Chapter Text
Verso had thought himself prepared for this. He had rationalized what needed to be done - for it was a necessity - and he thought he'd made his peace with it. What was one more mark in a ledger already drenched in blood? But here, now, in the aftermath of a violence he is uncomfortably familiar with, he falters.
It had to be done, he tells himself. A lie, a justification. One that he has told so many times before that it has grown smooth and worn. It tastes bitter on his tongue.
It had to be done.
He kneels beside the man's corpse and Verso's eyes travel to his face unbidden. For a brief moment, the face he sees is not that of a man he has only known from a distance. It is not that of a man at all. He knows this face intimately - in life and in death. Hazel eyes are suddenly blue and where there was a mess of brown curls is now blonde hair pooling on the ground. Her eyes are pointed and accusing. Too alive and too dead all at once. The breath is knocked out of him and Verso shudders a gasp.
Julie. He isn't sure if he thinks it or speaks it.
He blinks. Once, twice, and just as suddenly as the vision appeared it is gone. Hazel eyes regard him lifelessly once more. They still pierce directly into his very being. Guilt pools hot and heavy in his stomach becoming a gaping maw that he pretends he can't feel.
He reaches out, ignoring the way his hand shakes, and eases the man's eyes closed as if it's enough to apologize for what he allowed to happen. For what he will allow to happen again. It has to be enough.
It never is.
He travels with the last of Expedition 33 haunted by the ghost of a man he only knows second-hand. He learns that his name was Gustave. He learns that he was a brilliant engineer. He learns that he was kind. He learns that he would've liked the trains and snow and lasting friendships. He learns that he was the brother Verso always wanted to be but never was.
In the quiet grove past the Forgotten Battlefield, the Expedition Zero armband flutters in the wind like an accusing finger pointed directly at him.
When facing down Sirène, he is flanked by twin apparitions that leave him hopelessly adrift.
In the wake of Aline's departure, Verso feels nothing. There is no satisfaction for a goal finally achieved and there is no comfort in knowing his mother is safe at last. He thinks of all the bodies left at his feet to reach this point and feels only emptiness.
At every camp, at every encounter, at every mention of Gustave's name it is another twist of the knife Verso has buried in his own heart. He talks of love and loss with Sciel and speaks about living with grief with Maelle and he resents the fraud he is.
In a space between the very fabric of the Canvas, he meets the empty gaze of a soul pushed too far and feels kinship.
I'm tired too.
He is distracted in his fight with Maelle. His sword is drawn, his words are cutting, but his heart betrays him. Despite everything, despite his agony and despair, he still wants.
He wants -
When he wakes, it is as if from a nightmare.
He comes into awareness too quickly for his liking. Cold cobblestones of Lumière's streets dig into his knees and orange light filters through the shattered buildings. Verso wants to be angry. He wants to rage and let loose a scream he has strangled in his chest for a century, but the wildfire of his fury is reduced to a smolder when he looks up and sees Maelle.
She is still covered in dirt and grime from battles neither of them truly wanted to fight. Her eyes, red-rimmed and puffy, fill with tears when they meet his. Her usual confidence is all but evaporated, and not for the first time Verso is reminded of just how young she is.
Maelle descends upon him, nearly tackling him to the ground. She holds him too tightly, her thin shoulders shaking with sobs. She spits out apology after apology. They are broken things stunted with harsh breaths, but they are more honest than Verso has ever been. He hesitates for a moment, his arms held aloft around Maelle's frame. He glances back up to where Lune, Sciel, and Monoco stand.
There is a pinch between Lune's brows and a cold wariness in her gaze. She stands impossibly straight, her hands still prepared for a fight. Maelle's faithful protector.
Sciel stands close behind her. She hugs herself, her usual relaxed disposition set aside for the time being. She gives him a tight smile that he can't return.
He drags his eyes to Monoco last, scared of what he will see in his friend in the wake of his failure. The wooden mask reveals nothing, but when the gestral takes half a step forward and cants his head towards the trembling girl in his arms Verso understands completely.
He returns the embrace with a sigh.
“You're okay.”
-
Before anything else, Maelle grants him one thing: mortality. The end Verso had chased for so long freely given to him in her own way.
Verso feels the shift immediately when she finishes - an anchor that has weighed down his soul for so long finally coming loose. It is freeing and nauseating and so overwhelming that he runs away tossing a hurried excuse in Maelle's direction. He needs space. He needs to be alone. Lumière flies past him in his madness, hair whipping his face. He runs with no destination through the broken streets, past places familiar and not, until somehow he ends up at the harbor. He collapses at the edge of the dock, sucking in lungfuls of salty air. He feels like he has never truly breathed until now.
For a flickering moment, he entertains the idea of throwing himself from the dock into the waves below, but Maelle's words echo in his mind.
“Live a little?” she had said, voice quiet like she was talking to a frightened animal. Her one request and stipulation. “If not for me, for yourself. You deserve to live a life of your own, Verso.” His own sister had told him something similar once. It felt like a lifetime ago, now. Perhaps it was. And perhaps…
Perhaps this time he would listen to her.
Rebuilding Lumière is a slow process. The damage left in Renoir's wake is extensive, and Maelle is still too inexperienced to make quick work of sorting through the vast amounts of chroma her father had been hoarding. Maelle and Sciel are eager to bring everyone back, but Lune remains as practical as ever. They need the city functional before anything else. The homes and farms are all but destroyed and the streets remain a hazardous maze. They aren’t happy about it, but they know better than to try to argue with Lune. So they clear rubble and debris, Maelle strengthens her skills repainting businesses and homes throughout the city and all the while Verso tries to remember what it means to live.
For the first time in decades there is no urgency, no fight looming on the horizon. He spends quiet mornings watching the sun rise with Maelle. In the evenings he and Monoco duel in the streets and collapse into a tangle of limbs when they’ve had enough. He takes to playing the piano again in the silence of the night with only the moon as his witness. His heart beats and his breath still comes and he catches himself thinking of a future where he exists. It's dangerous, disastrous, and intoxicating.
The weeks pass and between the five of them and Esquie, they make considerable progress. Lumière almost looks just as Verso remembers it. New scars from the battle remain and while they may never go away, they will fade given time. Time which they all finally have.
On the dawn of a new day, Maelle begins bringing back those cruelly erased. She pulls in their chroma, dutifully finding each individual and stitching them back together in a shower of petals. It’s an amazing sight after watching the Gommage tear through Lumière for so long. The streets gradually fill with more and more people each day and the gears of the city churn into action once more.
The day Maelle brings Pierre back is not one he will forget. Sciel runs into his arms before he has even fully taken shape, weeping into his shoulder, smile never fading. Nearby, Lune watches her fondly, warmth fills her eyes and Verso notes that her ever-vigilant stance has melted away. Their love, their joy. A stab of cold regret hits him.
He almost missed this.
Maelle finds him the next afternoon at the opera house where he’s been staying. She had teased him endlessly when he asked her for help turning one of the dressing rooms into a small apartment (Really, Verso? A whole city and you want a dressing room?) but she acquiesced easily enough. It’s away from the city to give him the quiet and isolation he misses from the Continent, and he can play the piano at odd hours without anyone complaining.
A smile lights her eyes and a nervous energy emanates off of her as she approaches him.
“I found him,” is all she says but it’s all Verso needs to know.
She makes him be there when she repaints Gustave, and Verso isn’t entirely sure if it’s out of excitement or a punishment. Sciel and Lune are waiting for them in the garden Maelle leads him into - away from the hustle and bustle of the growing city. Monoco is behind him, a comforting presence he is grateful for even if the gestral only came because he was curious to know about the fallen expeditioner he’d heard so much about. The two women move in to flank Maelle’s sides, Sciel offering a quick squeeze to her shoulder and a comforting smile. Verso presses himself along the wall of a nearby building and Monoco stands beside him, head cocked and observing.
Silence settles over the group. Verso can’t see Maelle’s expression from where he stands, though her anxiety is evident. It permeates the air and sets his nerves alight. Summoning her rapier, she inhales sharply. Then, with a precise flick of her wrist, the space in front of her erupts with petals. They are an odd mixture of red and gold, he notes, before coalescing into a silhouette he has not seen since Sirène.
Gustave returns with a harsh wheezing gasp, his legs shaking and one hand clutching at his heart. His metal arm is missing, and Verso thinks of where it rests halfway across the Continent. The man crumples to his knees, knocking audibly against the ground, as his eyes flit around the garden wildly. They finally land on Maelle. She hasn’t moved a muscle - none of them have. Gustave’s mouth works and his brow furrows. His hand tightens against his chest.
“M-Maelle?” he says in a low tone, disbelief coloring his voice. He sounds strained, physically and emotionally. Maelle takes a step forward.
“Gustave,” she chokes out, half a sob and half a manic laugh. Gustave dips towards her and she rushes in, closing the distance between them. The hug is crushing and desperate. Maelle latches on like she’s afraid the man will disappear at any moment and Gustave’s one arm hooks around her shoulders with a white-knuckle grip. Verso feels like an intruder. He shouldn't be here.
Gustave glances up as if just noticing the onlookers. Relief flickers across his face when his eyes find Sciel and Lune. They turn abruptly, locking onto Verso. The outlier, the stranger. Those hazel eyes pin him in place, filled with a raging fire that had been extinguished at the Cliffs. Verso blinks and in the next moment Julie's bloody face is looking at him, her expression bitter and loathing. He stumbles back, his breath catching, and the vision falls away. Gustave stares at him. There is a question in his eyes and an apprehensive familiarity that has Verso floundering.
Sciel, with her ever impeccable timing, moves in between them blocking Gustave from view as she and Lune approach the pair where they kneel on the ground. Verso snaps his head away, huffing a breath, and slips out of the garden.
That night, for the first time in years, Verso dreams.
In it, the air around him is hot and heavy with desire. Verso is achingly hard and buried deep already. A figure straddles his hips riding him with a staccato beat, their head tilted back in ecstasy. Sweat slick hands press on his chest holding him steady, the touch a red hot brand against him. Verso attempts to focus in on the figure around the arousal throbbing in his veins, but their shape shifts like mist. The details blink in and out of their hazy existence confusing Verso to no end. Cascading hair falls over the figure's shoulders then disappears, their jawline oscillating between angled and delicate.
A soft groan is drawn out of him as the figure moves, angling him deeper, and his hands come up to grip their hips. Thumbs trace circles into their skin and Verso desperately wants -
Something in the air shifts, and all the heat between them evaporates. The figure leans over him studying, calculating. Hands bracket his face. One is slender and warm while the other is larger, metallic and biting. Verso tries to tilt his head away, but the hold doesn’t let him. The figure bears down on him further, trapping him. The hands move to his throat, the touch near bruising.
Above him the face shimmers, solidifying into something tangible for the briefest moment. Verso looks into hazel eyes and can’t breathe. The hands squeeze.
Verso jolts awake with a broken shout. He shivers in the cool air, running a shaking hand through his hair. Phantom hands encircle his neck and heat pools in his belly. A dichotomy he doesn’t know what to do with.
He doesn’t sleep the rest of the night.
The dream finds him again the next night. And the next. And the next. Each time, the figure’s shape grows clearer. Some nights, the silhouette is a feminine form he mapped long ago and couldn’t bear to forget. Other nights, it takes on a masculine image that is undeniably that of the one he can’t get to stop haunting his every thought.
After a week of sleepless nights, when he’s gasping awake in a cold sweat once again, he comes to the conclusion that something has to be wrong with him and as soon as the barest sliver of sun graces the skies above Lumière he is at Maelle’s door. It has to be a defect with his chroma, he reasons. Something went wrong when she put him back together or when she removed his immortality. It doesn’t even make sense, but Verso is desperate for an excuse. He needs something to blame, something he can fix. He shouldn't be dreaming. He shouldn't feel like this. Not about him.
He knocks an imperfect rhythm on the door, nerves undone from the dreams and lack of sleep, and steps back.
The door opens. It isn’t Maelle that awaits him.
Verso freezes. Gustave stares back at him. Neither of them say a word.
The man looks as bad as Verso feels. The sight makes his chest feel hollow. His face is pale and drawn, purple dusting the undersides of his eyes. The fire in them is dimmed from the wild inferno it had been when Maelle first repainted him. His shoulders are hunched and tight, and Verso distantly notices that his prosthetic is still missing. For some reason, it surprises him.
Gustave follows his gaze to his missing arm and a blush creeps up his skin. He shifts against the doorframe, hiding his left side behind the threshold. The movement feels self-conscious, almost ashamed. The hollowness in his chest expands impossibly. The man speaks, drawing Verso’s attention back up.
“Verso,” he says, soft and quiet, bordering on disbelief. Verso tenses. There is no question in his voice. Another surprise. The others must have filled him in on everything already. If he had to guess, he’d reckon that is at least partially responsible for his current state. Learning everything you thought you knew about your world is false tends to have that effect.
He nods. Verso doesn’t trust himself to speak right now, especially to Gustave.
A beat. Gustave swallows.
“Did you- Are you here for Maelle?” Another nod. “Of course, I- why wouldn’t you be, I’m sorry that was- That was a stupid question.” His words come out in a torrent, stumbling over each other in his hurry. His earlier blush deepens.
Verso tries to smile, a charming reassurance. It feels more like a grimace. If Gustave’s reaction is anything, it looks more like one too. He holds back a sigh.
“It’s not important, I can come back later,” he starts, but Gustave cuts him off.
“No! No, that’s- I’ll go get her,” he interjects before he closes the door and leaves Verso alone again.
The harbor is quiet in the morning light. Fog settles across azure waves, their gentle lapping at the docks occasionally disturbed by the cry of a distant gull. Maelle sits next to him, her heels tapping an incomprehensible pattern where their legs dangle above the water. She turns a smoothed stone over in her hands as she takes in Verso’s words.
Repeating dreams turning to nightmares, visions of the dead. He must sound insane. He probably is.
She studies him for a moment and whatever she’s looking for she must find. Then, “There’s more to these dreams, isn’t there?”
His face reddens. Verso turns away, inhaling the salt on the breeze. She always could see through him, he doesn’t know why he thought he could brush past the full extent of the dreams. But it isn’t something he ever wants to discuss with anyone - her least of all.
He doesn’t have to in the end, Maelle’s perception is right on point again. Her lips take a pitying downturn.
“Oh, Verso…”
“Don’t,” he whispers the warning to himself as much as her. She nods once. Terse, the closing of a paragraph.
“There isn’t anything wrong with your chroma,” she tells him. He feels the twist of a forgotten knife in his heart. “Whatever the issue, it’s yours alone.” The knife is driven deeper.
He lets out a manic half-laugh that is more an exhale than anything. It’s nothing he wasn’t expecting already, but the confirmation still burns on the way down. Beside him, Maelle shifts, pulling her arm back before launching the rock from her hands. Verso traces its arc through the air. It dives into the sea with an audible plop. He’s tempted to join it.
“You know,” Maelle begins, playfully bumping into his shoulder, “you could always just try talking to him.” Verso blanches at the mere idea. “Come on, I’m serious!”
The teasing edge to her voice falls away, and she turns back toward the waves. There is a hard look in her eyes now that doesn’t suit her. It’s a look Verso has seen reflected in his own eyes. His chest aches.
“I just… I think it could do you both some good.”
He doesn’t respond.
They sit in silence for a little while, listening to the waves as the city begins to wake up behind them. Shouts, children laughing, idle chatter that floats along the breeze. Verso hangs his head, a sigh on his lips, and makes to get up. Maelle stops him with a hand on his arm.
“I’m going to the Continent soon,” she says like she’s telling him a secret. “I figured, since I’ve done what I can for Lumière, it’s time to see what I can do out there.” She pauses, all brightness and nerves.
“You should come with me. I could use your perspective.” A tentative smile. An olive branch in a shaking palm. Verso gives the hand on his arm a light squeeze.
“I think I’d like that.”
-
Being back on the Continent seems to settle whatever had shaken loose in him upon Gustave’s return. Their first night sleeping in a camp under a sea of painted stars marks the return of Verso’s usual dreamless sleep - the oppressive void oddly comforting in a way it never was before.
Maelle doesn’t push him any more on the dreams, or his ever-increasingly complicated feelings for Gustave, but some nights he catches her glancing at him from across the campfire. Some tangled emotion rests on her face, firelight glinting in her eyes. Verso tries not to dwell on what it means.
Monoco, on the other hand, wastes no time on such cryptic expressions.
“You’re being stupid about something again, aren’t you?” he had said before Esquie had even lifted off from Lumière’s streets. Verso had only scoffed in response, but the rising blush told the gestral everything he needed to know.
The four of them criss-cross the Continent as Maelle realizes her vision for the Canvas. She doesn’t erase the scars from the Fracture and decades of sacrifice. She builds upon what already is, using it as a foundation rather than treating it as something in desperate need of fixing. She restores the fallen Expeditioners she’s able to bring back, and for those she can’t she honors them. Memorials of flowering fields and grand trees crop up all over, new beauty and wonder filling the landscapes. Old chroma given a new purpose.
Verso feels something akin to pride watching Maelle paint. Each stroke overflows with care and dedication, her love for this world and its inhabitants guiding her every step. Her vision for the Canvas is so unlike that of Aline and Renoir. Where they had been trapped in the past overcome by their doubts and fears, Maelle pushes forward assuredly into a future she shapes all on her own. The greatest surprise is that she doesn’t erase the Nevrons. Verso had thought ridding them would be among the first things she did for the Canvas, yet they remain. She repaints the especially dangerous ones, but leaves the rest as they are.
One night, he asks her why.
“They’re a part of the Canvas now just as much as anything else. It feels… wrong somehow to just get rid of them.” Then, after a moment of consideration, she grins. “Besides, the gestrals need something to fight besides each other.”
Monoco grunts in agreement, head bobbing animatedly. “I like the way you think.”
If he were a braver man he’d tell her he was wrong about her. That he’s proud of what she’s creating for herself and those of this world. But Verso’s always been a coward.
“You’ve been spending too much time with Monoco,” he tells her instead.
There is an itch in his body as they near the place where Search and Rescue had fallen to Verso’s blade. His hands twitch at his sides, fear and anger from decades long past trickling down his spine. He regrets leaving Monoco at the Gestral Village. He’d wanted to spend time with Noco, and Verso told him they’d be alright without him for a little while. He hadn’t known they’d come here so soon after.
Ahead of him, Maelle moves through the scattered wreckage of the camp. Some of it has been weathered by time, but Verso knows most of the damage is because of him. Heat and smoke from a phantom fire burns his eyes. He feels far away, detached from his body. He trudges forward as if moving through water, watching as Maelle summons her rapier.
“Can you bring them back?” he whispers, voice hoarse. He sounds like a stranger to his own ears.
Maelle regards him, a frown on her lips, and turns back towards the camp. She holds her rapier in front of her, eyes closed and concentrating. A moment passes. Her frown deepens and her brow creases.
She shakes her head, “I can’t. I’m sorry, Verso.” Relief floods through him, followed by guilt so crushing it nearly sends him to his knees. He feels hands closing around his neck.
“It’s okay,” he lies. His legs tremble beneath the weight of it.
Maelle pulls the impure chroma around her, the petals swirling in her hand before sinking into her. She balls her hand into a fist, head tilted and chews on her lip.
“That’s strange…” she says to herself, so quiet Verso barely hears her over the blood rushing in his ears. His entire being is alight with conflicting emotions of every kind. He takes a hesitant step towards her.
“What is it?” She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t even acknowledge that he spoke. Why won’t she look at him? “Maelle?” Teetering on panic, desperation tinges his voice.
“Julie’s chroma… Some of it is missing.”