Chapter Text
⟡ M ⟡
The campfire hissed and crackled as Maelle tried and failed to bring her friends back, producing nothing but smoke, rose petals, and bitter disappointment. The backs of her eyes burned with frustrated tears, but Maelle wasn’t going to cry. Crying would only slow her down, and she needed—she needed—
She needed to focus. She took a steadying breath, picturing Lune clearly in her mind’s eye, and reached out for the chroma to paint her with.
Nothing. Putain de merde.
“Papa did it so easily,” she mused, trying to replicate her father’s movements. “What am I doing wrong?”
From their seats by the fire, Monoco and Esquie offered words of encouragement. Verso, for his part, was resolutely pretending not to watch, elbows planted on his knees as he gazed into the flames.
Maelle tried again. Again, only petals. She didn’t blink as they floated innocently to the ground. If she blinked, a tear might slip past her lashes with no Gustave to wipe it away. Which was precisely why she needed to keep going.
Behind her, she sensed a silent exchange unfolding between Monoco and Verso. She chose to ignore them. They’d seemed such an unlikely duo at the beginning, endlessly amusing Maelle, Lune, and Sciel with their bickering and playfighting, but Maelle understood the bond between them now. It was nothing more complicated than a boy and his loyal dog, content to chase each other to the ends of the earth. Distantly, Maelle supposed she missed her family’s beloved pets, too. But it was hard to imagine caring about anything else in the gaping hole left by her missing friends.
“...Remember them,” Verso said at length, finally turning away from the fire to look at Maelle.
Maelle’s wavering focus slipped through her fingertips. She blinked and let her hand fall to her side, her last meager attempt disintegrating to wisps of grey and smears of red. Of course she’d been remembering them. What did he think she’d been doing?
“Painting isn’t about verisimilitude,” Verso explained, pushing to his feet and stepping through the lingering petals to stand at Maelle’s side, just outside of her line of sight. “It’s about essence. The truth of who they are.”
Essence. That was… her mother had always attributed her success as an artist to her mastery of ‘essence.’ It was what made her paintings superior: an intangible quality behind each brush stroke that elevated an ordinary artist to a divine creator. Maelle had never really understood what she’d meant. But applied to the context of people rather than art… maybe then…
Maelle could picture Lune’s face as clearly as if she stood directly in front of her. Her dark, clever eyes, her small nose and sharp chin, the delicate tattoos trailing down her cheek and forehead. Experimentally, Maelle closed her eyes to Lune’s image but tried to hold onto her presence in her mind. Somehow, Lune’s essence still remained. Maelle could feel the intense air of concentration that surrounded her when she worked on pictos. She could hear the gentle hum of guitar strings vibrating through the night air, could smell the earthy residue of elemental magic that clung to her expedition uniform. But Lune’s presence went deeper than the senses. The ‘truth of her,’ in Verso’s words, was less tangible but no less real. Her true smile was not in the shape of her lips, but the wryness of her amused grin. Her true voice was the warmth behind her encouraging words and the burning heat of her conviction that they must always, always ‘continue.’
Verso guided Maelle’s sword arm through the air with one hand, the other hovering gently over her opposite shoulder. He was saying something about her father’s axons now, but Maelle was barely listening. She had zeroed in on the concept of essences and was drafting her loved ones in her mind using this newfound technique.
Sciel. Brave, unbreakable Sciel. She was so much more than her green eyes, strong build, and freckles, just as she was more than the ribbon in her hair and the bands around her forearms. She was the sentiment woven into every one of those bands given to her by her students. She was the patience and grace of a world-class friend and mentor. She was the weight of her pain from losing Pierre and the lightness of an expertly timed joke when even smiling felt impossible.
Maelle could feel chroma taking shape in the air now. She thought she could grasp it if she reached out just a bit further; could pluck it out of the atmosphere before it reached Renoir.
Monoco’s low, rumbling voice cut into Maelle’s consciousness, naming the axons.
“They’re the essence of your mother,” Verso whispered behind her in explanation. “And… your brother.”
Her brother.
He meant Verso—Alicia’s Verso—but here, in this canvas, she was Maelle, and Maelle’s heart was wrapped tightly around the memory of Gustave. His essence, she didn’t even have to try to suss out. He was beyond words, beyond definition. Gustave’s truth was as tangible to Maelle as his steel arm had been before they’d buried it beneath the red tree near the Forgotten Battlefield. And his chroma… she could still try to reach for it, couldn’t she? It had been months since her painted father had taken him from them, but surely, with the strength of her love, she could pull it back.
Maelle’s sword materialized in her hand. Verso stepped out of her way, melting into the night’s shadows as she began to paint, collecting the pieces of chroma that felt like her fallen friends with the tip of her blade.
While Lune and Sciel’s chroma found its way to her easily, settling gracefully into place around her, Gustave’s proved stubbornly elusive. She concentrated fiercely on his brilliant optimism, his kindness, and the twinkle in his eye, but still came up empty. Closing her damp eyes, Maelle opened her heart to the parts that hurt to remember and reached out blindly to find them.
A protector. A strong, smart, loving brother—but not her true brother, even though she wished with all her heart it were so. A dreamer. A joker. Unwavering devotion. A sacrifice she had never asked for. A violent death. A loss that had shattered her.
There. She’d found it. The chroma was right there, bright and bountiful and so much closer than she would have thought after all these months. She grasped it and pulled, eyes screwed shut and sweat beading on her brow.
Behind her, Verso made a strangled sound. Monaco clattered to his feet, crying out, and Esquie took to the air calling, “Mon ami!”
Maelle nearly had everything she needed to bring the three of them back. The last of the chroma was resisting her, but she’d come too far to give up now. Her sword danced between the stars as she fought against the force keeping Gustave from her. At long last, it gave into her, and the last of the chroma she needed to bring her brother back was in her hands.
With a triumphant shout, Maelle slashed through the fabric of reality. She sheathed her sword and slowly straightened up to find Lune, Sciel, and Gustave sprawled across a patch of wildflowers, confused and shaken but whole and miraculously alive, surrounded by a flurry of golden petals.
For a long moment, she could only stand there and watch them get cautiously to their feet, her eyes brimming with tears. Then Gustave looked up with a bewildered smile and her feet were carrying her forward, tripping over the uneven earth to get to him.
“Gustave!” she cried out, throwing herself into his arms. He caught her, but barely, a pained sound escaping his lungs as he held her weakly.
“I’m sorry, I—I’m so sorry,” she babbled, burying her face into his chest.
“Maelle?” he breathed into the top of her head over her incoherent apology. “Is this… real?”
Lune and Sceil were exchanging disbelieving glances a few feet to their left.
“We gommaged,” Sciel said shakily. “And Gustave, you…”
Maelle squeezed Gustave tighter.
“Maelle… your hair…” that was Lune’s voice, now. “And where’s… Verso, are you alright? Monoco, what’s wrong?”
Above her, Gustave straightened up. Maelle let go of him reluctantly to see what had caught his attention over her shoulder.
“Someone’s hurt,” Gustave murmured, his expression still dazed, and staggered over to where Monoco, Verso, and Esquie were gathered near the fire. “What happened here? How can we help?”
Verso was on the ground, clutching his chest and breathing unevenly. There was no wound or blood as far as Maelle could see, though he was pale as though he’d lost gallons of it. Monoco crouched beside him like a giant, anxious monkey while Esquie floated overhead making sounds of distress.
“Verso? What happened to you?” Maelle asked, more confused than concerned. He’d been completely normal a minute ago.
Verso only shook his head, jaw locked in a grimace. Monoco looked between Verso and Gustave several times before landing on Maelle. He looked like he was about to say something, but stayed silent when Verso bumped him with the side of his boot.
“Dizzy spell,” Verso croaked. “I fell and… and landed poorly.”
Gustave knelt down in front of him, hands hovering. “Okay. Healing tints… ah, I don’t think I have—” he felt his freshly painted pockets. “Maelle, do you have any tints? Or Lune, can you—?”
“It’s alright, Gustave,” Maelle said soothingly, reattaching herself to his side. “Verso’s immortal. We’ll explain more later, but he’ll be fine. He always is. Right?”
She glanced back down at Verso, who nodded once. Monoco glared up at her, as much as a faceless mask could glare.
“He’s not fine,” the gestral growled. “Do you have any idea what you just did?”
“You can talk—?” Gustave exclaimed, momentarily distracted from his fretting before refocusing with a shake of his head. “I mean—that’s helpful. Let’s get him off the ground, at least. Here, let me—”
“No,” Verso gritted out forcefully through clenched teeth, and Gustave froze with an arm outstretched, eyebrows high on his forehead. “I’ll manage. Thank you.”
With what looked like tremendous effort, Verso pushed himself into a seated position on the ground and then, painfully slowly, up onto the log he’d sat on earlier.
“See? I’m fine,” he said breathlessly, mostly to Monoco. “I just need—ah—just need a minute. Freak accident. I’ve lived through worse.” He glanced up with sharp eyes at Gustave, then turned them on Lune and Sciel and managed a somewhat-roguish grin. “Welcome back.”
“I can’t believe we’re alive,” Sciel said faintly. She kept looking down at her hands and at Lune. Lune, however, only had eyes for Maelle.
“What did you do?” she asked, brows furrowed. “You two have a lot of explaining to do.”
Still beaming, Maelle began to tell the whole, world-shifting story.
⟡ G ⟡
Afterward, with the truth about the Paintress and the Desandres laid bare, Lune railed against Verso like a maelstrom. Her shouts echoed off the cliff walls as she accused him of being a traitor and a coward, making as if to shove him. It looked like Verso would have let her, too, if Monoco hadn’t stepped between them. Monoco flinched as her harsh words hit him but stood resolute, a great wooden plank of a shield.
Gustave couldn’t watch any longer. He was in too much shock to be angry and too far removed from everything that had happened since his death to share Lune’s sense of betrayal.
His death. Merde. Gustave had died.
“I don’t understand,” he said for what felt like the dozenth time. Maelle nodded for him to continue in an uncharacteristically benevolent fashion.
The two of them had drifted away from the others to a cluster of trees just beyond the camp site’s warm ring of firelight. Maelle’s white hair glowed eerily in the moonlight, as did the blank monolith looming in the distance. Both new features would take some getting used to.
“Lune and Sciel both gommaged,” Gustave reasoned beneath a furrowed brow, “so their chroma was making its way to Renoir when you caught it. But… I died ages ago. And I didn’t gommage. I was, er… I went the old fashioned way. My chroma should have been long lost by now.”
“But I found it,” Maelle said, shoulders proud. Despite the heavy mood that had settled over their camp, she still beamed every time she looked at Gustave. “I told you, I had to fight to break your chroma free. Beyond that, I don’t know how to explain what happened… I just remembered you, reached out for the qualities that truly make you you, and there it was. Like you were waiting for me.”
“Then, since it’s all my original chroma, does that mean I’m not… repainted?” Gustave asked, dropping his voice on the last word and glancing covertly at the scarred man hunched by the firepit. “Like him? A copy of a dead man. Alive, but not… real.”
“No, no!” Maelle reassured him, a hand flying to his arm. “You’re you. One hundred percent you. It’s the same ink in your veins as before. And Verso is… Verso is real. He’s more than a copy—whatever he might think of himself. So even if you were repainted, it wouldn’t make any difference. But you’re not,” she finished quickly, releasing him.
“Right,” Gustave said, scratching his head. “I guess if we’re all painted—except for you—it doesn’t make much of a difference anyways. Whether I’m one coat of paint or two.”
“It really doesn’t help to think of it like that,” a voice chimed in. Sciel took a deep swig from a goblet—was that wine? Where did she get wine?—and leaned against the trunk of a tree across from Gustave.
“I know I’m real,” she said plainly. “I know the world around me is real. This ‘outside world’ of the painters... what if it’s painted, too? Or the pages of a book, or a cruel game played by the gods. What does it matter if we’re all paintings inside paintings inside paintings? It doesn’t make any difference here, at the end of the day.”
Gustave raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure it’s that simple, Sciel. When you learn that the fabric of your reality is made up of—of linen and cotton, and not the scientific principles you were taught in—”
“You are such an engineer.” Sciel rolled her eyes and stooped to pick up a hefty rock. “If I drop this rock on your foot—” she held it out like a threat—“you’ll know immediately that the gravity acting on it is real, that the weight of it is real, and that the bones in your foot are really broken. How much ‘realer’ do you need things to be?”
“That’s… plenty real,” Gustave said placatingly, stepping forward to take the rock from her. He set it down gingerly, then took the goblet of wine as well for good measure. She shrugged and sauntered off in the direction of Esquie, waving as she went.
“C'est la vie, ici!” she singsonged over her shoulder. Gustave sighed.
“I know both worlds, and there’s no real difference,” Maelle said, her tone gentle. “Other than that, in this world, I have a working voice and a family that loves me. Also, gestrals. We don’t have those on the outside. Or nevrons… or the gommages. But we’re going to put an end to all that and bring everyone back. And then it’ll all be perfect.”
“Will you go back to your world?” Gustave asked, keeping his tone cautiously casual. “You say you prefer it here, but you have people there, too.”
“I…” Maelle wavered. “Not for a long time. If ever…” she huffed a dry little laugh. “It’s nothing you’ll have to worry about anytime soon, old man.”
“Hey,” Gustave chuckled, relieved that she didn’t plan to disappear right after their mission. “I was supposed to die young, I think you’ll recall. From here on out, all my aging is your doing.”
“I can live with that,” Maelle giggled.
Gustave glanced over at Verso again across the clearing. It was difficult to gauge his age in the dim light, especially beneath the short beard and the ragged exhaustion darkening his features. He surely couldn’t be old enough to go grey, though, and yet he had a thick streak of white hair at his temple. Gustave took a sip of Sciel’s wine unthinkingly.
“How old is he?” he asked quietly, nodding at Verso.
“Somewhere around a hundred, I think,” Maelle said. “My brother was twenty six when he died. Verso told us it took his family a while to realize they’d stopped aging, so I don’t know if he stopped before or after the fracture. But Maman would have painted him exactly as he was when we lost him.”
“And who is he to you? This Verso. He’s… not your brother.”
“But he is!” Maelle said earnestly. “He’s still my Verso in all the ways that matter. And he’s more. He’s his own man, too. The person living in this canvas and surviving on the continent has made him.”
“But you’ve only known him for a couple of months. And he was lying to you that whole time. I’m just not sure about him, Maelle. Even with the memories from your other life back, they’re memories of a different man. And he grew up with a different sister. His Alicia.”
“You don’t—” Maelle huffed. “It’s complicated. I don’t need you to understand us right now. I just need you to be my brother, too. I just got you back.”
“Yeah,” Gustave sighed, then drained the rest of Sciel’s goblet and pulled Maelle into a tight side hug. His whole body still ached like he’d fallen from the Endless Tower and landed hard in the ocean, but it felt good to ache after floating in the liminal nothingness of death. “Thank you, by the way. For bringing me back.”
“De rien,” her small voice said into the starry night.
⟡ V ⟡
It took a long time for the fire of Lune’s fury to burn down to embers. When she’d finally had enough of shouting and getting nothing back, she left to log an earth-shattering journal entry, leaving Verso and Monoco alone by the fire.
“Can you move at all?” Monoco asked in a quiet rumble.
“Not yet,” Verso admitted. “Sit with me until the others go off to sleep. They’ll think we’re talking about deep, interesting things.”
Monoco perched his ungainly wooden form on the log beside Verso. “Your arse must be numb by now.”
“Completely. I just wish the rest of me was numb, too.” Verso resisted rubbing his chest. It felt like there was a canon ball sized hole in it. He was doing his best to mask his discomfort, even as every inhale shot bolts of lightning down his spine.
Monoco bristled, seeing right through him. “‘He’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘He’s immortal.’ She barely even looked at you.”
“Hey, now. Maelle didn’t know what chroma she was taking. And she’s right: this won’t kill me. Not that I’d mind—”
“Nope. Not allowed. You promised, no more of that kind of joke. Not with me.”
“Sorry.”
“...Do you really think you’ll recover enough by morning to carry on?”
“Guess we’ll find out.”
“...What if you don’t? What if he keeps draining your—”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, and asking isn’t helping. So just drop it, alright?” Verso snapped.
Monoco stared at him blankly until Verso sighed and rubbed his throbbing forehead.
“Sorry. You didn’t deserve that. I’m feeling… a bit drained.”
Monoco snorted. “‘A bit drained.’ How much of your chroma did she take, exactly?”
“I’m not sure. Felt like half. Maybe a bit more.” Verso flexed his fingers experimentally, feeling the weakness in his grip strength.
“Shit.”
“Yeah,” Verso exhaled. “Hey, do me a favor?”
“Hm. Depends.”
“Right. Just—if Gustave touches me, I think he might absorb more of my lifeforce. I felt my chroma pull toward him earlier when he tried to help me up. So if you see him reaching out, could you bump into him or something?”
“I will tackle him to the ground.”
Verso sighed. “If you must.”
Monoco turned to look at Gustave with absolutely no subtlety, and Verso got the horrible feeling he was assessing the man’s feet.
“Why’d you let her take it?” Monoco asked after a spell. “You’re stronger than her. You could have held on.”
“She wanted her brother back.”
“You’re her brother. That’s why she locked onto your chroma while she was looking for him—”
“Monoco. No. She didn’t want me. I think her emotions surrounding Gustave and Verso must be similar enough that our chroma felt the same to her.”
"So you decided to let her use you. As an intermediary."
"Mm. There wasn't much time for decision making."
“Obviously. Because now, Maelle has two brothers who would happily throw themselves off a cliff for her: great. But what happens to Gustave the next time you die? Does he get resurrected, too? And what happens to you when he gets hurt? For that matter, how are either of you going to survive a single nevron fight in the first place, running on half a tank of chroma?”
“We’ll just have to—” Verso cut himself off, his eyes catching movement through the darkness. Gustave was walking over.
“Hi,” Gustave said rather stiffly, stopping in front of them. “I just wanted to say… well, I wanted to introduce myself properly first, actually. I’m Gustave.”
He held out his non-metal hand.
Verso glanced sideways at Monoco, who seemed too surprised to follow through on his promise to tackle anyone.
Verso couldn’t shake his hand. Not with the meagre remains of his chroma violently straining beneath his skin. He couldn’t even stand up to meet the man at eye level, his strength barely sufficient to hold him upright.
All he could do was suppress a grimace and say, “Verso. Welcome back to the canvas, Gustave.”
Gustave’s fingers curled into his palm before he pulled his hand back for the second time that evening.
“Alright,” he said coolly. “Well, then. Goodnight.”
He turned and left to set up a cot beside Maelle’s.
“Thanks for the help,” Verso tossed at Monoco dryly.
Monoco hung his shaggy head. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Verso exhaled, finally letting the heel of his palm press into the ache at his sternum. He watched through half-shuttered eyelids as Gustave tucked a woolen blanket over Maelle across the clearing, his cloud of light brown hair a halo around his head in the light of the moon. “Everything’s fine.”