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She sits beside the grave and traces the letters etched into the stone. The sentiment of those who never quite knew what they meant to say. The sobs had stopped days ago. Her throat felt it still, tight and hoarse and scraped thin.
The flowers were fresh. She’d gotten them from the market. His favorites. He'd always loved roses.
The world had not stopped. That was the thing. The sun still rose and the days still turned and she still moved through them. Grief became something she moved around, slowly and then more easily, until one day you realise you have not thought of him for an hour and you feel guilty for it, and then you think of him again, and the guilt softens into gratitude for the times you did have.
She had grieved him once when he was taken from her. She had grieved him again in a world made of paint and longing. She had come back from it carrying his canvas, and she had brought it somewhere no Dessendre would ever find it. Somewhere quiet and safe where no one would bother it, where no one would enter it again. She couldn’t bring herself to destroy it. It was all that remained of the world he’d created and his family had warped. A memory. A promise that he would not be forgotten, that his legacy would be safe in at least one pair of hands despite the desire to repaint what was lost and reform it, but that would make her no better than them. She couldn’t do that to him, no matter how much it pained her, she would not fall to the same desires and negligence for his wishes.
She pulled at the petals one by one until nothing remained but the stem. Her fingers opened. The wind took them, red scattering across the grey until there was nothing left to hold.
Until next life.
Each step into the painted world felt heavier than the last, as though the canvas itself could sense what she had come to do and wanted her to reconsider.
She had no words, but her mind would not quiet. She wanted it to be real. She wanted him to be real, and when she felt the warmth of his presence at the back of her mind, familiar as a song half-remembered, she could almost pretend.
Then she opened her eyes, and grief sharpened itself in her heart. Alicia had been sent back to the world beyond the canvas. She had cried, she’d begged but ultimately this was the right choice, or so she kept telling herself.
Then it was just them. He was there. Standing the way Verso stood, occupying space the way Verso had, and the sight of him split something open in her chest that she thought she had already finished breaking.
He looked at her with Verso's eyes but they were wrong. They were the same icy blue like that of Monoco Station, of the Frozen Heart but they were tormented. Her Verso had laughed easily. He had worn his heart close to the surface. These eyes held a sorrow ground over years, painted onto him by hands that had loved him and in loving him had asked too much. He had been shaped by grief that was never meant to be his, and it showed in the set of his shoulders, in the way he held himself. She felt sorry for him before he said a single word.
She crossed the distance between them and raised her fingers to his cheek. The scruff of him pressed into her palm and she stilled completely, terrified of what the touch meant, terrified of what it didn't. She did not have what he deserved. Peace was not something she could give with her presence alone, no matter how much she wanted to.
She came. The thought moved through him slowly, like light through water. Her face belonged in his family and had haunted him but the version he knew had been taken from him. He didn’t know her, this her, the real her. He knew the weight of her and the warmth of her and the sound of her voice in a room full of other voices. He knew all of it and none of it was his. It belonged to someone else, someone who had held her and was now gone, and all that remained was the memory of a love he had never actually lived, aching in his chest as though it were real.
It felt real. That was the cruelest part. It felt entirely real.
"I'm sorry-" He turned his face from hers, heavy with guilt that had been borrowed from a dead man.
"Don't be." She drew his face gently back to hers. "You've suffered so much. For that, I apologise."
She meant it. Looking at him, she meant it completely, and hated herself a little for the grief underneath, for the part of her that kept searching his face for something that would never be there, that would never be his to offer and never hers to take.
"He loved you." His whispered. How would he express the feelings he knew whatever fragment he was based upon once held for her, still held for her in its semblance.
"He did."
"I'm not-" The sentence dissolved at its edges. He couldn't finish it. She already knew. He could tell by the way she looked at him.
She glanced past him at the boy hunched over the canvas, still painting, still holding the world together one stroke after another. Something in her chest pulled tight.
"I know." Her voice was soft and warm. "I know you're not him. It's alright."
A small mercy, he thought. That she did not need him to explain it. She had arrived already knowing, already carrying the understanding so he did not have to watch her arrive at it in real time. It was also the only thing that made this bearable.
"It's time for him to stop painting." His voice sounded like tears. She pressed her lips together. She had cried enough for several lifetimes.
"It's time for you to rest." Her voice broke on the last word. Some things could not be helped. "It's time for us to put an end to this."
He reached for her face, so tentative, cupping her cheeks as though she were the fragile one. A tear escaped before she could stop it.
"Will she-" He stopped at the crack of his own voice but pressed on. "Will she be fine? Is it the right thing?"
Even now. At the very edge of everything, he was thinking of Aline who had painted him back into existence because the alternative was unthinkable to her. Of the sister he had lost twice over, of Alicia, of Maelle. There was so much pain she would not press into him but she had come here to be honest, and she would be.
"She’s lost her son. She'll never be fine." She met his gaze and held it, those eyes that were his and were not his, the colour she had loved for years and had spent more years trying to stop seeing in her sleep. "Alicia-, Maelle she’ll have to learn to live with her pain. They all will." A breath. "You and I both know this painted world won't solve anything. No matter how much they want to pretend otherwise."
She's right. He had always known it. Somewhere beneath everything Aline had built into him, some truer thing had always known. He was not a solution. He was a wound dressed as a comfort, a fire kept burning past the point of warmth. Verso would have hated it. The real one, the one whose memories he wore, the one who had loved this woman and loved his sisters, his mother, his father and would have chosen, if given the choice, to spare them this.
He was not that man but he understood him. Something settled in him. Quiet and final and long overdue.
"Thank you."
He pressed his forehead to hers. She let him. She pressed back, and she let herself sink into the warmth of him, into the shape of everything she had once had, when she felt his tears on her fingertips, she cried. Time moved strangely here. It might have been minutes. It might have been years. Out there it would have been nothing at all, a blink, a breath but she was given this much, and she held it.
When they pulled apart, she offered her hand. His fingers closed around hers. Warm. Solid. Already beginning to feel the way memory does, present and slipping all at once. Together they crossed to where the boy still painted. She did not let go. She held on tighter to force the tremble from her form. He squeezed in return, hanging on as if this would be his last moment. It would be his last moment.
"You need not do this alone," was all she said.
He took a breath, slow and steadying. He was afraid to ask but part of him ached for her, a vague memory, the part of him that wondered if he ever truly felt alive, or if he had only ever existed.
"Will you be alright?" Still hesitant. Still caring, right to the last.
"I'll live on."She had said goodbye once already, in smoke and ruin. She was grateful to have been given this, to be the one offering peace instead of only grief. "It's time for you to rest."
He reached toward the boy.
"It's okay." His voice was steady. She was glad for that. She needed it to be steady. "It's over, Verso."
The final remnants of the soul she had loved took the boy's hand and rose.
One step away from the canvas. Then another. Another. With each one she felt him growing lighter, the warmth of him thinning at the edges, until what she held was less a hand and more the idea of one, until petals brushed where his fingers had been, soft and then gone.
"Until next life," he said.
"Until next life, Verso."
She let go.
She stood in the darkening world and watched them walk until the gommage swallowed them whole. She stayed a moment longer, for him, for the heart she had come to know and love and lose in a different way than the first time but no less completely. Then she closed her eyes.
She let the weight of it take her.
Her breath stilled. The canvas released her, pressed her back into cold marble and noise, into sobbing and sharp words and the desperate endlessness of grief that had no intention of finishing. She curled around herself, silent tears taking her whole.