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Maelle is so vibrant. For all her misery and grief and rage, she is undeniably alive, undeniably real. Sometimes it hurts to look at her. Alicia should have that, too. Maman forgot the color when she painted his sister. Forgot, as if anything she painted was ever by accident. If there is one thing she has, it is control, an artistic hand that is steady and unwavering. She stole the color from Alicia when she painted her, stole her life and her voice. She did it on purpose.
But Maelle still has a life, and a voice, and a future. She should get to keep them. It’s not fair, but Verso learned a long time ago that his father is wrong about many things, this included: none of it is her fault.
She barely eats, barely sleeps, barely talks to anyone. Losing Gustave has been hard on her. What an understatement, one of those platitudes she nearly bit his head off for trying to use on her. He should have known better. Alicia, in her own quiet way, hated to be lied to more than anything. It made her feel small, talked down to.
He doesn’t know what Alicia was like after Verso died. Like this, probably. Pulling away from everyone, retreating into herself. It runs in the family.
As best as he can, Verso always tries to do what Verso would do. It isn’t penance, or obligation. He knows he’ll only ever be a copy, paint flaking and faded with time. Maybe he has no choice. Maybe it’s just who he is. He thinks that the real Verso did the same thing. Trying to be himself, to find the right face to put on, to know who that should be. It’s a comfort, sometimes, to think that that’s why Verso doesn’t know who that is either. It’s not because he isn’t himself. It’s because he is.
But this, he knows. Verso would have wanted to comfort Alicia after the fire. And here is Maelle, mourning her brother. It hurts to look at her and he can’t look away. Maelle, alone by the water; Alicia, alone in that big house, wasting away. The canvas and the reverse.
Verso finds Maelle sitting at the edge of the river. They buried what was left of Gustave a few days ago. Since then, the others have silently ceded this grove to Maelle, a place for her to mourn in peace. Verso knows exactly what that does to you. Sitting alone with your thoughts, letting them stew. Until you go and get yourself eaten by a snake, or try to kill your father, or paint yourself a new family and break open an entire world.
Maelle doesn’t have to want him there. She’s made it very clear that she doesn’t. But she shouldn’t be alone.
He sits down next to her. She ignores him, staring down at her hands, passing a stone back and forth between them.
“I won’t offer my condolences again,” Verso says. “But company helps. Consider me an experienced mentor in this area.”
She doesn’t look up. “An expert in watching people die?”
“It’s been a long hundred years. Yes.”
Maelle tosses the rock in the air, catches it with a flash of her wrist nearly too quick to see. Alicia always liked her fencing lessons. Her parents didn’t care about that kind of thing, so they left her alone to it—and because they left her alone, she shined. It was only when there were too many eyes on her that she faltered. Her father never understood that.
“I’m just sick of it,” Maelle says, nearly under her breath.
“Yeah,” Verso says. “Me too.”
She reels her arm back and throws. The splash is small in the face of the rushing river, the wide open sky.
“How do you—ugh.” Maelle shakes her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay,” Verso agrees. “What do you want to talk about?”
She turns to him. Very slowly, she reaches a hand out to his face, like she thinks he’ll pull away. How could she know, after all, that she’s the only one he won’t pull away from? She traces her fingers just under his eye, along the scar.
“Can you really not die?”
Verso shrugs. “Hasn’t taken yet.” He gives her his best smile. “Want to give it a go?”
“That’s not funny.” She takes her hand away. “Does it hurt?”
She could mean anything: the scar, the mortal wounds, walking away from them after. “You get used to it.”
“Right,” Maelle says. “I guess you can get used to anything. Even…” She looks out at the water, and then down at her hands, and then at Verso. Something in her face goes hard, determined. Alicia, trying so hard to paint something Maman would approve of.
In a lurch of movement, Maelle lunges for him. Verso has to focus on staying still, but he does—if she wants to hit him, she can hit him. He can take it.
She doesn’t hit him. She puts clumsy hands on his shoulders and uses the leverage to lean in and press her mouth over his.
Verso jerks back. He brings his hands up, but checks himself before he shoves her away. She might fall into the water. He tries not to grip her shoulders too hard, not to hurt her. “Maelle,” he says. He has no idea how to continue. She doesn’t know. It’s not her fault. No matter what, he can’t let her think it’s her fault.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she says. “Like I’m a child.”
“You are a child,” he says, grasping for it. It’s even true. “Maelle, this isn’t—”
She glares at him. “I’m not,” she says. “Everyone says that, but I grew up in Lumiere. My life has always been almost over, always! I did the maths when I was ten. I was only ever going to be twenty-five. I’ve always known exactly when it would end. And I thought that if I came here, I’d at least have the rest of his life, and we can’t even—I just want—I don’t want to think about it anymore, I don’t want to think about how he isn’t here. Please. I just want to be—somewhere else.”
Alicia, looking out the window, dreaming of other worlds but balking at putting them to canvas. Staying home when Verso and Clea came here to play, and then watching them with wounded lonely misery when they came back.
Verso burned and left her alone in that manor again, and finally she came here to escape, and now she’s back where she started. You run and you run and only ever find more to run from. Verso knows all about that.
He puts his hand on her cheek. Maelle leans into the touch, and Verso has a horrible thought. “Gustave—he never—” He’ll find a way to kill him again, if he fucking touched her—
Maelle blinks, looking at him with disdain, with disgust. “What? No, of course not. He was always my brother.”
Of course. Hypocrisy runs in the family too, Verso has always known that.
“Then you know what he’d say if he was here. He’d knock my lights out.”
She shrugs out of his hold and climbs, determinedly, into his lap. She picks up his hands and puts them on her waist, like she’s posing him to sit for a portrait. “But he’s not,” Maelle says, her voice gone very small. “He’s not. He’s gone. I thought you wanted to help me. Isn’t that why you won’t leave me alone like everyone else?”
“The others want to help you too,” Verso says. Despite everything, it feels good to hold her. She always fit so well into his arms, she never got so big he couldn’t pick her up and swing her around and make her shriek with laughter. “They just don’t know how. It’s a bad idea, Maelle.”
He tries to pick her up and move her, but she tightens her knees around his thighs and shoves at his shoulders, knocking him back onto his elbows.
“I know,” she says. “I know. But what else do we have left?” She shakes her head. “Just a bunch of bad ideas. This whole thing, this whole life. It’s all just a bad idea.”
There is something else left. There is, he has to tell her there is. Revenge, maybe. Killing Renoir, saving Lumiere—except of course she won’t save it, he’s taking that from her too. He has nothing to give her but empty condolences and a shattered dream of a living town and an empty manor and—this.
He can’t comfort her like he would Alicia. He and his sister can understand each other without speaking, but with Maelle—he can’t find the words to make it better, he can’t write her another lullaby, but she’ll let him hold her. She wants him to. As long as it’s like this.
This is the moment when he should say something. It doesn’t matter what, it doesn’t have to be the truth. Anything to get his sister, Verso’s sister, out of his lap. There was a moment just like this with Julie. He found it, afterwards, alone and stewing over it. The moment when he could have told her the truth, could have made her understand, could have saved her life. There’s always a moment. The real Verso knew it. When he had to, really had to, he lost everything to save his sister.
And he’s dead. The Verso that’s left has always been a coward. That’s the one thing he’s sure is all his own.
He lets Maelle lean down and kiss him again. It startles a shaky breath out of him. For all her harshness, her movements are tentative now. Her lips are chapped. She’s trembling, very finely, like a plucked piano string.
Verso opens his mouth and kisses her back. Tries to hold her gently, one hand at the back of her neck. Thinks of Julie, of Sciel, of anyone but her. What would Alicia say? Clea would kill him, finally, like they used to joke about—
Maelle’s hand presses down between his legs. He’s not hard, he’s not, but he isn’t soft, either.
Verso nearly unbalances them both with how fast he moves. He takes her wrist in his hand, his grip too tight, furious with her, sick with himself. For just a second, when she looks at him with startled eyes, she’s afraid of him. He drops her like her skin burns.
He takes a deep breath. “No,” he says, keeping his tone soft. “No, just let me. Let me do this for you.”
Her eyes are so wide when she nods. He’s still hoping she’ll get up and walk away. Instead, she says, in a small voice, “Thank you.”
Verso—Verso doesn’t want to think about anything either. He unbuttons her trousers and shoves his hand inside. She gasps when he presses against her, slick and soft already.
He rocks his hand against her, slowly at first, getting her used to it. She’s biting her lip. Maybe if she was louder Lune would hear and come and set him on fire. That’s about what he feels like, anyway, hot with shame, strong enough that he can feel it in his cheeks and his ears and his throat.
He sets a hand on her waist to help her balance, to make sure she doesn’t fall. “Breathe.”
“You can—you don’t have to be gentle,” she snaps. “I’m not some kind of doll.”
Verso can’t help it. He laughs. If either of them is a doll, it certainly isn’t her.
“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
He presses one finger inside her. He’d close his eyes if he could, but he can’t look away from her face. Mouth a little open, in concentration and a little awe as she figures out how to move. He’s seen that face before. Alicia writing poetry she wouldn’t show him, all her focus inward.
The angle’s bad; his wrist aches to bend the way he needs, a good grounding pain. He’s lost track of how many times he’s broken it over the years.
“Alright?” he asks, and wishes he hadn’t. He doesn’t want to hurt her, but he doesn’t want to talk. But maybe it’s worse, if she’s silent. Either way, it’s worse.
Her cheeks are flushed, her bangs starting to stick to her forehead where she’s sweating. He’s horribly grateful that she didn’t take her hair down. “You’re—oh,” she says. “You’re good at this.”
He shifts his hand, grinds his palm against her, feeling the way it makes her shudder. “I did do some things other than watch people die over the last hundred years.”
She laughs, a bright shock of sound. Her hand flies up to cover her mouth. Beneath it, she’s smiling, suddenly, mischievous. “I appreciate benefiting from your experienced mentorship, then.”
“That’s not funny,” Verso says, more sharply than he intends. He pushes another finger inside her, and she gasps, clenching tight.
“It’s a little funny,” she says, her voice wavering. “Does it—does it make it better?”
“What? Doing—something else? Than watching people die?”
He thinks, if he just moves a little faster, gives her a little more resistance to push against, he can get her there. He can make her come and she won’t feel better but she won’t feel worse, and he won’t have to be in this moment anymore. Nothing lasts forever. That’s something else you learn, living forever.
“Yeah,” Maelle says. Her voice still has that tremble to it. “That’s the idea, right? Not being alone.”
Like everything, it helps until it doesn’t. He remembers the way Julie had looked at him, the last time they fucked, and then just the last time.
Verso pulls Maelle closer to him, feeling the twinge in his wrist as it presses more of her weight down on it. She gasps, jerks against him. He’s here, now. He can’t be anywhere else. Julie is dead, and Verso is dead, but Maelle is alive. He can feel her breath every time she moves.
“There you go,” he says. She’s hot around him, her hips shifting haltingly against his hand. He puts his hand on her hip, urging her to move faster. “There you go. Don’t think about anything else. You’re okay. You’re here with me, you’re okay.”
“Fuck,” she says, and makes an undignified stifled noise, jerking forward to press her mouth to his cheek to muffle the sound. He feels her go tight around his fingers, the rest of her shaking. Maybe just for a moment she really isn’t thinking about anything else.
He turns his head. Not to kiss her; just to be close. For a moment, they’re both just breathing together.
Verso eases his fingers out of her. As soon as they’re disentangled she collapses into him. Her knees go tight around his hips, her arms wrapped around his middle, her face shoved into his neck. She’s shaking with how hard she’s started to cry. You can run and run and run, but some things always catch you.
“It still hurts,” she whispers. “I just want him back. Why won’t he come back?”
Verso wraps his arms around her and tips his head back to the sky. His hand is still wet. Her trousers are still open between them. Being cut in half hurts just like this, but it doesn’t matter. His sister needs him.
“I know,” he says. At least he doesn’t have to look her in the eye while he lies to her this time. He squeezes her, as hard as he can. “I know, sweetheart. It’s going to be alright.”