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Verso held the cloth in his hands, wringing it out over the pond, lingering too long. It wasn’t the fear of seeing the man’s blood that gave him pause. Blood was too familiar a sight, if anything.
Droplets ran down his hands as he stayed there, crouched, cloth dripping steadily. His eyes stared, focusing on nothing, brain both busy with thoughts and completely empty. This was all just doing the right thing, wasn’t it. Being a good person trying to save a fallen expeditioner.
If only that truth was so easy to believe. Verso had already dressed the man—Gustave, if the panicked screams of his allies were anything to go by—and his wounds, sealing up the worst of them and applying what little he could find in hopes it would help his healing. He’d never been much of a healer, but his previous travels had made knowing the basics a necessity. Gustave was far from the first person he’d seen to. Yet the memory of healing him was still fresh in Verso’s mind, tinged in a crimson halo of shame. As much as Verso liked to tell himself he had no thoughts or feelings for anyone, he knew that he’d found the man’s body shapely, remembered how hot his cheeks had gotten. The knowledge that he’d have to put his arm back on at some point was so intensely embarrassing—and just a hair arousing—Verso had put it completely out of his mind to the best of his ability. Which, considering he’d left the arm laying on his bedroll, wasn’t very much.
No amount of assurance from Monoco over the years had made him more forgiving of himself. As far as Verso was concerned, it was unforgivable. And so was sitting here by the pond when a man who had just barely teetered off the brink of death was laying on a blanket, covered head to toe with blood.
Slowly Verso eased himself up to standing, leather of his boots creaking on the way up. He closed his eyes and took a deep, uncertain breath; walking the short trip back to camp somehow seemed like a severe ordeal. He hadn’t wanted to stray too far in case the camp fell prey to a random nevron attack, but each step back towards it felt like an eternity. The trip only took two minutes, but it might as well have been two decades. Or maybe it was just Verso, his internal sense of the passage of time destroyed beyond all recognition as was usual.
Quickly Verso glanced upwards: night wasn’t falling, not for some time, but he should light a fire anyway. For safety. And to…keep Gustave warm. That was good for him while he was still recovering, of course. And if he kept it small, no one would see, no one would try to attack them. It was a good plan.
Verso almost dropped his cloth to go and gather some brush when he remembered the first task at hand that he was still tenaciously putting off. He was usually better than this: not so distracted, not so avoidant.
Sitting next to Gustave felt a bit like his own death sentence, which Verso was quite aware to be an insensitive thing to think after what had happened but knew that he couldn’t stop feeling it regardless. He flattened the cloth out from its previous twisted shape, thinking about what to do next, something so simple managing to baffle him in its procedure. To start he laid the cloth completely down over Gustave’s face, and exhaled a tiny breath of relief at no longer having to stare at it. The man’s face was the sort of thing that he both didn’t want to see yet his eyes were drawn to like a magnet, and the respite was surprisingly welcomed. Since Gustave’s torso was still wrapped in bandages, there was very little for Verso to peek at. None of that perverted eye candy that he hated himself for, that he couldn’t run away from.
With a jolt Verso realized that by covering Gustave’s face, that meant he wouldn’t be able to breathe, which was the precise opposite of what he was trying to do by healing him. Verso scrambled to remove it, only to see the bloody mess of a face underneath, and realized that he had run out of excuses to put it off.
He started with Gustave’s forehead. The blood was thick there, like it was everywhere, and came peeling off under his gentle rubbing. After so much blood, the cloth would have to be soaked long and hard to even be usable. Part of Verso was astonished that a man could bleed so much and still be alive. It wasn’t his first time cleaning away blood, but usually by now it would have been from a corpse.
A few times, Verso thought that Gustave really was a corpse now, and there was a clutch of panic in his chest, but a tiny stream of breath would hit the inside of his wrist to confirm that all was not lost. Peeling off the blood, already partially dried, was long work, something that Verso found comforting in some strange way, but the more of Gustave’s face that was revealed, the more on edge he felt.
The sun was much lower by the time he was clearing out the bristles of Gustave’s thin beard, most of his face now visible in its original form and staring up at him with closed eyes. Verso’s stomach was churning, cheeks hot, memories of sharp disapproving words from his youth flickering through the back of his mind. Depraved and uncivilized, these thoughts were. Gustave was just a man, that was all, and he needed to hurry up getting him better so he could return him to his expedition as was proper.
Besides, I think that dark-haired woman might have been his girlfriend. The thought came bitter and unwarranted, and Verso bit his lip with embarrassment. Really? Was he still thinking such childish, disgusting things? Seemingly a century wasn’t enough to fix him. Maybe nothing would be.
Gustave cleaned up well. It was a shame, really. Verso wasn’t sure what in particular was a shame, only that the situation at hand was not ideal for anyone involved and there was now a very handsome man laying in front of him, deeply wounded with less than a year left to live.
That was it. Verso got up, turning his back on Gustave in search for brush to light the fire with. He couldn’t keep sitting there, not while Gustave was sleeping, if his mind was going to keep going to such dangerous places. Rumination and idleness would do nothing to keep the younger man alive.
Verso stalked to a nearby clearing with his head down, scanning for anything to start a fire with, arms firmly crossed. The image of Gustave wouldn’t leave his head: calm and peaceful and covered in dried flecks of blood, while he was being beaten by Renoir—
The thought of it made Verso stop and lean against a tree, face contorted into a wince, thinking of that one time he’d dared to take a boy home with him. This time it hadn’t been his fault—he didn’t even know Gustave, aside from taking care of him while in a bad spot—but the similarities scalded like a metal brand in his eyes despite this time being worse in every way. Before Renoir had been fine enough with just spewing hate and looming behind with his cane clacking on the floor like an ill omen. The more he thought about these things he tried to bury, the less similar they became, but he still couldn’t shake the memories and parallels.
Was he only feeling all these forbidden things now, because of those foolish memories?
Not everyone Renoir despises is boyfriend material, Verso chided himself, forcing his eyes open and starting to look for tinder again. If that was true, I’d have an endless line of suitors.
𝄪
There must have been some sort of soothing dark nothingness between the bookends of agony, but Gustave couldn’t recall it. All he could remember was the feeling of dying, extreme pain, and then straight to whatever he was now. Not dying, maybe, his pain lessened compared to what it had been before, but the improvement was only slight. His whole body still felt like it was on fire, had been used as a nevron’s punching bag, and dropped down a nearby cliff for good measure.
He was certainly curious as to where he was—and why Renoir hadn’t managed to kill him—but the idea of opening his eyes seemed like too painful and exhausting an endeavour for the moment. If he focused hard and tried to listen, he couldn’t hear any sounds of danger or battle: only crackling fire. Whatever had happened, he seemingly was no longer in mortal danger, and was allowed to relax if only for a short while. Maybe he should have thought more about who lit that fire he could hear and see dancing on the backs of his eyelids, and that if it wasn’t one of his fellow expeditioners he wasn’t yet out of the woods, but that required energy and coherence. Two things that, at the moment, Gustave was not in possession of. He also didn’t think he was in possession of his prosthetic arm anymore, but that was…a problem for later too. He could have just misplaced it in all the pain. For all he knew, Maelle would come to wake him up in an hour carrying it, polished as best she could manage.
Gustave had done so much worrying and panicking as of late, and he knew the time for it was far from over, but he was too worn out to bother spending any more time on it. Unable to roll over without being overwhelmed with pain, he instead let his thoughts trickle out of his grasp as he drifted slowly towards sleep.
The second time Gustave awoke, he hurt marginally less, and his thoughts were slightly less vague. This was the first thing he noticed: the second was that somewhere nearby a twig snapped.
Instinctually he tried to sit up at attention, but found this motion impeded almost instantly by agony. He may have hurt less when laying inert, but sitting up was not something he was ready to tackle in his condition. Letting a moan of surprise and pain slip through his lips, Gustave let himself fall back down and realized that someone had spread a blanket underneath him. It didn’t do much to insulate from the hard ground beneath, but it was better than nothing.
Whoever snapped the twig didn’t seem to have heard or noticed his whimpering, which Gustave was thankful for. The last thing he needed was to survive only to be picked off by nevrons while he was in this helpless state. Years of training, wasted on a few moments of weakness.
At least he could open his eyes now, and while his eyelids still felt heavy the burden of seeing no longer seemed like a death sentence.
The first thing that dominated his vision was a small but steady campfire, a few feet in front of him, dancing and casting warmth across his face. In a strange way it felt healing, the sparks trailing up into the sky in a magical spiral. Around its edge was a tidy ring of stones, arranged with practise and a deft, careful hand. It looked like Lune’s handiwork more than anything, something that gave Gustave a flicker of hope. The others can’t have been that far away, right?
Across from him, behind the dancing fire, was a log; the remnants of what looked to be a bedroll were strewn across it. Nestled in the rolls of a black blanket was something that caught the firelight with streaks of burnished, charred gold.
That…is my arm. He’d been right about that, at least, and having it so close by was something of a relief. Not having to wrest it away from nevrons—or possibly even worse, a group of overeager gestral children—was one tiny victory he’d have to take. Reattaching it would likely hurt, but that would be nothing compared to what he’d felt earlier. He’d only have to endure some minor teasing from Maelle if he made too many faces.
How long had it been? He couldn’t quite tell…it was dark out, though, which meant at least a few hours. Part of him felt like it could have been weeks or even months with how stiff and sore he’d become, but he hoped not.
The fire was warm. Gustave inched closer, trying to feel more of its warm heat on his face, letting himself fall into a smile at the hint of comfort. He understood too well the merits of taking tiny victories where he could get them, especially in a situation as dire as this one.
Because of the bliss of the fire, it took a few minutes for Gustave to realize that his face wasn’t stiff as he’d expected. There had been so much blood on his face, and by now it had to have dried at least a little. Dried blood, in his past experiences with it, turned into a stiff sheet that made it difficult to move. Now, though, he had none of that. That meant someone had cleaned him off…
Gustave stared into the fire, wondering who exactly was behind treating him with such care, and why no one was around to keep watch. As much as it frustrated him, he was in no fit state to defend from anything. Keeping a rotating watch was basic common sense—what were they thinking, leaving Gustave alone by a fire, recovering and with no means to defend himself?
When footsteps slowly came into hearing again, Gustave found his body tensing, the motion hurting but instincts not listening as they prepared him for the inevitable worst.
Boots came into Gustave’s limited field of view: tall, soft black leather, the sort that bent with every step the wearer took, that were that indeterminate amount of aged that meant they could have been anywhere from a month to a decade old. He could only just see the baggy tops of pants tucked into them, though he knew better than to try and look up in his current condition. They only blocked the heat from his face temporarily, before looping back around to where his arm lay glistening in the firelight. The boots and presumably their wearer sat down, bringing more into view: the bottom of a coat and a golden stripe on the pants.
An expeditioner. Although Gustave wasn’t entirely sure who it was from his angle. They picked up his arm, and settled it in their lap. From where he was laying, he didn’t think it was any of his fellows.
Oh. That stranger who came up to him while they were fighting the grey-haired man—he had been wearing an expeditioner outfit. That must have been who saved him. A flicker of hope formed in Gustave’s chest only to be extinguished as he realized that they had never figured out whether or not the man was trustworthy. Since he’d saved Gustave’s life, he wanted to think that he was benevolent, but he knew that things weren’t always so simple. Unfortunately.
A clanking sound filled the air, and the smell of something warm and nourishing filled the air. Gustave looked up as much as he could without moving his head, which proved to be a difficult and uncomfortable endeavour, and caught a glimpse of the bottom of a round grey pot perched over the fire.
“You’re going to need a good dinner after all that,” the stranger said, lingering over the pot in a half-crouch, stirring it. “Afraid I couldn’t get any decent meat, but roots should do for now. You like carrots and parsnips?”
The man’s voice was nicer than Gustave remembered it being. Confident, calm, assured. There was a hint of kindness to it, as well.
“Yeah.” Gustave’s own voice was hoarse from lack of use, it seemed. “That’ll do just fine.”
“Good. You unlearn pickiness here on the Continent, anyways.” The man settled fully back onto his seat, crossing his legs and hand moving towards Gustave’s arm, only to stop.
“We ran out of rations a week ago,” Gustave told him, laughing weakly. Though he couldn’t see the stranger’s face from here, having someone to talk to was nice. “I’m used to it.”
“Really, it’s not so bad.” The man sat there, seemingly still, balancing on the edge of moving but not quite doing it. “As long as you don’t try and eat the nevrons.”
“I mean, the thought had occurred to us at one point—”
“And I’m here to tell you that it’s a bad idea.”
“Duly noted.” Gustave hoped the man would talk some more so he could hear his smooth, rich voice. It sounded like no one he’d ever met before, something special, something that made him feel warm inside.
“So. Uh…what’s your name? I don’t think I ever caught it.” The silence had gone on for too long, and Gustave wanted to hear him speak again. And have a name to put to—well, not quite the face, but the boots at the very least.
The man paused for long enough that Gustave started to wonder if he’d done the wrong thing.
“Verso,” he finally said, tone heavy with some sort of thought and meaning that Gustave couldn’t understand yet.
“How long’s it been?” Gustave wanted to add the man’s name after the question, feel how it sounded on his tongue, but he refrained.
“Since your accident?” Verso’s words sounded carefully selected. “About a day. I cleaned you off yesterday, tried to see what broth I could get you to swallow. I’ve been sleeping in shifts, making sure no one sneaks up on us.”
“And have they?” Gustave moved a tiny bit, able to see Verso’s chest and neck now. He was wearing an expeditioner’s uniform as well, although different from the ones they issued now. How exactly this Verso character was alive well past what should have been his expiry date didn’t make any sense to Gustave, but he knew now wasn’t the best time to ask.
“Not yet.” Verso reached over and stirred their dinner, letting the air fill with scents that made Gustave’s stomach growl.
“It’ll be a while longer for the stew,” Verso informed him, seeming to know exactly what the source of the sound was. “The carrots are still too hard.”
“Turns out dying makes you hungry.”
“I know.”
Gustave waited for a while, hoping to get some sort of elaboration as to how exactly Verso knew how dying was hungry work, but it never came. As he could have guessed.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t step in sooner. Renoir is a difficult opponent at the best of times.”
“That’s the man’s name?”
“Yes.” Verso clipped off the word in a way that made it clear he was not in the mood to talk about it any further. They fell into silence, the crackle of the fire filling the air with a warm soft background noise. Gustave’s view was now firmly of Verso’s neck, and he was gradually coming to the conclusion that it was a very nice neck indeed.
“I apologize about your arm,” Verso finally spoke up again.
“Why? Not like you cut it off or anything.” Gustave was hoping Verso might snort at the joke, even a chuckle, but either the joke wasn’t funny or he wasn’t the laughing type.
It figures, that I’m stuck with another humourless person like Lune. Not that he didn’t like Lune’s company—he absolutely did—but having more than one person around who didn’t know how to laugh might be a bit tiring. Gustave could always try again, but if Verso really wasn’t one for humour he doubted he’d get a different reaction.
“It’s a bit charred and I’m not entirely sure how to fix it,” Verso continued, oblivious to Gustave’s mental gears whirring at the speed of light. “I’ve been cleaning it, and it’s looking better. But before I help you put it back on, I’ll need to ask your help.”
The idea of Verso putting Gustave’s arm on made him more flustered than he would ever dare admit. Maybe the heat in his cheeks, if it was visible, could be passed of as being from the fire.
“It’s an impressive piece of kit. That and the thing on your back—it all looks to be well engineered. Well equipped. I’ve not seen expeditioners with anything like that, before.”
“It’s a lumina converter,” Gustave supplied, biting back his premature excitement at the idea of being able to inform Verso about his pet project. Chances were he wouldn’t particularly care, so he didn’t let himself get too excited.
“That’s an interesting thing. Useful, too, I can imagine.” Verso’s voice didn’t sound completely disinterested, which Gustave took as a hopeful sign, but he wasn’t going to push his luck quite yet.
“You could say that, yeah.” Gustave moved himself another painful time, and finally Verso’s face came into view.
Now that the world was no longer tinted with the colours of panic and battle, Gustave was able to see Verso in his full glory, and that was something that took his breath away. The mix of dimming daylight and warm firelight cast shadows across his thoughtful face, flames dancing in his eyes whose colour Gustave immediately knew he needed to get a closer look at later to observe all the minor details. Discreetly, of course. His wavy black hair looked a bit rough and probably unwashed, and Gustave caught his thoughts wandering off to what it might look like clean. And when the last time Verso had washed it had been.
“Your arm is just as impressive,” Verso continued, eyes flashing and a hint of a smile dancing across his face: a bit in his temple here, his left cheek there. It was defaced by a large scar, but that didn’t diminish his handsomeness in the slightest. “You have a good range of movement with this?”
“Not quite like the old one, but it does well.” Gustave chuckled, internally cringing at the sound. “Beats not having it at all, or one that doesn’t move. I’ve not had issues for a while.”
“It’s been cleaned up well, but I think there might still be a bit of internal damage. Hard to say. I’m not entirely sure how this thing works, as I said. When you’re up to it, I’d get you to take a look.”
Gustave was most definitely taking a look, though not at his arm; the firelight was reflecting across Verso’s rugged face and proving to be a surprisingly wonderful sight for sore eyes. Now was far from the time to be considering a fling, but Gustave only had a year left to live. What was the harm in pining, just a little?
“Sure, I can do that. It probably just short-circuited a bit from my overcharge. I brought the tools to fix it with me, just in case something like this happened.” Smiling felt nice on Gustave’s cheeks, although slightly less so when Verso didn’t appear to notice. This whole flirting business felt more than a little bit foolish, but the idea of Verso as an entity was becoming surprisingly appealing to Gustave for someone he knew nothing about. He had to forcibly push all the thought aside to remind himself of the more pressing matters and questions at hand.
“Are we at camp?”
“A camp, yes.” Verso’s eyes flashed and his voice was tight in a way that made it abundantly clear he wasn’t planning to indulge more details.
“What about Maelle? The others? Are they okay?”
“I believe so, yes.”
Now that the inital shock of Verso being deeply attractive had cleared, Gustave was feeling a prickle of annoyance at just how vague and avoidant he was being. They were, as far as he was concerned, the simplest questions in the world, and here Verso was refusing to answer them in any clear way. “Have you told them that I’m okay?”
“Dinner should be ready soon. I expect you’re hungry.” Verso painted right over Gustave’s question, showing no sign of having noticed its existence in the first place. With a weary sigh Gustave closed his eyes, fostering his own wish that the rest of the expedition was nearby and unharmed. He wanted to ask more, specifically about Maelle, but it was clear that getting information from Verso would be equivalent difficulty to teaching cats how to dance.
“I am getting a bit hungry. I probably shouldn’t eat too much, but,” and he was telling the absolute truth on this last bit, “your stew smells incredible.” Good at fighting, cooking, and medical care; atrocious at communication. Maybe that was a tradeoff he could manage. After all, he’d spent several years now working with Lune, who wasn’t opposed to going mum for an hour or two at a time if her work was absorbing enough.
Verso looked shockingly enough slightly bashful at this compliment. He didn’t blush or anything like that, but he ducked his head and bent further over the stew pot, stirring quickly in a series of quiet clinks. “Well, I hope it tastes good enough. When you spend long enough on the continent, you forget some of the finer details of cooking.”
Burning questions as to what long enough meant exactly were pressing in on Gustave’s mind, the whole existence of Verso tying his brain up in fascinated, flustered knots. “How long have you been here on the continent, exactly?”
“Long enough,” Verso said quickly and curtly. His tone screamed don’t ask me any more questions, which might just drive Gustave insane, but he held hope that if this man continued travelling with them he might get them eventually. It implied he was older than Gustave, by at least a year or two, something that should have been impossible and invited a litany of questions that he knew he wouldn’t get answers to.
A more pressing question for the moment, however, was whether or not the man could cook. As much as the other thoughts and questions were burning, the immediate matter at hand was that Gustave was hungry and Verso had cooked him something. Verso had started to ladel the stew into two wooden bowls that came out of his pack with a practised hand. He wasn’t the first expeditioner that Verso had cooked for on a fire like this, it seemed. What was the likelihood of him being from the last expedition, and somehow just a year younger? Gustave didn’t remember him, but maybe they’d just never crossed paths.
His questions were interrupted once again when Verso moved softly over and began helping Gustave upright into a sitting position. His touch was gentle and caring, although at the same time a bit hesitant and out of practise. The way he gently propped Gustave upright spoke of someone who understood how to handle another carefully, yet hadn’t done so in some time. A couple of times, between sharp spikes of pain, Gustave tried to glance up at Verso, only to see that his face was downcast and avoidant. The man was clearly a walking shroud of secrets and repression, something Gustave recognized all too well. Nothing of him seemed malicious, though, as far as he could tell; there was no fear in Gustave’s heart that the stew might have been poisoned. If Verso had really wanted them dead, he could have left him—and the rest of the expedition, for that matter—to die at Renoir’s hand. Since Gustave was both still drawing breath and being cared for with some degree of tenderness, he had to come to the conclusion that Verso wanted to help. Regardless of whatever his other motives were. It was an uncertainty that Gustave didn’t like settling with, but it would have to do for the time being.
Verso paused halfway with a bowl in his hand. “Can you…I mean…do you need both arms to eat this?” Once again, he seemed to be deliberately avoiding eye contact with particular fervour.
Images of Verso feeding him with a spoon danced through Gustave’s mind and made his face heat up slightly. It had been Emma, and occasionally Maelle, that had helped with things in the weeks between his accident and his arm being ready; but that had been out of begrudging sisterly obligation. Verso didn’t have any of that. They’d only just met…Gustave wasn’t sure if he wanted to say that he could manage and risk making a fool of himself in the attempt or let Verso help him.
“Just hold the bowl,” he settled on. “I’ll be fine with the rest.”
Almost unbelievably, Verso seemed to exhale a sigh of relief, delivering the bowl on cue and holding it steady in his hand, giving Gustave a spoon with the other. He took it, of course, scooping up a mouthful of broth with a single chunk of potato floating in it. The stew was by all accounts rather rudimentary, but it looked decent: the spoonful proved to Gustave that it tasted nice on top of that. The stew wasn’t good enough to distract him from the pressing matters of where the others were, what exactly it was that Verso was hiding, and the insistent aching of his wounds; however it was a welcome bit of warmth that made him smile. Just a little.
At Verso.
After all, in the event that their expedition did fail—something Gustave didn’t want to think about, but knew was a likely inevitability no matter how much hope he held and how positive he had spun things for Maelle—he didn’t have all that much time left. Taking time to appreciate little things was a good thing, before he ran out.
So he let himself savour the admittedly tasty if plain stew, and the fascinating lines of Verso’s face. It was getting late, and everything else could be faced tomorrow.