superniceone | tfln overflow / open post

"What, seriously?" That gets his eyes to pop open again, because of every possible thing he thought Verso could have maybe embellished, that wasn't actually on the list. Gustave is trying so hard not to laugh, but it's such a stupid, inconsequential thing, absurd to the point of peak comedy after what was actually a very stressful night. "But you were so— confident."

Sure, there had been the occasional hiccup, but Gustave had imagined it to be a combination of less cumulative experience with other men and trying to safely manage fraternization in the woods like a pair of horny animals. "And I was the one you chose to end your dry spell with?" He's shaking a little with suppressed laughter, squeezing Verso with the organic arm wrapped around him. "Sorry, I just— You're such an appealing man, so I just assumed."

Verso can feel the little tremors of Gustave's poorly stifled laughter, and he can't decide whether to be flattered or offended. It's complimentary, he supposes, that Gustave thinks he's so attractive that he'd be that— active. After the disappointment and disillusionment of recent years, even the prevalence of speaking to another human being dropped significantly, much less anything else. For a while, he'd entirely given up on the Expeditions. If not for Maelle, he probably wouldn't have spared this one a second glance, either.

"Let me do it over. On the Continent." It kills him to think that that's Gustave's memory of their first time. Awkward and halting and probably not even very good. He definitely doesn't want to admit how long it had been since he kissed a person before that. "I'll ply you with wine, ensnare you with my charm. Blow your clever mind."

"I don't need a do over," Gustave says with another little laugh, and he gives Verso a pull, trying to urge him up for an actual kiss. "I like the way we started. I mean—"

Okay, maybe not every moment of it. Maybe parts of it were miserable, but it definitely doesn't warrant a massive do-over.

"Je t'aime," he murmurs softly. "You don't need to prove anything to me."

Verso kisses him, closed-mouth and chaste, because he's not going to not kiss him after spending a large chunk of the last twenty-four hours convinced it would never happen again. It feels odd to still be treated so nicely and told such sweet things after what he had been certain was an event horizon, and he surreptitiously pinches his own thigh to make sure this isn't some pathetic wish-fulfillment dream.

Right after pulling back, though, he does argue, "Oh, it's not for you." A lie—of course it's for Gustave. Verso happens to think the sun shines out of his ass, and the thought of someone having the gall to make him a no-strings-attached wilderness fuckbuddy really grates at him, even if that someone was himself. Regardless, he says, "The do-over is all for me. It was over way too fast."

Gustave doesn't say what he thinks: that it been so casual, the lead-up to their hookup so— well, incidental, he has trouble imagining that same scenario not playing out for him dozens of times.

"Okay. Sure." He swallows down another soft laugh. "We can make plans when we're out there." Gustave pauses, idly stroking his fingers against the back of Verso's neck, an idle attempt to be soothing as he lapses into silence. After an uncertain pause, he asks: "What do you think will happen if Maelle can fix your— immortality thing? D'you think you'll just start aging normally, or will you just turn into a shriveled little grand-papa all at once?"

Gustave falls into silence, and Verso assumes that means he's drifting off, so he closes his eyes, too. They're still closed when Gustave asks his question, which is probably a good thing, because otherwise his brow would raise skeptically. If he were going to age all at once, he imagines it would probably end in keeling over, but he doesn't say so for fear of making Gustave anxious about the possibility.

Instead, he corrects lightly, "Great grand-papa." He's old as balls. "Don't worry. I won't hold you to anything if I turn out a wrinkled old raisin."

Gustave snorts at the correction, leaning his cheek into Verso's hair. "I don't like the implication that I'm so superficial," he murmurs, and maybe this isn't a conversation they should be having when they're both half-dozing, but it can't be helped: it's one of those things that his ceaselessly churning mind has locked onto.

"Still not really sure how— the rules of all that work." Maelle hadn't been able to help the Clea who had been painted into this world, after all. "But if she can—?" Is that something he'd even want?

There's truly no lore explanation for why Maelle would be able to do that, so Gustave should avoid hurting himself trying to wrap his head around it.

As for whether he'd want that— sure. Maybe. It would be strange to see himself age after decades of staying exactly the same, but 'strange' isn't bad. Experiencing something different, something that the Verso outside the Canvas never got to, wouldn't be unpleasant. He does wonder, though, if Maelle might be hesitant to gift him something like that out of fear that he might end things prematurely. Then again, if he did, she'd only have to bring him back. He's dubious whether she'd even be willing to let him go when his proper time came.

A lot of things to consider. Including, "Would you want me to?"

Gustave has honestly never really given much thought to the idea of his own aging past a certain point. He was hopeful about his Expedition, of course, had enough faith in their chances of success that he'd eventually stopped fighting Maelle in the face of her determination to come along — but even then, the day before departure, he'd felt compelled to remind her the years ahead of her were only promised if she stayed behind. He'd hoped, of course, to see his forties someday, but it was never something he had actively counted on.

He hums a quiet, thoughtful sound. "Could be nice to have company for the whole 'growing old' thing. But I don't think my opinion should be worth much here."

Verso can't help but smile. He constantly lives in fear of this one good thing turning to dust in his hand, but it's nice that Gustave doesn't seem to feel the same. That he can imagine a world where this lasts long enough for them to age, and that he can think of the future at all in any way that isn't the hazy darkness Verso can only assume most Lumièrans picture when the subject comes up.

"I look forward to your outsides matching your insides." Old!!!

"...I should let you get older first," he says after a moment. Older physically, if not chronologically. He's not opposed to silver fox Gustave. Playful: "Then you can be the genius inventor and I can be the trophy."

Gustave has no idea if the two of them are going to work out, or for how long — or, really, if they're even going to be able to somehow save Maelle and the Canvas alongside her. Regardless, he can't just assume they won't.

"You know I'm already obviously older than you, right?" It's probably less obvious than Gustave actually thinks, but whatever. "But I'll have to start wearing glasses full-time to really sell the 'genius inventor' thing, I think," he says, because they're canon now.

Gustave's mad scientist hair that looks as if it's never seen a brush in its life sells that plenty well, he thinks, but better not to say that.

"Sexy," is half a tease and half the truth, because it turns out he's very into the whole genius-inventor-tenured-professor-librarian vibe. He does, after all, actually like the unbrushed mad scientist hair. "If you'd worn them on the Expedition, I would have tried something much sooner." This one's a full tease. Gustave's looks, librarian-coded or not, were never the issue.

Gustave laughs out loud at that. Merde, they're meant to be sleeping, but there's something soothing about a no-stakes conversation. He still has questions: is Verso still going to bring Julie back? Is he going to let the others know what happened, way back when?

But, for now at least, it feels okay to let that lie. Maybe just for a few hours.

"I really only need them when I'm tinkering," he exhales — and maybe reading, a little, too, but he's reductant to admit that for some reason. "And I didn't plan on doing much tinkering on the Continent."

"You'll be doing more now." Out of practicality, but also out of enjoyment, he assumes (and hopes). There's only so much research to be done in a day, particularly when their research question is so very vague. He likes to imagine that their daily schedule will be something like— wake up, do degenerate things to each other, kill some Nevrons and drag their corpses back for study, dinner, Gustave tinkers with a project while Verso tries to master the guitar, do degenerate things to each other again, sleep.

He's open to suggestions, though.

"We'll have to hide you from the gestrals or they'll be all over you begging for you to build them a new Sakapatate."

Gustave has only ever lived in Lumière; he still hasn't quite thought in too much detail about what the specifics of a life anywhere else might look like. The idea of having time to tinker just for fun again, though? It's appealing.

"You know, I might not actually mind that," he muses. He pauses, then adds: "Know I said you didn't have to prove anything, but it's not nice to be left in limbo."

He said he loved you!!! And you left him on read!!!

Ow. It hurts his head something fierce to laugh, but he can't help it. "Come on," he grouses, although not without affection. "I said you were my light in the darkness."

Saying 'I love you' feels so obvious as to be superfluous. It's difficult to remember that he's only said it aloud a small handful of times, and that Gustave doesn't live in his head where it's been a given that Verso is obsessed with him for quite a while now. No, he lives in this world, the one where Verso has jerked him around and lied to him and tried to break it off a truly indefensible amount of times.

All right—it's more than fair to request reciprocation.

"Je t'aime," he acquiesces. "Very much so, if you need that spelled out for you, too."

Nothing about any of this feels obvious to him. Nothing about anything does, really, but that might actually have more to do with the fact that part of him is still reeling in the face of reality, especially when Sciel and Lune both seem to be adjusting fine.

"I thought you were just— humoring my sentimentality until very recently, you know." It's the same toothless sort of bellyaching. The idea of Verso genuinely reciprocating was — too ideal, really, when he'd spent so long on the Continent assuming the way Verso fled was because Gustave was asking for more than he was able to give. "Sue me. It's nice to hear."

And he does very much sound pleased about it.

For the millionth time this morning, he feels a surge of relief that Gustave wasn't scared off by his confession. Listening to that contented lilt of his voice is like being wrapped in a warm blanket. "Then je t'aime, mon cher," he says, tired but amused. He goes for a lazy kiss to Gustave's cheek and accidentally gets his ear instead. "You can hear it any time you like."

—Less cozy than being wrapped in a warm blanket is the reminder that Gustave really believed he was being humored, though. "You're ridiculous, by the way."

He'd liked Gustave during all of it. Only a little bit at first, sure, but it had ballooned out of control much more quickly than he'd been comfortable with. It's just that instead of butterflies in his stomach, he'd mostly just felt like throwing up from guilt.

"Only you could imagine that my inventing excuses to talk to you was humoring."

Gustave is pretty sure that's the first time he can remember his ear being tickled by someone else's beard before, and he swallows down the reflexive little laugh that threatens to bubble up.

(He wonders briefly if it's bad of him to wait until they're on the Continent again to ask some of the more uncomfortable questions about the things Verso has revealed, to wait until they're somewhere that will make running harder for the both of them. He's pretty sure it's either a great idea or just a selfish one, but he doesn't have the energy to spend figuring it out right now.)

"I was one of the three other human adults in the group," Gustave counters, pretty openly amused. "It would've been much stranger if you didn't talk to me."

Well— yes.

When he puts it that way, it makes all of the excuses Verso made for them to just happen to be talking feel a little... silly. At the time, though, it had felt impossible just to approach Gustave and say 'hi'.

"You could have told me that before I chopped off my hand for a reason to talk to you." One of his worse moments. "Concocting all of those plans was exhausting."

It occurs to Gustave that they'd spent relatively little time actually time talking at night, even after they'd begun almost wordlessly sleeping in reach of each other.

"Well, it's good you know now, then," he mumbles, the corner of his lip twitching into a smile. "I do, actually, prefer all your limbs attached." Is he fighting sleep like an overgrown toddler so he can keep existing in this comfortable liminal space where imminent and urgent problems seem a little further away? Maybe.

"More flattering words have never been spoken," he says dryly, although he's smiling, too.

At some point last night, Verso passed out; it hadn't been a restful sleep—too anxious—but it had been more sleep than Gustave had said he'd gotten. Still, the hangover makes him want to shut his eyes for at least the next hour, and Gustave is warm enough next to him that he can imagine dozing. He takes a deep breath in and out, quiet for a second, as if he might let the conversation lie there.

—Wait, one last thing. "Je t'aime." Now he's good to go. He snoozes lightly, a catnap more than a real, deep sleep; even after he wakes, he pretends to be asleep until he feels Gustave rousing, loath to wake him before he's rested.

When he finally does hear the telltale rustle of movement beside him, he says, quietly, "Hey." There's a little bit of tightness in his stomach, worry that maybe rest has made Gustave see things clearly and that his acceptance earlier had only been the product of sleeplessness. "—Want me to make eggs?"

It's possible that's one of the only things he knows how to make.

Gustave sleeps long enough to have a few scattered, fractured dreams. He'd very much hoped that they would settle down when he was back, safe in Lumière, surrounded by family and friends, but it's like the peace around him has only somehow fed into it. He's grateful not to remember any real details when he wakes, just a dull feeling of fear, of grief. (He's fairly certain Verso featured in at least one, which is not something you could torture out of him — he has a feeling he knows exactly what kind of reaction that would elicit.)

"Hey," he murmurs, body warm and heavy despite his racing mind; he rolls over to grab Verso by the waist and hides a yawn in the curve of his neck. "Mon beau. Neither of us want your eggs."

Relief bubbles up and manifests as a slightly giddy laugh. Thank god sleep hasn't made Gustave come to his senses. If it were anyone else but himself, Verso would be strongly discouraging Gustave from trusting a confessed murderer around his unconscious body, but— he can endorse bad decision making if it benefits him.

"I could improve," he argues, although it doesn't even sound convincing to himself.

If eggs are off the table, though, he sees no reason to force himself up yet. He smooths down a little of Gustave's bedhead with his fingers as he notes, idly, "You twitch in your sleep sometimes." He hadn't noticed it before, when they were sleeping within arm's reach but decidedly not close enough to feel the minute movements of Gustave's body. It's not an accusation of bad dreams, exactly, but it is an opening if he wants to discuss it.

It wasn't like Verso had been short on opportunity to off him, if that had been a goal at any point. And — regardless — Gustave wants to believe that Verso had good cause for what he'd done. That things wouldn't have ended that way if he'd had any other choice. Would Verso want to bring her back if that wasn't the case?

But it's easier to tilt his head a little into the touch of Verso's hand instead of pursuing lines of thought life that one, so that's what he does. "Nightmares," he exhales after a moment's deliberation, like he's ashamed to be caught having them. "I didn't realize I was moving around. You can wake me up if it bothers you."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject