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Renoir forced his way into the smouldering ruin of his home. The smell of smoke was overwhelming as he went deeper and deeper. “Verso!?” He called, still clinging onto hope that the fire brigade was wrong, that he’d hear his son call out for help. The smoke was smothering him when he stumbled into his son's room and saw it.
The burned and twisted body.
He was drawn forward like in a trance before he fell to his knees, reaching out and holding his boy. He felt like his whole world was falling out from under him as he sobbed and held Verso. Time seemed to halt and he pulled the body closer, squeezing. A nauseated feeling worked its way up as Verso’s shoulder crumbled in his too tight grasp, the ash filling the air. He didn’t think the pain from this would ever end, he couldn’t breath, he couldn’t ….
Renoir jerks awake “Verso!” He gasps choking on air as he sobs tears filling his eyes from the memory, or was that a dream? It felt so real… he looked around and saw he was in a tent.
He was with the search and rescue team, they were searching for Aline, were they looking for Verso too? He died, he was sure, he found his son's body after the fire. What fire? Where was Verso?…
He stumbled out of the tent. It was the dead of night and Renoir checked the faces of those sleeping he passed searching. He had to find Verso.
“Commander are you alright?” someone called and it took him a moment to place the voice, Louise.
Renoir stiffens looking back at the man, “Have you seen Verso?”
“Verso? Oh, yeah he’s uh in Julies tent.” Louise says, trying to hide a smirk.
The casual attitude grated against the black hole he felt in his chest, it had to have been a dream then? “You saw him tonight?” He asks, voice urgent needing the confirmation.
“Yeah. They snuck off after dinner today.” Renoir tries to calm himself hearing this. Right, he knew Julie, Verso met her after the fracture, so he couldn't have died in it, he was just overreacting he tries to reason with his dread.
“Are you sure you’re, whoa!” Louise jumps to help steady Renoir whose bad knee had finally given out now that his adrenalin was crashing. They both sat down heavily as Renoir tried to steady his breathing. “Merde, do you want me to get a medic? You look really pale? Or I can grab Verso if…”
“No, that won't be necessary, I just need a moment.” Renoir pants, pulling his good knee up and resting his head on it as he tried to center himself. These nightmares had started shortly after the fracture, and he had tried to figure out why to control his reaction to them but had little luck so far.
The Fracture had been chaotic and they had seen many dead and dying as they had tried to find their manor in the displaced city. One thing that stood out as a beacon that day had been finding a burned body hanging out a doorway. The sight and smell made him dizzy and for some reason brought on an overwhelming sense of guilt that he had failed in some way. His son was the one to pull him away from the corpse and get him to re-focus, maybe that was why he was associating Verso with burning so much?
Either way his nights had started to fill with dreams of his family shattering. Either through Aline vanishing or his son's death, and his mind couldn’t be cured of the latter without seeing Verso himself or confirming multiple times with his sisters that he was in fact alright. His children never complained, they had been treating him delicately since Aline had been lost, and his clinginess towards Verso had been chalked up to a side effect of that. With everything else going on he had little desire to worry them by admitting he was getting haunted by images of his son’s burned corpse.
Well, not his son’s corpse, Verso was alive and well. He needed to remember that.
But no matter how often he tried to convince himself that it was a dream, the bone deep terror that his child was going to vanish kept lingering. He could reiterate to his mind over and over that his son was just a few feet away but his heart never seemed to fully believe Verso was still alive.