[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. ]
[ (i was also today years old ;;b the rp gods are smiling down on the sad men)
Verso doesn't even notice how much neater the room is than it had been when they'd left; he just steps inside and closes his eyes and breathes in the otherworldly air as he lets Clive lead him onwards. The thought of sitting down – of being firm in the knowledge of knowing what he's meant to do next, no matter how slight – does even him out a little, but he pauses for a moment at Clive's question before taking a seat on the edge of the bed.]
Oh, come on. I don't seem that out of it, do I?
[Stupid question. He's a fucking zombie and he knows it. Can't even force himself to smile or lighten his tone for what was meant to be a joke. But he's a zombie who needs to make good on his word, so he starts contending with the not-insignificant matter of getting his jacket off – a slow, cautious affair that he insists on doing on his own, even as he solidifies his answer.]
Not if you don't.
[It's long been the case that Verso's thoughts are a dangerous thing when they're left to wander in isolation. So, even if there's a part of him that very much would like to pretend that he's finally found oblivion and doesn't have to exist anymore, he's also promised to try and be better. Which in this case feels like refusing to give into those impulses. The only things that have ever come from them are a deepening of his despair and an intensifying of his sense of futility.
Once his jacket is off, he nods towards the pouch at Clive's hip where he usually keeps his tints.]
[ Verso looks extremely out of it, actually, but Clive would be far more concerned if he didn't. To normalize this kind of suffering would be to see Verso's starlight snuffed out for good, and so Clive has to soothe his rabbiting heartbeat by telling himself that it's human for Verso to feel pain.
The "not if you don't" is slightly more exasperating, given that it's not an answer to do you want, but Clive doesn't press it. Instead, he gives his verdict in a short: ] I don't. [ Which might be a bit more blunt than it should be, but Clive can only tell the truth. He doesn't want to be away from Verso, even if it might benefit the both of them to put their respective heads on straight before reaching for each other again.
Clive can justify it, at least. Verso's hands are fucked (his heart seizes when he sees the extent of the damage, the cuts and the chipped nails and the burnt flesh), and Clive needs to stay to make sure he heals.
The pouch unfastens; the most potent of his tints is fished out, and Clive moves to sit next to Verso on the bed as he removes the glass top of the bottle.
He taps at Verso's bottom lip with an index. ] Open, mon étoile. [ Not doing the horrifically cloying thing of kissing the liquid into Verso's mouth (though he briefly considers it), but insisting that he be responsible for pouring it. ]
[Just apply it directly, he nearly says. It would hurt like hell considering the extent and depth of his injuries, but it might work quicker and focusing on the pain would give Verso a temporary reprieve from the dark cacophony playing across his thoughts. Clive doesn't deserve to be repurposed as a tool of Verso's self-flagellation, though, and so he takes the tint as asked, swallowing the whole of it down and preparing himself for the lesser ache that will inevitably follow.
The words mon étoile stick with him all the while. Guilt gnaws at him in place of love; taken by the moment and quieted by the inadequacy of words, he had only wanted to make it undeniably clear how Clive made him feel. Now, he wonders how it came to be that he passed his mother's cursed blessing onto him.
Maybe it's just the nature of his chroma; maybe the essence of his drive to provide some solace from the cruelties of this world misconstrued his true intentions. Or maybe that was his intention. As much as he wants to deny that any part of himself would force another person to endure the Canvas until its destruction, he's been so fucking lonely for so fucking long that he can't put it past his subconscious to reach out like that, wrapping Clive up in infinity so that he doesn't have to deal with the grief.]
I meant what I said. [He says after a moment, voice soft with guilt and drawn taught with pain.] If I'd known what my chroma would do to you, I...
[Wouldn't have been so reckless. Now that he's started speaking, it's hard to put the rest of it to words. Clive is alive because of Verso's chroma – he gets to make more out of his life than Clea had intended. He might even get to reunite with his brother; the fact that Clea hadn't invoked Joshua's name at all has assuaged some of Verso's concerns that his survival is some manner of trap. How does he makes those things out to be mistakes?
He swallows. Chases distraction in the ache of recovery but finds it insufficient. Tries again to complete his thought.]
You should have had a choice. I'm sorry I took that from you.
[ Clive sits back on his hands, keeping his touch on the mattress to discourage himself from his natural instinct to want to lean close. Verso is clearly struggling, and as much his heart strains to see or hear Verso in pain, Clive has sense enough to know when it would feel worse to be coddled through it.
He also has sense enough to know when someone's apology, however unnecessary it might be, needs to be held in one's hand for consideration. Dismissing it would be easy enough, but that I'm sorry is another piece of honesty to add to the growing pile, and Clive doesn't want to be careless with it.
So. A stretch of silence, as Clive examines it. Yes, he should perhaps have had a chance to choose whether he wanted to live a longer life than he deserves. Yes, immortality might be something that required more thought and consideration before accepting. But. ]
Neither of us could have known. If we're to blame anything, we should blame my anatomy.
[ Maybe Verso could have had a more normal lover. A he, not an it. But Clive doesn't say that, and he tips his gaze sideways, brows slightly downturned but his expression gentle. Or, as gentle as he can make it, knowing the cruelty of what he's about to say next. ]
Or would it have hurt you less had I chosen not to have you, and died tonight?
[ Because no version of Clive would have chosen that outcome unless it was better for Verso overall. If he'd known the odds, and he'd weighed his options, he would always have chosen the option that didn't leave Verso to fend against the world alone. ]
[It's true. Neither of them knew that it wasn't just starlight that Verso was imbuing Clive with. The salve it applies is light, but a salve all the same, and Verso takes a centring breath. One that also keeps him from objecting to Clive's attempt to shoulder the blame. They were both made in ways that go against their wills; they're going to have to learn the hard way what the full effect of each of their makings means for the other. Better to hold their truths than to try to take them away.
It's also true that Clive surviving hurts Verso less, at least in the immediacy of this moment. No good way exists for him to explain that at least, though; not without admitting how much his own immortality has proven that the longer he lives, the more he wishes he didn't have to go on any longer. But the thought of witnessing Clive's own slow descent into ideation sounds every bit as painful as losing him in an instant, and that leaves Verso struggling to figure out how to answer his question.
Trust me, be honest, let me help you. Cornerstones of their relationship, but not absolutes. Verso can't hide his feelings about life and death and immortality from Clive forever – if they're even still hidden – but there have been enough bombshell moments for the day, and so he falls silent as he thinks about how he actually feels behind the shock and the pain, really thinks about it, until he comes up with something that seems mostly right. They can't predict the future, they can only exist in the present, so:]
No. Of course not. I'm just... I'm tired of making things harder on everyone.
[Clive with his newfound immortality. Clea with her conflicted, aggressive grief. Aline with her inability to move on. Renoir with his white-knuckled grip on a family that Verso's creation had fractured beyond repair. His own family who bears the immense burdens of a sacrifice he never personally made. Every Lumieran he's known and loved and the countless, countless more he's never met.
It feels pathetic. The words, the sentiment, the self-centred and self-piteous analysis of the Canvas' shared tragedies. But he has never been more honest and that – that doesn't feel so awful.]
[ There are things to intuit, here. How Verso's first instinct was to apologize to Clive about the nature of immortality. The sincerity with which Verso says I'm tired. Clive's knowledge of how Verso's reality... well, fractured after the Fracture.
It's becoming clearer and clearer, in some respects, that Verso doesn't necessarily want to be alive. Not like this, anyway. Not if being alive means what it does now.
Verso is tired. He's tired, so tired. He's had six decades to be tired, and the promise of more must be even more exhausting. There's nothing that can be done about that exhaustion; not even love can fix the kind of erosion that Verso has weathered.
It breaks Clive's heart, obviously. But it isn't about him, and he turns the shape of Verso's exhaustion over in his mental hands again, around and around, without wanting to break it or invalidate it.
And so, instead of negating or convincing, Clive offers: ] What else is troubling you? [ Even though he said that Verso doesn't have to speak on things if he doesn't want to. It still holds― Verso isn't obligated to explain anything to Clive if it'll only add to his deep well of existential dread― but it also occurs to Clive that Verso may not have had anyone who listened to him in a long while.
Bracing his weight on one hand, he lifts the other from the bed to reach for Verso's head, to bury his fingers in black-white hair and pull Verso's face into his shoulder. Effectively obscuring both of their faces from the other's view. ]
Edited (editing something 500 hours after the fact.... please do not perceive me) 2025-10-20 21:54 (UTC)
[Verso shakes his head at Clive's question. When his mind is on this kind of downward spiral, everything troubles him, everything's a fucking problem, and if he knew how to pull himself out of it before reaching a far lower point than he's at now, then he wouldn't regularly go years without seeing even Monoco and Esquie. And so he doesn't relax into Clive's embrace as much as he permits it to happen, yielding in favour of Clive and against his own reflexes to stay close but not too close, to always have an escape route open that he can slip away without having to push against anything. Without having to see the effects his departure has on someone else, either.
It's all he's known for decades – the devastating effects of absence on those left behind.
And maybe that's the sum of what's bothering him. Wanting so desperately to exist in isolation or not at all. The desire to go up in smoke, as should have been the way of things, yet also craving connection and the capacity to feel human and ordinary and real in ways the paint of his creation denies. To want and to need and to find the vulnerable parts of himself in Clive's warm and gentle presence. He's not just of two people, he's of two minds that he can't bring to a consensus.
Specifically, though, he's troubled by Clive. By Joshua. By the inevitability of Gommage and the potentiality of inflicting his curse on yet another human being. By the doubts, too, of whether he would even be able to make Joshua immortal, given how different Clive is, and the nature of Verso's feelings towards him, and the fact that he doesn't understand how he'd shared his immortality to begin with. What an awful way to disappoint someone that would be; what a horrific failure to have to move on from.
But, again, he doesn't want to burden Clive with his own dread about things that may or may not come to pass – things which Clive can easily come to his own realisations and understandings regarding. So, he lets out a breath of what might have been a laugh under better circumstances and responds as best he can.]
What isn't?
[He needs the world to stop spinning for a while; he needs to pretend as though time can be stopped. But it's the last thing he can ask for right now, so he brushes it off instead.]
I don't know what to do.
[About anything, as is often the case when his family reasserts how much control they have on the Canvas. What the fuck is he actually supposed to do about any of this?]
[ Clive can feel the snakelike coil of Verso's muscles, tense against his side. What isn't and I don't know are both valid feelings to have about the herculean task of mitigating family-related emotional blowback.
His fingers sift idly through Verso's hair. Strangely, he thinks of his mother, fettered by traditions that she kept tightly wound around her neck like a noose. He remembers the feeling of her absence, the severity of her frown, the sound of her footsteps receding. He also thinks of Joshua, of his small fingers curled around Clive's, the way his brother would cling to his front after sneaking into his bed complaining of nightmares, of the sound of Joshua's fitful coughing in the night. ]
You don't have to.
[ Is what Clive finally says, after a while. ] You can only do what you can, in the moment.
[ A small, sad truth. Especially when it comes to family. Clive has no grand solution to the problem of being tied to people who also have their own goals and aspirations; he has no advice to give beyond loving and loving and trying to find the best outlet for that love, no matter how much it hurts.
His hand slides away, and rests on bedsheets near the small of Verso's back. Chin tipped, he looks at a fixed point where the ceiling meets the wall, trying to orient himself in the geometric lines of their surroundings. ]
You've ever done your utmost. I think it's your family's turn to listen, now.
[Briefly, Verso tries to do nothing besides focus on the feeling of Clive's fingers in his hair. He closes his eyes. He slows his breathing. He centres his thoughts on the gentle pressure of fingertips, on the motion of his own hair as it's stroked in one direction or another, on the tingles that still travel across his scalp even now, even like this, above the numbness.
It does nothing to stop the deluge of guilt and regret and failure and futility, though, and Verso's very next breath comes out more shuddered and drawn-out. Nobody in his family knows how to listen. Nobody in his family even cares about anyone else doing their utmost. They just want what they want and they expect everyone else to fall into line.
So, the first part of his response is a simple and blunt:]
They won't.
[He doesn't feel like there's anything he can say that will reach them. The Paintress has been lost to her own delusions, the pained Renoir is locked into his view of a future where his family persists until there is nothing left, the real Renoir thinks love justifies extinction, Clea has no patience for anything in the Canvas anymore. Even Alicia has her own dreams to escape into, her own nightmares that imprison her.
Simply spouting out refusals and doubts doesn't help anyone, though, and so Verso opens his eyes back up, and he looks at his hands – better now but still badly hurt as the tint continues working its miracles – as he wills himself to elaborate on what, exactly, happened.]
Clea didn't. Yeah, she stopped, but... it wasn't because of anything I said, it was because she hurt herself.
[ Another little tragedy to add to the pile: Clive believes "they won't". Anabella has given him a strong foundation for the reality of "they won't", and that was from a mother that never loved him. He can't imagine the mental toll of hitting a wall against someone who once fostered something more nurturing, more open. Can't imagine, either, being sandwiched between that wall and the adjacent, potentially even more claustrophobic wall of knowing that memories of nurture and love may not be completely his own.
They won't. Clive slots that into his mental repository, and bites back the horrific solution to it all: that he could swallow Renoir and Alicia and Verso, thereby removing the Paintress' incentives to stay. That he could be the monster he needs to be, if this is his duty.
He doesn't say it, but he thinks it. Ifrit trills happily in his chest. ]
...Hurt herself?
[ So he asks, instead, for clarification on this point. His memory of those last few moments spent under Clea's thumb is fuzzy, but he can't recall anything that happened that might have made Clea feel threatened. It was only when she touched Clive's silver that she'd flinched, and even that'd seemed like a negligible retaliation. ]
[It's not his story. It hasn't happened to him. That doesn't matter to the memories, though; once again, they assert themselves like they haven't been stolen from another man. Verso's breathing grows more erratic, almost like panic, and he forces himself to calm it down to something more manageable, something more appropriate. What he has to share is about Verso, and it's about Clea, and it has nothing to do with him, not really, so he can't let himself bear the markers of their pains, too; he can't. He has to stop and centre himself and be a separate Verso.
But the Verso inside of his head doesn't listen any better than the rest of the family members do, and this Verso casts a glance towards the closed door to the room, unable to shake the fear that there might still be flames raging across the other side of the manor. A feeling that carries in his voice no matter how he fights to swallow it down.]
Verso burned to death. In a fire.
[Looking down at his arm again, his mind supplies him with memories of the other Verso doing the same. Jacket gone, shirt gone, skin gone, the sound of his own screaming turning into something animalistic as he lurched through the flames and tried to come to terms with his own death.
He died hoping Alicia would be all right. That he alone would succumb and that his family would be able to move on.
A sharp inhale. Another, another, another. Calm down, he scolds himself. This isn't your story.]
[ The world (that isn't a world at all) spins off its axis.
Because oh, of course. Another of a million revelations today, ironies on ironies on ironies, because of course it was a fire, and of course a young woman with her whipcrack severity would be the one to weaponize even her own trauma. Of course, of course. She painted a monster that could lay siege to her mother's wayward fantasies by reminding her of the very thing that necessitated it in the first place. Fire, uncompromising and inexorable, lapping at the edge of the Paintress' delusion. Clea's middle finger to all of them, all of this.
Clive's first instinct is to recoil. To put as much distance between himself and Verso as he possibly can. To think of what he's done all this time, all this fucking time.
He can't fucking understand how Verso could have let him stay.
His breath catches in his throat; to reach, or to go? His heart hammers against his ribs, hating the outline of that panic that he sees in Verso, wanting to soothe it with arms and palms, while shrinking from the reality that his presence is the cause of that panic.
Warm, too warm, hot. The mattress creaks as Clive pulls himself up and off of it. ]
―And you share that memory.
[ Not quite a why didn't you tell me. Unproductive to ask. How Clive feels about this being kept from him is irrelevant, yet another instance of 'how the hell was he going to broach the subject, even if he wanted to?'
I am the son, and he burned to death. Clive turns away, and scrubs at his face with his palm. ]
[Clive leaves and the chill that overtakes Verso is twofold.
First is, obviously, the loss of his presence. He runs warm; the room, cool. And they had been sitting so close to each other that the difference is immediately felt.
But second is the too-familiar chill of the real Verso's prominence. For a moment – for maybe longer than a moment – what matters isn't what they've shared over the past several weeks, and it isn't the things that this Verso has done and said and embraced, it's not the initiative he's taken both in terms of reaching out for the firebeast inside of Clive and asking to be imbued with Clive's own flames, it's that once upon a time, some other man died.
It's a good thing that Clive looks away, because the look on Verso's face speaks of something akin to betrayal.
There's more depth to it than that, he knows, more undeserved guilt and responsibility for Clive to hoist onto his own already overburdened shoulders, but still. The real Verso occupies the space between them. And that sucks. It really fucking sucks.]
Yeah.
[But not the way he once did, where the flicker of candlelight was capable of drawing forth the memories. Not in a way where reactions like the one he's having now are in any way common. Clea brought this about because the fire she had set him on was supposed to be the same, it was supposed to have this kind of an effect, and Verso hadn't expected her to go that far so he hasn't built up a defense against it yet. Usually he can hold it back. That he couldn't now makes him feel like he's failed both himself and Clive.]
[ A breath in and a breath out, to soothe the pitter-patter of a nervous heart. It's the time and space he needs― but doesn't necessarily want― to right his thoughts and align the correct ones with their respective emotions. Blue eyes shuttered behind his palm, missing that moment of pain that he's caused, but with contrition in the slope of his shoulders. He, too, wishes he could know what to do, and to do it gracefully in the same way that his father and mentor always seemed to manage.
Fire, and paint, and the thing that Clea made him. Family that won't listen, and the destruction that Clive was meant to cause. His evasion of his Gommage, and everything following it that kicked his past sense of reality out from under his feet.
Strangely, he doesn't despair. Running through it all, the memories and the uncertainty, is starlight still. Lyrical, musical silver, and the unflinching yeah Verso had placed in Clive's palm when he'd asked for Verso's trust.
So. He's subdued when he turns back, but calmer. The kneejerk reaction to the truth of the original Verso's death settles like ash at his feet; it's still a grand tragedy, that, but it's out of his hands. He was made to emulate the thing that caused all this trauma, but the simple fact remains that Clive has nothing to fucking do with it. Like Verso, he can't claim a sin that he hasn't committed. ]
―Clea fell on her own sword, then. [ Is his final verdict on the matter. ] Her and her family's greatest failing is that they can't see past their own designs.
[ He moves back towards Verso, but instead of sitting next to him, Clive kneels in front of him. A better, proper vantage point. Blue eyes flick up to the shape of Verso's expression, trying to read what's plain there and what might not be. ]
I know you're tired, Verso. [ Gently, sincerely. His voice skims low, like embers on coal. ] This has worn on you. I've worn on you.
[ As yet another responsibility for Verso to claim. But he says it without self-deprecation, and just as a statement of understanding. Which is what makes the next words out of his mouth probably the most selfish thing he's said aside from I love you; he says it on the heels of his flashbang disbelief, that scalding moment of self-imposed distance. ]
But I want to ask you to keep trying. To move onward with me. To find what we can do, in the face of all that we can't.
[ It's a cruel thing to ask, and Clive knows it. ]
We're already more than what anyone designed for us. This, I truly do believe.
They're Dessendres. Acting like they know better than everyone else is in their blood.
[Aline's perfectionism and Renoir's desire for control has proven to be a potent mix, manifesting differently in each of their children. Clea's brutality, Verso's masks, Alicia's isolation and the respite she found in the Writers. All of them who they were nurtured to be, none of them who they want to be. It's little fucking wonder what's happening in the Canvas, now.
By the time Clive looks back to Verso, that flicker of betrayal has faded, but there's still some distance behind his eyes, a wariness that he wishes he could conceal but that has taken on a life of its own, remaining firm even as Clive kneels. There are lies Verso tells to protect everyone else, lies to control the narrative, lies to keep himself going and to spare others from despair, lies to shield his true intentions, lies to manipulate. But the ones he tells about who he is and the things he doesn't share about his shared past – those are because he's afraid of what the truth will change.
The more Clive speaks, though, the less Verso doubts. And though there's an impulse – there's always an impulse – to argue against his claim to have worn on him, there's no smooth talking Clive into accepting that Ifrit attacking Verso wasn't wholly unpleasant, so he stays quiet. Listens. Tries to keep holding himself together even as the thought of moving forwards reminds him how little capacity he has for even the basics of existence right now.]
Who said anything about stopping?
[Is all he musters at first, his voice once again unable to rise to the challenge of bearing any humour. It's enough to make him want to add emphasis, so he reaches out to run the back of a finger along Clive's jaw, ignoring how it trembles, ignoring how it still burns.]
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flamebrand) wrote2024-09-08 02:07 pm
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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
i was also today years old ;;b the rp gods are smiling down on the sad men)Verso doesn't even notice how much neater the room is than it had been when they'd left; he just steps inside and closes his eyes and breathes in the otherworldly air as he lets Clive lead him onwards. The thought of sitting down – of being firm in the knowledge of knowing what he's meant to do next, no matter how slight – does even him out a little, but he pauses for a moment at Clive's question before taking a seat on the edge of the bed.]
Oh, come on. I don't seem that out of it, do I?
[Stupid question. He's a fucking zombie and he knows it. Can't even force himself to smile or lighten his tone for what was meant to be a joke. But he's a zombie who needs to make good on his word, so he starts contending with the not-insignificant matter of getting his jacket off – a slow, cautious affair that he insists on doing on his own, even as he solidifies his answer.]
Not if you don't.
[It's long been the case that Verso's thoughts are a dangerous thing when they're left to wander in isolation. So, even if there's a part of him that very much would like to pretend that he's finally found oblivion and doesn't have to exist anymore, he's also promised to try and be better. Which in this case feels like refusing to give into those impulses. The only things that have ever come from them are a deepening of his despair and an intensifying of his sense of futility.
Once his jacket is off, he nods towards the pouch at Clive's hip where he usually keeps his tints.]
Little help?
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The "not if you don't" is slightly more exasperating, given that it's not an answer to do you want, but Clive doesn't press it. Instead, he gives his verdict in a short: ] I don't. [ Which might be a bit more blunt than it should be, but Clive can only tell the truth. He doesn't want to be away from Verso, even if it might benefit the both of them to put their respective heads on straight before reaching for each other again.
Clive can justify it, at least. Verso's hands are fucked (his heart seizes when he sees the extent of the damage, the cuts and the chipped nails and the burnt flesh), and Clive needs to stay to make sure he heals.
The pouch unfastens; the most potent of his tints is fished out, and Clive moves to sit next to Verso on the bed as he removes the glass top of the bottle.
He taps at Verso's bottom lip with an index. ] Open, mon étoile. [ Not doing the horrifically cloying thing of kissing the liquid into Verso's mouth (though he briefly considers it), but insisting that he be responsible for pouring it. ]
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The words mon étoile stick with him all the while. Guilt gnaws at him in place of love; taken by the moment and quieted by the inadequacy of words, he had only wanted to make it undeniably clear how Clive made him feel. Now, he wonders how it came to be that he passed his mother's cursed blessing onto him.
Maybe it's just the nature of his chroma; maybe the essence of his drive to provide some solace from the cruelties of this world misconstrued his true intentions. Or maybe that was his intention. As much as he wants to deny that any part of himself would force another person to endure the Canvas until its destruction, he's been so fucking lonely for so fucking long that he can't put it past his subconscious to reach out like that, wrapping Clive up in infinity so that he doesn't have to deal with the grief.]
I meant what I said. [He says after a moment, voice soft with guilt and drawn taught with pain.] If I'd known what my chroma would do to you, I...
[Wouldn't have been so reckless. Now that he's started speaking, it's hard to put the rest of it to words. Clive is alive because of Verso's chroma – he gets to make more out of his life than Clea had intended. He might even get to reunite with his brother; the fact that Clea hadn't invoked Joshua's name at all has assuaged some of Verso's concerns that his survival is some manner of trap. How does he makes those things out to be mistakes?
He swallows. Chases distraction in the ache of recovery but finds it insufficient. Tries again to complete his thought.]
You should have had a choice. I'm sorry I took that from you.
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He also has sense enough to know when someone's apology, however unnecessary it might be, needs to be held in one's hand for consideration. Dismissing it would be easy enough, but that I'm sorry is another piece of honesty to add to the growing pile, and Clive doesn't want to be careless with it.
So. A stretch of silence, as Clive examines it. Yes, he should perhaps have had a chance to choose whether he wanted to live a longer life than he deserves. Yes, immortality might be something that required more thought and consideration before accepting. But. ]
Neither of us could have known. If we're to blame anything, we should blame my anatomy.
[ Maybe Verso could have had a more normal lover. A he, not an it. But Clive doesn't say that, and he tips his gaze sideways, brows slightly downturned but his expression gentle. Or, as gentle as he can make it, knowing the cruelty of what he's about to say next. ]
Or would it have hurt you less had I chosen not to have you, and died tonight?
[ Because no version of Clive would have chosen that outcome unless it was better for Verso overall. If he'd known the odds, and he'd weighed his options, he would always have chosen the option that didn't leave Verso to fend against the world alone. ]
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It's also true that Clive surviving hurts Verso less, at least in the immediacy of this moment. No good way exists for him to explain that at least, though; not without admitting how much his own immortality has proven that the longer he lives, the more he wishes he didn't have to go on any longer. But the thought of witnessing Clive's own slow descent into ideation sounds every bit as painful as losing him in an instant, and that leaves Verso struggling to figure out how to answer his question.
Trust me, be honest, let me help you. Cornerstones of their relationship, but not absolutes. Verso can't hide his feelings about life and death and immortality from Clive forever – if they're even still hidden – but there have been enough bombshell moments for the day, and so he falls silent as he thinks about how he actually feels behind the shock and the pain, really thinks about it, until he comes up with something that seems mostly right. They can't predict the future, they can only exist in the present, so:]
No. Of course not. I'm just... I'm tired of making things harder on everyone.
[Clive with his newfound immortality. Clea with her conflicted, aggressive grief. Aline with her inability to move on. Renoir with his white-knuckled grip on a family that Verso's creation had fractured beyond repair. His own family who bears the immense burdens of a sacrifice he never personally made. Every Lumieran he's known and loved and the countless, countless more he's never met.
It feels pathetic. The words, the sentiment, the self-centred and self-piteous analysis of the Canvas' shared tragedies. But he has never been more honest and that – that doesn't feel so awful.]
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It's becoming clearer and clearer, in some respects, that Verso doesn't necessarily want to be alive. Not like this, anyway. Not if being alive means what it does now.
Verso is tired. He's tired, so tired. He's had six decades to be tired, and the promise of more must be even more exhausting. There's nothing that can be done about that exhaustion; not even love can fix the kind of erosion that Verso has weathered.
It breaks Clive's heart, obviously. But it isn't about him, and he turns the shape of Verso's exhaustion over in his mental hands again, around and around, without wanting to break it or invalidate it.
And so, instead of negating or convincing, Clive offers: ] What else is troubling you? [ Even though he said that Verso doesn't have to speak on things if he doesn't want to. It still holds― Verso isn't obligated to explain anything to Clive if it'll only add to his deep well of existential dread― but it also occurs to Clive that Verso may not have had anyone who listened to him in a long while.
Bracing his weight on one hand, he lifts the other from the bed to reach for Verso's head, to bury his fingers in black-white hair and pull Verso's face into his shoulder. Effectively obscuring both of their faces from the other's view. ]
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It's all he's known for decades – the devastating effects of absence on those left behind.
And maybe that's the sum of what's bothering him. Wanting so desperately to exist in isolation or not at all. The desire to go up in smoke, as should have been the way of things, yet also craving connection and the capacity to feel human and ordinary and real in ways the paint of his creation denies. To want and to need and to find the vulnerable parts of himself in Clive's warm and gentle presence. He's not just of two people, he's of two minds that he can't bring to a consensus.
Specifically, though, he's troubled by Clive. By Joshua. By the inevitability of Gommage and the potentiality of inflicting his curse on yet another human being. By the doubts, too, of whether he would even be able to make Joshua immortal, given how different Clive is, and the nature of Verso's feelings towards him, and the fact that he doesn't understand how he'd shared his immortality to begin with. What an awful way to disappoint someone that would be; what a horrific failure to have to move on from.
But, again, he doesn't want to burden Clive with his own dread about things that may or may not come to pass – things which Clive can easily come to his own realisations and understandings regarding. So, he lets out a breath of what might have been a laugh under better circumstances and responds as best he can.]
What isn't?
[He needs the world to stop spinning for a while; he needs to pretend as though time can be stopped. But it's the last thing he can ask for right now, so he brushes it off instead.]
I don't know what to do.
[About anything, as is often the case when his family reasserts how much control they have on the Canvas. What the fuck is he actually supposed to do about any of this?]
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His fingers sift idly through Verso's hair. Strangely, he thinks of his mother, fettered by traditions that she kept tightly wound around her neck like a noose. He remembers the feeling of her absence, the severity of her frown, the sound of her footsteps receding. He also thinks of Joshua, of his small fingers curled around Clive's, the way his brother would cling to his front after sneaking into his bed complaining of nightmares, of the sound of Joshua's fitful coughing in the night. ]
You don't have to.
[ Is what Clive finally says, after a while. ] You can only do what you can, in the moment.
[ A small, sad truth. Especially when it comes to family. Clive has no grand solution to the problem of being tied to people who also have their own goals and aspirations; he has no advice to give beyond loving and loving and trying to find the best outlet for that love, no matter how much it hurts.
His hand slides away, and rests on bedsheets near the small of Verso's back. Chin tipped, he looks at a fixed point where the ceiling meets the wall, trying to orient himself in the geometric lines of their surroundings. ]
You've ever done your utmost. I think it's your family's turn to listen, now.
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It does nothing to stop the deluge of guilt and regret and failure and futility, though, and Verso's very next breath comes out more shuddered and drawn-out. Nobody in his family knows how to listen. Nobody in his family even cares about anyone else doing their utmost. They just want what they want and they expect everyone else to fall into line.
So, the first part of his response is a simple and blunt:]
They won't.
[He doesn't feel like there's anything he can say that will reach them. The Paintress has been lost to her own delusions, the pained Renoir is locked into his view of a future where his family persists until there is nothing left, the real Renoir thinks love justifies extinction, Clea has no patience for anything in the Canvas anymore. Even Alicia has her own dreams to escape into, her own nightmares that imprison her.
Simply spouting out refusals and doubts doesn't help anyone, though, and so Verso opens his eyes back up, and he looks at his hands – better now but still badly hurt as the tint continues working its miracles – as he wills himself to elaborate on what, exactly, happened.]
Clea didn't. Yeah, she stopped, but... it wasn't because of anything I said, it was because she hurt herself.
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They won't. Clive slots that into his mental repository, and bites back the horrific solution to it all: that he could swallow Renoir and Alicia and Verso, thereby removing the Paintress' incentives to stay. That he could be the monster he needs to be, if this is his duty.
He doesn't say it, but he thinks it. Ifrit trills happily in his chest. ]
...Hurt herself?
[ So he asks, instead, for clarification on this point. His memory of those last few moments spent under Clea's thumb is fuzzy, but he can't recall anything that happened that might have made Clea feel threatened. It was only when she touched Clive's silver that she'd flinched, and even that'd seemed like a negligible retaliation. ]
In what way?
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But the Verso inside of his head doesn't listen any better than the rest of the family members do, and this Verso casts a glance towards the closed door to the room, unable to shake the fear that there might still be flames raging across the other side of the manor. A feeling that carries in his voice no matter how he fights to swallow it down.]
Verso burned to death. In a fire.
[Looking down at his arm again, his mind supplies him with memories of the other Verso doing the same. Jacket gone, shirt gone, skin gone, the sound of his own screaming turning into something animalistic as he lurched through the flames and tried to come to terms with his own death.
He died hoping Alicia would be all right. That he alone would succumb and that his family would be able to move on.
A sharp inhale. Another, another, another. Calm down, he scolds himself. This isn't your story.]
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Because oh, of course. Another of a million revelations today, ironies on ironies on ironies, because of course it was a fire, and of course a young woman with her whipcrack severity would be the one to weaponize even her own trauma. Of course, of course. She painted a monster that could lay siege to her mother's wayward fantasies by reminding her of the very thing that necessitated it in the first place. Fire, uncompromising and inexorable, lapping at the edge of the Paintress' delusion. Clea's middle finger to all of them, all of this.
Clive's first instinct is to recoil. To put as much distance between himself and Verso as he possibly can. To think of what he's done all this time, all this fucking time.
He can't fucking understand how Verso could have let him stay.
His breath catches in his throat; to reach, or to go? His heart hammers against his ribs, hating the outline of that panic that he sees in Verso, wanting to soothe it with arms and palms, while shrinking from the reality that his presence is the cause of that panic.
Warm, too warm, hot. The mattress creaks as Clive pulls himself up and off of it. ]
―And you share that memory.
[ Not quite a why didn't you tell me. Unproductive to ask. How Clive feels about this being kept from him is irrelevant, yet another instance of 'how the hell was he going to broach the subject, even if he wanted to?'
I am the son, and he burned to death. Clive turns away, and scrubs at his face with his palm. ]
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First is, obviously, the loss of his presence. He runs warm; the room, cool. And they had been sitting so close to each other that the difference is immediately felt.
But second is the too-familiar chill of the real Verso's prominence. For a moment – for maybe longer than a moment – what matters isn't what they've shared over the past several weeks, and it isn't the things that this Verso has done and said and embraced, it's not the initiative he's taken both in terms of reaching out for the firebeast inside of Clive and asking to be imbued with Clive's own flames, it's that once upon a time, some other man died.
It's a good thing that Clive looks away, because the look on Verso's face speaks of something akin to betrayal.
There's more depth to it than that, he knows, more undeserved guilt and responsibility for Clive to hoist onto his own already overburdened shoulders, but still. The real Verso occupies the space between them. And that sucks. It really fucking sucks.]
Yeah.
[But not the way he once did, where the flicker of candlelight was capable of drawing forth the memories. Not in a way where reactions like the one he's having now are in any way common. Clea brought this about because the fire she had set him on was supposed to be the same, it was supposed to have this kind of an effect, and Verso hadn't expected her to go that far so he hasn't built up a defense against it yet. Usually he can hold it back. That he couldn't now makes him feel like he's failed both himself and Clive.]
I don't claim it as my own, but. It's there.
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Fire, and paint, and the thing that Clea made him. Family that won't listen, and the destruction that Clive was meant to cause. His evasion of his Gommage, and everything following it that kicked his past sense of reality out from under his feet.
Strangely, he doesn't despair. Running through it all, the memories and the uncertainty, is starlight still. Lyrical, musical silver, and the unflinching yeah Verso had placed in Clive's palm when he'd asked for Verso's trust.
So. He's subdued when he turns back, but calmer. The kneejerk reaction to the truth of the original Verso's death settles like ash at his feet; it's still a grand tragedy, that, but it's out of his hands. He was made to emulate the thing that caused all this trauma, but the simple fact remains that Clive has nothing to fucking do with it. Like Verso, he can't claim a sin that he hasn't committed. ]
―Clea fell on her own sword, then. [ Is his final verdict on the matter. ] Her and her family's greatest failing is that they can't see past their own designs.
[ He moves back towards Verso, but instead of sitting next to him, Clive kneels in front of him. A better, proper vantage point. Blue eyes flick up to the shape of Verso's expression, trying to read what's plain there and what might not be. ]
I know you're tired, Verso. [ Gently, sincerely. His voice skims low, like embers on coal. ] This has worn on you. I've worn on you.
[ As yet another responsibility for Verso to claim. But he says it without self-deprecation, and just as a statement of understanding. Which is what makes the next words out of his mouth probably the most selfish thing he's said aside from I love you; he says it on the heels of his flashbang disbelief, that scalding moment of self-imposed distance. ]
But I want to ask you to keep trying. To move onward with me. To find what we can do, in the face of all that we can't.
[ It's a cruel thing to ask, and Clive knows it. ]
We're already more than what anyone designed for us. This, I truly do believe.
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[Aline's perfectionism and Renoir's desire for control has proven to be a potent mix, manifesting differently in each of their children. Clea's brutality, Verso's masks, Alicia's isolation and the respite she found in the Writers. All of them who they were nurtured to be, none of them who they want to be. It's little fucking wonder what's happening in the Canvas, now.
By the time Clive looks back to Verso, that flicker of betrayal has faded, but there's still some distance behind his eyes, a wariness that he wishes he could conceal but that has taken on a life of its own, remaining firm even as Clive kneels. There are lies Verso tells to protect everyone else, lies to control the narrative, lies to keep himself going and to spare others from despair, lies to shield his true intentions, lies to manipulate. But the ones he tells about who he is and the things he doesn't share about his shared past – those are because he's afraid of what the truth will change.
The more Clive speaks, though, the less Verso doubts. And though there's an impulse – there's always an impulse – to argue against his claim to have worn on him, there's no smooth talking Clive into accepting that Ifrit attacking Verso wasn't wholly unpleasant, so he stays quiet. Listens. Tries to keep holding himself together even as the thought of moving forwards reminds him how little capacity he has for even the basics of existence right now.]
Who said anything about stopping?
[Is all he musters at first, his voice once again unable to rise to the challenge of bearing any humour. It's enough to make him want to add emphasis, so he reaches out to run the back of a finger along Clive's jaw, ignoring how it trembles, ignoring how it still burns.]
Don't worry about me. I'll be okay.
[He has no choice.]
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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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...