"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."
This is just the way all of Lumière had become, at least by the Disaster Expedition. Quiet resignation of an unlucky fate, celebrating the people they were losing with wreaths of flowers and slow walks to the harbor.
Gustave doesn't say what he thinks: it was a whole family he'd dreamed of, safety and domesticity. Instead, his face just scrunches up at the suggestion. "What is— are you trying to sell me, monsieur?"
"Sell you—" Verso shoves Gustave's shoulder, playful and exasperated all at once. "I'd rather put you in a museum and keep you all to myself."
But he recognizes that he can't actually do that, or that he at least shouldn't. If Gustave has dreams that are yet to be fulfilled, then he should chase them. And, admittedly, perhaps some of it is driven by the urge to assuage his own guilt at having in some way deprived Gustave of these things. Not willingly, not on purpose, but all the same—the reason Gustave didn't have 'the ideal', as he'd said, is because Verso existed.
"I'm just saying," he continues, "if that's something you wanted to do." A little Noco next to Monoco, next. Even gestrals dream of fatherhood, it seems. "I wouldn't stand in your way."
Gustave would've been stunned silent by that logic, so it's probably best that Verso didn't actually voice it aloud. If Verso wants to take the blame for Gustave's life not panning out the way he'd dreamed of when he was young, he also has to take responsibility for Gustave's sheer existence. He owed his life to him in that sense.
"Maybe," he says, but his tone is gently dismissive. "It's not really something that's been on my mind much these days, to be honest." He's barely got a nub of chalk left, but he's leaning over to trace out a stick figure with Verso's hair, standing at equal height next to Noco. "What about you? Back before you knew— everything, I mean. You never dreamed of raising the next generation of musical prodigies?"
Ha. No. He'd assumed it would happen at some point, because that's just the sort of thing people do—chase 'the ideal' whether or not it's something that actually appeals to them—but he'd certainly never had a longing for it like Gustave did. Besides, he'd already had someone to take care of.
"You think I should be responsible for an infant?" he asks. His hut didn't even have a door. "—I see you're taking artistic liberties with my height."
"Absolutely not," Gustave deadpans, but there's a twitch at the corner of his mouth as he focuses very hard on his stick figure. "But I've never known you to be a man who lets his capability stand in the way of his desires." That's not the case, of course that isn't the case, but the weather is nice and the sun is warm, and he's quietly hoping this will be the first time they're able to exist together out in public without it ending in complete disaster.
He taps the nub of chalk against the ground. "And I'm not sure what you mean. I just draw what I see."
Luckily, there is neither capability nor desire. Verso rolls his eyes, then adds a little Gustave next to him—even shorter, although the wild hair adds a little height. He even scribbles in Gustave's metal arm, because he is a true artiste.
"I've already got a little thing to take care of, clearly," he says, tapping the chalk against the drawing. Something something you can call him Papa anytime?? "Look how small he is."
Gustave leans in, reaching out to make a single edit by way of smudging the hair up a little more. "Look at that. I'm adorable."
He casts a sidelong glance at him then, doing his best to get an actual read on Verso's mood. (Briefly, too, he thinks that it's unfair that it's still so difficult sometimes.) "You doing alright?"
Wow, that's Verso's art he's editing without permission. But the smudged up hair is very cute, he must admit—just like Gustave's hair in reality—so he'll forgive the faux pas. As for the question, he does take a moment to contemplate how he'd like to respond—
It's weird, right now. A little awkward. He doesn't know how to act, how to feel. Getting to see Maelle this happy, making art with other kids her age, should be the greatest gift in the world, but it's all tempered by the knowledge of what it's doing to her. Even more by the knowledge that he's the reason these other kids her age had to watch their parents disappear into flower petals.
"I'm with my two favorite people," he lands on, pressing a hand to Gustave's arm. "How could I ever be anything but all right?"
Gustave turns more fully toward Verso at that answer; his expression is gently amused, fond, but he tilts his head like an inquisitive dog. The evasive non-answers are occasionally more concerning than anything else could be, and he doesn't bother hiding the fact that he's trying to search Verso's face for more insight into his answer.
"Well, I'm completely out of things to draw," he settles on. It's an unseasonably warm afternoon, less cloudy than Lumiere tends to be. It makes the sight of the kids playing and decorating the plaza extra heartwarming, but Gustave is fairly certain he can feel his face just starting to sunburn. "I'm a much bettere consumer than producer of art, anyway."
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superniceone) wrote2025-06-23 06:53 pm
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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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Gustave doesn't say what he thinks: it was a whole family he'd dreamed of, safety and domesticity. Instead, his face just scrunches up at the suggestion. "What is— are you trying to sell me, monsieur?"
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But he recognizes that he can't actually do that, or that he at least shouldn't. If Gustave has dreams that are yet to be fulfilled, then he should chase them. And, admittedly, perhaps some of it is driven by the urge to assuage his own guilt at having in some way deprived Gustave of these things. Not willingly, not on purpose, but all the same—the reason Gustave didn't have 'the ideal', as he'd said, is because Verso existed.
"I'm just saying," he continues, "if that's something you wanted to do." A little Noco next to Monoco, next. Even gestrals dream of fatherhood, it seems. "I wouldn't stand in your way."
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"Maybe," he says, but his tone is gently dismissive. "It's not really something that's been on my mind much these days, to be honest." He's barely got a nub of chalk left, but he's leaning over to trace out a stick figure with Verso's hair, standing at equal height next to Noco. "What about you? Back before you knew— everything, I mean. You never dreamed of raising the next generation of musical prodigies?"
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"You think I should be responsible for an infant?" he asks. His hut didn't even have a door. "—I see you're taking artistic liberties with my height."
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He taps the nub of chalk against the ground. "And I'm not sure what you mean. I just draw what I see."
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"I've already got a little thing to take care of, clearly," he says, tapping the chalk against the drawing. Something something you can call him Papa anytime?? "Look how small he is."
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He casts a sidelong glance at him then, doing his best to get an actual read on Verso's mood. (Briefly, too, he thinks that it's unfair that it's still so difficult sometimes.) "You doing alright?"
forgive me i died
It's weird, right now. A little awkward. He doesn't know how to act, how to feel. Getting to see Maelle this happy, making art with other kids her age, should be the greatest gift in the world, but it's all tempered by the knowledge of what it's doing to her. Even more by the knowledge that he's the reason these other kids her age had to watch their parents disappear into flower petals.
"I'm with my two favorite people," he lands on, pressing a hand to Gustave's arm. "How could I ever be anything but all right?"
lmao i didn't get a notif for this...
"Well, I'm completely out of things to draw," he settles on. It's an unseasonably warm afternoon, less cloudy than Lumiere tends to be. It makes the sight of the kids playing and decorating the plaza extra heartwarming, but Gustave is fairly certain he can feel his face just starting to sunburn. "I'm a much bettere consumer than producer of art, anyway."
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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