superniceone | tfln overflow / open post

"Yeah. I'll see you." There are so many questions he wants to ask, but things feel unsteady, abruptly raw - and this definitely isn't the place for it. He opens his mouth, closes it, and then grabs his glass of water to take a long sip like that'll somehow ground him. "I'll see you in the morning."

Gustave is going to go home and emotionally vomit all of his thoughts into the nearest journal, see if that can help him parse them out. Poor Julie. Poor Verso.

Monoco's surprise is evident when Verso arrives home alone. "No tagalong this time?"

"Other side of the bed's all yours tonight, my friend," he says bitterly as he trudges inside.

As much as he loves Monoco, there's absolutely no way that discussing any of this with him will lead to anything productive—Verso doubts very much that gratuitous violence will make him feel any better about the fact that he just fucked this up in less than 24 hours—so he doesn't say anything else on the matter, just makes a beeline for the bedroom and shuts the door.

Well, wait. He does come back out in order to grab a bottle of wine. Then he absconds to the bedroom.

Gustave only has a few hours to try to untangle the confused knots in his head before he's cajoled into spending time with both of his sisters. He is at first exasperated and then, eventually, grateful; despite his worry about Maelle, they're still both very good at pulling him out of his own mind. They spend most of the evening playing Belote, and he has a much easier time breathing by the time he retreats to his bedroom again.

It's early enough in the morning that most of the city is actually still asleep when he returns to Verso's; he tries the door instead of knocking, just because he doesn't want to wake anyone up. Mostly this means Monoco will receive the jumpscare of his life when he leaves the bedroom the next morning and finds Gustave asleep sitting up on the divan like a grandpa after a holiday lunch.

None of this is Monoco's business, and it won't be until Verso makes it so, but he'll turn back to the bedroom and whisper hopefully anyway: "I can bounce him if you want."

Edited 2025-12-28 02:08 (UTC)

He's way too fucking hungover to deal with this breaking and entering shit this early in the morning, but— "No," he drones as he drags himself out of the bed he's been wallowing in ever since returning from lunch. Still in the same clothing, rumpled in a very non-artful, very non-sexy way, and his hair is a little matted in the back from all the miserable rolling around.

"I forgot. The apprentices need you in the workshop this morning for..." A beat. Yeah, too hungover to come up with an excuse to make Monoco leave, either. "Science."

Once they're alone, he stands and stares at Gustave's sleeping form for a long, admittedly sort of creepy moment before he reaches out to shake him awake. One quick press of the palm to his shoulder, and then he steps back and crosses his arms. "You drool in your sleep."

Gustave doesn't often feel particularly old, but thinks he's starting to feel his age when he pulls all-nighters like this. At twenty-two, he could throw himself into his work all night and remain tired but functional. Now, at nearly thirty-three, one measly night unable to sleep has left him dozing off upright.

"Oh. Hey." He wipes at his mouth, frowning up at Verso. Gustave knows he himself looks tired, but Verso looks rough as hell. "Didn't want to wake you two up." He glances toward the bedroom, silently asking if Monoco is in there.

"Gestrals don't have to sleep," he reminds Gustave, because he's never too depressed for a 'well, actually' moment. "They just lie there for fun."

Ugh. This is painful. He wishes Gustave would just get it over with. Maybe he's hesitant to do it with Monoco still in the house; maybe he's afraid of getting beaten up for hurting Verso's feelings. "He's not here." Verso gestures vaguely toward Gustave. "So." You know. Get on with it.

"Oh." Verso had already let everyone in the Canvas be erased; he's not really connected this behavior to fear over being broken up with for something he'd done before Gustave's parents had even been born. It had just taken time to unpack.

And he does want to talk about it, but they both seem to be in rough shape; he stands up with a little groan. "We could go back to bed for a bit then, if you'd like."

Verso stares. Blinks a few times. Tries to figure out if he's just too hungover to understand what's happening here. "What?" he manages to blurt out after a moment's delay. It's not like Gustave to say something he doesn't mean, but it's so far off what he'd expected that he has trouble believing it.

"Together?" he asks stupidly, unable to stop his head from tilting like a confused dog's. "You're not—" Well, there's a lot of things he expected Gustave to be. Repulsed, definitely. Deeply disappointed. Betrayed, for what's probably the third or fourth time. "...Afraid of me?" he finishes instead.

Gustave is— well. Several of those things, really. Betrayed and disappointed, sure, but more than any of that: he's mostly just sad about it all. If Verso is unwilling to talk about it further, that would definitely be a dealbreaker, but right now he just wants to understand.

"What?" he says a little dumbly when Verso gets his question out. "Do I have some reason to be?"

Yes, but no. Gustave has nothing to fear, but at the same time, it wouldn't be unreasonable if he did feel afraid after the confession Verso made. Well, people are usually a bit uneasy around murderers, he bites back the instinct to say; all that will do is just convince Gustave that he should be afraid. That might be the right thing to do, admittedly, but he's not sure he has it in himself to do it.

"No," he says, shaking his head. "I would never hurt you."

At least. Not now.

"And Maelle would just bring me back, even if you did," he can't help but add a little dryly. If Verso had grand designs on hurting him for some reason, there had been ample opportunity before now.

Gustave sits back down, apparently planning to just get comfortable on the divan in light of the fact that things are apparently even more complicated between them right now than he'd realized.

"No offence, but you— it looks like you feel like shit," he says. "It's early. We can talk when you've had some more sleep."

Verso would be offended if not for the fact that he does undoubtedly feel like shit. He spent his night drinking and feeling bad for himself and pathetically tearing up a little, and while he's immune to death, he's not immune to the symptoms of dehydration. All he can do in response is scrub at his face with his palm.

Gustave's incredible vagueness doesn't do much to provide him relief. Talk. Nausea sloshes in his stomach, although it's difficult to tell how much of that is anxiety about this upcoming 'talk' and how much of it is the hangover. 50/50, if he had to guess.

"Yeah," he says distantly, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Putain, my head hurts." He stands there for a long moment after, saying nothing but feeling a strong pull to ask Gustave to come with him. Clearly, though, the decision to sit back down on the divan was an intentional one, so after a prolonged stare, he just says, "Okay," and absconds back to his room.

Gustave should lay down on this divan covered in gestral fur and close his eyes. He's not entirely sure why he even came here this early; discomfort in his own skin, maybe, which— actually, lying here isn't doing much to fix.

He taps his foot restlessly when Verso disappears into his bedroom, then stands up to pace for a few moments, before he finally groans to himself and fills a glass of water in the kitchen. "Hey," he says, easing the door open. "Drink this, actually, before you sleep. For your head."

God, they both still suck at communicating.

The curtains in the room are drawn like they had been during the first week or so back from the Continent. The original intent had been to wallow in the darkness, but now it's out of self-preservation; his head hurts far too much to let the light in. When Gustave enters, he sits up on the bed and kicks a wine bottle underneath it.

Ah, Gustave is so nice. He really can't help himself. "Thanks," he says as he curls his fingers around the glass, taking a sip before setting it on the nightstand. There's another long pause—they're becoming a feature today—before he says, "You know, the divan's bad for your back."

"Do you have any more— enormous confessions to get out of the way before I get comfortable?" Gustave drops heavily down next to him, then yawns into the crook of his own elbow and glances sideways at Verso.

He swallows hard, then, gently bumping the side of Verso's knee with his own.

"I want to talk about it. And— it's very important to me that you answer the questions I need to ask. But— surely you didn't actually think I might fear you?"

Now this, finally, does give him some relief. There's still a tightening in his chest at the thought of having to answer those questions, but at least Gustave is here, next to him, and not physically in the other room and emotionally miles away from him. It's most certainly more than he deserves after not only committing a heinous sin, but then covering it up and hiding it from Gustave, too—but Gustave has always been more than he deserves, so maybe it isn't anything new.

"I don't know." He'd been worried about it. That Gustave might wonder if he'd be willing to do the same thing again. It doesn't exactly bode well for his relationship skills. "I thought you might have second thoughts about being alone with me on the Continent."

"Killing me now would just make you... horribly inefficient." The very first thing Gustave had seen Verso do was step in to save his life; he could have saved himself a lot of effort if that were his nefarious and inexplicable ultimate goal. Gustave squeezes his hands together, taking a low breath like that might help him brace himself.

"Do you want to just get it over with? And tell me how it happened, I mean." His voice is soft. "I don't know if the way my imagination has been filling in the blanks is better or worse than the truth."

He could do without ever telling Gustave how it happened, actually, but it seems as if that ship has sailed.

So, staring down at the twiddling thumbs in his lap, he starts, "On that first Expedition— we all made it as far as the Monolith. But Clea was there, and she..." He gestures vaguely. It had been the first time he'd seen someone die, but by far not the last. "Everyone but Renoir and I." No one had questioned their story back in Lumière; there hadn't been a reason to doubt them.

"We joined the next attempt, but we couldn't tell anyone what we knew. They would have thought we were insane." If Gustave and the others hadn't been Gommaged and brought back, they would have thought the same. "But I got attacked by a Nevron— torn apart. And Julie saw it. I tried to tell her she was confused, but she just wouldn't"—he grits his teeth, like the argument was just yesterday, like it's still fresh—"let it go."

He's never shared this with anyone—it both feels as if a weight has been lifted off his shoulders and like he might throw up, and he hasn't even gotten to the bad part yet. Nervously, he glances at Gustave, seeking some sort of reassurance that he should keep going.

Gustave does his best to put himself in the sort of mindset that people would have had on those early Expeditions, back when it was all still just a big rescue mission. How it must have felt for Verso, who also had to watch his team snuffed out around him.

"I can understand why that might have been difficult for her to just dismiss," Gustave says quietly, but it seems to be a simple statement more than a condemnation of any sort. He raises his hand to press gently against the small of Verso's back, silently encouraging him to continue on.

"Yeah," is all Verso says to that, eyes drifting back down to his hands. He'd wanted her to dismiss it more than anything. "Well, she spoke to some of our friends." A beat. "Her friends." Obviously, they weren't his. "They abducted me, interrogated me. Accused me of being a traitor." Even all these years later, he's still resentful; his tone is more bitter than is strictly respectable. "They thought it was Renoir and I who committed the massacre at the Monolith. I said that the Paintress wasn't their enemy, but they didn't believe me."

Now comes the bad part, evident by the way he stumbles over his words. "I— I didn't know what to do. I was afraid that—" That things would turn out the way they did, with every citizen in Lumière hoping to slaughter his mother and, in turn, destroy everything. Once upon a time, everything being plunged into oblivion had seemed horrific.

Skipping over the gritty details: "And then Julie showed up, and she saw what I'd done." It's pretty obvious what happened from there, he thinks. He's quick to move on. "I was trying to protect them, but they wouldn't listen."

Gustave has the presence of mind to wonder how much differently he'd take this story if he weren't in love with the man telling it. He likes to think that he's listening with a mind that's as objective as possible, but when he hears that Verso had been abducted, interrogated — well. Something goes unpleasantly tight in his throat, and it's certainly not out of sympathy for Renoir.

He wishes suddenly he'd sat himself on Verso's other side; it feels a bit silly, somehow, offering a mechanical limb for comfort, but he removes it from Verso's back and gently places it instead over one of Verso's hands. (A quiet, guilty part of him wonders if Verso is... embellishing to make himself sound more sympathetic, but he'd been the one to suggest bringing Julie, the one person who could contradict any of these statements, back to life. Surely that had to suggest he was being honest this time.)

"Okay," Gustave says after a moment, eyes unfocused, clearly processing. "... okay," he repeats, and flexes his hand atop Verso's. "What about— the Expeditions that came after that?" They'd recovered so many journals; most of them seemed to have died fully without any help from the painted Dessendres, but still: he needs to ask.

"What?" Verso has no right to be offended after what he just said, yet it still prickles that Gustave would think that he was... what? Some Expedition executioner? He hadn't even wanted to do it the first time. "No. No, I never raised a blade against them." Although he wasn't exactly helpful in those days, either. He'd wanted their help to break the barrier around the Monolith, but he'd dreaded the thought of them actually getting there. Renoir had thought it wasn't worth the risk. In fact—

"That's why Renoir and I fought," he says, gesturing to his face, the scarring. "I didn't want to cross that line again, and he... did." With enthusiasm.

That's enough to puncture the worst of his anxiety about the situation. "Okay," Gustave says simply, and shifts to gently bump his shoulder to Verso's. "Thank you for answering my questions." He wants desperately to make some sort of joke, to break the tension, but he can't begin to imagine how. "I — does anyone else know?"

"—Yeah, I thought it'd make a good ice-breaker," he says somewhat incredulously. Be so fucking for real, Gustave. Obviously, he thought this was a secret he'd take to his nonexistent grave. He had given up hope on bringing Julie back a long time ago, so he'd never really thought even she would spill the beans.

To clarify: "No. Never." It's just been eating him up inside for nearly 70 years. He practically told Esquie that Julie went to live on a farm. "You're the first."

His gaze drifts to Gustave's hand. "You aren't— appalled?"

"No. I'm— I don't know what. I'll let you know when I figure it out." He's just going to ignore that sass, thank you very much!! Gustave clears his throat, proceeding to mostly just think out loud.

"It's not like you did it for fun, or— it'd be different, if you turned to murder in the face of inconvenience. If this was a— trending behavior. I wasn't there, and I can't... absolve you of your guilt for this. But I don't think that you're a monster, either, if that's what you're worried about."

Verso hadn't told anyone; he could have very easily just let sleeping dogs lie, but to invite discovery by bringing Julie back — this must have been weighing heavily on him for a long time.

"I can, uh— react differently. If there's something specific you're expecting from me."

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