Archive of Our Own

There are two things Maelle notices about their new ally, this man they call Verso, in the matter of a scant few days.

First, as a person, he is altogether unlike Gustave. It is only that if you look, from far enough away, the silhouette can confuse you, for just a moment. She wonders if the others have had a similar experience, have seen a familiar flicker in the light: of Gustave’s mechanical arm, of the wild curls of his hair. Maelle has, and she has thought of asking, softly: you, too? She finds the question dies in her throat the first few times she tries, and so she thinks better of it.

She notices also that he treats her a little strange, both distant and familiar. Verso’s hand is always hovering, always: about her shoulder, around the small of her back, but never touching, never.

He is different around Lune and Sciel. Maelle can tell: they don’t trust him, but they are charmed by him, in spite of themselves. Lune likes his reliability, his answers at hand; Sciel likes his occasional joke. Maelle finds herself listening, even when they think she is not. She hears Sciel proposition him, and she wonders if she’s figured it out, finally, the difference between them and her: that she is not a woman to him, not in that way.

She hears him turn her down and finds herself at once relieved and disappointed. So, not that, then. It would be easier if it was, but then she would have been irritated by the simplicity of it—really, only that?

So he remains new and novel, a mystery to them too. They complain to her, when he is out of earshot, that he is not very forthcoming, very good at dodging questions. Sciel says also: I would trade him away for Gustave, in a heartbeat. Lune admits that it would not be very tactically sound to do that—after all, Verso knows more, has seen more—but then, as if feeling some shame at her own pragmatism, she would begin a reciting of Gustave’s virtues: he was a right historian, knowledgeable in his own right, and of course, our moral glue, our human heart.

What it all boils down too, in the end, is a warning in Maelle’s ears: be careful. And yet, she finds he talks more about himself around her than she would have expected.

Verso, the pianist. Verso: the odd kid, like you, when you were young. He implies this, and smiles at her a little nervously. He isn’t like that around the others, and Maelle is not sure whether to be offended, to be concerned, or—to be flattered?

They say: don’t ask, don’t get. She supposes that maybe he has grown tired of asking after things and takes it upon herself.

“Is it,” Maelle asks, “because you think I’m a child?” And, because he is taken aback speechless, she continues: “You treat me differently than you treat the others.”

His eyes dart about, and he looks like he is about to lie to her. Maelle is resigned to that, but she wants to hear the lie and see how much of the truth has seeped into it, regardless.

Verso tells her, all sincerity: “I’m sorry.” Maelle frowns. It is not even a lie—it is just silence.

...

When they are separated in Old Lumiére and it is only the two of them—well, the two of them and Noco—he lets her walk ahead. She can feel his gaze on her, and when she stumbles on the broken pavement, he is there to catch her: attentive. His grip on her elbow is strong, almost a little too firm. She hears his breath catch behind her, and when she turns around:

“Are you alright?” Verso says this looking more distraught than he has ever before. It couldn’t just be the pavement, the stumble, the tripping—but he won’t say, of course. She flashes him a smile.

“If I were as fragile as you think I am, I’d have fallen apart already with how hard you’re holding me.” He jumps back then, as if her arm had burned him, the lick of a flame rising higher than you would have expected. He says again, I’m sorry. She’s had enough of his apologies—she wishes they were emptier than they were. Instead, they are filled with something she can’t understand, deeper than they ought to be and always so very opaque.

“Don’t be.” Maelle pauses. Perhaps she was crueler than she ought to be, in her frustrations. “I didn’t really mean for it to be a complaint.” His face lightens up quickly at that, but it brings Maelle herself little particular joy. I am only one expeditioner of many, she thinks, how is it that I can have this sort of effect?

Verso takes her hand and folds it into his own. They are rough but warm, big enough to cover hers entirely. His eyes convey an odd gratitude, and his voice: “Be ever careful. Sometimes we are stronger than we think, like Esquie with his strength, and sometimes we are weaker than we think,” and here he smiled back at her, “like me.”

...

Maelle feels him beside her before she sees him—his long hair, its streaks of grey, and the scar that runs across the one eye—run past her, right past her. The sights she sees, what she hears him say: it is enough to render her mute, and so she says nothing as Verso talks, and talks, and talks with an abandon she has never seen before.

But, even if she is perhaps mute in this moment she is not blind. She looks a lot like me, Maelle thinks to herself, this woman masked. And then, of course, when Maelle sees a flash of silver overhead that she had not expected, in spite of all her fast reflexes, in spite of her skill and speed, there is him yelling: “Alicia!”

He is off yelling other things after that, merde, fuck, fuck everything, but Maelle sees this Alicia instead of him—bowed over and raving now—moving to remove the mask from her face, slowly, slowly, and: oh.

So, I remind him of her. It is not so different from when, in the right light, she could imagine Gustave standing next to her again, throwing rocks.

...

Here is something new, newly different: Verso approaching her now, as if afraid. Before he was anxious, or eager, in quiet anticipation of something or other, but now it is clear to her. He is afraid of me, comes the thought vaguely to mind, though he stands a head taller and has many, many more years on her.

Because he is quiet, waiting on her, she decides to jump straight to it: “So, Alicia is your sister?” Sheepishly, he admits it and looks away. Yes, he says, how did you know?

Maelle fights the urge to roll her eyes. Because you shouted it out loud, for everyone to hear—do you think me dumb, deaf, and blind? But, she supposes he has enough scolding for the day. Sciel has swapped her amusement for a cold cynicism and Lune too—for now, he is only a specimen, not a friend. Maelle was almost certain Lune glared daggers at him when he trailed after her to her usual spot in the lake. There was a hiss and a whisper, a warning of: don’t try anything funny, or we’ll hear you, we’ll hear her, and this time we’ll come running with our knives sharpened.

So, instead: “Do I look like a sister to you?” She gets a rapid flutter of blinks in response. With a nervous laugh—always nervous around her, always jittery—he says: “What does it mean to look like a sister?”

He adds: “As opposed to being one, I mean.” It seems a genuine curiosity, and Maelle is not sure herself what she meant by asking the question in the first place.

“Are they one and the same?” Verso continues on, surprisingly pushy, and Maelle sighs. Why was she now on the back foot, anyway?

“Well, if they were, they wouldn’t be two separate questions, would they?” It’s meant to be a meaningless answer, thrown out to get him off her back, but it seems to shake something loose within him, the way he looks back at her.

“Then,” he starts tentatively, “is Gustave a brother or a father? Because you had said he felt like both—” Maelle glares at him then, at his shameless use of something she had said out of pure emotion, that simple emotion of grief. No holds barred, then. Why had she even bothered being sympathetic before?

She reminds herself: he is very good at dodging questions, he is not very forthcoming, and we—I? We. We would’ve traded him away for Gustave, in a heartbeat. She is trying to remember, in her irritation—who said that? It wasn’t me, was it?

“It doesn’t matter,” she snaps back, “it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to label him to work out how much I should miss him. Only that I do.”

Because I do, she ends lamely, and for once, in lieu of an apology, Verso says: “I do too. Alicia—I miss her too.”

Because it surprises her, his candid voice and its slight shake, she looks up. His eyes shine just a little wet before he blinks it away, and she supposes for his little sliver of truth, for an answer and for his tears—he may be forgiven.

...

Their new plan: dangerous, suicidal, its odds close to zero? It gives Lune comfort. Perhaps it is because she likes a challenge, Maelle thinks—she never had that herself, an inclination for the steep over the smooth. She took to fencing because she had a talent for it; she took to the skies, grappling from building to building, because she had a talent for that too—that, and because the couriers were the only ones willing to take her in.

Still, she admires Lune and her mastery over chroma, the hard work that must go into it, just as she had admired Gustave for his technical mind. His achievements—the Lumina converter, the reverence of his apprentices, the quiet ease with which his co-workers respected him—those brought her comfort in place of her own grand achievements, her own grand conquests.

Gustave had always brought her comfort—but now, even that is not entirely true. Some nights she finds her nightmares repeat themselves, the same image layered on top the same image. There is one in particular that haunts her: Gustave in his Sunday best, Gustave in his blue suit from Lumiére, reaching out to her—and burning. The flames lick his face until she can’t even see him anymore, his kind eyes and patient smile, and the blue is a pitch black of ash. What does fabric smell like, burning? And leather, which is all but skin in a different form. The dreams invent for her: like this. It smells like the oil Gustave used on his arm, burning; it smells like the cream he used for his hair, burning. It smells like nothing that isn’t him because this is not a real fire, it is one made to torture her.

She wakes then, in a sweat. Her hair is plastered to her forehead, and a wipe of her hand across it leaves it damp. She wakes up and sees Verso looking at her, pity written across his face, and his hands have stopped what they were doing, sharpening the edge of his dagger.

...

He, Verso, is starting to regret now having left him to his death—Gustave, that is. He hears Maelle unravel her dream—her nightmare, really—and he feels something ugly uncurl itself in his chest too. It is heavy, and it feels a little like envy.

“Gustave is gone now,” Maelle seems to complain to herself in the silence Verso has given her, “so why do I see him, dying again and again?” She has her head buried in her hands, spindly things, wrapping herself in her arms. And it smells always of fire, and ash, and smoke, she mumbles, on and on—leather, which is but skin, and then skin itself.

Slowly, Verso untangles Maelle from herself—he wants to see her face. Or, he wants to emphasize: don’t turn inwards, which he knows to be dangerous; turn, at least, to me.

“Gustave was never afraid of flame or fire.” She tells him this, like it is a fact. Verso thinks: most of us aren’t, until it touches us. He says more comforting things out loud, says, “It is just an image. It is just a dream.”

This, though he knows that even mere images can be dangerous. Mere images, like himself, breeding dangerous thoughts. This mourning belongs to Verso, the original one, his mind begrudges the girl trembling against his chest. His mind adds also: and to me—it belongs to me, too.

And so, he pushes maybe a little more than he ought to, touches her a little more than he should: he brings her in even closer, saying, come here, and his hand is flat on her small back, soothing, “You’ll be alright. I’m here, and I’ve got you.”

...

The Axon with the masks—it reminds Verso of what he is, what he is meant to be. Hiding, always, and his emotions allowed only to be two kinds: defined, or dismissed. He can accept joy, how it blooms within his chest when Esquie reassures him: you are who you are, Verso or not. He can accept anger too, when he thinks a little too hard and a little too long about his Alicia, condemned to that meagre thing their mother called life. He could accept, perhaps, even sadness: the way memories of Julie could strike at him harder than any physical blow. But, whatever it was he was feeling recently, that ugly, grasping feeling sinking slowly into his bowels as if to embed itself: he is thinking, I will not think about it anymore than I have to.

So, he says, this night with Maelle in a cheerier mood: “Tell me what your life was like, back in Lumiére.” She doesn’t know that he knows the contours of it already, from the time he spent slithering across rooftops and keeping an eye on her—as per a request from their dear sister. It is why he feels it a comfortable topic, knowing in advance what she might say. Knowing, more than she knew.

Maelle has told him already about how she had felt aimless; she has told him also about her work, the one before this one, anyway. She tells him now about the people she had around her: both familiar ones and not. He hears a little about Emma, and he wonders if she is like the sister they do share—stern, but perhaps for good reason.

“That’s… a pretty good characterization of her,” Maelle admits, a little impressed, and Verso registers: joy. Or, perhaps, if he were to be ungenerous to himself, a little bit of self-satisfaction.

There is Gustave, of course, whom Verso has grown a little afraid of hearing brought up. Selfishly, he steers her away: “And what of close friends?”

Maelle furrows her brow. Friends? She takes a little while to think.

“Acquaintances… maybe? Well, I guess there was a boy I used to work with. He used to tease me, always. About my ponytail, and how it must get in the way of work. Of how I was better with buildings than with people.”

Verso is starting now to feel a frown settle on his face. He shakes it loose, with some will.

“But I was surprised to see him, the day before I left for the expedition. I had just finished escorting the orphans—the new orphans, after the Gommage, you know what I mean—and he found me in the crowd.”

The memory seems to come to her, like one wave after the next, because no one had asked her about it before. You don’t want to remember what you left in Lumiére when you are fighting to ensure that it can stay left behind, alive, existing.

“And I think he was crying, just a little, and then as if he were surprised by it himself, he said, mon dieu, Maelle, I will miss you after all.” Verso watches her, eyes blinking back… something.

“I haven’t thought about it since. Not ‘til now.” There’s a gratitude in her voice—Verso hears it and it only makes him nauseous. He didn’t know about this boy, whoever he was. There is only so much you can know, from afar. He is fighting down the urge to ask, who is this, this boy I don’t know of, and another to run far away from the unknown. What, he wonders, is the rational thing—what lies in the middle?

In the end, he offers a distraction: he offers himself.

“I had to scare off an admirer once. My sister’s admirer.” There’s a twinkle of amusement in Maelle’s eyes now; she says, with a light laugh, really, you? Running down the streets, yelling like a madman?

“And I did a very good job of it too, I’ll have you know.”

“Your sister must be very proud.” Verso can’t quite tell if she means to tease him. She has her arms crossed now, and her mouth in a upturned curl of delight.

“Well, that’s the thing… I think she was sweeter on him than I thought she might have been. So, proud? No. I think more… embarrassed.”

Maelle lets out a laugh, fully, loudly, and Verso thinks: well, now, she has forgotten all about that boy, his tears and his crying, and how he escaped, somehow, my notice.

...

This is how he was supposed to look: Gustave, healthy and whole. He shimmers against the sand of Sirène, but Maelle finds herself drawn to him anyway, so otherworldly, so ethereal. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t soothe, but he comforts her anyway with the way he looks at her so fond.

Impulse drives her on: I want to touch, I want to reach—she stretches out her hand and feels nothing, but she is convinced that a few more seconds would change that, would condense desert mist into something solid beneath her fingers.

It doesn’t, of course. When it is all wiped away, Maelle finds herself—to her own surprise—looking first to Verso as if to demand: is this the way it’s meant to go? Explain it to me, explain everything in this world you know so well. And then, because his eyes are so hard and so unrelenting, she wonders instead: what was he seeing, who had he seen?

Don’t ask, don’t get. Camp is quiet tonight, suffocated by ghosts. Maelle wanders off, expecting Verso to follow: they are leaning against the tree by the lake again, though this time they have given up on standing. She taps on his hand gently: “So, who did you see?”

“What do you mean?” His voice is low, but not unkind. Maelle clarifies: in Sirène, I mean.

“Oh,” he says, as quietly as a stone dropped in a still ocean, “no one.” Maelle is unconvinced, though his voice sounds so sincere, so genuine. She is needing to remind herself: very good at dodging questions.

“No one? Not your family, past friends, or lovers? Not even those who you used to… dance the night away with?”

She gets a laugh out of him, at the very least. He says, you remember that, do you?

“Of course. Everything you tell me, no matter if it’s true or not.” It’s not a very subtle jab; she smiles so as to soften the accusation. Verso turns away from her regardless, and for a moment, she is a little concerned of having hurt him, somehow or other.

He comes back to her though, with a grin of his own, saying: “Tonight’s a good night for dancing.” Is it? Maelle finds that hard to believe, the mood as glum as it is.

“If there was nothing to dance away, we would have nothing to do with dancing,” he explains, and then he invites her again, asking not once but twice: “Dance the night away with me?”

...

Maelle and her fencer’s feet, so light, and it is easy to pick her up off of them. She laughs freely, like she had when he made a particularly good joke, and she twirls, twirls, like air—it reminds him of the wispy Nevrons in Sirène, and the association comes unbidden: she is his own siren; the Axon need not conjure one up for him when she is right there.

Verso feels her hands and palms, clammy with sweat. They hold onto him, tight, and he leads them along the dance, even as Maelle breaks out of his rhythm into her own, every so often. He enjoys the recapturing of her, the drawing her back—his hand on her shoulder, sliding down the small of her back, touching now though he had always pulled back before.

“And what is that, what is that supposed to be?” He asks, half exasperated, half delighted, and she shouts back: now, I am dancing like I am a gestral, and now, like Monoco. On her tip toes, she glides about and away from him, and it is instinct that drives him: scoop her up, scoop her up and away.

Her legs kick the air as he gathers her in his arms, and though she protests, he feels her arms wrap around him and her cold fingers grip the back of his sweaty neck.

“Well, enough of that, my sweet siren.” He says this, so that it may enter the air and dissipate, dissolve into nothingness. He is hoping Maelle will laugh at him—how absurd, how presumptuous of you, you liar, you awful man—and he will be beaten back into propriety.

She looks away from him. She blushes, a rosy pink. He can see it now, even as his face casts a shadow over hers. Verso thinks: merde, I’ve made a hell of a mistake now.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Her eyes lowered, he could almost pretend she wasn’t seeking an answer, a real, spoken answer. When he stays silent, she looks back up at him: answer me.

“Nothing,” he says out of instinct before his mind has caught up to his mouth, and he forces himself to explain, “Nothing good, Maelle. I’m sorry I said it.”

At a whisper, he hears her mutter: “Again with your, I’m sorry this, I’m sorry that.” She is looking up at him now, her eyes watery and her lips drawn tight in a straight line. The emotion in her face distracts Verso enough for him to miss the movement of her hands, away from his neck and grasping tight the curls around his face.

...

She supposes it is her fault, for blushing, for reacting in that way—but then is it not his fault first, for saying such things? Dance the night away, he asks, with me. Enough of that now, he says, my siren. What is the distance between them now; if he is not a specimen to be studied, not a friend, not quite, but something else beyond that—what are they, to each other? She will not have the word, nothing. It is emptier even than his apologies.

The frustration moves her hands; she holds his face and sees his lower lip twitch. Then, there is darkness, because she is closing her eyes and closing her lips against his.

She is not sure entirely, how to kiss. She had seen it before—Gustave and Sophie, back when they were in love, simple love, and not as they were now: dead, but also, complicated. How he would reach out to her hand, and then stop. Vaguely, she realizes that it is not unlike Verso, hovering. He touched her tonight, differently. She wonders if that amounts to anything.

For a moment, Verso’s hands slip in his surprise; she feels herself falling, before they catch her again. She takes his uncertainty, takes it as an advantage, and she pushes herself further against him, her chest against his, their noses pressed together.

She has a few moments before Verso’s strength wins out, pushing her back gently and easing her back on her feet. She wonders what face he is making. They stand together, and then he takes a few steps back.

His face is one of fear. This hurts her more than any lie he has ever told.

“You didn’t like it—you don’t like me, do you?” She keeps her tone even; she doesn’t want to come across as irrational. Yet, she hears herself as the words come out and she is already a little embarrassed of herself. She doesn’t want to hear the answer—she is going to run, and run quickly.

“Forget I said that. I didn’t mean to ask you that; it’s an unfair question,” Maelle says this and feels herself flushing—she hadn’t wanted to dance, anyway—and she spins to leave, fast on her feet, fencer’s feet. She feels the brush of his hand as she all but flees, and then again, as he reaches out further and more desperate, and his voice is behind her hissing, wait, for God’s sake, please—

...

They spend the next few days preparing to breach the barrier, and Verso spends those days in the deepest misery he has felt for some time. It’s almost impressive, the novelty of the feeling—not its nature, of course, but its depth.

Maelle spares him only the most perfunctory of glances. It’s clear that something has happened, and Lune and Sciel look at him as if they want to stick knives into him, only the knives haven’t been found yet and sharpened—but wait, just wait, and they will be, soon.

“You should at least apologize.” Lune says this to him, under her breath, as they’re scouring the world for every extra bit of Lumina they could put to good use.

Verso sighs. He hears Maelle muttering again in his mind, always, sorry this, sorry that. “I don’t think she wants my apology. Besides, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be apologizing for.”

Lune glares at him then. “Well. That makes two of us. Only, Maelle will still talk to me, so maybe you’re alone on that after all.”

“Any other advice?”

“I already gave you all of it. Go ask Sciel, if you want a different opinion.”

He doesn’t. Asking would mean telling her, pathetically, that Maelle had kissed him after he had said things he knew both then and now he shouldn’t say. Who cares, Verso, what you think of the sound of her laughter, the sight of her sweeping, twirling across the grass, who cares—why would you call her that, why would you?

He finds that self-criticism helps him very little.

It is desperation that does him in—as always. It is the ticking of the clock, and the knowledge that this would all end, and very soon. He feels the heaviness in his chest has grown so much that he is afraid that he will become a permanent stain on this Canvas, unable to be carried off and away by sweet rose petals—but, of course, he is being facetious, to no one in particular.

Maelle is spending the night throwing rocks, not at the Monolith but at the tree they were sitting under some nights before. Perhaps it is closer in shape and size to what, who, she really wants to hit at the moment.

“I’m here, if you want to hit me instead.” Maelle looks at him, then through him, and returns to throwing rocks at the tree—even harder now, maybe.

“I’m not going to hit you. That’d be childish.”

“Then what has that poor tree done to you, exactly?” Maelle stops with a rock in her hand, and Verso wonders for a second if she has changed her mind and he is to expect a rock hurling towards him, any moment now.

“Nothing. It’s done nothing, just like we’ve done nothing.” Verso fights the urge to bury his face in his hands. Right, of course. His own words. Perhaps this is something he can solve with them too. He remembers the face Maelle had made, saying, answer me. Perhaps he could offer truth, a truth, without revealing its full entirety. It is not, not quite lying.

“I just want to talk. Can we?”

“Fine.” Maelle is glaring at him still, though at the very least she has stopped peeling the bark off the tree with her pelting. “Let’s talk. You start.”

“You don’t want it, but I’m going to start anyway by saying I’m sorry. Not because… I regret saying what I did.” Though he does, he does regret it. Verso keeps that to himself.

“Just that I didn’t do it… the right way. I didn’t time it right.”

“Is there a right way to call someone a siren? A sweet siren, was it?”

Verso sighs. His words again. Why was it always his words? What had she said, what could he use?

“I didn’t mean it as an insult.” Maelle makes a face as if to say: obviously. “I meant it to mean that I do… like you, a little too much, and there’s your question answered for you.”

Red snakes across Maelle’s cheeks, even as she grumbles: I told you to forget I said that.

“Oh, but I remember everything you say. Especially,” and here Verso steps a little closer to her with a small smile he couldn’t quite suppress, “as what you say is almost always true.”

“Almost always true?”

“Well, I’m giving you some room for improvement.” It’s a little bold of him, but with a brief pause, wherein he thinks again of a stone whizzing by his head, forehead, eyes if she is feeling cruel, Maelle—laughs. There it is again: the twinkle and the chime, the sweetest sort of bell to toll his doom, because that is where he is certain he is headed. He feels a little like he is digging his way out of a hole that he only ever makes wider, and yet where else is he to go? Down, or up, either way—he is saying, whether he should or not, come now, come closer. He wraps his arms around her and feels comforted by the thump in her chest and the feel of her beneath his fingers.

If he closes his eyes, he can believe—this is just Maelle, no one else, no other name, and no one will begrudge me this warm feeling because no one knows any better. So, if a kiss on her fiery hair will soothe her, then no one should fault me for it. If she looks a little too like his sister, or maybe not enough, no one but he knows, and when their eyes are closed and they are joined in other ways besides sight, it is no longer an issue, is it not?

For the moment, he is happy and consigned to knowing nothing if everyone else will join him in it.

...

Maelle feels it before she realizes: the moment something in Verso breaks, and all of the sudden he is quick as quicksilver, light and swift as in battle, pushing her up against the tree she had just been assaulting, unjustly.

He murmurs, you will not blame me for this, will you, and she says, without hesitation: of course not. It is enough for him, though she does not understand why he is so afraid of fault.

There are many things Maelle doesn’t understand about him, and she is not sure this, or whatever it is, will reveal anything more. Only small things: the prickling of his beard against her chin as they kiss, which he teaches her, patiently. How to open her mouth, how to taste him too, his tongue and its ridges. Verso feels heavy against her, his weight and his warmth, and she can hardly breath a moment before he is on her again, laughing in between—I am laughing at myself, he says, eventually, so as to prevent any more misunderstandings.

“And why’s that?”

“Because I am weak, Maelle.” Because if I were stronger, he murmurs, I would resist you and do you better.

Still, he tries. He draws on the chroma in the air as he had last, when he had summoned a piano and played for her, this girl who looks like his sister, and is his sister, and is not. He does not know what bothers him more: that she remembers still in the swaying of her shoulders the tunes the original Verso had played for her, or that she does not know the ones he had made for his own Alicia. Then again, those don’t belong to Maelle, and… Maelle shouldn’t belong to him, shouldn’t, but she will, for just this one night if he had any control over himself.

He draws out of the chroma a sort of blanket for her, warm and downy, to lay down in the grass. He is the very image of a gentleman, and it makes Maelle laugh—he is always making her laugh.

She sits, a little uncertain, on top of it, and Verso kneels beside her. Only if you want it still, he says, and though she says yes, yes, of course, she is not sure if he would have preferred she said otherwise. Something passes through his face, but then he closes his eyes and pushes her by the shoulders down onto the fur, the soft fur—he is undoing her clothes, and she feels it now, again, against her bare skin.

Maelle, near nude but for an undershirt—because you will be cold, he had said—lying stark against the black fur of the blanket he had created. He hasn’t painted in ages, he has preferred music, but she is—she is… He could look on, forever.

Enough of that, he thinks to himself—it will only be this once, Verso, and you know it. Enjoy it while you can, while she still looks at you in that way, so fond of you, something like love in her eyes. How nice it is, to be young.

Young: he remembers anew Maelle’s youth and it makes him flush with shame. And, in terms of practicalities, he asks too: “Will it be—will I be your first?” He wonders after the boy of the roofs and as imagining what he looked like seems an exercise in masochism, he turns his mind instead to her saying some nights ago: I want your concert to be my first. He is wondering, perhaps, if she is wanting other things too.

In the dim moonlight, Maelle blushes again that familiar color. Yes, she says: is that a problem? And, all in an embarrassed rush: but I have tried, with my own fingers, and—

“No, mon chou, no, it’s alright,” he says a little wry, “I am the problem.” But, he reassures her, I will try not to be, and finally he comes to join her, shifting slightly her legs apart. Her sweet thighs: a kiss for each. Because it tickles, she pushes against his hair: hey, hey, stop that, and he only bends them so as to lick and tease further, closer, closer.

Sweet siren: already wet. Maelle’s protests turn a little into squealing, then whimpering, and he forgets to tell her to be a little more quiet before he licks tentatively the slick leaking out of her entrance.

Her hands fly to her mouth, her shout is muffled, and he does not realize that he is only making it worse when he tells her: good girl, good.

“Verso, will… will you tell me the next time you do that again?” Maelle breathes heavy out of her mouth; he laughs at the innocent request.

“It will only be more and more of that, my dear, until it ends altogether.” He kisses her sweaty forehead, as he did when she had nightmares of fire, flame, and ash.

“Let’s start with something more familiar then, hm?” He stays, face hovering over hers, and leads her into a slow, languid kiss before reaching down to touch her again with his fingers. Her red tufts are matted wet, and the folds of her eager pussy slide easily as he strokes them, experimentally. Maelle makes noises against his mouth, and each one feels a blow to his heart. A familiar voice making unfamiliar sounds.

Eventually, Maelle has enough of his teasing, of touches and flicks but nothing more, and she grabs onto his cloak with her hands: enough.

“I-I… want more,” she says against his lips, “more than this.” What is more than this? The question is buried in there, in her tone.

“Than this?” Verso rubs then her swollen clit, peeking out now, and she arches into his hands. Circles, circles, and Maelle squirms beneath him, each passing finger sending shocks down her spine. She wants to feel more, push more—she tries to rub herself against his fingers, which frustratingly retreat to a circling of something further down, prodding. Maelle says yes, and then yes some more, if only to drive him further on, to drive him back to making her toes curl.

Verso supposes he should ask a few more times, slow down even further, be certain of her certainty—but, he is beginning to feel his own impatience building. The front of his trousers feel increasingly confining, and so he undoes them without thinking, wanting the relief of cold night air. The sound of rustling opens Maelle’s eyes, and she looks up and towards him and: oh.

“No, no, not yet,” Verso says, seeing where her eyes were going, and with as much courage as she could muster, Maelle tells him: I am not afraid.

“I know, brave one. But still, it might hurt.” She hears that question of his again, asking, you will not blame me, will you? She nods, so as to release him of it, whatever it was that burdened him. I trust you, she says, in the end.

Verso works first a finger into her hole, feeling her twitch in response, its instinct. He murmurs sweet things—very good, very well done—and he feels with two pads of his fingers a sort of wall.

He thinks, with a little pain in his chest: ah. My sweet sister, and the life that has been robbed from her. He stretches, as much as he can, the outer rim of her entrance, and then it is time—because they have no more of it. At the very least, he needs no coaxing. His own cock stands over enthusiastic, hard and warm in his own hand.

Maelle says, as if to herself: I am not afraid, Verso, I am not. She watches him spit in his own hand with some experience and run it all over—she closes her eyes. The anticipation is making her tremble, or it is the cold. When she opens them again, Verso’s face is above her once more, and his eyes—which looked so much like hers, had she ever noticed that?—seem to reflect her own nervousness.

“Maelle,” he says, as if wanting nothing more than her attention, “it will hurt, in the beginning. But, I will stop, whenever you tell me to stop.” Alright, she says, more breath than word, and to his surprise, Verso closes his eyes. They flutter, under his lids—and then Maelle closes hers too.

Verso feels for her, her beckoning wet hole, loosened as much as he could, and he guides the tip of his cock towards it—a tremble, in his hands. A voice in his head, saying: what have you come to, Verso, taking your sister’s maidenhead in a dirty grass field? Couldn’t you find less awful things for your pleasure? But she’s not my sister, not really, no, he thinks, and he thinks of her dancing and her listening and her keeping every word he has ever given her, and by then, he has slipped a bit of him inside her, hot and tight around the angry red head of his cock.

It's been too long, and he is not thinking of rightness anymore. He hears Maelle gasp below him, and he kisses her lovely sounds, her courage, her saying: I trust you. What did he ever do to earn that?

He hopes he is distracting her enough—he can feel him bumping up against that wall, her innocence, and he mouths to her, best he can: it will only be for a moment, mon chou, one moment. He thrusts his cock further in; he knocks, he pushes past, he feels her virginity give way, and he hears Maelle give a cry beneath him. Only a moment, only one moment more.

He feels himself slide in, penetrate deeper, and it is overwhelming: the feeling of her wrapped around him, half squeezing in panic.

“Sh, sh… it’s alright. You’re wonderful, doing wonderful,” he shushes her, a jumble of words, and he runs his hand through her hair, damp. He stays there, moving as little as he can, even as his body grows tense in its resistance to his colder, more rational logic. He wants nothing more than to plunge deep into her, and then out again, but that would be—no, no. He forces himself to wait for her.

It is a sharp pain, whatever it is. Maelle feels it pulsing still, that moment when Verso broke something inside her—she remembers how something had broken inside him too: that shift in his face, from fear to resolution. I must be resolute too, she thinks to herself, and so she blinks away the tears and looks up, up: Verso is looking at her in a way she has never been looked at before. He looks like he wants to eat her, and she has said yes, and plated herself for him, garnish and all. She feels a twinge again, where there had once been pain, and she realizes slowly that the pressure is of him, inside her, and the thought makes her blush anew.

Verso, from above: “Maelle. May I—Can I?” He rolls her name off his tongue with a painful tenderness. He resists the urge to say any one of the other things that are echoing in his head: I’m very sorry; you feel better than anything, all things; I will regret nothing so much as this; only if I had not done it would I have regretted anything more.

Maelle bites down on her lower lip; she nods, yes. He moves slowly, rocking himself inside her and feeling her clenching shift from panic to pleasure—he watches her face, intent like nothing else, how her lashes look against her cheek and how they flutter when she feels something, from him. She is, encouragingly, still very wet, swollen in her own arousal, and Verso can feel how easily she lets him in now, then out, and welcomes him back when he returns to her. Curious, he swipes a finger along Maelle’s clit—she howls into his mouth, raises her hands, clenched into little fists, as if resisting the urge to slap him. Fiery, fiery like the red of his hair.

He thinks: I should be quick, finish quickly, if only to better pleasure her. Better not to think much beyond that, it would be unfair to her (would it?)—his cock throbs almost painfully in its eagerness, and he wants, wants, and wants, her in her entirety.

He knows himself well enough to know how to be quick. With a grip tight on her hips, he thrusts shallow into her, rubbing his tip against the loose opening of her entrance; he lets himself look at her most shamelessly: the red of her lips as she bites down on them, the shifting of her shirt as he fucked her (the first, the first), the slight movements of her bare breasts underneath it with every tremble he got out of her.

“V-Verso…”

Maelle moans his name prettily, a sound as sweet as her laugh but tinged a little bit with his own terror. He closes his eyes, he focuses on her little noises—he can feel himself, the swelling of his cock, how much tighter she feels around him as he approaches—her shirt has shifted further and he sees the smooth skin of her belly peek out from under it.

The image comes too quickly for him to resist: Maelle grown, Maelle in the full bloom of her adulthood; the shape of her, how she would look with child, her belly full and round—her head bent in happiness. He thinks: I fight for this, I fight for this and its future, and though he would be long dead and but ash in her fingers, he imagines himself rounding the corner, his hand out to touch.

Rashly, Verso sticks one of his hands up her shirt, feels the movement down, and then up, of Maelle’s stomach. It would be wonderful—for her to live, for her to move on, for her to spend her life with someone she loved. It couldn’t be him, couldn’t, and so the face in his vision is left empty, and all there is black hair, down to the shoulders, and a wisp of white…

Couldn’t be him, could it?

And with that, he spills inside of her, suppressing as best he could the groans that dared to climb its way out of his throat with each pump of cum her hole squeezed out of him. He opens his eyes, sweat running down his chin, to Maelle’s face: watching him, it seemed, with rapt curiosity.

Maelle, who remembers everything he has ever told her. Maelle, smiling: “Tired you out?”

Breathe, Verso. The air rushes into his lungs and he says, with as much confidence as possible: “Not when I’ve you to take care of next, mon chou.”

...

The face Verso makes when he… when some part of him cracks again, but this time inside her and his fingers are gripping particularly hard the curve of her waist: pity swells in Maelle’s chest. He looks a little like he might cry—whether out of joy or sorrow Maelle couldn’t quite tell. He opens them, and she sees only trepidation.

Yet: she has gotten used to the feeling of Verso’s cock buried deep inside her, her hole filled with him and the wet heat of them joined in this way: as natural as the chirps of the night birds overhead. So, when he promises to take care of her, she believes him, and when he slides out of her, gently, she mourns him but resists saying, oh, don’t leave so soon.

Verso’s fingers return to where he has just left, and they scoop up what must be his cum—Maelle grows hot at the thought, twin flushes of embarrassment and arousal—to push it back into and through her slick folds.

“There, there,” he says softly to himself, and he kisses her again on the forehead. “To help.”

He drags his wet fingers back up and over her clit, peeking out still and eagerly awaiting his attention. He rubs her slowly, in gentle circles; he drives her mad, and she is no longer sure if she is in control of every buck of her hip, every squirm, every attempt to close her legs against the feeling of—too much, too much, and yet not enough…!

Every clench squeezes out a little of what Verso has just given her, and dutifully, she feels him slip his finger inside her occasionally to return it to what he seemed to think its proper place. But wouldn’t that… isn’t that…?

A wet pull on her nipple takes her out of her thoughts as Verso mouths at one of her breasts through the thin fabric of her shirt. She’s never felt this before, what she feels in one place of her body moving downwards to stoke the fire burning in the pit of her stomach. She closes his eyes: enough with thoughts. She can feel herself building with each rhythmic stroke of Verso’s fingers, the back of Verso’s palm, and now his tongue, swiping and playing with the bud now poking very obviously through the shirt he kept, gentleman he was, on her.

And yet, for all his manners, there again is his finger buried inside her as he brought her closer and closer to the edge, her walls clamping down hard around it. Vaguely, she misses him, both physically and something else—with a pinch of longing in her heart, Maelle comes hard on his hand with a great sob muffled by her own.

The world is spinning, the stars are a blur, and the only thing that seems certain in the shaking world is Verso’s face, hovering over hers, looking still as if he were being starved of something.

...

The world is spinning again, only it is rose petals in the wind, remnants of people she loved floating away in the breeze, and when her knees hit the ground beneath her, her hands fly to her stomach and her mind to his eyes, and she is thinking:

I see. Because it wouldn’t matter, in the end, would it?

...

When the world returns, Maelle finds Verso sat on a park bench, his hands intertwined. He looks almost as if he were deep in thought, but now she knows—because now she knows everything—that he is trying very hard to think of nothing at all.

He jumps, just a little, when she sits herself beside him, and then it becomes a slight trembling when she places her head on his shoulder.

He passes a hand across his eyes. He says again: I’m sorry. Maelle leans further into him.

“Don’t be.”

Verso laughs, just a little, at the familiar words, though it is a sad laugh.

“You don’t want even this apology?” Well, he says with some humor, I suppose my apologies don’t mean very much. He holds his head in his hands—perhaps it has become too heavy for his neck to carry the burden on its own.

“Only because there are still other things I want from you.” She had meant it then: I want your concert to be my first. And now, there are other things, other things she has been taught to want.

He sits up, and there it is again: fear, terror in his eyes. But—Maelle is not so afraid now of his fear.

“From me, or from… the Verso in your memories?”

“There is only the one Verso left now.”

Maelle holds his hand in hers, intertwines them. He can tell which fingers are hers and which fingers his from their shape and length, from the scarring and the comparative neatness of skin.

He imagines those hands wrapped around the throat of himself—but not himself, the him who came before—and he wonders if he could settle for settling.

“And if he would be my Verso, I would like him as he is.”

Maelle is looking at him with an awful sincerity. For a moment, he supposes he is willing to be enough.