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Chapter Text

Maelle a une vie à peindre

Douce étoile, effacée

—

Essence, Verso once taught her, over resemblance.

But even so.

For Gustave, Maelle sets aside her saber. She doesn’t need to do this the traditional way, but she wants to—has to—get him right. Accordingly, she assembles her atelier.

His eyes are what she most yearns after: dark, kind, belying a steel-forged will. It would not do to proceed too rashly, so for him she uses her hands, sketching with deliberation and precision, then glazing in layer over layer of paint, modeling the contours with her finest brushes and richest pigments, until he is perfect: she striates titanium laced with cadmium yellow into his flyaways where the light would catch; swipes in a mustache and heavy brows in broad strokes and stipples on stubble dabbed with just the barest traitorous pinpoints of snowy age; varnishes in washes of ochre-, cinnabar- and azure-touched white turpentine to bring forward the protrusion of his brow from the fold of his hooded lids; and finally, in the deepest seaglass she can mix from her purest indigo and brightest vermillion, pools the warm nadirs of his gaze.

It is a labor of days, weeks, months—she loses track of the time as, between these painstaking coats of paint, the rest of the city starts to regain its shape under her fingers, gleaming white stone edifices and black lampposts demarcating the passage of space and the pitter-patter of children’s feet and hawkers’ shouts at the flea market filling the streets below. Blustering spring has gusted away winter’s white cover by the time she takes a step back to admire her handiwork. She raises her fingers and, the dark chocolate of Gustave’s chuckle thrumming through her mind, breathes out a zephyr of perfumed petals—

And the paint stretches, expands, flexes to cloth and skin imbued with soft, breathing life.

It will not be the same, Monoco had warned, before they split to go their separate ways. He will be him, but he will also be new, he had said. Beside him, the void where Noco should have stood. The man you long for—that version of him—is gone.

But no, Monoco was wrong, for here he is: Gustave, painted from her and the Lumiérien citizens’ most precious memories. From the confines of her paint he rises, smile open, a tid sheepish, a tad confused, patting down his own body as if in disbelief it’s really all there. He runs a familiar, rugged hand over his left arm.

“You painted me a new arm,” he remarks. He wiggles his fingers, as if struck by their mobility. “Thank you, Alicia.”

But no, that’s wrong—

“I’m Maelle,” Maelle corrects, more bite behind it than warranted perhaps, and Gustave’s brow creases. “I’m Maelle,” she repeats, quieter this time, the way Alicia might have under a reprimand from her parents. But no, no no—don’t be Alicia. She had left Alicia behind, given her the peaceful oblivion they had both wanted. Hadn’t she?

Je suis Maelle, pourquoi tu me vois pas?

Maelle wants to shout—but Gustave doesn’t deserve that. She shouldn’t have lashed out, tries instead to smile for him in apology.

He returns it—uneven and hesitant, a shallow, surface thing—and Maelle’s heart cracks.

After a beat too long, he comes—finally—forward, and agrees, voice low, “Maelle, then.” His embrace envelops her in that familiar scent she feared she’d never be able to recreate—warm, musky, just a little bit sharp with a hint of the ozone-aftertaste of the lumina experiments that cling to him wherever he goes. He smells of home.

Maelle doesn’t dare raise her face from where she’s buried it in his chest, drinking him in, the real, three-dimensional physicality of him, when for so long he was so only in her dreams and nightmares. Buries herself in him, as if, by not looking, she can defer the inevitable.

Verso, it will just be Verso all over again, her mind whispers.

But the inevitable holds off. Gustave shifts above her, dips his chin to her head, and she feels his inhale: the expansion of his chest under her palm, the vibrating rumble deep in his throat under her ear. And then his abrupt exhale: chest falling, hand tightening around the handful of her shirt he grips at her back.

“I’m here, Maelle,” he whispers, lips dry but soft at her temple. By contrast his breath is damp, warm. He contracts around her, squeezing her in, as if he wants to keep her cocooned like this for the rest of eternity. She—they—would stay like this, she warm in his arms, he safe in hers.

Perhaps… the chasm in her chest will finally, finally begin to mend. “Meaning forever, then?” she asks, trying for joking, playful, but he grips tighter, and she relaxes back into him.

At length Gustave pulls away, slowly, carefully, and raises his head to observe the half-crumbled remains of Lumière’s once-great Haussmannian façades, the still-pockmarked cobblestone streets—the landscape he grew up in, the only reality he’s ever known. “Am I one of the first?”

“No,” Maelle replies, summoning a smile. His hand comes up slowly, telegraphing the movement, as if he worries he may spook her—such a ridiculous thought she almost laughs—and his familiar thumb swipes across the soft skin under her eye. She starts at the moisture that smears, then grins ruefully. Of course, it’s only to be expected, even after she thought she’d exhausted all her tears.

“I wanted to make sure I got you right, knew what I was doing,” she explains, and it comes out wobbly, so she leans into his warm side. “So I started with some of the others: other parts of the city, those who’d only been erased after Papa cleared Maman’s chroma from the canvas; their essences were still here, so I only had to reanimate them—your apprentices, Emma, the other Lumiériens who stayed behind. When I had more confidence, I tried those who were erased longer ago back or who died to Névrons and whose essences never rejoined the canvas. Well, the ones whom I remembered well enough to repaint…Séba, Catherine, Lucien—he’ll be so happy to see you. I wanted them to be here to welcome you back. Come, I’ll show you everything.” She takes his hand—soft, strong, callused, and all hers for these sweet moments—and tugs him along.

First, down through newly repaved roads and reconstructed shops: bakeries, butchers, fruit stands, past a small but bustling market towards the river. At the Gare d’Orsay she ushers them onto a pair of jangly bikes, and they take the next ten-minute stretch on wheels, cycling along the riverbank toward the repainted Champ de Mars. For the first time in his life—and hers in the painting—the steel colossus of the Tour Eiffel looms straight, unwarped, as if the Fracture had never been.

“I’ve only seen it like this in history books,” Gustave breathes, and props his bicycle against a lamppost so he can get closer, take it all in.

“This one was not particularly easy,” she explains, smug at the way his engineer’s eyes widen in wonder, the way his neck cranes back for him to try and see all the way to the top. “Me, I’m better at painting people and living things; it’s Maman, and before her Verso, who have a gift for depicting architecture. Monoco’s Station—we can take the train there from Orsay, it’s worth seeing for yourself, even if I’ve given you my memories of it—was all Verso, I think, and Lumière was mostly Maman’s work. I don’t think the city was here in Verso’s original tableau. He painted this place with Cléa as an escape from the outside world, originally, and they wanted it to be different from the outside world. We don’t have Gestrals, or Grandis, or a Suspended Ocean or Gilded Harvest.”

Gustave says nothing, so Maelle keeps talking, suddenly needing to banish the silence: “I worked hard on it, though. I wanted to get all of it right, for us.”

“But this city, now—is this how it all is in the world beyond?” asks Gustave, looking left to her half-painted bulk of the Invalides—now still a mere sketch with some preliminary washes of color, none of the detail filled in. Then right, past the Tour Eiffel to the right bank stretching away from the water for kilometers. The city’s pure scale must be beyond anything he could have dreamed a human habitation could achieve.

“Some, but not the parts we grew up in.” She takes his hand to start leading him back towards the bicycles. “Our street I painted based on my memories growing up and delivering packages here, though there are parts where this Lumière and the Lumière beyond are hard to reconcile. It’s a work in progress, but I’ll get it,” she assures him. “I’ll get it right for us, I promise.”

“And Sophie?” he asks, voice small, light with hope.

Maelle pauses, feels her fingers tighten involuntarily around his. She forces them to loosen. “I haven’t gotten around to her yet,” she admits, then turns so that she can meet his eyes with a sheepish smile. “I wanted to make sure I got her right, too, and I’ve been nervous to start… Shall we head back towards the center?”

When he hesitates again—and she hates that; he should be sure, driven, smiling always—she adds, “Lune and Sciel have waited months to see you.”

There is much Maelle is bursting to show him, so she takes them back in the direction of the Ile de la Cité, breeze dancing through their hair and clothes, bicycles clinking merrily in the morning sun. Gustave has never seen Notre Dame’s controversial spire, or the Sainte-Chapelle’s kaleidoscopic interior; in his time those monuments had been long lost to the abyssal fissures of Vieille Lumière on the Continent. On another day, they will visit Père-Lachaise, where the city came together to make out graves for all those whose petaled essence no longer remained for her to reanimate, or whom she does not remember well enough to paint from memory. Sciel spends some time there, most days, when she isn’t busy helping run the school.

In the world beyond, Alicia had never had much interest in the outdoors, and especially not after the fire. But now, with Gustave’s hand in hers, all Maelle wants is to bask in his awe, experience the city through his eyes. Maybe they will pick up a sandwich from Eustace’s bakery before crossing the river, and they can eat on a bench in the Jardin des Tuileries…perhaps stroll by the Palais du Louvre afterwards. There isn’t much adorning its marbled halls yet, but they will fill it in the years to come—with Gustave’s inventions, Lune’s research, her own paintings, the Grandis’ poetry, the Gestrals’ most magnificent potato sack constructs. For Verso. She will figure out how to make him smile again, she is sure of it. She is the Paintress, after all.

“I hardly know this city,” Gustave says later, once they’ve sat down by the Fontaine des Mers to take lunch under the sky’s unencumbered blue. “I’ve seen maps of it from before the Fracture, but this is…” He swallows, sharp Adam’s apple bobbing as he turns to meet Maelle’s eye. “It’s breathtaking.”

Maelle beams. “It’ll be even better once it’s finished,” she swears to him.

Chapter Text

His memories are a blur, too jumbled a disarray to sort through, so midway from the Sainte-Chapelle to Notre Dame, in a marché ouvert bursting with the rainbow and aroma of honeysuckle, irises, roses and peonies all as fresh as if plucked that morning from the Flowering Valleys, Gustave begs off on the false pretense of a budding migraine.

It isn’t that his head isn’t swimming—it is, and it would indeed be a shame to experience this marvel of an intact, Unfractured city through the beginnings of a headache—but rather that he doesn’t know how to act. He hates lying to her, but he needs distance, space, to sort through it all…to mourn.

To mourn Maelle. Because this girl, with her silver hair and her cultured smile, is a stranger despite wearing Maelle’s face and carrying all Maelle’s memories.

And also to mourn Gustave—the Gustave painted by Aline, who had with Emma taken Maelle in when no other Lumiérien could or would, the Gustave who had loved her with all the fierce, joyful closeness only a man occupying that nebulous space between father and brother could. He is that man—has all Gustave’s memories, but he has others also: flashes of a Fractured train station nestled in snowcapped peaks; a painted Renoir advancing down a grand, treelined drive under a grey sky; a desert sirensong driving him to madness with want to see his loved ones again. He remembers the funeral they held in the Forgotten Lands, though the memories cannot possibly be his own—an amalgamation, perhaps, of the memories of the others, distilled to chroma, given life in pigment and painted into his soul. He sees it in the full fire of autumn foliage, feels the annihilative void of their loss: Lune, shattered but stoic, ever unwavering; Sciel, heartbroken but accepting, as she accepted all the loss that had come before; and Maelle, eyes wide and cheeks tearstained, her earnest promise to carry on his legacy, to save them all.

It constricts his chest, as if the grief saturating the images in his head were his own, locking his jaw and whiting out his vision.

These aren’t his own memories, the same way his knowledge of Aline’s grief and the sense of crushing loneliness and despair that accompany thoughts of the Dessendre family are not Gustave’s. He cannot see into Alicia’s past, her childhood in that great, cavernous manor with its dark, hollow halls and permeating gloom, but its weight blankets him like tar. These echoes have been painted into him along with the rest of the remnants of Aline’s brushstrokes, as if unintentionally, with all the willful naïveté of a teenager who, after a lifetime of dismissal from the adults in her life, longs only to be understood, to be seen down to her shivering, shimmering core.

Gustave cannot blame her, and yet…the Maelle he loves through a pain so sharp it’s as if it burns a hole through his chest is the same Maelle Alicia replaced. That Maelle, standing firm and fiery against the painted shade of Alicia’s father at the top of the Monolith, that is the Maelle Gustave raised, but that Maelle…she had been moving on. That afternoon, in that carnelian burial ground, she had taken her first step towards acceptance.

Her final adieu: Merci d’avoir été ma famille.

Alicia, by contrast, cannot let go, wants to fix everything and everyone in this world. The evidence towers around him—a painted city rising proud and sparkling in brilliant Lutetian limestone—and glares at him from his very own body, in the form of the alien left hand he’s spent more of his life without than with: a gift from Alicia. Alicia, who will fix everything.

If he focuses, he imagines he can still feel phantom electricity crackle down his circuits, charging, warm, tingling, and the bloom of pride at the work of the apprentices he trained and raised himself.

Would he even be able to tell if, like the ghostly echoes of Alicia’s grief and the knowledge of having originally been created by Aline, which the original Gustave never could have known, none of his memories of being Gustave were real?

—

He seeks out Emma because she is his sister and, more importantly, she was Maelle’s sister—pure, unadulterated Maelle, before the overlay of Alicia’s memories and personality.

The reunion is tearful and wonderful and harrowing, but Emma doesn’t allow them to linger when there is work to be done, a thriving, whole city—with real, functional streets horses can draw carriages down—to be run and urban plans to be executed. A slew of new births is expected in just a few short months. They are planning to start building a school, and new farm and irrigation systems are under development for an expected population explosion; Emma plans to put him to work on these as soon as possible. Though they have their very own Paintress now to help them along, she has none of the experience and finesse of her mother, and a sixteen-year-old knows nothing of the way societies must work or how they are clothed, fed, maintained in order, and so Lumière’s conseillère-en-chef is no less busy or the political landscape less thorny than in the days of the Monolith. Emma promises to see him for dinner that evening and pulls a fountain pen and sheaf of papers towards her, as if that’s that, it’s ever so great her beloved older brother has returned from the dead, but she’s busy now so will see him later, after work.

“I want to talk about…Maelle,” he says, tongue still tripping over the name, over the wrongness of it on the girl he left among the blooms.

Emma pauses. Straightens to look at him properly. “What about her?”

“Do…Well, I mean, don’t you find her different?”

A light chuckle. “It would be a miracle if she weren’t different, wouldn’t it? She’s two people at once now, and a god with the power to make and unmake us. We were born of another Paintress, but now it is she who sustains us. She…is still our Maelle, yes, but of course I find her different.”

Clinical, analytical, and practical—yet totally missing the point.

Gustave counts very, very slowly down from ten, because if that’s all she has to say… “How much time have you even spent with her these past months I haven’t been here?”

Emma’s grimace makes his fist tighten a moment before he catches himself, shoves his hands in his pockets. “Less than I should,” she admits. “But she has herself been busy, and she’s got others now—the Gestrals, Esquié, Lune, Sciel…she’s also been taking a more active role at the orphanage, for those whose parents weren’t able to be repainted. I believe she also has a brother from our previous Paintress—the man named Verso, who was a member of the initial Expédition Zéro—though I’ve never met him, and I confess I don’t understand that entirely.”

“And so you’ve absolved yourself of any responsibility towards her? Drowning yourself in work again?”

“Don’t accuse me of that, Gustave—heavens, just barely back to life and already we’re back to the same fucking argument as always.” She throws down her pen, holding eye contact. He doesn’t flinch; this is old territory for them, but even so he can’t hold back his eyeroll when she looks away first, and rises out of her chair to make for the door. “She’s growing up, and you’ll need to start accepting that soon. I have a meeting.”

“I don’t have a problem with her growing up,” Gustave retorts to her retreating back…though maybe that isn’t completely true; it simply had never been a thought he’d had cause to examine with any emotion other than wistfulness before.

The door shuts behind her with a click.

“But…” he says into the empty grandeur of their newly restored parliamentary offices, “if that’s all it is and what you say is true, she should look less sad.”

—

He wants her to look less sad, see a smile on her face that isn’t a mask of the grief belonging better to a person who’s lived a hundred lives rather than one.

But because he is not yet ready to face her—Maelle? Alicia? Maëlicia?—Gustave sets out to reacquaint himself with this newly rebuilt world. Craning back to ogle at all the resplendent, restored structures lining the city’s grands boulevards and sprawling places puts a crick in his protesting neck after only an hour, though, and the unease roiling under his skin whenever his thoughts turn to her sets his teeth on edge. All around him, families go about their afternoon, laughing, playing badminton, picnicking in the park’s well-manicured lawns. Outside his field of vision, somewhere behind him, he thinks, a string quartet busks a lazy suite of transpositions from Bizet’s Carmen.

If all Lumière is happy, what does any of it matter?

This is how she finds him, her eyes nearly colorless and silver hair glinting in the afternoon sun. More Paintress than girl.

“I figured you’d have gone to take a nap or something,” she says, sitting primly down next to him on the bench. How odd, prim—not a word he would ever have dreamed of associating with Maelle. “How’s your headache now? I was worried.”

He does not turn to meet her eye. “I saw Emma,” he says, to avoid answering.

She makes a faint noise of surprise, and then some of Maelle’s mischievousness slips into her voice, her expression, as she dips conspiratorially into his field of vision. “Ah, you said something to upset her the moment you opened your mouth, didn’t you?”

Gustave leans back, allowing the cadence of an old rhythm to guide him. He slips hands behind his head and adopts an exaggerated supercilious tone. “What an accusation! She said something to upset me, I’ll have you know.”

“Oh? Do tell.” Maelle’s laugh, Maelle’s voice.

He turns to her and drops the playful act because, in spite of all his uncertainty and confusion, this does upset him. “She’s straight back to the same old—busy with work and no time for family, isn’t she?”

Alicia watches him carefully a couple moments. “I don’t hold it against her, and besides, I’ve been busy, too. Ah, I have something to show you—come with me.”

She leads him by the hand out of the sun-dappled Jardin de Luxembourg. All these places, he marvels, that he had grown up thinking existed only in history books, to the point they had achieved a mythological significance…and here they are, strolling, lounging about in them as if they, too, are mere characters in a story—and towards a wide boulevard.

On the street before them a lumbering…thing…tries to advance towards the corner, but its proportions are off, so the creature’s gait stumbles, agonizingly slow. A distressingly Renoir-like clack, clack, clack accompanies its every step, except that because of the imbalance in the length of its legs, the beat of its hooves lands like that of some convoluted avant-garde dance.

“What… is that?” asks Gustave, perturbed.

“Gustave,” Alicia warns.

“I’ve seen drawings and photos of horses in the books left over from before the Fracture,” he goes on, running a pensive hand through his beard for dramatic effect, “back when Lumière still had carriages, and that’s…well. I didn’t know you were an impressionist.”

“Gustave!” She actually stamps her foot.

“Didn’t you say this morning you were better at painting living things than architecture?”

With an offended sniff, Alicia turns her nose away from him, arms crossed. He has to make an extreme effort to keep his expression straight and contemplative.

It doesn’t work.

He’s laughing, then, something he hadn’t realized that had been building in his chest now bursting forth with furor, and then Alicia is laughing, too, pealing like the bells of one of the newly repainted churches, the both of them doubled over so hard they grab onto each other for balance. It’s almost—but not quite—enough to maintain the pretense that nothing has changed, that they are still the Maelle and Gustave of Before.

The “horse” whinnies pitifully. It’s a new sound for Gustave, but something in the high, needy pitch has him looking up at the pathetic hang of its head. He approaches, slowly, so as not to spook it. The only other non-human creatures this large he’s ever seen with his own eyes are Gestrals and Nevrons. But humans had worked with horses for generations before the Fracture; they are a totally natural fixture to add to these streets. When he runs a hand along its warm, glossy flank (lack of anatomical integrity notwithstanding, the light glancing off its shiny hair is a work of mastery), it calms slightly in a great, stuttering exhale.

“You poor thing,” he murmurs. “You can’t pull carriages, or frolic through meadows, looking like this.”

Alicia steps up beside him with a forlorn sigh. “You’re right…I should put it out of its misery.” She places a small hand against the creature and just like that—

Erases it.

A flurry of red and white petals interlaced with wispy black mist trails in its wake; a breezes bears it all aloft and away, leaving Gustave’s hand resting on empty air.

As if the creature had never been.

The silent street looks back, Alicia its only other occupant. “I’ll try again. I’ll work harder on the next one, promise. I’ll study up more and make sure it’s perfect, and we can have a fleet of horse-drawn carriages down the Avenue de l’Opéra, like in Paris.”

As if there had only ever been her, silver hair preternaturally iridescent like the moon even in broad daylight: the only real being in this world.

—

He has Gustave’s memories, but also others: I’ve given you my memories of it, Alicia said this morning.

He could try asking Emma again, but…does he want to know, truly?

Everything he’s able to remember from his childhood: his mother, a kind smile, a warm hand on his shoulder, the smell of antiseptic on her fingers after coming home from caring for the ill and injured at the hospital; his father, pen in hand and ink splattering his fingers, writing a libretto for an opera that never premiered because the composer ran out of time; Emma’s hand in his, both of them barely teenagers, watching the petals of their parents’ Gommage float away at the port. Are these all her—and others’—memories, recounted to Alicia so they could be painted into an imitation of a man gone for good?

Or are they from the chroma that originally made up Gustave, absorbed back into the canvas after his death and then recuperated, merely given new life—reanimated, as Alicia had put it?

He doesn’t know who he is.

He loves, he grieves.

But does he exist?

—

He cannot continue to put off addressing her by name, needs to commit to calling her Maelle, as she wants, but…the girl before him is too different. She isn’t his Maelle.

Maelle, Gustave thinks with a heart heavy with loss, was erased along with all the others, when Aline’s chroma was expelled from their world and Alicia’s memories reasserted. Oh, there are traces of her in the girl across from him, to be sure, but she isn’t the one he watched over from toddlerhood. She is just as headstrong, willful, certitude in her own worldview writ large across her forehead, exactly like Maelle. But she is also smaller, quieter, more hesitant. Sadder.

And, somehow, despite the two lives she’s lived, despite the silver starlight of her Paintress’s hair, younger.

Across the table, Alicia spoons chestnut soup to her lips, telling Emma about the church she’s painting among the hills of Montmartre, still under construction in the world beyond. “It’s been under construction since before even Cléa was born,” she says with a quiet smile. “That’s the way architects are, though. Such grand visions to touch the heavens, yet so slow to reach.”

It sounds like the adage of someone else, someone older, who has spent much time among architects, and Gustave realizes belatedly that it likely is. Something that one of her Painter parents like to say at their dinner table, perhaps. This Lumière has had no real architects since the Fracture, for what had there been to build, in such a destroyed city?

The conversation passes to the rehabilitation of Montmartre: “In the world outside, it’s a rather bohemian quarter,” Alicia explains. “Papa and Maman lived there for a couple years in a tiny flat, before they became established, and had Cléa and Verso. I’ve seen it only in their sketches.” She turns to Gustave, smile bright. “I’ll take you to Sacré-Cœur tomorrow, after we’ve gone to Notre Dame. The façade isn’t entirely complete, but you can help me think how to resolve some of the unfinished details. And I’m sure you’ll have ideas on how to make it better, or we can always put you to work on something or other out there, so that you earn your keep now that there are no Expeditions to prepare for.”

“My keep, eh? And who decides that?” he asks, looking between the woman and the girl at the table. They have pulled him into the old, familiar rhythm of dinner-table banter, and it is easy—comfortable—to slip into its current, let it carry him along.

The two share a conspiratorial look. “Who else?” asks Maelle’s face in Maelle’s voice, wearing the Paintress’ mercury hair.

All his life, he has been ruled by the whims of the women around him. Perhaps the differences, while there, mean nothing much at all.

Chapter Text

Try as he might to focus on what’s directly in front of him—the beautiful city coming together before his eyes, the enthusiasm of his not-quite-sister leading him along by the elbow, the cool caress of the spring breeze against his skin, through his hair—the questions will not leave him: Whose memories are these?

Who am I?

How much of him is him, and how much of him is Alicia’s design? Watching her frown in concentration at the empty recess built into a pediment above one of the side entrances of the Sacré-Cœur, he decides that he isn’t yet ready to ask, for that would mean broaching this conversation with her. There’s something oddly fragile-looking and closed about her, in a way that Maelle would never have been when it was just the two of them like this—as if this girl were glass and if he were to shift to regard her from a slightly different angle, the sun would pierce into his eyes, reflected off a thousand hairline cracks.

“We don’t have to decide on what sort of sculpture to put in this recess in there just yet,” he advises gently. “You don’t even have to do it yourself. We could go around, see if we can find a sculptor willing to take on the task—rebuilding this city is a team effort, isn’t it? Didn’t Loïc from the library dabble in sculpture? Or maybe Emmanuelle, who was in the class of 31 behind us at the Academy, do you know her? She’s got a knack for building things.”

“Emmanuelle…isn’t with us anymore,” Alicia answers in a small voice. “She came down with a bout of pneumonia shortly after we left on expedition and she was gone by the time we got back. And afterwards, I…wasn’t able to recall her chroma like for the others whom Papa erased right before we ejected him. Too much time passed, I think. Her chroma was reabsorbed into the canvas, and I didn’t know her well enough to recapture her essence. I…I’m trying, Gustave, but except for you and some of the rest of Expédition 33, so far, I’m not able to reach people who have been dead for that long.”

An uncomfortable silence follows, and despite grasping about for something to say, he comes up empty.

And then, in a whisper so faint he wonders if he imagined it, “I’m sorry. I just want us all to be happy here together.” A tug at Gustave’s sleeve, and he looks down to find her fingers gripping the cuff at his wrist. She doesn’t meet his eye, but the lowered angle of her face can’t hide the downward set of her mouth, the tension rocking her shoulders.

It twists something in his chest, winding so tight that it threatens to shatter, so he pulls her towards him, one arm around her shoulder, the other coming over to cover the hand gripping his cuff. “I think you’re doing great,” he quietly tells her, then motions to the basilica before them with his chin. “You rebuilt all this with your own hands, didn’t you?”

But for some reason this makes her shake harder against him, so, at a loss, he squeezes tighter, wishing he could by the strength of his embrace alone banish her silent tremors.

He doesn’t want her to cry, but no words that could stem the flow occur to him.

—

Eventually, she wipes her tears on her sleeve and insists she needs to go back to her studio, because, she tells him, there are other paintings—other buildings, other people—she’s working on, and she can’t let everyone down by slacking. She makes him promise to think about how to fill in some of the details of this newly erected church, and leaves him.

At loose ends, Gustave seeks out not his apprentices or his old Expeditioners-in-arms (there will be time for that reunion—so much time to learn, to catch up, to grow old, that he barely knows how to think, let alone feel, about it), or even Sciel, who would be content to distract him with small talk, good-natured ribbing and quiet acceptance.

If he can trust anyone to understand how it all works…

He needs to see Lune.

Stepping past a heavy wooden gate into an unfractured courtyard uncluttered by spikes of spoilt, overmixed acrylic, he pauses. It looks so quotidian, so picturesque: an orderly cobblestoned entryway perimetered by potted plants with braided trunks; a door painted a muted burgundy to his left, and before him, the entrance to Lune’s building painted an ashy teal.

Ordinary—not the likely abode of the greatest inquiring mind Lumière has seen in generations. Someone is leaving as he approaches—a vaguely familiar face who offers him a smile, a friendly hand holding the door open for him to allow him past. He makes his way up a narrow, carpeted set of stairs to the third floor, farthest door on the left, and feels a useless lick pride at how clearly he remembers the way despite only having been here once. He pushes the doorbell, and the door clicks open for him of its own accord, a curl of chromatic wind beckoning him inside.

“Shoes off, please,” she calls from somewhere within, and he pauses to comply.

He finds her in her sitting room, which really functions more as library, lined as it is along every wall with shelves upon shelves of books; she’s dressed in a loose linen shirt and soft yet shapely trousers.

She’s already smiling when she looks up, eyes alight, but when he smiles back she drops the (likely ancient, priceless, irreplaceable) scrolls she was studying to the floor—then in a flash is upon him, no footsteps to warn him of her advance, only the breeze that accompanies her flight.

They’ve never embraced like this before, notwithstanding that night right after her brother’s Gommage. She’d changed, after that, become more Lune, for lack of a better word, even moreso than after the expedition from which her parents never returned.

Alan, who had been trying to get back into the dating scene after Héloïse had passed in childbirth, had lamented to Gustave one wine-soaked night years ago that he’d never have a chance with her again, the way she’d plunged headlong into her work, as if she’d nothing else left to live for.

“Maelle told us she was almost finished,” Lune says, pulling away from him but hand still cupping the side of his face as she makes a close examination, as if for authenticity. Gustave holds very still, wondering if he passes muster, and eventually Lune smiles. “I felt your chroma pass through my wards downstairs, but still I wasn’t prepared for the reality of seeing you. I didn’t expect it’d be this soon.”

Gustave finds a smile for her. “Soon? I’m told my portrait has been in the works for months. Time still flies, even when you’ve got so much of it left now?”

“Well, I knew she was working on you. She said that as soon as you were back, she’d want to show you all she’s done with the city. I thought we wouldn’t see you for a while yet.”

“I’d hoped to surprise you, but…wards, of course. I should’ve expected you’d be so levelheaded, just…” he throws an arm up, “you know, take everything in stride.”

A smile. “So you’ve had your tour of the great city Maelle is painting already?” Lune glances over at the large-form map pinned to a wall: Lumière, now properly situated on the Continent and no longer an island floating out on a vast sea. Much of the paper is still blank, waiting to be filled in by her precise hand.

“I haven’t nearly seen all of it yet, but it’s incredible,” Gustave agrees. “Yesterday she took me to see the Tour Eiffel, the Tuileries, and then a couple churches on one of those little isles along the river—and there are more besides, apparently. And then this morning we went out to Montmartre. I’ve read all the history, of course, but I never imagined Lumière could feel this big.” He runs a hand through his hair, chuckles at the enormity of it all. “And on top of all that, she says all that is just a standard itinerary for sightseeing tourists up there in the world beyond.”

Lune hums in acknowledgment. “That’s quite the trek for someone just come back to life.”

“She also showed me the remains of the Monolith from the port. It’s very…” He pauses, because it is in fact so very Maelle, and yet… Aloud he settles on, “It’s very her.”

“Ah. Papa, va-t’en? Yes, it’s quite her.” Lune chuckles, then bends down to scoop up her dropped scrolls and hands two to him. “Help me tidy up here first, will you, and I’ll make us a coffee. These go on that shelf over there.”

They go through familiar motions, reminiscent of packing up camp at the beginning of a day back on the Fractured Continent, and then later, cleanup done and leant against the meager counter in her kitchenette with the kettle on the boil and the coffee beans ground, Lune fixes him with that piercing scrutiny that makes him feel like she’s seeing into every insecurity he’s ever tried to hide from the world.

“How are you?”

Despite—or perhaps because of?—its simplicity, the question knocks the air from his lungs. He takes a second to reorient, then: “Well, thirty-three could be worse, I guess.”

This pulls a real laugh out of her, and she turns to smile at him. “Yes, we have finally, successfully reached old age, now. Cheers. But you’re trying to sidestep the question.” Behind them, the heating kettle starts to rattle with the pent-up potential energy of a nascent boil.

He doesn’t know how to answer her yet, so to stave off more moments of dragging hesitation he replies with a question of his own. “By your understanding, how does it work?” He raises his—whole—left hand, turning it over, flexing and unflexing each finger, watching her sharp eyes track the motion. When he rotates his wrist, bends and re-extends his elbow, it functions as a perfect, natural extension of his arm; not at all like the prosthetic in his memories, with its phantom aches and maintenance woes, which, incongruously, he misses with a perplexing nostalgia, almost like an old, slightly irritating friend in the back of his mind.

Lune, too, stalls instead of responding right away, turning to the kettle when it whistles and taking her time to settle the coffee grounds in her press, then carefully pour in the water before covering it to brew.

“Well, I can see you’re not surprised at this at least,” he concludes, wiggling the fingers of his his left hand. Cocks an eyebrow at her, not serious but just to see how she’ll react. “Want to test it out?”

She laughs, bright and sharp. “Oh, fuck off, Gustave, we’re trying to have a serious conversation here.”

They rib back and forth a moment more, but he sobers quickly, and Lune, perceiving the dip his mood, turns back to the coffee. With a wave of her hand the plunger on the press descends, guided by a localized chromatic stream of air.

“No, I’m not surprised she replaced your arm,” she responds finally to his earlier observation, as she pours them each a small cup; half a spoon of sugar for him, none for her. “I haven’t been by Maelle’s studio lately, but she showed me some of her early sketches, months ago. It was winter, still, and some of them had you with the mechanical arm, while in others she drew you whole, like this.”

“I see.” He opens his mouth, closes it again, imagining the girl who painted him to life guiding Lune—and perhaps Sciel and Emma, too?—around a studio full of sketches, some of him, some of the rest of the Expédition 33, soliciting their opinions in a quest to pin down the most faithful representation.

The silence stretches again, and he tries to choose his words carefully, but none of them seem right. Finally, he settles on: “It’ll be hard to get used to, I suppose.”

Lune watches him silently for three, four, five counts. “What do you mean, exactly?”

“This.” He motions to his new, whole hand, to his own chest. “Me. I…” He meets her eye once more. “I was killed, Lune. We both know how chroma works. So who…who am I, exactly?”

A long sip of coffee before Lune replies, utterly unsatisfactory, “It’s a complicated question.”

He chuckles, dry, empty and unaccountably annoyed, despite her having no fault in this. “Yeah, well.”

Lune takes a sip of her coffee, contemplative, and after a moment, offers gently, “Perhaps Verso would understand.”

“I would like to meet him.”

Her response is to tilt her head, her regard dark. “I wonder.”

“What, you don’t think we’d get along?” Gustave asks, mock-offended, but Lune does not crack even a sliver of a grin. He switches tacks. “…I have some of the—maybe yours, maybe Sciel’s, or hers, I don’t know—memories of your Expedition with him. I’m sorry he lied to you all.” He pauses, weighing each word carefully. “I resent that he continued lying despite multiple entreaties that you deserved the truth…but I understand, I think, why he did what he did, and why he tried what he tried. He seems like a good person, at heart.”

A brief pause, then Lune concedes, “He is. In spite of everything he tried to do, everything he chose not to do that he could have, everything he never told us. He is, as you say, kind.” Her lips lift at the corner. “Like you, in that respect. He took over for you, watching Maelle, after we lost you. In hindsight it all makes sense, knowing what we know now…how quickly she took to him, how protective he was of her. Not in the same way you were—he was, ironically though understandably, less worried about her physical safety. But the similarities were there nonetheless.”

Gustave brings his coffee to his lips: only slightly sweet, mellow with a sharp edge, the way he’s always taken it. He likes it well enough this way, he decides, but he sets down the cup. “We’re similar in more than that, he and I.”

Lune is silent for so long this time Gustave has to prompt her with a tap of his socked toe to her bare ankle, and finally she says, “I’d wondered about that.”

“Of course it had already occurred to you.”

“You aren’t the first she’s painted from memory.”

“The others from our Expedition, you mean, whose chroma wasn’t returned to the canvas because they were killed by Nevrons. What are they like?”

Lune shrugs. “I didn’t mean them, no… but they are the same as any of us, really. Adjusting to the idea of having all this time left—the opportunity Maelle has given us.”

She keeps using that name, as if she’s simply accepted it, like Emma. The coffee’s aftertaste sours on his tongue, and he sets it aside.

“What did you mean, then?” he asks, to keep the conversation going.

“What I meant was more…” Lune pauses, brow creasing as she, too, mulls her words over care—too much of it, perhaps. “Your chroma didn’t stay in your corpse because you weren’t killed by a Nevron.”

“…I know. I remember.”

Looking down into a hole in his chest, blood so black under the Lampmaster’s stale light it could have been ink. Aware he should’ve lost consciousness from the pain but, oddly, painless. Near weightless. As if feeling were leaving his body, warmth seeping out, leaving only—

Maelle behind him, caught, crying, screaming his name. Barely hearing her, his focus on the old man even as the wrinkled skin and pristine suit fuzz around the edges, his colors bleed together, blend into the back of the cave wall, dimming, darkening, until Gustave no longer sees him, no longer sees the cave, or the lamps, or anything at all.

Just feels the cold.

In the background, nonsensically, a voice humming, like an angel’s…his mother? She has been dead for decades.

Still no pain.

There never was any, never will be any.

Just cold, and that angel’s hum.

“…ave… Gustave!”

A jolt up his arms. Fingers dig into his forearms; pinpricks of chroma-touched electricity needle across his skin. Lune grips his shoulders, her face incredibly close.

While her expression is neutral, focused, curiosity sparks in her eyes. “Back with me?”

Gustave is shaking. The details of Lune’s kitchenette filter back in: afternoon sun spilling over her unpolished little dining table, two wooden chairs for her though she rarely has guests, his forgotten coffee cup on the countertop.

“I was…”

“I understand.” She doesn’t need him to finish the sentence. Of course she doesn’t. She has always understood, even when she disagrees with him. She gives him one second, two, three.

Gustave squeezes his eyes closed, forces them back open extra wide, as if forcing himself awake, trying to reorient, grab onto the threads of conversation they were having. But it won’t leave him. The nagging unease.

“Could… that be a manufactured memory she painted into me, truly?” How could it be, something so visceral? But then again, does it…does it makes sense, hold together, as a memory of this death?

Debilitating it just was to live back through the memory, shouldn’t he recall more pain?

Lune’s gaze hold his for long moments, her face pale. “I…don’t know. In theory, as far as I can understand it, she can paint into a person’s memories anything she knows herself—whether it be a memory someone else recounted to her or one of her own—though I don’t have firsthand experience as to how faithful to lived experience her painted versions would be…That night, on the cliff, she was conscious the entire time, wasn’t she? She saw the whole thing as it unfolded, while we were below with the Lampmaster.”

He nods. In theory, it’s possible. That Maelle had seen it all, and then, Alicia, in her quest to recreate him with the greatest possible fidelity to the original, had done her best to include his death, too. Had she spared him the memory of pain as a mercy?

“When Maelle was working on your portrait, she came around to all of us, everyone—Sciel and Lucien especially—asking us to recount our memories of you. She said it would help her paint a more faithful portrait of you.” Lune sucks in a breath, and Gustave knows she really can’t help him, here; she doesn’t know the answer. She has never been one to hide the truth to spare a person’s feelings.

Merde. Merdemerdemerdemerdemerde—mais fils de pute .

He thought all he wanted was a fucking answer, but if all it’s leading him to is that he’s the most carefully researched painting in history…

Would he be happier not knowing, after all?

He digs the heel of his palm into his eyes, trying to clear his head, force down this unwarranted frustration. Grasps about for anything else at all to talk about. “You… you were saying—or talking about—the others, the ones the Nevrons killed.”

Just a single beat more, Lune’s eyes on his, before she is all business once more: “Yes, their chroma remained in their corpses and so could be recouped. It took her some time, but after about a month, Maelle figured out how to paint their chroma back into people—but even then, it only worked for those she knew and remembered personally: our Expédition 33, some of the 34 and 35 as well.

“What I meant earlier was that this wasn’t the case for you. You weren’t killed by a Nevron, so when you died, your chroma returned to the canvas, first to Aline, before we ejected her from the canvas, and then to Renoir—the Painter, not the Painted.” She glances at him to check he’s following, and he signals he is; one of the litany of details about the world after Gustave’s death he shouldn’t, but does, have knowledge of. She nods, as if this confirms a suspicion she had been harboring.

Gustave pulls a chair from her tiny table, sinks into the seat and lays his elbows on his knees, trying to assemble the question, before he looks back up at her. “So you’re saying Gustave would have ceased to exist. And that logically…” he swallows, tripping over the words, the concept—but no, focus on the logic, the puzzle to be solved, and have the panic attack later—“logically, I’m not him. Not the same exact person, at any rate. Gustave’s chroma was reabsorbed into the canvas, and so I’m not—couldn’t possibly be—anything more than an amalgamation of my Paintress’s memories of who he was.”

“In theory… but I…don’t know.” Lune reaches out to give his bicep a brief squeeze. “Standing here with you now, talking with you…I can’t pick out a single thing out of place, or that feels untrue.” She leans closer, scrutiny heavy on his features. “In my eyes, you are my friend, my comrade-in-arms Gustave, whether you remember things you shouldn’t or not. But could I tell you for certain whether you’re still that same person, made from the same chroma that made him?” She grimaces. “No, I can’t.

“But as I said, you aren’t the first one Maelle repainted from the chroma of the canvas. There were others before you, and there will be others after you. She was not nearly so successful in bringing back any of them. She hasn’t yet painted Sophie, and Pierre… he has been proving difficult. For everybody.”

“Pierre? Sciel’s Pierre?” He’d died years ago, and Gustave misses him still sometimes, as much as he used to miss his real arm, and now, he thinks with irony, as much as he misses his handcrafted one. Maelle had not known Pierre well, not like she knew the rest of the Expédition 33, like she knew Gustave. “She can do that, even paint people she barely knew?”

Lune cocks her head to the side, in something not quite a shrug. “No, not quite… I’ll come to that.” Her voice takes on a meditative, scholarly tone: “I would classify Maelle’s repainting campaign in three categories: those who were killed by Nevrons; those—like Sciel, me, Emma, your apprentices, everyone we left behind in Lumière—who were left alive and then caught in Renoir’s mass Gommage after we expelled Aline; and finally those who died or were erased prior to that—which includes you.

“That first category we already discussed. The second—me, Sciel, Emma—because our chroma hadn’t yet been absorbed back into the canvas after we were erased, Maelle only needed to isolate and reanimate it with her memory of who we were. In that sense, repainting for her was easy, quick, and entirely faithful to Aline’s original rendering. I asked Maelle about this, at length, and honestly I think even she only half understands it. She said she’d gotten the hang of it after reanimating me and Sciel, and only needed to read the residual chroma to bring the others back—that includes all the rest of the Lumiériens who remained here… Tiffanie, Cyril, Armand…none of them are different from what I remember. Like you.” She meets his eye. “Does Emma feel different to you, or seem to act strange around you?”

Gustave snorts. “She was the first person I went to see yesterday. We had a tearful reunion, and then immediately quarreled over the amount of time she spends at work.”

“No strangeness, then. I see you continue to get on as well as ever.” Lune’s smile is audible through her voice, and even though Gustave is still staring at his hands, he imagines its sharp curve in his mind’s eye.

To give his hands something to do he once again takes up his cooled coffee. “You would’ve thought that her own brother dying would’ve changed her outlook on life a bit,” he grumbles, “you know, perhaps encourage her to treasure her time with her family a bit more.”

A chuckle before she is all seriousness again. “You have to understand her political position, now.”

“…Must I really?” It isn’t quite petulance he hears in his own tone, but it comes awfully close. He’s never had a shred of interest in politics.

“Oh come on, Gustave, you’re the cleverest man I know—would it kill you to apply that brilliant mind to anything without chromatic circuits?”

“Well, out on those cliffs I was desperately applying my brilliant mind to ways to save Maelle…so arguably, it did.”

Lune’s cup meets the tabletop with a firm clink! “Fucking hell, Gustave.”

He peeks up to find her doing a poor job of suppressing a smile—one palm pressed over her eyes, the back of the other wrist pressed against her upturned lips to bottle up a laugh.

“But on the other hand,” he continues, encouraged, “I applied this same brilliant mind perfectly well to the Aquafarm 3 project, and not even to the portions requiring circuits. I’d call that one a roaring success, in fact—not only did I survive, that was where I convinced Sophie of my brilliance.” The thought of Sophie quiets him, and he rotates his coffee cup in his hands, mulling over the gently sloshing liquid before glancing back up.

Lune rolls her eyes. “I concede the point. As for Emma: she’s the Paintress’s legal guardian—in effect, suddenly the politically most important person in the world. Protecting Maelle from the bureaucrats in Parliament is more than a full-time job.”

“Even the Paintress needs protection, does she?”

“Maelle is just sixteen, and there are plenty of vultures out who would try to manipulate her for their own gain, given half a chance. Is overprotectiveness a trait you’re leaving behind in your new life?” Her eyes narrow. “Maybe you really are a different man.”

It’s said lightly, in jest, but it hits too close to the confusing sore spot, and Gustave doesn’t respond. Instead he asks: “Have you got any wine?”

Lune has one bottle she’s willing to share, but between them they finish it in record time arguing over why he should or shouldn’t give a shit about politics, and soon are out in rebuilt streets Gustave barely even recognizes, apparently in search of some restaurant where the proprietor refuses to give up hope that if he offers Lune enough free wine with her dinner, she will eventually fall into his bed.

“So what you’re saying is that I’m going to have to pay my own way while you drink for free for the rest of the night,” Gustave laments.

“Let’s find out. I think the others are all already here,” she says, and leads him towards the sound of festivities in Thierry’s dimly but cozily lit brasserie.

Chapter Text

“Oh putain, c’est vraiment lui—Gustave!”

He’s mobbed, instantly, a storm of warm bodies piling into him with enough force to knock him to the floor: Lucien, Tristan, Séba, Jérôme—he loses track—voices and laughs he hasn’t heard in a lifetime. All squeezed into a little eatery with a record of some jaunty accordion ditty crooning from a record player behind the register. Whoops of celebration are interspersed with various accusations (of a similar level of furor) of his not having visited or announced his return the moment he was back, with hearty claps on the shoulder since his back is pressed horizontal to the floor.

“What, have you all been here waiting for us?” he gasps through his laughter,, shoving blindly at an overenthusiastic knee digging into his chest. “Have none of you got jobs to be doing?”

“Oh, look who’s talking,” crows Lucien, grabbing his hand and hauling him up as he calls for another glass from the barman (who is eyeing Lune with such a soft, longing expression Gustave has half a mind to help him out). Lucien swings an arm around Gustave’s shoulders once the others have backed off a bit. “It’s good to have you back, man.”

Gustave clasps his friend’s arm in return. “And you.” Any words he could have found have stuck in his throat, so he squeezes just a bit tighter.

Lucien seems to understand. “We’ve missed you, mon pote.” Then, turning back to the bar: “Oy, Thierry! Where’s that wine for our guest of honor?”

The alcohol flows freely that evening. Gustave doesn’t recall a party like this since…he can’t remember when. They’d drunk the night of the Festival for the departure of the 33s, but he hadn’t found it in himself to really get carried away; in the wine’s soft embrace there had been no joy to be found. The former members of his Expedition catch up with him, and so do others—Tiffanie, Richard, Lucie—people he hasn’t thought about since they left on that doomed boat all those months ago. He takes more flack for not telling anyone he’d been brought back; no one had realized he was back until Séba saw him the street from afar this morning, and they’d scrambled to find a place to have a little fête. He asks after Sciel, whom it’s passing strange not to have seen yet and whom he’s never known to miss an occasion to drink, but apparently she travels frequently these days and is away on a trade run to the Gestral Village.

Lumière has been busy in Gustave’s absence, Catherine tells him, and in view of all the changes happening, everything being either repaired and built anew, they’ll need his talents, like on a new bridge being constructed over the river. He recalls what Alicia had said about not being proficient at painting architecture.

“Maelle is a great help on these things, of course,” Séba hastens to add, as if concerned Gustave will take offense on her behalf, “but she’s been better at painting us than she’s been at the structures in the city. She can get us started, but a lot of the fine-tuning, to make sure it all, well, holds together over time—those final steps are up to us. It works great as a partnership, honestly…still blows my mind though.”

“Yeah, our very own Maelle…” says Laurent from the post office, who had employed her for years as a courier before she’d bullied, threatened and coerced Gustave into letting her join his Expedition. “Who’d ever have imagined? Honestly, having a Paintress of our own who’s painting us a future, rather than a countdown to our deaths… I still wake up some days thinking it’s all a dream.”

“You should see how hard she’s working, Gustave,” Colette tells him earnestly. “We always knew she was driven—anyone with eyes who was at the Expedition Academy with her would’ve seen that…but it’s something else, for sure.”

All this effusive praise should ignite the fire of pride in his heart… but instead the feeling sinks, heavy and cold, like a stone. He has indeed seen how hard she’s working, and truth be told, he doesn’t like it.

At all.

Feeling suddenly a restless itch, that the interior of the brasserie has become too unbearably hot, Gustave excuses himself under the pretense of a grabbing a refill. He heads outside instead, where in the cool night air he spots Lune on her own at one of the spindly outdoor tables by the street. Her guitar is propped over her knees, her wine half-drunk by bare feet, dainty fingers strumming a mellow set of chords he thinks he might have heard back in peaceful moments at camp on the Continent.

“I thought you might be with your friend the proprietor with the free drinks,” Gustave ribs, and Lune smirks without meeting his eye.

“I might have that planned for later, you never know.”

“Touché.”

“They’ve let you go already? I’d have thought Lucien would try to drink you under the table.”

“I came out here because I needed a break,” he tells her honestly. “It’s… a lot. I don’t even know what to say to a lot of them, least of all to Lucien. If I think too hard about it…”

We all died. He died for me.

Lune hums, her expression sympathetic but placid, and Gustave takes a seat next to her. “So, now that there’s no Expedition to plan for, you do this often, go out to the bars with the Expeditioners, drink too much and end up playing melancholy tunes by yourself?”

Her fingers press flat against the frets, dampening the strings with a squeak as she meets his eye smiling. “Not at all. We gathered here for you, since you’re finally back. Just the 33-ers. Some of us have been waiting what feels like a long time.”

Gustave pauses. “Oh,” he says intelligently, as the words light a warmth in his chest. “That’s… I’m… er. I mean, thanks. I don’t know what to say.”

“You can rest easy knowing you haven’t changed, then. And really, in a sense, you’re our guest of honor.” She reaches into a pocket and pulls out a small, lantern-like object.

The lumina converter.

“There isn’t a world where we could possibly have made it as far as we did without this,” Lune says softly, eyes locked on the tiny object as if it holds magical properties, before holding it out to him. “You didn’t make it all the way with us…but we never would have made it all the way without you.”

“Well, you also had a Paintress and an immortal with you towards the end,” Gustave can’t help pointing out, picking the trinket out of her hand, turning it over in his fingers, and she goes back to strumming her guitar, the music’s soft rhythm a lulling comfort. “And you put just as much work into the science behind it as I did. We wouldn’t have completed this project without you, either.”

It had been a true team effort with her. The only reason he had even known where to find Lune’s flat earlier this afternoon was that he’d been there before—only once, back when they were struggling with development on the lumina converter: after a breakthrough on a crucial circuit only for progress to then stall for weeks, she suddenly remembered records of old chroma research from decades past her parents had kept but discarded as unworkable. Together they had rushed to her flat, through dilapidated alleys crumbled and upturned, over zinc roofs baked scalding by an afternoon sun filtered through the Dome, and there in one of its sparsely furnished corners found the papers containing the knowledge to complete the link between chroma and lumina, illuminated in fading script. The key they believed would change the course of Expeditionary and Lumiérien history.

He doesn’t remember who had kissed whom, only the taste of her on his years-parched tongue, the heated curve of her plush breast under his hand, the soft sighs so unlike her falling from her lips. After that first éclat of discovery there was no repeat, and they never spoke of it again.

His fingers clamp closed around the converter.

“Lune…” He’s standing, he notes distantly, eyes fixed on the distant moon. “Lune, I—I think my memories are mine.”

Behind him, her music stops.

He realizes he’s laughing, strangled, a little hysterically.

“Lune, they are mine. Or most of them, anyway. Probably. I hope.”

“Gustave… you okay there?” Her words are slow, quiet, as if she thinks he may be having a nervous breakdown.

Maybe he is a bit, but this memory, he knows with absolute certainty, is his own. Lune—ever private, ever closed—never would have imparted this to Alicia just so that she could paint a more accurate portrait of him. Which means that Gustave, the Gustave that Aline painted, different and apart, does exist within him, continues to animate his chroma, even remade as he is from Alicia’s brush and with Alicia’s memories.

He turns to her, arms spread. “Lune, I’m sure the memories are mine and not created —or the ones from when I was alive before, at least. Or, actually…” He pauses, and it must be the drink that’s making him crazy enough to actually ask this out loud. But just to be sure: “That day—” his voice comes out a tad hoarse, and he clears his throat, because this is odd to finally acknowledge out loud after almost two years, “—the day when we found your parents’ old notes on chromatic engineering, when we were working on the converter. Uh, after that.”

One elegant eyebrow lifts.

“I, uh, remember that,” he finishes lamely.

A beat of silence.

Fuck, did that sound like the world’s most pathetic attempt at a come-on? He tries again: “No—no, I didn’t mean it like that.

She waits, that one brow still up.

“…I mean, what I meant to ask was… well, which memories did you share with Alicia? That wasn’t one of the ones you recounted when she went around collecting everyone’s stories about me for painting me, right?”

The silences stretches, Lune staring like he’s lost his fucking mind.

“If you didn’t tell her about that, then the memory can only be mine, from before.”

She blinks once before understanding flashes across her face—a widening of the eyes, the beginnings of a smile, the bloom of a sparkling laugh.

“No, I’ve never told anyone about that,” she confirms, amusement curling through her voice. “But that… Gustave, that’s proof. That can only be your memory, from before you died. That means…” Her guitar vanishes in a flurry of chromatic motes, and she stands, eyes round with the enormity of it.

The knowledge pierces like a moonbeam through the miasmic bogs of his incertitude, heralding a wave of lightheadedness that crashes him to his knees. Lune is with him in an instant, hand light on his shoulder. He lets her pull him back to his feet, the throb in his aging knees an afterthought.

It’s proof that he exists—his thoughts, his memories, exist—his chroma shaped by Aline and dispersed back into the canvas—separate and apart from Alicia’s paint.

“You realize what this means,” Lune breathes, gesturing with excitement. “Maelle—it isn’t just a copy, you’re not just a copy. She really can draw specific people back through their specific chroma even after they’re erased and absorbed back into the canvas.” Her hands are raised and eyes forward, fixed on a middle distance of possibility only she can see. “If she can urge the chroma—even pure chroma—to remember its old form…”

“But she can also change it,” Gustave reminds her. He closes his eyes. “We’ve been over this. I also have memories that aren’t mine. Monoco’s Station, for example. I can picture it, the snowcapped peaks, the train tracks, all glass and steel and stone, even though I’ve never been. The Forgotten Lands. The carnage there. My…my grave.” He lifts his left hand, attached to him but somehow, also, not quite his.

Does the mechanical arm lie there still, a bionic curiosity among petals of scarlet and snow forever undecaying? He’s seized with the urge to go see for himself.

“Not only that…” Lune watches him a moment, a crease in her brow, her earlier high tumbling. “It’s possible you’re the only one she could conceivably do this for, because she knows your essence so well. Alan, for example—and the others who were killed by Renoir at the beginning and not Nevrons… ” She shakes her head, sits back down. “She’s done sketches of them, of course, even tried to paint some of them. Alan especially, she wanted to bring him back for his daughter, who was passed into the orphanage because the foster system is at capacity. We went back to the Dark Shores to see if we could find remnants of their chroma, but nothing has come of it, so far.”

Lune’s earlier words come back, haunting: Pierre has been proving difficult, for everybody.

“Sciel…” Gustave says, “They told me inside that she’s been doing a lot of traveling lately.” When Lune makes no effort to follow this up and sits back down, expression thin, he retakes his seat next to her and adds, “I’d thought it odd for her to be away, with how dedicated to the school she usually is.”

“She should be in the Gestral Village now, yes. I think she finds it simpler, sometimes, to be with them there, rather than here with us, walking among us where so many others have been brought back,” Lune says. “She’d been so looking forward to the idea that Maelle could paint Pierre back to life. But… after these past couple months, it became clear it wasn’t as straightforward as Maelle originally thought. That, maybe, she overpromised.” Her eyes dart over to meet his briefly before looking back into the shallow pool of wine in her glass, then drains it in a single gulp. “I’ll get us another bottle, wait here.”

From behind him, the clinks and laughter of Expédition 33’s merrymaking drift out of the brasserie’s open door, blissfully ignorant of the weight of the revelations occurring just meters away.

She returns with a bottle of a vintage from Aquafarm 3’s early days, and he gratefully offers his glass for her generous pour. Her own glass is already full, and she takes another generous sip for herself before continuing. “There were failed attempts at the beginning, you know. Of you, of others. Pierre. I wanted to learn about the process, so I observed some of her early work.”

Gustave, too, takes a generous sip, a sense of horror seeping into his bones.

“You were the first person she tried to paint. But she couldn’t get you to take form, no matter how hard she tried. And when she tried to force the paint too hard to produce substance…” She takes another long drink.

Gustave recalls the horse from yesterday: pitiful, misshapen, but alive and trying nonetheless. And then gone, with a resigned wave of Alicia’s hand. As if she were used to erasing her own creations, as if she had done it a thousand times. He takes another drink, and the wine sits suddenly astringent on the back of his tongue. Perhaps against his own better judgment, he asks, “What happened to him?”

“He was like a shade,” Lune says quietly. “She worked hard on the sketch, and so it wasn’t as if he were deformed or anything. But it was very clearly just…an image of you brought into three dimensions, rather than you. We tried talking to him, but he rarely responded or showed any awareness. Sometimes he would smile, but it was vacant, nothing like you, and it just made her cry.”

His chest seizes up as he thinks of Alicia, so much time spent alone in a studio, a failed painting for company. But… he glances at Lune out of the corner of his eye. “That wasn’t quite my question,” he prods her gently.

“She…she erased him after a time. Couldn’t bear seeing him, I think, and so she worked on the others, focused on those of our Expedition who’d been killed by Nevrons, those whose chroma she could still recoup, even if it was, as she said, impure. She finally had more success with them, which I think gave her the confidence boost she needed to try you again.” Lune meets his eye. “And she did it.”

“And the others?”

“She tried. But it was the same for Pierre, the same for Sophie, the same for Alan.” Lune takes another drink, something haunted entering her voice. “Art shouldn’t be forced, seems to be the conclusion. Maelle keeps trying, but I think… I think Sciel has accepted that this is as well as we will be able to do. I don’t know what seeing you will do to her state of mind. I’m happier than I can say that you’re here now, but…now that we’ve talked it through like this, I don’t know that Maelle could repaint anybody but you in this way.”

Gustave tries to picture it: a studio’s wooden, paint-stained floor littered with crumpled, discarded sketches, canvases splattered over in a layer of black. Failures brought to life and immediately erased, banished back into oblivion. As if they had never existed in the first place. Is that what painters do with failed works? He doesn’t know; he never never himself dabbled in the arts.

Alicia, lonely mistress of a thousand failed drafts.

How many failed Gustaves came before him? How imperfect does a likeness have to be before it is considered failed, doomed to the Painter’s gommage?

He stands.

“I need to go see her.”

“Sciel?”

“No—well, yes, Sciel, too, but not right now. Not yet.” He hands his wineglass back to her, asks once more, just to be absolutely sure: “You’re sure that memory can only be mine?”

Lune watches him, eyes calculating. “How sure do you want to be? Are you proposing we compare detailed notes?”

“…Ah.” That would be the only way to know for certain, wouldn’t it? “Ah. Er, no, there’s no need for that.”

“It seems right to me. I can’t imagine how else you could possibly have that memory, otherwise.” She pauses. “Do you have other…intimate memories?”

“…Yes.” This is horrifically awkward.

“Well, that should be proof enough, no?”

For his own sanity, he would hope so. The intrusive thought that the Paintress could paint those sorts feelings and desires into him… but no, down that road madness lies. Alicia is—and Maëlle was—sixteen, for fuck’s sake. He has to believe these thoughts and memories—Sophie, Lune, others—are all his own. He shakes his head, as if that could chase out this fleeting lunacy.

This is all he has to go off, in the end, a tiny fragment to hold onto: a shred of evidence that, even if his Paintress’ overreaching ambition to recreate life has overlaid some of her own memories over his, somewhere, within him, he is also himself, too—continues to have his own thoughts, feelings, desires. He has to believe that he can trust in them, even if, this far into an evening drenched in wine, they make little sense, conflict directly with each other, make him question his own reality. Even if they lead him down a path whose consequences he isn’t yet ready to examine up close.

“That’s some look you’ve got on your face,” she observes.

“Yes, well. Listen, Lune… I know I’ve just spent all afternoon and evening haranguing you about it…but what if it just… doesn’t matter?”

She frowns, waits for him to continue.

“I mean, maybe it really doesn’t matter whether or how different I am from who I was. Would it change what I feel, what I want? I still feel what I feel, want what I want, don’t I?”

She leans back on one hand, crosses one knee over the other, and takes a careful sip of her wine. “If you knew a particular desire or emotion came not from your own past experience but rather a planted memory, or the outside influence of your Paintress, perhaps it would change your outlook on it. Perhaps you might rebel against, or try to suppress, certain desires if you knew they didn’t originate with you, but rather were painted into you when you were brought back,” she suggests, then squints at him. “For someone who just spent the past five hours having an existential crisis, you seem to be coming to a remarkably anticlimactic conclusion.”

“I know…sorry.”

“Don’t be. You seem better now, at any rate.”

He looks at his hands. “I always wanted Maelle just to be happy. That hasn’t changed.”

Lune’s frown is back. “You say that as if she isn’t right now.”

“You think she is?”

“Well, I haven’t seen that much of her lately, but she’s got you back now. You’ve been running all over touring the city together, haven’t you? She’s been working towards this for so long, I’d expect she’s over the moon.”

“And before I came back?”

“She was singularly focused on painting you. And in her free hours she was all overthe city, painting buildings, helping us put it all back together. She’s been working harder than you can imagine,” Lune says with a wry smile.

“That’s what the others said, too.”

A shrug. “It’s true. I can’t imagine her doing all…”—a wave of her hand, gesturing at him, at the polished lamppost above them, the moonlight-bathed cobblestone streets around them—“if it didn’t fulfill her in some way.”

All perfectly logical…yet it doesn’t add up.

He can feel it even now, as if it were this morning again and he were still stood before the Sacré-Cœur, Alicia’s silent sobs wracking through her small frame against him, her sorrow overflowing from a source he can’t see, can’t reach, can’t fix.

All he had ever wanted, really, was for Maelle to grow up, grow old, smiling. That, he feels with certainty, has not changed, will never change.

Changing his mind, he takes his glass back from Lune for another drink, and chuckles at himself, at the irony. “I know what's important to me, regardless of all of it. And here I always claimed to be a man of science and rationality.”

Lune scoffs, wineglass paused at her lips. “Maybe you should call it a night, Gustave, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about anymore. If it makes you feel better, though—you may be a scientist, but you’re anything but a rational decisionmaker. I don’t think you’ve made a single one of the most important decisions in your life based on science or logic…or anything resembling rationality.”

Unacknowledged in the air between them tinkle the jagged glass shards of arguments from a lifetime past: protocol, their oaths, his beliefs, the strength of his resolve.

Est-ce que tu y crois encore?

He peers into the dark dregs of his wine, but the reflective surface holds no answers.

Chapter Text

Alicia, it turns out, is not easy to locate.

“She disappears for hours on end, sometimes days,” Emma tells him in the morning as he attempts to brew the world’s strongest coffee, while wishing he could find a pair of sunglasses to block out the sun’s pierce. “She’s always been a self-sufficient child, and now she’s almost an adult. She knows how to handle herself; I wouldn’t worry.”

But because Gustave never learned how not to worry about Maelle, he also does not know how to not worry about Alicia. And so, even with his head pounding and mouth drier than a desert, he spends the portion of the morning not dedicated to nursing his hangover braving the screeching, blinding Lumiérien streets in an effort to locate his wayward sister/Paintress.

He does not find her, but word around town is that Karatom the Gestral misses “Brushtache Man” and his “magic mushrooms,” so by late morning, Alicia still mysteriously absent and with nothing else on his agenda, a still severely hungover Gustave allows himself to be herded, to the backing chorus of Lucien and Catherine’s snickers about his being a secret Gestral drug lord, onto the next boat to the Village. He brings with him a hefty store of different varieties of gunpowder, as well as a couple chromatic swords reinforced with fancy, mastered pictos and a whole arsenal of lumina for solo duels. Just in case the Gestrals get too excited.

There’s no need for all the preparation, as it turns out: the minute the Gestrals start making noises about testing their newly and bombastically enhanced Sakapatates against their Magic Mushroom Master, Sciel appears.

“We’ll make it a tournament, shall we?” she asks brightly.

They spend what remains of the afternoon beating up overgrown rainbow potato sacks and the occasional elderly but cantankerous wooden puppet. Gustave would feel bad, except the Gestrals work themselves up into such a tizzy of excitement that he, too, finds himself—and Sciel with him—swept up in their flow.

The sun is low on the horizon by the time they are released to their own devices, the Gestrals tittering like birds over how they must improve on their designs to build an even better Sakapatate Ultime (which, technically, would make the one that came before the Sakapatate Pénultième and the one before that the Sakapatate Antépénultième, and so on and so forth, he manages to hold himself back from pointing out). As they clean up later, sat by a fountain, Gustave guzzling water like his life depends it, Sciel pours a few drops of healing tincture over a nasty gash on his arm. Being too used to the prosthetic, he’d not reacted quickly enough when a blow had come down from his left.

“Is it strange, having two whole arms again?” she asks in that direct way of hers.

Like a constant reminder that I’m not quite the same Gustave who died, he wants to say, but bites it back. “The prosthetic was convenient, in its own way,” he offers instead, motioning at the gash, which is tingling with warmth under the tincture. “And the boys made it, of course.”

“Have you been to see them yet?”

“…No.” He doesn’t even know—and isn’t ready yet to examine—why, but when he thinks of their smiling, dedicated faces, all that fills him is an inexplicable sense of dread.

“I thought that would probably be the case.”

He raises an eyebrow at Sciel. “How’d you mean?”

She does that thing where she holds his gaze, much too knowing, for a couple seconds too long. She places her hands on her hips. “I know you, remember?”

That figures. “So I pass, then?”

She frowns at him, uncomprehending. “Pass?”

Gustave twists his hands together, struck by the unfamiliarity of the look of his own interlaced fingers. If he weren’t really him, then he wouldn’t experience such a sense of wrongness just looking at his own hands, would he? “I spent most of yesterday with Lune, trying to understand the way this all works,” he responds by way of explanation, “how I…could possibly exist.”

Sciel watches him a couple moments longer, but this time he doesn’t meet her eyes, unsure he wants to see the sympathy overflowing from them. “You just do,” she tells him, serene, and lays her head against his shoulder, heavy and comforting, loose strands of hair tickling the crook of his neck. “If there were only one person Maëlle could repaint from chroma reabsorbed into the canvas, of course it’d be you.”

For some reason, that makes him angry—but he doesn’t want to think about why that is too closely in this moment, so he deflects: “That’s also what Lune said.”

“So it must be right, then, if we both say so.” She shifts, meets his eye so she can flash him one of those sly smiles.

“But it doesn’t make any sense—that isn’t… that just isn’t how chroma works.” He throws his hands up, and then, irrationally irritated by the sight of his own hand, puts them back down again, falling back on hard facts: “When we’re erased in the gommage, we return to chroma—everything we are dissipates. Everything about us—our physical traits, our emotions, memories, all that returns to pure chroma, which then cycles through as all manner of other things: plants, animals, other people…”

Against him, Sciel’s shrug is a gentle jostle. “So much science, so many principles based in logic, and yet here you are, in spite of all that.”

“Lune thinks…” He tries to find the right words.

“I know what she thinks, and I think she’s right,” Sciel says quietly. “I accepted it long ago, when Maëlle first tried, and failed, to paint you and Pierre.”

“But she brought me back—”

“Of course she brought you back,” Sciel interrupts, taking one of his hands in hers and squeezing. “And I couldn’t be happier for it. If she could recall anyone’s chroma from the Canvas, it would be yours. Because you’re Gustave. You’re the most important person in Maëlle’s life. But she can’t do the same with the others, and your being back with us doesn’t change that. She may be a Paintress, but she has her limits, and I…I’ve made peace with that.”

Gustave reaches the hand she isn’t holding—the new arm—around her shoulder, pulls her tighter against his side. “…I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t your fault,” she says, tone more matter-of-fact than reassuring. She gives his hand another squeeze. “Even if I can’t have Pierre, I’m glad we can at least have you.”

“How can you just…?”

“There is no just about it.” Sciel shrugs away from him and stands, swinging her arms, as if to shake out some sudden restless energy. “It took time—continues to take time, which is why I’m so often down here these days, instead of up in Lumière. Lots of time. But it isn’t my first time having to come to terms with this loss.”

The look on her face is so peaceful Gustave has to look away, his heart clenching so tight it feels as if it’s being sliced open. He finds his skein and takes another cold drink of water, letting the silence run its course.

“I spent many nights lying awake, looking at the stars,” Sciel offers, eventually.

Gustave chuckles faintly. “Whispering to them?”

She turns back to him with a small smile. “I’ve done a lot of that recently, yes, sometimes with Lune. So much so I may have gotten her into the habit.”

“Really?” He feels his brows rise towards his hairline. That doesn’t sound like Lune at all, but…a lot of things have changed, haven’t they?

“Really.”

Gustave runs a hand along the back of his neck, trying to imagine it: Lune and Sciel lying in the grass on a dark, moonless night, starlight the only source of illumination, soft and blurred against their silhouettes.

“…Any chance you’ve got room for one more? I figure I’ve got plenty to unload on those poor stars.”

Sciel laughs, meets his eye with a wink. “I’ll let Lune know you asked, and we’ll consider it. Maybe on occasion. Special invitation only.”

But her smile says, For you the special invitation is always open.

She leads him over to the square by the theater, where, over a dinner of roast pigeon and parsnip potage (surprisingly edible for a Gestral establishment), with a jazzy Gestral ditty playing in the background, she explains that while they’re working on getting the pre-Fracture rail systems back up and running (a project that has, apparently, inflicted no minor amount of anguish on Alicia “better-at-living-things-than-architecture” Dessendre), travel between the village and the city is unreliable.

“The boat is meant to run twice a week,” she says, “but none of the infrastructure is well established enough for that to happen consistently. So it’s more aspirational at this point—sometimes it’s a week between trips.”

Gustave spears a piece of dark meat onto his fork. “So your spending more time here these days is partially your choice and partially…due to poor transport?”

She shrugs, swirling her water in an inelegant but solidly built mug. “It reminds me a bit of when I washed up in the Gilded Harvest on my own, and thought I would spend the last year of my life entertaining the Gestrals as their champion. That was peaceful, in its own, different way.” She flashes him a grin, a wink. “Who knows, maybe by the end I’d have been able to take down Golgra solo.”

“If you’re here, what about the school?” he asks, letting his eyes linger on her bracelets.

A tanned hand comes down to play with the array of multicolored strands. “I spend some time there. Less, it’s true.” She swirls her soup around in its bowl. “But I’ll make it back to them eventually. I know the children miss me, and I miss them, too. But…” she meets his eye, expression open like a wound. “I’m not ready to be there every day yet. It’s… it’s too much a reminder, all over again.”

They finish the meal in companionable silence, the cutlery’s soft clinks against stone plates a gentle counterpoint to the cozy jazz.

—

“So I’m stuck here in the Gestral Village until the ferry serendipitously decides to run again,” Gustave concludes with a grimace, once they’ve left the restaurant. This is inconvenient—why had no one thought to mention this before they shoved him onto that boat earlier?

“Not necessarily. Maëlle can help us go back and forth through the Manor—she’s the only one who can change the exits—but the nearest entrance to Lumière nowadays is out past Monoco’s Station, and you’d have to trek back to the city through the snow,” Sciel tells him. “So it’d still be better that you pass the night here and set out in the morning, assuming she’ll be around to help us. She usually drops into the Manor a few times a week, so chances are good. There used to be an entrance in Vieille Lumière, apparently, but she closed that up when she moved our Lumière back onto the Continent.”

Gustave frowns. “Any idea why?”

“More or less. I can’t claim to understand completely, but I think…she didn’t want the reminder in the city proper, for all the rest of the citizens to see.”

“Of her own family?” He can’t help the incredulity in his voice, even though he knows as well as anyone—

La famille, c’est compliqué.

He thinks back to his own parents, long gone as they are, and to his rocky relationship with Emma—too close in age, and both too clever to get along properly, their mother had fretted when they were children; to Alicia, her lone typewriter in a manor whose every wall is plastered with the family’s paintings; to Maëlle’s childhood being tossed from foster home to foster home to orphanage, then finally to him and Emma when they were barely a foot into adulthood themselves.

“I can’t imagine it was easy for any of them,” Sciel says diplomatically. “In a way, Maëlle lost the rest of her family as well, when she chose to stay.”

Yes, family is complicated, but there Gustave draws the line.

He crosses his arms. “I reject that.”

“Pardon?”

“She may have spent sixteen years in here as Maëlle, but they wouldn’t—her parents wouldn’t abandon her like that.” He doesn’t know the Dessendres at all, but on this he feels more strongly than anything. They may have grown into different people, Maëlle and Alicia, due to their circumstances and environments, but the essence of who they are, that remains. Even if Alicia is not Maëlle and Maëlle is not Alicia, to love one is to love the other. He refuses to believe that any real family could do that to their child—especially not to a child like her.

Not to Maëlle, so vibrant, so full of life and love and earnest passion.

“Maybe she felt adrift, or… or lost, when she was just Maëlle,” he continues, “when she felt like she couldn’t find anywhere to belong no matter what we did, how much I wished she would understand she was my family. But now, she knows she’s got those people, for real. They’re still there, outside. They still love her. Don’t they?”

“Renoir does, certainly. But if it’s Maëlle who abandons them, decides she prefers us and this Canvas to the world beyond?” asks Sciel, carefully neutral, no real inflection behind the words.

In Gustave’s mind there is pain, a shattering desolation, when he thinks of that family, but felt as if from a distance, in a way he knows doesn’t belong to him: it’s too blunted, too removed, to be his own emotions. As if he had once read a gripping novel, and the pain and shock of the characters stayed with him. Gustave doesn’t know the full story of the Dessendres, and he thinks maybe he should fix that. He uncrosses his arms, looks to Sciel.

“Tell me what you know about them?”

Above them, the sky opens to deliver a light drizzle, and she smiles sadly. “Depends on whether you’re recovered enough from last night for some more wine? We’ll need it. And might as well find you somewhere to spend the night, while we’re at it.”

—

They take refuge at a Gestral attempt at human accommodation—apparently one of Sciel’s usual haunts these days, and another pre-Fracture curiosity: an inn, run by the very same proprietor from sixty-seven years ago, when humans and Gestrals frequented each other with enough regularity that a whole building like this, dedicated to travelers, was warranted. It’s simple: a quaint little wooden structure of two stories—a fireplace, a little seating area below with two tables, a (currently unmanned) reception desk, and not much else. Gustave has never been in an establishment like this before; Lumière has had no use for hotels since the Fracture.

Although Gustave finds no wineglasses, Sciel unearths some clunky clay mugs from a cabinet and starts them each off on a generous pour, then launches into her narrative of the fate of their Expédition désatreuse and what she knows of the Dessendre family’s history. When she finishes, Gustave holds his silence for several beats, listening to the crackle of the fireplace and finding himself once again looking to the dark depths of his wine for answers that do not exist. “So she repainted me not only to replace Gustave, but…”

Sciel’s hand finds his shoulder and gives it a reassuring shake. “You are Gustave; you aren’t replacing anyone. But yes, if you mean whether she has a longer list of family members to be missing than just you…” She leans her head against back against the slatted wooden wall, eyes closed. “I’d imagine Maëlle has many people whom she misses—both from here, and from out there, beyond our world, where we can never go. Verso, and—” Sciel pauses.

“The other Verso, the one who died,” Gustave finishes. “Her real father, her mother. Her whole family. Everyone outside.” He pauses, thinking of Maëlle’s solitary nature as a child, then an adolescent. “Friends?”

A shake of Sciel’s head, a swig direct from the bottle. “I don’t know. She’s never mentioned. In a way, though, it isn’t anything new, is it?” Sciel ponders, leaning forward on the table. “Even from early on you were her only family, the only one she clung to. I rarely saw her with other children her age when she was growing up here. How old even was she when you and Emma took her on?”

“Six,” he says, without needing to think. “Almost seven. Autumn had just started when she came over to stay the first time—it was supposed to be a provisional placement, until either space opened up at the orphanage or another family could be found—Emma and I were barely old enough to figure our own shit out.” He takes a generous swill of wine out of the clunky Gestral mug, then can’t help smiling, remembering the tiny child, eyes larger than saucers and brighter than chroma, hair cropped short like a wavy, crackling campfire.

“We made squash soup that first evening. She got the seeds everywhere cleaning out the gourd—on her face, in her pockets, her hair—like a sticky nightmare. The shops were closed by then, and I had to go knocking around on doors in the neighborhood to beg some kind soul for a change of clothes while Emma cleaned her up. Maëlle laughed the whole way through. And…then she stayed.” He chuckles to himself, thinking of the miracle of it. He hadn’t even known he wanted children, then. “You and Pierre married the next year, remember?”

Sciel hmms, and wistfulness brushes her lips, crinkles the corner of her eyes. “We were barely out of childhood ourselves.”

They lapse again into silence. Odd, how easy it is to think back on those as simpler times threaded with nostalgia, when in actuality they’d all lived with a guillotine hanging over their necks, every decision a balancing act, taken against a measurement of how much time remained. He thinks, with irony, that now that all he has is time, he hasn’t the faintest idea how he’s going to be able to use it all, make the most of it—that, itself, is in its own way a different kind of stress.

“In a way,” Sciel says eventually, “similar to how Maëlle was disconsolate after your death, she misses Verso now.”

“He died saving Alicia, didn’t he?” Like I tried to do for Maëlle.

“Ah, no—well, yes, he did, though I don’t know the story behind it, just that there was a fire. Maëlle doesn’t talk about it. But I meant—our Verso, not the brother from back when she was Alicia, though I’m sure she continues to miss him, too… Do you know much about him?”

Gustave shakes his head. “Alicia didn’t—or wouldn’t—mention him, and Lune was…frosty, is how I’d put it. I didn’t push. But he features in some of the memories I have that aren’t mine. Maybe yours, maybe Lune’s. Maybe Maëlle’s. He took you all to the burial ground in the Forgotten Lands, and traveled with you through to the Monolith.”

He finished what I couldn’t, Gustave can’t bring himself to say, but he thinks Sciel hears it anyway, because she lays her hand on the back of his and gives him one of those smiles that say, I love you exactly for you.

“So, the other Verso. The one Aline painted… I haven’t met him yet. Where is he, these days? What does he do?”

Sciel’s expression dims. “These days…he doesn’t speak much to anyone except Monoco and Esquié. I’ve tried to visit him up at the Station on occasion—Maëlle and some of the others managed to work together to get those trains running, because Verso loves trains, and she thought it would make him happy if she fixed them all.” She smiles, but it’s a melancholy thing.

“But he refuses to see her. He’ll see no one but Esquié and Monoco. Monoco threatens to fight us if we try to see Verso, and I…” she sighs, pushes the wine bottle away from herself, as if disgusted by it, all of a sudden. “I haven’t the heart to go through with it, to force myself into his presence.”

“Why?”

Without blinking, Sciel meets his eye. “Because, just as much as he wants to die, he doesn’t want to see us. We’re a reminder of all Maëlle is working to protect, to keep. The world she wants him to fit into. I…wouldn’t force that on him.”

“So…that would make me the last person he’d want to see,” Gustave surmises, dropping his gaze back to his drink.

“What makes you say that?”

He peers at her from over the rim of his mug, runs a finger of his left hand along the rim, flashes her a tired grin. “If you’re reminders, I imagine the rest of us—everyone she brought back—Lucien, Emma…we’re that even moreso. The fruits of her labor. His continued suffering, and the continued suffering of that piece that remains of Verso’s soul, is the price paid for our existence.” Gustave is looking at his left hand again, tracing each crease in his palm, each fold on the inside of his knuckles, he notices belatedly—a new habit.

Sciel’s gaze turns inward, and she pushes her mug away, too. “I once told him…”

She trails off, and Gustave waits her out.

“I once told him that I’d trade him in an instant if it meant I could have Pierre back.

Gustave whistles.

“I meant it then, and I’m not saying that I take it back, necessarily,” she adds hastily. “We all die—every single one of us, if this Canvas is destroyed…but.”

She reaches back for the wine bottle and pours the last couple of drops into her mug, pulls the mug back. “But he’s suffering, and anyone can see that.”

“…Maybe I should go see him after all.”

Sciel’s gaze turns considering, a tiny crease forming between her brows. “You do remember just saying that you’d be the last person he’d want to see, right? And thinking about it, I agree with you.”

Gustave rotates his empty mug in his hands, watching the dancing reflection of the thin film of liquid still clinging to the bottom. “I have questions only he can answer. Questions I have, about him, about this place—this Canvas. About myself.” He looks back up at Sciel. “How would you go about it?”

“I wouldn’t,” she says flatly.

He holds her gaze, unyielding.

“You don’t know him, Gustave, he…”

“That seems to be a perfectly good reason for me to meet him, then,” he replies. “But more than that…Sciel, I need answers. There are questions that I can’t ask Alicia.”

A frown. “She asked you to call her Alicia?”

“No, but I…” He hesitates, fumbles for the words, finds none, and parrots back what she said to him earlier. “I need time. I’ll get there.”

Sciel watches him closely a moment longer, then sighs. “You could try bringing him wine, I suppose.”

Gustave raises an eyebrow.

“If you mean to see Verso, I mean. We finished all of his during the Expedition.”

Gustave feels his other eyebrow follow the first one up. “You had time to drink while on Expedition? Without me?”

“We did,” she confirms, a playful lilt entering her voice. “Even Lune joined us, cut loose. We put on the record player and danced.”

“Everything about Lune I’ve heard you say this evening is making me question whether my presence in her life was somehow the thing holding her back from having fun—clearly she loosened up, but only after I died.”

Sciel laughs, clear and bright. “You can blame it on your own rotten timing. We drank all all Verso's grands crus the night before we headed up the Monolith.”

He doesn’t have anything to say to that, and tries to beat back the irrational twinge of irritation at having missed it.

Then, stretching like a cat, Sciel gives a great yawn. “I think it’s time we call it a night, don’t you?”

He chuckles weakly. “Yeah, good call—I’d rather go to sleep on that note than the thinking about the heavy stuff from earlier.”

He glances from the table they’re sat at to the single bed pushed up against the wall, and considers their options.

“We could share,” Sciel says, a sly grin curling her voice.

“That bed is very clearly sized for one person, and at my ripe old age of thirty-three my back is too fragile for that,” Gustave replies immediately.

She rolls her eyes. “Spoilsport.”

“The very worst. It’s why you keep me around,” he quips back, heading for the less comfortable-looking (but comparatively roomier) couch. “Bonne nuit, Sciel.”

“…Bonne nuit, Gustave.”

Chapter Text

The manor’s vestibule is different, and it takes him a moment to identify the reason. There, before him, up and to the right where previously a gaudy frame had sat empty, now hangs a portrait of the Dessendre family.

And staring out at him from the place of honor at the center, despite wearing Maelle’s fiery hair, is unmistakably not Maelle—a girl so entirely Alicia that Gustave can’t even find words to articulate how he knows. It’s in the haughty angle of her chin, the slant of her gaze, the set of her mouth. Alicia, the darling youngest child of a family of Painters, and to her left, the brother whose death rent them asunder. Verso has the look of someone who fancies the angles of his own cheekbones in the mirror too much, Gustave thinks uncharitably. To his left, the other sister—the Paintress of the Nevrons—and then on the right-hand side, their parents.

Alicia’s parents. Her real parents.

Is it abnormal, he wonders, that the first feeling he experiences is not fear for his maker and the mirror image of his killer—but rather a detached curiosity? His own parents were younger than this when the gommage took them—first his father and then his mother—and by then he’d been older than Alicia is now. Alicia and Maëlle have this, also, in common, then: a child born to older parents, likely an accident. A child who struggled find her place in the settled, constructed lives of a unit already formed without having prepared to account for her existence.

“Gustave?”

Even unsurprised as he is that Alicia is here—he’d come looking for her, after all—he still nearly jumps out of his skin, which elicits a startled laugh from her in turn. Alicia is wearing a splattered painter’s smock over a coral dress with a black, rounded collar, silver hair pulled back in a simple high ponytail, the same kind Maëlle always defaulted to for its simplicity.

“What’re you doing here?” she asks, clasping her hands behind her back in a way that is, again, so very Maëlle.

“Er, long story,” he hedges, thinking of Lucien and Catherine’s drug lord comments, and keeps it simple: “Visiting Karatom, you know. He apparently missed me and my explosives.”

Alicia’s expression falls. “He always asked after you whenever we went back. I…I never knew what to say to him.” But she lifts her chin back up at him and smiles. “I’m glad you’ve been to see him. He must’ve been so happy.”

“Ha, yeah. Sciel and I spent all afternoon yesterday test-running their newest-model Sakapatates.”

“Sciel? She’s here again?” Alicia frowns.

“Yeah. She said she comes here often.”

The frown deepens, and Alicia crosses her arms. “I thought she’d been doing better lately…and that that would mean she would feel up to spending some more time with the children at the school. They all love her so much.”

Sciel’s admissions still running through his mind, Gustave places a hand on Alicia’s shoulder and gives her a little shake. “Maybe she just needs some more time, hm? She’ll be all right, in the end.”

Alicia’s head lowers. “It’s my fault she’s sad,” she says, voice small. “I haven’t been able to repaint Pierre yet. Even though everyone’s counting on me to bring back their family and their loved ones.”

Recognizing the signs of an impending panic attack—the quavering voice, the too-wide eyes, the stress strung like a bow in her trembling shoulders—immediately Gustave moves around her so he can sling a comforting arm around her shoulders, pulling her in tight. She crumples like paper against him, and it breaks his heart how it’s all so very Maëlle, that this is exactly how she had been growing up, putting on a brave face and smiling through uncertainty until the veneer cracked. Though unlike the girl yesterday morning, Maëlle had never been prone to tears. “Come on,” he urges, rocking her against him the way he might have done when she was much younger. “You’re being too hard on yourself. You’re doing great.”

“You said that yesterday, too,” Alicia whispers, voice brittle. “But it…it isn’t true. I’m not doing a good job. If I were, then I’d have been able to repaint Pierre, and Sciel wouldn’t be so sad she had to spend all her time hiding out here with the Gestrals. She’d be happy with her family, back in Lumière, with all of us, the way it should be.” A wet swallow. “I’d have been able to repaint Lune’s siblings. Her parents. Sciel’s parents.” Her shoulders stiffen against him, and she cranes her head back to peer up at the portrait of her family, a litany of expressions fleeting over her face too quickly for him to follow. “And Verso…Verso wouldn’t be sad all the time. We’d all be perfectly happy, together.”

It’s such a simple wish, such a simplistic, young wish, that Gustave would laugh if his chest weren’t twisting with what he suspects is a similar, but differently driven, desperation.

“And…I’d have brought back Sophie for you already.”

The thought of Sophie tugs in his chest like an old scar, an itch to replace the old pain in the phantom limb which, ironically, he no longer experiences: her subtle, secretive smile; the brush of her fingers against his; the thrum of her low, knowing chuckle vibrating against his throat.

But compared to the quivering, living bundle in his arms… “You don’t need to bring Sophie back for me,” he murmurs, pulling her tighter against him.

“But I do. Of course I do. I owe that to you, I owe it to everyone, to—” she cuts off suddenly, with a sharp gasp.

“Alicia, what—”

To his surprise she pushes him back, not meeting his eye, lip still quivering.

“Don’t call me that.” Her voice whips like a thunderclap.

She turns to fully face him, then, tone suddenly, disconcertingly even, like a stranger’s. “I’m still Maëlle, Gustave, even if I’m also Alicia and have all Alicia’s memories. I have all Maëlle’s memories, too.”

“I—I know. It just, I didn’t—”

She pulls a couple strands of her hair forward, in front of her face, to examine up close. And then, with a quick flick of her wrist, the pulse of chroma at her fingertips—her hair is fire-red. “There, that should help,” she declares, with a smile half in triumph, half in challenge, a warped version of the look she’d given him that night on the cliffs at camp—not all that long ago for him, though months ago for her now—when she had laughingly called him an old fogey. “It must have been strange for you, with me looking so different. I should’ve thought of it before.”

He stares down at her, at the red burn where silver glinted just moments ago. Again, as with the misshapen horse: reality altered before his very eyes, like it’s nothing to her.

And perhaps it is nothing—the mere wave of a hand, the pulse of chroma.

Lune’s words from the night before echo in his ears, a stark reminder of the gulf between Paintress and Painted, Creator and Creation, speaking of the initial draft of Gustave Alicia had painted, silent and smiling occasionally, little more than a shade:

She erased him after a time. Couldn’t bear seeing him.

Gustave swallows back the implications he doesn’t want to examine too closely yet, and turns to study the family portrait once more.

Verso, who created this tableau with Cléa…  Aline, who had come in to imbue it with human life—human joy, human sadness, human hopes, human dreams. Renoir, who had come in to erase the illusion of a happiness contrived in paint.

And now, Alicia Dessendre, stepping in to fill the shoes of all of them: architect, creator, destroyer.

It’s wrong.

She should be living the carefree life of a sixteen year-old, thinking about—whatever it is sixteen-year-old girls are meant to think about. Boys, or fashion, or new haircuts?

Not…the weight of expectation clung to by an entire society created to ease the grief of a god.

And the worst part: she thinks it entirely natural—she thinks it right, that she should inherit as her own these jagged, remnant shards of a glass long smashed: sharp edges to bleed her fingers on, sadness to ease as if it were all her own, burdens to lighten as if they had all been her own creation—her responsibility, while the image of her family watches on imperiously through layers of oil and turpentine.

“Tell me about him.”

“Who?

“Your father.”

A pause, and Alicia turns to him. “You’re my father.”

“I’m your family,” he agrees, “but…” He cranes his neck back up at the Renoir in in the painting. “He’s your father. He—they… They’re also your family. They love you, too.”

Weighty, pregnant moments pass in silence, and then, as if it all means nothing to her, Alicia shrugs, smiles, eyes closed and peaceful. “You’re right that they were my family, but they don’t love me.”

“Oh come on, that isn’t true—you know it isn’t, we both know it isn’t.”

“They don’t love me,” Alicia spits with a sudden vehemence. “Verso did, but Verso is gone. And maybe Papa, too, sometimes, but for him, even moreso than Maman sometimes… I have always been a disappointment.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t know them.” Voice not combative but flat. Resigned.

It fucking breaks his heart that thoughts of that outside world should put this kind of expression on her face. But he refuses to be deterred. “I don’t need to know them. I know you.”

Alicia doesn’t meet his eyes, one hand balled in a fist, mouth set. He knows that look, knows the steel behind it. Were Emma to see the two of them at odds like this, now, she would put her hands on her hips, roll her eyes and then stalk away, muttering about stubborn goats and lost causes. It’s how Maelle had gotten him to acquiesce to her joining Expédition 33: she’d simply out-stubborned him—and in so doing, caused him more emotional anguish than the loss of his arm and the break-up with Sophie combined. So he casts about for somewhere else to steer the conversation.

“You come here by yourself often?”

Alicia shrugs, a tilt of the head.

“To what, pass the time?” Time you could be spending with the people and city you so painstakingly painted back? he leaves unsaid.

She doesn’t immediately respond, paces away and around to a small side table, putting it between them. “It’s helpful for me to study the paintings here. Maman, Papa, Cléa, Verso… they all were better painters than I am.”

Were, Gustave replays in his mind, they were, in the past tense, as if it is all of them who are dead and gone, and not just her brother.

“They were all more talented. If I could paint more like them, we’d have real, functioning horses, sturdier buildings, bridges and roads that don’t need maintenance all the time by the townspeople the way they do now. Everyone’s depending on me to build a better world for them, to fix what Papa broke. So I need to improve. And what better place than this to learn, the abode of the head of the Council of Painters herself?” She gestures around the great entryway, the pictures adorning every wall, with its hidden corners and secret rooms, each bursting with painting supplies and drafts in progress. “

“Really? I’ve always thought this place awfully dreary,” Gustave objects. “Your family have terrible taste in décor.”

This time, Alicia’s laugh rings genuine.

Sensing an opening, Gustave makes a huge show of stretching and pushes forth a great yawn. “Well, I can’t say I’m particularly enamored with the thought of spending any more time here than necessary; I’ll fall asleep if we stay much longer.” He nudges her with an elbow. “Any convenient cliffs around these parts for stone-throwing? We can see if you’ve improved any in the time I’ve been gone.”

She gives him a reproachful smile. “I have nightmares about stone-throwing now, I’ll have you know.”

He pauses.

…That…isn’t surprising. But he needs to get her out of this depressing fucking manor. “So we’ll just have to fix that, make sure you have so many happy memories stone-throwing there isn’t room anymore for the nightmares.”

“I’m…not really sure that’s how that works,” she hedges, but she’s smiling, there’s a conspiratorial edge to the quirk of her lips and he knows he’s got her. “It might take lots of stones to get that far,” she wheedles.

“So what better time to start than now?”

She laughs again. “Okay, fine, fine, old man.” She pauses. “I know what you’re trying to do, you know.”

“Oh?” he prods, not even sure he knows himself. “Well, is it working?”

She smirks in challenge, brings a hand to her chin and adopts a falsely conflicted air. Finally, at the end of long moments spent deep in thought, in imitation of him she waves a hand before her chest in a back-and-forth propeller motion and decrees, “It’s passable.”

—

Alicia, now wearing Maëlle’s striped shirt and Maëlle’s scarlet hair, opens the manor’s door onto an unencumbered, sunsoaked vista of the Monolith rising tall from a bed of glimmering sapphire. A damp breeze pours pungent salt air onto Gustave's tongue, and below them babbles the rhythmic, muted crash of waves.

“Papa, va-t-en,” he reads, chuckling once again at the childish impertinence scrawled giant on the rock face, the first thing visible.

“It was technically Verso’s idea,” she chirps.

“Oh?”

“I told him I thought the Monolith looked empty without the number, after we sent Maman home. So he suggested I paint over it.” She looks down, making a show of examining her nails. “I was only just rediscovering my abilities at the time, so it’s not very elegantly done.” She cocks her head. “Maybe I should do it over with some other message. What do you think? A poem, maybe?”

Gustave holds his silence a moment, still mulling his question over in his head. He dallies, casting about for a stone—not too large, not too small, the smoother the better—and shows it to her, as if asking for approval, before pulling his arm back and launching the stone into the distance. It lands in the barest speck of white, too far away for them to hear the splash.

“Do you like painting?” he asks mildly, watching her out of the corner of his eye. He thinks of the penchant for poetry Maëlle thought she had successfully hidden from him in her diaries, and of the typewriter in the room where they’d found her that day in the Suspended Ocean. Alicia’s room.

“I’m a Paintress,” is the simple reply.

“That doesn’t answer my question at all.” Alicia remains quiet, so crouching to his haunches, Gustave puts great ceremony into searching for a second suitable stone, to avoid her eye, allow her time to compose a response without feeling the weight of his scrutiny. He chooses a rugged one, its once-sharp edges dulled by erosion and a perfect, comfortable fit in his palm despite its irregular shape. He hands it to her. “To beat the nightmares, yeah?”

She picks the rock out of his hand, silent, forehead creased in contemplation for long moments before she looks back up to meet his eye. “Do you have nightmares about…”

“My death?”

An aborted nod, eyes wide, as if not only peering into his soul but through it and past it, to something buried deeper that only she can perceive.

“No,” he responds eventually, thinking of the vaguest shadows, like mist dissipated between his fingers before he has a chance of committing any of it to paper upon waking. “Or, not yet, I suppose. My dreams so far have been…mundane, uneventful.”

“Do…you remember it? Dying?”

He considers lying. Or coming up with some other way of dodging the question. But either he can’t bring himself to, or can’t come up with any dodge clever enough, he isn’t sure which, and after what feels like an age, heavily: “…Yes.”

From out of the corner of his eye he spies the line of her back tense, straight like her saber, before her head whips down and away, as if slapped. “…I’m sorry.”

“What for? It isn’t your fault.”

“But it is. If I were more skilled… I’d have liked to repaint you without that memory, if I could.” She refuses to meet his eye.

“You can do that?” He tries to keep his tone even, measured. They’re entering dangerous territory.

“In theory, it should be possible. I painted your arm back, didn’t I?” She raises the hand not holding the rock, and a cloud of chroma blooms in it, rippling the air, bending light and distorting color. “If I were as talented a Paintress as Maman, I could take away everyone’s pain, give them exactly what—whom—they want to be happy. Pierre, Alan…” Finally she finds his gaze and holds it, the rock gripped tight like a talisman in her other hand. “Sophie.”

“This isn’t about Sophie.” Not if Alicia is going to use her as a weapon in conversation like this. “That’s not…”

“What?”

“That’s not how life works,” he mutters under his breath, but he knows she heard by the way her brow folds into a frown. He plucks up another stone and, choosing a direction at random, hurls it over the cliff’s edge. It doesn’t even make it past the beach below, lodging in the sandy shore, and they both snort back laughter. Gustave nudges Alicia. “Your turn. Show me up, since I’m such an old man.”

She glances at him out of the corner of her narrowed eyes, then smiles. She plants one foot, swings the opposite arm back, and the rock arcs clean over the edge of the cliff to land in a bloom of white foam among the waves below.

“Passable,” he deems, before she can start crowing over it, “you almost made it as far as my first throw.”

“Please, yours was a fluke,” she ribs, but there’s laughter back in her voice now.

He picks another stone, tosses it, and waits for her to do the same. After a couple more rounds punctuated by good-natured banter, he takes a breath. “Maëlle…”

She must hear the gravity in his voice, because all of a sudden she stills, waits for him to go on.

“You can’t just…fix everything.”

“Why not?”

“It just…that isn’t how humans are meant to go through life. We experience loss, and we grow in overcoming it.”

He recalls the recovery after losing his arm bleeding from months into a year, and more, especially before the prosthetic. Every day discovering new inconveniences, new yearnings for the ease of quotidian things previously taken for granted: uncapping a pen without dropping the cap, opening a jar of fucking cornichons, drafting without a left hand to hold his ruler in place. The simple fact of balancing on his own damn feet when rising out of a chair or turning a corner, to say nothing of wielding a sword. How even to begin to explain all this to her?

“But I can fix it all,” Alicia insists. “If I just… work harder at it. Practice my technique more. Work on my weaknesses.” She looks back towards the manor entrance in the distance before meeting Gustave’s eye again. In the glare of the morning light her pupils are contracted to pinpricks, the irises washed translucent by the sun’s rays. “Do you want me to just accept as broken things that I could fix?”

That isn’t quite it…he holds back a grimace and comes back to his earlier question. “You never answered me earlier. Do you like painting?”

“What does that matter? Everyone is depending on me.”

“You keep saying that—why?”

“Because it’s true. Who else is going to bring back all of our loved ones if not me?”

“We—Maëlle, they died.” He reaches out, but she flinches away—it stings worse than if she had struck him.

“They shouldn’t have! They should have lived to be sixty, seventy—eighty even! Do you want them to stay dead?”

“I—”

He grasps into the furthest reaches of his mind, but the words to express how wrong this all is don’t come.

“I can fix it all, Gustave! Me, and no one else. Their—everyone’s—happiness comes down to me.” Her whole body shakes, her eyes round, pleading.

“Do you enjoy it, Maëlle?” he asks again, hardening his voice; because he so rarely takes this tone with her, it has always worked. But her lower lip trembles, and he softens at once. “Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, I…I just want to know, is all.”

“It…doesn’t matter whether I like it or not. It’s the only way.” The resignation, the despondency in her tone makes something within him crack.

“It matters to me.” The clarity with which the thought comes back to him is overwhelming: all he ever wanted was to see her grow up, grow old, smiling. When her only response is to frown at him, Gustave reaches out again, and this time she lets him put his hands on her shoulders. “It matters to me that you’re making yourself miserable, trying to singlehandedly paint an entire world back into existence. You shouldn’t, and can’t, do everything by yourself. ”

“But there are things that only I can do.”

“Just because you have the ability doesn’t mean you should, or that you need to.”

A bitter laugh, and when she meets his eye this time it is with incredulity. “Of course it does.”

“Maëlle…” He gives her shoulders a light squeeze, holds her gaze to make sure he has her full attention. “I’d—all of us, we’d all come to terms with the reality of the gommage long ago. Life, followed by death, on the most predictable schedule in Lumière. It’s the reality we were born into, that we had all our lives to come to terms with.” These are Sophie’s words, he recalls distantly—he’s repeating Sophie’s words. Even now, she continues to come through for him.

“But it doesn’t have to be this way,” Alicia pushes. “I can—”

“Not for everyone else, it doesn’t,” he agrees. “Not for all the younger generations who come after us. But for me, for Lune, Sciel, the others…that’s all in our past. We need to move forward, not dwell in memories, unable to forge on.” Perhaps it’s also himself that he’s trying to convince.

“Could you look Sciel in the eye and say that?” Alicia asks. Her voice shakes, and for the first time in Gustave’s memory he can’t read the emotion behind it—anger? Or grief, or both, or something else entirely?

It isn’t my first time having to come to terms with this loss, Sciel had said to him.

He counts down from five, forces down the swallow.

“Yes.”

“How can you say that? Do…do you wish I hadn’t brought you back?” Her voice cracks on the final word, and it’s nearly enough to break his resolve.

“No, I..." He raises a hand to her face, thumbs away the moisture gathered at the corner of her eye. "I’m happier than anything to see you again.”

“I brought you back,” she whispers, covering the hand still on her shoulder with both of her own, and offers him a wavering smile, willing him to believe—willing herself to believe. “If I could find you in the chroma, I’ll be able to find others, too.”

Though he feels in his bones that it isn’t true, that this isn’t how chroma—how life—works, he doesn’t have a comeback against her logic. He has only his scientist’s understanding of the limits of chroma manipulation, buttressed by Lune’s study and Sciel’s intuition, each of them certain in their own way.

But against all of that, his own existence: a mockery of all the established rules of their world.

Beside him, Alicia slips from his grasp, bends down to pick up another stone, and tosses it out to sea.