Work Text:
It’s been months since the world shattered into pieces. Gustave's hands show the strain: callouses and baked-in dirt stain his skin from endless hours in the workshop, while his metal hand is already covered with scuff-marks and knicks from hasty mistakes with his tools.
The Fracture, they're calling it.
It’s such a small word for the whole-scale destruction of their world: a city torn to pieces; a continent torn adrift; countless lives lost, and families ripped apart in the process.
Sitting in the waiting room of the Council’s head office, Gustave’s hands clutch hold of his plans as the seconds trickle past, a thick roll of construction paper trapped in a tube.
Lumière’s Head Engineer: the position should be an honour. Knowing that it’s soaked in blood, that the only reason this responsibility sits on his shoulders is due to the loss of those more qualified than him, it’s turned the honour into an empty one. A bitter one.
He watches the ticking clock on the wall as it counts away the seconds, and tries to keep his breathing steady as he does.
Finally, the door opens. “The Commander is ready for you now,” the council secretary says, someone who looks just as lost in their new position as Gustave feels. They hold the door for him as he heads into the grand office.
Its décor is something from another world, a past that already feels like it no longer belongs to them. There are lush paintings on the walls, gold accents on the furniture, and a rich mahogany desk. In the wake of all they’ve been through, it feels like a farce.
Behind the desk, leaning back in his chair with his hands folded against his chest, sits Commander Dessendre himself. His chair is tilted to allow him to stare directly out of the window: the view takes him down into the chaotic grey streets of Lumière, or what’s left of it.
The Commander himself looks as if he’s lost weight since the last time Gustave saw him, something that must only have been days ago but already feels like years. There’s a grey sheen of grief across his face, like a shadow escaped from a nightmare, accented with grey-and-white stubble; for all the years that Gustave has known him, Renoir is neatly groomed and dressed, the very picture of perfection - but, for all the years that Gustave has known him, Renoir has had his wife at his side, his own personal sun, stars and universe.
Without the sun, even the strongest redwood will wilt.
“Commander,” Gustave says to capture his attention back from Lumière’s broken streets. He stands before the office’s grand desk, clutching his plans in his hands and holding his head as high as he can: there’s a protocol for this, he’s certain of it, but that’s yet another thing he hasn’t had time to learn.
“Don’t start with that ‘commander’ nonsense,” Renoir rasps. Even his very voice carries the weight of his own exhaustion, the hoarse scrape of a hundred sleepless nights. “You used my name before the Fracture; you can continue to use it now.”
Gustave tries to hold back his sigh of relief at the faintest offer of normality in the midst of all this mess. The world was ripped apart around them only months ago; at the very least, it seems he can rely on Renoir to know how to cut through the unnecessary business.
“Of course,” he sighs.
“Unless you’d like me to start calling you ‘Head Engineer’,” Renoir suggests. He swings his chair back from the window and turns his sharp attention onto Gustave instead. For all that the sleepless nights are showing in his voice, and for all that the very turn of his shoulders inside his suit speaks of exhaustion, there’s nothing faltering in his voice. His pale gaze is as sharp as ever. “No?”
“Perhaps not,” Gustave concedes. It doesn’t feel quite right, reverting to titles when he’s been invited to dinner parties and events at the Dessendre Manor ever since his days as a student at the academy. At the time, he’d been nothing but a promising up-and-coming engineer, granted a late apprenticeship to the Dessendres to provide him with insights into the machinery of the Council of Lumière. Renoir had been a mentor to show him how the politics of it all worked - but it was never supposed to be like this.
Renoir nods towards the plans clutched in Gustave’s hands. “You have something to show me,” he states.
“Right. Yes.” Hastily, Gustave begins to unpack the papers. He steps forward to the desk and unfurls them across it: his own detailed scrawl unrolls over every inch of the surface. The diagram is intricately labelled and perfectly sketched out. “It’s the shield dome. Some improvements. What we have now is keeping the majority of nevrons out, yes, but -”
“There have been incursions,” Renoir confirms heavily.
“Yes. Not many: the dome is great. But…”
“It could be better.” Renoir leans forward to take in the details of the suggestions Gustave has made, his skilled eyes seeming to decode every amendment in the diagram without any need for Gustave’s notes or pre-prepared speech. “Monsters in the streets - half our city gone - a world gone quiet,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “We’re fighting something we know nothing about.”
Gustave’s fingers brush against the edge of the paper. “We’re doing what we can,” he promises. “The dome keeps most of us safe - and each time one of them breaks through, we get more data. With more data, we can refine the dome, and-”
“And build ourselves a thicker wall to hide behind,” Renoir agrees, “All while we send search-and-rescue missions back to a missing continent - and find nothing.”
This is beyond engineering and inventions; how can Gustave possibly hold a candle of hope in a world that’s determined to snuff it out? He traces one of the lines of the adjustments he wants to make to their security measures. “We’ll find something eventually, Renoir,” he promises. We’ll find her. “We have to.”
But Renoir doesn’t look up at him.
His gaze remains settled on Gustave’s plans and the silence stretches painfully between them. “You can have whatever you need.”
“Renoir, I-”
“You’re here to beg me for resources,” Renoir summarises, before Gustave even has a chance to ask. “You’ll have them. Whatever it is, we’ll find a way to make it work. If you say that this will protect our people, I trust your word.”
It’s too much. He’s ready to fight and argue for every scrap, but an easy victory feels wrong.
Finally, Renoir looks up at him. From the dark marks under his eyes, Gustave doesn’t think he’s slept properly since it happened - only fitful nights, one after another, as the Fracture tore their world apart and the monsters did the rest. “I won’t be here the next time you come asking for amendments, so if there’s anything you need: ask for it now,” Renoir states.
“What?”
“We’re sending a team to the Continent. No more exploratory missions. We’re going to the Monolith itself.” Renoir stands up from his desk and begins to make his way around it to Gustave’s side of this office. “A true Expedition. I’ve been calling the shots from afar for far too long.”
Standing in front of his petty plans, his fingertips trapped against fixes that feel so small, Gustave’s mouth goes dry. How many people have they sent to the Continent in the past few months?
And how many of them have returned?
It’s a death wish wrapped up in nobility of purpose.
“Alicia will be staying in Lumière,” Renoir explains, “But Verso will be coming with me.”
“Verso?” Gustave doesn’t quite mean the element of disbelief that threads its way into his voice - but he’s grown up in the same cohort as Verso, both of them similar ages even if Verso’s upbringing has been in a different strata from his own. Verso’s a pianist, an artist; he shouldn’t be thrown to the dangers of the Continent. With a breath, Gustave raps his metal knuckles against the plans on the desk. “Alright, yes. Fine. I’m coming too.”
An easy decision, even if Emma might kill him for it.
Renoir’s tired, weighted stare pins him in place and stops his mind before he can try to pull together a rushed plan of what he’ll need to do in order to join the Expedition in time. “You’re needed here,” Renoir states. “Someone needs to keep the city in one piece. As of now, you’re our best shot at it.”
“You are,” Gustave blurts. He should take it back as soon as he says it: he should scramble to collect the misspoken words, but instead he tilts his head back. “The city needs you.”
All the chaos, all the danger, all the death - they’ve been able to keep going with the knowledge that someone like Renoir is at the helm. In Renoir’s presence, or listening to his speeches, Gustave’s always felt convinced that they’ll make it through this mess, one way or another.
Renoir looks away from the hope in his eyes. He breathes out through his nose and shakes his head, almost to himself. “I know that we won’t find them out there, not alive,” he confesses - and the ghosts of Aline and Clea Dessendre seem to smother the air around them. Aline had vanished in the Fracture; Clea had followed months afterwards, disappearing in the night without a trace. Their absence carves a hole through the city’s very core. “But I need to find them. I need to know.”
This isn’t a rescue mission, Gustave realises. His stomach churns. It’s a recovery.
It’s closure.
The realisation hits him in the chest, a pessimism he hasn’t allowed himself to grasp: he wants to believe - needs to believe - that the people they’ve lost are out there on the Continent, clinging to survival.
But Renoir's words are spoken with a certainty that tells Gustave he's already started to grieve.
“Renoir...” He reaches out for him, his hand against Renoir’s sleeve. He can feel the thick material of his suit jacket beneath his touch, but underneath that there’s the still-living man: the echo of a husband and a father still walking through this life. And it’s not right, it’s not fair, but Gustave finds himself wrestling with the need to promise him that it’ll be okay. He finds himself swallowing against the foolish urge to share his own empty optimism with a man who has no need for it. “Let me come with you,” he asks instead. “Let me help.”
Renoir has always been layers above him: he’s been a councilman, an aristocrat, a statesman. Smart, handsome, ruthless, he’s golden bait for a harmless crush. For someone like Gustave, he might as well have been a god.
But the Fracture has ways of collapsing old hierarchies.
And now this god is before him, broken and exhausted, and there’s nothing Gustave can do.
“Stay here,” Renoir asks. “Look after Alicia while I can’t; rebuild our city.”
Renoir hasn’t moved Gustave’s hand from his arm. They’re standing too close, breaking all rules of propriety; there’s an unknowable distance in Renoir’s eyes. Gustave looks right at him, but Renoir isn’t meeting his gaze. His attention is washing over Gustave’s face instead, taking in his eyes, his hair, his features.
“She used to call you a work of art, you know,” Renoir seems to murmur, almost to himself. The words are there and gone again, lost in the haze of Renoir’s own exhaustion. He reaches out with a hesitant hand and brushes his fingertips against Gustave’s hair, a soft movement of the strands.
Gustave doesn’t dare to breathe. To move. To think.
Before Gustave can say a thing, Renoir snaps himself out of the memory he’s lost in.
His gaze turns sharp again as he pulls his arm out of Gustave’s grasp and takes a step back. “Take care of the city - there’s no greater relief to me than knowing that I’m leaving Lumière in safe hands. I know you and Emma will make your family proud.”
There’s a legacy lingering on his shoulders.
But there’s nothing that aches quite so badly as the cooling warmth in his palm, and the knowledge that the remaining Dessendres are willingly, painfully walking to their own doom.
*
Weeks slip past like helpless sand in an hourglass.
Gustave keeps his head down and works on the improvements to the shield dome. Day by day, the nevrons slip through less and less: fewer monsters on the street should feel like progress, but his attention is focused only on the harbour and the dark blue horizon. There’s no ship in sight.
No news.
Just the Monolith itself, dark and imposing in the distance.
“They’ll find what they’re looking for,” his sister assures him, unwillingly the youngest Councilwoman in Lumière’s history. It’s a role she’s as unready for as he is for his own. “Answers, if nothing else.”
He wants to believe her.
But when the Expedition returns, it arrives at night on a ship with torn sails and a ghost crew.
He hears about it from his apprentices first: it’s whispered gossip on the site of the dome.
Did you hear? someone whispers. Only the Dessendres came back.
What happened to the others?
- Missing, I heard -
- Dead, I heard -
- Murdered, I heard -
They say Commander Dessendre’s locked himself up in his Manor, isn’t talking to anyone. They’re saying Verso Dessendre’s had the doctor with him ever since they got back.
“Does anyone feel like sharing the news with me officially?” Gustave asks, raising his voice to break through the whispers even if he doesn’t raise his head from his work. He clutches his tools in his hands and tries to tell himself that his heart isn’t racing fast enough to hurt. “Or would you rather keep whispering until I work it out?”
“Sorry, Gustave,” the apprentices say, “But the Expedition came back last night. Everyone’s saying something went wrong out there.”
The rest of the details are scant, imagined things. It’s a ghost story, not a news report.
A ship full of strong, healthy expeditioners left the harbour weeks ago; a wreck with only two survivors returned.
He makes his excuses, fumbled as they are, and leaves the site of the dome for the rest of the day.
It’s a long journey back from the work site - and that’s more than enough time to pick up snippets of conversations on the street, more than enough time to gather up the thick tension in the air that threatens to suffocate him as he pushes through it.
Whispering, hissing, muttering, the crowds of Lumière jostle for the few scraps of information they can get.
Don’t you think it’s strange? drips like poison onto the cobbles. Only the Dessendres survived.
On the newspaper stands, there’s a fresh edition with an etched picture on the front: the battered ship barely holding itself together in the harbour.
Who does it benefit if the other high families of Lumière lose their place? breathes the crowd. Who gains all that power when there’s nobody else left to claim it?
Gustave walks through the herd towards the heavy, imposing gates of the Dessendres’ town house: he closes his mind to the dark clouds on the street, and aims only for the light.
*
The town’s doctor is angrily pulling on his coat and scarf in the entrance hall when Gustave steps through the front door. In days long gone, there might have been a servant here to tend to the Dessendres’ guests; now there is no one to temper the doctor’s irritation.
“He’s mad, that’s what it is,” the doctor rants when Gustave asks him what’s wrong. “No injuries. Nothing physical. But he’s covered in blood and he’s talking madness.”
The doctor holds his gaze with weasel-eyed nerves.
“What do you think that means?” the doctor asks.
It’s not a question that Gustave can answer; it’s not a question he’s meant to answer. It’s cold speculation that the doctor takes with him out into the city of Lumière - more grist for the rumour mill, details of a blood-splattered survivor who can’t tell a clear tale.
Gustave climbs the empty staircase. In all the months of Renoir and Verso’s absence, he’s continued to visit when he can: Alicia has haunted the halls and waited, silently, for her family’s return.
Today, the heavy curtains in the hallway remain closed to block out the early morning light. The air barely moves, only dust particles dancing as Gustave walks past.
It isn’t hard to find Renoir. He’s standing in his study, his shirt-sleeves still rolled to his elbows after his medical examination.
Gustave hesitates in the doorway - he doesn’t mean to stare, he doesn’t, but the sight is striking.
Blood. Dried blood. Old blood. It’s flecked on his clothing, stained into the cream cotton of his shirt. His hands have been cleaned, obnoxiously bright and clear compared to the rest of him; there are still dark speckles on his face. It intermingles with the mud and dirt he’s brought back from the Continent. He looks as though he’s crawled through it.
The jacket from his Expeditioner’s uniform is folded over the back of the chair, and it looks as if it’s been through hell, reduced to slashed cuts of ripped fabric. It looks as though it’s been under attack - it’s been shredded, and Gustave can’t fight the shudder that passes through him at the thought of teeth, and fangs, and claws. It's hard to imagine how the person wearing that item could have survived the attack. Luck? A near-miss?
“Commander,” he calls gently - but Renoir’s eyes gaze without seeing. His lips move, barely-breathed words passing between them. “Sir. Renoir.”
Renoir’s eyes snap towards him. They’re wild. There’s something reflected in there that Gustave can’t even begin to understand - there are sights that the Continent has inflicted on his old mentor that he might struggle to even comprehend.
The ice-cold gaze holds him in place as Renoir’s air leaves his lungs in a shaky rush: it would almost sound like a laugh if there had been anything but heartbreak on his face. The question that comes next is as earnest as anything Gustave has heard from Renoir in the past: “What about you?” Renoir rasps, hushed. “Are you real?”
Gustave gently closes the door behind himself as his mind scrambles for an adequate answer to that particular question.
“Flesh-and-blood?” Renoir asks. “Or pigment too? Nothing but paint?”
Talking madness, the doctor had said on the way out.
But there’s nothing like madness in Renoir’s eyes. When Renoir focuses on the details of Gustave's face, there's absolute clarity in the way he examines him. His eyes are so much older than he was when he left Lumière only a few weeks ago.
“Renoir, this blood,” Gustave says, jolting himself into action. He moves forward and grabs one of the white cloths the doctor left behind - examination equipment with nothing to examine. “What happened? Whose blood is it?”
Renoir only stares at him as Gustave hesitantly reaches out with the cloth to brush at some of the dried blood of his face. The blood is long dried; at Gustave's guess, the stains must be several days old. Renoir and his son must have travelled all the way back here from wherever they were, too numb to clean up or notice.
“It's mine,” Renoir states without further prompting. But there isn't a single cut on him: it isn’t possible. “It's theirs. All of ours.”
“What happened out there?” Gustave asks.
He doesn't know if he can handle the answer, but he needs to know.
“She's gone,” Renoir whisper instead of answering. “Aline. She’s gone. Or- No, not gone. Worse. She was never…” His breath shudders as it leaves his chest. “She was never…”
The sentence won't end. The final words won't cross his lips.
“And now she's…”
Renoir's hands move with unexpected speed to grab hold of Gustave's wrists and stop him from trying to clean him up any more. Gustave looks up, no more escape - but he doesn't know how to cope with the expression on his Commander's face. There's something there that is simply flayed open. It's beyond pain. Beyond madness. Beyond raw.
Renoir's vice-fast grip of his wrists relaxes, and Gustave finds Renoir's hand reaching for his face instead. Those blood-cleaned fingers push the hair back from Gustave's cheek, tucking it safely behind his ear.
“A work of art, that's what she called you. I remember,” Renoir murmurs, old words, faint echoes. There’s a laugh, a dry chuckle, but it isn't amusement: it's mourning. A punchline stranded from its joke.
Renoir's fingertips travel, cool as tears, along Gustave's cheekbone. He doesn't dare to move, not when he's close enough to view the crazed agony laced through Renoir's expression.
“Beautiful,” Renoir murmurs. Under the pressure, his whispered voice threatens to crack. “She made you beautiful.”
“What happened to her, Commander?” Gustave's voice shakes as Renoir's fingertips drift to his jawline, tracing over stubble and skin with all the focus of a sculptor. “What did you find?”
There's an answer in the dip of Renoir's head, cautious at first. Hesitant. Renoir leans towards him and hesitates while Gustave holds his breath, convinced that this isn't happening.
But he can’t miss the way that Renoir’s searching eyes duck down to his mouth.
He's had daydreams: willing hallucinations on bored days, moments spent staring at his mentor and wishing-hoping-dreaming, but not this. Not like this, not with dried blood on Renoir's face and unexplained tear tracks through the grime.
“Renoir,” he breathes, but it's too late.
Contact.
Renoir kisses him as smooth and sharp as a knife blade: it's a soft crush of contact, lips against lips; it's Renoir's firm hand sliding into his hair just to grab it tight and clench. Gustave's breath shivers but he barely moves, barely breathes; he stands in place, broken, and hates himself for it.
His lips part at Renoir’s silent request and he hates himself a little bit more - allowing himself to be kissed by a man half-mad with grief; allowing this to happen in the shadow of their worst days.
He should be stronger than this.
He’s not.
It’s everything he wants and it’s poisoned through and through.
“Are we real?” Renoir begs when he breaks the kiss and lingers in his space, breathing Gustave’s breath, stealing the life from his lungs and the hope from his heart. “How can any of this mean a thing?”
Gustave’s hands come to rest on Renoir’s chest, even when he should know better; whatever excuse Renoir is labouring under, whatever crazed trauma powers his decisions, Gustave can’t claim any part of it.
“We’re real,” he promises, without knowing what it means. “I promise you, Commander. We’re real.”
Renoir’s hand clenches in the front of his shirt, white-knuckled. Trembling. His head drops down until his forehead leans against Gustave’s shoulder, a painfully heavy weight. He’s still whispering something to himself, words that don’t make sense, words that can’t make sense.
Does this mean anything? Renoir asks, a question without an answer, What are we now?
*
There isn’t a mote of dust out of place in the Dessendres’ town house when Gustave leaves, a shameful crawl away into the morning streets right after sunrise.
The version of Renoir Dessendre who appears before the Lumière Council for his debriefing that afternoon is a world away from the man who had breathed madness into Gustave’s ear the night before. His head is held high, his demeanour is calm, his words and explanations sound reasoned and rational as he talks the Council through his account of their trip to the Continent.
The details themselves are confusing enough to leave Gustave frowning from where he listens in the back of the Council’s grand hall: it isn’t his place to pick holes in the narrative, and Emma and the others are more than qualified to do that on his behalf. But Renoir’s tale of a barrier near the Monolith, protected by monsters that make the nevrons that have tried to attack Lumière look like gentle hounds, it’s vague.
If nothing else, Renoir can typically be relied upon for his efficiency - and this isn’t him.
He’s lying, Gustave guesses as he watches his old mentor, and pretends that he isn’t thinking of what had happened the night before. A faded mistake. A forgotten folly.
If Renoir is lying, the truth that he’s hiding must be so much worse than the lies he’s fed them: worse, somehow, than monsters and barriers and certain, unflinching death.
Gathering up his belongings once the emergency meeting comes to a close, Gustave departs from the wooden benches at his own speed - even before this mess, Renoir would be flocked by hangers-on after every appearance. With this new mystery, the demand for his attention has trebled.
But it isn’t Renoir that’s waiting for him as he leaves the Council building.
It isn’t even Verso.
Leaning against the iron fence outside, his hair tied back, his arms folded across his chest, is Simon - he’s not someone that Gustave has had much reason to associate with, orbiting one another rather than ever having cause to interact. As far as he knows, though, he’ll have been the one that Verso reached out to upon his return from the same harrowing trip that scarred his father, the two friends practically inseparable even in their school days.
And now he’s standing here near the gates that lead to the Council buildings - and his pale eyes are focused only on Gustave. He ignores the rest of the crowd, and falls into place beside Gustave, a giant of a man who somehow still fits into his shadow. He hasn’t been the same since Clea’s sudden absence clawed through the town, the Fracture’s nightmare aftershock.
“Simon,” Gustave says uncertainly, but Simon cuts across him without pleasantries.
“They’re going back out there,” he explains. “Verso and his father. Another rescue mission.”
“I imagine so, yes. The Council was talking about-”
“They are going. And soon,” Simon corrects. “Verso says they’re taking Alicia with them this time.”
“Alicia?” Gustave doesn’t mean to sound so shocked - but she’s still a teenager, far too young and injured to be exposed to whatever horrors must await them on the Continent.
“There’s only one reason they’d bring her with them,” Simon points out.
He doesn’t put it into words, but he holds Gustave’s gaze. The unspoken truth passes between them: Renoir and Verso would only take Alicia with them to the Continent if they weren’t planning on ever returning to Lumière.
The knowledge churns with unease in the pit of his stomach, combining itself with Renoir’s smooth and hazy lies to the Council that afternoon.
His old mentor is keeping something from them, from all of them, from him.
Simon’s head tilts to the side as they walk together. “I’m going with them. Verso needs someone in his corner as we figure out what’s really going on. Julie and I will both sign up to watch his back,” he explains. “Don’t you think the Commander deserves the same?”
It startles a laugh from Gustave before he can catch it. “Me?” he asks.
And it isn’t disbelief at the thought of going. It isn’t horror at the idea of putting his own life on the line for Lumière - for Renoir - for whatever their people need. Gustave’s already tried to volunteer once.
But it’s the certainty in Simon’s eyes: it’s the surgical precision that proves that he knows the depth of Gustave’s loyalty to Renoir. It’s as deep as Julie’s ties to Verso, or Simon’s silent need to track down what really happened to Clea. Unflinching loyalty and unwavering trust, even when the whispers of Lumière are bound to crash like waves upon them at any moment.
“I- I don’t- ” The Commander is married. Widowed. Something. Whatever torch Gustave may have carried, it’s long buried - and it has to stay that way. Last night doesn't change that. “I’m not…”
“The Dessendres need people in their corner right now,” Simon says. “The circumstances don’t matter. Think about it.”
He disappears into the crowds of Lumière, leaving Gustave’s mind spinning in his wake, denial thrashing in his core.
But whatever else may be going on, Simon isn’t wrong: Renoir desperately will desperately need someone on his side in whatever storm comes next.
*
“No,” is the answer from the Commander.
“You’re needed here,” comes next.
And, “It’s too dangerous out there.”
But it’s defeated by a painful truth Renoir may not want to hear: “I’ve already asked the Council,” Gustave tells him, his expression impassive while his heart continues to race, “and they’ve already said yes.”
It’s out of Renoir’s hands, and that’s a sorry enough truth.
The implication, threaded throughout, is that the Council are no longer consulting the Dessendres about the composition of Renoir’s own Expedition: it’s a burden Gustave can’t hide from him, and he won’t even try.
*
Preparations should take weeks.
For them, it takes days. If the Commander had his way, Gustave has no doubt it would have been a matter of hours and nothing more.
As the city’s Head Engineer, in any other exploratory party Gustave would be the odd man out. Here, travelling with a concert pianist and a sixteen-year-old girl, he thinks he might be one of the most qualified people on the ship.
When they’ve set sail and the fiery nerves threatening to electrify his very core have settled, Gustave comes to find Renoir in what amounts to a captain’s chambers on this boat. Staring through the windows at the stormy seas around them, dressed in the neatly pressed lines of his Expeditioner’s uniform just like Gustave, Renoir cuts an intimidating figure all over again.
And yet Gustave can’t help the flash of another image when he thinks of him: fragile, confused and broken, muttering chaos beneath his breath. Gentle, demanding hands, and a kiss that had known how to silently make demands. That version of Renoir has been hidden carefully away once again.
Quietly, Gustave closes the door behind himself and steps deeper into the room.
He joins Renoir at the window, watching the rise-and-fall of the waves as their ship cuts its way through. Standing at Renoir’s side, shoulder-to-shoulder, Gustave feels some of his nerves calm down - the buzzing live-wire that has powered all his decisions since the Council meeting finally starts to settle.
He should try for small-talk. Perhaps he should give a report on how the voyage has been going so far; perhaps he should talk about the whispered tension on the deck of the ship, or the rumours that Simon, Julie and himself have been fighting hard to quash. Anything that avoids the chasm of their unacknowledged night together.
But as he turns his head to watch Renoir’s profile, taking in the determination on his face, none of that feels important any more.
“I know you’re not going to tell me the truth,” he says. As he breaks the silence, Renoir blinks slowly - there’s a twitch to the corner of his mouth, an unpleasant smile that’s caught just before it can bloom. Bitterness deliberately sweetened. “And I don’t know if it’s because you can’t, or if it’s because you don’t want to, or if it’s because you think I wouldn’t understand.”
In the absence of any other information, Gustave has had enough time to conjure up his own phantom stories of what may have happened on the Continent, each one more vicious than the last: each story has to finish with the whole party dead, with Renoir and Verso as the only survivors, with blood on their faces and a desperate escape to Lumière to collect their missing daughter.
There’s no room for a happy ending, not here.
Gustave swallows against the bile that threatens to overpower him, and he pushes forward. “But I need you to know that I don’t care. I’m here. No matter what,” he says. “Whatever the truth is? Whatever you’re leading us into? I trust you.”
He sees the flinch this time, the way that his words slice their way through Renoir’s face. It’s enough to make Renoir turn his head away from the window: it’s enough to make him look at Gustave for the first time. The storm trapped in his eyes is violent enough to put the sea waves to shame.
Renoir takes in the sight of him - it’s not enough to make him uncomfortable, but it’s enough to make him feel observed. Evaluated.
A work of art, that’s what she called you.
“I never apologised,” Renoir says eventually, “for the night I returned. I wasn’t myself.”
Gustave doesn’t need the reminder. It sinks through his ribs with all the precision of a dagger nonetheless.
The brush of Renoir’s lips and the touch of his hands is seared into the darkest hollows of his mind, impossible to remove; the way that Renoir’s hands had clung to his arms feels like a tattoo against his skin.
“It’s alright,” he says, without meaning a word. “You were dazed; I should have stopped you. I understand.”
Renoir reaches for him again, and Gustave doesn’t have it in him to flinch; when the back of Renoir’s fingertips brush against his cheek, all that Gustave can do is lean into that touch. Renoir leaves his hand there, a promise of warmth against the side of Gustave’s face and nothing more.
“You deserve so much more than the world they’ve given us,” Renoir murmurs - and Gustave doesn’t think that Renoir’s talking to him, not any more. “If things were different…”
“Another world, another life,” Gustave suggests, imagining that there’s a life where the question-mark of Aline's fate doesn’t hang over them so heavily; perhaps there’s a world where Renoir can look at him as an equal, not someone to mentor or coach. Perhaps there’s a world out there where they can stand side-by-side like this and have it mean something. Everything.
“I’m sorry,” Renoir says anyway.
Gustave turns his head away and willingly leaves the warmth of Renoir’s hand behind. The heat lingers on his cheek like the fading sun. “I’m not,” he answers.
Worshipping Renoir from afar has been the instrumental score of his life since he first took up his apprenticeship: it was never supposed to go this far. He was never supposed to experience it outside of the confines of his own mind. Knowing how Renoir tastes, knowing the way he sounds when he’s pulling someone close, those are all the kind of details that will turn this harmless crush into a dangerous rot.
“Me being here, it isn’t because of… that…” He needs to clarify. He needs Renoir to know, deep-down, that he isn’t here because of a petty crush or desperate hope that this might turn into something more - he’s here because he believes in something.
“This voyage was supposed to be for our family only,” Renoir admits. “Myself, my son, and my daughter.”
The Council widened it deliberately, Gustave knows, not trusting Renoir’s intentions; the expedition is far bigger than the Dessendres would have wanted.
As his side, Renoir nudges their shoulders together as they fall into place, staring out to sea once more. Two Expeditioners, side-by-side.
“I only want what’s best for my family,” Renoir explains, but his voice drops lower by the word. Gustave is glad - so glad - that Renoir’s gaze has returned to the window and its waves. “One way or another, that includes you.”
Something in Gustave’s heart releases, like a clinch knot suddenly cut free.
Family.
He doesn’t know what awaits them on the Continent.
He doesn’t know the fate that befell the prior search-and-rescue missions; he doesn’t know what became of Renoir’s wife; he doesn’t know what they’re sailing into or how long he can expect to survive it.
But, watching the waves and leaving the old world behind, he knows the only important thing they have left: he belongs here in this moment, at Renoir’s side for whatever horrors come next.