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The third day after Verso fell into a crevasse with an Expeditioner, he started to feel like the walls were closing in. The firelight danced in stark, shifting shadows, and hunger was gnawing at Verso's stomach with razor-sharp teeth.
It had to be worse for her. It would get worse for him, but she—
"You have to eat me."
"What?" Cecile's gaze was blurry, weakened. There was only so much that melted ice water could do to keep you alert when you were starving.
"You have to eat me." Verso fumbled at his belt for the knife. "It's fine. I can't die, you can. Your team'll be down in a few days and you'll still be alive."
She recoiled from him, bodily visible even beneath the layers he'd piled onto her to help her stay warm. "I can't do that." Her voice shook. "I don't— I don't want that."
Verso watched her for a moment. He knew Cecile, as best as he could know someone he'd spent no more than a few scarce weeks with. She had a fire in her; she wanted to live. Unlike half her Expedition, she really wanted to take a crack at the Paintress. She wanted to go home.
She was tired, that was all. She flinched from the idea that she'd have to do something so ugly. Maybe she thought Verso wanted her to refuse.
"That's okay." He smiled at her, and he felt ill. "We all do things we don't want to sometimes." He did it every day.
Thigh was best. He'd be cold without his trousers, but he could layer some of their makeshift blankets on top. Getting fabric out of a wound was shit and this was better. This had to be better.
Verso stuck the knife in the fire, watching as the metal heated. A burn was better too, better than bleeding onto the snow. Better again than accidentally hitting an artery with the wound uncauterised.
"You're out of your mind." Cecile said it like she was seeing it for the first time.
"Way ahead of you on that one." Verso tried for a grin. His lips felt dry and cracked, even though water was the only thing they had enough of down here.
The thing was that Cecile was right. He was out of his mind. He was down here fretting over a single, short life when the world wasn't real. He was chasing the end of all things. Any semblance of normality had long since left him and would never return.
(That, and hunger made him scattered. Fear for Cecile's life left his lungs heaving for air he couldn't quite get enough of, and reason fled into the black spots in his vision. It was like he was wearing blinders, like— like horses, which was— merde. Horses didn't exist inside the Canvas.)
When the knife looked like it might be hot enough, Verso didn't bother to test it. No need to cause any more pain than the real thing. He stared at it for a few moments, then realised the air would cool it too much. Propped it back up into the flames as he shuffled out of his trousers. Ignored the way Cecile averted her eyes.
He stared at the knife for a moment more, then unwound the Expedition armband wrapped around his uniform, wadding it up to put in his mouth. Wouldn't do to scream, or crack a tooth, or—
Verso grabbed the knife from the fire, lined it up against the meat of his thigh, and made the first cut.
The feeling was nothing, and then it was burning. The smell came first, maybe, or the sizzling sound. Then the gagging noise, but that wasn't him. He didn't gag at burning flesh; he'd smelled it too many times before.
There was fabric in his mouth. He couldn't tell her to keep her stomach acid where it belonged. He ignored it all and made a second cut; he had to act before his body healed itself. Third cut, fourth. Squinting through the horror, the burning of pain-wrong-fuck-this in his chest that screamed at him to stop.
His vision swam when he used the point of the knife to scoop the chunk of flesh from his thigh. Fuck.
The noise, too, when it hit the ground. Limp, light, nothing like— okay, Verso needed to stop thinking about the sound of severed limbs. He needed to stay in the present, or he was going to lose what little of his mind he had left.
He had to keep Cecile alive. That was the only thing that mattered now.
Verso dug into the bag next to him for a length of bandage. The chunk of his leg taunted him from the ground, dancing at the edge of his vision as he wrapped the bandage tight around his thigh. That burned, too, but it would help. He didn't need to dress his wounds, but it was— it felt like a piece of normality. He really needed something that made sense right now.
Cecile kept her gaze away from him. He was glad for that.
Verso wiped the blood off the dagger. Took a shallow inhale through his mouth. Exhaled. Inhaled. Watched the shadows of the fire dance against the crevasse's wall. Exhaled.
He stuck the dagger inside the lump of fat and meat that still remembered it was meant to be part of his body (fuck, he always hated his own special brand of magic at least a little bit, but it was worst right now), shoved it in the fire, and tried not to scream.
It sizzled. Merde, it smelled. Perhaps the only mercy was that this whole thing made him so sick to his stomach that it didn't make him hungry for literally a strip of his own flesh.
Everything hurt. His mind rebelled from every second of this, warning Verso that it would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his forsaken fucking endless life. And there was the other small mercy: Cecile didn't even have as long to live with it as he did. Wasn't that a twisted miracle?
Verso tried not to look at his leg kebab for too long; just checked on it enough to work out when it was probably— cooked. Was it even safe to eat? Hell if he knew. Hell if he cared. It was the only thing he had left to try.
His stomach turning over itself, he fetched a fork from his pack (it hurt to move. Turned out his thigh didn't like having a chunk taken out of it) and tried to pull the meat (the meat. Not his leg, the meat. The meat) apart. It tore like anything else would. Just meat. Cooking it had killed all the nerves, too, so he didn't feel it anymore.
It was fine. All of this was fucking fine. It was a smart idea all along. Cecile was going to live. Cecile was going to eat.
He pushed it into her hands, partially wrapped so she wouldn't add burns to the problem that could easily become frostbite before long. She retched.
"Please," he said. She looked up, but she wouldn't meet his eyes. "Cecile. You'll die."
"So we should be this instead?" she asked. She took the wrapped skewer in her hands. "This is— this is monstrous, Verso."
"I know." It wasn't the worst thing an Expeditioner had done to him. It wasn't the worst thing he'd done to an Expeditioner. Funny, all the ugliness that could exist in a world that wasn't even fucking real.
"You just—" Cecile shook her head. She was watching the meat in her hands warily. "Don't look?"
"That can be arranged." Didn't stop him hearing the noises. She ate it very slowly, gagging half the while. He heard her swallow it, though. Piece by piece. Hard not to hear.
She was still weak from hunger when she was done, and Verso was still weak from the pain. Nevertheless, he shuffled across their makeshift camp to wipe tears from her eyes.
"They'll freeze," he warned, trying to make it sound like a joke. "You'll thank me later."
She just looked at him. They both knew she wouldn't.
Verso did it again, the next day. Sliced a section from his left thigh instead of chunking it and lost a mouthful of bile when he skinned the section so Cecile wouldn't have to eat his leg hair. There was blood in the vomit, but probably just because he'd bit the inside of his mouth too hard in his efforts not to shout in pain.
He did it again. The first wound had healed, and his hands shook from the hunger-exhaustion. He'd starved before — of course he had, especially in the early days — but it was worse than he remembered.
Another day. Cecile had stopped trying to refuse, but she was dead behind the eyes. Every day they lost down here was a day the Expedition made no progress, and they knew it. If the team really were looking for her, they weren't pursuing the Paintress. Verso wished it had only been him down here; he, at least, could make near-suicidal attempts to scale the crevasse walls.
Once more. Without food and with his body trying too hard to heal him, he was losing weight fast. He wasn't going to be able to do this for much longer.
Everything blurred, after that. The world got like this when he was dying, sometimes, warning him that he was on the verge of death and alive but not all the way there. It wasn't helpful for keeping Cecile alive. Verso considered stabbing himself right through the chest, if only to force his mind to make a decision and give him a bit of fucking clarity.
He felt filthy. Their little cave was coated in a hazy mist of blood and roasting fat. Cecile watched him like an animal, but he couldn't string the thoughts in the right order to work out if she was the one who felt like an animal, or if it was him who was the beast.
Verso was in the middle of checking his wounds (his thighs were a mess of lumpy scars. He wanted them all gone once this was over) to decide where to take Cecile's next meal from when the crackling echo of climbing ledges being fixed into the walls began. Heart in his throat, he stashed the knife and wrapped everything back up and shuffled back into his trousers — dark enough that they didn't show the bloodstains, thank fuck — just in time for a worried, friendly voice to cut through.
"Cecile?" She practically jolted upright. "Verso?"
Verso caught her eyes. He had no idea if an understanding passed between them or not.
"We're down here!" he called. "About halfway down, tucked in the ice."
Cheers; laughter. There was rope within half an hour, smiling faces, slaps on the back. Verso's face stretched with it, ached with the weight of reflecting their happiness. Cecile, for her part, seemed more alive than she had been for the past week.
He passed out on the way back to the camp; fell face first in the snow, the way Corin told it. The way the medic told it, Verso's heart had already stopped when he was brought in.
"You look dreadful," she said, brushing hair away from his face. Someone had cleaned him while he slept, but he still felt greasy.
"Feel it," he agreed.
"You starved down there?" she asked. "Cecile wouldn't say."
No, Verso imagined she wouldn't. "Gave Cecile what I had."
She regarded him with searching eyes. It wasn't until a few days later, when Verso had the strength to string more than a couple of thoughts together and do pretty much anything for himself, that he realised someone had re-dressed his leg wounds between when he died and woke up again.
A couple people avoided him, after that. Cecile was the worst of it, but he didn't apologise and she didn't ask for one. That was fine. She lived.
They all died anyway, within the next month — courtesy of some arsehole who slept through their watch and couldn't alert them to the approaching Nevron. Verso woke face down in a pool of his own blood in the late afternoon, too late to change a damn thing.
Verso spat the rest of the blood from his mouth and pushed himself to his feet to see what he could reasonably scavenge. Half the camp, Cecile included, had died right there on their sleeping rolls.
No one could say he hadn't tried this time.