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The fire roars all around her. It’s all Aline can do to cough, all she can manage from where she lays on the ground. When arms slip around her, pulling her from the haze of smoke that clogs her throat, she hardly recognizes it at first. It takes her four, five large swaying steps for her to recognize her rescuer.
“Verso,” she croaks, the ash in the air drying out the simple act of saying her son’s name.
“I have you,” he says, but she feels the thundering of his chest against her arms as he coughs, feels the way he staggers. “I’m here.”
Her eyes drift shut of their own accord. She has to fight to open them again. When she finally manages, she’s uncertain how much time has passed, recognizing only belatedly that they’re outside now, out the front door of the Manor.
She tries to say thank you. All that comes out is another withered Verso as she feels herself being lowered into the soft wet grass of the front garden.
“I know,” he says, “I know.” His voice is flat and tired, like it’s a mantra he can’t let go of. “I have to… to go back. I have to go back.”
She shakes her head, her fingers clutching his lapel. No, she wants to say, but she can’t get the word out - a word as simple as that, a single syllable, and she can’t manage. She shakes her head again. Non.
His fingers wind around hers, prying hers away as easy as anything. She had no idea her grip was so weak.
“Alicia,” he begins gently, soothingly, “Alicia is still inside. I have to go back.”
Her heart leaps to her throat, forcing a cough out. He uses it as an opportunity to escape her grip entirely as she coughs and coughs and coughs at the sight of his retreating form rushing back across the lawn.
“Verso,” she pleads, finally able to get it out. The dread and terror and smoke in her lungs make her roll onto her stomach, urgency making her nails dig into the earth below in a desperate attempt to bring him back away from the growing flames. She has to stop him. Alicia is… she can’t lose two children to this.
She can even feel the heat from here.
In the doorway, Verso turns, his lighter hair bouncing across his forehead. It is a bolt of light separated from his dark curls, chiaroscuro.
She can’t help but to follow the movement with her eyes, that streak of white. He was born with it. She’s afraid now that he will die with it. Die here and now, with her alone on the grass, unable to even stand up for the choke of it all.
And Verso, her darling Verso, just smiles at her, the corners of his mouth barely tipping up like he heard her thought. Heard it and doesn’t care, because he has to do what needs to be done. It needs to be done and he is available to do it - that’s just how it is for him. He will do it.
So he turns away, back into the Manor.
When the news comes that he is gone, Alicia in critical condition but alive thanks to Verso, Aline is unconscious with Renoir at her side. Her husband tells her when she comes to in his arms, tears in his eyes. He says he almost lost her too, almost lost Alicia, indeed lost their son. All she can think of as she shuts her eyes to fend off the oncoming tears is her son’s last sad smile, his white hair curling over his dark eyebrow.
He was born with that white streak. He died with it.
Her chiaroscuro, gone in a flash.