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It was Verso who suggested it.
In a way, it was always Verso who suggested it, and Clea who led it. That was simply the way things were and always had been between them. Verso’s Canvas, but Clea’s monsters. His Gestrals and Grandis, but dancing to her tune. Verso picked the lie, and Clea backed it up.
Perhaps an outsider might look at that and call it stifling, but in doing so would simply tell on themselves as uneducated and shallow. A sonnet always held a certain form, a rigidity made trellis to allow anything to flourish on its structure, and so to do did Verso and Clea follow a certain pattern.
He had obviously invited her because he wanted to play piano – he hadn’t said so, but Verso rarely ever said what he wanted.
What Verso wanted, or worse, what he needed, was something that existed in negative space. There was the front, “Clea, François missed you dearly. Not to mention, you look like you could use a break? Come visit him, we don’t have to go running off on any adventures. We can just rest in Esquie’s nest.”
And then there was the back, 'I miss you. I’m tired, let’s just relax in place where there is no one to see us but each other.'
Clea agrees.
She would not have agreed for anyone else, but she agrees for Verso.
He might have known her since he was born, but the corollary is this. Her first memory is being paint-stained and curious, her mother’s indulgent voice that she was will have an eternal playmate, a little brother or sister in just a few months, isn’t that wonderful?
A stupid question, how she had she been supposed to answer? Before her brother and sister, she'd existed as a singularity.
Twins, Clea sometimes thinks, don’t know how good they have it. They are born at the same time as their other halves, and don’t have to know what it is to stand alone, but perhaps their way is more natural. It is very human to think the sun and moon, light and dark were birthed at once by the universe, but the truth of the matter is that very often an argument will exist for lonesome years before someone finally offers a rebuttal against which it can lean. So to did Clea know solitude before she'd known her brother.
So Clea agrees, and here they are back in the land of their childish half-forgotten but foundational daydreams. She lies against François, sturdy and cool and quiet in his radiant joy at her presence.
Across the cavern is Verso playing the piano.
What a funny word, playing for instruments. Like the musician is a child, or one to indulge in joy. It fits Verso’s favored mask so well and the actuality of him so poorly.
The notes echo, melancholy and not even trying to disguise it. Obviously why he'd wanted to play where no one but her could hear. The most tone deaf, cheery drunk in Paris might weep hearing her brother's music – he truly is the worst liar if you know how to look.
Clea opens her eyes to the soft blue glow of François' mushrooms and Esquie’s nightlights.
“Do you sometimes wish,” she asks, “that you had been born the first daughter of the Dessendre family, and I had been its first son?”
The song stops. Verso tilts his head, then starts again, something arrhythmic and almost like a pleasant toothache for how it refused to settle.
Instead of an answer, the music is a question. It asks for Clea to continue, even pulling her to a stand at the bone-itching beat, “Papa would spend less time being disappointed at you for not being the ‘man of the house’ for me, and more time actually helping me try to assert my authority with the Council.”
If her Father had a flaw it was this, he imagined that every man must be himself, love like himself. A noble martyr, ready to lay himself across fire for his beautiful, wondrous beloved. To shield her from arrows, to provide an unyielding shoulder against which she may weep. He looked for too much of himself in his son, and too little in his eldest daughter.
Clea continues, stretching out her hands and positioning herself for a solitary waltz, “I could protect our family – carry on the Dessendre name as Painters. You could devote yourself to music and marry Simon – finally be happy doing what you wished and being unconditionally loved for it.”
She begins to sway, her feet finding a restless patterns against the cool stone floor that soothed itch of the piano’s notes. This was her favorite way to waltz, and she knew her brother’s favorite way to play a duet.
Verso lets his fingers dance, as she sways for several more beats, before finally answering, “I don’t want to marry Simon.”
Clea snorts, “Neither do I.”
It is not that she doesn’t like him. Simon is a likeable man. He is kind, strong, sincere. About two years older than Verso, about two years younger than herself. The perfect age to love her as a man should a woman according to the their parents, with a sword poised to offer her any life she chose, including his own. The perfect age to love her brother as a man should another man according to everyone else, like a younger sibling to nag and cherish.
He would allow her anything, were she to accept him as her husband. She would never hear the word ‘no’ from his lips, no matter what powers she grasped for, no matter where her journey for comprehension, for perfection might take her. For his desire to love her just as her father loves her mother, he might be the only man, the only person, in the world outside their family of whom their parents see any value.
Clea does not care to be allowed anything. She cares less for what their parents approve.
Wouldn’t if be better if Simon could simply remain her friend? Wouldn’t hesitant, giving Verso with the soul of martyr and the heart of a romantic be a better recipient of a devotion Clea finds insulting?
If she could charge forward, and be seen as bold and confident instead of reckless and self-sacrificial? If Verso could comfort and accommodate and be seen as giving and wise instead of duplicitous and unsure?
A silly daydream perhaps, in this land of silly daydreams. Even if they swapped clothing and names, everyone she wished would treat them differently knew them far too well to be fooled. The past is the one thing they cannot change, for better or worse.
Jazz is a cruel sort of music. A freedom you can only truly grasp after the work of learning the rigid fundamentals.
Clea is a kind sort of person. Her heart is the sort you can’t really see unless you truly understand the cruelty of people.
Verso connects the thoughts and lets them flow to fingers, to ring in his ears as an imagined tune, before trying them out into the echoing cavern of Esquie’s nest and its perfect acoustics.
Across from him, both a response and a muse, Clea dances to Francois and Esquie’s delight. Only she could make the waltz a solo, make it the most perfect and beautiful and wrong-yet-natural thing in the world. Her hair sways like a shroud or a cloak, her feet are bare and her clothes simple, and she commands more majesty than their father could muster at the height of his power and wealth.
It is similar, perhaps, to how quiet Alicia can whisper him a story so vehement and true, can tease and poke to make him laugh so freely that it outshines all their mother's technical perfection.
It is taboo, dangerous and cruel to Paint a copy of someone, and it is one taboo to which Verso has never been tempted. Even if he misses Clea busy with her important people or far more important works, or thinks wistfully of sharing this place with shy and hesitant Alicia, not his father, not he, and not even his mother could ever hope to replicate his sisters. He counts himself lucky to have been born after Clea steadied the world, and before Alicia illuminated it - there is little to nothing about their past he would change.
“I don’t think I’d like being a girl, or you being a boy for that matter.” Verso finally answers.
He likes the lines of his body, the depth of his voice, how is his hands are large and long enough to so comfortably hit the chords on his piano. Suspects Clea likes the length of her hair, sway of her skirt, and how her singing voice is high and tonal like her harp or Simon’s violin.
“Though sometimes I dream,” he admits, selfish and honest, in the way he can only be with Clea who expects and needs nothing except the everything of him of being himself, “of just walking out one morning and taking the train from Paris to somewhere far away.”
Clea hums, and he lets the notes of his song twine around the sound. She’s always been horrid at playing a harmony, but perfect at picking the few clear notes around which to build a melody.
Verso elaborates on his own horrid daydream, “We’d go to the station, flip a coin to decide whether we go east or west. Then, just disappear without telling anyone. I’d play the piano to earn money, you’d paint or sculpt or even cheat men at poker.”
A laugh. They both cheat at poker after all.
“After we’d seen the mountains and picture-words of China, or the jazz bars and wetlands of New Orleans, then we’d let the other one have their turn as we circle the globe.”
Clea dips and turns, “Then why don’t we? The future is whatever we shape it be after all.”
What a cruel thing to ask, like she could actually yank and tug and rend that beloved daydream into reality, like she would throw aside all her ambition and pride onto the pyre of their shared happiness. Well, she probably would. Clea is, as she just pointed out, everything their father wished for and more in a son. She'd burn the world down to make him and Alicia happy, though unlike Papa she'd make them actually ask for it first.
It is however still an impossible dream, for Verso at least. Because it would break their mother’s heart. Break their father to see that, to lose them. And worst of all – “We still have to look after Alicia remember?”
Clea laughs again, even as she pokes a neat, precise, and utterly merciless hole in the logic “You throw her favorite books in a steamer trunk, and I’ll throw her over my shoulder. She’d be just as happy holed up and reading in a hotel, as she would be at home, no?”
Horribly, yes.
And even more horribly, worse and more blasphemous than imaging Clea as the Dessendre’s family’s son and heir, and himself as its cherished daughter is, perhaps even worse than his daydreams of leaving their loving parents without a word or thought of return, “Do you ever think Alicia would be happier if we were her parents?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Clea swirls, her bare feet soundless. “A father who isn’t shy about showing he loves her, instead of expecting her to divine it in silence?”
Verso matches her, a swift progression up the keys, “A mother who wants and expects nothing from her except that she lives a life that makes her happy?”
Of course. Just as he’s the only person Clea would ever let herself depend on, and she’s the only person he could ever be honest with. Of course, they could raise Alicia better.
It’s just, “It would break Maman’s heart to lose even one of us.” Verso says.
Clea sighs, disappointment in her tone, “And Papa would run himself ragged to the ends of the earth and back trying to fix whatever upset her.”
And it is still the lesser of two cruelties to let Alicia struggle through the realization every child has that their parents love them imperfectly, than to steal away Maman and Papa's so deeply beloved family.
Still it is a beautiful dream, fit for a place like this. A grown-up version of running away to fight with Gestrals and argue with Grandis, of riding Esquie and François through the sky and sea. A future he could never let them have.