superniceone | tfln overflow / open post

"Sounds extremely traumatic," Sciel adds cheerfully, "but he hasn't told me yet which end you escaped from." She lifts a hand to wave at them both as they approach, shooting Gustave a curious look when Verso hands him the cup.

Gustave just shrugs at her in return, mystified, and indicates Verso with it. "He claims he's got a bit of wine to share with us, so I'm here to investigate."

Is Esquie going to summon it from somewhere? Lead them to a secret cache? It's almost as interesting as the promise of alcohol itself.

Sciel gasps. "And you've only just decided to cough up that information now?"

"Right," Verso says, moving swiftly along from disgusting stories and very true accusations of keeping things from them. (If only she knew.) "Esquie, do you remember what I gave you?"

"The wine you told me not to tell anyone about?" Blunt as always. Esquie turns to his non-Verso friends, saying very loudly, "I think Verso wanted to keep it all to himself because wine makes him cry, but crying with friends is good!"

Verso stares, unable to say anything besides, "Yeah. That wine." He holds out his cup. "You can share it now."

"Oh, good. I don't like keeping secrets from friends." That feels a little pointed, but Verso ignores it, and a moment later, there's a horrible, resounding BLUUGHHH as wine shoots out of Esquie with alarming force.

Speaking of coughing things up.

Gustave had been halfway to giving Verso's shoulder an awkward, consoling squeeze when Esquie blithely broadcasts that horrifyingly personal information - but Esquie is spewing wine a second later. Gustave is shocked into abrupt motionlessness.

"-what," he says, mouth slightly agape, and then, more emphatically: "What? You filled Esquie with wine?" Even Gustave can't decide if he's awe-struck or fully indignant on Esquie's behalf.

While he decides, Sciel is just plucking the cup from his hands to fill it for herself.

"Where else would I put it?" Verso asks. It's not like Esquie's using all that storage space in there. Besides, when he feels like drinking, having Esquie dramatically spit the wine out lifts his spirits. Sort of.

"It feels funny, but that's okay," Esquie chimes in before starting up again, like a very inelegant wine fountain. Little Verso probably wasn't thinking of this function when he first painted Esquie.

Verso quickly places his own cup underneath the geyser. "Hey, it doesn't go on the ground, remember?"

"Wow," Gustave starts, then shakes his head, repeats: "Wow. This is - the worst thing I've seen in a minute." And yet, the engineer inside of him is fascinated, and the force of the surprise isn't enough to prevent him from retrieving another cup almost guiltily. "It's not... uncomfortable for him, is it?"

He'd ask Esquie directly, but he's busy burbling up wine that Gustave is tentatively trying to catch himself.

"No," Verso answers, somewhere between offended that Gustave would think him so cruel as to cause poor Esquie discomfort and pleased that, well, at least Gustave cares if he is uncomfortable. Despite being the friendliest creature in the world, Esquie doesn't actually have many people who care for him, stuck on the continent with Nevrons and Gestrals. "Of course not."

Esquie finally takes a breath while Sciel goes to bring a cup to Lune, who's currently sitting with Maelle and watching this whole fiasco with horror and awe. "Verso would never hurt a friend," he assures Gustave, before— "Well."

"Anyway," Verso interrupts, clinking their cups together, a little wine sloshing out. "Santé."

Esquie's aborted tangent doesn't concern Gustave as such, though it'd be a lie to say he isn't a little curious. He raises both eyebrows at Verso, but he's smiling subtly at the clumsy toast. "Tchin tchin," he agrees softly, studying the drink in the cup before having a sip. If he suppresses the fact that this was recently regurgitated, it's really not bad.

Sciel beckons them over, and it's then that Gustave seems to realise a fatal flaw in the plan. "Oh, yes. We should probably go socialise." The group of young women sitting by the fire are easily the people Gustave loves more than anyone else alive; he just wouldn't have joked about drinking at all if he were in a convival mood. He pulls a long drink from the cup.

Gustave could just not, if he really wanted to. The women (and girl) would understand if he said he wanted to be alone. They might try to rope him into their impromptu party at first, but surely even they understand that someone just wants to drink in silence.

But that would require Gustave being able to say 'no' to them, which is not actually a skill Verso has witnessed yet.

"I could pretend to be drowning my sorrows by the water"—which is in character for him, he thinks—"and you could claim to be cheering me up."

When, in actuality, they'll both just be staring out at the endless horizon and drinking miserably. Fun.

The conflict is briefly visible on his face. There's a quiet but unmistakable voice inside telling him not to miss gripping onto every moment of warmth and peace that they can find with both hands, that stewing quietly by the lake in his cups is a miserable way to be.

It just sounds so nice.

"For half an hour," Gustave suggests then, swirling some of the drink in his cup. "I'll have a drink, recharge, and we can come join the party. If you really don't mind me using you for an excuse."

Oh, it's absolutely a miserable way to be. Unfortunately, he's talking to a deeply miserable person, so there will be no good influence here.

"I'll go brood mysteriously, then," he says as he steps away. Just in case Gustave wants to at least pretend that he has any intention of happy drinking before he joins Verso in misery.

Gustave watches him go with a thoughtful frown; mostly he's just thinking about how surprised he is that Verso doesn't seem more eager to join the party himself, unaware of how the optics are actually going to do a pretty good job of helping him sell his story.

It'll be less than ten minutes before Gustave joins him by the water, his own cup of wine refreshed and a refill in hand for Verso. "Harder than I expected to convince Sciel not to come do the 'cheering up' for me," he says, chuckling wryly and offering him the second cup.

One responsible glass, already out the window.

He takes the cup, because you can't brood drunkenly by the water without a drink; he tosses a glance back at the women (and Esquie, and Monoco now, too) before taking a sip. Sciel would volunteer herself to do the cheering up. She's terminally perky. He likes it, though, likes the way it feels to be around someone who's still so full of life despite everything that's been thrown at her. Verso could probably stand to be more like that.

A quirk of his brow, an amused twist of his mouth. "So how did you convince her?"

One responsible glass with the group, one with Verso. He was just being respectful, after all; it would be rude if he were the only one not nursing the cup in front of him.

Or something like that.

Gustave's brow knits and he flusters slightly, clearly not expecting Verso to follow that line of questioning. "I, uh- guy talk. I said we were having guy talk." His tone suggests that he's baffled that any of them bought it.

Guy talk. Ha. He laughs into his cup. Verso hasn't done any of that in a long while. Monoco and Esquie are ostensibly 'guys', but Monoco is usually more interested in beating each other up and Esquie is... Esquie. Before that was Alicia and Clea, neither of which had any interest in guy talk. He'd never minded, of course. He'd still preferred time with them over anyone else.

Regardless, he looks disbelieving (and amused). No way the girls bought that — or maybe they're already tipsy. Gustave is way too awkward for guy talk, after all. Verso's pretty sure he'd spontaneously combust from embarrassment if things got too raw and unfiltered.

"Okay. Wow me with guy talk."

It'd be embarrassing if it weren't such an outright silly situation. Gustave takes a seat, legs crossed beneath him; almost unconsciously, his eyes scan the ground near him for a suitable stone to skip across the top of the water.

'Guy talk.' He'd panicked. What would that even be? Opening up about his lost lover? About the way he'd once wistfully hoped to be a father? None of it was exactly conventionally masculine.

"Maybe when I'm finished drinking," he informs him with a mock terseness. "Is it really guy talk if we're having an honest conversation sober?"

"Fair enough."

Honest conversations aren't really his thing. He should probably slow down, in fact, lest he accidentally blurt out something better left unsaid. But Verso is as wise as he is honest—which is to say, not at all—so instead, he raises his cup again.

"Bottoms up, then."

The temptation is there to drain his cup, but he tamps it down. Maybe this is good. Just enough to feel a buoyant brush of tipsiness, a little warmth in his ears. Gustave pulls another mouthful of drink, then seems to settle on an appropriate stone. He turns it around in his fingers, appraising, before winding up to send it skipping across the surface of the water.

It's satisfying.

After a few long moments of just dwelling in the quiet, he'll think to say: "Thanks, by the way."

Verso's good with draining his cup. Life sucks. Might as well be inebriated for it.

"For the wine?" he asks before finding a stone himself and skipping it. It sinks beneath the dark water afterward, and Verso finds himself a little jealous of its ability to simply disappear forever.

"Esquie can't keep a secret. You would have found it eventually."

"Yes, but also for the company. The quiet." It's not like they're sitting here in silence, but both the light and their voices are much softer than the snatches of conversation he's able to hear drifting over from the fire.

He swirls the wine in his own cup, just keeping his hand busy more than anything else.

"I was - suspicious of you when you showed up. That's not a secret. But I'm glad you've stuck around."

Verso could rib him for essentially saying thanks for being quiet, but he chooses not to. For now. He finishes off his cup, setting it on the ground beside him as the faint buzz of alcohol makes its way through his veins.

"You aren't the first to be suspicious," he admits. Of course he isn't. Verso is suspicious. His mere existence is enough to make people wary. Dryly, with a hint of— not bitterness, exactly, but maybe ruefulness: "Guess there's something about seeing someone survive bisection that doesn't inspire trust."

Gustave shakes his head no at that, but he'll nurse more of his own cup before he does - as if he thinks that might help him find the exact words he is so often searching for.

"Wasn't that. You were just..." He chews on it for a moment, before just lofting another pebble into the water with a solid plunk this time. "Too good to be true, I think. Hard to believe this expedition would give you to us without a catch."

Verso had saved both his and Maelle's lives, knew his way around this place like no one else did. Was an asset in a fight, and there was no chance Monoco would be with them without Verso. He felt like a lucky break.

Verso picks up his cup to take another big swig only to find it's already empty. Merde. He stares down into the empty bottom before turning back to look at Esquie again, as if he might be able to send a psychic request for more alcohol.

"Yeah, well." He shrugs. "I'm sure you'll think of a catch or two."

"I guess we'll see," Gustave says, watching Verso try to drink from an empty cup. He leans in, offering out his own - about a third left sitting in the bottom. "Here."

Verso takes the cup, but instead of drinking out of it, he stands up, both cups in hand. Maybe the first person to double-fist on the continent. "I'll be back," he says, stepping back. Then, tongue-in-cheek, "Wouldn't want to give you too much quiet."

When he returns to the campfire to seek more wine, Sciel makes a comment about all the guy talk they're doing. Verso smirks and says, "You wouldn't believe what he says when he isn't in mixed company."

Esquie catches him up in a conversation about why he wasn't invited to guy talk, but about five minutes later, Verso returns to the waterside with two full cups in hand. As he holds one out, he asks, "Dissociating yet?"

It's another night of extremely pleasant weather. It's one of those things that Gustave doesn't allow himself to actually appreciate often enough; there's just not enough time for it. There's time for so few things, it feels like. But Verso disappears to refill their cups, and Gustave can feel the warmth of what he's had to drink already - subtle, but enough to let him relax while he's alone.

The water sounds nice, smells nice. It's calming, and when Verso returns, Gustave is smiling a little more sincerely when he reaches a hand out to take the refilled cup.

"Nearly there. You can go join them if you want, you know. I'll be fine over here."

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