superniceone | tfln overflow / open post

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."

Verso raises an eyebrow. "No, uh." It's just strange. All this time, he'd built it up in his head to be this horrible secret that would ruin everything once it got exposed. Rot underneath his foundation. He's a bit dumbfounded that Gustave can even look at him, much less accept this.

"—I just thought I would have to prostrate myself before you quite a bit more."

He'd expected a lot of begging and pleading, maybe some shouting. He would have put money on Gustave storming out by now. Maybe Gustave had a point about ruining things preemptively.

"You don't seem like the sort to prostrate yourself for forgiveness," Gustave says, nudging him gently again before he removes his hand. "And I don't know. Maybe I am underreacting. But in light of— everything..."

He trails off, scrubbing his fingers through his hair and making fluffing out what is already definitely a mess. "I want to assume the best intentions from the people that matter to me. And I want to think, based on the evidence I have, that you wouldn't have done it unless you had to. I have no idea how anyone else might feel about it, but..." Gustave shrugs listlessly.

Gustave's hair sticks up in feathery tufts, physical evidence of the stress Verso is putting him through with this confession. He feels guilty for what he did to Julie, and he feels guilty for all the lies, and now he feels guilty for making Gustave have to deal with it all. He reaches out to—very carefully, very gently, in case they aren't in a place where he's allowed to initiate touch like this—replace Gustave's hand with his own, smoothing down the worst of the unruliness.

Not all of it. He happens to like it fluffy.

"Sorry for ruining lunch." They'd been doing so well. Out in public and everything. "I'll make it up to you." Somehow.

"I'm pretty sure my weird— panic attacks were well on the way to ruining it, don't take all the credit." Gustave doesn't seem bothered by the touch; the ship sailed on that when he was willing to keep hooking up after being quite literally Gommaged and brought back.

He laughs abruptly, a short and self-deprecating bark of it. "Putain. I was jealous for that first few minutes, you know. Humiliating." An absurd way to feel in light of the truth.

His hand stalls in Gustave's hair, overcome with incredulity again. "Of— Julie?"

Despite the awful conversation they just had, despite the hangover, his mouth twitches. It must be a moral failing to be pleased by this—Gustave experiencing jealousy over the ex-lover that Verso killed—but he can't quite smother down the satisfaction. Horrible, selfish asshole that he is, that wouldn't have ruined Verso's lunch at all.

"'Humiliating'," he echoes, hand dropping. "Do you have any idea how much time I've spent agonizing over your lost love?" A fucking lot. "That's humiliating."

"Well, it turns out that I'm no better. You were being eaten alive with guilt while I was sitting there thinking, 'he must have really loved her if he can't even bear to see her again after this long.' That— probably says more about me than I'd like, huh."

When he'd been so deeply in love with Sophie that he'd avoided her for years, had wasted his time on the rooftops staring out at the horizon while she said her goodbye to the rest of Lumière. Who knows how much more time he would have lost if Maelle hadn't interrupted him that day?

Gustave leans down to peel off his socks, trying to ease some of this choking tension as he glances up and over at Verso. "But I thought it was sweet, by the way. That you called this 'home', I mean." Because he's told himself that playing house for a little while is no more stupid than anything else they've done so far.

He gets the feeling that it was only found sweet in hindsight. It hadn't been enough to convince Gustave not to go, after all. "You didn't even know what I was talking about at first," is a little sheepish—that's a little humiliating, too. Turns out this whole relationship is just an elaborate humiliation ritual for the both of them.

"That's the first time I've called it that," he admits. Verso's not a 'home' kind of person, not since leaving the manor for good. You wouldn't be either, if you lived in that shitty hut. "It doesn't really feel like home. But it does when you're here."

Gustave leans up slowly, hand flexing as he resists the urge to make a mess of the hair that Verso so kindly just (mostly) fixed for him. "I get... a little in my own head sometimes," he starts awkwardly; it feels greedy, in a way, to be disclosing this at all when it's really not about him and his issues right now. "It gets hard to think. It's like my brain is—"

He cuts himself off, shakes his head. Recalibrates.

"What I mean to say is— I would have picked up on it immediately, most of the time. I'd like it if I could be home for you."

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