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Alicia needed glasses.
She had known for a while; this was by no means a recent development or sudden revelation, but right after the fire she had been barely able to stay conscious and if she was, she had been too busy screaming her remaining voice dead to notice anything around her, and after Verso’s Canvas got destroyed, after Maelle and the life she had lived as a part of Lumière, Alicia hadn’t been in the state of mind to pay attention to such trivial matters.
After its erasure, her family had started moving on and expected her to do the same, but she simply couldn’t. As always, she wasn’t able to meet her family’s expectations and continued to be the family disappointment.
But it had simply hurt too much. There had been an unbearable pain inside her, overpowering the one from her physical injuries, gnawing away at her and threatening to consume her. A yawning emptiness tearing her down where the only thing left had been the immeasurable loss she was feeling that she couldn’t possibly put into words.
The only reason she hadn’t finished what the fire had started was guilt. A debt to her brother Verso who heroically had sacrificed his life to save her, and to honour his deed she was now trapped in this existence.
(In some fleeting moments, right after waking up and remembering everything or when her scars relentlessly continued to burn, she resented him for it.)
Verso’s death was still an open wound but the bleeding had slowed down enough that most days you could ignore that it was still killing you. But it wasn’t just his death anymore relentlessly tearing into her. Now she grieved for her life in Lumière too that had been ripped away from her against her will, for better or worse.
She ached for the world inside the Canvas and its people, and more than anything else she desperately needed proof of its existence, that it had been more than a fantastical dream, that the people had existed and had been real, despite everyone telling her otherwise, that she had lived among them, that Maelle had been alive.
Despairingly, she had realized that she was the only person left, the sole survivor of Lumière, the only one who could and would remember its people and the lives they had led.
But there was no one she could talk to about it, no one she could explain it to and share her pain with, trying to make herself heard.
Including her own family.
Alicia thought it was very telling that they never even considered keeping a closer eye on her after the destruction of the Canvas beyond her recovery from Painter sickness, never keeping her away from sharp objects, locking her windows or regulating the intake of her pain medication. The fact that it had never seemed to cross their minds that she might struggle with the events in the Canvas and the aftermath enough to take her own life meant they wouldn’t understand if she brought it up, their reactions at best varying somewhere between incredulity that she could still cling to this make-belief world and well-meaning pity.
So in her desperation to keep the world of Verso’s Canvas alive and preserve her memories before they inevitably faded into obscurity, she had started writing them down.
Transcribing an entire world with all its wonders and complexities as well as thousands of lives onto paper had been an enormous and challenging task, and Alicia hadn’t had the faintest idea of how to begin.
So she had started with Gustave, because where else would she have started.
She had written about how he had taken her in, the unwanted problem child, and had made his home feel like it was hers too, his kindness and warmth, and how he used to trip over his words, and his dedication to the future of Lumière.
She had continued with the expedition; the beach, the Manor, the Gestrals and Esquie, and all the wonders and horrors the Continent had to offer, and the cliffs, difficult as it had been as tears had started clouding her eyes, smearing some of the words as they had fallen onto paper, and then there had been the Verso of the Canvas and she had to cross out some of her writing and start anew several times as she had tried to work through the complicated emotions she felt towards him – sometimes hatred, often yearning and despair and, what she hated most of all, understanding – and she had written about everything that came after right up to her and the rest of this world dissolving into petals.
That done, it hadn’t nearly been enough.
She had backtracked from there and had written down every single thing she could remember of Lune and Sciel, and their lives, how the laughed and how they fought.
The rest of Expedition 33 had followed, then every other expeditioner she could remember, then Emma, who had been busy and absent a lot but had loved her no less, then Gustave’s little apprentices, Sophie, the other couriers, the nice baker who had lived across from them, the other children at the orphanage and its continuously overwhelmed caretakers, all her foster families, every person who had ever left any kind of impression on her no matter how good or bad, even her parents of that world whom she knew precious little about, which had never upset her before, but it did now.
After that, she had turned to the more structural and cultural aspects of Lumière’s society. From its everyday life, different stages of life, schooling and how apprenticeships worked, to its laws and economics, politics, technology, engineering, agriculture, architecture, even its weather and climate: every topic she had been able to think of including areas where her knowledge was quite lacking, much to her chagrin.
Every minute detail, every single thing she could scrounge up from the depths of her mind.
It had been a mess; no order, no real beginning or ending, just her desperation to shape her feelings and memories with ink and drag them onto paper.
But she had done it, she finished it, even as it had become detrimental to her health, pain flaring up throughout her body from sitting hunched over several journals for hours on end, hand cramping, begging her to drop the pen.
It hadn’t lessened the pain. But it had turned it from something sharp and tearing into something dull and heavy. Something she had learned to live with, something that was always there in the background of her mind and would probably never go away, just like the throbbing of her scars and the muted pounding of her head, but not taking over her entire being anymore, making her want to claw at her skin until she could get it out.
But with so much time spent – time she wasn’t spending listlessly looking at walls or, if she was feeling adventurous, out of windows – staring at tiny scribbled letters in dim light, it had slowly become abundantly clear that at some point her eyesight had gotten worse, considering how hard she had to concentrate to read her blurry writing, and eventually, it had become inconvenient enough for her to want to do something about it.
It was a problem, an annoyance, but unlike so many other aspects of her life not an unfixable one.
So, Alicia needed glasses.
Or at least she hoped she did. It was either that or her remaining eye was going blind, and if that were the case she hoped she would be met with at least a mediocrity of understanding from the rest of her family and anyone who would hear the tale of her tragic and pathetic life if she flung herself of the nearest balcony. That was still a fairly tempting endeavour most days anyway, but being mute, disfigured, in constant pain and losing her main sense was one line crossed too many.
She was already a cripple; she would not become an invalid. Her family was already overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do with her now, God knows what would happen if she needed constant around-the-clock care and supervision.
Though altogether, she wasn’t that concerned with that actually happening. As mentioned before, it wasn’t a sudden development and it wasn’t getting worse either beyond the blurriness and occasional headache caused by it.
She briefly considered bringing this matter up to her family and dismissed it in the same breath. They were busy as is. They would help her if she asked – out of love or maybe out of duty – but it would take time away from more important matters.
On top of that, it had become exceedingly… hard might not be the right word- draining for various reasons to spend time with them.
She barely saw her sister anymore. Clea was busy quite a lot, with council duties which their parents still hadn’t taken back up, and her self-appointed crusade against the Writers. She had questioned – or interrogated might be more fitting – Alicia in the beginning of what she knew, but all her information had turned out to be dead ends, all names she remembered, aliases.
Which meant, it had all been planned from the start, to get close to her, to use her to get to her family, the fire, everything. And like the fool she was, she had given them everything they needed.
It was no wonder Clea easily tended to get so irritated or impatient with her, like Alicia needed her uselessness and incompetence shoved further in her face when she was already well aware of it. As usual, her sister had been right: her naivete had gotten Verso killed.
Even if it had come at a far too high cost, at least she had learned something valuable about trust: it was dangerous, and if she wasn’t smart enough to tell when she was being taken advantage of, she couldn’t afford it.
An advantageous side effect of the charred ruin of her face in that regard was that most people, especially in the Dessendre’s social circle of wealth and nobility, didn’t bother with playing nice and courteous anymore, or at least failed spectacularly at hiding their horror.
Like Maman, who still couldn’t look at her without recoiling in disgust, shock or hatred; Alicia wasn’t entirely sure which one but also had no desire to find out any time soon. To not strain the fragile peace their family had somewhat achieved further, Alicia favoured to stay out of her mother’s way, only leaving her room when necessary or when no one was home, quietly moving through hallways to avoid any unexpected encounters.
A consequence of this was that she didn’t see Papa all that much either since he rarely left Maman’s side, always taking care of her, the decades spent in the Canvas fighting lying heavily on her health.
To be honest, it wasn’t an entirely unwelcome outcome. Her father truly believed that he had saved them, that he had fixed the issue of the Canvas and that there was nothing more to it. And Alicia had tried to move on, tried to start living again and to convince herself that she was more than a shell of her former self, but she just couldn’t.
How could she possibly explain to her father that just looking at him frequently brought back the memory of seeing everyone around her at the docks of Lumière fade away into petals and of not understanding what was happening, the sensation of herself disappearing, dissolving into nothingness, the sheer powerlessness of it all until she unfortunately remembered who she was and everything else.
How could she explain or want to in the first place if he couldn’t or even refused to understand her distress or why she might be struggling even a little bit?
On the very rare occasion that all of them came together for dinner, to stave off the awkward silences, her parents, mostly Papa would make conversation with Clea about the state of affairs and how her work with the Council was going, and Alicia wondered if they truly didn’t hear the bitterness in her sister’s replies or if they just chose to ignore it.
She herself mostly kept her head down and would take a few courteous bites with what little appetite she had, not taking part in any of their stilted conversations. She knew they were always skirting around the one thing all of them herself included were thinking: Everything would’ve been easier if it was Verso sitting here instead of her.
And what could she possibly contribute to all that political talk anyway, except serve as a shining example of what not to do?
No, she really didn’t need to involve her family with something as trivial as resolving the issue of her eye sight and she didn’t really want to either. It was better doing it on her own and getting it over with.
She believed to remember having seen an optician near one of her favourite bookstores which she hadn’t been to since the fire.
(She still loved reading, getting lost in a story, but too complex were the emotions she felt when opening a book to truly be able to enjoy it.)
The following day was cold and clear and as good as any, so Alicia dressed herself accordingly: thick boots, a long coat, leather gloves that would not help much against the cold but would serve their purpose in case she needed to write something down to communicate with other people, a thick shawl covering her throat and mouth, and a wool hat that kept the hair over her empty eye socket in place.
Winter had always been her favourite season, now she just appreciated the opportunity to cover up as much of her body as possible, even if the clothes were chafing unpleasantly against her skin. This way, less people would gawk at her with no women clutching dramatically at their pearls, men protectively stepping in front of their families or children breaking out in tears and the likes.
It was about a twenty minute walk to her destination which would take her about an hour, Alicia estimated as she stepped outside an already empty house with small steps and measured breaths.
She didn’t go out often, but often enough that being perceived by strangers had turned from a mortifying ordeal to an uncomfortable annoyance. Yes, she was aware of what she looked like, now move on.
Luckily, it was early and cold enough that most people passing her were still too caught up in their own minds, heads bowed down, hurrying to their destination to notice her, thus avoiding any unpleasant encounters on both sides until she arrived at the optician which fortunately was where she remembered it to be.
The inside was quiet, and to Alicia’s relief, empty aside from what she assumed to be the owner of this establishment, a middle-aged, wiry man with full but greying hair and wire frame glasses that fit his stature.
He started to turn around after noticing her entrance: “Welcome, how may I be of-” His eyes landed on her face and Alicia braced herself.
His eyes widened, his unfinished sentence ended in a gasp as shock slowly morphed into a grimace- but not disgust, which, Alicia supposed, was at least something. Before he could finish his assessment of her and start to judge or ask her to leave, she quickly shoved a prepared note in his face which simply said in neat and elegant letters: “I need glasses. When I read, the letters are blurry. May you be so kind to help me?”
Her sudden movement broke the poor man out of his stupor and made him read the note. He gave her one last quick once-over before finally regaining his composure remarkably quickly and continuing on, luckily without further stalling on his side or any remarks on her appearance.
Instead, he started asking questions pertaining her eye sight while doing various tests that went somewhat above Alicia’s near none-existent understanding of ophthalmology, like a true professional of his craft, and in return she gave short and precise answers with the help of her note book which he diligently read and responded to.
During the entirety of this ordeal, he only minimally avoided looking at her face which meant he was already doing far better than her mother.
Truly, a professional.
Or maybe, after finally noticing anything else about her besides her face, he just had taken in her clean, well-tailored, expensive looking clothes and realized she had the money to spend. Not that Alicia would complain about that; they were making progress either way.
At one point, while taking a closer look at her eye to see if there was any discernible damage or any other issues she needed to be concerned about, he even briefly and carefully touched her face without any hesitation or flinching.
By God, give this man an award for his troubles and bravery.
Thankfully, in the end, it turned out she only needed simple reading glasses, no need for any special orders or anything, and she wasn’t going blind either which she had already suspected wasn’t the case but it was a relief to hear nonetheless.
There were several pairs of glasses available she could choose from. Ah, right, style mattered a lot after all and she wouldn’t want to look ugly now, would she, Alicia thought sardonically.
She went for practicality instead.
The common pince-nez was popular but out of the question. The glasses were kept in place by pinching the bridge of the nose and the thought of them constantly pressing against and cutting into the thick scar tissue over her nose made Alicia shudder. Anything touching her face for an extended period of time would feel uncomfortably after a while, but there had to be a better option.
Getting a monocle was also an absurd notion even if it made somewhat sense; she only had the one eye after all. But she was not some old man sitting in some dusty office, totteringly holding his monocle in front of his eye while squinting at some dry documents about taxes. She wasn’t exactly sure why she drew the line specifically there considering everything else that was already wrong with her, but the idea was simply too ridiculous.
However, a pair of the fairly new temple spectacles should be acceptable. They were quickly gaining in popularity; she could tell even from her isolated and reclusive existence: Two lenses in a metal frame that were mostly held up by the ears and only lightly rested against the nose. Alicia wagered they would still become unpleasant for her to wear after a while but they were definitely the best option she had and she did not need to wear them at all times.
Alicia considered the available options: The frame shouldn’t be made out of nickel or copper or any other impure metals since they easily irritated her now sensitive skin. Particularly thin or wiry frames would cause the same issues.
In the end, she decided on a pair with thicker frames made from platinum. They were quite expensive but with all the terrible things that had happened in her life so far, poverty wasn’t among them.
(Yet. She wasn’t that optimistic.)
As Alicia paid, the man – while putting the glasses in an etui for her to take them home in – offhandedly suggested, “I do not intend to offend, but may I recommend a glass eye for the sake of symmetry?”
Not offended by his remark, but also not bothering to write anything down, Alicia just shrugged in response and the man dropped the topic.
Truthfully, it had been talked about before, getting a glass eye as a means to prevent deformities of her skull but also as general damage control, a way to make her face appear slightly less grotesque.
Talked about not with her, mind you, mostly over her as she lied bed-bound and suffering, and the doctor tending to her quietly talked to whoever of her family was sitting by her side and brought it up as a possibility but ultimately advised against it because of the extensive burn damage inside her eye socket that a foreign object would only worsen.
But that had been many months ago and might have changed by now, Alicia mused. It was certainly an idea worth following up on. She would have to consult a doctor first, obviously, before taking the next few steps and actually acquiring the eye, though it was not an impossible thought.
But that was an adventure for another day; it would have to wait, Alicia considered in resignation as she stepped outside, her purchase safely tugged away in one of her coat pockets.
The ‘excitement’ of the day had gotten to her, making her feel frail and brittle: Her feet were aching after being on them for so long. The cold winter air was burning against her skin, its dryness chafing it raw. Her hands were starting to cramp and she felt too hot and too cold at the same time.
Every freezing breath she took scraped along her throat like nails, arduously dragging itself down before clumsily landing in her lungs. The saying ‘As easy as breathing’ had lost all meaning to her since it became anything but. She never thought she could be this laboriously aware of something that used to be an effortless action, completely natural and automatic.
She already knew she would not make it out of bed tomorrow, or the day after for that matter, as she stiffly and ever so carefully began her way home.
As predicted, the next two days were spent in bed in a feverish daze, not peaceful, not unbearable either, thanks to her pain medication, as Alicia rested to get her body back in what was its version of a working order.
According to her physician, she was technically allowed to take a higher dose of her pain relief still before it truly became unsafe but the experiences she had with it weren’t worth the lack of pain. It made her disorientated beyond comprehension, making her see things and being unable to tell where she was.
Sometimes it would be the burning manor or the dark cliffs, sometimes a dying Lumière, death and destruction lingering in the corner of her eye, and sometimes she had looked at Maman and Papa and seen the Paintress and the mirror she had Painted of her father instead. It was like her mind was repeatedly playing a record titled “Alicia Dessendre’s tremendous failures and subsequent torments – The Greatest Moments,” dragging the usual landscapes of her nightmares into the waking world.
She had ultimately decided to take a clear mind over constantly suffering through that at the cost of being in a bit more pain.
After she has sufficiently recovered, she’ll continue with her sanity bearing task of putting her memories and knowledge of her other life onto paper, this time with the help of her new purchase, currently safely tucked away in a drawer.
She was currently finishing up the fourth draft of her work. Since the first one had been written while on the edge of madness, born out of pure despair and been a mess and all over the place, she had started over again after, adding details and putting some kind of order and structure into it.
She had also started drawing portraits of Maelle, Gustave, Lune, Sciel, of her friends and family, scenes and even maps of Lumière and the Continent, and she had done it over and over again, until she knew the curve of their smile, the glint in their eyes, every single strand of hair, every wrinkle, until she got it right and could draw it in her sleep, her unpractised hands gaining confidence as she steadily improved.
She was by far the most unskilled artist in her family, but as a Dessendre she was still leagues above the average person, and she would almost say she was proud of what she had accomplished with her drawings. Maybe even her mother with her strict expectations would approve, if she still had in her to feel pride for her youngest daughter.
For the next draft, Alicia planned to use her type writer instead of just writing it by hand again, and maybe to pick up a paintbrush instead of her pens.
Her current plan was to make a few more copies, even after being completely satisfied with her transcription work, which she then would store in different places, not just in her room, but elsewhere in the manor too, maybe bury one in the garden, or find somewhere outside the estate entirely.
(Because she remembered how easily paper burned – just like her clothes and her skin and her hair – so many poems and anecdotes and little stories she had written over the course of her life, that she had been so, so proud of, all gone, turned to ashes like the rest of her life, with no intention of recreating or continuing any of them because her desire to write was what caused any of this in the first place.)
And after… after having been fully satisfied with her work, after she has decided that she’s made enough copies and not seeing any point in making more… after, she didn’t know, she really didn’t.
Sometimes, Alicia thought about Verso’s – the one her mother had Painted – last words to her as she was forced out of the Canvas, sobbing and begging.
You’ll never have to suffer a life you don’t want.
She didn’t know if this was just another one of his many lies or if he truly meant every word he said. She couldn’t decide which was worse: that they were just empty words and he saw her as nothing more than a means to a quite literal end, or if he was genuinely trying to be comforting, completely convinced of his words.
Alicia wanted to laugh, or maybe cry, but doing either would hurt her face so she did neither.
This wasn’t a life she wanted. This was barely a life at all. It felt more like a punishment she couldn’t confidently say she didn’t deserve. A punishment for wanting: wanting friends, wanting someone, anyone in her life who shared her passions, for wanting to belong and other such childish desires… for wanting to cling to the life she had lived in the Canvas.
She has been doing a lot of reading lately, not the fun kind she used to enjoy but purely non-fiction concerning historic fires and their impacts as well as some medical texts that revolved about treating burn victims. Call it desensitization or call it morbid curiosity, though she had no idea what acquiring this much knowledge about the Great Fire of Rome or the Great Fire of London had accomplished.
Much more engrossing had been the texts and articles she had found about the Bazar de la Charité fire of 1897 right here in Paris. She had been eight at the time and very vaguely remembered hearing about it, though it had been of no concern to her back then.
Funny, how that had worked out considering that the medical treatment the roundabout 200 survivors with varying degrees of burn injuries received back then might have advanced or prepared that medical field enough, possibly resulting in a better care for her own burns.
Some articles about the aftermath included drawings, some even photos, depicting victims and survivors alike in gruesome detail. Compared to some of them, Alicia still had all her hair and the shape of her face and more or less well functioning limbs, and wasn’t she lucky to be spared worse?
She wondered if Verso (either of them, really) ever contemplated about what life would look like for her after his heroic martyrdom. If he imagined it all poppies and roses, a sunlit manor, a grieving family moving on from tragedy while she herself grows up and finds her place in the world, or if he didn’t care beyond the simple goal of “saving” her.
But fact was, what she had garnered from having looked into this topic in the first place was a look at what awaited her in the future: being ostracized by society, an ailing body with a high risk for infections and diseases as well as madness born from stress from being in constant pain.
Realistically, it was unlikely she would make it to forty.
And she didn’t care.
She felt relieved actually, and only a little bit guilty that she considered this good news.