embrace and the feeling of Gustave’s breath tickling by his ear. The smooth metal of Gustave’s hand against his own gradually warms to his own body temperature. Verso doesn’t want to stop. Even as the record spins out into silence, he wants to stay right here: turning slowly in place, hidden against one another, lost in the quiet acceptance of Gustave’s arms.

In the silence, they gradually stop moving.

Verso pulls back just enough to be able to look Gustave in the face: those sad eyes, that pink mouth, the ridiculous, perfect curl to his hair.

He thinks about how badly he wants to kiss him, and he doesn’t do it.

He thinks about how much he loves this gentle, foolish man, and he doesn’t say it.

He raises their joined hands to his lips and presses a simple kiss to the back of Gustave’s knuckles. 

“Sleep well, mon cœur,” he whispers, simply to see the flush those words bring to his heart’s sweet face.

*

The traipse to Monoco’s Station is cold enough that Verso can feel it down to his bones.

They shuffle through the snow, fighting back nevrons as required. Verso’s still trying hard not to think too hard about what comes next: the promises he’s made to too many interested parties, the tightrope he’s walking, the mess they’re rushing right into.

At his side while the others are forging ahead, Gustave is shivering from the cold. His breath turns to mist as it leaves his lips, and Verso starts moving before he’s even thought twice about it. He starts pulling off the sleeve of his coat.

“Verso,” Gustave says without breaking stride - although he turns around to walk backwards so that he can still see Verso as he walks in front of him. “If you’re about to try and offer me your coat, just know that I’ll throw it back at you.”

“But it’s cold.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m immortal.” It’s not as if he has to worry about frostbite, after all.

"Yes,” Gustave agrees. He pauses like he's waiting for Verso to catch up, then takes pity on him and adds, "...So am I."

Verso tilts his head to the side as he tries to puzzle that one out. “That’s different,” he claims.

“Is it?”

“Different immortality,” Verso insists. From the roll of Gustave’s eyes, he already knows he hasn’t managed to sell that one. He gives up on taking off his coat, and catches up to walk at Gustave’s side instead. As always, he has to pretend that his hand doesn’t long to reach out and take hold of him. “You’ve never told me how old you are now, you know.”

“Thirty-one,” Gustave answers confidently. His eyes rest on Maelle, Lune and Sciel as they dart down one of the paths in front of them. Slowly, they follow wherever the girls are leading, and with a slight nudge from Verso Gustave admits, “... And a bit.”

“How much is ‘a bit’?”

Verso doesn’t know exactly what he’s expecting - but it still hits him hard when Gustave lets out a long, cold breath, shrugs, and says, “I’m not sure exactly. A few centuries, at least. It was hard to celebrate birthdays in the - you know, in the…” He trails off and clears his throat. When he picks up his thought, he gestures vaguely at the air around them. “I didn’t have much of a calendar. Or. Well. A sun. Days, nights, months… They didn’t mean a whole lot in there.”

There’s a chill crawling up Verso’s spine, a vicious set of ice-cold daggers, that has nothing to do with the snow around them. “The abyss,” he says as casually as he can. “I thought you said you didn’t remember much of it?”

The shrug that comes next isn’t half as reassuring as Gustave probably thinks it is. “I remember a little,” he says - and Verso wonders, for the first time, if this is what Gustave sounds like when he lies. “Not much.”

“But centuries,” Verso says. He thinks of his own decades on the Continent: years and years of suffering with no end. He thinks of how exhausted he feels every single morning that he wakes up and needs to find a reason to keep on moving. His fist clenches, uselessly, at the thought of Gustave going through all of that and more. The abyss. He doesn’t want Gustave to have to remember a single second of that place. “How? How are you still here? How are you still - you?”

Their boots crunch as they walk together through the snow. It’s all the louder with the weight of Gustave’s silence as he seems to work hard to come up with an answer. “It wasn’t easy,” he admits - cautious, hesitant, as if he wants someone to take the words away from him. “But I didn’t have a choice, Verso. This chroma of mine? It won’t let me go.”

Verso won’t let him go, he means. The original. The man who painted him into being and never had an exit plan for either of them. Verso clenches his jaw and looks down at the snow, letting a few more paces go by.

“If there had been a way to end your canvas,” he asks delicately, “A way to rip it up permanently… Do you think you would have wanted that?”

Their footsteps keep going. Trudging onwards. Gustave’s breath is still shivering against the cold, and Verso really does wish he would let him pass his fur-lined coat over. Merde, Gustave deserves it more than he does.

Thoughtfully, Gustave buries his bare hand in his pocket and takes his time before he answers. “There are people I love here - in this world. This canvas. If Renoir had succeeded in destroying the old one, I never would have got to meet them.”

“Maelle,” Verso guesses.

“Maelle. Emma, Lune, Sciel, my apprentices. Sophie.” Gustave looks at him as they walk together and, silently, Verso begs him not to say his name. He can’t hear that: he can’t handle it. He thinks it must be some twisted form of hope or mercy that keeps it from Gustave’s lips. “Whatever it was like in the abyss, I’m glad I made it through. I’m glad it brought me here.” He nudges at Verso’s arm with his metal hand and makes himself smile. “Even if ‘here’ is unimaginably cold.”

Before he can answer, they hear the others from up ahead: calling them, claiming that they’ve found the station. Verso knows they’re right with how close they are now - and he’s glad for the escape. Glad for the breath of fresh air as Gustave pushes their conversation aside and speeds up in order to catch up with them again.

It leaves Verso with the combined weight of centuries on his shoulders.

It leaves him thinking of the look in Gustave’s eyes, open and promising, as he’d claimed there are people here in this canvas that he loves.

It leaves him wondering if love is enough.

*

Monoco is, well, Monoco.

One hard, invigorating fight later and they have him on board - and it’s nice, in all honesty, to have someone in the party that is unequivocally and only Verso’s friend.

He doesn’t think Esquie counts.

Monoco, on the other hand, is on his side. Mostly. Some of the time. When it counts.

And when he hears that they’re on their way to Old Lumière, and more importantly when he hears that it was Verso’s idea, he gets on board. The gaze from his mask - no eyes, but Monoco still knows how to stare - tells Verso that Monoco is assuming that he has some kind of plan behind all of this. It’s nice to have someone with that level of faith in him. Misguided faith, of course, but it’s nice all the same.

Back at camp, snow still nipping at their heels, Monoco starts weighing Gustave up with an intensity that makes Verso start to strongly regret bringing him along, actually.

“That’s him,” Monoco says by the fireside. It’s quiet for Monoco, which means it actually isn’t quiet at all. “The Mystery.”

“Not much of a mystery after all, as it turns out,” Verso says. “Just an impossibility.”

Monoco is absolutely, completely blinking at him in confusion and disgust. Verso can just feel it.

“He’s the real thing,” Verso explains. “Not a copy. Not a re-painting. He’s from the other Canvas - collaged into this one.”

“So that’s why he looks like that,” Monoco says. “Strange little thing.”

Verso grins, and tries to imagine Monoco calling Gustave that to his face.

Of course, what Monoco decides to say to Gustave a few moments later is altogether worse.

“Tell me, strange one,” Monoco asks, crouched uncomfortably on a log by the fireside while Gustave prods at the fire to try to get it roaring again, “Are you his yet?”

They freeze, both of them.

Verso wonders if anyone would notice if he allowed himself to tumble off the edge of the cliff.

Even Maelle, her hair gone whiter than ever, stops to look at the pair of them. Verso thinks she might even come to their rescue if he needed it.

Do you want him to be? Monoco had asked him years ago, when Gustave had been a curious mystery buried in the depths of Lumière: a distraction and an oddity, but tucked safely away from both the Continent and Monoco. Verso had never thought that particular conversation would come back to bite him.

He starts scrambling for a way to take back that question before Gustave has to answer it.

Still stoking the fire, Gustave glances up at Monoco with a wry smile instead of anything else. He looks from Monoco to Verso then back again: Gustave doesn’t seem to be contemplating certain death in quite the way that Verso is.

Gustave thinks about it, and shrugs. “We’re working on it,” he answers.

We’re working on it.

Verso is very glad that he’s currently sitting down. He knows he’s going to be mulling over that particular answer for weeks to come, assuming they survive that long.

We’re working on it. 

Working on Gustave being his again. Working on it through lying side-by-side star-gazing, and working on it by dancing by the fireside, and working on it through hushed, fractured conversations about their immortality and the eternity that waits for them both.

We’re working on it.

Putain. He doesn’t need to look at Gustave and Monoco by the fireside and see the gentle mischief reflected in them both.

They’re heading to Old Lumière. To the Paintress, to Renoir, to his Maman.

The last thing Verso needs is the promise of something so good still to live for.

Chapter Text

.after

Gustave can’t say that this is getting any easier.

They’ve been travelling through the Continent for weeks now with a barely-formed whisper of a plan. Lune thinks he’s lost his mind; Sciel might be slightly more sympathetic, but that’s not the same thing as belief; and Maelle seems to flit closer and closer to being Alicia every time he talks to her. And Verso…

Well.

Verso is a whole other problem.

Perhaps ‘problem’ isn’t quite the right word. ‘Confusing, swirling vortex of emotion’ might be closer.

Gustave takes his time rinsing their dishes in a nearby stream after being pounced on by Monoco and stabbed with a question that had been perfectly carved, like a homemade shiv, to do the maximum damage.

‘Are you his yet?’

It’s still echoing in his mind. That question. The look on Verso’s face at his answer. The deep, comforting heat in his own belly: there’s a deeper truth, something he’s not ready to speak aloud just yet.

There’s an intensity to the way that Verso watches him. And a steady certainty in knowing that, no matter where he is in camp or what they’re currently doing, if he looks up he’ll probably be able to find Verso’s piercing gaze on him. When he’s speaking with the others, whether it’s talking scientific theories with Lune or unhinged nonsense with Maelle, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that Verso will be nearby, quietly listening in.

And, merde, it aches - he wants to draw him in, wants him to be part of this strange family of his, even when Verso hangs at the edges as if he needs a formal invitation. At least they have Monoco to properly keep him company now. Verso isn’t a solo outsider now that they have both Esquie and Monoco along for the ride.

Gustave is half-way through rinsing off their dishes in the stream near their camp when he recognises the sound of Maelle’s boots on the ground. Her footsteps are so light and catlike that he almost misses her - but it’s impossible to miss the teasing lilt of her words.

“‘We’re working on it’,” she quotes, high-pitched and breathy, before she clutches her chest like a romantic heroine and slumps down to sit on a log close to the stream.

Gustave glances up at her, fighting back a smile. “I’m reasonably certain I didn’t sound like that,” he says.

“I can verify that you definitely sounded exactly like that,” she insists. She throws some of her hair over her shoulder - and it’s whiter every day, now. The red is barely clinging on. “Did you see Verso’s face?”

Gustave is trying very hard not to let his little sister make him blush - and that’s made so much worse because, yes, he did see Verso’s face, everything from his initial stunned reaction to the quiet, smug hope that had started to take root afterwards.

“Maelle,” he chides nonetheless, while wondering - as always - if that’s even the right name to use any more.

“Oh, don’t get all upset,” she scolds. She pushes herself off of the rock to come and help him with the last of their dishes. “It’s sweet, you know. The two of you.”

He’s tempted, for a moment, to tell her that there’s no such thing as the ‘two of them’, but he’s fairly sure that ship sailed a long, long time ago. They’ve been linked long before anyone put it into words.

“I can almost remember it, you know,” Maelle breathes at his side. “The way he used to talk about you. It was… secret, wasn’t it? You were a secret?”

His hands have frozen in place on their plates. He can feel the old vice around his throat, a threat that the tightness might close up entirely and stop him from talking at all if he spends too much time thinking about it - she’s talking like that was Verso, but it wasn’t this Verso, and he’s trying so hard to keep them separate. He coughs and tries to clear his throat as best he can. “Uh, yeah. Yes,” he says, looking back down at the last of the dishes. They’re already as clean as they’re going to get out here. “I wasn’t supposed to exist.”

“I’ve been dreaming about it,” Maelle confesses. “Bad dreams. Horrible dreams. And I don’t want them to be real, I don’t want any of it to be real, but…”

She leans against him by the stream, her white-haired head falling on his shoulder.

“Sometimes things are real whether you want them to be or not, aren’t they?” she asks.

There are a thousand memories that want to push their way to the front of his mind. A thousand regrets spread over centuries.

“I don’t know if I want to remember all this, Gustave,” Maelle admits - and for the first time in a long time she sounds like a sixteen-year-old girl again.

He slips his arm around her shoulders and tugs her in as close as she can get. 

“It’s not all bad,” he promises. “Sometimes, I think, you need to remember the darkness if you want to remember the light.”

*

As they head north the next day, a continual trudge, Gustave watches Maelle and Verso walking together up ahead. She barely reaches Verso’s shoulder, but there’s a familiar bounce in her step and an animated flurry to her hands: after their conversation the night before, she feels purposefully like Maelle all over again, like they’re back in Lumière and one of her warehouse customers has done something to provoke a dedicated rant. From the diligent way that Verso is listening to her, he doesn’t seem to mind it at all.

At Gustave's side, Monoco slows down until they’re walking side-by-side as well. After last night’s fireside antics, Gustave braces himself for what might be about to come out of his mouth next.

“You knew him,” Monoco says eventually. No small talk, then. “The other Verso?”

He fights back the threat of that old tightness in his throat, the one that still crops up every time he thinks of him. “I did. You did too?”

“He used to come here to play when they were children. Verso and his sister. They were wild things.” From the feral tone in Monoco’s voice, Gustave is very certain that’s a compliment. “Stopped eventually. When they got older. When they made… other friends.”

“Me,” Gustave clarifies. “You can say it.”

“You,” Monoco agrees. If he’s looking at Gustave, it’s hard to tell, but he shakes his shoulders off hard. “This Verso. He’s different.”

“Yes.”

“That’s important. He’s not a replacement. He’s different.” Monoco pauses and waits for Gustave to nod, as if it is very, crucially vital that Gustave understands the truth of what he’s saying. A soft, comforting glow settles in Gustave’s chest as he realises that if he messes up here, if he hurts Verso in any way, he’s going to have a whole seven-foot of furious gestral hunting him down for sport: it’s actually a relief, in its own twisted way. “His own man.”

Gustave thinks of the gut-punch of Verso walking back to their fireside after their visit to the gestral village: his hair dyed and his scar gone, and the determined look on his face as he promised to turn himself into an echo of the past for him. Even now, after they’ve talked it through and Verso’s old scars are right back where Verso wants them, that new memory lingers. An open wound in his heart.

“I won’t let anything happen to him,” Gustave says. It might not be what Monoco’s asking, but he thinks it’s what he needs to hear. “Verso and I…. It’s messy. I know that, believe me, I know that. Saying we have ‘history’ doesn’t even cover it.”

Monoco grunts in return. At the very least, it isn’t a dismissive grunt. It sounds like he’s listening. It might even sound like he’s approving of it.

“But we know where we’re going, I think. We know the destination. Now we just need to, you know… get there.” He trails off and scratches at the back of his neck, a frown on his face. Is that true? With the way Verso watches him, cautious and adoring, he’s always assumed that the end goal is clear if they can ever make their way there.

‘Are you his yet?’ echoes in his mind again.

Yet.

An inevitability.

But going up against the Paintress with half of a vague plan and a backlog of missing details plants quiet seeds of doubt in his mind about what ‘after’ looks like for the two of them. For there to be an ‘after’ for them, they both need to survive whatever’s waiting for them in Old Lumière - and there are times, when Verso settles in the silence, that Gustave isn’t sure if that’s his plan.

For now, Monoco gives him a nudge to his arm that’s almost strong enough to knock him off his feet. “Fine. But if you hurt him, I’ll feed you to a boucheclier,” Monoco finally intones.

Gustave nods in approval. “Don’t worry,” he confirms, “If I do anything to deserve it, I’ll feed me to one myself.”

He's not sure what's stranger: getting romantic advice from a gestral, or finding out that it actually helps.

*

It’s a ridiculous hour, closer to morning than night, but Gustave can’t sleep - after days of travel, Old Lumière is only a short distance away, along with whatever they’re expecting to find there. 

He knows that Verso’s laid out his version of the plan for the group: they’re hunting for the Paintress’s Heart somewhere deep in Old Lumière. When they find it, they'll destroy it, so they can get closer to the Monolith and take out the real thing. Gustave had listened as Verso outlined it for Lune, and it’s the closest thing to a plan that they have.

That doesn’t explain why he feels so much like bait.

After tossing and turning under the starlight and the faraway gleam of the Monolith, he finally pushes himself up and slips away from the others. If he’s going to be awake, he might as well make himself useful. He brings his tools with him and finds a spot on a small rock away from the group. Perching on the edge of the rock, he starts to focus on his arm.

It’s been playing up since the beach, or maybe since entering this canvas at all. Yes, the overcharge still works - thank god - and, yes, the rest of his arm still functions as usual, but after spending so long in the abyss being able to rely on reworking the chroma when needed, it feels like something vital is missing. He’s been doing his best to keep it from Verso and the others, to hide the frustration, but being unable to affect any of this canvas’s chroma feels like a constant reminder that he isn’t really part of it.

He sighs and tweaks one or two parts he’s already tweaked several times already, tightening gears and fiddling with wires. Eventually, when it's ready, he holds his hand over one of his tools, shakes off any tension in his shoulders, and tries again.

It starts easily enough. Red electricity crackles through the arm, building slowly - and from there it should be simple. The tool in question is a small set of pliers: he should be able to change it to a screwdriver, then change it back. Small. Simple. Easy.

The charge builds slowly, electricity starting to fizzle through the arm, an awareness of the chroma around him and how all he needs to do is will it to make it reshape itself how he wants.

But, instead, it twists. Inverts.

The only chroma he can feel is part of him, running through his veins, settling in his chest, flowing through every paintstroke that makes him what he is. And when he pulls on it, when he thinks of willing it into a new shape, all that comes is pain. It lances up his arms, refusing to stay constrained within the metal one, straight through the core of him like it’s stripping the very marrow of his bones. The golden glow of his skin starts to fizzle like boiling water.

His breathing runs wild, ragged, as he tries to get control of it. If he can only latch onto the chroma of this canvas, not himself - if he can only calibrate it right, then maybe - maybe - 

“Gustave, that’s enough,” Verso’s voice interrupts. “Make it stop.”

He grits his teeth and forces himself to shut it down, though the red electricity hums through his metallic arm practically in protest as it winds down with nowhere to go. The stinging pain in his bones remains, screaming at him, demanding action.

“Make it stop,” Verso snaps again, as the sparks slowly start to fade.

Verso’s footsteps are rushed. Hurried. He rushes in and drops down to one knee in front of Gustave - and grabs hold of the sparking arm to look at it. Red sparks shoot at Verso's hand in response but he barely even flinches.

“What were you thinking?” It isn’t only Verso’s voice that’s shaking. It’s his hands, too, as they brush over Gustave’s arm like he’s trying to find out what happened by touch alone. “Gustave. What was that?”

“I was trying to get it to work,” Gustave admits, but he’s breathless and dazed. “I thought if I focused enough I’d be able to target it - we’re arriving in Old Lumière tomorrow. We need every advantage we can get.”

“What ‘advantage’ are we going to have if you repaint yourself all over camp?”

He drops his hold on Gustave’s arm, still resting on one knee in front of him where Gustave is sitting on one of the rocks near camp. Before Gustave can say anything, Verso’s hand hooks around the back of his neck and drags him down so he can rest their foreheads together. It's not soft or tender: it’s as if he’s trying to transfer what he’s saying directly from his head to Gustave’s. Osmosis alone.

“I can’t keep you safe if you insist on putting yourself in harm’s way.” Verso’s frustration might be growled through those words, and his hand on the back of Gustave’s neck is firm enough in its desperation that it’s starting to hurt - but Verso’s other hand, that one is tracing the spider-web cracks in the chroma along Gustave’s human arm. The cracks are no worse than they were the day before, or the day before that, but they’re there all the same; a forever-symbol of the other canvas and his broken, foreign chroma. “I’m doing all I can. Work with me here.”

Gustave’s metal hand is still crackling with the last dying gasp of red sparks as he raises it up. He threads his fingers through Verso’s hair, the messy black dye already thankfully starting to give up and allow his white to come back through. Carefully, he pushes some of it away from his face, and he wishes he knew the right thing to say here.

The way that Verso watches him, it’s a lot - but this? This is so much more than watching.

There’s something broken underneath it all. Something desperate, as if Gustave is slipping back out of this canvas and might vanish altogether if Verso takes his eyes off of him.

Did the other Verso watch him like this, all those years ago? Or is this something new, a decades-deep mania and pain that threads through this Verso and this Verso only?

It’s getting easier and easier to tell the two of them apart.

Gustave straightens up and hears the small sound of complaint that’s buried in the back of Verso’s throat. He ignores it, entirely, to press his lips against Verso’s forehead. He lingers there, just breathing him in, waiting for him to settle.

“I’m okay,” he murmurs eventually, letting those words sink into Verso’s skin. “It was stupid, and it was an accident, but I’m okay.”

He pulls back enough to watch Verso - still not quite meeting his eyes, back to focusing on the paint-cracks of his skin instead. Reluctantly, Verso’s grasp on the back of his neck relaxes until it’s just resting there, his palm against Gustave’s nape.

“Tomorrow,” Verso says, interrupting the silence like it’s been crowding out his own thoughts, “Whatever happens, just listen to what I tell you to do. Trust me.”

There’s that feeling again. Unease.

Bait.

“It’d be easier to listen if you told me the whole plan,” Gustave points out.

“The heart of the Paintress. We’re going to find it. And we’re going to destroy it,” Verso says, a pretty repetition of exactly what he’d recited to the others. “She’s my mother, Gustave. I might not really be her son, but she’s still my mother. And I know what it means for a Painter to get lost in a canvas. I need to help her get out of here.” Verso meets his eyes again, finally, and Gustave wishes he knew how to read everything that’s lost on his face.

But Verso’s hand is moving. It shifts from the back of Gustave’s neck, down his front, and comes to rest against his chest. His palm against Gustave’s heart.

Gustave rests his hand over Verso’s wrist, a gentle grasp to keep him close. In another life, they’re so close to one another that he could have leaned in to close the distance. He might have been able to remind himself of what Verso tastes like when he needs comfort.

Tonight, his own heart thudding, there’s only one thing he can ask. “What is her heart, Verso? What is it we’re looking for?”

Verso holds his gaze too easily, too calmly.

A half-smile forces its way onto his face, and Gustave doesn’t trust it for a damn second.

“I guess we’ll find out. Tomorrow. For tonight, you have to rest. No more playing games with your chroma.”

But sleep, when it comes, is fitful.

*

They’re not in Old Lumière for long before everything starts to fall apart.

It starts with a building crumbling under Monoco’s enthusiasm. Their party split neatly into pieces.

Monoco, Sciel, and Lune. Verso, Maelle, and Gustave. Poor Noco trailing slowly in their wake.

There’s something crawling at the back of Gustave’s neck, right where Verso’s palm had rested so gently the night before. A sense of unease. A promise that they’re not walking back from whatever happens next. Whatever it is, it’ll be permanent.

Maelle is enjoying the exploration. Perhaps, any other time, Gustave might have enjoyed it too: the ruined husk of their fractured city to explore. Endless details. The other half of their own broken home.

“Speaking of home,” Maelle asks as they brush off yet another battle, “Where’d you live in Lumière?”

Verso sounds as distracted as Gustave feels right now, the words drifting from him as his eyes search their surroundings. “Above a bakery near the centre. Angelique’s Boulangerie. I ate there every morning. I wonder if it’s still there.”

Maelle grins. “It’s called Mathilde’s now. When this is over, you should go and visit. The two of you,” she says, before adding with a sly glance at Gustave from the corner of her eye, “Maybe Mathilde will agree to rent out the apartment to you both.”

He catches eyes with Verso without meaning to - and there’s a flash, just for a moment, of what a life after all of this might look: the two of them in that warm apartment, sunlight through the window, the scent of croissants drifting up from the bakery below. Verso wrapped tight against his back, Verso's breath against the shell of his ear as they watch Lumière lazily wake up from their sun-dappled window, preparing to face the rest of the sleepy day together.

We’re working on it, he thinks again, and is perfectly sure he’s blushing. With his tell-tale rich chroma, he’s sure it’s even more obvious than he wants it to be.

“When this is over,” Verso agrees mildly, not breaking eye contact with Gustave even if he’s answering Maelle.

His stomach is tying itself in knots and, merde, it’s a relief when the next set of nevrons comes along.

It’s less of a relief when Verso vanishes in the midst of the chaos.

He can’t have gone far. Gustave can still sense the weight of him - that piercing gaze, hiding somewhere out of sight. His skin prickles and he wishes he knew why: they’re walking into the unknown and the only relief is that, out there, Verso must have a reason for it.

“C’mon,” he tells Maelle, “We must be getting close.”

He shepherds her behind him, her mostly-white hair falling haphazardly by her face. Maelle’s glee in their exploration has vanished quickly; the rest of their journey is conducted in silence, punctuated only by Noco’s occasional delighted remark.

It isn’t long before their destination looms in front of them: dark, enormous, unforgiving.

“The Dessendre Manor,” Maelle breathes, unbidden. Memories bubbling under the surface. “I know this place.”

Gustave might not know it on sight, but he knows it by description: Verso’s high-pressured, lonely childhood spent in its halls. A world of luxury turned into an empty, rambling prison.

“The Paintress’s Heart,” Gustave agrees. They pause together, staring, by the old Expeditioner’s Flag planted right outside the gates. He glances over at Maelle. “Verso must think it’s in there, somehow. She’s in there.”

“Maman,” Maelle says, her voice quiet and uncertain. “She’s who I came in here for.”

“Both of us,” Gustave agrees. “You sent me in here to help you get her out, remember?”

She frowns and combs her fingers through some of that wild, white hair. “I didn’t think it through,” she says. “Bringing you here. With Verso. I didn’t realise…” She trails off and leaves that thought unfinished.

“Hey.” Gustave rests his hand on her shoulder. “I’m here now. And whatever happens next? I’m glad, I’m so glad, I got the chance to be your brother too,” he says. “Alicia?”

She tilts her head, staring up at the Mansion in front of them. “I think I prefer Maelle,” she breathes.

And isn’t that a whole new problem?

“You could wait here,” Gustave offers, already knowing the exact reaction he’ll get. “Right by the flag. I can handle this on my own.”

The look he gets from Maelle is withering.

Right. That settles that particular suggestion. They approach the Manor together, bracing themselves for what’s to come.

Even in the darkness, the grounds are well-maintained against the Continent’s backdrop of decay and chaos: tall hedgerows, neat trees, smooth cobblestones. Unease curls in Gustave’s stomach and he gestures for Maelle to stay a half-step behind him - he’s sure she ignores him, but he holds his arm out anyway, shielding her from the unknown as best he can.

A few steps forward is all it takes after that before they’re there: standing before the tall, imposing doors of the Dessendre Family Home.

Gustave’s breath catches when he hears movement inside.

And, slowly, the doors swing open. They open outwards on their own accord, pushed by an unknown force: in the open doorway, floating, unseeing, defiant, she’s there.

The Paintress.

Aline.

Half her body is missing, drifting away in lost chroma - her own face is a black void that calls to him like the abyss of his broken canvas, an empty nothingness where Verso’s mother should be staring back at him. Yet, he feels the weight of her gaze. Piercing. Intent. First on him, then on Maelle. It’s like she sucks the air from the canvas with the force of her presence alone.

With her arms outstretched, she beckons them inside.

He glances at Maelle - there’s unspoken horror on her face, the sight of her mother decayed and rotting like this, but she gives the faintest of nods.

They push onwards. With a steady step, Gustave walks across the threshold and enters the Manor. It’s eerily familiar to the place Verso had taken him to recover after the episode on the Beach - same-same but different, perhaps. It’s difficult to take in the details when he doesn’t dare to take his eyes off of the spirit floating in front of them.

He steps inside. Maelle steps next.

And there’s a clatter of running footsteps as Verso reappears from the shadows, rushing inside just before the doors can slam shut in his face.

“I knew you’d open the door for them,” he snarls. Too late, the door snaps behind him - but he’s inside already. All of them are.

All of them.

Tearing his eyes from Aline, Gustave becomes aware of the other Dessendres in the Manor’s grand entrance hall. Renoir stands tall to the side of his wife, his cane clutched in his hand and his weary gaze locked on his son. Deeper in the room, hidden by a porcelain mask, strange, monochrome eyes stare mournfully at them all: it takes Gustave a moment, her face twisted by her desaturated chroma and the painful burns, but before long it clicks. Alicia, this canvas’s version of her.

It’s a painful family reunion.

“Verso, what is this?” Renoir asks, his voice rumbling through the whole hall. “What is your plan? Bringing them here?”

“I knew she’d open the door for them,” Verso spits. “And then I could-”

“You could what? Rip our family apart? What happens to them if you succeed, Verso? What happens to him?”

Verso’s hand twitches. “He’ll be fine,” he snaps. “He’s different. His chroma. It’ll survive.”

This is going to bubble over at any moment, Gustave knows. There’s violence teetering on the edge - the air in the room feels like it’s trembling and Verso must be a split-second away from conjuring his blades.

And, through it all, the Paintress is staring only at him.

No eyes. No face.

Staring.

“Are you really here? Is this… Is this real? Are you real?” the Paintress asks. Her voice is half-wild. Lost. “Or is this another of his tricks? A cheap one at that…”

“Aline.” Renoir breaks away from Verso to reach for his wife. “My love. You have to rest.”

“No. No. You are not my Renoir. And that is not my Verso.” Her voice shakes. There’s madness scattered throughout it - her mind as gone as the rest of her, floating, her chroma lost in slow destruction of the canvas she loves. “But him… That one. I feel it. I can feel him.”

She’s looking at him again. The non-existent, empty stare of a woman who doesn’t have eyes to stare with.

It’s his chest she’s staring at.

His heart.

“Mme Dessendre,” Gustave says. “We haven’t had the pleasure. I’m-”

“Verso?”

“No, it’s…”

The words die in his mouth as she floats towards him, her movements too smooth to be real. Too perfect. Her hair floats around her head like it’s stuck in a single moment, and he’s left staring, helplessly, into the abyss of her face.

Would this have happened to Verso? he thinks, unable to stop it, If I’d kept him for any longer? Would he have lost himself too?

Her hand drifts towards him until it’s hovering inches from his heart. “Verso. My Verso. He’s in here,” she murmurs, lost in her own madness, half of her mind a long-gone casualty of her war with her husband. Her fingers brush against his chest, and he’s too frozen in shock to even step back. “Right here.”

It’s enough to silence the parallel argument between Verso and Renoir. There’s a barking cacophony of sounds - confusion from Renoir, panic from Verso, denial from Maelle - as they try to work out what she’s doing. But Gustave knows.

It tears through him. The tug in his heart, his chroma responding to a stronger Painter as she calls to it - Verso’s soul hiding where it rests like a living bird inside his chest, now flayed open for her pigmented attention.

“Maman?” Maelle asks behind him, scared and quiet, in the Paintress’s thoughtful silence before all hell breaks loose.

Gustave has enough time to see the flashing purple of Verso’s blades and hear the responding snap of Renoir’s cane, before the Paintress’s hand plunges deep into his heart.

He feels it: his chroma parting like rippling water before her mourning, desperate fingers; his pigment tensing in response to the invasion; Verso’s soul, fragile and scared, hiding deep inside his chest.

His breath stops. Time stops.

Is that real?

The Paintress is staring at him, her mind too gone to think too hard about what she’s doing; her desperate, hungry grasp is slicing through his chroma to get to the core of what she wants so badly, her lost son so nearly in her grasp. 

But the part of Verso that he carries with him isn’t something that can be taken; it isn’t something that can be passed around and held. It’s him.

In the background, Gustave thinks he can hear Verso and Maelle screaming. Shouting. Threats and pleas and promises.

With the Paintress's hand sinking wrist-deep in his chest, rippling chroma around her wrist, he thinks he might be dying.

“Aline,” he chokes.

His hand starts to crackle with red, frantic sparks.

He can feel his own chroma. He can feel the violation of her hand in his chest as her grasp tries to take the only part of the old Verso that he still has left.

His arm charges. His air grows short. He thinks of Verso’s stories of his mother, stern but wise, demanding but talented, and hopes to god that he’s doing the right thing.

Arm cracking, he wields his own chroma, what little of it he can spare - and he forces it into the abyss where Aline’s face should be.

No, not her face. Not just her face. Her mind.

The pain lances through him. It shoots through his bones in the same way it had the night before: he can feel it, ice-cold, as it scrapes through the core of him, a counter-point to the claw-like stab of the Paintress’s hand in his chest. Petals threaten to lift from his skin.

Somewhere, far away, he thinks Verso is shouting his name.

It doesn’t matter.

This needs to end.

He focuses on the pain. Begs it to listen to him, as he narrows it down to the metal of his arm, the one part he can sacrifice all over again - and, under his control, the chroma begins to drift.

His arm's chroma drifts to her mind in a slow flurry of black petals, stripping his metal arm pigment by pigment as it goes. Over the rest of him, the cracks in his pigment start to deepen like dry earth in an earthquake. He grits his teeth through the pain and focuses only on his image of Aline: how she should be, how Verso had promised him she was, not the monster that has haunted Lumière but a pained, mourning mother.

The chroma warps, grabbed by the Paintress’s power to help guide him, and slowly a face starts to form in that void: sad eyes, half-crazed, and her mouth half-open as if she’s sobbing or screaming.

Red sparks of electricity fly from his mechanical arm like a final cry for help as it starts to vanish, layer by layer, feeding the Paintress.

Eventually, time rushes to catch up with them and he becomes aware of Verso again - suddenly behind him, grabbing him by the shoulders, yanking him back. The Paintress’s hand slips free from his chest, drenched in the paint-blurred colours of his pigment, while the hole she'd ripped in his chroma mercifully closes again. Gustave and Verso stumble backwards, legs tangled, until they fall to the ground in a bruised, smeared mess.

Maelle steps in front of them, sword drawn - her eyes blazing as she stares up at her Maman as the Paintress stares down at her in turn. No, not the Paintress any more. Aline, the abyss of her face filled in with the stolen warmth of Gustave’s canvas. Cracks of paint show all over her face, a shimmering mess.

Her hands shake. She looks down at the mess in front of her, the boys in a tangled heap, her own daughter defiant and terrified.

Whispering into his hair as he clings onto him, hollowed and desperate, Gustave becomes aware of Verso’s voice: begging, over and over. “Not him,” Verso whispers. “Please. Stop.”

Gustave cradles the stump of his arm against his chest: most of the metal is gone now. The top edge remains, but it fades into rippling nothing by the time it reaches his elbow: only a confused blur of wiped chroma remains.

Staring down at them, the glow from Verso’s canvas in her eyes, Aline looks down at the mess she’s made. Her face is filled in. Her mind is back.

And before her lies the wreckage of all she’s done: Gustave sees her take in the shrapnel she’s left behind. Her broken daughter. Her copied son. And the chroma she’s leeched from the man who carries his soul in his heart.

At her side, Renoir reaches for her hand, cautiously. Slowly. “Aline,” he murmurs, soft enough that it’s hard for Gustave to match him up with the man who slaughtered their Expedition on the beach.

She doesn’t look at him. She only stares with newly painted eyes at the triptych tableau of her own destruction.

“I think,” she rasps. Her voice is broken. She's only spoken madness for decades, “I need to speak with my husband.”

“My love, I’m here. I'm always here,” he promises.

“My real husband,” she clarifies. She doesn't do him the courtesy of looking in his direction.

There isn’t enough chroma in the canvas to mask the dagger-slash pain of Renoir’s reaction to that: beyond a gut-punch, it’s sheer, forgetful brutality.

With his body aching to the very core of his chroma, and with Verso clinging to him so tightly it hurts, Gustave can’t bring himself to offer a word of comfort. “Please,” he wheezes, eyes locked with Aline’s. He can’t work out what he’s asking for. Anything. “Please.”

“Maman,” Maelle breathes, still standing like a protective barrier between her mother and her two strange brothers on the ground. “Papa, he’s going to destroy it. He’ll destroy everything.”

Her mother’s hand drifts to her face. When she strokes softly across Maelle’s cheek, a gentle mother’s touch, she leaves a smear of Gustave’s chroma behind. “I won’t let that happen,” she promises.

“You need to leave them. Everyone needs to leave them alone,” Maelle pleads. “They’re happy. He’s going to be happy. They can have a happy ending here, you see.”

“He’s not our Verso,” Aline intones. “I tried. I tried so hard, but it was never right.”

Gustave’s hand clenches on top of Verso’s arm where Verso keeps holding onto him. At this angle, he can’t see Verso’s face, but he can imagine it and that’s bad enough.

“First I need to speak to your father, Alicia. And I’ll speak with you soon.”

“Outside the canvas?”

“I’ll speak with you soon,” is all Aline will say.

She floats backwards, her body the Paintress while her mind is Aline, and Gustave feels the stab as she stares at him and Verso again. He tries, ineffectively, to scramble to his feet, but Verso’s arms only tighten around him.

“Please,” she rasps. “Accept the Dessendre Family’s apologies, as inadequate as they are. My apologies. This was never what I wanted. I wanted my family back; I needed my son back. But I see him, now.” Gustave’s chest aches where she’s raked through it, knives like daggers as she searched for all he had left. “I see him in you.”

“I’ll carry him,” he promises, one mourner to another. His fingers press against his chest - and if the pain makes him want to scream, he doesn’t know if it’s physical any more. “Always.”

Her rich, chroma-filled eyes stay on him and Verso, helplessly connected, until she turns away - a portal of rippling chroma appears at a wave of her hand. When she vanishes through it, barely a moment has passed before the painted version of Renoir follows after her, helpless in her wake.

Silence falls in the hall of the Manor.

Against his neck, Gustave feels the heavy puff of Verso’s breath; clammy and thick and heated. Verso isn’t sobbing, not quite there, but his grip on Gustave is so tight it might be bruising.

There are words trapped in those heavy breaths.

“Why would you do that?” he whispers against Gustave’s neck, a question that doesn't need an answer. “What am I supposed to do if something happens to you?” Verso rests against him, clinging tight, as Gustave tries to shuffle around to get his good arm around him. 

One last whisper filters through: “What am I supposed to do now?”

*

They sit on the floor of the Manor for what might be hours.

It feels like days.

Maelle, her sword dismissed, opens the doors to let the others in. Lune, Sciel and Monoco tumble inside in a chaotic blur of chatter and unspent energy: they’re ready for a fight, but all that’s left is the wreckage of one.

Somewhere in the chaos, the painted Alicia slips away into the depths of the Manor. They should follow her, Gustave thinks hazily, and check that she’s alright - but he’s not sure if he can move right now. One arm curls tightly around Verso, the remains of the other one rests tight against his own chest, and he thinks he might have forgotten how to stand. Or talk. Or function. He feels as useless as he felt on the beach all those weeks ago. Frozen in shock.

Quietly, Verso traces the cracks in his skin: they’re deeper now, forming golden gouges like old oil paint up his remaining arm. It must be on his face as well, Gustave thinks. Maybe that’s why Verso won’t look him in the eyes.

The others are talking over their heads: Maelle’s filling the others in on what just happened with Aline and Renoir. There’s a solid, purposeful tone in her voice now: something stronger than her years. Gustave thinks it must be Alicia talking now, the red having vanished from her hair entirely in the course of that encounter, and he doesn’t know what that means for the girl he raised in Lumière. Who is she now? Who are any of them?

Verso stirs first. “We should move,” he murmurs, almost losing the words as he presses his lips against the side of Gustave’s head through his hair: it’s almost too much to be a kiss. Too aggressive.

“We should talk,” Gustave clarifies.

His voice is nothing but a rasp. Maybe ‘talking’ is ambitious.

They climb to their feet anyway - and the others start to pay attention to them again, no longer giving them the benefit of that gentle shield of privacy. Even standing now, Verso’s hand won’t leave him: he stays connected like a lifeline, his hand lingering on the back of Gustave’s shoulders like he needs the contact to prove they’re both still there. Merde, Gustave needs that contact too.

Sciel is the first to offer a smile. “Maelle says you fought the Paintress,” she says.

“Fighting. Is that what we’re calling it?” Gustave asks.

Leniently, Maelle tilts her head to the side. “It sounded better than… whatever just happened.”

“Your arm,” Lune cuts in, gesturing towards the scraps that remain.

“Ah. Yes.” Gustave looks down at it as if noticing it for the first time - he’s been thinking about it since the moment he lost it, but he can’t stand the thought of them worrying about it. “I needed to use the chroma to fill in the gaps in the Paintress’s mind. Everything she’d lost over all these years. And I can’t manipulate chroma from this canvas, so… My arm. I thought that was better than sacrificing anything else.”

The sound that Verso makes beside him is more like a growl than a grunt. His hand is tightening up on Gustave’s shoulder, so Gustave nudges him with his elbow like that might in any way help.

“Besides. My apprentices can make me a new one,” he says, much lighter than he feels, “Once we get back to Lumière.”

A new one. It won’t be the same. 

It won’t be from his old canvas, it won’t be a gift painted into being by his old Verso, it won’t shine in the same way. It might have been metal, but it had been a part of him for so long. Its absence, a phantom weight, feels like a whole new loss to mourn - but he can’t let that show, not on the surface.

“Back to Lumière,” Sciel repeats. “Is that it? Are we really done?”

Maelle’s the one that shakes her head. 

“No,” she says quietly. “We’re not there yet.”

*

Verso barely talks. His hands linger like a constant tether, whether it's on his shoulder or his hip or the small of his back, but Verso himself is withdrawn: a mournful presence at his side.

They leave the Manor. There are times when Gustave isn’t sure if he can keep walking, the chroma of his body itching and screaming at its loss, but the others are there with him. They keep him going.

Old Lumiere is a fractured mess, its buildings ripped into pieces, but Monoco helps them to find one that’s mostly still intact. He seems to take great joy in making sure it’s fully secured from the roaming nevrons: multiple sets of feet go flying, but before long he’s secured them lodgings for the night. Even squatting in a dusty old building with a dubious safety record is preferable to spending a night in the Dessendre Family Home, Gustave thinks.

They settle down; they make dinner; they all pretend that they’re not watching the Monolith on the horizon and wondering if the shining number on its front is ever going to change.

This building must once have been a shop of some kind, perhaps a clothing boutique. There’s a set of apartments on the higher floors. Monoco makes himself cosy for the night on the stairwell, more of a nest than a bed, and tells them he’ll keep watch with Noco. Poised for action, watching the doorway, he looks more like a guard-dog than a gestral.

They split up. The girls in one apartment, the boys in another. There’s a moment where it seems like Maelle might want to join them, desperate to keep an eye on Gustave after the hell they’ve been through, but Sciel catches her, a soft hand on her arm. “Why don’t you bunk in with us?” she suggests instead. “I’ve got a couple of new combat moves I need to show you anyway.”

It’s transparent enough that the only way Maelle falls for it is willingly - but she relents after only a tight hug with Gustave, her arms clinging so tightly it’s like she’s trying to absorb what little chroma her mother left behind. “Be careful,” she pleads, her hand hovering over his heart: the aching, invisible wound where the Paintress nearly stole everything.

He doesn’t make any promises, only a wry smile that hurts his face, and before long they’re left like this: him and Verso, alone, in a dusty apartment in Old Lumiere.

The silence doesn’t last long.

“So…” Gustave starts.

“Don’t. Don’t even try right now,” Verso says. “I’m so mad at you.”

“Wait. You’re mad at me?”

The look Verso shoots at him could wither crops and dry up lakes. He paces to the other side of the apartment - and, after so many hours with Verso glued to his side, Gustave feels the absence. He’d laugh at himself if he could find the energy.

“You could have died,” Verso snaps. “Self-sacrificing bullshit. We get you back after decades, and you decide to throw all of it away? After I told you not to?”

“What else was I supposed to do?” Gustave asks. “She was going to kill us all. You know it.”

“You could have trusted me, like I told you.” Verso stares long and hard at Gustave’s chest, at the still-aching spot where the Paintress had stabbed inside and scraped at his very core. “I had a plan.”

“And what would have happened if your ‘plan’ worked, Verso? You ran through those doors planning on killing Aline yourself, am I right? Forcing her out of the canvas? Tell me: what would have happened next in this grand plan of yours?”

The silence speaks loud enough for them, even if Verso won’t answer him: in the gap between them, they can both see it. The canvas emptying under Renoir’s hand, nothing but petals left behind. Gustave has lived in the shattered remains of one ruined canvas. If anything, he only hopes that Renoir would have finished the job this time around.

“You would have survived. Your chroma’s different; the gommage wouldn’t have touched you. You would’ve been safe.” Even as he’s speaking, scrambling to justify it, Verso is twitchy. He moves restlessly through the small, ruined apartment, like a wolf cornered in a cage. “But she’s my mother. I needed her to stop. I needed her to go home.”

Gustave gives a frustrated sigh and closes in, a step or two at a time. The distance between them shouldn’t feel so vast in this dusty, cloistered little space, but it still makes him feel like he’s intruding on private property. As he gets close enough, Verso slows down. He stops pacing eventually.

“And you?” Gustave prompts, barely a whisper. He knows the answer; he needs to hear him say it.

Verso meets his eyes. That unreadable expression. Those pained eyes, just waiting for the next kick. Verso swallows hard and Gustave waits it out, wondering what Verso’s going to give him: a truth or a lie. Or something polished enough to be neither one.

But the words, when they come, are broken.

“I needed it to stop,” Verso rasps. “The canvas. The fighting. The Dessendres. All of it.”

Gustave nods. He steps closer again, until he can reach out with the arm he has left. Their hands brush against one another; Verso flinches, at first, the kind of reaction that a blink could miss, before his hand clamps firmly around Gustave’s.

“I’m old,” Verso admits, a near hysterical whisper of half-laughter on his lips, “Gustave, I’m so old.”

“I know,” Gustave agrees. He looks up at Verso and takes in the sight of him: the scars, the dirt, the blood, the bruises. The pain of today’s battle is piled on top of the weight of decades. Gustave tilts his head to the side all the same, and adds, “I’m older.”

Verso uses their joined hands to pull Gustave a little bit closer. His other hand slips onto Gustave’s hip - careful, at first, like he’s waiting to be told to remove it. When that doesn’t happen, the grip becomes firmer.

“And I’m tired,” Verso adds.

Gustave looks up at him and he can see that too: the strain of endless decades on the Continent, a wild, unending battle. He doesn’t know if he’s enough to ease the weight of it. He does know that he’s going to try anyway.

“I’m tireder,” he says, just for the twitch at the corner of Verso’s mouth.

“All of this seemed a lot simpler a few months ago,” Verso whispers. “I’ve been helping the Expeditions for years. Trying to get her out of the Canvas. And then you showed up.”

“I’m inconvenient," Gustave agrees, as if he isn’t distracted by the slow creep of Verso’s hand from his hip around to his back, slowly pulling them slower.

Verso shakes his head. “You’re impossible,” he corrects.

Gustave breaks his hand from Verso’s grasp purely so he can reach up and rest it on his cheek instead - and he feels it, the way that Verso’s immediate response is to lean into his touch. Starved for contact. 

“There are centuries ahead of us, Verso,” Gustave breathes. He feels them every day, stretching out for eternity: the never-ending rise-and-fall of their sun, as long as this canvas survives. He looks at Verso, searching his face, as he tries to imagine what this world might have looked like if his plan had worked: cold and empty and without him. “I want to spend them with you.”

He isn’t imagining the way Verso’s breathing stutters to a stop. This version of him isn’t nearly as hard to read as he likes to imagine, but even here Gustave is lost. He holds his gaze, pleading.

And Verso nods, just barely.

“That means I need you here,” Gustave urges, “I need there to be a ‘here’ for us.”

Verso closes his eyes and leans into the solid heat of Gustave’s hand on his cheek. His face looks wrecked: ruined, like something might be breaking inside of him.

“Verso,” Gustave breathes. "Please."

He waits long, aching seconds for Verso to open his eyes again, blinking softly in the half-light of this ruined apartment. They don’t speak, drinking each other in instead. Eventually, he brushes the hair back from Verso’s hair, fading dye against his fingertips, and then he closes the gap between their lips.

Finally.

Verso groans like he’s been stabbed when Gustave kisses him, like it’s a slice that leaves him bleeding. For a moment, he hardly moves. He lets Gustave kiss him, pleading lips barely parted, as he stands there in static shock.

But when it clicks, when he activates, it’s like several decades of longing all at once: one of Verso’s hands slides to the small of Gustave’s back and drags him close. The other slips its fingers through Gustave’s hair like it’s just been waiting for permission, coming to cup the back of his head and keep him in place.

They’re standing in the wreckage of Old Lumière, in a building that’s on its way to falling to pieces.

Out there in the canvas, Aline and Renoir are deciding their fate.

Across the hall, Maelle might not be Maelle any more, and Gustave still doesn’t understand everything that that might mean.

But right here, right in this moment, it’s Gustave and Verso alone - and Gustave is sure he can taste the outline of forever on the gentle curve of Verso’s lips.

Chapter Text

.after

They kiss, and it’s so much sweeter than oblivion.

Verso had been ready for the end. He’d been prepared for whatever sacrifices were necessary to save his mother. When they’d arrived in Old Lumière, he had braced himself for whatever happened next, fully aware that he was likely leading yet another Expedition directly to their own demise. He’d prepared himself for that.

He hadn’t prepared himself for this.

He hadn't prepared himself for the promise of forever and the hopeful, open press of Gustave’s mouth. His fingers clench in Gustave’s hair and Verso takes this moment while he has it: if Gustave is going to come to his senses at any second, he needs to taste him while he can. He needs to make those quiet, pretty sounds tumble from his mouth again, again, and again.

But when they finally part, panting, Gustave is still there. Still holding him. His face holds the fault-line fractures of his missing chroma and his absent arm rests between them like an accusation he refuses to level in the right direction, but he’s there.

Gustave’s head drops to rest against Verso’s shoulder. Verso breathes in the scent of him, the turpentine horror that Aline left behind, and keeps his arms tight around him as if he might dissolve into petals if Verso falters at the exact wrong moment.

He loses track of how long they stand there. Holding Gustave like this, feeling the weight of him, it’s like dancing again - quiet music flows through his head, and new compositions spring to life like he hasn’t been able to imagine for years.

“Verso,” Gustave asks eventually: his voice sounds tired already, sleepy like he might drift off right there without either of them moving. “Can we go to bed? Can I -” His head stays where it is on Verso’s shoulder. Exhausted. Strung-out. He sighs heavily and Verso feels that heated huff of air against his neck and the faintest accidental brush of his moustache. “Can I just hold you? For the night?”

Verso barely needs to answer.

They’re in the hollowed-out wreckage of an Old Lumière apartment. Technically, there’s a decaying bed frame in the corner, but they bypass it in favour of their old bedrolls spread out on the floor. They settle down together. Verso ends up with Gustave’s good arm wrapped tight around his shoulders, Verso’s head resting on Gustave’s chest; he rests above his heart, right where he can hear the steady beat beneath his ear and imagine the ghost of his old self, living on with him forever. For the first time in a long while, the old, scarring jealousy doesn’t spring up at the thought.

His hand rests, butterfly soft, on top of Gustave's sternum through the soft material of his shirt. There’s no sign of destruction here: no wound, no blood, no bandages. Nothing to show for the tableau of horror that Verso’s own mother has put him through. He can't stop seeing it: the unnatural horror of her hand sinking deep into Gustave's chest, scrambling to rip something out of him.

“Did it hurt?” Verso whispers, as his fingers trace over a wound that isn’t there.

Gustave’s breath tickles against the top of his head. “I survived,” he says. It’s not quite an answer.

He raises his head simply to press a kiss against Gustave’s chest through the soft shirt he’s sleeping in. “Never again,” he whispers, a vow to the canvas itself. “You don’t do anything like that again, you hear me?” He tries not to let himself imagine the other way this night could have ended: the slow, gradual dissolution as the wave of the gommage took hold, Gustave left behind in the broken scraps of yet another canvas.

There’s still time. Somewhere out there, Aline and Renoir are deciding their fates. Everything that Verso planned for could still come true, and there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it any more.

With Gustave holding him like he’s something worthy of his attention, Verso now knows how to fear the reality of getting everything he wants. He closes his eyes: throughout the night, sleep doesn’t come easily, but he’s lulled by the rush of Gustave’s breathing beneath him and the welcoming heat of Gustave’s arm around his shoulders.

Restful hours pass.

And they wake up to a hammering on the door.

It’s barely morning outside as stringy, weak sunlight tries to work its way through the open windows of the apartment. At best, Verso would estimate they’ve managed to sleep for a few hours, nothing more. He’s still pillowed on Gustave’s chest; at the sound of the knocking, Gustave’s arm tightens around him and the sleepy groan he makes is ridiculous.

The knocking doesn’t stop. It’s joined by a voice, Lune’s, and that’s enough to propel Gustave out of their bedroll. As much as he’d like to lie there and watch him move, Gustave’s rich but cracked pigment and healthy glow standing out so much more in the bleakness of Old Lumière, Verso rolls over and starts to get to his feet as well. His joints ache.

At the door, Lune and Sciel look ragged.

“What-”

“The Monolith,” Lune pants.

“What happened to it?” Gustave asks, sleep vanishing fast from his voice.

“It’s gone.”

From the window, the truth is obvious. 

There is no dark, towering building miles in the distance. 

No glowing numbers to count their years away one-by-one. Only an empty horizon and a clear morning sky.

At the window, Verso stands and stares as he hears Gustave and Lune behind him - they’re theorising like mad, their whip-sharp minds following the strings of conjecture and hope. This could be the end, the last gasp of breath before Renoir finishes his work; or it could be the beginning, the willing withdrawal of Aline from their canvas and the promise that they’ll be left alone.

Verso’s hands clench on the windowsill and he already knows which outcome he’s hoping for. It’s not the one he would have expected even a day ago.

But in the distance, he hears arguing.

Raised voices. Shouting.

It's too far to make out the words, but the sound of it is familiar. Alicia?

“Maelle,” he checks as he turns away from the window, “Is she still with you?”

Sciel starts to look over her shoulder. “We left her in the-”

That’s enough of an answer. Unsupervised while the Monolith is missing, there’s no way Alicia would have stayed in place. Verso moves without thinking about where he’s going. He rattles down the stairs, past Monoco and Noco, out the door, and follows the faint sound of fury in the distance.

Gustave is less than a step behind him, slightly off-balance without the weight of his stolen arm, and this time Verso doesn’t even bother trying to tell him not to come: if yesterday had proved anything, it’s that Gustave isn’t interested in listening to him when it comes to the canvas or his Maelle.

They run straight towards the sound of raised voices. In the broken grounds of the Dessendre Family Home, the voices finally get loud enough that he can make out what they’re saying, and who it is that’s talking. Alicia is the only one whose fury is loud enough to carry: the pair that she’s shouting at are practically stoic in response. 

Renoir and Aline are here.

As Verso and Gustave close in, Verso gestures with his hand to tell the rest of the party to stay back. He doesn’t want to believe that Aline will hurt any of them - but the image of her hand sinking into Gustave’s chest is branded into his mind. He can’t risk it. If he could convince Esquie to grab Gustave and fly him away from here, he’d try it. There’s no time.

The argument falls silent as Verso and Gustave pull closer. In the watercolours of the early morning light, the Dessendres stand on the flagstones in front of the Manor.

Aline and Renoir Dessendre: The Curator and The Paintress were only hollow, fading dreams, but the real Painters have taken their place. Aline’s face still glows with the holy warmth of Gustave’s offered chroma; the rest of her body has been reformed in her own paint, standing true.

At Aline’s side, this Renoir Dessendre is a slighter man than Verso remembers him being, a twist of his stolen memories. He dreads to ask where his painted father has ended up, but there isn’t time for that thought: not with Renoir and Aline beckoning them closer.

“Here they are,” Aline says. “You can talk to them yourself.”

In front of Aline, Alicia is heaving for breath: Verso recognises the signs of her fighting to regain her composure, and he thinks that they must be only moments away from Alicia drawing her rapier on her own parents.

“What’s going on?” Gustave asks. He completely ignores Verso’s attempt to make him take a step back from the conversation. Of course he wants to get involved. Apparently losing one arm isn’t enough for him.

“They want to lock it away,” Alicia says. “The canvas. Just pack it up like it’s nothing and shove it somewhere that nobody can see it.”

“We’ll put it into the family vault,” Renoir corrects, his eyes only on his daughter. “It’ll be safe. Protected from sunlight so it won’t fade. Preserved perfectly. Locked away.”

“So we can’t visit it,” Alicia storms. “So we can’t stay here.”

Renoir, to his credit, doesn’t flinch. “Exactly,” he says. “Alicia, please. You know I want everything in the world for you.”

“What I want is this world. My friends are here. My life. My family.”

Verso doesn’t miss the crack on her parents’ faces. He wishes he was vindictive enough to take pleasure in it.

Gustave reaches out to place his hand on her shoulder, but she jerks away fast. “Maelle-”

“They left you, Gustave. Last time, they left you floating in nothing for years. For hundreds of years. They can’t do it again.” Alicia looks at them all with nothing but fury in her eyes. She'll fight for them, Verso realises. She'll tear the canvas apart to try and save it.

“What I did last time was wrong,” Renoir states. His gaze finally drifts to Gustave and Verso, though Verso can't stand to meet his eyes. He's looking at Gustave instead. Something unreadable flashes over Gustave’s face: hundreds of years of buried pain and rage. “I’m sorry. If I could do it over again, I would. I would handle it differently. More carefully. And perhaps- perhaps everything would have worked out in another way if I’d only had a little more grace.”

Unspeaking, Gustave shakes his head like it's a mechanical pain to do so. Verso sees him swallow hard and there’s a moment where he really thinks that Gustave is going to tell Renoir that it's okay: ever the saint, Gustave looks like he's going to absolve him of the rotten mess that started this all, as if Verso’s original memories of years spent mourning Gustave are nothing - as if the years Gustave spent imprisoned in darkness and isolation are something that can be forgiven.

Merciful in his lack of mercy, Gustave doesn’t say a thing. His mouth opens silently, before he checks himself. There’s nothing.

There's only hollow pain that no apology can undo.

In their silence, Aline speaks up. “And Verso. My Verso. I have so many regrets of my own: for the world I brought you into, all for my own comfort. I should have known better…” At her side, her husband’s hand comes to rest on her shoulder: with his silent support, she takes a breath and draws on the strength she has left.

She straightens, regally, and Verso is no longer watching his mother: he’s watching Madame Aline Dessendre, Head of the Painter’s Council, come to right her wrongs. “If you still wish it, I can offer you an ending. An undoing.”

Oblivion.

“I can unpaint you,” she offers, all emotion carefully kept from her voice.

It’s all he’s wanted since the Fracture. An end to the torment. An end to the decades of roaming this Continent. An end to the burden of knowing that he’s only ever going to be a shadow of the person he’s supposed to be. Yesterday, perhaps, he would have welcomed it with open arms.

But, today, Gustave’s hand slides into his own: wordless but present. Warm.

It would mean an end to that too.

An end to the possibilities Gustave had sketched out for him the night before, whispered in the darkness while they both reeled from all that had gone wrong.

There are centuries ahead of us , Gustave had whispered, looking at him like he was something worth looking at all on his own, I’d like to spend them with you.

Verso’s hand tightens its hold in Gustave’s grasp, a silent promise.

“Thank you,” Verso says, with a bow of his head, “But I think I’d like to stay.”

There’s a warmth in Aline's eyes that he hasn’t seen since before the Fracture or maybe even earlier - and when her gaze drops to the point where his hand rests with Gustave’s there’s no malice in it. There’s sadness and grief and regret, but none of the judgement his memories had been so afraid of. So ashamed of.

But Alicia is still shaking her head. “I want to stay,” she insists. “There’s nothing for me out there: I want to be here, with them.”

“Nothing for you?” Renoir asks. “Alicia-”

“I want to stay,” Alicia repeats, burning with ice-cold heat. “There’s nothing you can do to force me out of here.”

Renoir’s jaw clenches and the sky itself seems to darken abruptly: the morning light vanishes like there’s a storm on the horizon, dark clouds drawing in.

“Papa, no. You can’t make me leave,” Alicia pleads. “I’m not like Maman. I’m not like Verso. I won’t lose myself in it.”

At her husband’s side, Aline steps aside and holds out her arm: the air starts to swirl with chroma of her own, and the very world starts to shake. Verso can feel it tingling against his skin: the unreality as their canvas responds to the threat of three separate Painters about to wield their brush.

“Enough,” Gustave snaps - and he lets go of Verso’s hand in order to step into the middle of the fray, bodily putting himself between Maelle and her parents. “Does everything have to become a fight?”

The answer to that might be ‘Yes’. They are Dessendres after all.

And, quick as he is with a pistol and a picto, Gustave might as well be an honorary part of this family.

“No one is going to ‘win’ by slinging chroma around,” Gustave says sternly. Verso’s not quite sure if the flesh-and-blood Dessendres have ever been scolded like schoolchildren by one of their creations before. “M. Dessendre, Mme. Dessendre, thank you for your… help. You can leave the canvas now. Maelle will join you soon enough.”

“Gustave, I-” Alicia starts to object, but the firm look that Gustave gives her is enough to make her quieten down for now.

Verso’s not sure if he’s ever heard a Painter have their invitation formally withdrawn from a Canvas before - and Gustave thinks of Painters as gods, he always did. Does this mean he’s over that belief? Or does it mean he’s angry enough not to care?

Verso’s not sure if he’s ever been more in love with this idiot.

Renoir’s jaw clenches. Aline’s eyes linger desperately on the centre of Gustave’s chest, the pulsing beat of a fragment of her son’s soul in his heart - and all Verso can think about is her maddened hand sinking into him yesterday, fingers like claws, searching for what he carries so easily.

With reluctance, her eyes flicker past him to her daughter. “Don’t take too long,”  Aline warns her, her voice painfully tight and restrained. “Your father and I have found a compromise. Adding any more complications might make him reconsider.”

She doesn’t need to add the details of what that consideration might look like.

Her eyes meet Verso’s. For a moment, it feels like his mother is there: the woman he remembers raising him, the woman who taught him to ski, the woman who came to his first piano recitals and who would comfort him when he cried. 

Hollow memories, but they're all he has of her now.

In a swirl of sweet petals, both Aline and Renoir are gone.

There’s an empty space where they’d once stood. Verso stares at the blank, open air and can’t figure out what to feel - not yet.

In their absence, Alicia laughs in relief. “They’re gone. Thank you,” she breathes. “Oh, Gustave, thank you. You’re smart. You’re so smart. Now we have time to work out what to-”

“They’re right,” Gustave says. The words fall across Alicia’s glee like a guillotine. Her laughter fades fast. “You can’t stay here with us, Maelle. Alicia. You know you can’t.”

“It’s fine. I’ll be fine,” Alicia promises, but she’s backing away from them already. “I’m not like them. I know what I’m doing.”

Knowing exactly where this is going, Verso doesn’t have time for the weight of his own regrets. “So did they,” he sighs, “And it nearly killed them anyway.”

It nearly killed him, the Verso whose memories he stole: a fragment of a world so sweet he couldn’t leave it. A love so deep that the real world could offer him nothing.

A tower that slowly became home.

A life that slowly became death.

“You saw it,” he murmurs. Little Alicia: she’d come to visit that Verso, to see Gustave in his canvas, and instead she’d found her brother collapsed on the ground and lost in the paint, slowly and willingly fading away. She knows, perfectly, how this ends. “Alicia, please. Don’t do this.”

“I’m not like them,” she insists through her teeth, but her voice is raw and her eyes are wet. “And you can’t make me leave. Not here.”

She storms backwards before they can argue with her any more. Her hand raises and with a flurry of dark chroma and petals, she rips through the canvas, just like her mother. It parts like a hole in reality, and she just keeps walking - straight through the portal.

Gustave glances in Verso’s direction, but they both start running at the exact same moment: this is their little sister, one way or another. Following her isn’t even a question.

*

They step through the portal at the same time, and Verso feels the canvas lurch around them.

Old Lumière disappears. The sky disappears. The canvas disappears.

It’s replaced with black.

Dark earth beneath his feet. A black sky around them. Smothered swirls of chroma in the air.

The dirt crunches with every step, and beside him Gustave’s breath shakes. “The abyss,” he whispers, eyes wide. "This is just like it."

Verso knows that it’s fear painting that tense expression on Gustave’s face, but this time Gustave doesn’t give it any time to take over. He keeps walking forward.

On the blackened earth in front of them, there’s a canvas on the ground: a representation of their world.

Crouched beside that canvas, there’s a little boy. A faded husk.

He has a paintbrush in his hand. When they come close, he doesn’t even look up. They've seen shades of this boy throughout the Continent, whispering his regrets; Verso recognises him easily.

Verso can feel the petals start to lift from his own skin, the push of the gommage against the impossibility of his being here, but it does nothing. As soon as the paint lifts, it's replaced. 

This place is affecting Gustave too, though not quite as much. Even as the rich pigment threatens to lift from Gustave’s skin, it's repaired. Immortality. An anchor from their respective creators. The canvas might not want them here, but it has no say in the matter.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Alicia says cautiously, standing at a distance. “You shouldn’t be able to follow me.”

“Where is… here, exactly?” Gustave asks, but he’s staring down at the young boy, still painting.

“The back of the canvas. The world beyond. You saw it, I think, when Papa…” She trails off and lets the pain sink in. “When your canvas was torn, I think this is where you ended up. Where I found you. Something like this, anyway. Scraps of it.”

“I remember,” Gustave confirms - no details beyond that. A horror that’s all his own.

“Alicia, you have to go back,” Verso insists. “Your parents, they’re waiting for you. The whole world out there is waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me for what? There’s nothing for me out there. Nothing,” Alicia snaps. “I’ll be wasting away. Alone. At least in here I can… Gustave?”

Her attention is snatched away when Gustave steps closer to the boy hunched over his endless canvas. He kneels down beside him, first taking in the swirling canvas and then taking in the sight of the little Painter himself. His faded, blackened cap is pulled down low on his head and he doesn’t look up at first, not even as Gustave makes himself more comfortable and sits cross-legged beside him.

“Have they stopped fighting yet?” the boy asks: he has no face and no mouth, but his voice is as clear as any other, almost echoing in the space. “Maman and Papa. They’re destroying everything.”

“They’ve stopped,” Gustave says. Soft. It sounds like his heart is breaking. “They’ve gone home now. No more fighting.”

Verso doesn’t know how it’s possible for a faceless child to light up in joy, but the young boy manages it as soon as he hears Gustave’s voice. He swings his head up, and falters at the sight of Gustave too.

His hand without the Paintbrush, it reaches out for him - tiny, but with the same familiar desperation as it reaches for his chest. For his heart.

After what they saw yesterday, both Verso and Alicia lurch forward. Gustave gestures for them to stay back, as the little boy pats at his chest over his shirt.

“Oh,” little Verso says, with a trickle of laughter that sounds so out-of-place in this bleak world. “That’s me. I’m in there.”

“That you are,” Gustave agrees, forcing mirth into his eyes. “I wish I had some more chroma to spare for you, little one. I think I’m almost all out, but whatever you need you can take.”

There’s a moment, a brief moment, where Verso thinks about throttling this self-sacrificing idiot himself.

“I don’t need your chroma,” little Verso objects, all childhood confidence and the need to prove himself right. “I’ve got my own. I can paint anything.”

“Anything? Really?” Gustave asks. He looks at the churning canvas in front of them and swirls his fingertips in the bottom corner. Verso wonders if he’s triggered some kind of ecological event in the corner of the Continent with that small act. “Do you like painting?”

“Me and Clea paint all kinds of stuff. Like gestrals. And grandis. And those mountains over there, I did those ones.” The little boy looks at the part of his canvas that Gustave has disturbed, somehow frowning with his absent face, and quickly sets about fixing it. “I just don’t like it when Maman and Papa start fighting. Or when Clea starts making monsters. Why can’t she make nice things?”

As they’re talking, Verso approaches Alicia again. Maybe they can resolve this while Gustave's busy. “This has to be over,” he whispers. “We can’t chase you from the canvas, but your parents will. Is that what you want? To be the next Paintress trapped in a Monolith?”

“It won’t be like that,” Alicia murmurs as she watches Gustave with the baby version of her older brother. Two fragments of Verso’s soul side-by-side. Verso knows it's an unwitting trap for her, for all the Dessendres. It'll be their ruin. “And if it is, it’ll be worth it. I know what I’m doing, Verso.”

She looks up at him, her pale eyes haunting, and he’s forced to confront the truth - she means it.

She knows the exact decision she’s making. She’s seen the hollowed-out wreck it turned her brother into; she’s seen the faltering health of her mother - and she’s choosing this anyway.

She’s choosing a long life in the canvas and a bitter, brutal death outside of it.

He remembers that: the original Verso’s thoughts still swirl in his mind, the warmth of their life in the tower contrasted with the cold and emptiness outside of it. And he remembers how willing he’d been to wither outside if it meant he got to have another few nights in his ‘real’ life inside the canvas, Gustave by his side.

He won’t let that happen to her.

“Alright,” he breathes, as they both realise there’s no other way out of this. They’re Dessendres. This was never going to end peacefully.

He steps back from her, bracing himself, as he conjures his blades into his hands. 

In front of him, her face tilted defiantly, Alicia draws her rapier from the ether. Her fully white hair floats around her shoulders and even when he knows this is going to hurt, Verso is prepared for the pain.

His hands clench on his blades, and his eyes won’t leave Alicia. He can make this fast, as long as he strikes before she can; if he can take her out, perhaps her parents will find a way to keep her from the canvas permanently. He hates the thought even as he has it, and feels it sink deep like a jagged stone in his belly, then tightens his grip and prepares himself.

Alicia’s rapier swipes in front of her in a pretty, skilled swirl - inviting him forward. Accepting the fight.

“No,” Gustave says as soon as he spots it, abandoning his position at little Verso’s side.

He doesn’t sound scared. He doesn’t even sound furious.

He sounds mildly peeved, like he's scolding a set of misbehaving pets.

For the second time that day, he plants himself in the middle of the Dessendres.

“That’s enough. Swords away, both of you.” He walks between them, right into the middle of their nearly-fought duel, and little Verso energetically gets back to painting. Whatever he’s been talking about with Gustave while they’ve been distracted, it looks as if he has a whole new set of projects. “Do we solve all our issues with violence, Alicia?”

“You’ve just spent the past few weeks shooting your way across the whole Continent, Gustave,” Alicia points out, too smart even now. “So: yes? Maybe we do?”

“...Right,” Gustave says. “Excluding that very specific scenario: we don’t fight each other. Please, Alicia. I don’t want to fight you. You’d beat me fair-and-square, and beating up an old man isn’t very sporting.”

“Stop it,” she warns him. “You’re trying to be sweet. And charming. It’s not working.”

“It’s a little charming, isn’t it?” he asks. Verso wants to speak but he doesn’t dare; if anyone can talk her out of this, he thinks it might be Gustave. The family she chose. All Verso can do is stay silent and hope. “Come here.”

She starts protesting, but Gustave holds out his arm for her and waits until she has no choice but to let herself come close, enveloped into the tightest one-armed hug Verso’s ever seen. She buries her face against Gustave’s chest and breathes deep like she might be able to fully inhale him. It’s only when she isn’t looking that Verso sees Gustave look up to the black, heartless sky and fight back the threat of tears.

By the time he speaks, he’s got it under control. His voice sounds alarmingly steady when he speaks to Alicia, cushioned against his chest.

“I want you to go, Alicia,” he murmurs.

“No, no, it’s-”

“I want you to go and explore the world of the gods for me, Maelle,” he repeats more firmly. “My baby sister, walking with giants. That big, wide world? There’s so much to learn. So much to see. I used to read about that world. I used to imagine how big it must be. Now I need you to go and see it all for me.”

“I can’t. I can’t go, Gustave. You know what it’s like. I’ll miss so much. It’ll be years in here. Centuries.”

“Exactly,” Gustave agrees, sad eyes flashing like that’s a positive. “And just think of everything Verso and I will have done in all that time. Think of the stories we’ll have to tell you.”

She’s shaking her head but it’s buried, the words smothered between the press of Gustave’s chest and the tear-tracks she’s unwillingly dripping onto his shirt. “I don’t want stories. I want the real thing. I want my brothers.”

His fingers tangle in her hair, and over her shoulder Gustave meets Verso’s eyes. Verso can see his own mask reflected on Gustave's paint-scarred face: Gustave of Lumière is losing his little sister, just as much as Gustave de la Tour is wishing her well on her biggest adventure. “And we want you to be alive. To be happy.”

“That’ll only happen in here. I’ll miss you too much.”

He kisses the top of her head, and it’s as decisive as a final blow. “I’ll miss you too, Maelle,” he whispers so quietly Verso barely catches the words. “I’ll be so, so happy to miss you.”

Verso allows the blades in his hands to disintegrate into nothing; no fighting today, not on Gustave’s watch. His gentle, peaceful Gustave, thrown into a world and a family he’d been designed to shield Verso from - but Verso had never needed his protection, not physically. What he’d needed was open acceptance, a calm levity, and the safety of someone who could understand everything he didn’t know how to say.

With the immediate fight gone, Verso turns to give them what little privacy he can, stepping away to join the child on the ground instead. He kneels down to examine the canvas, unable to make any sense of it, only able to pick up on the renewed fervour the boy is painting with.

“Are you okay?” he checks.

“They’re sad,” the boy says. “Gustave and Alicia.”

Verso can only nod. “Yes, they are,” he agrees. “What about you? Aren’t you tired?”

A little boy trapped in the beyond. A soul fragment in the abyss. It’s cruelty, isn’t it?

“I just want everyone to stop fighting. And stop being sad. And stop making scary monsters,” little Verso complains. “Gustave said I could paint anything I want. Anything. He says I can paint new things if I want, I don’t have to stick to what Maman and Clea told me.”

There’s a new fire building in the little boy’s voice. A terrifying level of excitement. Verso worries, for a second, that Gustave may have created a monster of his own with his quiet encouragement.

“You don’t want to stop?” he checks, quite certain that that would have horrendous consequences but also certain that he can’t not ask. “You could come with us. You could rest…”

The look he gets, from a face that doesn’t exist, is nothing short of derogatory. “I’m the Painter. I’m supposed to stay here,” he points out, as if Verso has just failed the most basic of Painting lessons. “Gustave has the other part of me living in his heart, but I’m living here. I don’t want to live in a heart, you see.”

“... Ah. Yes. I see,” Verso agrees, helplessly. He glances up at Gustave and Alicia, but they’re still hugging and crying. No rescue there. “I don't think it's literal.”

“Living in a heart would be disgusting,” the little boy continues anyway, and Verso wonders if he was really so morbid when he was this age.

Yes, actually. He's quite certain he was.

“So you want to live here?” Verso checks. “Painting the Canvas for us all?”

The little boy looks down at his canvas with a terrifying level of inspiration. “I think I’ll Paint a dragon,” he hisses - and Verso knows without a doubt that they’ve created a whole new set of problems.

“Verso,” Alicia calls, saving him from the childhood conversations of dragons and hearts. She sniffs, and holds out her hand for him. “I’m ready.”

*

She takes them back to Lumière.

All of them.

Lune and Sciel are reunited with their friends. Monoco, Noco and Esquie are swarmed by the delighted children of Lumière, and for the city there is one gleaming, perfect evening of celebration and gratitude.

Under the stars that night, aching and tired, Gustave and Verso meet with Alicia. She stands between them and allows them both to hold her hands: together, they stare at the blank space where the Monolith should stand. Its absence is their hard-won triumph. The horizon is clear.

“You take care of each other,” Alicia says, her voice thick and her eyes shining with tears. “Be good. And be together. And be happy, both of you. Don’t be stupid old men about everything.”

“We won’t be,” Gustave says. “I promise not to be a stupid old man in your absence.”

She releases Gustave’s hand just so that she can shove hard at his arm. Laughing like he’s under attack, Gustave allows himself to be pushed around, until Alicia gives up and pulls them both in tight again, a messy group hug so tight it hurts Verso’s ribs.

“I’m going to miss you both so much,” she says - and it sounds fierce in her hurt, almost like she’s threatening the canvas itself. “I’ll be back. You promised me stories, Gustave.”

“You promised me some too,” he reminds her.

“We’re going to have dark and dramatic stories for you,” Verso promises, pressed close against the two of them and feeling his heart break. “After all, we’ve got a dragon to fight…”

She laughs, hiccupping, and squeezes them one last time. “You’re the best brothers I’ve ever had,” she says - before the petals start, their sister crumbles, and it’s just the two of them on the harbour once more. 

Their group hug collapses as its centre fades.

Verso looks up at the stars above them and tries to force himself to breathe in the weight of her absence.

At his side, Gustave tangles their fingers together and tilts his head onto Verso’s shoulder. They stare at the stars together, until, quietly, Gustave murmurs, “Welcome to eternity.”

If eternity is like this, with Gustave at his side to soften the aching, quiet loss, Verso thinks he can survive it.

“Let’s go home,” Gustave sighs, and all Verso can do is follow.

*

Verso’s been to Gustave’s home before, technically: he’s not sure whether standing outside wistfully watching in all those unknown-years really counts as ‘being’ here. This time, at least, he has an invitation.

The apartment is practically sterile, every item boxed up or donated already. The only reason there isn’t a new tenant is because Lumière doesn’t have enough people to claim it. The empty rooms make him long more than ever for the cheerful chaos of Gustave’s tower - it’s far from unusual for him to have a sense of missing a place he’s never been, but he doesn’t mind it so much this time.

After inviting him in, Gustave seems to lose the thread of his own thoughts. Maybe his own confidence too.

He stands in his once-abandoned living room, gestures vaguely at the couch and then turns once on the spot like he’s about to head for the kitchen before thinking better of it. “Do you need anything?” he asks. “I should get you something. A drink? We probably need a drink. There might be something in the cupboards. I think I emptied everything before the expedition set off. Didn’t think I’d be coming back here.” He rubs at his forehead, looks around at the echoes of his former life, and takes a deep breath. “Right. Try again: Verso, would you like a drink?”

Watching him, waiting out the adrenaline of his nerves, Verso shakes his head. “Not particularly,” he says.

Could he take a glass of wine? Absolutely. Does he think it would do a damn thing about what really has Gustave tied in knots? Absolutely not.

“Come over here,” he asks, hands outstretched. He tells himself they’re not shaking, and it still feels like a miracle when Gustave simply listens. He’s drawn in by Verso’s words, until he’s as close as he was last night and Verso can see the paint-spotched exhaustion on his face. He reaches for his face and lets his fingers trace over one of the deeper cracks Aline left behind where it trails across his cheekbone; it’s smooth beneath his fingertips, and Gustave doesn’t flinch. “Are you okay?”

Foolish question, and the weight of it hangs heavy.

Gustave shakes his head, and he’s barely moving at all. “No. I'm not. It’s - I-” The words won’t come out, as if reality itself has a strangle-hold around his throat. “Can I just- ?”

He surges forward before Verso needs to answer - and he’s left with his arms full of Gustave, with Gustave’s desperate lips pressed against him, stealing yet another kiss. This one, too, makes him melt. It comes with the memory of another first kiss, Gustave and that other Verso - so many years ago, so many lifetimes, overwhelmed with nerves and laughter and desire. That had been a first.

This isn’t that.

This is two men who know what hell means, clutching to each other in the wreckage. Verso gets to sink his fingers through Gustave’s hair and cling on tight, while he slows things down and meets Gustave’s messy, broken fire with the steeled flame of his own.

“It’s okay,” he whispers against Gustave’s lips. “I’m here. You have me.”

With all those centuries spread in front of them, how is he supposed to be enough? The thought is infinitely more terrifying than the promise of oblivion, but the needy way that Gustave nods against him makes him think that they’re both willing to try.

“Let me take care of you, mon coeur,” he asks, “Just for tonight.”

I’d do this forever, he thinks but doesn’t say.

Gustave quietly leads them through the shuttered shrapnel of his apartment until they reach his bedroom, shedding clothes as they go. Verso’s hands are shaking on the buckles and clasps of his own clothing: it’s almost impossible to get anything done, because he can't look down. He’s too busy drinking in the rich, cracked glow of Gustave’s skin when he finally sheds his shirt in the soft light of his bedroom.

“I’m sorry,” Gustave says, as he stands at the foot of his bed and the anticipation of what they’re about to do yawns behind him. He’s stripped down to his underwear and Verso is staring in a way that he knows can’t be particularly polite - but he’s been sneaking looks, almost unnoticed, for weeks now. He’s finally got an excuse to drink him in openly. “I know. I must look like Frankenstein’s Monster.”

The cracks that Aline left behind are considerable. They snake like deep craquelure over every revealed part of Gustave’s body: over his face and neck, down his surviving arm, through the dusting of hair on his chest. They’re signs of provenance, of survival. They’re a reminder that the canvas tried to take Gustave from him, again, and that his foolish, brave, impossible man merely laughed in its face.

“Frankenstein’s Monster,” Verso repeats, stepping close enough to drag his hands over the sides of Gustave’s torso, his mind fully broken at being allowed to do this. It feels like an utterly cosmic mistake, an error that’s bound to be corrected if Gustave ever comes to his senses. He starts to trace one of the deeper lines where it runs from Gustave's hip all the way up to his chest. “Not quite how I’d put it.”

“Don’t you think that’s interesting?” Gustave asks, nervously distracted even as he starts to look down and watch Verso’s hands softly explore freely given skin as they stand together. He feels warm beneath Verso’s palms, and Verso can feel the easy rise-and-fall of each breath as he speaks. “I’ve read Frankenstein. That’s a book that exists out there, in the other world - but it was painted into being in here. In my canvas. So do you think the version that I read was the same as the ‘real’ version? Or was it something that the canvas’s chroma created from what it thought the book should be like? Quote-for-quote, page-for-page? It’s-”

“Gustave?”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to throw you on the bed now,” Verso says, hands settling on Gustave’s hips.

He waits for the answer, as Gustave glances over his shoulder at the neatly-made bed. “Ah,” he says, “Yes, that’s probably a good idea.”

He lands with a gentle bounce and Verso is able to crawl over him, nudging Gustave’s legs apart as he gets closer so that he can neatly slide between them. He sheds the last of their clothing, sending it sailing onto the floor, and that leaves them with this: skin-on-skin, bare contact, the warmth and richness of Gustave’s body beneath him. Gustave’s hand flutters onto his back, nervous at first and then so much more certain as it travels over new ground. 

Verso’s trying to pretend as if his heart isn’t threatening to break his ribs with how hard it’s hammering. He dips down and is able to press his lips against Gustave’s heart in return.

He takes his time. Breathes him in, right at the spot where the Paintress nearly took Gustave from him. There’s nothing there now but the faintest discolouration, like a trick-of-the-light where she almost destroyed the one thing in this canvas he values most. He breathes him in and listens to the way Gustave’s heart is racing underneath him, just as fast as his own. Faster.

“Are you alright?” he checks.

“Yeah. Yes.” Gustave reaches down to brush his fingers through Verso’s hair, and there’s nothing Verso can do but lean into it. “I didn’t think I’d be this nervous. It’s just…”

“A lot?”

“Exactly,” Gustave agrees, with a fractured smile and those gold-flecked eyes of his turning soft and needy.

“Do you want to stop?”

Gustave’s 'no' when it comes is so scandalised and downright offended that it does wonders for the state of Verso’s confidence. He smirks happily against Gustave’s chest and gently lets his fingers start to tease at the soft skin of Gustave’s inner thighs.

“Do you want to stop?” Gustave asks. His fingertips trace gentle patterns against Verso’s scalp as he combs through his hair; it’s enough to leave Verso’s eyelids fluttering and he wonders if he could moan, if he could lose his mind, just from Gustave stroking his hair. “I mean it, you know. If you’re not ready. I know this is complicated, the two of us, especially now. After today. And I don’t want you to think -”

Verso shuts him up with a kiss, chasing the words and the nerves from his lips all at once. Merde, he likes being able to do that.

When he pulls back, it’s only so that his hand can reach between them, cupping the hard length of Gustave’s cock so he can watch the way that Gustave’s head thumps back against the pillow. Gustave's breath hitches, his hips roll up against Verso’s palm, and Verso is left thinking that this is what power feels like. 

“What I want,” he murmurs against Gustave’s lips, “is to be inside you.”

He wants to sound calm. He wants to sound sophisticated. He wants to sound like he’s in charge and Gustave can simply trust him and surrender.

He’s fairly sure he just sounds like he’s begging.

Gustave’s frantic, eager nod breaks something open in the centre of Verso’s chest. They scramble together after that: finding slick oil in the bedside cabinet, easing Gustave open for him on his fingers, drinking in the sound of his heavy breathing and barely-muffled moans. The way he sounds is simultaneously exactly how Verso remembers, and something entirely new. Something entirely his.

He keeps Gustave on his back when they’re ready: he needs to see him, his face, as he slowly, carefully presses inside. He watches him like he can’t stop taking in every fine detail, this work of art underneath him, completely undone because of him. Gustave’s mouth falls open when Verso first pushes inside, and his tongue flashes out to wet his lips like temptation itself in human form. It’s impossible to look away.

God, he’s tight. Verso strains at every scrap of his self-restraint and works his way in slowly through shallow rolls of his hips. “Gustave,” he chokes when he’s seated, unable to take it any more, “Feels like you’re made for me.”

Their eyes meet, Verso buried inside Gustave and Gustave just on the perfect side of too-tight, as the truth of that statement settles in. Made for him. Maybe not this version of him, maybe not this version of Gustave, but there’s a reason that this feels perfect. A reason nobody else would ever compare.

Are you his yet, echoes in Verso’s mind, and there’s a satisfied, possessive whisper that realises the answer is clear: yes.

The weight of that is enormous.

“Please,” Gustave pants, digging his heels into the base of Verso’s back while his legs are split-open around Verso’s hips, perfectly splayed. He arches his back and does everything that he can to encourage Verso onwards. “Don’t stop.”

Verso buries himself deep and only draws it out as much as they can both take, making sure he finds that angle that makes Gustave’s breath stutter into a shaky, frantic moan; he drowns himself in the way that he can make Gustave sound and in the way Gustave’s strange chroma seems to shimmer gold and rich when he takes him just right, when his hand wraps around Gustave’s cock and it feels so good Gustave can barely remember how to stay in one piece.

“Is it good?” he asks, panting the question with parted lips. Gustave nods frantically, but Verso needs to hear it, desperately. He’ll beg if he has to. “Gustave. Please.”

“‘s good,” Gustave groans, right on the edge where Verso can see him struggling for words. “It’s good. You’re so good.” Gustave sinks his hand back into Verso’s hair and drags him down to kiss him again; they’re messy and uncoordinated and Verso is swallowing the sounds that Gustave makes against his lips, he’s pulling out every trick he knows - because Gustave deserves this. Verso wants to take him apart; he wants to keep him in ecstasy.

When he said he wanted to take care of him it wasn’t a trick and it wasn’t empty words; the only question is whether or not Gustave will let him.

They make it last as long as they can, losing themselves in one another, before Verso gently takes Gustave over the edge - a soft cry of Verso’s name, a clutch of his hair, and then Gustave’s spilling in his hand, making a mess of his own stomach.

Breathless, he urges Verso onwards: he lets Verso watch him with all the intensity that he needs, and Gustave tells him he’s good, and he lies handsome and scarred and perfect beneath him. His, all his.

Even when Verso feels like he shouldn’t even have permission to touch him, Gustave urges him onwards, promising him everything - and Verso doesn’t last much longer before the air is freezing in his lungs and he feels the edge slam into him. He thrusts as deep as he can into the heat of Gustave’s body and loses himself there, buried as tight as he can get. Leaving himself behind.

He collapses beside Gustave in the bed, spent and staring at the ceiling. The domestic echoes of Gustave’s former life are scattered around them: the bedroom is packed up as neatly as Gustave could have managed before he set off, but it’s still him. It’s so far from the Continent and its ravaged wildness that Verso feels like he’s in another world. It isn’t even the sterile richness of the Dessendre Family Home. It’s Gustave.

As Verso lies there, his mind a wreck, Gustave groans and reaches out for him with his one good arm. With a gentle yank, he pulls Verso towards him - avoiding the mess on his stomach, Verso instead finds himself with his head on Gustave’s shoulder.

It’s the same as last night, hearing the sound of Gustave’s heart beneath his ear; the promise of the lives they’re going to live and the world they’re going to see.

Gustave’s fingers toy with his hair, the white strands in particular. “Are you okay?” he whispers.

I love you, Verso thinks and, You're everything, and, You terrify me.

But what he says is: 

“Well. Could Frankenstein’s Monster do that?”

It’s more than worth it for Gustave’s outraged laugh, and the gentle shove at his shoulder in protest. Verso hasn’t heard him laugh in so long - he doubles down, teases him more, and slowly they remember how to smile.

*

They’re on the harbour of Lumière.

Days of tense, messy organisation have passed: Verso has stood back and watched Gustave get involved in the tricky, painful process of piecing together what their new reality means for the city. There are thousands of unfinished threads for Lumière to find and repair. With Lune and Sciel getting stuck in, Verso is sure they’ll figure it out.

But here they are, on the harbour, with Gustave skimming rocks. “Can’t quite get it right,” Gustave complains, as yet another perfectly smooth stone gives up after the first skip. He gestures with the half-gone stump where his mechanical arm should be. “It’s throwing me off.” That's his main complaint after sacrificing a part of himself for their canvas. Its impact on his stone skimming. He's a study in deflection.

“Your apprentices. They’re working on a replacement?”

“They said they had ‘ideas’,” Gustave quotes, with a meaningful look in Verso’s direction. He knows that the project would probably go faster with Gustave guiding them a little more, prodding them in the right direction - if he’s choosing to step back and let them go wild, it probably means that he wants to see through whatever the outcome might be. “Do you want a go?”

Gustave passes over a couple of those perfectly selected stones, and even after days of being tangled together Verso still can’t hide the way his breath shakes when their fingers touch. There’s a knowing glint in Gustave’s eyes that says he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Verso takes over the throwing, even if he doesn’t have the same knack that Gustave always has. “Esquie and Monoco are planning on going back to the Continent,” Verso says as he watches one of his stones jump and jump over the water. “Not right away, but soon.”

“What do you think?” Gustave prompts without hesitation. When Verso doesn’t immediately answer, he clarifies, “About them going? About you wanting to go too?”

Half-formed protests wisp into being on Verso’s lips, but he doesn’t bother saying them aloud; somehow, inevitably, Gustave already knows him too well. The city doesn’t suit him. Once upon a time, long before the Fracture, it might have. He could have been that person - but he’s been out in the wilds too long.

“You have people here,” he points out - because going on his own isn’t even a question any more, and he would never ask Gustave to leave. “Lune and Sciel. Emma. Your apprentices. You have a whole life.”

In the gap between them, he can almost see Maelle; the little sister and ward that should be part of this equation, her own personal conundrum. He’s sure Gustave feels her too.

“You have people out there,” Gustave counters. “Your father. Your sisters.”

Verso runs his thumb over one of the rocks in his hand and looks down at it as he tries not to think of them; the last time he’d seen his father, he’d been chasing after Aline. The last time he’d seen Alicia, she’d been retreating deeper and deeper into the Dessendre Manor. And the last time he’d seen Clea… God, he can barely remember it.

“I can’t ask you to leave Lumière,” he says. He throws the rock - and it goes badly enough that it slices straight through the water and sinks down into the depths. “You’re needed here.”

“We can make it work. Esquie can fly now that someone's remembered where Soarrie is, remember? You used to go back and forth all the time, checking up on us.” Gustave reaches out and corrects Verso’s grasp on the next stone he’s about to throw. Gustave’s fingers are almost surgical in their precision, and it’s always a struggle not to get lost in the sight of him - whether it’s at work with his tools or just writing notes, Verso has to fight to keep his attention on the world around him. “I want to go with you. Me and you, together.”

When Gustave says things like that it always makes the canvas lurch around him - because he means it. He’s sincere. Gustave thinks of eternity and he thinks of Verso in the same breath and for some unfathomable reason it doesn’t make him want to start running.

Verso drops the last of the rocks. He reaches for Gustave instead, wrapping his arms around his narrow waist and allowing himself to revel in the fact that he’s able to do this any time he wants now. Nothing’s stopping them.

“Off to the Continent,” Verso says, just to try it out. “Me and you.”

Gustave looks up at him with a nod that’s so heavy in its honesty. “We’ve got centuries together,” he says. “They get to look however we want.”

The Continent stretches out in front of them.

They’ve spent so long, both of them, languishing in the margins of someone else’s tale - they’ve been hidden from the world or forced to step in as an empty shadow and replacement.

As he soaks in Gustave as he glows for him on the harbour of Lumière, Verso is sure of one thing about their future: escaping the margins, it’s finally time to write their own story.

Together.

Chapter Text

.after

Alicia lands back in Lumière as if she’s never been gone.

In the outside world, long, painful months have passed: the war with the Writers has continued, her physical therapy has been long and arduous, and her Maman has floated through the hallways of their home like the very ghost she mourns. Through it all, the painting, their painting, has been hidden securely in the family vault.

But not today. Today is special.

She's finally allowed to visit.

The sun is streaming down around her as she makes her way through the cobbled streets of Lumière - but the streets themselves are different. Expansive. Crowded. Is that a train station in the distance?

She remembers these streets as sparsely populated, but the city is bustling. They’re dressed differently from how she remembers: the tailoring is more precise, the colours are richer, and the fabrics are made from something softer that she doesn’t even have a name for.

And Lumière is big. It’s so much bigger than she remembers.

As she looks out towards the horizon down the central street of Lumière, she can see the yawning horizon where the Monolith used to stand. The sky is open. Free. She thinks she might be able to see something flying out there, something much larger than a bird.

She breathes in the scent of the place: fresh baking on the air and lush flowers from the market. She’s soaking in the sunshine on her unscarred, unblemished face, turned up towards the sun like perhaps she can learn how to photosynthesize within the canvas itself - and just as she’s starting to think about planting herself here for good, there’s a nudge of an elbow against her side.

She opens her eyes.

It's Gustave.

He looks just as he did the last time she saw him - but not quite. There's a tally of differences like the ticking of a clock.

here’s a new arm: this one is a delicate silver with black embellishments, different perhaps just to show off that it can be, to show that he is. Her brother’s always been one for symbolism. There are intricate flourishes like pictos carved along the length of it, and she’d give anything to stand and study it more deeply. 

And his clothing, that’s different too, just like the crowd; not radically, not strangely, but tailored in a fashion she doesn’t recognise from either Lumiere or Paris. The deep colour suits the glow of his skin perfect: his soft shirt is a rich burgundy she’s never seen on him before.

There are streaks of white in Gustave’s hair too: it’s not from age, she realises as she stares up at him. They’re Painter’s white. Not much of it, not entirely, but enough to notice. She wonders just what he’s been doing with that new arm of his.

“I heard there was a visitor making trouble in the middle of town,” Gustave says, a smile broadening on his paint-cracked face. “Should’ve known I’d find you here.”

She says his name and jumps - he wraps her up in his arms, one flesh, one silvered metal, and lifts her up to spin her around. She could be a child again, just Maelle: they could have the whole Expedition ahead of them again.

“I’ve missed you,” Gustave breathes against her ear as he puts her down. “So much.”

“How long’s it been?” she asks, as she searches his face for any hint of his age - but there’s nothing, of course. Verso had painted him that way, permanently perfect. She can still see the paint-fault cracks, and the deep gouges left behind by the chroma lost to her Maman that has never been replaced, but the rest of him is exactly as she’s always remembered, whether in this canvas or the one before.

“Guess,” he tells her, as he slings an arm over her shoulder and starts to lead her through Lumière’s metropolitan streets. As they walk, the light glinting on the exposed silver of Gustave’s arm, she sees the glances from the crowds: there are double-takes as if they recognise him, and a subtle parting of the crowd as they walk.

“A hundred years?” she picks at random, a deliberately wild number just to make him laugh - and all she gets is a smirk. “More?” He doesn’t confirm it one way or another. “More?”

“We have to go to the boulangerie,” he tells her. “There’s a new type of pastry there. Palmiers. You’re going to love them.”

He directs her to a bakery she doesn’t know and pays with coins she doesn’t recognise. The person behind the till nods their head deferentially, eyes widening as if they’ve spotted something significant. Someone.

“You have to tell me everything. About everyone,” she insists as they find a table by the window.

And he does.

Monoco and Esquie on the Continent, fighting back nevrons and more. Adventures under the stars.

The painted version of her father and her sisters, echoes of their old selves, are still refusing to move back to Lumière - yet they are slowly and gradually opening their doors. Gustave tries to describe his first ‘meet the family’ dinner, and it sounds so horrendously awkward she threatens to leave the canvas immediately unless he stops.

There are other updates she doesn’t like so much. He tells her about Emma, Lune and Sciel’s descendants, but she already knows she won’t get to see the real people again. The loss stings, even when it’s expected. Time can't slow for all of them, not even in here.

“They lived a good life,” Gustave tells her when he sees the stricken pain on her face, but there's still a strain of loss in his voice. “A long, happy life. It’s all we ever wanted on the Expedition, isn’t it? One more year - and they had dozens of them.”

She picks at the pastry Gustave bought for her, and she hates that he’s right: the pastry's good, and she shouldn’t be pouting.

Behind their table, the bell above the door rings as someone else enters the boulangerie.

“What about Verso?” she asks, almost scared to hear what had happened there.

Soft footsteps sound behind her, before a gentle kiss is dropped onto the top of her head, with a hand on her shoulder to stop her from reacting to the surprise with a whip-fast attack.

“I think he’s doing just fine,” Verso answers on Gustave’s behalf, flowing straight to Gustave’s side and settling into the empty seat at their table. It’s like watching a set of magnets snap together, the way they bleed into one another’s presence - hands entwining beneath the table, knees resting against each other, even their shoulders turned in like they’re recalibrating the centre of their world.

“Verso,” she says, barely daring to laugh. “You’re here.”

“And you’re lucky. We’re out on the Continent most of the time. If you’d arrived when Gustave wasn’t here do-gooding, we would’ve had to send Esquie to scoop you up.”

Gustave’s eyes roll at the mention of ‘do-gooding’, and she can see the little twitch in the corner of Verso’s mouth - is he teasing? Do they have inside jokes without her now? Is that fair?

There's more white in Verso's hair now, like he doesn't bother to dye it very often, and he's dressed in the same new fashions as Gustave, the cut and soft materials something she hardly recognises: she feels out of place having conjured herself in her old Expeditioner's uniform. It makes her feel like a relic.

But, more than anything, he looks relaxed. One hand is holding onto Gustave’s like a tether and his other arm comes to rest casually along the back of Gustave’s chair, like he's staking a claim without needing to think about it. It has all the ease of a quietly earned habit, the unspoken need to be in Gustave's space. 

It reminds her of all those nights in camp, their eyes inevitably drawn to one another and the way Verso would sink into Gustave's orbit - Maelle and Sciel would giggle about it behind their backs while Lune would warn them to be kind.

Gustave leans forward, eyes bright, with that familiar, rich glow still clinging to his skin after all these years. “How long do we have you?” he asks.

“Papa says I can’t stay any more than a couple of days in here,” she says. She recites the rules like a heavy lead weight. “Any more than that and he’ll lock the canvas up for good. It won’t even be an hour out there. It isn’t fair.”

Even with her complaints, Gustave glances at Verso, a whole conversation passing between them in the silence like they're debating an itinerary without telling her the details. 

“A couple of days,” Gustave repeats.

“Then let’s get moving,” Verso says, stealing the last of Gustave’s pastry from his plate and getting nothing more than a grumbling complaint in response - something that’s undone in a second when he steals a kiss from Gustave’s sugar-sweetened lips, nothing more than a casual peck of their lips. It’s so easy. “C’mon. We’ve got so much to show you.”

She follows the pair of them out of the boulangerie, her mind spinning, struck by the world they’ve been building together.

Merde.

She can’t wait to see what they’ve done with the place.

*

.before

Verso takes a breath as he steps into his canvas for the first time.

He’s spent months making sure it’s perfect. He’s smuggled his mother’s finest paints into his bedroom; he’s stolen gold leaf so he can highlight the details of his eyes and his arm; he’s poured every speck of himself into this canvas.

And now it’s here.

The tower is warm and welcoming around him. It’s so different from the Manor’s looming walls and empty hallways. Even the colours here are richer, aren’t they? Warmer?

He’s landed in a kitchen. The canvas only finished drying a few hours ago, but it smells like there’s already something cooking in here, the scent of it flowing into the room around him. There's sunlight pouring through the window and a big, wooden table in the centre of the room, chairs set up around it that look like they might actually be comfortable enough to sit on.

He rushes to the window and looks out: here's the fluffy rolling clouds and luscious sky that he’s spent hours perfecting, and just knowing that he got something right makes him want to start laughing hysterically.

He’s still staring out of the window when there’s a very polite cough behind him, someone clearing their throat.

Verso spins around like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t - and he’s left facing the man he’s been dreaming around for months. Years, actually.

He’s painted to look Verso’s age, a trick of the canvas that should keep them both forever even. In front of him, a little worried and a little awkward, he looks more real than Verso could have imagined. He’s spent hours perfecting every detail of his hair, but it still doesn’t compare to the sight of it; and he’s agonised over trying to get every fleck of those doe-shaped eyes to be absolutely right, and the reality goes beyond even that. Even the fabric of his shirt looks softer than should really be possible.

Staring at him, lost for words, Verso learns that it’s possible to be tongue-tied in front of your own creations.

“Are you Verso?” the boy asks, the first one of them to find their words. All Verso can do is nod, silently, and wonder how he’s supposed to sum up the nerves to speak to this creature. Talking with Monoco for the first time had been much, much easier. “I’m Gustave. Hi.”

He waves with his metal arm: black and gold, metal parts, smooth gears, it’s the opposite of the ‘art’ that Verso has been surrounded with all his life. It’s science. Technology. Engineering.

Gustave holds his hand out for Verso, undeterred by his silence. “C’mon. Follow me. Did you know there’s a whole workshop up here? And a balcony right up at the top of the tower. You can see the sky for miles.”

“Really?” Verso breathes, as his hand slides into Gustave’s without question. He feels the smooth metal of Gustave’s palm, then a cheerful jolt as Gustave takes hold of him, fingers clutching tight.

“Really,” Gustave agrees, barrelling them both towards the doorway. “C'mon. I’ve got so much to show you.”

They hit the stairs with their footsteps in perfect sync.

And with a smile on his face Verso follows him up the warm, winding stairs of Gustave’s tower - helplessly, hopelessly, happily.

.fin