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[superniceone]

(open / overflow)

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[superniceone]

"I never said just one more time." Gustave holds up a finger, a moment, settling his things on the couch and retrieving the wine before he takes the seat next to Verso. He bumps Verso's leg gently with his own, before plinking a soft melody — simple, like the one before.

"Strange, the way memory works," he muses, lowering his hand. "My mother taught me that. I couldn't tell you the name of it, or write the notes down, but..." It surfaces the moment his hand is on the keys.

[recreatable]

Verso could tell you the notes! He makes a mental record of them, just in case. "You have good hands for the piano," he says, canting his head. "Nice, slender fingers." This is not a come-on—Gustave does have nice hands, perfect for all that little detail work he does. "...And that metal arm of yours can probably play twice as fast."

He shifts so that the sides of their legs pressed together, as if by accident. There's just not a lot of room on this bench! An index finger presses down on the keys, a soft C ringing out, and then—

"You need to catch up." He gestures to the wine. "I'm already two glasses in." And he'd feel better if Gustave were a little tipsy while he plays.

[superniceone]

Gustave would have laughed if he'd known Verso was inventing reasons for physical contact, considering they've hooked up twice today. "No good if one hand plays at half the speed of the other," he says with a little laugh.

He bumps his shoulder into Verso's, taking a long pull directly from the bottle. "And alright. You get warmed up and I'll do the same."

[recreatable]

Verso's fingers play idly: C-D-E, then D-E-F, then E-F-G. "It's been a while since I've played," he admits. Just that time for Maelle and Esquie, and not much else. "I'm a bit rusty."

He still has nearly a century of experience behind him, so 'rusty' is relative, but he can still feel it all the same. The muscle memory is there, but it feels like coming back home after a long vacation elsewhere. Everything is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

"I haven't even done any finger exercises." A pause. "Traditional finger exercises, anyway."

[superniceone]

Gustave taps the same notes an octave down, an echo in staccato while he sips at his drink. "I'm a philistine, remember? I won't notice a little rustiness."

The quip does earn him a light jab to the ribs with his elbow. "Merde. You can't help yourself, can you?"

[recreatable]

"Nope." He's incorrigible, actually. "But I'm hoping you find it endearing."

A moment, and then he plays the little melody Gustave had played, glancing down at the other end of the piano to see if Gustave will echo that, too. It's easy enough to recreate after a near-century of practice identifying notes. He doesn't usually like someone else touching his piano, but he'll make an exception here.

[superniceone]

"I do, actually," Gustave says, his tone long-suffering as he raises a hand to carefully mimic that, too. "It's actually quite annoying. Fairly certain there's some sort of mind control at play."

He hits the wrong key, a result of poor playing form more than actual mistake, and he grimaces slightly. "See. A lost cause."

[recreatable]

Verso does his best not to think about whether that's true, although it's something he's considered before. Maybe all of the friends he had back in Lumière only liked him because they were created to like him. Maybe Gustave only feels attached to him because the creator of this world did, too. Tonight is not for existentialism and rumination, though, so he just smiles and gently reaches for Gustave's hand, rearranging its position on the keys so that he barely needs to move to play the melody.

"I don't know." A lingering moment with his hand over Gustave's, and then he places his own back on the keys. "I made an excellent dancer of you. Maybe you'll be a brilliant pianist, too."

[superniceone]

"Best to keep your dreams realistic, mon chéri. I only danced with you to make sure no one else did." He shoots him a subtle and crooked smile, then tries the notes again — admittedly with more success this time.

"No good," he says, lowering his hand. "I can't drink, inspire your creativity, and practice a new skill. One of them's gonna have to be put on hold."

Fuck, he's happy. Hiccups aside, it's been the sort of day he's going to hold onto when things inevitably get hard again. He ducks his head down, kissing Verso's shoulder. "I'll learn by osmosis."

[recreatable]

With a matching crooked smile, turned up on the opposite side from Gustave's: "Fair. The drinking is the most important part."

He plucks at the keys for a few more moments, getting his hands comfortable being on them again, before improvising a wandering melody, something soft and bittersweet. Major and minor chords, high and tinkly like a bell.

"You know," he says quietly so as not to talk over the music, "I have half a mind to play you Chopsticks right now."

[superniceone]

Gustave seems to consider something for a moment — he was going to pass the bottle to his real hand to sip while he listened — but seems to decide against that. Instead, he just rests his hand gently on Verso's thigh. There's no attempt to be provocative here; he's just touching for the sake of touch.

"Well, it's a classic for a reason, I guess," he murmurs. "But I like this. Reminds me of..." Gustave hums low in his throat in thought. "The trains in the snow."

[recreatable]

It's so objectively stupid when he's gotten Gustave's pants off twice today, but it's the warmth of his hand through the fabric of Verso's borrowed trousers that makes him glance shyly from the piano keys to Gustave's face, like an adolescent on his first date. "Yeah," he muses, eyes flicking back to his own fingers as he plays a little arpeggio. Then, confessional: "I really miss those trains."

He wonders if Verso—the actual one—would, too, or if he only feels this way because a mother remembers the sort of things her son liked when he was nine.

[superniceone]

There's something sweet in the shyness of that look, in his small but sincere admission about the trains. It squeezes at his heart, makes him wish he could give Verso the things he actually wants for himself, instead of just the things everyone else wants for him. Gustave squeezes his leg, a fond acknowledgment of his words as he listens to the broken chord.

"Couldn't be too hard to get one up and running," he murmurs after a long moment. It's a logistical nightmare; they're monstrously heavy, they need working, unbroken track to go somewhere at all. Between the Station and Old Lumière, maybe? If the Grandis—and Esquie, definitely—were willing to help out, too—

He realises he's distracting himself and shakes it away. "I like the set in your room. It's well-crafted."

[recreatable]

Verso laughs down at the keys. "You were thinking about the logistics," he accuses, not unkindly. He likes that Gustave has an engineer's mind, always moving, always planning. Figuring out how things tick, and then making them tick even better. Creativity comes in many forms, and that's Gustave's.

"Thanks, though." About the train set. It's from Maelle, as everything he has in this world currently is, but he doesn't mention that. "I used to have an even better one." In his family home. A finger slips, playing a discordant note before he recovers. "A long time ago."

[superniceone]

Gustave wonders, for just a moment, how difficult it might be to build one. Maybe he could call it practice for repairing the actual trains.

"What made it better?" He won't ask about the long time ago; it feels too much like a landmine.

[recreatable]

The light, tinkling notes slow a little as he thinks. He remembers it being a birthday gift, can recall ripping off the wrapping paper with crystal-like clarity. Now, though, he has to wonder if that ever really happened or if it's just a memory that came preloaded into his head to make this all more realistic.

"The trains had little motors," he recalls. "So they could drive down the track on their own."

This is by far the most childish thing he has ever said, and he's vaguely aware of that. "Pretty cool, I know. First thing I showed girls when I took them to my room."

[superniceone]

Gustave does not, in fact, think it's childish. He thinks it's pretty neat. "Well," he says, "I would have been impressed." He nudges Verso with his arm again, his expression a little amused. "'When you brought girls back to your room.'"

He's laughing a little bit, trying to figure out what, exactly, it is he wants to say to that.

"It's no good. I wouldn't have stood a chance. You would have been too cool to ever talk to me."

[recreatable]

Usually, Verso would be more than happy to let Gustave imagine him as wildly popular and impossibly cool, but he doesn't like the added implication that Gustave would be somehow inferior. Sure, he'd had plenty of friends; he'd been good at nearly everything he tried; he'd been the pride of his family. But none of that had been real—half the time, he'd only ever brought those girls to his room as a distraction from the bone-deep feeling of wrongness he'd never quite been able to shake.

"I was a grown man with a model train set in his bedroom." Still is. "I think you might be overestimating how cool I was."

[superniceone]

Gustave would be flattered if he'd known Verso's exact thought process. He's never really thought of himself as lesser, has never had trouble making or keeping friends, but it stands true that he often has very little in common with the sort of person who flits between lovers like a hummingbird in a garden of flowers. He'd spent time in his room with girlfriends; that seemed quite different than bringing girls to it.

"Wow, look at you, turning down a compliment," he says, rolling his shoulders back in a silent laugh. "What do we call that? Personal growth?"

[recreatable]

There's a flutter of his fingers, a little musical imitation of the sound of laughter that Gustave doesn't make. "Now you see how annoying it is," he teases. Not his intention, but Gustave could stand to get a taste of his own medicine once in a while, too. It's exhausting trying to compliment a beautiful man who just brushes you off!

"I would have talked to you." This, he thinks, is probably true. He'd always been gregarious, and he would have been interested in whatever Gustave would have been tinkering with. "And I definitely would have invited you to come check out my train set."

A couple contemplative notes— "And you'd be so oblivious that you'd just take a look at it and leave."

[superniceone]

He can't help but find the improvised sound effects added to their conversation anything but intensely charming, and Gustave shakes his head before he has another nip from the bottle. "In another world," he says, and allows that same powerfully bittersweet feeling to wash over him. There's no sense in running away from it; best to just acknowledge it and be grateful for what he does have.

"And you think I would be oblivious?" he says, scoffing, clearly oblivious to his own obliviousness. "I made the first move on you, monsieur."

[recreatable]

He's not sure what Gustave did could be considered a 'move'. It was weird and halting and awkward. Most things out on the Continent were, so he can hardly be blamed, but—

"You were lonely," Verso says. "And scared. And a little wine-drunk." Thinking you're going to die within the next few weeks—or maybe days—is a far cry from living regular life in Lumière. "I wasn't oblivious, I just didn't want to make things... complicated."

Not because he'd been under the delusion that Gustave had some sort of schoolboy crush on him, but because he'd sort of expected him to get weird and regretful about it. His position in the group had felt very tenuous, and he'd been uncomfortably aware of how souring his camaraderie with Gustave could push him out.

Also, there was the whole 'almost let him die' thing. But Gustave doesn't need to know about that.

"Pretty sure I made them complicated."

[superniceone]

"You made them complicated?" The words come in an incredulous sort of exhale — but still soft, unconsciously very careful not to step over any music Verso might add to their exchange. "I was the who one—" Caught feelings immediately, incapable of untangling the notions of sex and emotional intimacy despite his insistence otherwise. Who had found refuge in Verso when his own fear and uncertainty about the newfound nature of their world had flung him into mental turmoil. Who was acting like an anchor to him even now, when he clearly had no interest or intention of remaining in Lumière.

Gustave cuts himself off with another sip, stalling, and doesn't say any of that.

"I wouldn't have just looked at the model train and left," he says instead. "I would have wanted to take it apart, started crushing hopelessly on the boy with the fancy gadget, and then left. It's a very important distinction."

[recreatable]

"Oh, so you'd only want me for my fancy gadgets," he shoots back, although he's clearly happy with the response, ears pink with pleasure. Gustave is so very sweet; he can hardly believe he's the recipient of it. There have to be at least fifteen people in Lumière who'd like to be in his position, and who are more deserving of it, too.

"That would have been nice," is accompanied by a few chords, idle movements of his fingers more than real music at this point. "If you'd known me before." Instead of now, after he's crossed so many lines. It had all been fake and wrong, but at least he didn't have the last 67 years weighing on his conscience.

"Although I think I'd be too embarrassed to try again, after the model train fiasco."

[superniceone]

Gustave is— well. Not surprised, really, at the idea that Verso can't even imagine a happy outcome for the two of them in their verbal game of pretend, but it does make him a little sad. Not because their own relationship is any more doomed than it's ever been; it just feels more evident than ever, in moments like this, that Verso is unable to imagine a happy life for himself at all.

"That's the sort of thing that qualified as a fiasco for you?" Gustave laughs, and then hesitates, because there's something there that doesn't sit right with him.

"Hey," he continues after a moment, putting the bottle down by his feet. He angles himself slightly on his seat, reaching to try to coax him into a quick kiss. "I'm into much older guys, remember? I prefer you the way you are now."

It's his extremely clumsy and intensely dorky way of trying to reassure him that he likes him the way he is, that he doesn't yearn for Verso-but-better.