Archive of Our Own

Clea startles awake with a gasp.

The world spins in her eyes as she tries to orient herself, trying and failing to remember where she is, and how she ended up passed out on the ground. She has passed out a few times throughout her life, mostly from a lack of sleep and once from a high fever, but never so severely that she couldn’t immediately piece together what had happened to her.

Lying on her back, the ground underneath her is cold and uneven, maybe made out of carved stone from the little she can intuit from its shapes. Above her, swirls of bright colours dance across an ominous, sunless sky.

The sight is familiar to her, but a strange physical sensation distracts her from recalling it. At first Clea thinks its tenderness from having been unconscious, until she identifies it as something less like a pain and more like nervous excitement, her fingers twitching as if craving to be occupied with something, anything.

Clea takes a deep breath and sits up, ready to inspect herself for any injuries. Her body moves without any effort, a very promising sign that could at the very least rule out the possibility of a physical altercation having taken place.

As she moves her hand over to feel her forehead, Clea immediately understands she’s dealing with something far worse than wounds or even broken bones.

Her hand is not her hand.

Clea stares in cold horror at her bare forearm, skin gray like ash and fingers dark as coal. The surface of her skin is covered in what she first assumes to be scars like Alicia’s, until a closer inspection proves them to be paint – dried and uneven, yet somehow their application feels almost purposeful.

She tries to scrape off the paint but it won’t come off, and Clea has no intentions of injuring herself on purpose. Panic begins to swell in her chest as she hastily looks at her other hand and confirms the same ghastly appearance, her bare feet and what she can see of her chest similarly affected.

This body isn’t hers.

Despite how similar all its proportions are, there is an inherent wrongness to this body that Clea cannot recognize as her own. Her mind flashes back to the day of the fire, to the disquieting aftermath where everything the fire touched was rendered to gray monochrome. To keep moving on Clea has learned to quiet her mind when the memories of the fire surface, but this time it takes real effort to push aside.

When her hands begin to tremble, she sincerely cannot tell if it’s because of the memories of the past, or the horrors of the immediate present.

Clea continues her desperate inspection, trying to understand what’s wrong with her. Hands still shaking she runs her fingers through her hair, no different to touch, but each strand entirely void of colour. She feels for her face and recognizes all its familiar angles, but by then her mind has finally caught up on what she should have known from the start — after all, she can always recognize her own brushwork.

Somehow, against all common sense, she has become that other Clea — a painted abomination created by Aline; yet another mistake of hers that Clea had been forced to fix.

This knowledge does little to the repulsion Clea feels at the very thought of being trapped inside something so much lesser than her. A part of her wants to hurt herself, to peel off her skin until she sees whether this painted body bleeds blood or ink, but she has no time to feel sorry for herself.

How could this have happened to her? Did she enter a Canvas carelessly like her sister and got painted over by Aline’s chroma?

No, out of question. She wouldn’t make a mistake like that.

However, she must have done something wrong to end up in a situation like this.

Clea doesn’t like it, this gnawing feeling of confusion and helplessness. She needs to do something — anything — to ground herself; remind herself of the control she has of herself, if not of her situation.

She stands up on shaky legs and tries to summon chroma, but it doesn’t yield to her like it normally would. Instead it feels heavy against her hand, as if she was trying to swim against a strong current.

Clea is no longer recognized as a Paintress within this Canvas. Instead she has been chained to the restrictions of her painted counterpart, still powerful, but limited to very specific types of chroma use and little more. Clea herself has never felt this powerless inside a Canvas before, not even as a child.

Clea tries to voice her frustration, to take control of the silence by replacing it with her own voice, but she hears nothing.

She tries again, but all that comes out is at best a soft whimper, quieter even than Alicia’s raspy attempts at conversation.

“A---a...ah.”

She brings her hand over to her throat and tries again, this time more forceful.

“.... h..hnhh....”

What comes out is closer to a moan than anything resembling intelligent speech.

There is nothing structurally wrong with her throat; she hasn’t sustained any injuries that would prevent her from speaking. Clea feels as if she has completely forgotten how to speak, or something needed for it to happen is missing from her altogether.

The little of her own voice she can hear sounds soft and powerless in her own ears, as if she was too shy to speak, and it bothers her more than she’d want to admit. Clea would much rather die than let anyone hear her sounding like that — quiet, delicate, and weak.

She can’t even scream.

Until now she has managed — for the most part — keep her head cool despite her situation. But there is something about the loss of her voice that finally manages to dig its claws under her skin, and the terror she’s unable to shout out finally erupts inside. Her body begins to tremble against her will, with an intensity she isn’t prepared for. Her breathing becomes uneven, lungs so desperate for air that they leave Clea gasping like a fish on dry land, but every breath makes her lungs feel like they’re on fire. Her head is throbbing with a cold, sharp pain like a prick of several needles against her brain, and the sound of her heartbeat is so loud it threatens drowning out all her thoughts.

Rationally, Clea is aware that her reaction is normal given her circumstances, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. All this acknowledgment does is make her feel stupid, and small, and very afraid.

Worst of all, every second she spends inhabiting this lesser body makes it feel more like hers, and it sickens her.

“Merde! Get a grip of yourself, this isn’t getting us anywhere!” She tries to will herself out of her agitation, but somehow doesn’t feel any more in control of herself than she was before.

Another pitiful whimper then escapes her mouth, as if this painted vessel was purposefully trying to deepen Clea’s indignity.

Clea closes her mouth and grits her teeth enough to make her jaw ache, and shifts to a different approach.

“What is this place, and what can I do here?”

Concentrating on her surroundings immediately distracts Clea from her own discomfort, though her lack of spatial awareness prior to this moment does make it seem like some kind of deep, personal failure.

Clea recognizes this room she’s in as her old workshop inside Verso’s Canvas; a small part of the home she had made for herself when she and Verso were children. She had been so proud of it at the time, because it was bigger than her real home, and certainly larger than anything Verso had built for himself. Clea had her own Canvases with much larger buildings, yes, but those were for practice while Verso’s Canvas was for fun.

Inside this Canvas and within these painted walls, Clea could do and create anything she wanted.

Then it had all been torn apart by the impact of their parents’ stubbornness, her manor sent up in the sky in pieces as if her hard work on it never meant anything. Aline and Renoir didn’t truly care about Verso’s Canvas when they came here, it was merely a stage for their grief, and now it’s all been ruined. All they’re doing here is disrespect Verso’s memory, and disgrace the only Canvas he had ever created.

Her own anger and frustration towards her parents grounds her, a sentiment she has gotten uncomfortably familiar with as of late.

This body may not be hers, but this space certainly is because she made it, and she simply won’t tolerate being scared in her own workshop.

It’s no different from how she refuses to be afraid of her own home in the real world, despite the knowledge the fire started from inside

Now, with the edge anger has given her, Clea gets to thinking again. The sooner she figures out what happened to her and how to leave this place, the faster she gets to return to her duties.

The last thing she remembers before awakening here is of all the paperwork she has to do, to keep the illusion of normalcy within the Dessendre family by doing her parents’ work in their absence. But this information helps her little, so Clea begins moving forward.

Her steps are confident and she moves at ease. For all its faults, this painted body is still strong, perhaps the closest thing to a Paintress something painted to life can achieve — still a downgrade, but it could be worse. At least she still remembers who she is.

Clea keeps looking around, trying to further attune to her surroundings.

Something about this place feels different, as if she wasn’t inside a Canvas but somewhere else altogether. There is an almost dream-like quality to this space, as if the corners of her vision are always blurry, and things only gain proper detail when she focuses her eyes on them.

The experience is vivid, but not quite as vivid as Canvases feel to her.

Then she understands.

This is a dream, she is asleep.

The realization comes to Clea as a relief. None of this is real, and all she has to do to escape this uncomfortable situation is to wake up. She feels stupid for not considering the option sooner, but at least she had her solution now — she could leave.

Clea pinches herself.

Nothing happens.

She pinches herself so hard that it hurts and leaves a visible mark, but still she remains within the dream.

Then she tries to roll her eyes, in that specific way that sometimes wakes her up from nightmares, but it results in nothing other than making her eyes sting uncomfortably.

Clea looks around, sees the edge of the atelier floor and the chasm below, and decides killing herself is just as valid a way to awaken as any.

When she reaches the edge and tries to jump, an invisible wall prevents her from moving forward. She tries again, and again, and again, but the wall remains steady.

Clea had nearly forgotten all the ways in which she had made the escape of her painted self impossible. It’s unfortunate that her dream adheres to her original vision so vividly — and if that’s the case, injuring herself isn’t going to help either, because Aline had painted that other Clea immortal. Clea had further cursed her with an abundance of life, to create more of her monsters and make her even harder to injure.

Well, Clea can wait.

She can just sit down and wait for the inevitable awakening from this dream, so that is precisely what she does.

With a quiet sigh she holds the hem of her skirt and sits down, placing the fabric over her feet to cover them up as carefully as she can. Like a wound that refuses to heal, the wrongness of who – what – she is pervasively draws Clea’s attention back to itself, and at first she doesn’t want to look at herself. Then her own avoidance begins to annoy her, so she moves up the skirt hem all the way up to her knees just to see even more of herself.

Clea tries to regard her exterior as something separate from her, no different from other works of art she has produced, and for a moment it works. It’s easy enough to evaluate the raw skill required to paint over someone else’s creation, and in this regard Clea is quite satisfied given the circumstances.

Painting over Aline’s creation wasn’t what Clea had expected when she had entered the Canvas to help Renoir, so when she saw her double, there was no planned design in mind for her repaint. Everything was done on the spot, improvised; led by how she had been feeling in the moment, and Clea hadn’t been particularly happy. Still, she had painted her double like she painted all her other monsters; lethal, efficient, and visually pleasing to her own eye.

It’s just that the paint was supposed to be on her double, not on Clea herself. Even in her own dream. Clea feels unnerved by theblurring boundaries between the art and the artist.

Clea closes her eyes and breathes deep.

It’s taking awfully long for her to wake up. Few things are as intolerable for Clea as sitting still and doing nothing, and she doesn’t like the direction her idleness in this space takes her thoughts. She tries to think of something to kill her time with, and then remembers the doors to her workshop. Clea knows they’re sealed tight with no way out from the inside, but walking there and inspecting them gives her something to do.

It doesn’t take her long to reach the entrance, so excessively massive in size that they almost get a smile out of her — Clea can’t fault her child self for a lack of ambition.

She places her hands against the cool metal of the doors and pushes with all her might.

As expected, the doors won’t budge.

She summons chroma and tries to will the doors open, but the chroma doesn’t obey her the way she wants to. Clea knew that would happen, but wanted to try her luck regardless. Then she summons powerful spectral monsters to do the work for her, but the pounding of their claws and weapons against the metal is of no use either — there is not a scratch on the doors.

Nothing is working, and Clea can’t do anything.

She can’t use her powers the way she’s used to, she can’t control the dream, and everything she can do as this painted version of herself is utterly useless. She can’t even make herself wake up.

Clea draws from her frustration to overpower her growing sense of fear again. She lets out a pathetic little whine when she tries to scream, and then hits the door with her fists.

It hurts, but not enough to mean much.

“There you are,” a sudden, terrifyingly familiar voice calls out to her from a distance. “I was beginning to wonder where you had gone.”

Clea recognises her own voice, and an unpleasant shiver travels through her. It reminds her of the time she first encountered her painted copy, how she had tried to speak and even reason with her — and then Clea made her silent, because she grew tired of the double’s screams.

“Come along now, your work awaits.”

Her tone is carefree, but the double clearly has no patience for any disobedience. Clea feels the yank of invisible strings around her limbs, and suddenly her body moves on its own. Against her will she turns round, forced to walk back to the middle of the workshop where the other Clea now stands.

She is the perfect replica of her real self,Clea as she’s meant to be; auburn hair, grey eyes and skin untouched by the colour of ash. The other Clea appears confident and relaxed, arms crossed, and an unnerving smile playing on her lips. Clea sees this smile and knows what it means, because she is self aware enough to recognise her own delight in exerting her power over others.

“I’m not --”

Clea tries to speak, to explain that she’s not the painted Clea her double is looking for, but the words die in her throat. All that comes out is that pitiful whimper again, and the sound of it makes the other Clea mockingly roll her eyes and then smile dismissively.

“How cute.”

She wants to smash the other Clea’s face in with one of the rocks among the debris of the workshop, but her body now refuses all independent action.

If she is now her painted self, it means that her obedience towards this other Clea is absolute, and ordinary resistance is futile. She has to think of something else — or, even better, wake up.

“Are we done, or is there still something you’d like to add?”

Clea stands in front of this strange dream version of herself and lowers her gaze.

“Good. Now, start painting.”

And so she paints, because she must.

Her hands move and control the flow of chroma even if she herself consciously stops moving them, but she’s not denied autonomous action as long as it pertains to painting. It’s hardly a decision for Clea to take control of the creative process, even though she has been reduced to this thing that can never measure up against the real her, and who is only marginally good enough to exist as one of her monsters.

It feels demeaning to be made to paint like this, stripped of her powers, autonomy, voice and even of her own face; little of her real self remains in her current state. Clea isn’t even allowed to create anything new. Instead she’s made to paint replicas of her already made creations.

Of course, this isn’t the first time she must create art for its utility, rather than for the joy of art itself. Everything she has done inside Verso’s Canvas has been unpleasant, and she laments the way she must employ her own creations when they could be so much more than their sole duty. But Clea does it for what still remains of her family, and for them she is willing to discard her own enjoyment for painting. If she imagines what she does is for their sake, perhaps it will be easier to endure.

“Not good enough,” the other Clea suddenly interrupts her, just as she’s finishing her Portier. “Start over.”

There is authority in her voice, in the way it echoes in the atelier and fills the silence, and Clea notices its power only now when she has lost hers.

She will not disgrace herself any further by trying to contest that sound with her own pathetic wails, as much as it goes against her very nature to decline a challenge.

Clea starts over, but doesn’t understand what she’s doing wrong. This is her dream and these are her creations, yet this made-up version of herself has the audacity to suggest Clea’s work is not good enough? She, who literally created these beings from scratch, whose work is literally the golden standard her painted double was painted to perfectly replicate?

“I thought I painted you better,” her double speaks and shakes her head, impatience in her voice. “These designs aren’t even that difficult to replicate. I don’t understand how you can get them wrong.”

Clea wants to scream. She wants to kill that other Clea, or maybe herself — whichever option puts the quickest end to this torture and allows her to wake up.

When she feels her lower lip quiver, only the other Clea’s power over her is stopping her from killing them both.

“What, are you going to cry?” the double asks, nearly laughing. Then she pauses, and with a disdain in her adds: “Oh, is this how Aline perceives me? Does she think of me so fragile that a few harsh words are what it takes to break me?”

Clea has to do something with this discomfort and frustration and rage inside her, so she continues to work. She paints with harsh and forceful strokes, wills one Braseleur after another into existence to house her anger.

One, two, six, ten, fifteen.

Her repurposed wrath takes her far, but to the other Clea it’s still not enough.

“Too slow, you need to be faster. You don’t have to linger on every finished work like it was your masterpiece, because none of them are. Just finish it, be done with it, and move on.”

What this other Clea now demands is among the reasons why she had made her painted self to create monsters in her stead. Beyond the simple convenience of it all, this way she didn’t need to be the one turning her work into soulless mass productions; thousands upon thousands of replicas of the same designs repeated over and over. This isn’t what she has spent her entire life practicing for. She doesn’t want to do this.

But the dream still hasn’t ended, and her warden isn’t letting her stop creating, so Clea meets the challenge. She stops thinking about the process; the feelings, thoughts and intentions she’d otherwise honour her work with. Clea knows she’s good — no, the best — at what she’s painting, and she can sacrifice this aspect of her art if it means she’ll attain her goals. It sickens her, but her determination triumphs over her disgust.

The other Clea watches quietly as she paints.

One design after another, Clea feels her fingers breaking and bleeding gold over her monsters, as if nourishing them with her own blood. It hurts but only momentarily, the chroma flowing through her always repairing damage but not cleaning the mess her injuries make. Her hands, her clothes, her face, even her feet are smeared in this dark hue of gold.

“No, no, you’re doing it wrong again. These are nothing but husks, they lack character. Start over.”

At least sixty different Nevrons, all gone in an instant, and still Clea doesn’t understand what she’s doing wrong. Does the other Clea not understand that perfection will never be achieved by making compromises? Clea is doing her best, genuinely her best, and still it’s never enough.

... Is this what she sounds like?

The chroma released from the erased creations returns to Clea as a surge of energy, powerful enough to almost knock her over. But while this body is not burdened with prolonged pain or exhaustion, the same cannot be said for her mind. There is only so much art you can create; even as a Paintress she would have her limits. She’s beginning to feel worn down.

But it’s not like she is new to exhaustion either. If anything, Clea has learned exhaustion is little more than a warning, something you can still ignore if need be. It’s a dull ache, not a sharp pain, and drowns under more pressing matters if you let it. And right now she has to continue painting, so she ignores the warning signs and presses on. Ever since her brother’s death, all this has become part of her life.

Clea paints.

She paints, and she bleeds, and heals and bleeds again, and there is no end to this nightmare. No matter how hard she tries she can’t wake up, and the other Clea is driving her mad staring at her that exact same way Aline once used to do. But she has to endure, because she always does, because despite this body she’s in she knows who she is and the real Clea Dessendre wouldn’t crumble under any weight.

Finally the other Clea moves, and now she stands quietly right behind her back. It annoys Clea, but she doesn’t allow it to make her hand quiver as she paints. She also has no desire to please this other Clea, she isn’t creating to gain any approval from her, but under such strict supervision it’s only natural to want to try even harder.

And Clea is still a little upset at having her earlier work unfairly erased, so she has to pick up the pace to make up for her losses. Even if she thinks of her work as flawless, there must be a reason why her Mistress would make it all undone regardless.

Wait, what is she thinking?

Clea catches her own sense of self drifting, startled by how easily it can happen, and disturbed by how comfortably her mind could slip to inhabit the role of her own creation.

And she still hasn’t even caught up with the work she had previously lost. She is thinking too much, her thoughts are too loud to focus on painting, and once more Clea feels like who she is becomes buried under a single-minded sense of duty.

“Not so nice being on the receiving end of this treatment, now is it?” the other Clea leans closer and whispers into her ear.

Clea feels her blood run cold. Until now her double has always addressed the painted Clea, the copy, but now she speaks directly to her.

Dreams aren’t supposed to be this self-aware of their own nature.

“Don’t look so surprised. This is your dream, of course I know who you are.”

Clea still can’t speak. She is no longer forced to paint, but she isn’t permitted to move from where she stands either. She is still stuck in this body and trapped in this nightmare, and all she can do is watch and listen.

“So, how does it feel?” the nightmare Clea asks as if she was making a casual conversation. “Are you enjoying the new and improved version of yourself?”

This is nonsense. They both know this is a downgrade, and if the other Clea is trying to make her feel bad about what she did to a painting, it’s not working. Her painted copy is not a real person, barely a convincing imitation of her, and Aline shouldn’t have painted her without Clea’s consent. She has every right to do what she pleases with this fictional double.

“Well, I think you look very lovely,” the other Clea responds and places her finger under Clea’s chin. She lifts her head lightly, then pretends to measure her with her gaze like Clea herself was a work of art — and, in a way, she was.

“With a face like this, I’m sure people would finally leave you alone. Isn’t that what you have always wanted?”

Clea feels unusually vulnerable baring her neck so openly to this nightmare version of herself, but there is nothing she can do to prevent it from happening.

“But no,” the other continues and lets go of Clea, “I’m not here to change your mind about Aline’s creation — in fact, I agree with you, she is not real the way you are.”

Her eyes move to meet Clea’s, and Clea can’t look away even when it hurts her to see her own face stolen and staring back at her.

“But did you ever consider what these paintings mean to his Canvas, or to the piece of his soul that still continues painting?”

This nightmare creation has no right to bring Verso into this.

Clea would narrow her eyes if she could, but the other Clea has fixed her expression into a vacant stare.

Besides, Verso wouldn’t have wanted their parents tearing his Canvas apart. Clea is honouring him by trying to erase what Aline had painted, and what she did to her double was merely a matter of convenience. The faster this is all over, the more merciful it is for Verso’s Canvas, and to what yet remains of his soul.

“You have made your mirror suffer.”

Again, she is not a real person with feelings.

“She is real to him. When you painted that Canvas together he always told you so, how they’re all real to him; how they all have a soul just like you do.”

Yes, because he was a child. Clea is sure that as an adult, Verso had grown past that kind of dangerous sentimentality.

“But the soul inside his Canvas is that of a child.”

Well, Clea had done her fair share of tormenting her brother inside and outside of his Canvas, especially when they were children. The remaining fragment of his soul probably finds it funny seeing a representation of Clea have her monsters finally turn against her, and then becoming one of them — it’s all quite poetic, really.

“Your brother loved you,” the other Clea answers solemnly and runs her fingers through Clea’s white hair, her eyes serious but her touch unexpectedly gentle.

“What joy would it bring him to watch someone looking like his sister being turned into... this?”

Clea averts her gaze.

She would rather continue painting than be subjected to the moral judgement of her subconscious mind.

“Well, in that case, I’ll let you continue. Have fun.”

And then the other Clea vanishes.

Clea stares at the empty spot where the other Clea had just been standing, and then turns around to see if she really is gone.

The mere act of turning away from her unfinished work suddenly becomes a struggle, and it takes all of her willpower to simply look around and confirm she’s all alone.

Then she’s back to painting again.

The way she lamented the wrongness of her body feels childish now when she no longer has any control over it. Compared to her painted double, everything Clea has been forced to give up in her pursuit of art has been her own decision. For Clea there is a goal she wants to achieve by creating her tools of destruction; for her double there is none. All that Clea is doing is dooming her family into further despair, what could have been their greatest asset turned into one of the real Clea’s pawns.

As a work of art Clea finds it beautiful in its morbid irony.

.. But perhaps Verso would think otherwise.

She continues painting.

Clea feels like she has failed at observing art. For all the love and care and effort she has put into her creations, to ensure that they would fit the world she and Verso had created, she didn’t consider the broader meanings of the Canvas. It was her brother’s only Canvas yet still a collaboration, and perhaps that should have told her something about the sentiment at the center of its conception.

She keeps painting.

The painted copy of her is not real, her despair no different from the despair of any other fictional character — the illusion of life is simply more convincing. Clea is very proud of her work on the double’s overpaint, too, as well as the message it sends to Aline. Still, she may have gotten a little carried away with that project.

She paints and watches ink trail down her arms in streams of shimmering gold.

Only now she notices how heavily covered in her own ink she is. The artistic symbolism behind making the paint on her double doesn’t feel quite as clever when she’s the one bleeding and feeling pain, even if only for a moment.

Clea wants to stop painting, but the dream won’t let her stop.

She continues painting.

Verso was always the softer of the two; always the first to cry and feel the pain of others as if his own. It was stupid, Clea had never understood this aspect of him that made him so vulnerable to human malice, but that’s just how he was. Even as an adult, behind all those masks that he had learned to put on to keep himself safe, Verso still retained that foolish, soft, kind heart. And he always wanted light to triumph over darkness.

That was the kind of world he painted together with her.

Clea stops painting.

The Canvas will be erased. She can’t afford to let go of the painted copy, not with the way her presence hastens the conclusion of that stupid conflict between her parents. But the Canvas does deserve some sort of sendoff, maybe. Some kind of conclusion that Verso would have approved of, given these unfortunate circumstances.

She leans against the unfinished figure of a Stalact, head resting over one arm while holding out the other. It may not be hers, but at least she can move it freely again, and for now that is enough. It isn’t even that different from her own hands, anyway.

Clea lets out a soundless sigh.

Real or not, that painted Clea probably means something to that child soul still painting while the real Verso is gone forever. She is a violation of ethics, Aline ignored Clea’s consent when creating her and for this she hates them both, but technically none of this is the painted Clea’s fault. And while Clea finds what she did to her amusing, in her heart she knows Verso would find it at least a little tasteless.

Alicia will likely never find the painted Clea, but if she does, perhaps she can think of something for her. It might be a fun challenge, it’s not like her atelier is impossible to access. And if not, maybe there is something Clea can do to the painted double that gives Verso’s Canvas some sense of cathar--

Her thoughts are interrupted by a sudden heavy impact that knocks her over.

A pained grunt escapes her mouth as she falls on the ground, and right then she sees her assailant — a giant paintbrush, dripping with white paint.

Clea doesn’t understand what is happening, but she also doesn’t want to be painted over. She tries to stand up but her limbs feel like lead, and when the brush presses its tip against her face and begins to paint over her, Clea can’t even scream.

-----------

She is awake.

The world spins in her eyes as she tries to orient herself, and for the first time in her life she’s grateful to find herself lying on the floor of their living room.

What Clea doesn’t appreciate, however, is the beast looming over her and licking her face with its wet tongue.

“Monoco, get off...” she groans and pushes the dog off of her.

She can speak again.

Clea is so relieved of this regained ability for speech that she doesn’t even care her face is covered in sticky dog saliva, at least not until it starts to sting against her skin. In the absence of anything better she wipes it all off on her sleeve, and for a fleeting moment the lack of grey on her forearms feels almost strange.

She sits up and looks around, all the while trying to push an enthusiastic dog from climbing on her lap. Clea deems she must have fallen asleep on the sofa, and then at some point rolled off and down onto the floor. How she didn’t wake up from the impact of falling is anyone’s guess.

The sense of helplessness from her nightmare still lingers; a memory of something that never truly happened, but affected her all the same. One part of Clea is embarrassed by how deeply she is allowing a mere dream to get under her skin, the other simply relieved it’s finally over.

For a while Clea relishes in her recovered freedom by speaking nonsense to Monoco, who doesn’t particularly care what she says unless it’s a word he recognizes — like food. Still, it feels good to speak.

Somewhere further away the clock chimes exactly four times.

Finally she gets up and feels the dull ache of weeks of relentless work and poorly slept nights like a heavy weight on her shoulders. She is glad to be awake, glad to inhabit her own real body, but she hadn’t even realized how badly it hurts all over. All of this has been her own decision — the inevitable price for her choice to protect her family — but it does feel jarring after having imagined a body that never grows tired, and feels pain only momentarily.

Clea thinks of that painted imitation of herself again.

For the first time the acknowledgment of her existence doesn’t explicitly anger or disgust Clea, though sympathy would be too generous a word to describe her feelings.

No, this isn’t about her — it’s about Verso, and what he would have wanted. The last thing Clea wants is the spirit of her dead brother haunting her as some vague sense of guilty consciousness for the rest of her life.

So, fine. If Alicia and her painted... friends can’t do anything to change her circumstances, perhaps Clea will. For all her nonsense, the dream version of her was right about one thing.

Verso wouldn’t have wanted to see anything resembling his sister suffer.