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The baby always, always slept through the night.
"Is she broken?" Verso peered over the edge of the crib to stare at her tiny, sleeping face. She was very pink.
Maman laughed. "No, mon chou. Why do you think she's broken?"
"She doesn't cry." He had friends at school who had baby siblings, too, and they all said that they cried all the time and were really annoying. Alicia wasn't like that at all. "Don't babies cry?"
"Not all babies. They have different temperaments. Like you and Clea are different, babies are different too."
Alicia snuffled, then, her eyes opening. She had a strange, sort of scrunched up face. Babies were meant to be cute, but Alicia wasn't. She sort of looked like a mole.
"What was I like, as a baby?"
Maman smiled, then leaned over to ruffle his hair. He pulled a face, angling himself away from her. She laughed, reaching to pick Alicia up out of the cradle, but she was still looking at him. "You've always been mon ange."
"Mamaaaan. That's not an answer."
"Isn't it?" She bounced Alicia up and down in her arms, and Alicia gurgled. She looked over at Verso, eyes wide, and he waved.
"No, it's not."
"You're pouting, mon chou." He schooled his expression. "You slept well, when I could get you to sleep, but you were just as fussy then as you are now." She laughed. Alicia laughed too, which wasn't fair because she didn't even know why.
"And Clea?"
"The grumpiest baby you can imagine," she said, "surpassed only by her becoming the grumpiest toddler you can imagine."
Verso grinned, and Alicia burbled at him.
She cried, that night. And the next, and the next. Verso somehow felt like he'd cursed the peace by saying something, but when he mentioned it to Clea, she told him not to be so superstitious.
"Oh, Verso, what's wrong?" Maman opened her arms for him, and he ran to her, nearly tripping on the last few steps to reach her. "Oh, mon bébé."
He cried into the front of her shirt, tried to stop, then cried some more. It wasn't fair.
"It's alright, Verso." Maman held him close with one arm around his back, stroking his hair with the other. "It's okay."
It wasn't okay. The more he cried, the worse it felt, but he couldn't stop because it hurt too much to do anything but cry.
"Are you injured?" She stepped back, regarding him at arm's length. She looked sad. He shook his head. "What happened?"
"It's silly," he confessed, then kept crying. His teacher told him it was silly to be upset, too, and that he was making a scene, and maybe it was better if he went home if he couldn't calm down.
"No, no." Maman squatted down to his level, wiping his eyes with the edge of her sleeve. "If you're upset, it's not silly. Did something happen at school?"
The tears bubbled up again. "I— Ophelia, she's in my class, and she— it's her birthday soon, and she invited— invited everyone except me." He sucked in a hiccuping breath, but it didn't really help. "I thought maybe she forgot, so I asked, and she— she said she didn't want me to be there because I'm weird."
"Verso…" She pulled him back into another hug, her arms tight around him. She squeezed him so hard he had to squirm to tell her to let go, but she did. "That was very cruel of her. That's not something you should say to anyone, but it's also not true."
It was; Ophelia wasn't the only person who'd said it. Verso didn't know what he did wrong, but everyone at school thought he was funny. But he didn't like being laughed at.
Maman seemed a little angry, though, so he didn't want to argue with her. He nodded and tried to wipe away the snot on his face, and that made her expression less scary. She pulled a handkerchief from nowhere, the magic trick she always did but refused to tell Verso or Clea how she managed it, and handed it to him.
"You know you're special, don't you, mon ange?" Verso ducked his head and focused on wiping his nose. "Verso? You know that when people are cruel, it's just because they're jealous."
"I know." She'd told him before. He didn't feel very special.
"Good." She ruffled his hair. "You've had a hard day. You can go get some sweets from the kitchen, okay? And then go find your papa; I'm going to the school."
Verso's eyes widened. "Please don't make Ophelia invite me." Everyone would know he wasn't really meant to be there.
"I won't," she promised. "Don't worry. Maman will sort it out, alright?"
"Okay," Verso said, and he went in for one last hug. It helped him feel a bit better, at least.
Ophelia didn't come to school again, after that. No one mentioned her birthday party. Everyone was nice to Verso again, and it was like the whole thing never happened. Sometimes the memory still hurt, though.
The next time someone was mean at school, Verso didn't tell anyone. He didn't really know why.
"Urgh." Mattieu flopped back on the grass. "Ugh." Weakly, he struck the ground with a closed fist. "Uuuuuugh."
"Alright there, Mattieu?" Verso peered at him from his position propped up against the tree.
"No, not really." He let out a long, heavy sigh. "You wouldn't get it, Verso."
Verso frowned. "Let me try?" That was what papa said, sometimes, when Verso argued with him about art.
Mattieu just huffed, turning over onto his stomach. "I've studied so much for these exams, and it feels like my brain is… wilting lettuce."
"Poetic." Verso adopted something sympathetic in his tone, but behind it all he was confused. Hadn't they just been studying together? Why wouldn't he get it?
"I don't have poetry in my brain right now." Mattieu tore a fistful of grass out of the earth. "But I'm meant to, for literature. There's just so much that I can't hold it in my head anymore."
"We'll be fine," he promised. They'd worked hard, together. They'd worked for months making sure that they were ready. Sure, they were both tired, but they'd make it. The finish line was nearly in sight, and then they had one single, boundless summer to enjoy before the future snatched them up.
Huh. Verso's brain was still perfectly capable of poetry.
"You'll be fine," Mattieu corrected. "Everything always goes fine for you. You barely even have to try and everything works out."
Verso smiled, because Mattieu might get annoyed if he frowned. "That's not true."
"It really is. You don't even have to do well in these exams."
…That was true. "Only because I already did the work to get into the conservatory."
"Yeah, yeah." Mattieu waved him off. "And was that hard?"
No. Verso felt like he'd been preparing for it his whole life. Completing his recital had felt barely more strenuous than breathing, even if he had been a little nervous. "Yes, of course. I worked forever for that."
"And if you hadn't?" There was something cold in his voice. "If you'd failed, and they didn't take you?"
Verso laughed. "Maman would have been delighted to have an excuse to keep me home."
"Yeah." Mattieu rolled back over onto his back, staring at the sky. "Yeah, I thought it might be something like that."
When Verso walked back home that evening, he felt lonelier than he ever had after spending time with the boy he'd come to think of as his best friend. He took his exams, and he aced all of them because he'd worked hard, and then he didn't spend the summer with Mattieu because Mattieu didn't do well enough to secure his place at the university and had to find work instead.
They didn't talk much, after that.
Verso woke from sleep with a bad headache, like he'd drunk too much wine the night before. His throat hurt. The world smelled—
He shot upright, heart racing. The world smelled like smoke. The fire.
He wasn't even halfway out of bed before maman was at his side. He hadn't seen her, but there was a chair by his bedside. She must have been watching over him. "Maman, Alicia—" His voice crackled.
"Is alive," she said, hand on his shoulder. "She is… badly injured." A shadow passed over her face. "But she's alive. Thanks to you, mon ange."
"Please, can I—" He ducked away from her grip. Normally he'd play nicer, wouldn't want her to see him stressed, but Alicia. He couldn't stop hearing her screaming. The memory of the flames still licked at his fingertips. "Please."
She looked at him for a moment, something he couldn't quite read on her face, then nodded. "If you're feeling well."
He was. It felt… he remembered walking into the flames. He remembered reaching for Alicia, the smoke choking them both, and then nothing else.
He should have felt worse than this, surely.
"I want to see her." She watched him, eyes tracing his every movement, as he rose from the bed. Someone had dressed him in soft clothes, for sleeping. He was fine. Why was he fine? Why didn't he feel fine?
He felt winded. His chest hurt. But Verso hunted his bedroom floor — maman had tidied — for socks and there were no burns on his hands. He could have sworn—
"Maman." He didn't know why speaking felt like an accusation. "What happened? In the fire."
"Someone broke in and set a fire in the basement," she said. Her tone was careful. Why was her tone careful? How did he ask, without letting her know she was scaring him? "It spread up to the kitchen, and then to where your sister was writing in the study. You heard her, grabbed her, and jumped out of the window. The two of you landed in a bush."
"And I'm fine." He ran through the flames. He remembered reaching through the flames.
"The suit you were wearing isn't," she offered. He didn't know why it felt like an offering. She didn't say that Alicia wasn't fine.
It didn't make sense, but still, Verso went out into the hall. Strangers in expensive coats — doctors, they had to be doctors — stood in a little flock outside Alicia's bedroom door.
"Monsieur Dessendre!" One of them turned to him. Verso had seen him at his recitals, he recognised his face. "I didn't expect you'd be up."
Verso nodded. "I think I'm doing alright, all things considered." He plastered a smile on his face, the one that came easiest. The hallway stank of antiseptic; new medicine. Experimental medicine, because that was what Alicia needed.
The doctor nodded vigorously. "Considering your sister's injuries, your condition is a miracle."
But as Verso approached, he could hear his sister behind the door, struggling to breathe through the rasp of the burns that had torn through her throat, and it didn't feel like a miracle. How could he pretend to be happy when she was suffering?
"You're beautiful, you know." The sun warmed his face, filtering through the branches of the willow, catching the gold in Julie's hair. They'd been here for...he didn't know how long, and it didn't matter — the blanket beneath them was still comfortable, the food from the picnic Verso brought still offering new delights.
Sometimes, he felt like he could be out here with Julie forever. Never go home, never wrangle his sisters' moods, never dodge his father's disappointed little frown. He'd be happy forever like this.
"Flatterer." She was blushing, though.
"Is it flattery if I mean it?" Her lips tasted like strawberries and a dusting of sugar.
"Yes." She drew back, fiddling with a strand of her hair. "You make me feel like I'm looking into the sun, sometimes."
"Me? Surely not." Verso flashed her what he was reliably informed was his most dazzling smile.
"Stop that." She swatted at his arm. He let the smile drop, but he couldn't keep the real, soft one off his face. "You pull that one all the time. How do you avoid wrinkling like a prune?"
"What?" He laughed. Fed her another strawberry. "We're young."
"No we're not." Julie took one juice stained finger and touched the skin at the edge of her eyes. "Sure, we're not old, but we're not young, either."
"Julie..." He never knew if it was a hint. She said things, sometimes, and he wondered if he was meant to ask her to marry him. He didn't know why he didn't.
"I'm jealous, Verso." Julie tipped her head back, laughing. There were little lines at the corners of her eyes, just as she'd said. "We're both in our thirties, but you don't look a day over twenty five."
Verso laughed it off. He kept hearing that from his friends, lately. "It's a gift passed down from maman, I'm sure."
Verso woke in the dead of night, and something was very wrong.
It was bright outside his window. The sky was dark and the world was bright and there was a— a noise. He couldn't put his finger on it. He couldn't describe the way it coiled in the back of his head, the way it screamed.
He felt uncoordinated as he clamber-stumbled out of bed. His eyes hurt but his head felt just left of clear, like someone had rung a bell directly into his right ear. There was no sound. There was sound everywhere, the world thick with it.
Verso opened his bedroom door, and the landing was a swirl of colour. Through the light-dark strain of shadows, he could see Alicia — deathly pale, unmasked, eyes wide — standing, too, at her bedroom door.
His father was in the hall, coming home. He wore a coat Verso had never seen before, thick wool and pale brown. His hair was windswept, dark against the riot of— of the thing Verso was trying not to look at, because that feeling in his head lilted ever further to the left when he so much as thought about it.
"Papa?" His voice sounded small in his throat, but the man's eyes snapped to him. For a moment, he didn't have eyes at all, just a yawning chasm Verso somehow recognised.
"Verso." His voice cracked. He shook his head. "Something is very wrong; take your sisters. Run. I'm going to find your mother."