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There is a god that lives in the heart of this world.
Eternal and always.
The stories speak of a destined painter; they talk of a man who created their world with the flick of a paintbrush; they talk of a god who could destroy their world just as easily as he made it.
In the shadow of a god, The City of Lumière sends what it can: pleas, wishes, and gifts.
*
“This is a quick trip, remember?” Emma prompts Gustave. “In-and-out of the portal. You have some offerings; he’ll have some answers. A quick trade. After that, everything should be sorted for the rest of the year.”
Gustave nudges the wicker basket sitting between them on their coffee table. It’s filled with Lumière’s latest delicacies: soft bread, rich cheeses, and sweet pastries, along with a thermos of hot coffee. There’s a picto on the side of the flask to keep it warm for as long as possible. The whole thing is covered over with a red-and-white blanket that’s tucked in at the edges.
“Offerings,” Gustave repeats. He gives the basket another little nudge with the back of his fingers. “Is that what we’re calling this? I think I’d call it lunch.”
His sister looks at him with the whisper of a knife in her eyes. He shouldn’t tease her, he knows. Not when she’s worried.
But their god hasn’t hurt anyone, not in their lifetime.
“I’ll be fine, Emma,” he assures her before she can try to tell him to take this seriously. “I’ve done this before.”
“Yes. Several times,” Emma repeats. “You’re the only one he keeps asking for.”
“Well,” Gustave says, “Maybe he likes me.”
He says it like it’s a good thing. Emma looks at him like it’s a death sentence.
“I don’t like it,” she says, before she heaves a sigh and straightens her skirts. “But it isn’t up to me to like it or not. The Council has agreed -”
“ - despite your protestations - ”
“- The Council has agreed that you are to be Lumière’s chosen conduit with the canvas’s god for as long as he wishes.” Her jaw clenches. “Try to be less interesting this time, Gustave. I preferred it when someone was chosen at random.”
“I can’t help that I’m so charming even the gods want to talk to me,” Gustave says, though he can’t help the self-deprecating smile that follows, or the way that even faking that level of arrogance makes him cringe. He sighs before his sister can try to cut him with her eyes again. “He just wants someone to talk to. A friendly face. I think- ” He tilts his head, weighs the words, and says them anyway. “I think he’s lonely.”
“A lonely god at the heart of the canvas,” Emma recites. “I’d feel more pity for him if he wasn’t trying to abduct my brother.”
He shouldn’t laugh. He really shouldn’t - but the grin comes anyway. “Abduct? Emma, I’m taking him lunch.”
He might be smiling, but his sister isn’t as she presses the handle of the basket into his hands.
“Be careful,” she warns him, “And be dull. I want my brother back in one piece.”
*
They dress him up for the visit, their offering to the gods.
He’s allowed his hair to grow a little longer than usual, soft brown curls and waves - they’re a nuisance in his daily life, forever falling in his eyes when he’s trying to work on a project, but he can’t forget the way their god had looked at him during the last visit.
There’s a moment, frozen in his mind: a pale blue gaze watching him softly, and a gentle hand tucking some of his hair behind his ear for him. The god’s fingers had brushed his face accidentally, just for a moment, and the feeling of it is wired into Gustave’s very core. That hand had been gentle with him, careful; those fingers had been covered with the paint that makes up their world, and yet they’d felt so human. So normal.
Now, Gustave sits calmly in place in the Council’s workshop as Sciel helps to pin back some of his hair with one of Lumière’s deep red flowers. It’s a match for the suit that the Council has provided him with: a white suit, adorned with black-and-gold embellishments and deep red accents at his neck and waist. A red sash slashes across his middle, designed to point attention to his waist, pinned in place with a flower that perfectly coordinates with the one Sciel is tucking into his curls.
“You look like a work of art,” Sciel says happily as she steps back to admire him. “Sophie’s outdone herself on the costume this year.”
There’s a familiar stab of pain, as there always is, at the mere mention of Sophie and all those missed chances - but he’s rescued before he has to address it. “May I remind you that this is Lumière’s Chief Engineer,” Lune cuts in from the opposite side of the lab, “Not Lumière’s Chief Eye Candy.”
Even while Gustave is chuckling and fighting hard with himself not to simply hide underneath the workbench in response, Sciel responds with a bright grin. “He can’t be both?” she asks. At least the way she prods at Gustave’s cheek and his worsening blush proves it’s all a joke. “Besides, it’s traditional. Lumière’s delegate always gets dressed up for the occasion. We can’t change it just because the god’s got himself a favourite.”
“I’m not his favourite,” Gustave protests, scandalised. “I think he just- He just likes the way I do things.”
“Oh,” Sciel says, eyes sparkling, “Does he now?”
“Efficiently,” Gustave rushes to clarify. “I’m quick. I just get it over with, and I don’t fawn over him. I’m not…” He struggles to try to put it into words: he’s been interrogated over and over and over again about what has occurred on each of his trips through the painted portal, but so much of it is impossible to describe. “I’m not scared by him. Or impressed by him. He’s not a god, not to me. He’s a painter.”
A painter trapped at the heart of their world; a brush stuck in his hands; a lonely eternity with no company, no end, no relief.
When Gustave thinks of their god, he doesn’t feel awe. He doesn’t feel worship.
He only feels his heart breaking for every year that passes for him, trapped there alone.
“This will be your fifth visit,” Lune points out as she approaches them from the other side of the workshop. She tucks a piece of paper into the wicker basket: fresh questions and requests, Gustave has no doubt. “You two must be old friends by now.”
“I don’t think someone like that has ‘friends’,” Gustave says - but his heart warms all the same.
*
The route to the heart of the painting sits at the back of the opera house: it’s an inauspicious location for something so truly vital to their world.
Settled backstage and now guarded by heavy curtains, thick barriers and strict security, there is a trick of the light: a swirling, ever-moving rip in their world.
A portal.
For the majority of the year, there’s a faint red glow to the portal: there are stories in early journals confirming that those who passed through it never returned alive, lost to the heart of the canvas instead. Subsequent tests confirmed that the chroma of the portal was too volatile for most of the year, too unsteady - and Gustave has read those scientific entries with enraptured fascination, soaking in every hard-won scrap of knowledge. The sacrifices of their predecessors paved the way for what they know now.
And, today, for the fifth time Gustave will be the one person allowed to pass through it.
The red glow in the swirling energy has vanished, proving that for now it is stable enough to let a single person pass through unharmed.
A group has gathered to watch him go: the Council’s dignitaries are lined up to ensure his duty is performed as it should be. Emma is among them, though her face is carefully schooled into professionalism. On the opposite side of the room, Lune is studiously taking readings from the portal, monitoring any fluctuations and taking records for the future.
The wicker basket in his hands feels heavier than ever. Gustave stands before the yawning portal and can’t help but think of all of those who have come before him: from the journals he’s read, he knows that the Expedition used to be perilous. To be chosen used to mean that you might never return.
A portal like this isn’t meant for people like them; it’s meant for the gods alone.
But humankind has never taken notice of those limits.
He takes a breath, he nods at his sister - and then he steps outside of their world.
*
It hurts.
It always hurts.
When Gustave steps through the portal, the energy grabs hold of him and pulls: it’s a vortex like a miniaturised whirlpool in a painter’s cup of water, but it’s him. The pain is old; it’s a familiar, bone-deep, aching agony, trying to rip every inch of him apart, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take.
There’s a good damn reason most people won’t make this journey twice.
He feels this place taking him apart, pigment by pigment, re-working him to the core while he’s conscious enough to feel every scrap of it, and-
“Easy,” Verso murmurs, suddenly in front of him as his hands reach out for Gustave’s upper arms. His touch breaks through the smear of paint. At the contact alone, Gustave's chroma starts to settle bit-by-bit. “Breathe; take it easy. I’ve got you.”
A Painter’s flex, a flick of the brush, a pulse of control.
The paint settles under his will. Gustave’s chroma stops trying to rip itself to pieces - for now.
He breathes deeply and blinks hazily. In front of him, their god looks exactly as he had one year ago today, and all the years before that - which is to say that he doesn’t look god-like at all. He looks like a regular man, one that wouldn’t look out of place on the streets of Lumière. His black-and-white hair is flawlessly in place, and his comfortable white shirt seems to have been deliberately draped to frame the delicacy of his chest where it’s on show.
He might be a god - but he’s nothing but a handsome man underneath it all, and right now he’s a man that’s smiling at Gustave like he’s something worth hungering for.
“You came back,” Verso says in surprise, now that Gustave’s initial painful entry has settled.
Gustave thinks about all the polite rules he was told when he was first selected as Lumière’s delegate all those years ago: he thinks about the tome of etiquette and the journals of past visitors to their god, of how he had been warned to be deferential and demure, of how the books warn about the sheer power of the being that runs their world and the importance of ensuring he views Lumière kindly. Flattery, deference and awe had been the scripture.
And, now, Gustave rolls his eyes at his god and heaves the wicker basket he’s carrying slung over one arm. “Of course I came back,” he complains, “You asked for me specifically.”
“Did I really?” Verso asks, eyes glinting. “That doesn’t sound right. I don’t think I would ask for someone so stubborn.”
“Apparently you were very insistent in last year’s missive,” Gustave confirms.
He takes the basket to the centre of Verso’s bleak world and sets it down. Focusing on the gifts he’s brought means that he doesn’t need to look around too much - because, yes, he can be flippant in the present of Verso because he’s a man as much as a god, but even Gustave can’t shrug off the chaos of their surroundings.
The platform that Verso lives on is pitch black beneath their feet, as dark as burned ink. There’s a gold-framed painting on the ground, with chroma swirling inside its boundaries; sitting on the black ground beside it is the faintly glowing paintbrush that Verso uses to keep their world turning, and Gustave knows if he keeps their personal deity distracted for too long the consequences for Lumière of that simple break would be disastrous.
Above them, the universe itself hangs in unknown and unknowable beauty: there is a black, marbled sky punctuated only by inexplicable streaks of light and a stomach-churning, impossible abyss.
Gustave has tried, over and over, to describe this world-beyond-the-world in his journal, or to Lune herself.
Words can never come close.
He kneels on the ground and opens the wicker basket. Behind him, Verso’s footsteps echo as he draws closer. He kneels with Gustave and together they unpack the basket: the picnic blanket, the finest food that Lumière can muster, a bottle of wine that Gustave wouldn’t be able to afford with even a year’s wages.
They spread the blanket on the onyx-black ground and sprawl on opposite sides of it.
“Isn’t this supposed to last you for the rest of the year?” Gustave asks as Verso starts to share the food between them.
“A baguette and a few croissants? Hardly,” Verso says. Gustave’s fairly certain that the Council of Lumière would be horrified to hear their wares described as a ‘few croissants’ - he quickly decides that perhaps this is another detail that he can spare from his report. “I don’t need to eat. Not here. So this? It’s not for survival. It’s about breaking the monotony.”
Gustave reaches for one of Mathilde’s finest pastries, feeling those buttery flakes between his fingertips.
Breaking the monotony, he muses, as he tries not to think about an eternity stuck in this place: an immortality of darkness and loneliness, with only the occasional promised gift to break it up.
“I like your hair, you know,” Verso blurts at the exact moment that Gustave takes a bite from his pastry, his mouth too occupied to answer. Verso's eyes flick away from him in a panic and stare down at his waist instead, like there's some special detail highlighted by the white outfit that Gustave hasn't noticed yet. It seems to take him a special effort to look back up at Gustave's face. “It’s, uh, longer than it was last year. It’s good. With the… flower. And the suit. It’s nice. I mean. Well. You look nice.”
Verso clears his throat while Gustave chews slowly, taking his time, and thinking that it’s a relief that immortality and deification don’t appear to come with any inherent smooth-talking abilities.
“Thank you,” he says eventually, when his mouth is clear again. “I’ll pass the compliments along - I didn’t choose the outfit myself.”
“I didn’t think you did,” Verso agrees, before he frowns at himself. “Not that you couldn’t. I’m sure you have excellent taste.”
Gustave takes his time, fighting the smile that wants to grow on his face; he wonders if any of Verso’s other visitors have ever made their god so nervous.
He wonders if any of them have ever felt this warm glow in their stomach simply from Verso’s desperate attention.
“Well. Thank you again,” Gustave says. “I’ll make sure to pass along the message. Maybe next year’s delegate will wear something similar for you.”
He loves the way that Verso snorts in response - he loves how familiar it is.
“I’m asking for you again,” Verso says, like it’s a done deal. “Nobody else shares the wine with me.”
“Everyone else pays attention to the handbook,” Gustave says.
“There’s a handbook?”
“It’s very detailed,” Gustave says. “Lots of rules to make sure we don’t bring down the wrath of our personal god.”
“And, let me guess, you’re breaking all of them?” There’s a glint in Verso’s pale eyes, something that’s nothing short of delighted.
“The rules are in place to make sure the mission is achieved: we’re here to pass along our pleas for the year. Lumière’s meagre requests.”
“The mission,” Verso repeats. That spark is still there in his eyes, delighted for once instead of heartbroken. “Is that what I am?”
“The mission,” Gustave repeats. He picks up his wine glass without breaking eye contact, and allows himself to toy with the stem while holding Verso’s gaze. That glow in the pit of his stomach is growing by the second. “Is there something else you’d like to be?”
In the back of his mind, he’s sure he can hear Emma screaming at him. Something about toying with the gods. Something about being reckless. Something about learning to play by the rules.
All of it seems quiet in comparison to the playful joy in Verso’s eyes.
Verso clears his throat then holds out his paint-stained hand. “C’mon, then. Lumière’s demands. Hand them over.”
There’s supposed to be more ceremony than this: Gustave is supposed to pass over the message from the Council with his eyes bowed and his voice soft as he makes their appeal for Verso’s continued beneficence. What he does instead is reach into the basket, find the record of the Council’s request, and throw it across the blanket so that it hits Verso in the chest, leaving their god fumbling to catch hold of it.
It’s worth it. It is. It’s worth it for the disbelieving way that Verso chuckles and shakes his head as he opens it up, stealing glances at Gustave like he can’t quite believe he’s here.
Gustave’s fighting a smile of his own - because this isn’t him. He doesn’t act like this in Lumière, not in his workshops, not the library, not while he pours over his inventions and allows his mind to unravel the puzzles their world presents him with. He’s Lumière’s Chief Engineer, dragging the city into the future through the sheer force of his will and intellect alone.
But here, in the heart of the world, he can leave all that behind, just for a moment. He can be the light in someone else’s darkness. He never feels more real than when he's here, right here.
“Nothing too extreme this year,” he says as Verso reads through the Council’s appeal. “They’re hoping to find more resources in the Continent’s mountains. And they’re hoping for a good summer for the crops outside Lumière.”
“I can do that,” Verso murmurs, almost to himself. His fingers, tipped with swirling paint, twitch thoughtfully even before he finishes reading the message. He glances up. “There’s nothing for you. There’s never anything for you.”
It’s enough to surprise a smile out of Gustave, a real one. “Me?” he repeats. “What would I even ask for?”
“Fame, wealth, riches,” Verso lists off without hesitation.
Gustave can’t help but roll his eyes in response. “I don’t want any of that,” he protests.
I just want to see you again, god of mine, he thinks instead.
It’s one wish he doesn’t have to make.
*
Three years pass, easy and hazy in their haste.
They’re blessed with good crops, warm weather, and a bounty of luck for the people of Lumière, if not for Gustave himself.
Every year, Gustave makes the customary trip through the portal to make an appeal to their miniature god; every year, without fail, Verso sends back a message with a simple request, asking for Gustave to visit again the next year too.
This is no exception, but as he stands before the portal on the year of his thirtieth birthday there are nerves that he hasn’t felt before. His hair keeps threatening to fall free from the red flower pinning it back, and he can feel the hammering of his heart as he counts down the seconds before it’s time to step across.
Don’t think about it, Emma had told him. He’ll have other things to think about, not you.
It’ll be okay, Lune had promised. Pass over our appeal and get out of there, it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.
He’ll already know, Gustave, Sciel had reassured him, her hand on the new metal of his replacement arm, a new addition in the twelve months that have passed since he last saw Verso. He’ll have been worried about you, you know he will.
This year’s offerings are clenched in the hand of his prosthetic arm - and he’s grown used to it, he’s had to, but the memory of that ill-fated mistake in the lab is wrapping tight around him as he takes a breath and steps into the portal. The stump aches where it's attached to the metal, and it's all in his head - he knows that- but he can't make it stop.
The pain of leaving this world and entering the next hasn’t stopped either: it never does, it never will. It rips him apart as he walks into the heart of the world, as the canvas itself pulls at his chroma, stretches his pigment, and tries to warp him into something fresh. Something new.
“I’ve got you,” comes Verso’s voice - and this time it’s followed by his arms, his chest, his warmth, when Verso grabs hold of him and draws him in tight. As Verso reaches out to steady his chroma and keep him grounded in this forbidden world, all Gustave can do is screw his eyes shut, lean against Verso, and hope desperately for the best. He breathes in the scent of his hair, too familiar after all these years of strange, impossible visits. “You’re okay. I’ve got it under control. You’re here. You’re okay.”
He wants to pull himself together; he wants to be flippant and breezy and irreverent, exactly how Verso likes him, but it feels like he’s choking on the relief of having Verso here with him.
“I’m sorry.” He releases his mechanical hand’s grip on the handles, and the basket of Lumière’s most precious offerings thuds to their feet. “I’m sorry.”
Verso draws back from him, just enough to look at his face. Gustave is cleaned to perfection, as neat as Lumière can make him, but he still feels like a disgrace under Verso’s soft gaze. The stump of his arm aches under the weight of its pictos, protesting its own existence in a way it hasn’t done in months.
Verso’s hand brushes against the side of his face, his thumb tracing along the line of Gustave’s cheekbone like he’s tracing the outline of a sketch. “I should have been there,” Verso breathes, “Not trapped here. Not forced to watch. Again. All this power, all this paint, and I can’t even- ”
His jaw clenches and the words die on his tongue, unable to be shared. Gustave leans into the softness of Verso’s hand against his cheek: it’s so human. So real.
“I should’ve been able to do something. I should’ve warned you,” Verso says.
Gustave’s had months to get used to this, to recover - it’s not enough, it’ll never be enough, but he tries to shake his head all the same. “You’ve got a whole world to run, Verso,” he says. “I don’t think one human’s arm is at the top of the priority list.”
Verso’s left breathing through his nose, words unsaid, so Gustave untangles them from one another. He clears his throat as though there’s any chance of bringing them back to propriety, and leans down to pick up his basket from where it’s sitting forgotten on the ground. “C’mon,” he beckons. “Mathilde’s been working magic with choux pastry again.”
There’s no joy in Verso’s eyes when they sit down for lunch. There’s no spark in his smile when Gustave makes him taste Lumière’s richest wares; there’s no answering lilt when Gustave tries to needle him into their old banter. All that remains is the exhaustion on Verso’s face as he watches Gustave’s mechanical arm move, and his thoughts seem to drift through phases that Gustave could never hope to understand.
He doesn’t try to tell him that it’s alright.
He doesn’t try to tell him anything.
He lets Verso watch. He lets him see whatever he needs to see. And, for his part, Gustave takes a chance to study his god in return: the exhaustion in his shoulders, the broken tone in his voice, the defeat in his every movement.
“Why are you here, Verso?” he asks without meaning to, the eternal unanswerable question tumbling out of him unintentionally. “The real story, not the fairy tale. Not the nonsense they feed us at school.”
Verso’s eyes, cool as glaciers, watch him from beneath his brows. He’s frozen. Wordless.
“You shouldn’t be back here,” Gustave insists. “You shouldn’t be hidden away, painting. You’re human. Just like me. I know you are. I can feel it.”
Paint is swirling at the end of Verso’s fingertips. The air is drenched in it.
“We’re all fairy tales in the end,” Verso says. “Nothing but stories.”
"Verso," he pleads. Gustave isn’t buying it. He sits at the opposite side of their blanket, arms crossed, eyes pleading. This act, this tradition, this farce, how long have they been performing it now? This is his eighth visit. How many more renditions before something has to change?
“Imagine…” Verso halts, and looks down at his own paint-stained hands. “Imagine you’re living your own life in Lumière. You have a little apartment above the bakery. You have your family. Friends . Someone you love. A life. Imagine that you have all of that - and one day the world breaks into pieces, and someone appears to tell you it was never real. You were never real. Just a painting. Just a story.”
Verso reaches out for his glass of wine, half-finished already, but Gustave doesn’t move. He can’t.
“Imagine you spend decades knowing that your life is a fake, nothing more than a facsimile of who you’re supposed to be. You spend lifetimes trying to fix the world. Trying to set everything right. You let people get hurt along the way. You let people get killed.”
Verso looks up from his glass as he says those words, and he lets his gaze rest heavily on Gustave’s face. It’s enough to stop him from breathing. It’s enough to take the air from his lungs and leave an aching pain in the centre of his chest, all the pain of a gaping wound without a drop of blood to show for it.
“Imagine you make it through all of that, all of that pain, all of those lies, all of that bloodshed, and you reach the heart of the canvas. And you think you’re ready for what you’ll find there, but what you find is this: a little boy. A tired little boy, who just wants to be allowed to stop painting. But you know the real gods of this world will never let him stop, never let him rest. Would you take his place, if you could? Would you pick up a brush, knowing it’s forever?”
Gustave needs to answer. He needs to speak. He needs to do something to address the bitter agony in Verso’s voice, but he’s frozen in place, his mind whirling desperately.
“Imagine watching the world begin afresh under your hand: imagine that it’s wiped clean and you get to watch, from afar, as your friends rebuild a new life without you, never even remembering you were there. Imagine if you could watch the man you let die for your plans as he goes through his life: fit and healthy. And he’s as sweet as everyone used to tell you he was. He's stubborn. Thoughtful. Brilliant. And you know you should keep your distance - you know this isn’t right - but they tell you you’re a god and there’s a part of you that wants to believe it.”
“Verso - ”
“Because there’s a part of you that’s so exhausted that you need a reason to keep painting,” Verso finishes regardless, like he doesn’t know how to stop any more, “And you hate yourself for it, but he’s it. He’s the reason. You keep painting because he deserves it. He deserves the world, and you’re the only one that can keep it going for him. You’re the only one that can give him a second chance after you stole the first.”
“Verso,” Gustave cuts in, finally. Verso’s mouth snaps shut at the sound of Gustave’s sharp voice, but Gustave doesn’t have anything to fill the silence with. The world is threatening to spill apart into threads around him, the fabric unravelling, and all Gustave can do is stare at a god he doesn’t know and will never understand - all he can do is stare at Verso’s wild eyes and wonder if he’s ever understood him at all. “What is this? Is that true?”
Verso downs his wine disrespectfully fast.
“It’s a story,” Verso says in the end. “An old fairy tale. It’s as true as any of them can be.”
There’s no joy for the rest of Gustave’s visit. When he leaves, there’s no smile on their faces, no well-wishing for next year, no warm hugs or teasing promises.
Verso’s tale spins in his head.
Imagine, Verso had said - and now the blood-stained dreams won’t let him forget.
*
Despite the pain, Verso asks for him again the next year.
And the next.
And the next.
Gustave’s thirty-third birthday passes with an avalanche of nightmares: strange images dance in his mind at night. There’s a daughter - a sister? - he doesn’t remember, with mirth-filled eyes and brilliant red-hair; there’s a voyage he can’t understand, sailing on the sea for an expedition that makes no sense in the world he now knows; and there’s the crash of a cane, heavy on the ground. The dreamed sound alone makes him wake in the middle of the night, sweat-drenched and heart-pounding.
I’ve been reading too many books, he tells his friends when they worry about him. I need to start avoiding the horror section of the library, that’s all.
With a roll of his eyes and a self-deprecating smirk, it’s easy enough to chase them away.
But the determination shows on his face as he stands in front of the portal to the heart of the canvas once again.
No flowers this time. No elaborate outfit. The Council had tried to insist, citing tradition, but Gustave has been their delegate for over ten years now: he is the tradition. If he's doing this again, he's doing it in his own clothes in his own way.
His friends are at his side, his sister too. They’ve waved him off for so many years now, this voyage they can’t understand, but this time is different - he’s sure they feel it, all of them. It’s there in the tightness when they hug him, the way they cling on for a moment too long.
Stepping through the portal aches - it’s worse this time than before. It gets worse every time, and there have been so very many visits now.
The canvas grabs for his chroma like it’s proving a point; as he lands in the darkness at the heart of their world, his feet unsteady beneath him, his own pigment starts to leak, starts to smear into the air.
Like a watercolour exposed to rain, his very being starts to dissolve.
Running for him, Verso is there in seconds: clinging onto him, fighting it back, a god wrestling with the world he’s supposed to control.
“It’s okay,” he promises, again, again, again. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
Did you have me then? Gustave wants to ask. The other world. The life that doesn’t exist. The time you let me die. Did you 'have' me?
Verso holds him tightly and breathes in the scent of his hair, great ragged gulps of air.
“It’s not working properly,” Verso mutters, a frustrated growl to the universe itself. “Not like it should. I can’t hold all of you in place.”
Gustave holds onto him tightly in return, and pretends that he can’t see the paint-smudged smear around the line of his own arms: he pretends he can’t feel the borders of his own being threatening to dissolve.
“It’s fine,” he whispers. “I can’t feel a thing.”
He even manages to conjure an empty smile onto his face.
But Verso isn’t smiling in return when he pulls back to look at him. Verso’s hand brushes the hair out of Gustave’s eyes, and then his fingertips hover over Gustave’s cheek, skimming through the chroma without actually making contact. Whatever he sees there, it makes him shake his head.
“You’ve been here too often,” Verso says. “This place, it’s not for the likes of you or I. The only reason I’m still alive is maman’s gift.”
Hissed as it is, there’s no ‘gift’ to the words. No grace. Resentment and horror and loneliness: it’s cavernous in its black depths. It's an abyss as dark as their surroundings.
“Go home, Gustave,” Verso says, stepping away, further into the dark horror of his no-man’s-land. Further into his own isolation. “Tell them to send another. Better yet, tell them to throw their requests through the portal next time. I don’t need a visit; I don’t need this.”
Gustave stays where he is, rooted to the spot, his chroma fighting with the canvas to stay with him even with Verso’s limited protection. He watches Verso pace, watches the hate-filled glare he directs at the framed painting of their world where it’s spread upon the ground. The chroma within the frame only swirls viciously in response.
“Verso,” Gustave sighs. “You can’t stop me from coming.”
“I’m a ‘god’, remember,” Verso laughs, a sound that’s dark with rot. “I can do anything I want. Can’t I?”
For a god, he’s like a child in the midst of a tantrum - he sounds like someone reeling against the walls simply to find out where the barriers lie.
“You’re a god,” Gustave agrees calmly. The chroma of his skin prickles as it swirls around him, a death taking place one pigment at a time. “You’re a painter. You’re a man.”
“And it means nothing,” Verso snaps, his storm still raging. “Even taking on this power, even picking up that brush, I can’t change what matters. Look at you, Gustave. Look.”
When Verso gestures towards him, Gustave doesn’t know what it is that he sees: he doesn’t know if he’s talking about the accident that took his arm, or the wild raging of his chroma as it wars with their world.
He doesn’t know if he’s talking about the dreams he has some nights, or if he’s talking about the way that Gustave wakes up even now to foreign memories of blood in his lungs and a painful, desperate death.
He doesn’t know.
He doesn’t care.
It’s time to move. He steps forward, one foot after the other, while the painting tries to hold him back: his colours are a doubling after-print behind him in the air. It feels like dragging himself through oils, thick and cloying, but it brings him to Verso.
“You’re a god, Verso,” he repeats, even if he doesn’t believe it. Not any more. He drags his dissolving hand up towards Verso’s face; it’s his turn to cup Verso’s cheek, to feel that warm skin beneath his hand. There’s the faint scratch of Verso’s stubble against his palm, so real, so human. “If you want something to change? Change it.”
He’s asking for the impossible. He’s challenging powers he doesn’t understand.
He’s asking Verso to repaint the way their entire world works - and he doesn’t care. Verso’s done it once before, hasn’t he?
“Someone needs to stay here,” Verso rasps. “Someone needs to paint, or everything - everything - stops.”
“But who says you have to do it alone? You can change it. Paint me: paint me here; match my chroma with the heart of the canvas, and I can stay with you. It’ll work.” He reaches out with his other hand too, cupping Verso’s face between his palms and making sure that Verso is looking into his eyes: he needs Verso to know that he means this. He needs him to know that he’s had years to think about it, piece by piece, visit by visit. “I know what I’m asking. I know what I’m choosing.”
“Gustave, don’t. You don’t-”
Gustave cuts him off with a kiss that has to say everything that he can’t.
They’re not good at this, talking it out: the words trip them up. But this?
His lips press against Verso’s softly, a kiss that’s been years in the making. The startled shudder of Verso’s breath rushes against him, a line of heat; there’s a barely muffled sound, not quite a moan, not quite a protest, not quite a plea. Something trapped between all three.
There’s a frozen moment, too stunned to move - they do nothing more than stand in place.
And then Verso’s arms move around his waist, clinging on tight. His hands sink into the soft cotton of Gustave’s shirt and grab hold of it like an anchor, tying them together.
Gustave wraps Verso up too, holding him against his chest when their kiss breaks. His chroma drifts in streaks and swirls in the air, its own gommage; it’s a word Gustave shouldn’t know, not in the world Verso built for them, but it’s bubbled in his mind for years now. Context. Reality.
“Leave,” Verso begs, even as he holds him tighter. “You deserve the world, Gustave. You deserve a life.”
“And I’m choosing this one. Here, with you,” Gustave repeats.
It’s what Maelle would have wanted, comes a thought from a different life. I can’t look after her. So let me look after you.
His metal hand presses softly against the nape of Verso’s neck, fingers sinking into the mess of his hair. “There isn’t much time,” he murmurs - the chroma leaking from him is getting to be too much, taking its toll. He can feel the core of himself leeching into the air. Soon there won’t be a choice left for them any more. Soon he’ll be a painted blur on the breeze and nothing more. “You can do this. Paint me.”
“I can’t condemn you to that.”
“Paint me. I want this life,” Gustave insists. Pinned to the heart of the canvas rather than the outside world, walking the horrors of this dark abyss, sitting at Verso’s side for years at a time while he paints a world for the ones that they love - it’s not a life he could have dreamed of, but he thinks it might be the one he was made for. “I want this life.”
He presses his lips to Verso’s forehead as the paintbrush slowly materialises in his strange god’s hand.
“Paint me,” he whispers a final time - choosing this life, choosing eternity, choosing Verso.
The paintbrush in Verso’s hand flicks.
And they begin again.
*
There are two gods that live in the heart of this world.
Eternal and always.
The stories speak of destined lovers; they speak of soulmates; they speak of life after life of tragedy and a slow climb towards the inevitability of eternity.
But the stories can say what they wish - only the gods, hand-in-hand, will ever know the truth.