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It was odd, in a sense, having no memories.
Odd, much in the same way it was to not know what “odd” meant.
When had it occurred to him to even think about it?
Verso shook his head as if he could dislodge the thought, and slid another scroll back into place on the shelf. It settled as if it had always been there. So did the oddness. But he had a cartful of journals and scrolls to replace, and not much time left in the morning to do so. Verso let out a little sigh, and carried on with his task. There was no sense in dwelling on something he couldn’t even identify. Instead, he focused on the melody stuck in his head and the music library’s organizational table. Simple. Straightforward.
Verso slipped a paper-bound journal back into its place, and couldn’t shake the feeling that he had a similar gap in his own memory
~*~
Something about turpentine brought back the oddness.
Verso put the brush back in its jar and wiped away a spot of paint from his hand. The red smeared strangely, almost like…like…
Verso shook out the cloth and hung it up in the window, right next to the rest of the grey and white brush rags the others used. He used the studio so rarely that it had become storage for his siblings and parents. They left their brushes to dry and stacked clean pallets, blank canvases, and old sketchbooks wherever there was space. And where there wasn’t, was Verso’s easel and stool.
It was a simple thing, one that he could collapse and fold into a tidy case with his few brushes and paints, should he venture out onto the grounds to work. The shades of grey and taupe got repetitive, and as such, he spent less and less time away from the shelter of the manor.
It was easier, after all, to connect with the clear black and white of a piano’s keys than to paint faces he couldn’t see or landscapes he couldn’t discern. The music flowed when words wouldn’t come, or when his fingers forgot how to balance a brush.
Verso found himself staring out across the southern gardens nonetheless, at the sway of the trees and the drizzling rain. The patter of water down the drainpipes and eaves melted into the ceaseless melody in his head, and for a moment, he let himself get lost in the gentleness of the world around him.
A bird, small and fat and vibrant, fluttered in through the open window and came to rest on the rack of washrags. It picked at its pretty feathers, all in a fluff, and shook out as much rain water as it could. It settled then, almost staring at Verso, and chirped, brisk and sharp. Verso tipped his head a little at the odd little thing. The bird was no more than the size of his fist, with a short little beak and black feathers around its beady eyes. It stared a moment longer before deciding to venture deeper into the crowded studio. Verso watched as it hopped about over canvases and little wooden figurines.
It finally came to a halt atop his easel, where it peered down at the abandoned canvas. Verso couldn’t even remember what was on it, but he didn’t care.
The little bird was a rare burst of color in his world. Watching it was mesmerizing. Its bright crimson feathers fluffed as it started preening again, and his eyes focused on the tiny down feathers floating to the ground. It was…calming, almost.
Verso blinked. The little bird, nor any of the downy feathers, were nowhere to be seen. Only a single, long feather remained, too large to have come from such a tiny little thing. It was the only proof that the bird was real, that he wasn’t crazy. Not fully, anyways.
He didn’t remember moving, let alone picking up the feather.
Why did he know that a twitch of his fingers could summon a knife? Verso searched the empty cavern of his memory, and found nothing. But the knife was there and his hands moved without his permission. Under his touch, the feather was worked into a usable quill. That, at least, Verso could remember learning about.
In his memories, the faceless, nameless man guided his fingers around another feather, a pile of failures growing nearby. It wasn’t that Verso couldn’t remember what the face looked like - the man simply didn’t have one. But nevertheless, there had been something achingly familiar about him. In that fleeting slip of memory, Verso leaned into the presence of the faceless man. In the cluttered studio, Verso’s balance failed him. He caught himself just in time to not fall completely over, but…
Verso found himself sitting on the window bench, remembering the love in the cracked, clay-like hands that taught him to make quills. With a last snap of the knife, a neat point was made on the shaft. With the right nib, it would be a lovely addition to his small collection. The pop of color would be quite nice.
Stone grey eyes came to a rest across the vast gardens beyond the window.
Red was a lively color.
Verso couldn’t help but wonder what other colors might exist.
~*~
Aline knew she went unnoticed where she peered through a crack in the doors.
The warmth in her heart at seeing her son mucking about once again didn’t soothe the numbness in her fingers.
His shades of grey in the otherwise vibrant warmth of the manor was far too unsettling to bring her any comfort.
~*~
Red ink to match the red quill.
It was a good idea, in hindsight. No chance of ruining the feather if he accidentally set it aside on wet ink. Which, in his state, was likely to happen.
The ink flowed like water over pebbles, endless and effortless. He’d barely needed to construct the most basic anatomy guides; only a single line down the center to measure his symmetry. Verso felt the weight in the corner of the eyes, of the years that sat in each delicate line. He felt an unseen breeze dancing through soft hair, touseling it beyond repair. Each stroke of the quill cast more depth, more life into the portrait, and Verso had long since felt his consciousness slip away. All there was in the world was himself and the thinned paint he used as ink.
A woman that might’ve been a mother, once, slipped into his vacant thoughts.
A flow, the faceless woman called it. The point that a Painter’s soul connected with the Canvas.
Verso couldn’t remember the last time he felt it.
~*~
Verso lost an entire afternoon and much of the evening. When he finally felt himself slip back into realness, the face that stared back at him from the paper was unfamiliar, and yet, Verso knew the man in his bones.
The quill came to a rest, and Verso didn’t feel it halt. He could barely feel his limbs -did they still exist? Was he real?
In a sense, perhaps. Though he was painfully aware of each and every single breath. They all felt like his last.
The face was soft, worn with years that weighed too heavily for how few there were. If he thought about it hard enough, Verso could feel the line where soft skin became a coarse beard, where the strong line of his jaw hid. Verso knew that line well. He couldn’t remember why.
It was lower, where the man’s neck disappeared under a collar that Verso had never seen. The cut of it was nothing that he’d ever seen, or ever thought of. And yet, his fingers twitched with a need to straighten out the crease in it, to recenter the tie. What was missing?
Verso’s fingers moved involuntarily, drawing in a broach of sorts on the man’s lapel.
What possessed him to draw a mangled tower?
~*~
Renoir hadn’t thought much about the workshop in the north wing in ages. For years it had been a catch-all room, saving his family a longer trip to the storerooms when they ran out of basic supplies. And true to that purpose, an empty tube of Naples Yellow was what drew him back to the room.
The door was slightly ajar, though that was nothing out of the ordinary. What was not ordinary, however, was the sight of his son (whatever it was that had replaced his son) sat hunched in front of a canvas. Not a proper Canvas, that was impossible nowadays. But a canvas nonetheless, intently focused on the portrait that was coming to life on the linen.
Renoir had not heard a single note from the piano in Verso’s suite since before the incident, which was perhaps for the better. The more this version distanced himself from the original, the better off they all were.
Odder than the sight of his son painting, was that it was a ghastly, monochrome thing, just like the creature painting it.
The tube of Naples Yellow all but forgotten, Renoir stood a respectable distance away from the easel and simply observed.
All over the room, pinned and propped up against whatever would hold them, were drawings and ink renders of the same man in the painting. All in different clothes, in states of dress and undress alike, and all of them done in the same red.
Renoir felt a chill drip down his spine.
Extracting that last sliver of soul had been a feat in itself, let alone managing to Sculpt a working body. For months, the clay golem that they’d shaped into Verso had ambled about with only the barest of memories of life before.
None of them had thought he would retain memories from within that wretched Canvas.
And to his knowledge, Verso had never met the engineer that little Alicia had latched onto.
The fervor with which Verso had been drawing and painting the man, and the intimacy of many of the scenes, spoke to much more than just a passing awareness or a single meeting.
Renoir closed his eyes, drew in a steadying breath, and sought out his paint.
It was best to just let the boy work.
~*~
The first time Verso felt his fingers slip into the Canvas, it felt like a shock of cold water. He pulled his hand away from it and held it close to his chest. It was solid, warm as always. His.
But what a fascinating sensation it was.
Verso closed his eyes and stretched his hand out again, forcing himself to keep going even as the icy cold washed over him.
He’d never leapt into the Seine, but he thought it had to be a similar feeling.
When he opened his eyes, the studio was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Verso was in a dim room, lit almost entirely by the ambient light of a forge and a scattered few oil lamps. The clutter was -somehow- familiar as he walked between the tables and shelves. Haphazard journals and scrolls and sheaves of loose paper were scattered amongst a dizzying array of bits and bobs, messes of springs and wires and glass cuttings. Off to the side of the farthest desk was a bin nearly overflowing with crumpled papers and half-complete little contraptions. Some of them looked like little lanterns, others were entirely unidentifiable.
And the color-
Yellows. Warm tones. Verso knew those. They faded into the red that Verso was oh so familiar with.
Verso’s heart ached at all of it, and the only word that came to mind to describe it was fondness.
A smile pulled at the corner of his lips.
When was the last time that had happened?
Verso’s thoughts were still horridly empty, but his hands remembered the feeling of a working man’s skin under his own fingers, its heat and coarse sweat and the swell of muscles honed for function over frivolity. Disjointed memories of that body flitted to and fro as Verso squinted at a stack of papers nearby. Research logs of a man who signed his name only as “G. E.”.
Gustave.
Why did Verso know his name?
“Verso…?”
He jerked away from the table so fast it made him dizzy.
“Woah woah woah easy there-”
Verso felt warm hands on his waist, steadying him.
“-sure when you’d come back for a visit. It’s been a while since you left and I thought-”
Left? Come back? Verso’s head spun as he stared at the man, at the rich chestnut hair and dark eyes that had been haunting his dreams and canvases.
“-you look so tired. Come on, let’s sit down, yeah?”
Warmth.
Verso let himself be led to the only table without a massive mess all over it. Gustave, because there was no one else it could’ve been, was still talking to himself as he rummaged around at a nearby shelf. His head throbbed, the heat of the workshop crowding into his space and squeezing him and-
“-I know it’s not much right now, but it’s something until we can get you home.”
Verso looked down at the flask in Gustave’s hand. His own felt like a distant, foreign thing as he took the sweating metal and popped the cap open. The water that hit the back of his throat was cool. How had he not realized he was so thirsty?
When was the last time he ate?
There was a hand against his forehead and Verso leaned into it. It wasn’t flesh. Why wasn’t it flesh?
Verso’s fingers wrapped around the smooth metal wrist. He knew the pictos etched into it like he knew the back of his own hand. Another blank memory, but…
Gustave was talking again. Verso couldn’t make out the words. Just the arms around him again, the sturdy body holding him up, the voice… Gustave kept talking. Verso recognized the low hums of reassurances and worries. A mother he couldn’t remember used them. A faceless father told them to a mother he surely had once.
Verso felt the plush of a mattress beneath him, and the exhaustion of returning to a canvas he had never been meant to leave nearly crushed him. Gustave tried to walk away, saying something about going to wash up. But that would separate them too much for too long.
Beautiful brown eyes softened, and Gustave surrendered.
A moment of clarity came right at the brink of sleep, tucked safe in the engineer’s arms. For the first time that he could remember, Verso felt peace.
~*~
Aline hadn’t felt quite so faint since the physicians had finally pronounced her children dead. Perhaps the moment when little Alicia shocked them all by drawing breath, but not since.
Now, it took all of her remaining strength to keep herself upright, even with Renior’s help.
In life, Verso had never taken to the Canvases, no matter how much they tried to coax him with magic and wonder. He’d kept a journal and a single, massive Canvas as a boy, filled with all manner of boyish fancy.
It had remained under a sheet for nearly twenty years, until Aline herself succumbed to madness and-
The Paintress’s madness was nothing in comparison to the sight before them now.
A great and violent storm may as well have struck the studio. Plastered to every surface and strewn about the floor were hundreds -thousands- of loose papers, all scrawled with a horrid red ink. It was the same face, the same man, on every single one. Ink stained the floor -and heaven have mercy she hoped it was just ink- and the drop cloths that had been tossed about to keep dust away.
“Aline…”
Worst of all, in the eye of the storm, was Verso. Sprawled on the ground, half atop a familiar Canvas, his eyes seeping with Paint.
It shouldn’t have been possible, and yet, Aline understood. Taking a shard from a Canvas had never been attempted, much less successfully. It was a miracle that he'd lasted so long.
Aline felt the low rumble of her husband’s voice in his chest as she tucked herself even closer.
“It seems to me that he’s gone back home.”
“Yes,” she said in turn, barely above a whisper. “I do believe he has.”
~*~
It was an odd thing, to have memories he didn't quite remember making.
Much in the same way it was odd to think about the mechanics of familiarity.
Verso couldn’t pin down the exact moment he no longer needed to ask for directions to Gustave’s favorite bakery, nor the morning when he started being able to put together breakfast without a soup-stained cookbook propped open near the stove. But he could do all of those things, and he did them with the same fluidity of water moving through the creek that ran behind their house.
It was a quaint little thing, built just far enough from town to be away from the hustle and bustle, but not impermissibly far off, either. The trees had begun to turn the color of sunsets, and Verso had half a mind to paint the view from the west windows in the evening sun. The reds in particular were a breathtaking shade. The way they faded into gold and brown reminded him so much of the light of Gustave’s forge reflecting in his honeyed eyes, or the noon sun catching in his hair.
The memories came back slowly, the longer Verso spent in the Canvas. He had been created there, for that world, never meant to leave it. The Verso that he’d replaced had been the one to fashion Gustave, first as a childhood friend, then a confident adolescent. And then that world’s Verso had been killed, and Verso as he was now came into being. Gustave knew the difference, but fell for him nonetheless, and Verso himself had been entirely at his mercy. There was a warmth and compassion to him, offset only by the intense passion he held for his work and caring for his loved ones. It was intoxicating.
Verso let his fingers settle over the keys, the sonnotta coming to a gentle close. Gustave would be home soon, and the least he could do was start on dinner.
When he walked into the kitchen, something caught his eye.
There, on the windowsill over the sink, was a little red bird.