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He wakes to the feeling of lips against his shoulder. Lips against his shoulder and the trailing of hair against his skin. He feels her smile before he hears it in her voice as she hums. “Good morning.”
She buzzes when she is happy, a sort of low humming that he can’t seem to shake from his brain no matter how hard he tries.
His lips curve up to mirror hers, as her hand cups his cheek and she kisses him, fingers threading through individual strands of his beard, tender and sweet. Her hands are soft enough that he remembers when they were still gentle, when they were still something other than what they have been twisted to now.
Now she wields a weapon and her lips turn down more often than not, a quiet anger simmering, threatening to boil over.
He misses seeing the gentleness in her hazel eyes. He misses the way her face would wholly light up when she smiled. The look on her face when she would sit cross-legged on the ground, a child in her lap tracing the constellations of her freckles and two more circling around her, following verbal instructions to create braids in her hair. “A crown,” one of the children crowed. Julie had laughed.
He missed her laugh.
“Good morning,” Verso murmurs back. He does not feel guilt in stealing the breath from her lips, not when she looks at him like that.
And then the curtain falls away.
“Where is your father?” Julie asks like she has every morning for the last month. Verso barely sighs now, the question routine.
“I don’t know,” he says. It is still the truth; he knows, vaguely, that his father followed him towards the second expedition team. He knows that they have not found his father yet. That is all he knows.
Verso is learning he knows very little.
Verso has learned too much.
“Verso,” Julie sighs. And, oh, it hurts all that much more when she moves and it shifts him so his shoulder burns, a low ache there is no respite from in his position. “Verso, I want to help you. You know I want to help you. But you need to help me first.”
The Paintress is helping, he wants to scream. His throat is raw when he swallows. Verso closes his eyes and rests his forehead against his arm.
They’ve tied his hands above his head now. They can’t risk him managing to grasp the hilt of his weapon again, Dion claimed, after he’d managed to free himself of his binds and had rushed at Claude.
Only to maim, Verso insisted, around a mouthful of blood and a grunt as boots met ribs, not to kill. Never to kill. Not when they had the same goal: survive.
Their goals have twisted. Search and rescue, they said. They did little searching or rescuing these days, focused entirely, instead, on their efforts to break him.
This is the first time he has woken to kindness from Julie. Yesterday they had dumped a bucket of ice cold water on him and laughed when he shivered, teeth chattering against one another. The day before Claude stepped on his fingers until they broke.
This is unusual.
Verso doesn’t trust it.
“Where is your father, Verso?” Julie asks again. “All you have to do is tell me, and we can make this better. We can put your arms down again.”
“I don’t know.” The air shifts, her sword extending in her hand. He flinches away from it.
“Verso,” she says again. She sighs his name like he is one of the misbehaving children in her classroom. Like her disappointment alone could change behaviour. “How did you survive? I watched you die.”
“It missed me,” he lies through his teeth. “I’ve told you this. The blast narrowly missed me.”
Verso knows before he’s finished the sentence what is coming. The tip of the blade traces down his chest. He flinches despite his best effort to hold still.
It hurts. Of course it hurts.
He can still hurt. He can still bleed.
He just can’t die.
No matter how hard he tries. No matter how badly he wants to.
No matter how much easier it would make this. Any of this.
“Where is your father?”
“I don’t know.”
A drop of blood wells where she digs the blade in. The crimson dulls the shine of the blade, the glint of sunlight off of where she shines it into his eyes. Petty, but she has always been petty. He used to love it about her.
“Where is your father, Verso?”
“I don’t know.”
He hisses that time, as she carves another line in his chest. Verso closes his eyes and arcs his head up into his arm, gritting his teeth.
He waits for the question to come again.
A worse question comes instead.
“Where are your sisters, Verso?”
He snarls and strains at the bounds around his wrists. He scrambles to get his feet underneath him, baring his teeth when Julie knocks his legs out from under him. “Where are your sisters, Verso?” Julie repeats.
Shadows fall on the camp. The others have returned.
“What’s got him all riled up?” Claude asks like Julie doesn’t have the tip of her blade in his chest.
“Will you tell them? If you won’t tell me?” Julie asks Verso. He spits at her feet, saliva and blood and growls. “Where are your sisters, Verso?”
“Go fuck yourself,” he bites out, practically choking on the words.
“He’s mouthy again,” Dion says dryly. “Are you sure we need him to answer questions? We could cut his tongue out.”
His shoulders burn as he strains at the binds again.
“We found something you’ll probably want to see, Jul,” Louise says. The soft-spoken one, the one who never quite looks at Verso.
He had been tutoring her in piano when the Fracture tore them from the Continent. She had blushed when he’d complimented her new haircut, had smiled at him hopefully when he’d complimented her posture. They had gotten excited together when she had mastered a particularly difficult melody.
“I’ll be there in a second,” Julie says. Verso closes his eyes and waits for the inevitable pain of the hilt of her sword against his head. Pain blossoms and dark overtakes him; for a moment, Verso swears he can see the outline of his father, a small figure standing slightly behind him. Is it for longing that he sees Alicia now too?
So pathetic that he hallucinates an injured teenager hoping she will save him.
It is the last thought before unconsciousness takes hold.
~
He kneels in puddles of blood and stares at the crimson staining his hands. His arms, his shoulders, his chest; he has not found where they put his clothes yet. He has not been able to pull himself away from this position yet.
A hand, gentle and firm all at once, rests on his shoulder. “Papa,” Verso whispers, broken. For a moment, he is a little boy again, tears welling in his eyes at a skinned knee.
Grief clouds the look in Renoir’s eyes. “Stand up,” he instructs. His voice, like his grasp, is gentle but firm. Verso stumbles to his feet. He follows the next instruction—”Dress yourself”—without pause, fingers shaking as he tries and fails with the buttons of the uniform.
It is not his. It is not Dion’s nor Claude’s. He does not know who it belongs to. He knows they are dead.
“They are gone,” Renoir says quietly. “You did what you needed to. You survived.”
Had he? Verso doesn’t feel alive. He feels hollow. After the fire he had at least thought himself full of smoke, piloted by flames that had not yet been put out, smoldering unseen.
Verso sinks back to the ground and digs his fingers into the ashes of the campfire. They are cold, dead.
“Verso.”
It sounds like a lie. His name sounds like a lie.
It is all a lie.
“Don’t,” Verso hears himself say. “Just don’t.” He raises his head and meets Renoir’s gaze. “I’m not your real son.”
That same grieving look overtakes Renoir’s face. He does not argue. He simply nods once and turns, the asynchronous tapping of his cane against the ground retreating until it is silent.
And Verso is alone.
He stumbles across the camp and sinks to his knees where she lays. Her hair haloes out around her, her eyes closed as though she is sleeping. Verso wills the chroma to his hand, begs it silently to fix the hole in her abdomen, but it does not respond.
Because he is not real.
“I’m sorry,” Verso tells Julie. His face scrunches up, caught between the fury of a burning house and the tidal wave of grief threatening to overtake him. “I’m so- I’m so sorry.”
~
He buries her and places a flower atop her grave.
He visits when he can muster the strength to.
The third time he visits, he watches a young girl bury her brother, tears carving paths down her cheeks. He could have prevented it. He didn’t.
Numbness has overtaken the grief, coldness overtaking the numbness. They bury their friend, their brother. Verso instead looks at the patch of grass where she rests. I’m sorry.
~
He wakes to the feeling of lips against his shoulder. He hears a hum he once knew all too well. “Good morning.”
He knows that hum. He loves that hum. He has always loved that hum, even when the steady hum of nature brought about intense waves of nausea, of roiling anxiety that doubled him over, clutching at a nearby rock, tree, crumbling hut, tears carving valleys down his cheeks.
“Julie,” Verso whispers. His throat is raw, his voice hoarse. Those gentle hazel eyes he loved peer back at him, a tentative curve to her lips.
“Verso,” she whispers back. “Verso, merde… I’m so sorry.”
How, he wants to ask, but he knows the answer: Alicia. Verso cranes his head towards the door of the manor. He can’t see her, not entirely, nothing but the silver strands of hair that catch in the light as she flees down the hall, footsteps muffled by the carpet that was always just a little too thick.
“Julie,” Verso repeats. Helplessly, he is helpless in her grasp again.
His hands are free. He rolls his wrists.
His hand still fits comfortably at her throat.
Julie raises her chin and meets his gaze. Waiting. Defiant. But quiet.
His hand falls to the bed. The energy he had thought himself capable of mustering, to drag himself out of bed, disappears in an instant and he just wants to curl up and go back to sleep. The mattress dips as Julie lays beside him.
The inches between them are a chasm, a void yet unexplored. “You lied to me,” Julie says finally.
“You wouldn’t have believed me,” he whispers back. Her defiance rests on crumbling pillars; the fight dissipates, and she nods, acquiesces.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers again. He doesn’t know why they are whispering.
“I am too.”
She isn’t humming. Her expression is overcast, nearing distress.
His hand finds a rest at her waist.
Julie looks at him, startled. “Come here,” Verso whispers. “You’re so far away.” He tries for a smile and finds it comes easier than he expects. Like they are decades in the past and she is squirming into his bedroll, she wriggles closer and lets out a small sigh when his arm falls around her. She lifts her head as his other arm stretches out, tucking herself right into his side.
They are nearly close enough to share breath. If he leans in, his lips would find hers.
He does not lean in. He studies her; the arm her head rests on comes up so he can run his fingers through the fine strands of her hair.
“Do you know?” he asks. He’s not sure what he’s asking about exactly. The truth of the Canvas. The truth about him. Why he could not tell her. That his sister will die—again—to keep them all here, safe and happy.
Julie nods. Her face remains static but he can see her strength crumbling in the shaking of her hands as they find purchase on his chest. His heart beats under her touch, skipping.
“I know,” she answers. His heart breaks, again; there are only so many times his heart can be mended before the shattered pieces will be too small to mend.
Julie wields a magic he does not know. Her fingers curl into a fist that she taps against his chest. “You’re real to me.”
He kisses her.
“Merci,” Verso says, and means it.
~
Her hands are folded neatly behind her. Julie walks like she is dancing, light on her feet, each step taken with her toes first. Verso walks behind, watching her with blatant fondness etched into every line on his face.
There is some festival or another today. He’s not paid enough attention to say which or for what or who organized it. He knows only that Julie walks along the pier, a smile on her face, each step as light as air.
It’s not magic but it might as well be. She brings that same lightness to a dead man walking; Verso feels the same way he does when he’s pulled himself up with a grapple, in those moments before he makes contact with the ground once more: his stomach dropping out from underneath him, weightless and heavy all at once. He tenses, ready for contact, and relaxes when she directs a smile as bright as sunlight back at him once more.
“Where is the orphanage?” Julie stops to ask. There is an earnestness to it that endears everyone to her. She has asked countless questions and had each of them fondly answered by strangers on the street. “I’m Julie,” she says brightly when they ask, unfamiliar with her. “I was on the Continent but I’m back now.”
Lumière had been barely dust when she’d first left. It was a thriving city now, even with the emptiness that Alicia tried to paint whole.
Verso swallows down grief that threatens to overtake him.
He promised to try and live. To try to find happiness. Alicia promised him a life, if he tried. He can feel the way age catches in his bones now, the way he wakes up earlier and earlier with every passing day.
Julie doesn’t notice. Or doesn’t mind. Verso is not sure which. He doesn’t want to ask.
“Come on, Verso!” His eyes catch on Julie as she spins and extends her hand to him. “You’re so slow!”
He can practically hear the old man tacked onto it.
A huff of laughter escapes him and he takes her hand. “I love you,” Verso says. He kisses the back of her hand and smiles when she blushes.
“Shut up.” Her shoulder nudges his. “I love you too.”
She smiles and it is sunlight. She hums and it is a birdsong.
Verso smiles back.