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Verso cannot Paint.
He isn’t the original, only a pale copy meant to fill the hole that Verso left and he can’t even do that right.
He cannot Paint.
He can sink into the layers of the Canvas between color and shadow and light, where the boundaries between a living world and ink and pigment on paper grow thin, and hide himself from the eyes of people.
He cannot Paint.
He can accelerate himself through the Canvas until the world blurs around him and he is nothing but a streak of light until he emerges at his destination, crossing the Continent in seconds where it would take others weeks.
He cannot Paint.
The world of the Canvas bends around him, just a little more than it should, to suit his needs. Hiding spots appear and reveal themselves when he’s running from a Nevron he can’t defeat. Berry bushes grow in hidden pockets across the Continent so he doesn’t always have to starve or steal from Lumiere or his family. Wood planks lock together and stay standing and sturdy in a humble shelter when they should collapse around his ears at the slightest movement. He is favored, ever so slightly, by the world around him.
(He is as unaware of this favor as he is of the genuine nature of the love of his friends. In his better moods, he attributes it to fortune looking kindly on him for once. In his all too common bleak moods, he considers it a cruel joke that has any good luck at all. Brushes any truly implausible incidents off as his mother’s waning sanity taking hold just long enough for her to interfere yet again from afar to keep him intact.)
He cannot Paint.
Everything he can purposefully do is just…chroma manipulation. Highly advanced, draining, and technical chroma manipulation, yes. Chroma manipulation that anyone not blessed with pinpoint fine chroma control, incredibly large stores of chroma available, or both, should not attempt lest they risk burning themselves out, blowing themselves up, or worse. But it’s still chroma manipulation, not Painting.
Verso cannot Paint.
He’s tried. Oh, how he’s tried to channel the kind of world altering power that his creator mother and her family use to slowly tear his world, Verso’s world, apart.
He cannot erase or create Nevrons, or turn them from their purpose. The Axons do not bend or fall to his will, nor do new ones rise plucked from his imagination into reality to challenge them. He cannot untangle whatever cords his mother painted into him that keep him tied to existence and erase himself and thus the source of the grief plaguing the Canvas. The damned petals that mark the powers of Painters refuse to come from him, no matter how he tries.
Verso cannot Paint.
He can shape and bend his chroma to be what he needs it to be. It pours into him like a waterfall, healing him and reshaping him and bringing him back to life no matter what he tries or what he wants, but he can….adjust the flow, so to speak. Direct it. Build dams around the places he doesn’t want it to go so he can keep some of the scars, to remind himself why he’s doing all this.
The chroma of every person painted into the Canvas, across all the generations and all the Expeditions, taken together would combine to form a vast sea of chroma. On an individual level, however, most of the people painted into the Canvas have only a small bucketful of chroma. Some have more or less of it than average. Some, like Lune, have a natural gift for manipulating chroma, able to pull the smallest drop from themselves and their environment and shape it to their will.
Every Expeditioner Verso has ever seen or known that made any progress into the Continent quickly got good enough at it to pull chroma from the landscape and environment of the Canvas itself rather than from their own natural stores in order to power up their attacks without exhausting themselves. It came easier on the Continent, where the original Verso’s childhood vision still ran wild and free and chroma buzzed in the air for anyone to pull at and use. Aline, in her dedication to recreating even a sliver of the outside world where she could pretend her family was still intact, had painted Lumiere tight and precise; the lack of loose chroma saturating the world within its borders was like a physical sensation every time Verso visited.
The point is, most people are a puddle in the ocean of chroma that makes up the Canvas. Thanks to his mother, Verso and his family are…different.
Verso’s chroma is like a mighty river, looping around and feeding back into itself. He never runs out, never runs dry. Channeling too much at once can exhaust him the same way it would anyone else, his immortal body is still not built to pull the entire crushing flow at once. He has limits. They’re just…on a different scale from nearly everyone else’s.
He has enough chroma that he can direct it to pool outside his body and hold himself in stasis while cut in half. Split himself between those two halves. And then simply release his grasp on it and it will snap his body back into shape, rewinding to before his torso was severed from his legs. He has enough chroma, that even with the Paintress, with his mother, gone and unable to intercede anymore, he will probably exist until the Canvas itself is depleted and nothing remains.
The very idea terrifies him.
It’s a quiet, screaming terror slowly growing in the back of his head when Maelle bursts back into the Canvas, her hair a stark white, and drags him along with their freshly restored fellow Expeditioners to find a way to eject her father before he can erase everything.
They deserve to live. Sciel with her kindness and determination to keep going in the face of tragedy. Lune and her curiosity, her never-ending drive to know and understand and go further than anyone ever has. Monoco and Esquie, his two oldest friends, who have stood by him and supported him even as he chased what would be an end to them and their world. Gustave, who carries the stubborn persistent hope that they can rebuild. Who has sat with him and tried to understand him and insisted that Verso still has a future with him, if he wants it. As if it’s ever mattered what he wants.
Of course they deserve to live. He’s never not believed that. He just couldn’t bring himself to believe that they could live and he could save his mother at the same time. So he made his choice and swallowed down the guilt and quietly hoped he’d be erased before he’d have to truly face it. Which worked out about as well as hoping for anything has ever worked out for him, and he just…he doesn’t have it in him to condemn them all to death again. Not when they’ve all made an effort, led by Gustave, to speak of the future they could build with him. Not when they’ve shared their hopes and dreams, even though he betrayed them, in an effort to inspire him to have some of his own.
He’s so tired of being the cause of people’s suffering.
So when they push Renoir out and Maelle seems insistent on staying, on clinging to this world, and he enters the Heart of the Canvas and finds the last shard of the man he could never replace, a little boy he knows on some instinctual level is just as tired as him, he has an idea.
The Canvas will cease to exist without something fueling the chroma to move and change and be alive forever. Normally, that something is a piece of a Painter’s soul.
Verso cannot Paint. He can’t do what this last shard of the original Verso—“Don’t call him the real Verso as if you’re somehow not,” Gustave had snapped at him one night at camp. “You’re as real as any of us are, so act like it!” and Verso had been helpless to do anything but try and obey—does and Paint the world. He can’t reshape it for his friends, no matter how much he wants to. But he has a well of infinitely looping and replenishing chroma. A battery that has kept him going against his will for decades now. He has nothing left to lose and people he has come to love and care for and want to save in spite of his best efforts not to.
He is so tired. As tired as the soul shard is, probably. And if turning himself and his chroma into the Canvas’s new battery destroys the things that make Verso himself in the process? That’s a fair trade. A bonus, even. It will mean there’s not even the shadow of the man the Dessendres have been tearing themselves apart left for them to cling and fight over. They might finally leave the Canvas alone.
So when Maelle chases after him, he offers to make a deal: She can look him in the eye and swear to him to stay just long enough to try and bring who she can back and say goodbye, before leaving the Canvas for good, and Verso will swear on whatever will make her believe him to never be a threat to the Canvas’s existence again. Or he will force her out here and now, and she will never see him or the shard of her real brother again.
It’s a gamble. A desperate bluff that he’s not even sure he can follow through on. If Maelle refuses to leave and he can’t win their duel, he will at her mercy and possibly lose this one chance to save his friends, the Painters he cannot help but care for as family— *he has lost every single piece of his own family, all of them in part by his own blade and actions, and their counterparts can never replace them, but Verso was made in the image of a man who loved his little sister so fiercely he died for her and for all that he is not that man, he seems to have inherited that instinct* —and escape the crushing weight of his own immortality. Even if Maelle agrees, he will have no way to guarantee she leaves and doesn’t just change her mind and stay after all. If he leaves the Heart now and watches to make sure, he doesn’t know if the portal will last. He doesn’t know if she won’t rally the others to force him away and render his plan worthless anyway.
Verso does not like gambling on the actions of others like this. But at least, if she agrees and then lies and stays and restarts the cycle, if Gustave cannot or will not make her see reason and return to the outside world and her true life, Verso will not be forced to watch it happen. He has no idea how much of his awareness will be left when he does this, but he is not a Painter. Even if he’s technically still alive, he will be stuck in the Heart. He can simply unplug himself and let the Canvas come to its final end. And if he can’t, Renoir or Clea will return eventually to drag her out just as they had for Aline, and then erase the Canvas and Verso for good.
It’s the only plan he’s got. A risk worth taking.
Maelle screams at him. She cries. She begs. She wants to stay. Verso is unmoved. She wants to see the future he and Gustave talked about building together. It takes everything in him not to flinch.
He wants to see that future, too. He wants to see it so bad, and he can’t, not if it means leaving the soul shard to suffer the way he has. Not when the Dessendres seem to be incapable of letting even the shadow of the man they lost go. His mother dove right back into the Canvas to keep slowly killing herself over him. Maelle is determined to stay and let her body waste away in part because of him, and he cannot let her. And that means he can’t see the world Gustave has never stopped dreaming of building. He can’t do what he can to build it with him. He can’t even Paint over the destruction wrought by the Fracture to give him a head start.
All he can do is make sure there is something to keep the world going so that Gustave and the others have a chance to build it without him.
So he makes himself immovable. Closes his heart to Maelle’s every attempt to convince him to let her waste away inside the Canvas. Turns her own arguments against her, because he has to believe that Gustave cares enough about Maelle to not want her risking losing herself the way her mother had.
Every part of him shakes under the weight of that hazel gaze when Maelle summons him through the portal to try and get Gustave on her side. It’s bad enough that he knows Monoco and Esquie are watching. That they might suspect what his plan is. He has never been able to truly hide from Gustave, the engineer has always seemed to see through to the broken thing beneath the masks, and he knows if he falters and shows too much of his hand now, the other man will ply the truth from him and it will all fall apart.
Protected by Maelle from being torn apart in the Heart of the Canvas, Gustave listens to them. He watches and listens and occasionally asks questions as Verso and Maelle argue. Verso does not want to fight him, does not know if he’ll have it in him to fight both Maelle and Gustave if it comes down to it. It takes every ounce of hard won trust that Gustave has painstakingly built in spite of Verso’s best efforts to not simply throw himself at the soul shard and enact his plan before they can stop him. He turns every inch of his fear and his panic to try desperately to convince this man, who has inspired him to hope for something better after so long of seeing only tragedy, who loves Maelle more than life itself, to let her go. To send her away so she can live and not call the wrath of her fellow Painters down on the Canvas again to retrieve her.
By some miracle, Gustave sides with Verso. The relief nearly brings him to his knees.
The engineer is gentler with his sister than Verso was, kinder than he had it in him to be when he thought he’d be standing alone. But he makes it very clear that he cannot support Maelle staying forever knowing what it will do to her. Gustave doesn’t like the Dessendres, has made it clear since learning the truth that he is…deeply unimpressed, to say the least, with how they have behaved since the fire that set all this in motion. But for all that he refused to lie down and die quietly to Renoir’s plan to erase everything, he cannot deny that he loves his family beyond reason. He is clearly perturbed to even have to acknowledge the place they have in her life, but still he reassures her that the family she fears hates and blames her for what has happened do indeed love her.
Gustave offers them both another deal, a compromise: Maelle can stay long enough to restore whoever she can without straining herself and help Paint over some of the damage done to Lumiere, then say her goodbyes. She will leave the Canvas to heal and mend things with her family and do whatever she can to ensure the Canvas’s safety from outside as only she can. And when the time is right, when she has recovered and let herself grieve with her other family, she can return to visit to see what her brother’s world has blossomed into without threats looming over its very existence. And Gustave, Verso, and the others will make sure there’s something beautiful for her to visit for a time when she can.
Verso aches at how, even now, after everything he’s done, Gustave is including him in his plans for the future.
It’s enough. Somehow, it’s enough. Maelle agrees to go. Verso will not have to watch this cycle he’s been a witness to begin again. The relief is enough to stagger him. Both of them, this young woman who is and is not his sister, whom he loves like a sister anyway, and this stubborn, kindhearted engineer who clung to hope so fiercely it made Verso want to change the world for him, hold him up and hold him close when he nearly falls to his knees.
They coax him into leaving the Heart, to share the news with the others and Verso…Verso is weak.
He can give them this much. He can say goodbye. Make sure they have no reason to worry when he goes. For a moment when he steps out, he thinks the portal will disappear behind him. But it holds. As if waiting for something.
One night. Verso gives himself one last night to say goodbye. Maelle has promised Gustave she will leave eventually. He…he has to believe that she was telling the truth this time. That Gustave will have enough sway over her to hold her to her word, even if she drags her feet. He watches as she begins to undo the last Gommage, wiping away the worst of the damage Renoir inflicted and bringing the first wave of people back.
He watches from afar, flanked by Esquie and Monoco, as the others reunite with the friends and loved ones Renoir took after the Paintress fell. His two friends do not question him. Monoco…Monoco seems to know he is hiding something still. Esquie probably does too. But they allow him to shake off their questions, take his reassurance that he will hold to his word to not destroy the Canvas at face value.
He can’t decide if he’s glad or not.
He knows he can’t bring himself to abandon the soul shard to continue Painting. Both out of empathy for his counterpart and for his own selfishness.
The future Gustave spoke of is filled with as much pain as promise for him. He wants to see the others live so badly. He is so terrified of watching them all die. Of clinging to this beautiful dream they speak of, only to be left alone again when they inevitably wither while his own chroma refuses to let him do the same. Knows that it would break him to try. He doesn’t have it in him to spend an eternity alone watching the Canvas move on around him, even now.
He is so tired. He has been so tired and weighed down by the weight of what he carries for so long.
He makes his rounds, telling the people that matter most what he needs them to hear. That he is proud of what they’ve managed, and grateful, and so so sorry for how he almost took this future away. He tries to be happy. To pretend all he feels is relief and joy and hope at the future the rest of his friends see. He doesn’t fool any of them, not completely. But even Gustave is preoccupied with his apprentices and Emma and Maelle and the celebrations to corner him.
Late into the night, Verso slips away, back through the portal to the Heart, where the little boy waits.
He tells him he can rest now. That they’ll all be okay. That he’ll make sure the Canvas full of their friends can continue on for them.
When he saved Gustave at the Stone Wave Cliffs, he poured some of his chroma into the engineer to force his body to hold on long enough for Lune to heal the damage his father had already done. Now, he grasps all his chroma, more than he’s ever dared to manage before, and he siphons it all into the Canvas.
And then he drifts.
He doesn’t know for how long.
Everything is quiet around him.
There is chroma and there is him and he scatters and reforms over and over and the things that make Verso Verso sleep within the Heart.
Outside, it doesn’t take long for the others to notice Verso has disappeared.
Gustave goes searching for him that night. At first he thinks the immortal has only slipped away to take a break from the people. When he’s still gone the next morning, he begins to worry. When he still doesn’t show up and is nowhere to be found anywhere in the city by the end of the day, he begins to think he’s run back to the Continent. That maybe the future they spoke of together, that Gustave has been quietly hoping they could share, was not a vision Verso shared, and feels his heart break a little at the thought.
Except Monoco is still in Lumiere and also has no idea where his friend has gone. And Verso would not have left without telling him where he was going or taking Monoco with him. And Esquie….Esquie is quiet and sad in a way Gustave has never seen before.
Monoco takes one look and starts cursing up a storm.
“He’s done something foolish, hasn’t he?” The Gestral demands. It’s barely a question.
“VerVer did something very kind,” the giant marshmallow replies. “He’s sleeping now.”
“Can you take us to him, Esquie?” Gustave asks, trying to ignore the dread building in the pit of his stomach. It doesn’t work. When Esquie waddles over to the portal leading back to the Heart, Gustave nearly joins Monoco in his cursing.
“He’s in there. But also now he’s everywhere. Like he’s hugging all of us.”
They’ve gotten no closer to untangling what Esquie means by that when Maelle runs up to them, pale and shaking and babbling something about how the Canvas’s chroma has changed. That it no longer feels like the playful easily shaped chroma of the little boy they saw throughout their journey, the last remnant of her first brother. That it’s…slower now. It bends and moves to her whims just as easily but it feels…almost tired. Heavy.
It doesn’t take long to figure out what has happened from there.
When they enter the Heart of the Canvas, Gustave feels tears sting his eyes that he has to fight to not let fall.
Verso hasn’t become a living statue the way Maelle’s family have. What remains of his body is….almost an echo. An imprint of loose chroma kneeling beside the painting that is their world, an endless loop of loose chroma flows in and out of him, bubbling like the chroma fountain they once found on the Continent. His form flickers in and out of view.
Maelle tries to use her powers to pull him out, and quickly has to stop, lest she accidentally destroy the Canvas in the process.
She doesn’t know how to untangle Verso from the loop of his chroma feeding the Canvas. Doesn’t know if she even can, or what could replace him to keep the Canvas alive. She spends weeks in the Canvas, alternating between restoring Lumiere and its people and trying to untangle the mess Verso has made of himself, working until she exhausts herself and Gustave and Monoco and the others have to take turns carrying her out of the Heart. Gustave finally has to remind her that she promised Verso she would not stay. That the answers they need to save him might be outside the Canvas. She promises that she will do everything she can to find out.
Maelle leaves the Canvas to search for answers. Life inside the Canvas goes on. The weeks turn to months and Gustave cannot afford to spend his every waking hour lingering outside the Heart of the Canvas. He can’t do anything for Verso directly now. So he throws himself into trying to make sure that whenever Maelle returns to save him, there will be a home worth returning to waiting for him.
The repairs in Lumiere progress at speed. Maelle made enough of a dent on the damage to the city before she left that there’s not much Gustave can contribute beyond manual labor. And that grows old quickly. Gustave loves Lumiere, he’s loved it his whole life. He dedicated himself to fighting his way through the Continent to ensure its future. But with Maelle gone for now and the man he’d fallen in love with so close and yet beyond his reach, the idea of staying begins to feel…suffocating. There’s an itch, something calling him away.
So he returns to the Continent.
It’s at once better and worse. There are so many places that remind him of Verso. And yet, it feels like the details of who Verso was, those precious things that drew him to the other man, grow fuzzier and fuzzier the longer things go on. He wakes in a panic one night when he realizes he can no longer remember the exact sound of the other man’s voice. Then he can’t quite picture the shade of his eyes. Or the shape of his jaw. He hoards every memory he can, going over them in his mind every day, fearful of losing what’s left.
“He’s still with us,” Esquie soothes, voice just a little bit sad. “He’s all around us now. You just have to reach out and feel him.”
Whatever comfort the gentle giant means to offer with that advice is a cold one, and Gustave cannot make heads or tails of what it means. It’s only when Monoco joins them, Noco once again at his side, that it begins to make sense.
“Verso’s chroma fuels the Canvas now,” he grunts. “The same way the first one’s did. When I reach out to feel the chroma without manipulating it, I can feel him in it.”
Gustave has never had the same gift for sensing and manipulating chroma that Lune has. He can channel his own well enough, can use the ambient chroma that saturates the air and land and water of the Continent to supplement his reserves, but *sensing* chroma without actively shaping it? It does not come naturally to him. Over the next few weeks as he travels with Esquie and the two Gestrals, he tries again and again to learn. Monoco watches and judges silently, only occasionally deigning to offer advice. Noco is…less helpful but more eager to provide feedback. Progress is slow, but….he starts to feel something. A familiar presence. With it come the details he can’t seem to hold on to. Flashes of quicksilver eyes that made his breath catch. A throaty chuckle that warms him from the inside. Strong hands wielding a sword and dagger in a graceful dance to summon light.
He can still remember everything he went through with Verso, who the man is, why he’s important. But it’s like his absence has gained physical weight, leeching away the small things bit by bit from Gustave’s mind and it’s only through finding the flashes of his chroma that he can recover them. It makes him more determined to hold on to every last scrap.
It helps that everywhere they go on the Continent is somewhere connected to Verso. They travel together, flying from Monoco’s Station and the ruined trains still left in the Frozen Hearts to Old Lumiere. They don’t talk about the ghost hanging over all of them, the absence they stubbornly refuse to grieve.
They spend 3 days in the woods of the Ancient Sanctuary, quietly turning the sparse hut where Verso lived into a more sturdy home. A proper cabin, big enough for two. Gustave quietly tries to pretend he’s not leaving space for his books and spare tools taking up space on the empty shelves. That he’s not picturing all the ways their lives could intertwine here as well as in Lumiere.
It’s on their third night there, after Noco has curled up to…do whatever approximation of sleep Gestrals do, that Monoco finally brings it up.
“I knew it was too easy,” the Gestral rumbles. His voice is heavy and more tired than Gustave has ever heard it. “When he said it was over. That he’d changed his mind. I knew. I should have known he’d do something foolish like this.”
Gustave’s throat closes up. He’s spent so much time blaming himself for not seeing it coming. For wondering if he could have prevented all this. He has to swallow twice before his voice will cooperate, and even then he struggles to put his thoughts into words.
“He—I saw him pulling away but—he promised Maelle. He said—and he left the Heart willingly. I didn’t think…” he trails off, unable to finish the sentence. He didn’t think Verso would choose to die anyway.
“I saw how the decades broke him. How every death weighed him down until he was drowning under it. Death, a permanent ending, has never scared him. I knew it never scared him, knew he had always sought the promise of an ending. And I still didn’t question him, even though I knew something was off.”
They sit in silence for a while, the weight of Monoco’s words heavy between them.
“He was…lighter with you. Towards the end. Wistful. I hadn’t seen him want anything but an ending in a long time,” the Gestral finally offers. Gustave swallows around the knot that puts in his throat.
“I thought he knew what I wanted. That he…that he wanted the future I saw too.”
Monoco snorts at that.
“Verso is stupid and stubbornly self-destructive at the best of times, but he wouldn’t have spent so much time shooting you longing looks whenever you wouldn’t notice if he didn’t want a future with you too.” Gustave could feel his cheeks flare with heat. The Gestral let out a deep sigh as he continued, “Wanting has never been the problem. Accepting that he can have what he wants, that he deserves to have it…it’s a battle Esquie and I have fought for years.”
Gustave considers his words. Thinks of everything, good and bad, that he knows Verso has done over the years. Thinks of the guilt and grief he could always see weighing him down. How he had kept a distance between himself and the rest of their party, always a half-step removed. How he had seen the masks begin to crack, just a little, towards the end there when Verso began to ask what he would do if they succeeded.
“When he gets back,” he said slowly, when, not if, because Gustave will not allow it to be an if, “we’ll keep fighting that battle together.”
It’s only a few days later, when they’re putting the finishing touches on the cabin, that Maelle appears in a flurry of flower petals. And she’s not alone.
Behind her is a tall, striking woman with long reddish brown hair and a severe scowl. Gustave has only seen her counterpart, who was far less expressive and had had her color leeched from her, but he still recognizes Clea Dessendre. The woman who created the Nevrons. He can’t help but stare at her warily, even as he catches Maelle when she rushes forward for a hug. Clea meets his gaze with a haughty look of her own, but does not otherwise move or intervene.
“She’s here to help,” Maelle insists once she has pulled away. “I…I don’t think I’m a powerful enough Paintress to do this myself. Not all of it. So she came to help make sure it works.”
Clea sniffs disdainfully but doesn’t disagree when he and Monoco turn to stare at her again. Esquie hums joyfully.
“Will you come see FranFran while you’re here, Clea?” He asks.
The Paintress softens, just a smidge.
“…I will, Esquie. After we’ve finished what we came here for.” And that is that.
They fly back to Lumiere to find Sciel and Lune already waiting for them near the portal to the Heart. Once they’re together, Maelle fills them in on what she’s learned.
“Verso fed his chroma into the Canvas. It’s keeping the Canvas going, making sure it doesn’t all…disappear without a Painter to guide things. It’s why I couldn’t pull him out the first time. And I couldn’t replace him with a piece of my own soul like it was before without it…destabilizing things. I…I tried before I left and the Canvas…it didn’t work,” she explained, grimacing at the memory. “My chroma is too different. It…it would overwrite everything. Remake the world from scratch.”
They all paused to take that in. After a moment, Maelle rallied and carried on.
“When I left, I tried to find a way I could…replace him. Set up a new loop of chroma to feed the Canvas and then pull him out of it. What he’s doing is…it’s keeping the Canvas fed for now, so. I thought I just needed to replicate it. But every time I practiced…I couldn’t create that kind of self-sustaining loop. Not without some kind of driving will to guide and stabilize it. That’s where Clea comes in.”
The problem is this: when Maelle and Clea returned to the Heart to investigate, Clea was convinced that Verso’s chroma alone would not be able to power the Canvas for long, with or without him. As strong as the immortality Aline painted him with is, it was never meant to carry the weight of keeping the entire Canvas alive. To make matters more complicated, they are fairly certain that whatever remains of Verso’s will is keeping his chroma endlessly looping into the Canvas. Even if they were to create a larger loop that would last, if they removed that willpower urging it to replenish and to feed the Canvas and keep it alive, it would run the risk of destabilizing, turning the Canvas into nothing more than a wasteland of formless chroma over time.
Maelle came up with a solution to the first problem: creating a loop that replicated the cycle of death and rebirth that fueled ecosystems in the outside world. Like the Gestral River on a larger scale. The landscape would no longer be eternally in stasis. Old chroma would slowly break down and join the new loop at the Heart of the Canvas, cycling back in to be reused to reform into something new. Nevron remains, the trees and foliage of the Continent, the chroma of those who have died, all of it will become one large cycle of death and rebirth. The intent of those who came before to feed the cycle would fuel it and keep the loop stable to ensure it continued for those who came after.
But Maelle could not create a stable loop on that scale, and rescue Verso. And she refused to settle for one and not the other. Somehow, after what had to have been weeks of bargaining and begging and prodding and pleading, she had worn Clea down into agreeing to assist with creating the loop. And it was Clea who provided her sister the answer for how to retrieve Verso without losing him to the new cycle they would be creating.
“Think of it like a split in his chroma. There’s the part that Maman added later, the endless loop that made him immortal and that’s letting him keep the Canvas alive now. And there’s the part that is just him. That has his essence. Right now they’re all mixed together, and the pieces that are him are scattered throughout the Canvas’s chroma. So while Clea creates the loop, we have to gather those pieces of him. We have to…draw him out, think of all the pieces that made him Verso. If we can gather enough, I can find the rest and pull it from the Canvas and Paint it all back together myself.”
Gustave exchanged glances with Lune and Sciel.
“So we have to just…think of him?” It sounded too simple.
Clea huffed impatiently.
“You have to call him,” she corrected. “He’s shattered into tiny drops of chroma right now. You all are the ones who know him, who will recognize the pieces you need. All the fragments that make up the whole. So you have to feel for the right pieces that feel familiar and pull them out of the rest of the chroma.”
Gustave swallowed harshly.
“And if we can’t find enough? Or pull the wrong chroma?” He asked.
“Then whatever Ali—Maelle paints with what you do find will be a copy of a copy,” she replied bluntly. “It will be like him. But never quite the same.”
They all sat with that for a moment. Weighing the risks.
“He never can make it easy, can he?” Sciel mused, an exasperated smile flickering across her face.
“We won’t fail,” Gustave declared. “We’re getting him back.”
When they enter the Heart of the Canvas, the forceful churn of chroma looking to pull them all apart and turn them into loose chroma to join the flow feels…different. Even shielded behind Maelle and Clea’s Painterly chroma, Gustave can feel the difference. It still tries to seep in to pull them into disparate pieces, but it’s…slower, somehow. More a gentle pull to dissolve than a forceful wave aiming to erase.
Verso is in even worse shape than the last time Gustave was here before Maelle left. He can barely make out a humanoid silhouette amongst the loose chroma feeding their world. It almost coalesces into the familiar beloved shape of him every so often, before dissolving back into a mostly amorphous mass.
With a flick of her wrist, Clea manifests a shining paintbrush. Beside her, Maelle’s rapier morphs into a similar shape. Clea huffs when she catches sight of the strange hybrid between brush and sword, but does not comment.
“I will hold the flow of chroma steady for as long as I can. Work quickly,” the older woman instructs.
In tandem, the two Paintresses flick their wrists and a stream of petals begins to flow.
Clea’s stream of petals joins the looping stream of chroma fueling the Canvas, guiding and reshaping it to her will. Maelle’s circles around the hazy figure, before slowly scattering. Searching. Calling.
“Verso,” she calls, stubborn and impatient and just this side of pleading, “come back!”
The chroma stirred, pooling and spilling out and cycling around her. Small threads slowly pulled out of the mass, collecting in front of Maelle.
Monoco stepped forward next, reaching out to stir the chroma himself and search for more of Verso’s chroma.
“There are more adventures to be had, my friend. You owe me more sparring matches. So you can’t go yet.”
Lune hummed, holding her arms out to join in.
“You don’t get to give up now, Verso. There’s still work to be done and questions to be answered. We need you here. Come back,” she demanded.
“You deserve to enjoy our victory with us. Don’t make us go on without you,” Sciel pleaded.
Gustave exhaled carefully and closed his eyes. He reached out, feeling for that familiar presence.
“Verso,” he whispered. “I know you’re scared. I know you spent so long watching things fall apart. But there’s a future here for you where you won’t have to carry that burden anymore. It’s time to wake up, mon ange. You can rest after you’ve seen it.”
They stood together, sharing stories, calling out to the pieces of the man they all knew, asking him to come back. Slowly, they pulled more and more of the silvery threads of chroma out of the whirling mass. Maelle carefully collected it all, calling more and more for them to sift through together.
At a certain point, the quicksilver chroma became…reluctant. They had to fight harder to pull it from the stream, slowing their progress.
Maelle huffed in frustration, the scowl on her face a perfect match for Clea’s.
“Verso,” she huffed, “stop fighting us. Why do you always have to be so stubborn?”
The more they pulled, the more it seemed to be split. Torn between the call to sleep and their pleas to return. Even the chroma they’d already collected seemed to war with itself, pulling together before fighting to scatter, over and over and over again.
Maelle pulled more and more chroma from the cycle Clea was directing, ignoring the other woman’s hissed warning to slow down, scouring it as she began trying to shape what she had to try and draw the rest into reforming in his body and soothe it into shape.
“I don’t understand,” she murmured. “Verso, please! We want you back! You! I—I’m sorry I treated you like a replacement before! You deserve to live your own life, to be you, I just—please!”
Gustave’s mind whirled. There had to be an answer. Something they could say to get through to him. He glanced between Clea, struggling to keep the chroma flowing stably and build the new cycle without scattering the pieces they needed to the wind, and Maelle, trying so hard to coax Verso’s chroma into settling once more to be repainted. He stared at the way the chroma in the Heart flowed slower than it had before. An echo of things Verso had once said came back to him.
Burying everyone you know can wear you down a little.
I’m tired.
He thought of his conversation with Monoco about how long Verso had chased the promise of an ending, and he knew what they had to do.
“Maelle,” he called. “When we pull him…can we only pull the pieces that were mortal? Or does it all have to come? The pieces your mother added and all? Does he have to be immortal?”
Her eyes widened. She shot a panicked look at Clea, unsure.
The elder Paintress grunted, annoyed. “Verisimilitude, Maelle,” she reminded her. “The essence of him. You need enough to reform what was him. Can you gather enough without Maman’s additions?”
Maelle grimaced. “If you can give me more time. How long can you hold it?”
“If you don’t upset the flow like you almost did? Long enough.”
They set to work again. Carefully sifting. Seeking only the strands that felt like *Verso.* Gently separating it from the shining golden white threads that marked Aline’s additions.
“One life, Verso,” Maelle promised. “One life that’s all your own.”
“A normal life. Not an endless one. You’ll be part of the cycle, not an endless witness,” Monoco added.
“We’ll be there, Verso,” Gustave vowed. “You’ll never be alone. Let us catch you. You don’t have to fall alone.”
Slowly, slowly, the chroma answered their call.
With a triumphant cry, Maelle brandished her brush and pulled it all, every piece of Verso they had found, together. A swirl of petals enveloped it.
“Clea! Now!”
“Finally,” she huffed, before beginning to Paint in earnest. A great current of chroma joined the tide that was cycling in and out.
And in front of them, Verso reformed.
As a new cycle of life took shape behind him, Gustave ran forward and pulled Verso into a tight embrace. He was quickly joined by Maelle and Monoco, shortly followed by Sciel and Lune.
“You…came back for me?” The man murmured, voice shaky. “How did you—”
“You absolute bastard,” Gustave growled, tears already leaking from his eyes. He pressed his forehead to Verso’s. “You stupid fucking idiot. Of course we came back for you!”
They all pressed in tight, holding on to each other.
“Stop trying to do things alone,” Maelle commanded, glaring tearfully up at him. “We told you you were one of us. We told you there was a future for you too. Stop trying to throw it all away just because you think it’s all on your shoulders!”
“Maelle, I—"
She shook her head, cutting him off.
"You have to start living for yourself too."
"...I don't know how," Verso confessed, voice so very very soft.
Gustave pulled him closer, giving in to the urge to kiss his temple.
"None of us do, Verso. You think we aren't just as lost on how to live for ourselves now that we don't have to die for Lumiere? So let us figure it out together. Let us be there." His voice cracked a little as he continued, softer. "Help me lay the path for both of us. Together."
Verso stared at all of them, at the people he'd first let die and then tried to die for. Slowly, carefully, he reached out to hold on to them in turn.
"I'll try," he whispered.
Gustave smiled. Surrounded and held by all their friends, he gently took the other man’s face between his hands and pulled him in for a gentle kiss.
“Together,” he whispered when he pulled back, pressing their foreheads together again.
“Together,” Verso promised, tears running down his cheeks. They held him through it, and he finally let them. Even better, he held on back.
And as they stepped out of the Heart one last time, together, they all kept holding on.