—If he really thinks about it, they owe 100% of this relationship to the trauma. If this were real life, Gustave really wouldn't have looked his way twice, except maybe to help him cross the road. At best, Verso would be old and wrinkly, and at worst, he'd be buried. He tries not to dwell on that, though.
"Smooth," is his response to the poetry, wry amusement for wry amusement. Smooth as hell, actually, to quote a composer, even though he's certain Beethoven wasn't talking about a 100-year-old man. "Do you wish that things were different?" That they were on an even keel, or that they didn't have the so-called trauma bond.
In case Gustave is worried that he's going to overreact to the answer, he adds, "It's normal, I think. To want things to be simpler."
Gustave wishes that they could look toward a future with confidence that it wouldn't mean the end of someone they both love. He wishes Verso hadn't been stuck in this exact position for the last sixty-odd years. He wishes that the fact that he'll never truly have a legacy here in this child's sandbox didn't discourage him so much. It makes him feel selfish.
"Do I wish things were different between us?" He chews on that for a moment, voice soft more because of how close they are than because of the actual topic. "No. Unless you count daydreaming." In another world, as he'd said to both Sophie and himself countless times. "I'd like to have been the boy invited to your room to obliviously compliment your toy train."
—Whoa, whoa, whoa. He's in a good enough mood for Gustave to shit-talk his kissing skills, but there's no mood buoyant enough to allow him to refer to Verso's trains in such a way. He can't help arguing, "They're not— toys. They're... models. Scale replicas."
Gustave would have been invited to his room to 'check out his trains', and on top of being oblivious, he would have called them toys and completely destroyed Verso's ego. Truly, maybe it's for the best that things didn't turn out that way.
The defensiveness catches him off guard and totally dismisses the threat of melancholy hovering near his thoughts. Gustave brings the book to his face, vainly trying to hide the way he's left laughing at his reaction.
"'Toy' isn't an insult," he says, attempting to stifle a crooked little grin. Fuck!! It's adorable that Verso still has it in him to argue about toy trains, and Gustave laughs again. "I'm crazy about you. You make me crazy." A teasing echo, but very much not a joke.
Gustave probably has no idea what a massive relief it is for him to act like this after such a monumental confession, but it is; Verso feels tension he wasn't even consciously holding seep from between his shoulder blades. He presses his mouth to the mop of Gustave's hair, arm squeezing a little tighter. Look how far he's come since rebuffing Gustave's attempts at affection.
"You think you're crazy about me now," he says, voice sounding ridiculously pleased, a complete 180 to the misery in it this morning. "Wait until I put a door on our house."
Okay. Well. 'House' is a really nice term for what it is. But he can't keep calling it a hut.
There's a not-insignificant part of Gustave that's made nervous by the easy affection, by the way they've slotted themselves comfortable in here. It still feels too easy, somehow — like maybe this contentment is entirely a result of the both of them lying to themselves.
"Our house? We just started dating and we're jumping straight to home co-ownership?" As if any one single thing about this courtship has been normal. He snorts, expression fond, and turns enough to bump a kiss against the side of Verso's neck. "I'm expecting one hell of a door now."
"It's, uh, less a home and more a..." Hm. "Rundown shack." If he has to name it accurately. And he'd been trying to be gracious in calling it 'ours' instead of 'mine' when Gustave will be living there too, but—
"You can be my tenant instead. But I do expect rent, in that case."
Wow, Gustave will sleep with a murderer, but he draws the line at landlords. "I thought we'd established a firmly neighbourly relationship." He is of course just bullshitting here, but yeah okay he doesn't actually want to think right now about all of the work that's going to go into making that rundown shack liveable.
He rolls his head back, thoughtful. "Or would you consider something long-distance? Some of those vacant apartments in Old Lumière seemed nice." And also like absolutely tragic relics of the past, and also kind of lopsided?
"Works for me," Verso says lightly, although he can't help but wonder if maybe Gustave would be happier with some distance. It might be healthy. Give him a little more perspective. Of course, that perspective would probably lead to him figuring out he's not so keen on sleeping with a murderer, either, so it's difficult to push him in that direction.
"If you won't be living there, then I won't have to put the door up."
"You'll take any excuse you can to live in the world's most terrifying conditions, won't you?" Gently, he knocks into Verso's side with his flesh and bone elbow. "You're meant to act put out, not to immediately call my bluff."
"I did that last time you threatened to be neighbors," he points out. "I thought you'd get bored if I didn't switch it up."
But clearly Gustave is going to complain no matter what he does. Very sweet, but impossible to please! Verso sighs melodramatically, then recites with the same amount of theatricality, "Please don't stay in Old Lumière. Without your light, I'm liable to wither away like a flower in winter."
"Better," Gustave says, settling the open book back into his lap again with a chuckle. God, it's going to be hard after letting himself get comfortable here on the island again, but at least they'll be able to settle in one place. He can't really imagine putting down roots out on the Continent, but it's not so dire to think of it as home for a while.
"Alright, alright. Reading now, if you still want."
Gustave has come to accept that the people who care about him the most seem to show it through merciless teasing, so he rolls his eyes and obliges anyway. He doesn't do voices, but his voice is steady and rich, and something in him has calmed by the time he wraps up. Somehow the pressure where his body leans into Verso's soothes some of the wild panic ever-present on the periphery of his mind, lurking in wait for whatever opportunity they can take to fuck with his thoughts.
It's a nice way to spend the rest of the morning, and he'll do his best to be a calming presence in turn on their way to meet Maelle. She's holding a pouch of multicolored chalks when they arrive, clearly part of whatever plan she has for them that afternoon. When Gustave explains he'll be coming with them, she gives Verso a look that's both uncertain and hopeful. "So... you're feeling a little better?"
It's awkward. Obviously, it's awkward. It's the first time they've really interacted since turning blades on one another; he's not sure what he'd do if Gustave's presence weren't here to take some of the pressure off. But if he's going to be here, there's no point in making Maelle feel uncomfortable—besides, she deserves a few more good days before they break it to her that they're fucking off to the Continent.
So, he says, "Much better."
They share a look, one that suggests Maelle doesn't find much closure in this but doesn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, either.
"But don't let me get in the way of—" He cants his head toward her supplies. Whatever it is they're going to be doing. "I can always stand on the sidelines and offer moral support."
Maelle hesitates, glancing at Gustave, and the caution in her face makes his chest ache. It's clear that part of her is worried that this is some sort of pincer trap, that they're going to close in and start emphatically instructing her on things she knows neither of them could never fully understand, but she relaxes slightly when they both seem to just linger in wait for her answer.
"People have been decorating Trocadero Plaza today," she says. "I thought it could be fun." Children, mostly, covering the entire square in chalk art — but Gustave loves kids, and more than anything else, she's hoping this might remind him of what he'd been fighting for in the first place. The way he keeps disappearing terrifies her.
"That's an excellent idea," Verso says, because if he's going to be here, he's determined not to make it weird and awkward and sad. Besides, anything that brings Maelle even a modicum of joy before he has to break the news of their departure to her is a relief. (Selfishly, too, he'd like to experience that joy with her before she inevitably gets angry with him for leaving and gives him the silent treatment.)
"We already know you're a gifted artist." He holds out his hand and makes a sound of protest to stop her before she argues. "...But I'm curious to see if Gustave can draw more than schematics."
A beat. "Or I suppose he could decorate the plaza in diagrams of combustion engines."
"I invite you out with us out of the kindness of my own heart, and it's met with unprovoked aggression? I see how it is." It's already weird and awkward and sad, and Gustave knows Maelle isn't blind to it, either. (She already seems slightly skeptical of the careful distance Gustave is keeping from Verso, hovering away like a repelled magnet, and chooses not to point out the fact that the cat is already firmly out of the bag in that regard. Whatever he needs to do to feel comfortable, she supposes.)
Maelle tilts her head to indicate the door, then moves to lead the way out. "Am I going to need to separate you two? Opposite ends of the plaza, maybe?" The teasing is a little clumsy if only because she hadn't been expecting both of her brothers to appear at home with her; she's still trying to figure out which avenues of conversation are the safest ones.
"Probably unnecessary," he says—it isn't like they aren't already leaving room for whatever the Lumièran equivalent of Jesus is already, so. "I'll just stand around and supervise."
You know, offer unwanted art criticism. He might not be as dedicated to painting as the rest of the family, but he still has lots of opinions.
"I'm not letting you turn this into a graded assignment," Gustave says, his tone long-suffering in a way that telegraphs that he, too, is trying really hard here. "Not without a rubric to review, first, at least."
But it does become clear pretty quickly that Gustave really does light up around the kids in the square, transitions seamlessly into a sort of fun uncle while they color in sections of flagstone together. He drops down to a seat next to Verso after a while, patting his arm with a hand covered in blue chalk. He's pretty much a complete mess himself already. "I'm expecting a masterpiece from you, you know."
Verso glances down at his sleeve, which has now been dusted with chalk; rude! Luckily, Gustave could quite literally get away with murder in his eyes, so he just responds with a shake of his head and a scoff-laugh. "Oh, good. I was worried you'd have high expectations."
It's fun. Even now, though, he finds himself critical of the very temporary art he creates. He's been going for a depiction of Esquie, but it keeps feeling like it lacks— something. Regardless— he turns his attention to Gustave for the moment, lifting his hand away by the pinky and shooting a pointed look at his blue fingers. "You've been having fun." Obviously. He's a mess. "—You're good with kids."
It's hard not to feel a little melancholy about Gustave's wasted paternal potential—wasted in large part because of him, if you get down to it—but he tries not to look too brooding about it. "I bet you would've been a father five times over by now if not for the Gommage."
"Five? Do you think I have unlimited energy?" Gustave echoes back, his tone both lighthearted and incredulous. It is something he'd felt melancholy about, and then summarily moved on from, if only because he didn't have a choice.
Legacy. Did legacy even have a meaning for fake people like them? He shakes it off.
"Two, probably," he concedes after a moment. "When I imagined— you know, the ideal?" Even now, his tone is wistful, but not exactly sad. Life is different than he'd hoped it to be in a lot of ways; not having children of his own running around his feet is really the least of it.
He leans over to add a little blue flourish to Esquie's mask.
Gustave always seems unbothered when talking about the things that he's had to give up—or, perhaps more accurately, the things that were forcefully taken from him. Stoic, accepting. It's hard to tell, though, how much of that is a mentally healthy tolerance of things that didn't turn out as expected versus a complete repression of any feelings of grief and disappointment. Like maybe Gustave thinks there's something wrong with feeling anything but grateful that he's still alive.
Verso doesn't want to push him into an unhappiness that he might not feel, though, so he treads carefully. Doesn't ask if it was hard not to get to experience 'the ideal'—not just the 2.5 kids and wife, but everything he had once hoped for his future.
Instead, he carefully outlines the flourish Gustave added, thin and clean. "Let me guess, a boy and a girl? Like you and Emma?"
If forced to an admission at gunpoint, Gustave would probably have to admit that he's not certain what the ratio of resignation to repression actually is - one of the myriad reasons why he avoids actually confronting that idea at seemingly all costs.
Almost idly, he starts a cartoonish doodle of Monoco next to Esquie. "Never really saw the point in hoping for one gender over the other." Look at Verso's family, with Clea the ruthless pragmatist, Verso the hopeless artist. "I-" Gustave's hand stalls, his expression pinching thoughtfully. "I suppose I thought it'd be nice if they had each other to rely on when we were gone. Two's a good number for that."
Verso can tell he doesn't even mean to, but somehow nearly everything Gustave says ends up crushingly depressing anyway. It's difficult to know how he's meant to respond to these comments, if he's even meant to respond to them at all. Gustave doesn't seem to enjoy too much sympathy, but it feels rather cruel not to acknowledge it when he says things like this.
"Incorrigibly thoughtful," he says, rubbing Gustave's shoulder.
"You could still—when you get back." Because, ideally, they won't be out there forever. Ideally, they'll eventually fix things and, he supposes, return. Even if things don't go ideally, there's a nonzero chance Gustave will get sick of being out there with him and come back to Lumière. "Adopt." He shrugs, reaches over and makes Monoco's mane a little bigger. "Or enlist one of the many women who'd be thrilled to take part in the creation of Gustave Jr."
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superniceone) wrote2025-06-23 06:53 pm
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"Smooth," is his response to the poetry, wry amusement for wry amusement. Smooth as hell, actually, to quote a composer, even though he's certain Beethoven wasn't talking about a 100-year-old man. "Do you wish that things were different?" That they were on an even keel, or that they didn't have the so-called trauma bond.
In case Gustave is worried that he's going to overreact to the answer, he adds, "It's normal, I think. To want things to be simpler."
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"Do I wish things were different between us?" He chews on that for a moment, voice soft more because of how close they are than because of the actual topic. "No. Unless you count daydreaming." In another world, as he'd said to both Sophie and himself countless times. "I'd like to have been the boy invited to your room to obliviously compliment your toy train."
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Gustave would have been invited to his room to 'check out his trains', and on top of being oblivious, he would have called them toys and completely destroyed Verso's ego. Truly, maybe it's for the best that things didn't turn out that way.
"...They're very adult," he finishes.
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"'Toy' isn't an insult," he says, attempting to stifle a crooked little grin. Fuck!! It's adorable that Verso still has it in him to argue about toy trains, and Gustave laughs again. "I'm crazy about you. You make me crazy." A teasing echo, but very much not a joke.
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"You think you're crazy about me now," he says, voice sounding ridiculously pleased, a complete 180 to the misery in it this morning. "Wait until I put a door on our house."
Okay. Well. 'House' is a really nice term for what it is. But he can't keep calling it a hut.
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"Our house? We just started dating and we're jumping straight to home co-ownership?" As if any one single thing about this courtship has been normal. He snorts, expression fond, and turns enough to bump a kiss against the side of Verso's neck. "I'm expecting one hell of a door now."
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"You can be my tenant instead. But I do expect rent, in that case."
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He rolls his head back, thoughtful. "Or would you consider something long-distance? Some of those vacant apartments in Old Lumière seemed nice." And also like absolutely tragic relics of the past, and also kind of lopsided?
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"If you won't be living there, then I won't have to put the door up."
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God! Flirting is hard, why does anyone do it!
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But clearly Gustave is going to complain no matter what he does. Very sweet, but impossible to please! Verso sighs melodramatically, then recites with the same amount of theatricality, "Please don't stay in Old Lumière. Without your light, I'm liable to wither away like a flower in winter."
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"Alright, alright. Reading now, if you still want."
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With a playful ruffle of Gustave's hair, he says, "I still want, monsieur le narrateur."
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It's a nice way to spend the rest of the morning, and he'll do his best to be a calming presence in turn on their way to meet Maelle. She's holding a pouch of multicolored chalks when they arrive, clearly part of whatever plan she has for them that afternoon. When Gustave explains he'll be coming with them, she gives Verso a look that's both uncertain and hopeful. "So... you're feeling a little better?"
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So, he says, "Much better."
They share a look, one that suggests Maelle doesn't find much closure in this but doesn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, either.
"But don't let me get in the way of—" He cants his head toward her supplies. Whatever it is they're going to be doing. "I can always stand on the sidelines and offer moral support."
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"People have been decorating Trocadero Plaza today," she says. "I thought it could be fun." Children, mostly, covering the entire square in chalk art — but Gustave loves kids, and more than anything else, she's hoping this might remind him of what he'd been fighting for in the first place. The way he keeps disappearing terrifies her.
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"We already know you're a gifted artist." He holds out his hand and makes a sound of protest to stop her before she argues. "...But I'm curious to see if Gustave can draw more than schematics."
A beat. "Or I suppose he could decorate the plaza in diagrams of combustion engines."
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Maelle tilts her head to indicate the door, then moves to lead the way out. "Am I going to need to separate you two? Opposite ends of the plaza, maybe?" The teasing is a little clumsy if only because she hadn't been expecting both of her brothers to appear at home with her; she's still trying to figure out which avenues of conversation are the safest ones.
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You know, offer unwanted art criticism. He might not be as dedicated to painting as the rest of the family, but he still has lots of opinions.
"I promise to be an unbiased judge."
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But it does become clear pretty quickly that Gustave really does light up around the kids in the square, transitions seamlessly into a sort of fun uncle while they color in sections of flagstone together. He drops down to a seat next to Verso after a while, patting his arm with a hand covered in blue chalk. He's pretty much a complete mess himself already. "I'm expecting a masterpiece from you, you know."
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It's fun. Even now, though, he finds himself critical of the very temporary art he creates. He's been going for a depiction of Esquie, but it keeps feeling like it lacks— something. Regardless— he turns his attention to Gustave for the moment, lifting his hand away by the pinky and shooting a pointed look at his blue fingers. "You've been having fun." Obviously. He's a mess. "—You're good with kids."
It's hard not to feel a little melancholy about Gustave's wasted paternal potential—wasted in large part because of him, if you get down to it—but he tries not to look too brooding about it. "I bet you would've been a father five times over by now if not for the Gommage."
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Legacy. Did legacy even have a meaning for fake people like them? He shakes it off.
"Two, probably," he concedes after a moment. "When I imagined— you know, the ideal?" Even now, his tone is wistful, but not exactly sad. Life is different than he'd hoped it to be in a lot of ways; not having children of his own running around his feet is really the least of it.
He leans over to add a little blue flourish to Esquie's mask.
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Verso doesn't want to push him into an unhappiness that he might not feel, though, so he treads carefully. Doesn't ask if it was hard not to get to experience 'the ideal'—not just the 2.5 kids and wife, but everything he had once hoped for his future.
Instead, he carefully outlines the flourish Gustave added, thin and clean. "Let me guess, a boy and a girl? Like you and Emma?"
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Almost idly, he starts a cartoonish doodle of Monoco next to Esquie. "Never really saw the point in hoping for one gender over the other." Look at Verso's family, with Clea the ruthless pragmatist, Verso the hopeless artist. "I-" Gustave's hand stalls, his expression pinching thoughtfully. "I suppose I thought it'd be nice if they had each other to rely on when we were gone. Two's a good number for that."
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"Incorrigibly thoughtful," he says, rubbing Gustave's shoulder.
"You could still—when you get back." Because, ideally, they won't be out there forever. Ideally, they'll eventually fix things and, he supposes, return. Even if things don't go ideally, there's a nonzero chance Gustave will get sick of being out there with him and come back to Lumière. "Adopt." He shrugs, reaches over and makes Monoco's mane a little bigger. "Or enlist one of the many women who'd be thrilled to take part in the creation of Gustave Jr."
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forgive me i died
lmao i didn't get a notif for this...
my white man yaoi is being silenced
are they the first case of yaoi heads
stop i try to forget about their giant heads
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