Work Text:
to distract our hearts from ever missing them
I am forever missing him
- Youth, Daughter
0: prologue
Despite the world having ended a few months ago, Clea cannot deny that she was having a pretty good time right now. Half of her hometown had been physically gouged out from the earth itself, her entire family was missing, many people died, and whatever remained of her city was still in ruins. Still, it was hard to not feel good when you were soaring across the sky on a flying serpent, the wind caressing your hair, the whole world spread out like a canvas underneath you, and you were as talented and gifted as Clea was.
Chroma manipulation, like Painting, had come easy to her for as long as she could remember, and she was only second to her mother in Lumiere (not that she would ever admit that) when it came to painting dazzling, complex—and in some cases, almost alive—creations out of thin air. Her gift was useful in the aftermath of the calamity that struck them: her creatures could easily lift fallen walls and roofs, dig through rubbles, put fires out, and navigate the hazards of the ruins of the city. Now she used them to paint creatures that take her to the sky or the seas to look for survivors and signs of the missing people of her city, and along the way, indulged in her long-held desire to see more of the beauty and art this world had to offer. It was hard to not feel like a god, and it was hard to not feel pretty good when you feel like a god.
All her expeditions were solitary under her own insistence. Apart from whatever that had split Lumiere into two, the world was safe—had always been safe—and more importantly, she wanted to indulge in her gift. She now had all the time and space to bring into life the wildest designs she had ever thought of without naysayers' unwelcome comments, without the need to justify her design choices or the colour palette she used, or defend the meaning of and the intention behind her work. A bonus: she didn’t have to feel embarrassed about marching around with her creatures, even if it may look like a child playing pretend general with a pretend fantastical army. It reminded her of the Canvases she would Paint as a child, where the possibilities were infinite and where she felt like a peerless deity.
And yet, the exhilaration from the freedom had been increasingly tainted by a creeping sense of foreboding dissonance.
She couldn't remember when was the last time she traveled. All she had was this feeling like she had always wanted to, that she had always done so, and yet she could not recall clearly of any time she actually did, in childhood or otherwise. It felt like she should have, but any idea of such trip felt more like sketches she improvised instead of concrete memories.
There was another uncanny feeling that had been bubbling up in her stomach lately. This world was beautiful, but it felt ... small. Yes, it was big enough that she still had not found her missing family and friends, but she couldn't help asking herself if this was it, and she couldn't help the growing disappointment festering within her. It didn't feel right for a world that could give rise to the complex systems that were human beings would be so sparse—"simple" was a more appropriate word, maybe even "childlike".
It was a beautiful world to look at, but apart from the Fracture a few months ago, it was saccharine and harmless. It was too safe. It was sterile. The Gestrals and the Grandis were pleasant enough races, but where were other people, and where were monsters in any meaning of the word? Where was the complexity, the ugly and the grotesque? Where was any danger, death, decay? Any complete painting needed a good range of values, there must always be shadows to the light part of the canvas, and this world felt like it was missing half of the spectrum.
Did the Fracture do this too? Did it break and strip the world into this empty shell, this barren banality? Was she one of the last survivors of a dying world, doomed to be reduced to a walking dead with nothing to live, nothing to hope for?
She went north for today, a general of a fantastical army with nothing to fight against or fight for, up towards the odd mountainous structure that had jutted out of the earth since the day of the Fracture. It was the one thing in this world that felt dangerous, the one thing that made the hairs on her body stand on their end, that made her stomach clench and her heart rate quicken. Nothing living was ever around here—everything was still except for the flickering eternal flames on the thousands of candles that stood at attention around the area. Her visits had become more frequent, and she got closer and closer to the invisible wall that hurt her very being every time she came closer to the structure. It was enthralling—addictive, even.
One of her favourite designs, a gentle beast she called Globlu, whined as she stepped even closer than she had ever before to the invisible pulsing wall of Chroma. She petted it, and it dutifully followed in her footsteps even though she didn’t will it to. She knew it was an impossibility—she was always taught it was an impossibility—but sometimes she wondered if one day her skills would reach such a height that any of her creatures would awaken to independent thought and become free of her. She chuckled inwardly imagining her mother’s reaction: she would be furious for all the ethical landmines this would bulldoze over and the danger this action would to their family’s standing amongst Painters and society, sure, but would she finally admit that Clea had bested her in something? Would she finally admit to be proud of her daughter?
Clea reached a hand up to feel the throbbing of the barrier. It felt like it contained a storm within, it felt like it was protecting the world from it as much as it protected the structure from the world.
She turned to Globlu. "What do you think?" she said, mostly thinking aloud to herself, but she had been enjoying the pretence of being able to hold a conversation with her creatures lately. "Shall I give it a try?"
Globlu shook its head and Clea laughed.
She pressed her index finger in, ignoring the hum and the pain and the throbbing. The barrier resisted harder and harder, until suddenly it felt like slipping into the surface of a cold pool of oil. It felt like an uncoiled spring jumping back to its full length after being squeezed, it felt like floating down a rapid stream, it felt like—
"Well, will you look at that," mused Clea as she watched her finger dissolve into petals, "so the sweet release of oblivion is this way then."
Pulling her finger back in didn't take as much effort—it popped back into existence the moment it joined the rest of her this side of the barrier. Something that was out of her reach in this tiny world, something that denied her. She touched the finger to her lips and smiled.
"What secrets does it hold?" said Clea to Goblu. She stretched her hands and glanced up at the gigantic figure sculpted into the face of the mountain. "Did someone make this?”
Globlu whined again and clutched at its head. "Alright, we'll step away for today," said Clea, turning around towards her little army of the fantastic. Globlu huffed, still clutching its head, still rooted in the spot. And then it emitted a screech; its arm swung towards Clea; she was sent soaring into the air; she could feel blood dripping into her mouth as she crumpled into the ground.
Clea sat up—the spot where she used to be was now a crater, Globlu still screaming beside it. It had saved her—from something. Whatever happened had stirred up dust and sand into the air and they stung the wound that Globlu had opened. She called for her army to attend to her.
Her creatures marched—away from her. One by one they took to the sky, they slithered, they glided, all moving away from her, all ignoring her call no matter how she pulled and tugged at the strings between creator and createe. They only stopped when there was a clear line between her and the screaming Globlu.
Clea scrambled to her feet. This had never happened before—this should never happen. Her orders were always absolute—her commands were the raison d’être for her creatures. She raised her hand towards them and pulled again. It felt like tugging at a mountain with a string, and the mountain ignored her.
Globlu’s screaming only ended as it fell to its knees and exploded into petals that the increasing wind swirled and whipped with all the dust and particulates.
“Odd,” echoed a voice, so familiar and yet so strange that it felt like a dream from a long time ago. “But no matter.”
The ground shook as her creatures took a synchronised step and parted in the middle to create another line. In the dust and grime Clea could make out white wisps—white and long like that of the figure sculpted into the mountain. Was that a painted creature too like the rest of hers? Had it awakened to punish Clea for trespassing?
She lifted her hands, her Chroma pulsing in her hands. She could make more of her creatures, this time making sure their leashes to her were unbreakable. She started sculpting them in her mind and felt the Chroma wisp out of her fingers—
—her hands dropped to her sides. She could no longer feel them, but they were still there. And then her knees gave way and she crumpled back into the ground and into a nightmare.
She had always thought that she was a god in this tiny world, but now she understood she had been a puppet all this time, and she was about to witness the cruelty of real gods; their arrogance; their capriciousness; their patheticness.
00: prologue 2
No part of her wanted to be here.
She stood in front of her childhood Canvas beside her father’s frozen body for a long time, her body coiling up before the plunge, and she thought of when he and Verso would swear again and again the water wasn’t that cold, come join them in the lake—
She shook her head. This was exactly why she didn’t want to do this, and exactly why she’d told her father when he first took the Canvas out of storage this was not just a horrible idea, it was perverse. The dead should be put to rest, not put on life support to perform like a circus monkey for the living.
Just one trip, said a desperate man, your mother just wants one last chance to see him and say her goodbyes.
Just one trip, indeed. The only thing she was even remotely looking forward to in the Canvas was to tell Renoir how wrong he was, and that as usual, she was right.
She glanced at Aline's shrinking body. Of course she was angry at her mother. They had been entangled in that eternal generations-long dance between mother and eldest daughter, a dance of souls that mirror each other too much, locked in never-ending competition for each other's approval, and convinced they will be the death of the other; now that woman had interrupted this comfortable dance they had with the insistence that she was going to kill herself out of grief first.
And fine! Fine! That was her prerogative, just like how it was Verso's stupid prerogative to die. That didn't mean Clea couldn't be angry at her, just like how she had every right to be angry at Verso for making his decision. But unlike Verso, her mother should have known better. She was a woman of responsibilities—for her family’s name and legacy, for the Painters and their position in society, and for having married a dumb love-drunk man and for having children—three!—with him. And yet, she threw them all to one side—
—all for this stupid Canvas.
She knew better than to try talk sense into her mother—they were two sides of the same coin when it came to stubbornness. Her father, on the other hand, was not a lost cause yet, although she was as annoyed with him: She had a million and one things to do, her sister was half-dead and alone in an abandoned scarred house barely holding together after the fire, and their father had decided to set aside his duties as head of the family to run after a woman who had decided to follow her son to the grave.
When she told her parents to stop treating like a child, she didn't mean for them to themselves regress into children themselves leaving her the only adult at home. It wasn't as if Clea needed any of them—only Alicia did, and since her sister was too busy drowning in self-pity these days, she could feel at least indignant on her behalf.
She glanced behind her shoulder to the entrance of the atelier. Empty.
Just a quick dip, she thought to herself. In and out. And then back to the real world, her war, her life.
1: the first time
Their house stood as if nothing had ever happened, impeccable despite the devastation all around it. Clea thought about the ruins her mother had left behind, and she thought of setting this house on fire because Aline didn't get to see the house burning down the first time, and she also wanted to see if it would feel as hot as the fire she felt in her stomach.
That fire had been simmering since she chanced upon her mother’s portrait of her in this Canvas, and it had grown only steadily since her brief reunion with her father at his self-imposed jail. She was disappointed in him—no, she was angry with him. Usually, reason and sense would prevail with Renoir—they were both highly logical people who see and appreciate the big picture. They had spent many long nights in the library talking about the state of art, the state of government, the state of the world; Renoir was always willing to listen to her, and he—unlike her mother—never precluded changing his mind for her.
And yet, all those times after her and Aline’s fights he would still side with her mother, even if she knew he should know better, even if he had approached her quietly afterwards to say she was not wrong. Of course he would side with Aline again. Of fucking course. When William Thackaray wrote that love makes fools of us all it was a mortal warning, and her parents should go down in history as the biggest example of this statement.
The fire in her stomach became churning hot Chroma in her hands. She could burn this house down—she could destroy this family all over again, she could let her brother's memory rest in his still-fresh grave. How could Aline drown herself in such childish fantasy when the world outside was still burning? Clea had tried to be nice to her (she found an easy way to do so—she simply stopped talking to her mother after she found the Canvas). She had tried to be understanding. She had tried to respect her choices. But Aline never ever listened to her; she never ever respected her.
If the woman wanted to die in her own faded fantasy of a heaven, that was her right. But doing that in her Canvas; the one Canvas literally still haunted by her dead baby brother; his first and now final extant Canvas; their Canvas that Clea now had to destroy the moment they were all out? Clea had every right to express her displeasure. In fact, Clea had every right to go scorched earth in this Canvas right now and the only reason she had not rained Armageddon down was that she was a cool, collected, and rational person who knew and understood she had bigger and more important fish to fry in the real world.
“Clea?”
That was her father’s voice—did he change his mind and chase after her to tell her he was wrong after all? About goddamn—
—his weight slammed into her with such force that it knocked the wind out of her. Her father had always been generous with hugs, but he’d never dished it out with this much … desperation?
The hair was dark instead of the silver the Painters would have when walking in the Canvas. The outfit was too structured, too formal, too sharp. But she could feel his warm breath on her face; she could feel his heart beat; she could feel the tremble in his body as he held her. It reminded her (grudgingly) that her mother was indeed one of the best living Painters: even today, society still argued about the theoretical possibility that Painters can create and animate realistic humans that resemble sentience in their Canvas. It reminded her (urgently) that her mother had possibly done something incredibly unprecedented, unethical, or maybe even illegal that would not just put her entire family's reputation in jeopardy, but perhaps, the Painters' entire profession and stake in society.
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” whispered this fake Renoir as he somehow managed to hug her even tighter against his chest. “We’ve combed the entire city and couldn’t find you or your mother, we were so worried—“
“I told you she would be fine, Papa,” said a voice from behind this incredibly suffocating Renoir, “it’s Clea.”
This Renoir released her, and even though Clea already knew this was coming—even though she had come here, to this too-pristine model of her house, to look for them—she still dreaded looking behind him to see this undead travesty, grinning at her with Verso’s smile, staring at her with Verso’s eyes.
The wind tousled Verso’s dark curls, and fanned the fire in Clea’s stomach.
“Salut, ma soeur,” said Verso’s voice as his copy approached her. "It's been a while."
Clea didn’t entirely know how to react—seeing your brother alive again after seeing his charred dead body just a few weeks ago was a pretty novel experience she had never managed to prepare for. She settled for a nod and taking a small step towards him. Verso pulled her in into an embrace—not as tight as Renoir's, and instead full of warmth and relief and contentment.
“Sorry about the smell,” said the Verso copy, leaning in to give her a kiss each on the cheek as per the usual greeting. Clea had to steel herself to not flinch, and it wasn't because of the smell. “Our Commander here made us march here on the double once we got a glimpse of the city.”
“Commander?” said Clea. She did notice the many other figures in black circling them, watching them. Were they a military organisation? Did Aline paint this after her Renoir came into the Canvas—or before?
She looked at the man wearing Renoir’s face again. She did wonder what kind of man Aline had painted to be a replacement for her father, but he looked exactly the same, bar a more serious dedication to grooming and menswear. But a Commander? Did Aline somehow paint a colder, more martial version of him, someone who could protect and defend his family where the real Renoir failed?
"This is a search and rescue expedition," said this Verso, "Papa found it the moment we got back to our feet at our new home to find the lost Lumieré and its citizens."
Clea looked around and behind him, because the more she looked at this Verso, the more she felt like she was going to spontaneously combust. The Verso copy followed her gaze and looked around him before turning back to her.
"There's so much that's happened—oh, and Alicia, she right behind us, tending to some of the survivors we found. She'd be so happy to see you!" The Verso copy furrowed his brows, and lowered his voice. “Listen, Clea, Alicia didn’t come out of the Fracture unscathed, but please try to not … anguish about it when you see her later. You know she doesn’t like us fussing over her. And Simon too; he’s not in this team but we’ll get word out to him…”
The fake Renoir took her arm again, this time with a gentleness she had always associated with her father.
“Your mother,” he said, not entirely succeeding in masking the desperation in his voice, “were you with her? Did you see her?”
Clea shook her head. “No,” she said, not lying. She ignored the cauldron of hot, boiling oil simmering in her stomach.
The Renoir copy sighed. “It’s okay,” he muttered, sounding as if he was trying to convince himself. “You’re safe and that’s all that matters. We will find your mother, and our family will be together again soon.”
“Together?”
The cauldron of boiling oil in her stomach had spilled over and all Clea could do was laugh. She had not laughed like this in a long time (had anyone in her family laughed after the fire? Verso was always the ones with the jokes, it made sense that their laughter would die with him). She buried her face in her hand, but the laughter shook through her, and she threw her head back, clawing at her hair. How dare this fictional portrayal of her father talked about his family coming together! This heinous fantasy of an insane woman was breaking and keeping her family apart! How could Renoir (whose copy was staring at her with confused worried eyes) still forgive Aline for this—how could he still choose her over the rest of his family, the rest of his responsibilities, the rest of his life?
This was her Canvas, and she could feel the long dormant Chroma from deep within its fabric stirred and flowed into her. There were pieces of her soul, pieces of her life that she had shared with Verso—everything she had outgrown and left behind, pieces for her to pick up like everything else in her real life. She was this world’s creator, and she would be its destroyer.
“Commander!” yelled one of the figures in black. Clea didn’t even realise how high she was floating above them all until she saw how small they were under her feet. Like ants. Like droplets of paint.
Her old sketches here—some of which she made to scare Verso, most of which she made to impress him—answered her call. They rose from the earth as if sculpted by the suddenly roaring wind. Clea could hardly hear the screams and the curses and the pleading, but she could feel Aline’s Chroma being released. This was like moving paint around with a brush, she thought to herself as she watched her creatures scatter white and red petals in the canvas below, like when her mother used to paint with her to show her the correct techniques when she was a child, like when she and her brother poured their hearts out in this Canvas together.
Focusing on her sculptures in the recent years meant that it had been a while since she was last in a Canvas proper, and it had been an even longer while since she let loose so much Chroma all at once. It felt exhilarating. She didn't realise how tired and exhausted and numb she had been since the fire, and now she felt alive: she was burning, but she was so, so alive. She thought of how much fun she had with Verso in this Canvas, and maybe this was one last way to honour his memory: having fun in his name destroying their Canvas.
“CLEA!”
Verso’s voice somehow made it over all the wind and the screaming. She saw his figure wave his sword at her—his sword? She couldn’t help but descend towards him so that he could see her laugh at him.
“What the fuck are you doing?” yelled the Verso copy, “have you gone insane? These are your friends—we’re your family, and you’re trying to kill us?”
His face was splattered with red paint—his? Someone else’s? Didn’t matter. He held a dagger in his other hand—Verso’s long pianist fingers, always employed in the service of creation and Art and delighting others, now pale from clutching his blades tightly as he approached Clea. Behind him, the Renoir copy stared at her with wide eyes frozen in terror—Clea had only seen that look on her father once before, and it was when he arrived at the charred ruins of their house too slow too late. In his hand was a long black blade—one of her Mimes’ heads lay at his feet. Clea couldn’t help but chuckle at the ridiculous image before her.
What kind of family did Aline have in mind when she Painted them into existence? Did she think that maybe if this bunch of soft sheltered artists had been rough and tough warriors they would have been able to avoid the disaster that befell them?
“You’re not my family,” said Clea calmly. “I may kill you, yes.” She hadn’t entirely reached a decision, even with Aline’s copy of her that she had put to sleep in the old flying house. She had felt like a harangued parent keeping away her child’s toys until the tantrum subsided, and now she felt like maybe the parent was entitled to break the toys a little bit, to teach the child a lesson—and as a little treat for the parent: a little catharsis.
The Verso copy staggered back. He shook his head, and the sword and dagger dissolved into thin air. He slowly raised his hands and stepped towards her in an even slower pace. “Clea, we’ve seen this before: everyone’s been through a lot, and I know you’re strong, but many people have cracked under everything that’s happened.” He opened his hands wide. “You’re safe. You have to stop this. Come home with us.”
Using words instead of swords—that was more like the Verso she knew. The ridicule she felt slipped back into annoyance.
“Verso’s right, Clea,” said the Renoir copy, his hand clutching his cane again instead of the long dark blade. “It will be okay. Just… come back to us.”
“You’re not my family,” said Clea again, her voice lower and colder because she was annoyed she had to repeat herself, and because an unexpected drop of pity trickled in. Was it an act of compassion or cruelty to reveal to them the truth of their existence? “You’re the painted fantasies of a woman who’s lost herself in grief.” She turned to the Verso copy. “The Verso Aline based you on is dead. This world, this Canvas—this was ours, and she took it from us.”
The Verso copy tried to give an incredulous nervous chuckle, his mask crumbling; the Renoir copy seemed to grow even more alike in expression and demeanour with how the real Renoir looked when she left him alone in his self-imposed jail.
She gestured at the distant figure of the Monolith behind them. “What you called the Fracture was Renoir attempting to save his wife from losing and killing herself in this Canvas. I’m sure you can sympathise,” she added with a bemused scoff. “I tried talking sense into him, I told him to leave her with you, with her fantasy, but his stubbornness is only matched by hers, and he will not leave this Canvas without her, even if it meant destroying it.”
She was barely cognisant of the battle (is it a battle when it was so one-sided? Maybe a ‘massacre’ was the right word, but then again, Clea wasn’t a Writer and was not particularly invested in being accurate with words) still raging around them. She had plenty of doodles and sketches her younger self had scattered around the Canvas; they were still responding to her call, they were still unconditionally following her bidding, throwing themselves and their jagged edges at the hopeless figures in black.
“Clea,” croaked the Renoir copy, “my Clea. Did you kill her?”
Clea shrugged. The ground drifted away again from her as she easily floated into the air, revelling in the realisation in their eyes that they were in the presence of a god, of a phenomenon more powerful beyond their imagination.
“Does it matter?” laughed Clea, “you’re all brush strokes on a canvas that will be erased anyway.”
The sword glimmered back into this Verso’s hand and a shorter dagger emerged from the other. A stray memory landed in Clea’s mind like a buzzing bee dipping in for nectar: tiny Verso painting himself a little sword as he rode on Esquie, charging at her while she was on top of Françoise, tiny Verso’s voice yelling En Garde En Garde!—
—she waved her hand—waved the memory away—Painting and sculpting an old design into life beneath her, and as it took form its shadow enveloped her fake father and brother and the pathetic ants scurrying about under her.
“You raise your sword at me, ‘Verso’?” said Clea, “you want to duel?”
She was a Paintress, not a pretend warrior like this bunch of pretend Dessendres who thought dancing and twirling were fighting (clearly an artistic liberty her mother indulged in). As per her family legacy, she would let her art speak for itself.
She will call this one Dualliste. “Have at it,” grinned Clea as her wonderful creature drew its sword and swung it towards the black dots, smudging the canvas with all shades of red.
No artist enjoyed erasing; it is a much harder and more delicate job that requires even more control and luck than layering on your medium of choice. Working with your mistakes—or Clea’s favourite hack: never make a mistake in the first place—was much easier than erasing. The act of erasing itself is an art form that requires much practice, skill, and finesse.
In pencil and graphite an eraser would do the job, although it may not erase cleanly and eventually the friction may wear holes into the paper; in ink you try to cover your mistakes with white ink; in watercolour you whisper your prayers and wet the offensive spot and try to lift it away with a dry brush: in oil you whisper another set of prayers, you press a piece of paper or rag against the offensive spot and repeat until it’s gone, or you can take a sandpaper to the canvas and grind down the paint and the canvas until it was good enough to be painted over.
And here, in this Canvas, the fastest way to erase errant paint spots is to remove the Chroma attached to an animated figure by fulfilling the conditions of its expiry (such as by way of a stab to the heart)—this is a little bit more similar to working with mistakes on your canvas. But without stopping this Chroma from returning back to Aline, there would be nothing stopping her mother outside of the death of her physical body (which Clea was convinced was Aline’s goal to begin with) from continuously Painting more simulacrums of humans here.
Clea watched one of the fake humans fall into their own pool of blood, twitching as the death rattle seized them and the Chroma started to seep out of their body. She painted a shell around the dying body, a dark opaque colour that would be difficult to paint over. She smiled to herself; her hunch worked out well, but now came the more difficult part of engineering a way to keep this little trick of hers going.
She glided through the battlefield, experimenting with her new idea, and she was so deeply taken in by this exciting train of thought (an affliction of “single-mindedness” her father had said, she wasn’t sure as a jest, was passed down and inherited by the women of the family) that she didn’t notice the blade sticking out of her chest until her white shirt was drenched in red, and pain seeped in. She was equally amused and curious with the sensation of pain as she was annoyed with this little distraction.
She turned around. A young woman looked on in terror—at both her blade and at Clea. Clea felt like she had seen the face around before—her mother really did Paint into this Canvas actual people in their lives, a big headache, really, if word ever got out about her mother’s insanity and blatant abuse and contravention of Painter Council’s rules and regulations that had transpired here.
“Monster,” gasped the young woman, “leave us alone!” The terror and desperation in her voice only made Clea’s grin wider.
There was another way to erase in the Canvas—it was an inelegant, brute force way that was more reminiscent of scrubbing an oil canvas with a rag or sandpaper, and it would take up a disproportionate amount of Chroma compared to the first method. Clea reached out to the young woman—maybe her name in the real world was Claudia? Clara? Just a passing face in society, a background character in Clea’s life.
“Get out of my Canvas,” said Clea, and a jolt of Chroma blasted the young woman into a flurry of petals. Another mistake erased.
Verso’s eyes stared at her through the diminishing mass of petals. She knew he was watching the gaping hole in her chest close up and heal. She knew that he now understood the hell he was born into courtesy of their crazed mother. She would feel sorry for him if he were a real person. She still felt sorry most of all for her actual dead brother. Verso, her Verso, would have never wanted this.
“This is a kindness,” said Clea, and Dualliste’s sword charged from behind her and straight into the fake Verso’s heart.
She had expected the sham Renoir to rush immediately over to his side (how lucky of this Renoir to be able to be by his son’s side as he died, she thought with some amusement). Dualliste readied a second sword behind her—it would be much easier to erase mistakes that were congregated in one spot together.
She had not expected a second figure in black to rush to Verso: a rapier was now pointed at Clea’s throat, the other arm protecting her family behind her.
“Alicia.” Clea didn’t even realise that she said her name out loud.
She had been painted over. The mask hid her scars, the same scars Alicia had in the real world. Why would Aline paint her with these scars, why would she still let her daughter suffer like this even in her happily ever after fantasy?
In the weeks after the fire, Aline had turned away from Alicia in her struggle to not blame or lash out at her daughter over what had happened, and instead she turned towards this fiction for comfort. It didn’t make sense at all, thought Clea, for Aline to paint something that was the opposite of comfort, unless the woman had really lost it, and had become a total stranger in comparison to the woman who had raised her.
Certainly, thought Clea, this cruelty was as good a sign that Aline had abandoned her family.
This Alicia glared at her with a fury that Clea had not seen in her Alicia’s eye for a long time. Her Alicia, now practically an orphelin alone in the empty house, as much as a willing prisoner in her room as Renoir was under the Monolith. Her Alicia, who deserved better than being abandoned by her family for a childhood Canvas torn apart by marital strife.
Clea sighed and Dualliste lowered its swords behind her. Behind the masked Alicia, she could see Verso cough up blood, but somehow still scrambling to his feet, one side supported by his father, and the other by his sword that was planted into the earth. His wound was shrinking, almost as fast as Clea’s own just now—his dark hair, matted with blood, was turning as white as her own in the Canvas, and as white as the masked Alicia’s, as if it had just been painted by watercolour and a dry brush sucked it dry of pigment.
The masked Alicia’s rapier wavered, her glance darting between her brother and Clea.
“I’m fine,” croaked the Verso copy, a question mark hanging in the air at the end of his sentence.
“Aline,” muttered the fake Renoir like a prayer. “She’ll always protect us.”
“Indeed,” said Clea with a bemused, hollow chuckle, “it looks like she’s made her choice.”
Clea wasn’t even annoyed anymore. Yes, her mother just made things even harder for her. But this helped Clea reached a certain enlightenment: this was a waste of time, and a waste of her Chroma. This was not her problem. She had a million things she had to do in the real world, and it was uncharacteristically wasteful and mindless of her to waste her limited time, energy, and Chroma on babysitting her parents. She could circumvent this inconvenient immortality by forcefully erasing them like she did Clara (? Claudia?), but apart from the fact that it would take up too much precious Chroma Clea would rather save for her own war in the real world, it also wouldn’t stop Aline from painting new fake family again and again.
The fire in her had cooled and all that was left was the acidic twang of fatigue. This had been an indulgence, but it simply wasn’t fun anymore.
Dualliste dropped to one knee and offered a hand for Clea to step onto. “This has been fun,” said Clea as Dualliste stood up to its full height, “but I have better things to do.”
She could still give her father a little helping hand. She would really prefer having him by her side doing actual work in the real world. But she was done wasting her time trying to clean up after her mother’s perverse little project.
The masked Alicia rushed towards her brother’s side, hugging him tightly with one arm even as the other kept her rapier pointed at Clea—it remained steady even as her father pulled both his children into a desperate embrace. It made Clea wonder if this fire was still in her Alicia somehow, even if Alicia herself seemed to have tried her best to smother it.
“Hold onto one another,” she said without any trace of jealousy in her voice, because Clea was the one who taught Verso how to lie and how to keep your voice steady, how to keep yourself in control even as your inner world was falling apart.
Dualliste bent its knees like a coiled spring and took to the sky.
2: the second time
She found him in the perpetually frozen mountains where they used to ski and build endless snowmen snow monsters as children. There were more trains in the train station and on the tracks than she remembered. He had also painted himself a piano right there in the open, exposed to the constant cold and snow, and the fact that it remained pristine and kept playing was a display of the not-insubstantial amount of Chroma and Chroma manipulation Aline had gifted him with.
Monoco and Noco the Gestrals saw her approach and they quietly left her and Verso alone. They both had to know this Verso’s real nature. They both clearly didn’t care. Their kindness and innocence made her think of Verso again and how everything that was good in this Canvas was him—her Verso, not this copy in front of her still mindlessly playing through arpeggios of every scale like the world’s longest piano warm up.
He ended on a dissonant note when he felt her behind him. He turned around, hands slowly raised away from the keys as if surrendering.
“I’m not here to kill you,” said Clea. “I already know I can’t.”
He put his hands down beside him. “You can still erase me,” he said. He sounded almost hopeful.
“I could,” said Clea, “I won’t.”
His glare at her belied the anger and frustration a helpless mortal would be seized with in the face of capricious gods. It was the kind of expression Clea had always sought to evoke with her works—yet she found that it brought her no pleasure to see this on his face now.
“Nice scar,” she said instead, gesturing at the ugly welt across his eye.
“Thanks,” muttered Verso, “you should see the other guy.”
“I’m impressed,” said Clea, “I’ve never seen Verso make Renoir that angry before." Well, she had never seen Renoir genuinely angry before, she really didn't know what was wrong with that man; she felt annoyed because she had to feel angry on his behalf since he apparently couldn’t, and it was just a waste of time and energy when she had so many things to do.
She perched herself on the piano in front of him. “Maybe the closest thing to that would be when Verso told him and Aline that he was going to move out to stay closer to the theatre and that he was going to do music full time," she said, drumming her fingers on the glossy black sheen of the piano on which they left no finger prints. She didn't know why she was saying all this to this painted facsimile of her dead brother. "That was a few days before the fire, and I wasn’t there to see that.”
“I’m not your Verso,” said Verso, his voice simmering with something dark and sharp.
Clea raised an eyebrow. “I noticed,” she said flatly.
“What do you want, Clea?” said Verso, getting up from the piano with such force that the seat toppled back into the snow. “If you’re not here to kill me, then why are you here?”
Clea swung her legs slowly, drawing an arc in the snow below her. “Because you look tired,” said Clea, “and I think you can help me help you.” She reached a hand into the harp in the centre of the piano and tickled the strings. “I think we both want the same thing, don’t we?”
Verso may have been an expert at masking himself, but Clea had always been able to see through those light blue eyes and she held and searched his gaze almost out of habit. He looked down almost immediately, the mess of white and grey and black strands obfuscating his eyes.
“Get Maman home,” he said softly.
“I don’t care about Aline,” said Clea, a little too quickly and maybe a little too harshly. Verso just looked at her, shook his head, and then turned to gaze into the frozen mountains, his hands in his pockets. The snow flakes peppered his hair, undoing the bad dye job he did to desperately colour his silver hair.
“Will you stop all the killing and let the Expeditioners reach her?”
She sighed. “I don’t understand how you don’t see that I’m helping you. No one in this Canvas can even imagine the amount of Chroma she has, much less have any hope of surmounting that. I’m chipping away at that—every erased drawing here is an increased chance for you to take her on.”
Verso shook his head again, slower this time. “I’m not helping you and your father kill people, Clea.”
Even the drip of annoyance she felt at him felt intimately familiar—it was exactly the shade of annoyance she reserved for her baby brother whenever he shot down a brilliant idea of hers because he was too much of a crybaby.
“Fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I don’t need your help.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Verso had sat back down on the piano and played back the absent-minded notes she had tickled on its strings. She didn’t realise her fingers had been playing Debussy, specifically, the opening melody to Rêverie, a piece that Verso performed a few weeks just before the fire.
She got off the piano and his notes rang clearer without her body muffling it. “Do you want me to erase your father for you?” she offered, sitting down on one corner of the seat facing away from the keys beside him, reminiscent of how she used to sing along with him while he played. The seat used to be much bigger then.
Verso stopped playing again. “No. Stop killing my family, stop killing people—what's wrong with you?"
Clea shrugged. "You said you want more Expeditioners to reach Aline."
"I’m not going to hunt down my family,” said Verso, “I’m not going to hurt them any more than I already did.”
“You’re not making this easy,” said Clea lightly. She was teasing him—she had no desire to kill her father’s doppelgänger, and in any case, she didn’t have the luxury of time to.
“There has to be another way,” he insisted, “there’s got to be.”
Clea looked at him the same way she looked at her brother when he insisted that Monoco had to come back from the vet, that he just had to. Still in denial, she thought, about what he wanted, and about what he needed to do.
He went back to the piano, his fingers hammering out a frustrated Wagner’s Fantasia in F Sharp Minor, and then stopping halfway and changing into the introspective Scriabin’s Poem No 1, Op 32. She knew she had to leave when she caught herself thinking that this was so typical of him, that he would hide everything within himself and only let it flow out on the piano like a controlled stream from a dam.
She stood up and left. She didn't have to say goodbye to him. She didn't have to be polite to her brother, much less her mother's copy of him.
3: the final time
It was easy to find him—she had his Chroma signature down: a melody that was a different key from Verso’s. He had set up a solitary camp in one of the cliffs overlooking the graveyard of ships and trenches and petrified bodies, his clothes in tatters, dried blood caking his face and his entire lower half. He hardly reacted when he saw her approach: after the barest acknowledgment with a gaze, he turned back to the fire he was nursing, poking at it restlessly. She took a seat on the ground across him.
“I’m tired,” he said finally. It sounded almost like pleading.
“I know.”
He gestured at the devastation below and behind them. “I don’t want this.”
She thought of a younger Verso breaking into sobs in front of her when she showed him Lampmaster, and how quickly she had promised him that she would put it in a frozen canvas within the Canvas.
She could erase him now. It would be quite an expenditure of precious Chroma she needed for the other million matters in her life, but there was no question that she could. But no, she didn’t want to. This wasn’t her problem, thought Clea bitterly again. This was all her mother’s fault, and she really had so so many things she should be doing instead of cleaning up after her and having to watch her a copy of her brother disappear by her hands.
“It will end soon.”
Verso’s glare at her remained frozen despite being shot through the flames of the fire.
“Alicia’s here,” she said, trying hard not to sigh and reveal her frustration.
Verso dropped his stick and stood up, looking around.
Clea sighed inwardly again. “My sister Alicia.”
He walked back to his original spot by the fire and plopped back down onto the ground. “Ah,” he muttered, “Verso’s.” He drew his dagger and started whittling down the pile of sticks by his side. “She’s not with you? Is she with Maman, or with your Renoir?”
Clea slid her arms behind her and leaned her weight back. “Neither. She’s a little bit out of practice in Painting,” she said, looking up into the black ink of the sky above her, “Aline’s Chroma painted over her when she went in here. She might pop up in your city any time now, if she already hasn’t.” A stray wind blew and the fire between them danced wildly. “She has been mostly in bed since the fire—she’s not exactly in the pink of health, so a protracted stay here might not exactly be what the doctors have in mind for her.”
Verso continued chipping away at his sticks and feeding them into the fire.
“Keep an eye on her, will you?”
He snorted. “You killed my oldest sister, you tried to kill me, and your family maimed my youngest sister. You want me—“ a bitter chuckle as he shook his head, dried blood flaking off onto his shoulders “—to watch over your sister?
You Painters, you just take and take and take.”
Clea drew her arms around her knees. She expected this reaction.
“She might be inexperienced, but she’s still a Paintress and a Dessendre. Her Chroma might be what you needed to push Aline out of this Canvas.”
Verso threw a particularly large stick into the fire and it burst into sparks.
“You’ve got family here,” he said, glancing at the shadow of the Monolith behind them. “Ask him for help.”
It wasn’t entirely just pity that stopped her from telling Renoir about Alicia. She wasn’t entirely sure how he would react—her father had stopped making sense since he decided to chase after a lost wife who didn’t want to be found. For all she knew he might stop the annual Gommage or ask her to stop her creatures out of irrational fear of hurting Alicia—or worse, he might ask her to keep an eye on her sister when she didn’t have time for that. She had a million things to do, and now she was also the only person actually alive in their family, actually living in the real world, actually dealing with the consequences of their actions. She was the only one who could watch over their vulnerable flesh shells of bodies frozen in front of this Canvas.
So many things she needed to get to, and once again her family was holding her back.
“He can’t help,” muttered Clea. Her old man was as trapped and hopeless as everyone else here.
"And you think your Alicia would help?" said Verso quietly.
Clea shrugged. "I can never tell with the silly girl. I'll tell her one thing, and she'll do another." She thought of her sister, the person she used to be, not the shadow she was now: tomboy Alicia, bookworm Alicia, a storm of contradiction and passion, as headstrong as anyone in their family, always running even if there was nowhere else to run, until she runs herself down. Just like their mother. "She'll do whatever she wants, I guess."
"You Painters tend to do that," muttered Verso bitterly.
"And you can do whatever you want," shot Clea back immediately, "I'm not telling you what to do."
Alicia would be fine with or without this Verso’s help. Clea would get her out eventually-she would take care of everything like how she had been taking care of everything since the fire, alone—and in the meantime, maybe her little sister could do with a little bit of escape from that cold empty carcass of a home.
Verso glared back at her wordlessly, and Clea was pricked once again with annoyance at just how damn good of a Painter Aline was. Verso had given her countless copies of that glare over the years—as he got older, it was one of the few glimpses of his true feelings he would share with her when he felt like he had to swallow his words, especially around his parents and other members of society. Just how did her mother craft such a ghost whose very existence seemed to constantly tug at memories Clea didn't even remember storing—
—Verso chasing after her every second of her life after he figured out how to walk, the resignation she felt as he climbed all over her, and the annoyance she felt at her parents because she did not ask for a shadow—
—Verso leaning on her shoulder and falling asleep after a long day of playing or painting or practising on the piano, the annoyance she felt because he had trapped her like this, and the dead arm she would get because she let him stay that way every time anyway, sometimes letting her cheek rest in his hair and also feeling her breath slow down to match his and drifting off to sleep—
—lanky Verso shooting in height every day that one year when he was fifteen and the slow burning realisation Clea had only years later that he had become a pillar of the family, and the annoyance she felt that even she leaned on him sometime—
—that pillar was gone now, and their house, their family were in ruins.
She stood up and brushed dust off her skirt. Clea was not someone who runs away from her ghosts, but she did have a million other things that she should already have been done with.
"Before you go, maybe you should see François," Verso said, looking up at her from his seat on the ground. "He gets grumpier each time I visit Esquie. I know Clea—my Clea—did not visit him either."
"I don't know who that is," said Clea.
"Liar," laughed Verso, "pants on fire."
She crossed her arms and took in the dark sky of her and her brother's childhood world, littered by destruction and ruin, broken and tragically beautiful. Time is linear, and it's finite. She had learned early on that there was never enough time to do all the things she needed and wanted to do, and being stuck in the past would slow her down. Her father's voice somehow came to her, telling her about how the past was the clay that shaped her into the sculpture she was today, and there was nothing wrong to occasionally look back to the past to obtain more supply of clay that way. And look at where that got you, thought Clea with petty vindictiveness as she dropped her glance towards the Monolith, how do you like that jail sculpted by the clay of the past?
"This is probably going to be goodbye," said Clea.
Verso got up. "Don't get my hopes up like that."
She released her arms and regretted that—now she felt like they were just dead weight hanging off her shoulders, like how they used to feel after letting Verso sleep on her shoulder for hours. What to do now—should she give him a handshake? In a way, they were now business associates, or in more nostalgic terms, partners in crime.
The last time she saw Verso was the morning of the fire. He had asked to have breakfast with her, at the bakery below his new rental flat ("best viennoiseries in Paris, I promise", knowing all too well she was vulnerable to freshly baked chouquettes). He had asked for her advice because even though he felt terrible about what he said to their parents, he felt like he wasn't in the wrong.
"Of course not," said Clea impatiently. She didn't want her brother to fall back into his customary parent-pleasing mode after such a breakthrough.
"How did you do it?" said Verso. "How did you get them to be..." he shrugged. "... normal about you growing up and having a life of your own?"
Clea laughed. "Oh, mon petit frère, Maman especially would never be normal about letting you go."
Verso rolled his eyes. "Enough with this favourites nonsense," he said, "especially when we both know that Alicia's both of their favourites."
They shared a look as they sipped their coffee. They both knew what Alicia had in store for their parents—she had confided in each of her older siblings as her parents' nagging about the company she kept had gradually turned into more contentious arguments. It wasn't as if Clea liked Alicia's friends (pretentious passive-aggressive bunch, she had thought, how tiring it must be to be in their presence for more than five minutes), and she generally had a healthy distrust (and even a tinge of disdain) for Writers like any Painter who had been working in society for a while, but her sister had her own life and had every right to make whatever friends she wanted, and she would learn the hard way like the rest of them did about the harsh reality of fake friends and rigid societies.
Maman was about to have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, mused Clea to herself. Well, every mother bird eventually had to deal with her baby birds leaving the nest.
"I have a lot to pack anyway, so I'll be staying over tonight—the weekend most likely," said Verso, stretching his long figure, his fingers almost touching the ceiling of the tiny cafe. "I'll think of something to say. I should remember to get flowers for Maman."
"I thought Alicia's having her dinner thing tonight," said Clea, mostly remembering that her parents would be away for a glitzy society dinner for old fuddy-duddies and that Alicia had always wanted to take advantage of their absence to have friends over.
"I'm not sure if you'd noticed," said Verso, "but our family home is pretty sizeable. I'm sure Alicia won't mind having her brother skulk around in the shadows."
She had to leave then because she had a million other things she had to do. Did she even say goodbye? She didn't remember giving him the usual kisses, or even a hug—she probably just gave his arm a pat as she squeezed behind him for the exit.
Clea let her gaze drift back to this copy of her dead brother. Alicia, ever the romantic and ever the poet, would say something like how this was the kind of second chance everyone prays for to make things right. No, thought Clea, this was exactly the kind of thinking that got Aline into where she was today.
"I'd say take care," said Clea finally, "but you might take that as a threat."
Verso looked down. "I hope you and your family will find peace," he said softly. When he looked up, the clear blue eyes held no malice in their depths.
So kind. So soft and gentle and so fucking kind. Just like her dead brother, and why he was dead, and why she loved him so.
Clea turned away and ripped open a hole into her father's atelier. It was exactly the kind of thing Verso would say, and she could feel something boil in her stomach. Anger at her mother. Yes, that had to be it.
She took her leave of him and stepped back into her world, her war, her ruins.
Epilogue
Clea woke up from her nightmare into another one. Verso was here, Alicia was here—she had never wanted her younger siblings to see her as anything less than indomitable and indefatigable, and here she was, a limp puppet dangled in front of them. They were all puppets too; they were all as much puppets as the creatures she had been mindlessly creating, play things for arrogant pathetic gods in a tiny disgusting sand box. Her sketches answered her call still—she wished her siblings didn’t have to watch, but they knew how proud and strong she was, and if they ever forgot, they were about to be reminded—
Clea’s light steps to Verso belied how heavy these flowers felt in her arms. She crouched down and placed the flowers in front of him. This was the real Verso, very much dead, very much missed, very much loved. The weather was beautiful, the golden glow of the sun warming her face as the gentle breeze whipped around her. This was the kind of weather she and Verso would have fallen asleep to under one of the big oak trees in the grounds many many years ago, and as they drifted off to sleep they would fall onto each other, becoming intertwined like leaning branches that only had each other for support.
She had always wanted to look indomitable and indefatigable to her siblings. She was so tired. She still had a million things to do. She glanced back at Alicia, small, timid, but alive, clutching at Esquie as she silently stared at the grave; at her parents, who had finally broken through whatever invisible barrier they had between them, back to doing what they do best, which was loving each other. She thought again of the many naps with Verso under the tree.
She didn’t look back at Verso as she took her leave. She was so tired. But she had to continue.