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A soft brush of gentle fingers caresses Gustave’s face, waking him slowly. He leans into the touch, warm and familiar, a slow smile beginning to grace his lips. “Mornin’” He mumbles, turning slightly where he lay, but unable to force his eyes open quite yet.
His brow furrows in confusion a bit when there’s no accompanying greeting, instead feeling the dig of a few fingers into his neck, and then a pinch to his cheeks. Gustave flinches back, eyes opening ready to chastise Verso, only to find no one in front of him.
“Huh,” Gustave lets out before suddenly feeling a tapping on his shoulder from behind. “Oh, there you -“ Gustave swivels to look behind him and sees-
A hand.
Verso’s hand.
With no Verso attached.
“PUTAIN! Verso!!” Gustave yells, eyes widened as he backs up in the tent away from the single appendage. He grabs for his prosthetic first, attaching it while maintaining eye contact on the severed limb that seems to be patiently waiting, a light tapping of a digit against the ground.
“If I open this tent and you are just standing there grinning like a loon, I will find a way to kill you,” Gustave grits out, putting his uniform on before exiting said tent only to find,
No one.
For Verso to play a trick like this, especially after his evening with a severed torso, Gustave would genuinely be unsurprised. The rest of the team to be missing as well, playing along to Verso’s ‘magic trick’ seems questionable though.
‘Merde, what did I sleep through?’
Gustave starts looking around, trying to find signs of messages or direction only to feel a small tug on his pants and looks down again to see Verso gloved hand tugging with two fingers.
“This is ridiculous, you know that, right?” Gustave asks out loud, not even sure Verso could hear him.
The hand shrugs.
Gustave stares at it with growing frustration.
A finger lifts from the sprawled crawl of the hand, pointing northwest past the edge of camp and Gustave starts to follow before turning back.
“Our supplies?” Gustave questions, eyes glancing back towards the tent. Verso’s hand turns around from its forward movement, as if looking back towards the tent and items laying there, as if it had eyes, Gustave didn’t know how it worked, and then turned fully back and began moving back in the direction it had started in originally.
Gustave follows it for now, until they get to a small river, maybe even closer to a stream, and Verso’s hand pauses. The water itself isn’t too deep, maybe half a meter at its deepest point, only a couple meters wide. The hand points to a spot across the water, turning back and forth as if to ensure Gustave knows the path to follow across.
“Hold on, let me take off my boots, I’d rather not have sloshing feet the entire rest of the day,” Gustave grumbles before leaning down and untying the laces. He rolls up his pants while he’s at it, hoping there aren’t too many jagged stones in the water. Looking down into the clear liquid he mostly spots smooth pebbles and is about to take his first steps forward, boots hanging from tied laces on one arm, when Verso’s hand taps above his ankle.
“What now?” Gustave asks and before he has time to step back, Verso’s hand is crawling its way up Gustave’s leg and back, fingers gripping tightly onto the fabric of Gustave’s clothes as it makes its way up to Gustave’s shoulder. “Oh! That feels so weird,” Gustave says with a flinch of his neck at the sensation. He imagines it’s what it feels like to have a large spider or such crawl their way up your body, digits digging into his flesh with determination.
The hand settles itself loosely gripping onto Gustave’s shoulder, halting its movements. “Was there really no other way of doing that?” A single digit is raised to point across the water. “Right, sure, moving on I guess.”
Gustave wades his way into the water, cursing quietly at the cold temperature but continuing his march forward to the other side. Once his socks and shoes are back on, he looks at the hand sitting on his shoulder, waiting for it to crawl back down and lead the way.
When the hand seems unwilling to move, Gustave sighs and asks, “Just gonna hang out there all day?” Verso’s hand taps lightly on the skin of his shoulder, before the thumb is pressing down onto Gustave’s pulse point, something that Verso knows Gustave likes, and Gustave almost tries to flick him off.
“Don’t get any ideas there, I am only a fan of your hands when they are attached to your body.” Gustave grits out instead, annoyed at his own body for responding even slightly to the touch. The hand seems to deflate in disappointment, gripping onto his shoulder before raising a single digit in the direction he needs to follow.
Gustave is just about to try and ask how much farther before he hears muffled yelling up ahead, and breaks into a sprint, accidentally throwing Verso’s hand off his shoulder with a ‘thwump’ as it hits the ground.
He turns around, ready to walk back and scoop the hand up from the ground before two fingers raise and wave him off. He turns back towards the earlier sounds and speeds up.
He spots a large rock structure and a giant pile of rubble and dirt covering what was most likely the entrance “Mon coeur! Finally, I’ve been stuck for a few hours now,” He hears, the sound muffled by the landslide, seemingly escaping the cave from another entrance point.
Just as he’s about to wonder where that point is, he watches Verso’s hand crawl up the cave wall, before dropping into a small hole near the top to the right of the original opening. Gustave makes his way over to it, the hole only slightly larger than his own head, definitely too small for an entire person to fit through.
Despite his annoyances, as soon as Gustave’s eyes meet Verso’s through the opening, a warm smile spreads on his face, even as his tone is biting, “Did you enjoy scaring the shit out of me this morning?”
Verso makes a disgusted face, one hand rubbing the wrist of his other hand as the connection stitched back together. “I hope not literally, that sounds-“
Gustave sputters, “What? No! I meant, whatever, it doesn’t matter. What happened, why are you in this cave? And where is everyone?”
Verso chuckles, staring up at him, a hand coming to the back of his head sheepishly. “Sciel announced today as a ‘relaxation day for sanity’ and took off with Lune and Esquie. Monoco went with Maelle to the Gestral village to say hi to Noco. I was keeping an eye on the camp while you slept and ended up following the sounds of a nevron. Killed it, but it, uh,” He explains, waving his now attached hand to the caved in entrance.
Gustave frowns, surprised to hear about the team splitting up, even if he agreed that they all definitely need a day of rest after the last axon they encountered. “Why did no one wake me up?”
Verso frowns back up at him, his voice gentle when he does finally speak, “Gustave, you hadn’t slept in three days.”
“It hasn’t been that-“ Verso’s eyebrows shot to the top of his forehead before Gustave could even finish. “Okay fine, fair point.”
Gustave looks back from Verso for a moment, does his best to study the inside of the collapse, but the small amount of light reflecting off the stone walls wasn’t providing a clear enough picture. Before he could even ask, Verso was summoning a light picto with his hand, doing his best to show Gustave the edges of the collapse.
He considers building up a charge with his arm and blasting his way in, but the more he looks at the crumbling of the stone and dirt the more he worries of an even worse collapse. He turns to the small hole already formed in front of him, one that was considerably easier to get up to from the outside, and picks at the rock until it gives way under his hands.
“I don’t know how I’ll get you up here, but I think this is our best bet.” Gustave states and begins slowly tearing at the edges of the stone with his prosthetic, careful to limit force and vibration, lest the walls fully collapse onto Verso.
“We’ll figure it out,” Verso replies back calmly, a smirk on his face. Gustave appreciates the bode of confidence and continues.
By the time Gustave has widened the hole enough for Verso to get through, with his entire body in one piece, he’d also found a few stones further in to stack into a makeshift set of stairs.
Verso climbs up, hand reaching out towards Gustave. Gustave reaches his hand down, careful not to brace himself too close to the edge. “Don’t grab onto the edge, okay? It’s just gonna crumble.”
Verso nods, “Just hold on to you, got it.”
Gustave rolls his eyes, even as a tiny flush graces his cheeks.
Gustave reaches down, grasping Verso’s forearm with his right hand, his metal one digging into a safe place as he begins to lift Verso up. “Putain, you’re fucking heavy,” Gustave utters under the strain.
“The dozen or so kilos of equipment I’m carrying probably aren’t helping,” Verso replies, doing his best to listen to Gustave and avoid grabbing onto the edge of the opening. Once he can reach with his other hand he grabs for Gustave’s shoulder, and Gustave’s metal hand suddenly pushes through the fragile wall.
“Merde,” “Shit,” they say in unison, clinging to each other and rolling down the hill, away from the collapsing stone. They tumble down half a dozen meters, finally landing on solid flat ground with a combined “Oomf.”
Gustave heaves out a sigh of relief, his body laying atop Verso’s, both of them covered in dirt and tiny pebbles, the sound of the cave collapsing in on itself beside them. Verso looks up with a smile, his hand reaching to brush some dirt from Gustave’s cheek.
“Mmhm, reminds me of last night,” Verso teases, free hand coming to grip onto Gustave’s hip, and Gustave laughs, dropping his head to Verso’s chest.
“You are an insatiable, infuriating man, Verso.” Gustave teases back with a smirk, forcing himself to stand and immediately reaching to help Verso up.
Verso shrugs his shoulders once they’re standing in front of each other. “C’mon, let’s head back. Maybe we can take a good bath before everyone gets back.”
Gustave hums pleasantly at the idea, turning around and beginning the small trek back to camp.
Once turned around, Verso’s right hand comes up to tickle along Gustave’s back in the same way it had crawled up on its own earlier and Gustave flinches instantly, head whipping around to glare at him.
“Oh, this is gonna be fun.”
“I will kill you, you arse.”
Verso reaches down, twining their hands together. “No you won’t.”
Gustave sighs. “No, I won’t.”