Chapter Text
The first strike from the Jar hits Verso right in the stomach, knocking the air out of his lungs and punting him into the cliff's face. His vision goes white when his head hits the rocks, dancing sparks in front of his eyes as the Jar comes in for another blow.
It raises its staff high above its head, and Verso can't move away fast enough. He twists, the world swims around the hot coals of pain in his stomach and back, and before he can get away, it explodes anew against his legs.
Verso can't do anything but watch, breath ragged in his throat. It brings the staff up again, the pale grey flecked with his blood. Chroma dances around his legs, but he can't heal fast enough; it slams down, catching one kneecap with an agonising crunch. Then it goes again, again, again, again, again—
He's used to pain, he tells himself. He can feel the shards of his bone scraping against pieces of his flesh no longer attached to his body. It's all alright, because he won't die. The Jar rattles its staff in some kind of victory dance and, on spotting that he's still breathing, lines up to attack again.
He waits for the pain to overwhelm everything else. He waits for the blood loss to outpace his healing.
Verso spends a lot of time waiting, lately.
He must have died, in the end, because he wakes up in the Manor. Everything hurts, but his legs are the worst of it; they can't be quite back together yet. It hurts too much for that.
He tries to push himself upright in bed. It's his bed, his night shirt, so someone must have peeled the torn fabric from his ruined flesh and pieced him back together. Did papa find him, or Alicia? He can feel his legs, raw and sensitive, bare underneath the blankets. He must have still been in a state when they laid him down to rest.
His bedroom door opens so soon after he rouses himself that he knows it's maman. She always knows when he wakes.
She looks like her today, like the maman he remembers growing up with but sporting ever so slightly wilder hair. She enters without knocking, hesitating only briefly in the doorway to watch him, momentarily so very still. The world seems to stop around her when she's still.
"Maman," he greets. He's always felt small around her, younger than his now thirty eight years. He supposes a part of him always knew the truth.
"Verso." There's a glass of water in her hands that wasn't there when she entered the room, and she hurries to his bedside. "You're awake."
She sets the water beside his bed, helping him brace his weight against the headboard. Verso winces as the base of his kneecap brushes a blanket's seam. It smarts, and then it's gone. Maman again.
"Just about," he says. He thinks she still finds it charming when he smiles through the pain, so he puts on a brave face. "That was…"
"Alicia dealt with it." She brings the water to his lips, letting him drink only in small sips. Verso had rather hoped Alicia hadn't seen him in that state, but when it comes to bodily harm he rarely gets what he wants. "And she brought you home."
Verso tries not to think about Alicia, knees in the grass, his blood drying under her fingertips as she gathered the shattered bones of his legs into a bag and strapped the top half of his corpse to her back so she could carry him back to the manor. He fails.
Maybe he was conscious. It's vivid enough an image that it could almost be a memory.
"Is she okay?" Maman brushes some hair away from Verso's forehead.
"She is… as ever." No, then. They can all smile and dote and talk around the looming horrors, but none of them are okay. Perhaps Alicia least of all.
(Maman least of all, of course, because she carries the grief of a second life. But Verso mentioned this to papa, last year, and was told in no uncertain terms that his mother is the happiest of them all, with enough conviction in his tone that Verso pretends to himself that he believes it.)
"I'm sorry I got hurt, maman."
She smiles at that. "That's alright, mon ange. Nothing you can't recover from."
They never mention that she's the one healing them all, keeping them alive. When his father fell from a crumbling building in the now-emptied Lumière and impaled himself on a broken window frame. When Alicia got dizzy on a cliffside, fell into the sea, and washed up six hours later, her lungs long since filled with seawater.
Verso doesn't know why they don't mention it. He doesn't know why he doesn't ask her now.
"Maman…" She looks at him, pale eyes clear as glass, and the question dies on his lips. "Never mind. It'll be fine."
It's a game, and she knows how to play it as well as him; she sets a hand on his shoulder, comforting. He can't feel her warmth, even through the thin fabric of his shirt. "You can always tell me if there's something you're worried about."
He meets her eyes, and he thinks briefly about when she doesn't look like herself, when there's a hole in her face and a void in place of her expressions. "I'm fine, maman. Nothing to worry about."
He's lying; she knows he's lying. They go through the ritual just because they can. They go through the ritual, he thinks, because she has a son who can't lie to her anymore.
"I'm glad, in all these horrors," she says, "that you have such a fire to live. I know it helps keep you here, even when…" She shakes her head, then presses a kiss to his cheek. Her lips are dry.
"I'm glad I came back." But the question occurs to him, there and then gone in a moment: what if I didn't want to? If I wanted to die, would you help in the same way you help us survive?
Verso knows the answer to the question. He's glad, with her hand carding through his hair, that he wants to live.