Chapter Text
Verso stumbles offstage to the sound of thunderous applause at what could be called a run.
Her eyes were on him the whole time. He had felt the weight of her gaze like a physical presence. He flees into the wings of the opera house, takes a few turns at random until the flaying agony of his sister’s attention fades into the churning background; sags against a wall, heart hammering, sweat beading on his forehead. She will never let him go. She will never grant him the mercy of oblivion.
He finds himself in the makeup studio. He identifies it by smell rather than sight, his vision blurring and doubling, the dust of cosmetics thick in the air. He gags dry, as much from the cloying perfumes as from the nausea he’d been feeling ever since he stepped out on the stage, under the weight of her eyes. He sinks into a chair and buries his face in his hands and tries very, very hard not to vomit.
The door creaks open. (Did he close it? Did he bother? He must have.) Verso drags his head up in time to see Gustave slip inside and shut the door behind him. He locks it. Verso cannot bring himself to care.
Gustave stares down at him, unreadable.
“What are you doing back here?” Verso manages through a dry mouth. He doesn’t know Gustave, not like he knows Sciel or Lune. Not like he knows Maelle. His head swims.
“I remember,” says Gustave, level as the horizon, face terribly blank. “All of it.”
Verso had wondered. He’d had the thought that maybe he was the only one who had been permitted to keep his memories of the expedition. Everyone else — the brief glimpse of them he was given in the audience — had seemed so happy. Verso had seen Gustave there, arm-in-arm with a woman he doesn’t recognize, and had assumed his sister had removed the burden of memory from them; a clean slate to soak up her miasma of comfort.
But Gustave stares him down with no echo of comfort. He brings up his prosthetic arm and Verso doesn’t flinch — but Gustave holds out a rose. “Sciel asked me to deliver this for her,” he says with no inflection. “She enjoyed the performance.”
“She could have come herself.”
“She’s with Maelle.”
Keeping her occupied goes unsaid. Even Alicia cannot be everywhere at once. Verso takes the rose with a hand that pointedly does not shake.
Gustave’s other hand comes up, and this one holds the gun.
“What have you done,” he hisses.
It’s a masterful piece of craftsmanship, the pistol. Verso recalls thinking as much the first time he saw it. The Expeditioners always had such beautiful tech. None of it helped — but beautiful nonetheless. And wasn’t there a tragic loveliness to it? To creating new ways to dash themselves to pieces upon the rocks of the Dessendre family?
“I asked her not to,” Verso says. The gun does not frighten him. He is not permitted to die. “I begged.”
Gustave’s knuckles are white on the gun. There are Pictos engraved into it — Verso hadn’t noticed them before. The sweet smell of lead hangs heavy in the air between them. “You’ve doomed us all,” he says, “to living like this.”
Verso wants to feel something. Guilt, or fear, or anything. He just feels tired. “I know.”
“Do you know what it’s like?” Gustave’s voice begins to quiver. It’s the first sign of emotion Verso has seen him make since his death on the cliffside. “To be… to be torn from the grave? To be forced to love you, despite all?”
The world was made to love Verso. Not this one — the real one, the one with blood in his veins instead of paint. The one who was loved so desperately that no one can seem to let go of him. “No,” says Verso hoarsely. He has inherited a dead boy’s playground that knows nothing but how to love him, and he will be trapped in it forever. He wants to say all of this to Gustave even though it wouldn’t matter a whit.
Gustave cocks the gun. The click is muted in the perfumed air.
They stare at each other for a long moment. Verso wonders idly if Gustave still has his scars. Alicia took all of Verso’s. Even the ones he wanted to keep.
“Say something,” Gustave demands.
Verso can’t.
In a flash of motion, Gustave’s prosthetic darts out and grabs Verso by the collar, hauling him nose-to-nose with Gustave, and buries the barrel of the gun under his chin. The metal is warm. “Fucking say something!”
Verso doesn’t resist. “She won’t let me die,” he whispers.
Gustave uncocks the gun, raises it, and brings the butt of it down hard on Verso’s skull.
The world bursts in a flash of blinding pain. Verso reels backwards — tries to catch himself on the chair — knocks over everything on the makeup table — but Gustave still has hold of his collar, drags him back upright, pistol whips him again across the face. Verso feels his jaw crack — his mouth fills with blood — he swallows a tooth that begins to grow back almost instantly. He doesn’t make a sound. Pain, he knows. Pain is his second oldest friend.
Gustave releases him just to punch him in the stomach with his prosthetic. The force of it drives the air out of Verso’s lungs in a bloody hrack. He doubles over just as Gustave’s knee comes up to crunch into his face. Verso’s nose breaks.
It goes on for a while like that — carefully placed blows, one after another, in near silence — Verso can see his blood splattered down Gustave’s clothes, in those brief moments when his vision clears — Gustave speaking quietly, his voice shaking with rage, things that Verso can’t hear over the ringing in his ears. It’s only when Gustave seizes him by the hair and slams his skull down into the stained makeup vanity that he catches a string of words —
“What,” Gustave is seething, “does she love you so much for?”
Verso lies there, choking on blood but painfully conscious, letting blood pour from his mouth onto the wood covered in cinnabar and old paint, and wants to say you had more time with her than I did and I’m sorry I let my father kill you and you belong here more than I do and I would flay myself alive for you to take my place and please, please, please kill me and she still loves you more than she loves me and when she looks at you do you feel her eyes like weights around your neck and you were there for her when it mattered and I hate you for it.
He says none of it. Instead, he sucks in a gasp of air and spits a mouthful of blood onto the floor, splattering the fallen rose from Sciel. Blood and roses. Roses and blood.
Gustave drags Verso away from the vanity and casts him down on the floor. Little drifts of spilled makeup puff up around him. Gustave kicks Verso in the ribs — once — twice — a third time on the other side just to switch it up a little. Verso can’t help a pathetic little groan.
Gustave kicks him again, but he seems to be running out of anger, or breath, or both. He shoves Verso onto his back, drops to his knees over his bleeding form, and puts his face inches from Verso’s. The barrel of the gun finds its way between Verso’s ribs.
“You put her in danger,” he spits in Verso’s face. “You put them all in danger. And I — I could have—” He visibly struggles for words for several agonizing seconds.
“We’d all be better off if you were dead,” Gustave finally finishes.
“I know,” says Verso. “Forgive me.”
Gustave’s grip slackens. Not much — just a little — but Verso gently takes hold of the barrel of Gustave’s gun and eases it out of his ribs, guides it up his chest, over his sweat-slick throat, until it rests, warm as a lover’s lips, right between his eyes. “I wish you could do it,” Verso breathes into the space between them. “I really wish you could.”
Gustave surprises him with the trigger pull.
-
The greatest tragedy is that he wakes.
He’s still on the floor in the makeup studio, blood sticky in his hair. It’s not cooled much — he’s been down for five minutes, maybe.
His first worry is that someone will have heard the gunshot — or worse, told Alicia. It would upset her so terribly. Verso tongues at the socket where the tooth came loose, but it’s already grown back like nothing happened. Every bruise is fading and every cracked bone is knitting back together and when he runs a hand over his face he can tell even the gunshot is smoothing over. It won’t leave a scar. She won’t let it. Paint it over with a fresh coat.
Verso sits up, enduring the wave of dizziness. He feels… better. Better than he did in the immediate aftermath of the performance. There is comfort in knowing he can still be hurt. In knowing this world is not perfect, when his sister isn’t looking.
Gustave sits at the vanity, pistol discarded on the wood still tacky with Verso’s blood. There is a deep furrow between his brows. He seems to have made a cursory attempt at wiping Verso’s blood off his face, but there’s nothing to be done for his clothes. He watches Verso right himself with an unreadable expression.
Verso tries to speak. Gags and chokes on something at the back of his throat. He rolls to his hands and knees, gags again, coughs hard twice, and finally spits out something small and hard.
A single lead round plinks to the floor, deformed from impact but in one piece.
Verso draws a shuddering breath and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sorry.” He isn’t sure for what.
Gustave breathes a sharp huff of a laugh. “You’re sorry,” he repeats.
Verso sits back on his heels. His mouth tastes like metal. “I tried to tell you before. I can’t die. She won’t let me.”
“She loves you too much.” Gustave sounds strangled. “Everyone loves you too much.”
Verso doesn’t know what to say to that.
“No one has a choice anymore,” Gustave goes on. “Her word is law, and she loves you. So the rest of us have to follow suit.”
“I’m sorry.”
Gustave, horrifyingly, sniffs. “She didn’t love me that much,” he says thickly. “She didn’t repaint the world for me. Just for you.”
“I’m sorry.” Shoot me again, he doesn’t say. Maybe it’ll take.
“And you don’t even fucking want it.”
Verso thinks of a warped record. “I know. I’m sorry.”
Gustave swipes at his eyes.
There is a pounding at the door. It jars both of them onto their feet — Gustave snatches his gun from the ruined table — Verso lunges for the door to brace it shut, forgetting for a moment that it’s locked.
“OPEN,” roars a voice that sounds a great deal like Monoco.
Verso jerks back from the door. He can’t identify why his first instinct was to keep it shut — maybe he feared Alicia was outside it — she would be terribly upset —
Gustave is gone through the second door at the back of the studio. Verso hadn’t even noticed it. It’s just him, now, alone in a room of lead and cooling blood.
Verso sighs just as someone breaks the door down.