[ Frozen Hearts turns out to be as perplexing a puzzle as any other place on the Continent: an ever-shifting landscape of structures in ice melting into pools of heated lava, primordial and intimidating. Navigating its sharp corners and hidden Nevrons turns out to be as arduous as the Grandis have promised, and Clive has worked himself up into a slight sweat by the time they reach a cavernous section of the area with a very nasty Veilleur guarding a very familiar-looking door.
The fight goes as well as any fight against an oversized monster with a penchant for weaponizing blights can go, which is to say－ Clive is short of breath by the end of it, wicking ink off the flat of his blade as he reaches inside his pouch of supplies (thank god he had the foresight to restock) for a tint and a check-in: ]
Are you alright?
[ Heels pivot on snow. Clive turns his back to the familiar shape of the gilded manor entrance in the process of facing Verso, shaking messy bangs from his eyes; his first instinct isn't to suspect that anything else could happen in the wake of a tough encounter like the one they'd just weathered.
That turns out to be a mistake. As he slides his attention away from the dissipating remnants of the Nevron and towards Verso, he thinks he hears the click of a doorknob turning, the creak of hinges giving way－
－and the sound of a soft footstep descending on snow. Indelicate, and with purpose. He doesn't see her in his quest to check on Verso's condition, but if Clive cared to turn (he will, in a moment), he'd see a waterfall of auburn hair, a pretty face set in fierce neutral, bare arms folded across a shirt stained in places with streaks and smudges.
Clive misses her, but she doesn't miss him. Sharp and severe, her scrutiny flicks over him; she nearly wrinkles her nose. ]
[Verso's never really fallen out of the practise of fighting, but the past few weeks spent exploring the nuances of the Canvas rather than exterminating its Nevron problem have resulted in him feeling more on the sore side of things than he'd like. That's not worth grumbling about, though, especially considering how they're both still standing and not scathed to extents that a tint can't fix. So, his response comes out as a good-natured:]
I've seen worse. [Which is more honest a yes than a yes itself would have been.] You?
[Before Clive can answer, though, the door opens all the way and Verso's eyes widen alongside it. He takes a step back, then forward again, grasping onto Clive's arm and pulling him back beside him. Even so, a flicker of hope rises in his heart that this might be his Clea, the one who has love for this world in her heart, but it's soon extinguished by the look on her face. She watches them in the manner of a lioness that's equal parts opportunistic and bored, as if she's aware that she's already won. She may well have. Almost immediately, Verso's thoughts flash back to what happened with Expedition Zero, to the ease with which she snuffed out so many lives in an instant, in a heartbeat, in a halved breath.
His own breath catches in his throat as he speaks.]
Merde. Clea.
[Every part of him wants to position himself between her and Clive, or else to tell Clive to get the fuck out of here, to just fucking run, but he knows that this is impossible on two fronts. Clea is stronger than the two of them combined, for one, and Clive would never leave Verso behind, for another. Which puts him a state of near panic, barely held at bay by the strict necessity of remaining level-headed and present for whatever will come.
"I must say," Clea says after an appraising pause, "I didn't expect the beast and the doppelganger to join ranks."]
[ No space or time to answer "you?", before he's being yanked and his attention is being pulled towards the sudden appearance of this stern-faced stranger. Clea, Verso says on a ragged whisper, and it takes a heartbeat to process that it's a name: Verso knows this person and the bitter edge to her voice, and this person knows Verso enough to call him 'doppelganger'.
The designation turns Clive to steel. Whatever warmth he reserves for Verso vaporizes when he turns his focus on the young woman and the severity of her scrutiny; the look on his face is a clear don't call him that.
She doesn't humor it. Her job, evidently, is not to suffer fools gladly. (That is not her brother, that man is not a man, all of this is a wish, a falsity, a delusion. They will take her family from her.)
"Aline always did have a firm hold on her toys," the woman called Clea continues. "That creature was supposed to awaken ages ago― long before leaving the safety of your Dome for the Continent."
Bare feet slide over snow, as if it were just another carpet. Clive, broadsword still in hand, tries to step out of Verso's grip, mirroring the need to put himself between the other man and 'Clea'. ]
Verso, who is she?
[ He has to ask, even if it earns him a scoff from the 'she' in question. ]
[They both know that Clive is the strongest of the two of them; even if Ifrit wasn't a factor, he'd still be able to hand Verso his ass. Which isn't to say that Verso is weak, but rather that the strength imbalance between them – even if it is slight – is an unarguable fact. Verso feels no shame over this. Together, they work well. Nothing else matters. So, the way that he quickly and decisively stops Clive from stepping ahead of him says and means something – don't, seriously, please fucking don't – that Verso can only hope that Clive picks up on.
It occurs to him that maybe he shouldn't tell Clive the whole truth here; there is simply no way that he can do so without revealing to Clea that he and Clive are much, much more than two men who are simply travelling together, which would make it all the more easy for her to weaponise Clive against him, or him against Clive. But Clea is smart. Brilliant, really. Nobody knew the real Verso better than she had. It is quite possible that she's already figured everything out for herself just by how Verso holds onto Clive, still. So, with a grudging sigh he decides that it's better for Clive to have all the information at his disposal rather than leaving him confused in the face of an incomparably strong enemy.]
This is Verso's older sister. She made the Nevrons.
["And you," she adds with flippant dismissiveness, casting her gaze on Clive, looking upon him as if he's a lesser creature. "I thought you'd be my piece de resistance. What a disappointment you turned out to be."]
[ Effectively stopped, both by the hand clawed around his forearm, and the firmness of the explanation. There's still cognitive dissonance when Verso refers to 'Verso' as someone else－ a strange vertigo, an inclination to push back with you're Verso－ but Clive swallows it down, and focuses only on the harsh, immovable facts of the matter.
This woman is a 'Painter', and she isn't an ally.
She is also his creator, apparently, which is a mic drop that she delivers with such cold dispassion that this, too, almost doesn't register. It's a cruel facsimile to the previous day's I love you, a thing that Clive had held evident but been blindsided by upon its delivery. The silver lining is that it doesn't feel anywhere near as shattering and re-shaping, which puts him in a good place to reorient his emotions, to ground himself in his reality: he's Verso's Clive, and that means far more to him than the terms of his creation.
So. ]
―Neither he nor I are tools beholden to anyone's whims.
[ Is a biteback to 'disappointment'. Unoffended on his own part (he can't be angry about not fulfilling a duty he never pledged himself), which is probably typical Clive behavior; he doesn't have the ego to bruise.
Still, Clea seems to find that amusing. Or, well. As amusing as she'll let herself be, steeped in self-ordained contempt. "Aren't you? Look at the both of you, playing make-believe in Aline's little sand castle."
It's pathetic, is the sentiment here. "I have no time for this. If the creature I painted is only going to hinder the progress I'm trying to make, I have to dispose of it."
A sigh. "As always, I have to do everything around here." ]
[No, no, no, no, no, Verso thinks. It's only on the sixth no that he realises he's speaking aloud.]
No. Stop.
[The words it and creature hit him every bit as hard as the word dispose, and he takes a step closer to the woman with the cruel eyes and his sister's face and invisible blood dripping off her hands as if she has a heart to implore.]
You don't have to do this.
[Again, he falls into that trap of helplessness, knowing what she's capable of and worrying about what he's not, yet also hopeful in the way of a boy looking up to his sister with a plea in his eyes and whatever she needs to hear on his lips. The problem is that he doesn't know what he could say that would help with anything; regardless of how she might or might not feel about him, Clea looks at him and hates that she sees her brother. And he can't do anything about that. He can't change that about himself anymore than she can. Nobody wishes that he could more than him.
But there are things he does know, and he grasps for them now.]
This place, it means something to you, too, doesn't it? What you and Renoir are doing clearly isn't working. Let us try.
[Please, he thinks, not saying it aloud else Clea take it as an additional expression of weakness and latch onto it like an exposed throat. Nothing changes, though. Not Clea's expression, not the way she holds herself, and not the tone she uses when she speaks again. "It did," she says, offering him the barest iota of acknowledgement. "But unlike the rest of my family, I understand that things that are gone stay gone. Now, for your reminder..."
Raising her hand, she summons a cage of paint, trapping Verso and separating him from Clive. Then, she points her finger at the latter and the air takes on an ominous quality.
[ Clive isn't sure what's worse: the distant understanding that this is Verso begging a porcelain-faced woman to spare his life, or the still-difficult-to-digest reality that this 'Clea', unlike Verso or Renoir or Alicia, is not Canvas-born. She's someone from the other side of the looking-glass who sees Verso but doesn't see him, whose plain disdain is born of as much grief as the Paintress and her drawn-kneed despair on the base of her Monolith.
Balancing those scales is irrelevant, though. Clive can't stand the desperation on Verso's face, and he can't stand the way this woman and her imperious anger makes Verso have to bend the knee. He can stand it even less when she cages Verso, conjuring gilded bars as easily as breathing, and he opens his mouth to call Verso's name－
－when something around him, in him, seems to twist and rend. His hands slip over the outline of Verso's prison, fingers suddenly losing the strength to grip.
Fuck, he thinks. No, no, no. He can't, this can't happen. Fear seizes him, not because he's afraid of dying, but because he's afraid of what that would mean for Verso, Verso and his starlight, Verso and the guilt he already carries for having to survive.
Don't, he tries to say, but the words don't come: instead, he doubles over and wheezes through his next breath, claws at his burning chest, feels something split between his ribs.
Clea is impassive as she watches Clive buckle, her hand still raised with mannequinlike authority. Her finger crooks just slightly, and Clive retches where he's curled, red and white petals spilling from his mouth, turning to ash as it hits the snow beneath him－ he can't even scream through the pain of it. His chroma churns and roils, and dies as flowers flooding from between his lips.
"Hm," is Clea's assessment. "On second thought, it might take longer than I anticipated." ]
[Weeks ago, Verso had been... not quite prepared for the sight unfolding before him now, but he at least understood that it was an impersonal inevitability, cold in ways that at least provided some measure of peace for those who sought it out. There's no peace in what's happening now, though. Nothing about it feels inevitable.
Impersonal, though...
Verso watches Clive writhe and wretch as that beautiful and warm and loving fire of his bleeds out from a mouth that's spoken such kind and loving and honest words, and has kissed Verso so gently and so roughly, always exactly what he needed and wanted, and he wonders who between the three of them is truly the least human. It isn't as simple as that, he knows; to Clea, he's a desecration and Clive is a defect, and she's every bit as desperate and despairing as they are, even if she's not inclined to show it. But in this moment, watching the man he loves die a slow and agonising death, it's impossibly hard for him to accept that she's anything more than monstrous.
Railing against his captivity, railing against the fear and anxiety and anguish coursing through him, railing against the injustice of what's unfolding before him, he tries to free himself from the cage until his fingers bleed and his shoulders bruise, and then he tries even harder. Resigned to the fact that there isn't a single fucking thing he can say to sway Clea, the only sounds that come from him are guttural, angry, almost inhuman in their own right.
Clea watches him impassively at first, then frustratedly, and then she can't bear to watch him at all. So instead, she steps closer to Clive, unwittingly placing her hand in the very spot where Verso first infused him with his chroma. And as she sends a burst of her own power straight into his heart, she blithely offers, "Maybe this will help.]
[ (They're paint, Clea reminds herself. They're paint, and her family is whittling themselves thin for the sake of all this paint, and they will all die for the sake of pretending that this paint means more than their breathing, living family.
So she tells herself to be furious instead of miserable, cold instead of empathetic. Still, she can't look at the man who looks so much like her brother grit his teeth and snarl in anguish, fighting for this smear of paint on canvas.
Who's fighting for her, when she has to inflict so much suffering? No one. Not her mother, not her father, not her sister, and Verso is dead. He's dead.)
Clea's hand rests on Clive's chest. It's more pain to add to the pile. Clive doesn't hear her at all, too busy scrabbling with his numb hands on snow, trying to drag himself towards the sound of Verso's voice, trying to say anything to reassure Verso when he knows that that task is impossible. It's not alright, it won't be alright if this continues, and this woman and the whipcrack of her purpose won't yield.
Verso, Verso. Clive's heart breaks, literally and physically; Clea tries to crack him open from the inside out, and he looks inside himself, gasping and fighting for breath, for the one thing that has always given him strength since the night he looked at his truth and accepted it to be his own.
Silver, white-silver, floods through his seams. It pushes back against the Painter's attempt to unglue him, and reinforces itself around the patterns and pathways that Clea stitched inside him. Guidance, starlight. Something new to hold himself together, something made inextricable through time and understanding. He opens his mouth, and this time, no petals spill out; the sound he makes is strangled and hoarse, but a sound.
Clea flinches away from it. Her hand draws back as if scalded (and maybe it is－ her palm has turned slightly red), and she whips her focus towards Verso in his cage, brows furrowed in clear consternation.
"Oh－ aren't you clever", she snaps. "You gave him Aline's blessing." ]
It's not a blessing he wants to spit out, but seeing Clive illuminated with his chroma and hearing noise spill from his throat instead of petals – that changes everything, at least for this moment of fresh breath and a restored capacity for speech and thought. Clea can't take Clive. She can't erase him from the Canvas. She can't.
And oh, what a beautiful understanding that is at first; oh, how it calms Verso's heart and amplifies it in equal measure.
But it doesn't last long. There are other things Clea can do to them. Things that are worse than Gommage. She's already infused Clive with a beast and set him up in Lumiere like a ticking time bomb. Whatever she's done to the painted version of herself, she did it decisively with no trace of her remaining. It can't be a coincidence that the only dead Axon is the one that resembles her. It feels like all the power in the world collects in her hands while his own hands always come up empty.
So, still he paces in the cage like an animal; still, he matches Clea's snappishness with a sharpened glare.]
I gave him a piece of me. That's all.
[Said as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. And maybe it is for Clea; maybe she's traversed hundreds of Canvases, made chroma-laced connections with other creations. Maybe she's sought the validation of being seen and understood and accepted for herself and without condition in the arms of paint, finding solace in the knowledge that they didn't recognise her and they would never meet again. It wouldn't surprise him. All Paris offers her is a war she wages alone and the burdens of being the eldest Dessendre. Why wouldn't she seek escape elsewhere?
The sense of anger doesn't really fade, but the pleading returns, making him come across as being more erratic and less easily readable, like Verso himself is blurring along his edges.]
It wasn't supposed to be... this. [He gestures to himself.] I would never inflict what I am on anybody else. Don't you see? I'm tired, too, Clea. I don't want things to go on like this, either.
[ "Don't presume," she snaps, taut and tightly-wound, "to know how I feel."
It's an immediate kickback to a plea that obviously digs at her, spoken in the voice of someone she obviously held dear to her heart. Clive tries to gather enough of himself to approach the bars of Verso's prison, to find his hand as he paces between those painted bars; now that he knows he's not dissipating, Clive's main concern is the man he loves more than anything, and how he's fending against the contempt of a woman who wears a sister's face.
He reaches, but the gesture is short-lived. Clea whirls on him, fury in her level stare, hand outstretched again in a threat she makes good on.
"Tell me what you intend to do, then," is her grief-laced, cold ultimatum to her brother's doppelganger. "Quickly, before I make you regret your misguided sentiment for your pet."
She could take Clive's mind. She might not be able to kill him― that pesky silver is getting in her way, wound around the core of Clive like a protective barrier― but she can change him the way she changed Simon, and she demonstrates it now: yanking at the Nevron she painted into Clive's foundations, she turns the hand Clive is extending to Verso into obsidian claws, makes curled horns sprout from untamed black hair. The creature she crafted tips its head back and screams, and she doesn't care one whit about it. She can't. To do so would be a failure, and she can't let herself fail.
(Verso was always the most empathetic of all of them, damn him, damn him. Clea sees it in this painted version of him, the same stupid fucking self-sacrificing sentiment that doomed him to that stupid fucking fire, that fire, damn it all to hell.)
"While you waste your time on fancies," she hisses at Verso, "you jeopardize my family." ]
Edited (please let me submit 1 (one) tag without editing it) 2025-10-17 11:23 (UTC)
[The little brother inside of Verso almost rankles; he almost rises with a tease to match Clea's temper, to call her out on the simplicity of exhaustion and the fact that even with her Painter powers, she is no superhuman. But the grown man – the separate man who only knows her through someone else's memories – knocks that impulse upside the head. That kind of warm yet adversarial familial familiarity is the last thing Clea needs right now. It's probably what she wants the least.
As for the lover, who watches the sister twist the object of his everything into the beast he'd just overcome, he walks over to the edge of the cage and reaches for Clive's warped hand. Maybe he manages to take it; maybe he only grazes the edge of a finger with the tip of his own. The searing pain that comes from the contact is the least of the hurt he feels right now. In a way, it centres him, distracting him from hurts truly capable of bringing about his ruin, should he allow them to take root, as he faces Clea head-on.]
I don't know. Save her?
[It's a useless answer, he knows. Clea's been grappling with uncertainties over how to get her parents out of the Canvas ever since Renoir decided he needed to bring Aline home through devastating force. Nobody's been able to figure out what to do – nobody understands how to fucking solve this problem beyond waiting it out – and Verso suspects that it's the absolute last thing she needs to hear right now. But it's all he's got.]
If it was easy, it'd be over by now. You know that.
[A glance over to Clive. A shuddered breath as he absorbs the sounds of his screaming with a similar ache and intensity with which he witnessed those petals spewing forth. Fancies, Clea accuses, and maybe she's right to an extent. But they're what keeps him going, what solidifies his strength. So:]
And you should know that if you take him away, you're on your own.
[Harsh though it may be, it isn't a threat or a bargain, it's a statement of fact. In the end, no matter how much she might hate it, and even if he'd never join up with her, even if he hates every single thing she's done to this Canvas and to its people, he can't help himself. This Verso still cares about what she puts herself through alone more than her own parents do. He knows that even distanced by death, he may well be all that she has. And he understands that he might only rile her up more, but he can't do anything else and so he has nothing to lose.]
[ Clive― the dregs of his sanity left to him, at least― grapples with Verso's touch. Half-turned and with paint splashed over his blue, blue eyes, he scrabbles against the infernal instinct that Clea has collared him with, clamps his jaw down and stops screaming to grit his molars against the hunger and violence fighting for dominance in his headspace.
Still, the clawed hand that Verso deigns to hold curls too tight. The sharp ends of his tapered fingers curve inwards, drawing blood from already-torn skin; fire flares and settles in errant waves. Wounds open and cauterize, open and cauterize.
Clea watches this happen with distant coldness. She takes in the way the grotesque thing of her making kneels to the facsimile of her brother, how it struggles not to harm, how it brushes its forehead against 'Verso's' mangled fingers with stuttering reverence. It's love and loyalty that she didn't paint into its design, and seeing it makes her as sick as the audaciousness with which Verso says you're on your own.
Because it would be a lie to say that she doesn't need anyone. She does. That's the whole point of this entire thing: that she wants her family back. And it guts her to think that the only one in this entire Canvas who might have any inkling as to what that means and what needs to be done is...
...well, the horrible ghost that her mother made in her grief. And now, perhaps, the mangled monster attached to the ghost's hip as well.
Galling, all of it. She bristles all over, but she keeps that tremble well-contained; it only manifests as a twitch of her fingers as she sweeps her hand over her painted cage and unmakes it, freeing Verso from its confines.
"Use the creature more effectively, then. It should be able to dispose of your wretched father, at least, if it comes to that." ]
[Worse burns have consumed Verso's flesh; worse blades have been stabbed clean through him. He's survived enough cycles of agony to endure the mangling of his hand because for once, he knows the pain is a product of genuine love, the possessiveness towards something he has freely offered, the nearness wanted, so very wanted that he tightens his grip even as the pain makes it hard to think, to breathe, to speak.
But speak he does once those painted walls come crumbling down, the determination in his voice ringing as pure as possible above the strain as he continues refusing to let go of Clive's hand.]
His name is Clive. And he's more a man than most.
[Fix him, he wants to demand, but he knows he can't trust Clea with something so important. So, he moves to place his hand over Clive's chest, keeping a watchful eye on his not-sister while he channels as much of his starlight as he can into the spaces she had claimed for herself, hoping beyond hope that he has the capacity to heal whatever harm she's caused.
And maybe it isn't wise for him to halve his focus like this; maybe she will find some other reason to be affronted by his love and his happiness and his fancies and consider it cause enough to change her mind. Or maybe what she's doing to Clive is part of her twisted, bullshit directive to use him more effectively and she plans, still, to draw Ifrit all of the way forth. Nothing can be certain, least of all their safety, but he can't spend the rest of his already too-long life living in fear of retaliation.
So when next he speaks, it's to Clive, as if she isn't still there with them.]
It's the second gimmick she's painted into Clive alongside the Nevron under his skin. The ability to consume, to contain. It's her contingency plan against the sweet little snowglobe her mother has deigned to put her fake family in, to erode that unbreakable barrier by creating something hungry enough to feed on it. One flick of her wrist, and she can make that creature flare hot, hotter. She can make it fill this cavernous space and swallow the ghost of her dead brother whole and consign him to an eternity of burning until Aline gives up trying to find him, gives up her hold on this cursed place and its cursed memories.
She considers it. Tests it, even, by yanking on her monster's invisible chain again. Clive pulses with heat, too much of it to keep under bay even with the silver winding its way through him, and makes a strangled sound as he floods Verso's arm up to the elbow in searing, impossible flame.
Clea watches as the creature shakes its head, scrabbles its free hand on rock bared by melted snow, and tries to speak the outline of his lover's name. Verso. Imploring him to make distance, begging without begging to back away before the fire spreads up and higher, before it does something Clive can't endure.
It quickly becomes impossible to keep watching. The memory of their family's shared tragedy rears its ugly head; in Clea's mind, Verso is always smiling as he burns.
She pulls her hand back. Silver replaces her paint, and the shuddering creature calms in its light, cast in white pallor as it reaches, now without fire, to pull its handler into an embrace.
Clea should burn the both of them. It's her biggest failing, that she can't.
"None of this will last," she finally says. To Verso, obviously; she has no patience anymore to speak to the rabble. "Maman made you far too sentimental." ]
[Even though Verso knew that retaliation was possible, it still surprises him when the flames overtake his forearm. At first he just stares at it, trying to convince himself that the ground is still snow and mud instead of black and gold, and that he can't hear Alicia screaming in the near distance, and that the fire hasn't already kissed the whole of the body with its unyielding heat. It doesn't work; the real Verso's memories assail him with too much strength, and the soft sound that rises from his throat is thick with both pain and genuine, abject terror as he finally releases Clive's hand and steps away.
Towards Clea.
Clive is the fire and Verso feels like a shambling corpse taking its final steps towards escape, even if it's just an illusion, a promise that reality cannot possibly keep. But Clea turns away – the real Clea would never have turned her back on the real Verso – and everything is back to being white and green and brown as he falls to his knees, equal parts relieved and agonised, and buries his arm into the snow, all the while glaring at Clea's back.
At least until he feels himself being pulled into Clive's arms – warm now, not scorching hot; safe and protective and his. Alive. Well. Recovering. It's enough to empower Verso to bite back against Clea's next bout of vitriol. Foolishly, so fucking foolishly, but he can't help himself.]
Maman didn't make me this way.
[Said through gritted teeth, decisively and with an underlying tone of I am my own person. It's rare that he's willing to make such an assertion, but just as there are parts of the real Verso that he has tossed aside and refuses to claim, so too are there things that he honours and keeps safe. In particular, the way that Verso viewed people is imperative to everything that this Verso does, and he's not going to let Clea take that away from him, he fucking refuses.]
She barely recognises me. [A pause, then:] Do with that what you will.
[It isn't much in the way of information, but it's what he has and it's all he's willing to offer to her. Breathing heavily in Clive's arms, holding onto his lover's wrist with the hand that hadn't just been on fire, his grip tight enough to leave behind a bruise, he turns away from her again and stops just short of telling her to go the fuck away and leave them alone.]
[ Clea's is a power that Clive has never felt. He has never doubted, not even for a moment, that Verso was telling the truth about the Painters and the hold they have on this world, but the gap between the academic knowledge of it and the reality of Clea's grip on the very fabric of his existence was nothing he could anticipate. She'd reduced to him a helpless thing without so much as touching him― she would have done worse if something hadn't stopped her from following through on her carousel of threats.
Clive cares to know what that something could be; he also fucking doesn't. His mind comes back to him with each step Clea takes away, thoughts made unclouded by the steady filter of starlight. He takes in the shape of her, bare-armed and barefoot yet entirely obscured by her austerity― he wonders if, in another life, he would have been able to see how those sharp features resembled any of Verso's own. (Light eyes, a strong jaw, high cheekbones.)
"Maman doesn't recognize any of us anymore," their tormentor says. It's the last thing Clea offers, the last hanging blade above all of them before she steps, not through the gilded door from where she came, but behind it. Reality bends around her, and the cave goes quiet and still, her unmistakable presence gone as if she'd never been there to begin with.
It's hard to know what to do. What to say. Clive sits in that silence, his ragged breathing eventually evening out to something more manageable, and pulls Verso closer against his chest.
Finally: ] ...You're far more charming than she is.
[ Not an apology (he doesn't think Verso wants to hear one) nor frantic concern (it'll break both of their hearts), though the latter is sitting just under his skin, screaming to be let out. In this sea of not fucking okay, in the aftermath of this horrific reminder that they're only two people against insurmountable odds, Clive curls against Verso and tries to hold himself steady.
They need to rest. They need to be somewhere that isn't here. They need to just be, for a bit. ]
[Verso doesn't watch Clea leave. Looking at his arm instead, he tries to temper the real Verso's memories, calming the residual fear and agony of the brutal death that scaffolds his entire existence. Thoughts of Clive being potentially immortal now also plague him; as grateful as he is that Clea couldn't take him, he's also horrified at the thought of having bestowed his curse upon him, condemning him a never-ending existence of bearing witness to death and death and death and death.
There's the matter of seeing Clea for the first time in decades, too – the tangential ache of missing his own big sister, the guilt and self-loathing over being unable to protect her from her other.
Taking a tint would probably be prudent, but he feels almost frozen; even when Clive pulls him closer, he doesn't really reciprocate, only shifting to make himself less of a dead weight. When Clive speaks, the sound of his voice is muddled, barely able to overtake the pounding in Verso's head. There's humour to his words, he knows, but he doesn't know how to respond in kind right now. So:]
This world is almost as much hers as it was Verso's. She probably spent... centuries of her life here, and now she's watching her parents destroy it while she grieves alone.
[He rises to her defense. Which he ought not to do, considering everything she's done and all that she'll continue to put the world through, but which he can't really fathom not doing because he knows who she once was, and he understands what she's had to endure her whole life, and the real Verso's love for his real family is also part of the scaffolding of this Verso's existence.]
I mean, obviously I don't condone what she does, but...
[Is there even a but? He doesn't know. His arm hurts and his head hurts and his heart hurts.]
[ The rest of that unspoken "but" is evident. But, she's an inextricable thread in the fabric of Verso (painted and unpainted)'s life. But, there is no correct way to deal with a catastrophic loss that has shifted the terms of their reality.
These are strings that Clive can't untangle. Aren't his to untangle. They're not even his to touch or unspool, really. He can sit with it, and watch Verso trace them, and accept how they vibrate around him. Bleeding, raw, exposed nerves.
So he lets his touch drop. He tips his head up, staring at patterns in the cave walls around them, mulling over what should be done, what he can do. Silence settles over them again, snowfall-heavy, before Clive finally breaks it. ]
―They must have been close. Her, her brother. Their family.
[ Or so he assumes, based on the devastation coloring every word out of Clea's mouth, every piece of reality she bent under her hand. I have to do everything around here, she'd said, and it gives Clive an idea of what role she thinks she has to play in this grand war.
It's tragic, is what all of this is. Sadness eclipsing every moment, past and present, of fondness. He shakes his head, scattering the last of the fog from his own head, and slides away to pull himself back up onto his feet. ]
You needn't speak on it. [ Verso doesn't owe anyone an explanation. Especially not now, when everything is an open wound. ] ...You should rest. Recover.
[ A gesture towards the gilded door and the respite it should offer, if it remains as empty as it was the last time they found an entrance similar to this one. It isn't productive for Clive to wonder if none of this would have happened at all if he hadn't asked Verso to accompany him to this place, so he doesn't let himself; what's more important now is finding a safe place for Verso to have space and time, without the burden of expectation or performance.
Again: Verso needs to simply be, Clive thinks. For once, without the burden of worrying about someone else. It's why he offers the you, not we. ]
[A light exhalation after they must have been close. They'd been all the other had for a while, and then she grew up and Verso was left behind while she made more important friends, took care of more important things. But when Clive lets him know that he doesn't have to answer, he accepts and refrains from revealing those truths. Anything he can say about the relationship with Clea and her family belongs to Verso, and he's already struggling to separate his thoughts and his feelings and his memories from his counterpart's.
It's the invitation to rest that he ultimately wants to decline. The more that Verso is going through at any given moment, the less inclined he is towards giving himself some time to breathe. Even so, he rises to his feet when Clive indicates the manor door, though he doesn't make his way there quite yet.]
You're the the one who needs rest.
[Defensive words spoken in a tone of pure concern. Verso doesn't mean to deflect; rather, he sees what Clive endured as being more significant, more draining than what he himself suffered at Clea's hand. Potentially at Verso's hand, too, depending on what his chroma has truly done to him.
The thought compels him to take a step backwards, to create a distance that doesn't need to be created, but one that he tries to put to words all the same.]
What she did to you... I should have warned you, I should have...
{Been more honest and forthcoming. Explained what, exactly, the Painters are capable of inflicting on them. Revealed who else lurks on the other side of the Canvas, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Regret floods him and the only words he can come up with are thick with it.]
Verso. [ Clive's answer is immediate, but soft. ] Don't apologize.
[ It's less that what Clea did to him doesn't matter― it did, if it hurt Verso to see it― and more that, of all the things she did and said, Clive understands it the most. He's had weeks to come to terms with the fact that he was made to be an 'it', not a 'him'; he's had time to understand that nothing about what makes him him is normal. Someone made him with deliberate intention, and it stood to reason that that someone would have the power and the incentive to unmake him.
Verso has given Clive fair warning, besides. And even beyond that, the Gommage has always been a reminder of the ephemeral nature of their lives. Year after year, he has already known that someone else has their hand poised over the world's hourglass.
So, with conviction, he states: ] I'm alright. [ Believes it, even. ] I should be the one apologizing to you.
[ For failing to protect, and for the obvious harm he's done. Would have done. Could have done. Most would question the wisdom of choosing to stay with a creature that could be so easily weaponized against them, but Clive isn't interested in having that debate anymore; he loves Verso. Loves him more than anything, still. Always.
Blue eyes flick towards the state of Verso's mangled hand(s), and struggle to keep the anguish at bay. The pit of self-defeatism is tempting to look into, but this is hardly the time nor place. ]
At least heal yourself. [ A little strangled. ] Please.
[They could argue about who deserves to apologise – certainly, Verso has more than half a mind for it – but Clive doesn't need to deal with his self-loathing on top of everything else, so he sighs the impulse away.
Something similar rises in its stead when the focus shifts back to his wounds. They'll heal on their own, he thinks to say. There is so much more on his mind than dealing with the lacerations and burns covering his hand and arm. He's woken up from having half of his torso blown off, for fuck's sake. It's fine, he's fine, everything is fine.
Except even if that were true and he was in no pain and his thoughts were solely occupied with things like preparing something for dinner or choosing which vintage of wine to imbibe, the fact of the matter is that Verso didn't hurt himself by carelessly pissing off the wrong Nevron or stumbling into a campfire. He made a statement, and that statement has impacted them both.
So, he takes a step forward to make up for the one he took away, then reaches with his good hand to take Clive's.]
Okay. But let's get settled first.
[They may be in a cave, but it opens up to a broader world with options stretching out in all directions, and while Verso has no idea what he wants or needs or should be doing right now, he at least has sense enough to know that cloistering himself away in one of the manor's rooms or another will shrink his surroundings enough that he might be able to focus better.
Clive can't read his mind, though, and so Verso adds a bit of clarity:]
[ Okay is a relief. The hand being placed in his own isn't― despite not being ruined by fire, there are still signs of struggle mapped on them, from when Clive was too busy throwing up chroma to speak― and it hurts to think that, even for a moment, he was the reason Verso might have felt helpless.
But, again. Not the time nor place. He brings their twined fingers carefully up to his lips, intact and without petals to impede them, and places a featherlight kiss against broken knuckles. ]
Whatever you need.
[ Asserting Verso's autonomy, his ability to choose. (Even if Clive wouldn't have accepted "I don't want to heal myself" as a valid choice. Stubborn as an ox.) He takes a moment to press his palm against the door of the manor as they approach it, then press his ear to it as if he'd be able to hear or sense any presence behind it― he doesn't, so he takes that as tacit permission from the building that they're clear to enter.
The doorknob clicks, hinges give way―
―and they find themselves in a room that looks almost like an atelier. Canvases in varying states of completion litter the space alongside easels both occupied and unoccupied, configured with haphazard care; miniatures of familiar-looking Nevrons stand vigil on shelves and pedestals, loom watchful from portraits hanging on frames on the wall. A single harp sits in the middle of the room, and Clive can't tell if it's a centerpiece of an afterthought that the owner of the room couldn't get rid of.
Renoir's atelier? Clive remembers Verso mentioning it, but he can't imagine a fastidious-seeming man like Verso's father keeping his space quite so untidy.
He tries not to busy himself too much with observation and speculation, though, given Verso's current state. Still, time is given to adjust and to take their surroundings in, before he makes any attempt at leading Verso out. ]
tfw you put the sad man through so much that you forgot what you put the sad man through
[In the aftermath of the fire, Verso almost forgot about the rest of his injuries. Clive's lips graze his knuckles and the unexpected slice of pain that rises in response causes his fingers to twitch, and he barely holds back a sound of pain at the back of his throat. But again, he's been through worse and lied about more pressing pains, so he pretends like sharp shockwaves aren't still coursing up and and down his arm as he follows Clive towards and through the door and into Clea's spaces.
Of course. Of fucking course.
Immediately, his focus falls on the harp and the record to its side – something the real Verso wrote for her, no doubt, something precious enough that it travelled across the divide between worlds against her will. It's been decades since he last heard anyone play the harp, and he almost moves towards the instrument now, as if his fingers know how to pluck its strings and his heart has the capacity to reminisce about one sister who he never knew and another who he lost long ago.
He had wanted the world to close in around him a little more; now, he feels constricted, like he's suffocating in open air. Clive's already concerned enough, though, so he pulls himself together and carries himself like he doesn't want to find someplace small and dark and quiet to curl up in until the void of sleep takes him away.]
This is Clea's atelier. That door'll take us to her bedroom. Take a right from the door after that, and we'll be back in...
[My room, he almost says. But this is not the manor he had once lived in as himself. That manor is still in Old Lumiere, its doors locked to him, its hallways hostile for how they're haunted by Aline's disappointment in her falsely resurrected son.]
We'll be back in Verso's room.
[Which probably shouldn't feel comforting while he's still grappling with the resurgence of the real Verso's memories, but there's nowhere else in the manor where he wants to go, and all of the memories that he himself has formed of being in his other's room are wrapped up in the moments he and Clive had shared there, so maybe it will be all right. Maybe the dissonance between a familiar space arranged in unfamiliar ways is exactly what he needs.]
[ (that said, the funny thing is that i didn't even plan the Frozen Hearts door leading into Clea's atelier, i was today years old when i realized that it did)
Great. Wonderful. They escaped the cave to be away from the vestiges of what happened, only to be slapped in the face with remnants of the woman who Verso both knows and doesn't know. Clive's expression twists for the second it takes for the words "Clea's atelier" to sink in, but he rights it again after a heartbeat of a second, back to sympathetic neutral. His focus remains sharp, but his body language remains gentle. ]
Alright.
[ There's more context surrounding what this manor is, this time around. Before, Clive had assumed erroneously that this was the cage that Renoir had wanted to put Verso in, the 'home' of come home. Now, he understands it as a shadow of a place that exists (existed? past tense?) elsewhere, displaced and isolated from the rest of the Canvas as a kind of purgatory, a place neither painted nor real. Like the strange space one drifts in when they're not awake, but not quite asleep.
Clive does as he's told, and winds through Clea's bedroom (even more sculptures, even more Nevrons looking at them from every corner) to exit out into the hall, and then towards the hazy familiarity of the other Verso's room. Strangely enough, the room seems to have been tidied after its previous use―
―save for the nearly-empty bottle of bourbon left on the windowsill, like a game of "spot the difference". Clive doesn't know whether to find it charming or disconcerting.
Leading Verso towards the bed, Clive finally untangles his hand from their grip, and ventures: ]
Do you want space?
[ Because love is sometimes about knowing when the fuck to leave someone alone with their thoughts. And besides, Clive won't be far: he doesn't intend to go farther than a raised voice's distance away. ]
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flamebrand) wrote2024-09-08 02:07 pm
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The fight goes as well as any fight against an oversized monster with a penchant for weaponizing blights can go, which is to say－ Clive is short of breath by the end of it, wicking ink off the flat of his blade as he reaches inside his pouch of supplies (thank god he had the foresight to restock) for a tint and a check-in: ]
Are you alright?
[ Heels pivot on snow. Clive turns his back to the familiar shape of the gilded manor entrance in the process of facing Verso, shaking messy bangs from his eyes; his first instinct isn't to suspect that anything else could happen in the wake of a tough encounter like the one they'd just weathered.
That turns out to be a mistake. As he slides his attention away from the dissipating remnants of the Nevron and towards Verso, he thinks he hears the click of a doorknob turning, the creak of hinges giving way－
－and the sound of a soft footstep descending on snow. Indelicate, and with purpose. He doesn't see her in his quest to check on Verso's condition, but if Clive cared to turn (he will, in a moment), he'd see a waterfall of auburn hair, a pretty face set in fierce neutral, bare arms folded across a shirt stained in places with streaks and smudges.
Clive misses her, but she doesn't miss him. Sharp and severe, her scrutiny flicks over him; she nearly wrinkles her nose. ]
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I've seen worse. [Which is more honest a yes than a yes itself would have been.] You?
[Before Clive can answer, though, the door opens all the way and Verso's eyes widen alongside it. He takes a step back, then forward again, grasping onto Clive's arm and pulling him back beside him. Even so, a flicker of hope rises in his heart that this might be his Clea, the one who has love for this world in her heart, but it's soon extinguished by the look on her face. She watches them in the manner of a lioness that's equal parts opportunistic and bored, as if she's aware that she's already won. She may well have. Almost immediately, Verso's thoughts flash back to what happened with Expedition Zero, to the ease with which she snuffed out so many lives in an instant, in a heartbeat, in a halved breath.
His own breath catches in his throat as he speaks.]
Merde. Clea.
[Every part of him wants to position himself between her and Clive, or else to tell Clive to get the fuck out of here, to just fucking run, but he knows that this is impossible on two fronts. Clea is stronger than the two of them combined, for one, and Clive would never leave Verso behind, for another. Which puts him a state of near panic, barely held at bay by the strict necessity of remaining level-headed and present for whatever will come.
"I must say," Clea says after an appraising pause, "I didn't expect the beast and the doppelganger to join ranks."]
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The designation turns Clive to steel. Whatever warmth he reserves for Verso vaporizes when he turns his focus on the young woman and the severity of her scrutiny; the look on his face is a clear don't call him that.
She doesn't humor it. Her job, evidently, is not to suffer fools gladly. (That is not her brother, that man is not a man, all of this is a wish, a falsity, a delusion. They will take her family from her.)
"Aline always did have a firm hold on her toys," the woman called Clea continues. "That creature was supposed to awaken ages ago― long before leaving the safety of your Dome for the Continent."
Bare feet slide over snow, as if it were just another carpet. Clive, broadsword still in hand, tries to step out of Verso's grip, mirroring the need to put himself between the other man and 'Clea'. ]
Verso, who is she?
[ He has to ask, even if it earns him a scoff from the 'she' in question. ]
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It occurs to him that maybe he shouldn't tell Clive the whole truth here; there is simply no way that he can do so without revealing to Clea that he and Clive are much, much more than two men who are simply travelling together, which would make it all the more easy for her to weaponise Clive against him, or him against Clive. But Clea is smart. Brilliant, really. Nobody knew the real Verso better than she had. It is quite possible that she's already figured everything out for herself just by how Verso holds onto Clive, still. So, with a grudging sigh he decides that it's better for Clive to have all the information at his disposal rather than leaving him confused in the face of an incomparably strong enemy.]
This is Verso's older sister. She made the Nevrons.
["And you," she adds with flippant dismissiveness, casting her gaze on Clive, looking upon him as if he's a lesser creature. "I thought you'd be my piece de resistance. What a disappointment you turned out to be."]
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This woman is a 'Painter', and she isn't an ally.
She is also his creator, apparently, which is a mic drop that she delivers with such cold dispassion that this, too, almost doesn't register. It's a cruel facsimile to the previous day's I love you, a thing that Clive had held evident but been blindsided by upon its delivery. The silver lining is that it doesn't feel anywhere near as shattering and re-shaping, which puts him in a good place to reorient his emotions, to ground himself in his reality: he's Verso's Clive, and that means far more to him than the terms of his creation.
So. ]
―Neither he nor I are tools beholden to anyone's whims.
[ Is a biteback to 'disappointment'. Unoffended on his own part (he can't be angry about not fulfilling a duty he never pledged himself), which is probably typical Clive behavior; he doesn't have the ego to bruise.
Still, Clea seems to find that amusing. Or, well. As amusing as she'll let herself be, steeped in self-ordained contempt. "Aren't you? Look at the both of you, playing make-believe in Aline's little sand castle."
It's pathetic, is the sentiment here. "I have no time for this. If the creature I painted is only going to hinder the progress I'm trying to make, I have to dispose of it."
A sigh. "As always, I have to do everything around here." ]
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No. Stop.
[The words it and creature hit him every bit as hard as the word dispose, and he takes a step closer to the woman with the cruel eyes and his sister's face and invisible blood dripping off her hands as if she has a heart to implore.]
You don't have to do this.
[Again, he falls into that trap of helplessness, knowing what she's capable of and worrying about what he's not, yet also hopeful in the way of a boy looking up to his sister with a plea in his eyes and whatever she needs to hear on his lips. The problem is that he doesn't know what he could say that would help with anything; regardless of how she might or might not feel about him, Clea looks at him and hates that she sees her brother. And he can't do anything about that. He can't change that about himself anymore than she can. Nobody wishes that he could more than him.
But there are things he does know, and he grasps for them now.]
This place, it means something to you, too, doesn't it? What you and Renoir are doing clearly isn't working. Let us try.
[Please, he thinks, not saying it aloud else Clea take it as an additional expression of weakness and latch onto it like an exposed throat. Nothing changes, though. Not Clea's expression, not the way she holds herself, and not the tone she uses when she speaks again. "It did," she says, offering him the barest iota of acknowledgement. "But unlike the rest of my family, I understand that things that are gone stay gone. Now, for your reminder..."
Raising her hand, she summons a cage of paint, trapping Verso and separating him from Clive. Then, she points her finger at the latter and the air takes on an ominous quality.
"Be a good pet. This won't take long."]
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Balancing those scales is irrelevant, though. Clive can't stand the desperation on Verso's face, and he can't stand the way this woman and her imperious anger makes Verso have to bend the knee. He can stand it even less when she cages Verso, conjuring gilded bars as easily as breathing, and he opens his mouth to call Verso's name－
－when something around him, in him, seems to twist and rend. His hands slip over the outline of Verso's prison, fingers suddenly losing the strength to grip.
Fuck, he thinks. No, no, no. He can't, this can't happen. Fear seizes him, not because he's afraid of dying, but because he's afraid of what that would mean for Verso, Verso and his starlight, Verso and the guilt he already carries for having to survive.
Don't, he tries to say, but the words don't come: instead, he doubles over and wheezes through his next breath, claws at his burning chest, feels something split between his ribs.
Clea is impassive as she watches Clive buckle, her hand still raised with mannequinlike authority. Her finger crooks just slightly, and Clive retches where he's curled, red and white petals spilling from his mouth, turning to ash as it hits the snow beneath him－ he can't even scream through the pain of it. His chroma churns and roils, and dies as flowers flooding from between his lips.
"Hm," is Clea's assessment. "On second thought, it might take longer than I anticipated." ]
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Impersonal, though...
Verso watches Clive writhe and wretch as that beautiful and warm and loving fire of his bleeds out from a mouth that's spoken such kind and loving and honest words, and has kissed Verso so gently and so roughly, always exactly what he needed and wanted, and he wonders who between the three of them is truly the least human. It isn't as simple as that, he knows; to Clea, he's a desecration and Clive is a defect, and she's every bit as desperate and despairing as they are, even if she's not inclined to show it. But in this moment, watching the man he loves die a slow and agonising death, it's impossibly hard for him to accept that she's anything more than monstrous.
Railing against his captivity, railing against the fear and anxiety and anguish coursing through him, railing against the injustice of what's unfolding before him, he tries to free himself from the cage until his fingers bleed and his shoulders bruise, and then he tries even harder. Resigned to the fact that there isn't a single fucking thing he can say to sway Clea, the only sounds that come from him are guttural, angry, almost inhuman in their own right.
Clea watches him impassively at first, then frustratedly, and then she can't bear to watch him at all. So instead, she steps closer to Clive, unwittingly placing her hand in the very spot where Verso first infused him with his chroma. And as she sends a burst of her own power straight into his heart, she blithely offers, "Maybe this will help.]
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So she tells herself to be furious instead of miserable, cold instead of empathetic. Still, she can't look at the man who looks so much like her brother grit his teeth and snarl in anguish, fighting for this smear of paint on canvas.
Who's fighting for her, when she has to inflict so much suffering? No one. Not her mother, not her father, not her sister, and Verso is dead. He's dead.)
Clea's hand rests on Clive's chest. It's more pain to add to the pile. Clive doesn't hear her at all, too busy scrabbling with his numb hands on snow, trying to drag himself towards the sound of Verso's voice, trying to say anything to reassure Verso when he knows that that task is impossible. It's not alright, it won't be alright if this continues, and this woman and the whipcrack of her purpose won't yield.
Verso, Verso. Clive's heart breaks, literally and physically; Clea tries to crack him open from the inside out, and he looks inside himself, gasping and fighting for breath, for the one thing that has always given him strength since the night he looked at his truth and accepted it to be his own.
Silver, white-silver, floods through his seams. It pushes back against the Painter's attempt to unglue him, and reinforces itself around the patterns and pathways that Clea stitched inside him. Guidance, starlight. Something new to hold himself together, something made inextricable through time and understanding. He opens his mouth, and this time, no petals spill out; the sound he makes is strangled and hoarse, but a sound.
Clea flinches away from it. Her hand draws back as if scalded (and maybe it is－ her palm has turned slightly red), and she whips her focus towards Verso in his cage, brows furrowed in clear consternation.
"Oh－ aren't you clever", she snaps. "You gave him Aline's blessing." ]
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It's not a blessing he wants to spit out, but seeing Clive illuminated with his chroma and hearing noise spill from his throat instead of petals – that changes everything, at least for this moment of fresh breath and a restored capacity for speech and thought. Clea can't take Clive. She can't erase him from the Canvas. She can't.
And oh, what a beautiful understanding that is at first; oh, how it calms Verso's heart and amplifies it in equal measure.
But it doesn't last long. There are other things Clea can do to them. Things that are worse than Gommage. She's already infused Clive with a beast and set him up in Lumiere like a ticking time bomb. Whatever she's done to the painted version of herself, she did it decisively with no trace of her remaining. It can't be a coincidence that the only dead Axon is the one that resembles her. It feels like all the power in the world collects in her hands while his own hands always come up empty.
So, still he paces in the cage like an animal; still, he matches Clea's snappishness with a sharpened glare.]
I gave him a piece of me. That's all.
[Said as if it's the most obvious thing in the world. And maybe it is for Clea; maybe she's traversed hundreds of Canvases, made chroma-laced connections with other creations. Maybe she's sought the validation of being seen and understood and accepted for herself and without condition in the arms of paint, finding solace in the knowledge that they didn't recognise her and they would never meet again. It wouldn't surprise him. All Paris offers her is a war she wages alone and the burdens of being the eldest Dessendre. Why wouldn't she seek escape elsewhere?
The sense of anger doesn't really fade, but the pleading returns, making him come across as being more erratic and less easily readable, like Verso himself is blurring along his edges.]
It wasn't supposed to be... this. [He gestures to himself.] I would never inflict what I am on anybody else. Don't you see? I'm tired, too, Clea. I don't want things to go on like this, either.
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It's an immediate kickback to a plea that obviously digs at her, spoken in the voice of someone she obviously held dear to her heart. Clive tries to gather enough of himself to approach the bars of Verso's prison, to find his hand as he paces between those painted bars; now that he knows he's not dissipating, Clive's main concern is the man he loves more than anything, and how he's fending against the contempt of a woman who wears a sister's face.
He reaches, but the gesture is short-lived. Clea whirls on him, fury in her level stare, hand outstretched again in a threat she makes good on.
"Tell me what you intend to do, then," is her grief-laced, cold ultimatum to her brother's doppelganger. "Quickly, before I make you regret your misguided sentiment for your pet."
She could take Clive's mind. She might not be able to kill him― that pesky silver is getting in her way, wound around the core of Clive like a protective barrier― but she can change him the way she changed Simon, and she demonstrates it now: yanking at the Nevron she painted into Clive's foundations, she turns the hand Clive is extending to Verso into obsidian claws, makes curled horns sprout from untamed black hair. The creature she crafted tips its head back and screams, and she doesn't care one whit about it. She can't. To do so would be a failure, and she can't let herself fail.
(Verso was always the most empathetic of all of them, damn him, damn him. Clea sees it in this painted version of him, the same stupid fucking self-sacrificing sentiment that doomed him to that stupid fucking fire, that fire, damn it all to hell.)
"While you waste your time on fancies," she hisses at Verso, "you jeopardize my family." ]
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As for the lover, who watches the sister twist the object of his everything into the beast he'd just overcome, he walks over to the edge of the cage and reaches for Clive's warped hand. Maybe he manages to take it; maybe he only grazes the edge of a finger with the tip of his own. The searing pain that comes from the contact is the least of the hurt he feels right now. In a way, it centres him, distracting him from hurts truly capable of bringing about his ruin, should he allow them to take root, as he faces Clea head-on.]
I don't know. Save her?
[It's a useless answer, he knows. Clea's been grappling with uncertainties over how to get her parents out of the Canvas ever since Renoir decided he needed to bring Aline home through devastating force. Nobody's been able to figure out what to do – nobody understands how to fucking solve this problem beyond waiting it out – and Verso suspects that it's the absolute last thing she needs to hear right now. But it's all he's got.]
If it was easy, it'd be over by now. You know that.
[A glance over to Clive. A shuddered breath as he absorbs the sounds of his screaming with a similar ache and intensity with which he witnessed those petals spewing forth. Fancies, Clea accuses, and maybe she's right to an extent. But they're what keeps him going, what solidifies his strength. So:]
And you should know that if you take him away, you're on your own.
[Harsh though it may be, it isn't a threat or a bargain, it's a statement of fact. In the end, no matter how much she might hate it, and even if he'd never join up with her, even if he hates every single thing she's done to this Canvas and to its people, he can't help himself. This Verso still cares about what she puts herself through alone more than her own parents do. He knows that even distanced by death, he may well be all that she has. And he understands that he might only rile her up more, but he can't do anything else and so he has nothing to lose.]
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Still, the clawed hand that Verso deigns to hold curls too tight. The sharp ends of his tapered fingers curve inwards, drawing blood from already-torn skin; fire flares and settles in errant waves. Wounds open and cauterize, open and cauterize.
Clea watches this happen with distant coldness. She takes in the way the grotesque thing of her making kneels to the facsimile of her brother, how it struggles not to harm, how it brushes its forehead against 'Verso's' mangled fingers with stuttering reverence. It's love and loyalty that she didn't paint into its design, and seeing it makes her as sick as the audaciousness with which Verso says you're on your own.
Because it would be a lie to say that she doesn't need anyone. She does. That's the whole point of this entire thing: that she wants her family back. And it guts her to think that the only one in this entire Canvas who might have any inkling as to what that means and what needs to be done is...
...well, the horrible ghost that her mother made in her grief. And now, perhaps, the mangled monster attached to the ghost's hip as well.
Galling, all of it. She bristles all over, but she keeps that tremble well-contained; it only manifests as a twitch of her fingers as she sweeps her hand over her painted cage and unmakes it, freeing Verso from its confines.
"Use the creature more effectively, then. It should be able to dispose of your wretched father, at least, if it comes to that." ]
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But speak he does once those painted walls come crumbling down, the determination in his voice ringing as pure as possible above the strain as he continues refusing to let go of Clive's hand.]
His name is Clive. And he's more a man than most.
[Fix him, he wants to demand, but he knows he can't trust Clea with something so important. So, he moves to place his hand over Clive's chest, keeping a watchful eye on his not-sister while he channels as much of his starlight as he can into the spaces she had claimed for herself, hoping beyond hope that he has the capacity to heal whatever harm she's caused.
And maybe it isn't wise for him to halve his focus like this; maybe she will find some other reason to be affronted by his love and his happiness and his fancies and consider it cause enough to change her mind. Or maybe what she's doing to Clive is part of her twisted, bullshit directive to use him more effectively and she plans, still, to draw Ifrit all of the way forth. Nothing can be certain, least of all their safety, but he can't spend the rest of his already too-long life living in fear of retaliation.
So when next he speaks, it's to Clive, as if she isn't still there with them.]
It's okay. I still got you.
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It's the second gimmick she's painted into Clive alongside the Nevron under his skin. The ability to consume, to contain. It's her contingency plan against the sweet little snowglobe her mother has deigned to put her fake family in, to erode that unbreakable barrier by creating something hungry enough to feed on it. One flick of her wrist, and she can make that creature flare hot, hotter. She can make it fill this cavernous space and swallow the ghost of her dead brother whole and consign him to an eternity of burning until Aline gives up trying to find him, gives up her hold on this cursed place and its cursed memories.
She considers it. Tests it, even, by yanking on her monster's invisible chain again. Clive pulses with heat, too much of it to keep under bay even with the silver winding its way through him, and makes a strangled sound as he floods Verso's arm up to the elbow in searing, impossible flame.
Clea watches as the creature shakes its head, scrabbles its free hand on rock bared by melted snow, and tries to speak the outline of his lover's name. Verso. Imploring him to make distance, begging without begging to back away before the fire spreads up and higher, before it does something Clive can't endure.
It quickly becomes impossible to keep watching. The memory of their family's shared tragedy rears its ugly head; in Clea's mind, Verso is always smiling as he burns.
She pulls her hand back. Silver replaces her paint, and the shuddering creature calms in its light, cast in white pallor as it reaches, now without fire, to pull its handler into an embrace.
Clea should burn the both of them. It's her biggest failing, that she can't.
"None of this will last," she finally says. To Verso, obviously; she has no patience anymore to speak to the rabble. "Maman made you far too sentimental." ]
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Towards Clea.
Clive is the fire and Verso feels like a shambling corpse taking its final steps towards escape, even if it's just an illusion, a promise that reality cannot possibly keep. But Clea turns away – the real Clea would never have turned her back on the real Verso – and everything is back to being white and green and brown as he falls to his knees, equal parts relieved and agonised, and buries his arm into the snow, all the while glaring at Clea's back.
At least until he feels himself being pulled into Clive's arms – warm now, not scorching hot; safe and protective and his. Alive. Well. Recovering. It's enough to empower Verso to bite back against Clea's next bout of vitriol. Foolishly, so fucking foolishly, but he can't help himself.]
Maman didn't make me this way.
[Said through gritted teeth, decisively and with an underlying tone of I am my own person. It's rare that he's willing to make such an assertion, but just as there are parts of the real Verso that he has tossed aside and refuses to claim, so too are there things that he honours and keeps safe. In particular, the way that Verso viewed people is imperative to everything that this Verso does, and he's not going to let Clea take that away from him, he fucking refuses.]
She barely recognises me. [A pause, then:] Do with that what you will.
[It isn't much in the way of information, but it's what he has and it's all he's willing to offer to her. Breathing heavily in Clive's arms, holding onto his lover's wrist with the hand that hadn't just been on fire, his grip tight enough to leave behind a bruise, he turns away from her again and stops just short of telling her to go the fuck away and leave them alone.]
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Clive cares to know what that something could be; he also fucking doesn't. His mind comes back to him with each step Clea takes away, thoughts made unclouded by the steady filter of starlight. He takes in the shape of her, bare-armed and barefoot yet entirely obscured by her austerity― he wonders if, in another life, he would have been able to see how those sharp features resembled any of Verso's own. (Light eyes, a strong jaw, high cheekbones.)
"Maman doesn't recognize any of us anymore," their tormentor says. It's the last thing Clea offers, the last hanging blade above all of them before she steps, not through the gilded door from where she came, but behind it. Reality bends around her, and the cave goes quiet and still, her unmistakable presence gone as if she'd never been there to begin with.
It's hard to know what to do. What to say. Clive sits in that silence, his ragged breathing eventually evening out to something more manageable, and pulls Verso closer against his chest.
Finally: ] ...You're far more charming than she is.
[ Not an apology (he doesn't think Verso wants to hear one) nor frantic concern (it'll break both of their hearts), though the latter is sitting just under his skin, screaming to be let out. In this sea of not fucking okay, in the aftermath of this horrific reminder that they're only two people against insurmountable odds, Clive curls against Verso and tries to hold himself steady.
They need to rest. They need to be somewhere that isn't here. They need to just be, for a bit. ]
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There's the matter of seeing Clea for the first time in decades, too – the tangential ache of missing his own big sister, the guilt and self-loathing over being unable to protect her from her other.
Taking a tint would probably be prudent, but he feels almost frozen; even when Clive pulls him closer, he doesn't really reciprocate, only shifting to make himself less of a dead weight. When Clive speaks, the sound of his voice is muddled, barely able to overtake the pounding in Verso's head. There's humour to his words, he knows, but he doesn't know how to respond in kind right now. So:]
This world is almost as much hers as it was Verso's. She probably spent... centuries of her life here, and now she's watching her parents destroy it while she grieves alone.
[He rises to her defense. Which he ought not to do, considering everything she's done and all that she'll continue to put the world through, but which he can't really fathom not doing because he knows who she once was, and he understands what she's had to endure her whole life, and the real Verso's love for his real family is also part of the scaffolding of this Verso's existence.]
I mean, obviously I don't condone what she does, but...
[Is there even a but? He doesn't know. His arm hurts and his head hurts and his heart hurts.]
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These are strings that Clive can't untangle. Aren't his to untangle. They're not even his to touch or unspool, really. He can sit with it, and watch Verso trace them, and accept how they vibrate around him. Bleeding, raw, exposed nerves.
So he lets his touch drop. He tips his head up, staring at patterns in the cave walls around them, mulling over what should be done, what he can do. Silence settles over them again, snowfall-heavy, before Clive finally breaks it. ]
―They must have been close. Her, her brother. Their family.
[ Or so he assumes, based on the devastation coloring every word out of Clea's mouth, every piece of reality she bent under her hand. I have to do everything around here, she'd said, and it gives Clive an idea of what role she thinks she has to play in this grand war.
It's tragic, is what all of this is. Sadness eclipsing every moment, past and present, of fondness. He shakes his head, scattering the last of the fog from his own head, and slides away to pull himself back up onto his feet. ]
You needn't speak on it. [ Verso doesn't owe anyone an explanation. Especially not now, when everything is an open wound. ] ...You should rest. Recover.
[ A gesture towards the gilded door and the respite it should offer, if it remains as empty as it was the last time they found an entrance similar to this one. It isn't productive for Clive to wonder if none of this would have happened at all if he hadn't asked Verso to accompany him to this place, so he doesn't let himself; what's more important now is finding a safe place for Verso to have space and time, without the burden of expectation or performance.
Again: Verso needs to simply be, Clive thinks. For once, without the burden of worrying about someone else. It's why he offers the you, not we. ]
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It's the invitation to rest that he ultimately wants to decline. The more that Verso is going through at any given moment, the less inclined he is towards giving himself some time to breathe. Even so, he rises to his feet when Clive indicates the manor door, though he doesn't make his way there quite yet.]
You're the the one who needs rest.
[Defensive words spoken in a tone of pure concern. Verso doesn't mean to deflect; rather, he sees what Clive endured as being more significant, more draining than what he himself suffered at Clea's hand. Potentially at Verso's hand, too, depending on what his chroma has truly done to him.
The thought compels him to take a step backwards, to create a distance that doesn't need to be created, but one that he tries to put to words all the same.]
What she did to you... I should have warned you, I should have...
{Been more honest and forthcoming. Explained what, exactly, the Painters are capable of inflicting on them. Revealed who else lurks on the other side of the Canvas, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Regret floods him and the only words he can come up with are thick with it.]
I'm sorry.
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[ It's less that what Clea did to him doesn't matter― it did, if it hurt Verso to see it― and more that, of all the things she did and said, Clive understands it the most. He's had weeks to come to terms with the fact that he was made to be an 'it', not a 'him'; he's had time to understand that nothing about what makes him him is normal. Someone made him with deliberate intention, and it stood to reason that that someone would have the power and the incentive to unmake him.
Verso has given Clive fair warning, besides. And even beyond that, the Gommage has always been a reminder of the ephemeral nature of their lives. Year after year, he has already known that someone else has their hand poised over the world's hourglass.
So, with conviction, he states: ] I'm alright. [ Believes it, even. ] I should be the one apologizing to you.
[ For failing to protect, and for the obvious harm he's done. Would have done. Could have done. Most would question the wisdom of choosing to stay with a creature that could be so easily weaponized against them, but Clive isn't interested in having that debate anymore; he loves Verso. Loves him more than anything, still. Always.
Blue eyes flick towards the state of Verso's mangled hand(s), and struggle to keep the anguish at bay. The pit of self-defeatism is tempting to look into, but this is hardly the time nor place. ]
At least heal yourself. [ A little strangled. ] Please.
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Something similar rises in its stead when the focus shifts back to his wounds. They'll heal on their own, he thinks to say. There is so much more on his mind than dealing with the lacerations and burns covering his hand and arm. He's woken up from having half of his torso blown off, for fuck's sake. It's fine, he's fine, everything is fine.
Except even if that were true and he was in no pain and his thoughts were solely occupied with things like preparing something for dinner or choosing which vintage of wine to imbibe, the fact of the matter is that Verso didn't hurt himself by carelessly pissing off the wrong Nevron or stumbling into a campfire. He made a statement, and that statement has impacted them both.
So, he takes a step forward to make up for the one he took away, then reaches with his good hand to take Clive's.]
Okay. But let's get settled first.
[They may be in a cave, but it opens up to a broader world with options stretching out in all directions, and while Verso has no idea what he wants or needs or should be doing right now, he at least has sense enough to know that cloistering himself away in one of the manor's rooms or another will shrink his surroundings enough that he might be able to focus better.
Clive can't read his mind, though, and so Verso adds a bit of clarity:]
I can't think out here.
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But, again. Not the time nor place. He brings their twined fingers carefully up to his lips, intact and without petals to impede them, and places a featherlight kiss against broken knuckles. ]
Whatever you need.
[ Asserting Verso's autonomy, his ability to choose. (Even if Clive wouldn't have accepted "I don't want to heal myself" as a valid choice. Stubborn as an ox.) He takes a moment to press his palm against the door of the manor as they approach it, then press his ear to it as if he'd be able to hear or sense any presence behind it― he doesn't, so he takes that as tacit permission from the building that they're clear to enter.
The doorknob clicks, hinges give way―
―and they find themselves in a room that looks almost like an atelier. Canvases in varying states of completion litter the space alongside easels both occupied and unoccupied, configured with haphazard care; miniatures of familiar-looking Nevrons stand vigil on shelves and pedestals, loom watchful from portraits hanging on frames on the wall. A single harp sits in the middle of the room, and Clive can't tell if it's a centerpiece of an afterthought that the owner of the room couldn't get rid of.
Renoir's atelier? Clive remembers Verso mentioning it, but he can't imagine a fastidious-seeming man like Verso's father keeping his space quite so untidy.
He tries not to busy himself too much with observation and speculation, though, given Verso's current state. Still, time is given to adjust and to take their surroundings in, before he makes any attempt at leading Verso out. ]
tfw you put the sad man through so much that you forgot what you put the sad man through
Of course. Of fucking course.
Immediately, his focus falls on the harp and the record to its side – something the real Verso wrote for her, no doubt, something precious enough that it travelled across the divide between worlds against her will. It's been decades since he last heard anyone play the harp, and he almost moves towards the instrument now, as if his fingers know how to pluck its strings and his heart has the capacity to reminisce about one sister who he never knew and another who he lost long ago.
He had wanted the world to close in around him a little more; now, he feels constricted, like he's suffocating in open air. Clive's already concerned enough, though, so he pulls himself together and carries himself like he doesn't want to find someplace small and dark and quiet to curl up in until the void of sleep takes him away.]
This is Clea's atelier. That door'll take us to her bedroom. Take a right from the door after that, and we'll be back in...
[My room, he almost says. But this is not the manor he had once lived in as himself. That manor is still in Old Lumiere, its doors locked to him, its hallways hostile for how they're haunted by Aline's disappointment in her falsely resurrected son.]
We'll be back in Verso's room.
[Which probably shouldn't feel comforting while he's still grappling with the resurgence of the real Verso's memories, but there's nowhere else in the manor where he wants to go, and all of the memories that he himself has formed of being in his other's room are wrapped up in the moments he and Clive had shared there, so maybe it will be all right. Maybe the dissonance between a familiar space arranged in unfamiliar ways is exactly what he needs.]
i am eating so well on the sad man suffering 🥹
that said, the funny thing is that i didn't even plan the Frozen Hearts door leading into Clea's atelier, i was today years old when i realized that it did)Great. Wonderful. They escaped the cave to be away from the vestiges of what happened, only to be slapped in the face with remnants of the woman who Verso both knows and doesn't know. Clive's expression twists for the second it takes for the words "Clea's atelier" to sink in, but he rights it again after a heartbeat of a second, back to sympathetic neutral. His focus remains sharp, but his body language remains gentle. ]
Alright.
[ There's more context surrounding what this manor is, this time around. Before, Clive had assumed erroneously that this was the cage that Renoir had wanted to put Verso in, the 'home' of come home. Now, he understands it as a shadow of a place that exists (existed? past tense?) elsewhere, displaced and isolated from the rest of the Canvas as a kind of purgatory, a place neither painted nor real. Like the strange space one drifts in when they're not awake, but not quite asleep.
Clive does as he's told, and winds through Clea's bedroom (even more sculptures, even more Nevrons looking at them from every corner) to exit out into the hall, and then towards the hazy familiarity of the other Verso's room. Strangely enough, the room seems to have been tidied after its previous use―
―save for the nearly-empty bottle of bourbon left on the windowsill, like a game of "spot the difference". Clive doesn't know whether to find it charming or disconcerting.
Leading Verso towards the bed, Clive finally untangles his hand from their grip, and ventures: ]
Do you want space?
[ Because love is sometimes about knowing when the fuck to leave someone alone with their thoughts. And besides, Clive won't be far: he doesn't intend to go farther than a raised voice's distance away. ]
bless the tragic ben starrs
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slams back in
wb...!!!! the men have remained sad, just for you
what good, accomodating sad men ;;
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how the FUCK did i respond to the wrong tag
LMFAO both of us as tired as the sadmen are!!!!!!!!!!
so tired that i missed my opportunity for a voice twin gag sadbanana.png also i am ready to retire
NOOO they can punk renoir with voice twin gag and embarrass him... i believe in us
beautiful. leave that man utterly tomfooled!!!
modern AU where clive takes all of verso's phone calls for him
bless him for dealing with the dessendres so verso doesn't have to (i give it five minutes)
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crawls back to the starrs, wheezing and panting
hands you a sadman and a pillow
two of my favorite things 🥹
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how DARE you choose that song...........
says the person who linked me a piano arrangement of MY STAR!!!
that's the Verso Dies Ending song.....................
at least clive will know how jill felt
he'll ugly cry for 100 years and then die of dehydration
he needs a torgal to sop up at least some of those tears; they should adopt that fluffy pink nevron
clive wants VERSO!!! (but they do deserve emotional support fluffs)
clive can have verso's petals that's something
opens up microsoft word to write a 500000 word fic about clive crying over verso's petals
rabidly refreshes ao3 (no but we should do this somehow)
you've given me too much power and i've gone mad with it
rubs hands together with such gusto the friction sets the sadmen aflame (again) (sorry, ben starrs)
WHEN WILL VERSO BE FREE!!!!!!!!!!
probably some time after the heat death of the universe or the reaper invasion or w/e destroys earth
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