Chapter Text
Transversal wave: a wave that oscillates perpendicular to the direction in which it is running. Examples include the vibration of a guitar string, or electromagnetic waves such as light.
The garage door opens with the rusty roar of a prehistoric beast.
For the n-th time this week, Gustave rolls his eyes. In theory, he just has to spray a little WD-40 into the hinges. He even placed the can in a very obvious spot on top of his work bench after the neighbors complained. Still, the thought flies out of his head each time he leaves the garage, as if there was nothing between his ears to hold it back.
He leans his bike flush against the right wall so Emma has an easy time parking later. When he removes his helmet and cap, sweaty brown curls spill out from underneath; he rubs his bearded chin where the straps left impressions. Despite the chill of the winter evening, it’s a relief to get all these layers off his head. A couple of hair strands are glued to his forehead. The muscles in his thighs twitch slightly from the strain of the ride home.
It has been a long day.
While spraying the joints and hinges of the garage door with the lubricant, Gustave looks over to the house. Only the apartment on the first floor – inhabited by a lady in her mid-thirties and her teenage sister – has the lights turned on. Alicia, the girl, leans dangerously far out of the window, rapidly tapping on her phone. Her red hair shines in the yellow light spilling out of the room behind her.
Ducking beneath the gate, Gustave pulls it down shut – without a sound. Both him and his knees wince under the weight of his backpack when he stands up to his full height again. 33 years old, and he’s already starting with the dad noises.
“Hey Alicia,” he calls up to the girl. “You good? Maybe you shouldn’t leave the window open for so long, the electricity price has gone up again.”
She only peers down for a brief moment to wave at him before demonstratively pointing at her phone. Since the house fire that destroyed her family’s ancestral home, an injury has rendered Alicia mute. Gustave is diligently practicing sign language, but as of right now, communication via messenger app still is faster.
Gustave! Look up! WTF is in the sky? says the text message appearing on his phone. Confused, he gazes back up to her again - her eyes and phone are directed at the sky, following something. The claw clip that has kept her hair up so far loses its fight against gravity with a clacking noise.
So he tilts his head back – and does a surprised double take.
The sky is tinted by that kind of tired sunset that only happens after particularly gray and cloudy days. The colors are faded and desaturated, reminding a little of dishwater. Against the muddy clouds, the silhouette of an object falling out of the sky stands out, slowly but surely increasing in size.
But this description is not entirely correct, Gustave realizes.
First of all, the object is human-shaped – there's a head, two arms, two legs. It also does not seem to be much larger nor smaller than a human. Perhaps it is some kind of crash test dummy or one of these dolls used in first aid training for the CPR exercise. Which would be absurd. And yet it moves.
Secondly, it is notfalling
In an astonishing contradiction to all the fundamentals of physics that Gustave knows, the doll(?) is sinking to the ground at a controlled and almost unhurried speed. Neither gravity nor the acceleration that this body should be experiencing seems to be particularly at work here. As far as Gustave can make out, it has the relaxed pose of a person sleeping on their back, gently lowered to the ground of this world by two invisible hands.
The ground in question being the very driveway that Gustave is currently standing on, gaping into the clouds like an idiot.
A million questions light up his work-tired brain like a cloud of fireflies rising from a forest clearing. He rubs the bridge of his nose. The pain of confusion briefly thuds in his head.
There is a doll-person-body-thing. Sinking to the ground. Out of the damn sky.
For a moment, Gustave's eyes wander over the neighborhood. It is quiet – almost too quiet for the comparatively early time of day. The weather is cold and dry, but no passersby wander the streets; silhouettes move around in illuminated windows. A car slowly drives past.
His phone vibrates again.
It's a guy, Gustave! Dressed weirdly, Alicia writes.
Should we call the police? An ambulance?
He honestly does not know what to answer. If that was truly just a doll, he would call the authorities for nothing and make a fool out of himself. If it isn't a doll, though, that means that what is descending from the sky here is a–
But why would it be? Why would this invisible force be so careful with a dead body?
This doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense. Is this a dream?
Using his prosthetic hand, Gustave pinches the back of his arm, cursing immediately when the pain hits. A glance back upwards - he barely has to tilt his head back anymore - reveals that he is, in fact, not dreaming.
The man (that's what Alicia said, right?) is still there. Floating down, unperturbed by the storm in his brain.
Gustave shivers. Nervousness starts to grip at him from the depths of his stomach as the winter-cold creeps through his clothes. To soothe himself, he starts calculating a mental estimate of how long it will take the person to land. The embrace of numbers comforts him immediately.
Physics is a measure of reality. Something tangible to deal with. Equations have solutions – and isn't that a calming thought? Having a solution?
As his eyes track and his brain races to estimate speed and distance and force– a thought flashes in Gustave’s head. It is a lightning strike, a eureka that borders on the sensible.
Cushions.
He should soften the landing.
There is someone floating into–
And if his mental math is correct, he has enough time to get a blanket, or pillows, or something from his living room…
“I– I’ll get some pillows,” he shouts up to Alicia, not waiting for her response or watching her face. His feet take off before his head can follow.
Gustave fumbles with the keys, dropping them to the ground. His hands shake as he opens the house’s door.
The apartment becomes a blur. Against his thigh, his phone buzzes again and again. Gustave’s arms robotically gather pillows, his favorite blanket. His mind is already blurry with cotton-fuzzy anxiety, his heart bobs up and down in an ocean of oddness.
Somewhere far behind, steps thunder through the staircase with all the weight of a teenager freaking out.
When he finally stumbles out of his apartment door, his soft cargo at least prevents him from hitting the handrail. His phone still vibrates angrily, incessantly, an electric swarm of bees hurrying him along. Entirely too fast and too slow at the same time, his feet carry him down the few stairs to the house’s entrance, send the doormat flying, rush around the corner.
Alicia is already there, signal-red in her winter coat. A girl-shaped exclamation mark in the encroaching blue-gray of the evening. She stares at him, wide-eyed and frantic, her hands flying in gestures Gustave doesn’t understand. The outside light is on and casts a circle of cool white on the pavement.
In it, as if presented on a stage, lies the man. The person. No doll, no thing.
He is too late.
A pile of fluffy, colorful, rectangular breadcrumbs falls to the ground as Gustave drops the pillows. Beside the man, he finally drops to his knees too. Cold concrete grinds against his legs through the fabric of his pants.
Gustave swallows the million roiling thought-fireflies in his head. They go down his throat like static.
Thump, goes the fist against his sternum. Breathe. Focus.
Yes, you want to freak out, Gustave, but you need to be an adult. Alicia is here. And maybe this guy needs an ambulance. One thing after another.
He thumps again. The strange panic begins to recede a little, like water with the tide.
A small hand is placed on his shoulder and he turns. Alicia looks down at him, concern dancing in her eyes. She tilts her head in a silent question.
“Sorry,” Gustave breathes. “I'm OK now. I'll check for a pulse and if– if he's hurt. You can go inside. I’ll take care of it.”
She shakes her head, still wide-eyed. Pulls out her phone again and types, then shows him.
Im not a child
And I wanna help
Above the message field, he can see some cut-off demands for him to hurry.
There is a man who has floated out of the sky into our driveway.
“Checking someone’s pulse is not a group activity. Really. I can hear you shivering. You don’t have to freeze. I’ll let you know everything later,” Gustave promises. After he has drunk a coffee or three and reaffirmed his grip on sanity.
Focussing back on the man, his good hand brushes away hair and a shirt collar. Fingers find a jaw, a neck.
Recoil for a heartbeat – the skin is warm.
Beneath his fingertips, he can barely feel a pulse. Faint like a brushstroke, slow like thick dripping paint - as if the man had been hibernating.
“He’s alive,” Gustave whispers, astonished. Next to him, Alicia rustles as she kneels beside him. Of course she's still there. This man is alive. “We need to call an ambulance. Or Lucien at least, he's a doctor,” Gustave begins thinking aloud. “I should check for injur–”
A phone is held under his nose. Wincing, he squeezes his eyes shut at the light of the screen.
Nah, no injuries. I looked at him long enough when you were inside
Also, dude smells like oil paint
“Oil paint?” Gustave sniffs. A weak hint of turpentine is in the air. As far as he can see, the clothes of the man are a little dirty, but there are no spatters of color on them. Looking down, his hands are clean as well.
“Can't see any color… maybe he spent some time near an open can of varnish? But really– we should get him inside. It will get too cold soon. And then I'll call Lucien. Or Emma…”
Gustave loses himself in his thoughts again. He has always been easily affected by stress. While not necessarily stressful, the weirdness of events is throwing him off. His best friend and sister have often emphasized how they are happy to help him when he is overwhelmed. Have done so, back when he had the accident and lost the arm. But – Emma has an important council meeting tonight. And Lucien is a freaking doctor. He has to get it together.
Looking up, Alicia stands at the head of the man. Her brow is furrowed, eyes boring into a spot on top of the dark hair. Immediately, alarm surges through Gustave.
“What's wrong, Alicia? Is he injured?,” he inquires, getting up from the ground under the protest of his knees.
She shakes her head. Types on her phone again.
Am I crazy or is that a halo floating over there?
“I'm sorry, what is floating–”
Gustave chokes on his words as he follows Alicia to look down at the man.
Hovering slightly over the crown of his head is, barely visible in the glow of the lamp glaring into the driveway, a very weak ring of light.
If you wanted to be romantic, it would kinda fit, wouldn't it? Maybe the man is an angel who has fallen from heaven.
But the stories always end there. They never tell you what to actually do once the angel lies in front of you.
Krr–ou have reached th–krr–box of 0-1-5–
Sighing, Gustave presses his metal fingers into his eyes. Lucien is not answering his phone.
Of course he isn't.
He'll try again later.
Taking a deep breath, he walks back into the living room. Where, on his couch, an unconscious man lies. Who might be an angel.
Carrying him into his apartment had been an ordeal; the man was not only roughly the same height as Gustave, but also a good bit heavier. Whatever the man had done before his arrival here must have been physically demanding. Even considering the layers of clothes he was wearing, he seemed to have a broad, sturdy build.
Alicia has taken up residence in his comfortable desk chair, eyes trained on the couch as if the man would disappear if she stopped looking. Occasionally, she peers down on her phone – probably talking to Clea. A steaming mug of tea sits on his desk next to her.
Pulling up the little stool he normally uses as a footrest, Gustave sits down to examine the ring of light above the man’s head.
Flushed from the heat of Gustave’s apartment, it is undeniable that the man is beautiful in every subjective and objective way, even if his face is carved through by oddly gray scars. One cleaves through the man's left eye, the second one bisects the back of a strong nose horizontally. Multiple more coil from the jaw over the bearded cheeks and run down the throat to disappear beneath the collar of a shirt that might have been white a long time ago.
Carefully, Gustave stretches out his left hand – the prosthesis. Behind the dark metal, he hopes, the ring should be easier to see and thus study.
But as his fingers approach the aureole, he feels an odd force pulling at the tips like a magnet pulls at a piece of iron. He touches the light gently, as if expecting it to have a firmness to it.
A pattern, engraved in his prosthesis, lights up suddenly with an inner fire never before seen.
“What the–”
Gustave croaks out a surprised noise; he also hears Alicia gasp when, immediately, the ring of light breaks in front of their eyes, dissolving into a fine mist of particles that seem to eagerly disappear into the metal of his arm.
A heartbeat later, the man on the couch inhales, and it sounds like a thunderclap in the quiet room. His chest begins to softly move up and down with his breath.
In the end, Verso frees the Soul Fragment from its pointless, endless curse. It is a kindness that destroys the Canvas. And what comes next is formless and empty, and darkness is upon the face of the deep.
Nothing.
Verso is not.
Finally.
After such a long life, nonexistence is a very relaxing state. Exactly as hoped for. Freed from the restrictions of a corporeal form, an identity, an existence for the benefit of others; of that endless, greatest guilt.
Only strange thing is that he… kind of expected that he would perceive less. That the release of the soul fragment and the subsequent erasure of the Canvas would have felt like falling asleep and not waking up anymore. The absence of all sensations. In reality, it feels more like he is a leaf that is being carried into the depths by a gentle breeze.
Maybe the dissolution of the self is a longer process.
After all, who should he have asked how it feels to truly die? The thousands of deaths he has lived through were but a motif of suffering. A fugue in pain major. The same shit over and over again.
While he is sinking into this unknown abyss, fragments of sensations float past him.
–a girl and a man stand watching him, both weirdly dressed, both oddly familiar, both with exasperated expressions on their faces. “His pockets are empty?”--
– cold fingertips run gently over the pictos on his wrist, touch the multitude of Lumina spots tattooed onto his skin. Where has his bracer gone?--
–an odd scent engulfs him, floral, yet not from any flower he knows, almost more perfume or an exaggeration of a flower–
–that same man with the shaggy brown curls stands next to a dark-skinned man in a white long coat – a doctor?. “Are you fucking kidding me, Gustave?”
Gustave?!
“Lucien, I will absolutely not call the damn police. What am I supposed to tell them?”-
–light–
–darkness–
–”Merde. You have no identity, stranger from the sky. Nobody seems to be missing you. How is this going to work? How would you get a passport? A job? Friends? Bank account? Pay fucking taxes !? This is absurd,” a man (who he knows! But from where?) murmurs, burying his face in his hands while muttering more gibberish-
–“No, he's not awake yet. But he's moving more and more. I think it won't be long anymore.”-
…
Life is a mystery
Everyone must stand alone
I hear you call my name
And it feels like–
-there is light behind his eyelids, but the effort to open them feels sisyphean. He has a headache like never before in all his years. A woman sings quietly, but gratingly in the background. Unrelenting pain hammers behind his temples and between his eyes. His tongue feels like a giant dry sponge in the desert.
Verso is.
Putain de merde.