WHO: Expedition 33 (Gustave, Maelle, Sciel, and Verso) WHEN: post-mingle, pre-mission WHERE: the apartments WHAT: the remaining members of Expedition 33 NOTES\WARNINGS: spoilers for Acts 1&2 of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
"You'd think! We do the evening sober, then," she says, still grave, but she can't keep that up forever. She exhales, shoulders relaxing, and she turns to pour them water, instead. Convenient that there's already two washed cups in the sink.
But she looks at him over her shoulder and adds, with the slightest bit of humour:
"...And I immediately regret not going to get wine," he says, with an exaggerated grimace. He pushes off the doorframe and comes into the kitchen to idly open a few cupboards, as if he might possibly find a hidden bottle somewhere.
"Well, I'm tired of talking about him sober. But I don't think I have much choice in the matter right now, do I?" His tone is joking, but there's more than a little truth to it, even if he doubts Sciel would ever try to make him talk about it all if he didn't want to.
But there are reasons why he came to speak with her last, after the dust had settled. He curls his metal fingers around the back of one dining chair and looks over at her. His voice is gentle as he says: "You didn't need to send him away, you know. I could have handled it."
He has his suspicions as to why she had. Gratitude and guilt curl in him like twin cats, snuggled up together.
"You get to choose, Gustave," she reminds him, but they both know there's things to be said, and it might as well be done before either of them go to bed. Tomorrow can be a fresh day, and Verso will be a part of it, even if there's a couple more doors between them.
She wanders to the dining table and sets a glass in front of him.
"And no... I didn't need to," she agrees. "But I don't think you should have to be a gracious host while grappling with all of this, and he's a grown man. And..."
She looks at him, long, calm.
"I should have told you. It might have spared some upset."
Verso dug himself a plenty deep hole all on his own, but she's not blameless, either.
He sets both hands on the chair back, leaning there, gaze on the table even as he gives her a nod of thanks for the glass of water. He's tense, he can feel it all through his shoulders and down along his back, and the glance he gives her, along with the wry tucked curve of a half-smile, is only a flicker. "Maybe. Probably not that much, if I'm being honest."
Which he tries to be, whenever possible. He doesn't like lying anymore than Maelle does.
Is that why he got so upset? He hardly even knows, anymore. The anger is gone, but it's left deep, sore scratches in its wake. He feels sore inside, raw and bloody. "I'm glad you prompted it, at least."
Maybe Verso would have told him, down the line. He can almost believe the man when he says he meant to, but it's easy to have the best of intentions.
She nods. It could have changed nothing at all, really, but any little bit would count. But if he’s not bothered, she won’t waste his energy pretending any of it could have been avoided. So she watches him lean, and the way he moves.
“I am, too. Come stretch with me while we talk,” she says, giving him a friendly little poke in the side as she walks around him to the living room, taking her glass with her.
She talks over her shoulder as she goes, in that quiet, children-are-sleeping sort of tone:
“It was difficult for Lune, too, you know. To adjust to how close he keeps his cards to his chest.”
He snorts, staying where he is another moment even after she prods him in the ribs and wanders into the living room. "There's playing your cards close to the chest and then there's deciding to change the rules so you can play whatever cards you want. Or none."
It's difficult to imagine Lune putting up with it at all, but apparently she had. Adjusted. He's never known Lune, practical and sure of herself, to adjust for anyone.
Finally, he forces his fingers to uncurl from the chair back and follows her into the living room, feeling more than a little like a kicked dog. "I'd expect Lune to give him the same tongue-lashing she'd give any of the rest of us."
Oh, does she ever know that distinction. She shakes her head, a little disappointed –– as if Verso could feel it through the walls, up the hall, bearing in on him in his barren apartment. He makes it very hard to defend him, sometimes.
“Whenever I see Lune lay into someone, I’m at least a little glad it isn’t me,” Sciel agrees, as she drags the flimsy coffee table out of the way with one hand. She sets her glass on it. “But he was our only lead on how to get to the Paintress, so…”
So it was what it was. They picked their battles. Sciel shrugs, and she feels her memories of that time in her body, in the way it tenses up, too.
“Sit,” she tells him, as she sinks cross-legged to the floor. She fixes him with a very serious look, her bangs shading her eyes. “And tell me what’s on your mind. Whatever you need to say or ask, even if it’s really, really uncharitable, and I’m going to make sure you don’t wake up stiff as a board.”
Of course they'd go along with almost anything, anyone, in order to get to the Paintress. The mission came first. They had to continue. "Yeah. Yeah, I know. I get it."
He does. But understanding it seems to have come almost wholly uncoupled with how he feels about it, and he doesn't know what to do with that. Nothing, probably. It's an almost entirely useless piece of information that changes nothing about what happened, about what might happen now.
Gustave gives her a long-suffering look, but obeys, settling down on the floor across from her. "Come on. I'm trying to be fair... the last thing any of us need right now is for me to be uncharitable."
He's always trying to be fair. He is, in her mind, one of the most responsible people to have ever graced this Earth. That Earth. Wherever they were, or are.
"The last thing I need, personally, is for my dear friend to become a complete basketcase because he is more concerned about managing what is fair and charitable than what's eating him up inside," she says, and as she says is, she slowly leans her head dramatically towards one shoulder, stretching out the long muscle of her neck. "You've heard some ugly things out of my mouth over the years, too, Gustave."
He eyes her, mouth twisting in faintly exaggerated disbelief. "A basketcase? Really?"
Rather than follow her lead and stretch, he shifts to put his metal left hand in his lap, reaching up to scrub the fingers of his right into the hair at the back of his head before letting them curl at the nape of his neck. His shoulders lift and fall with the deep breath he takes, slowly exhales. "Yeah, I know."
Sciel is a constant; she's bedrock. They've talked about a lot of things over the years: loss and hope and grief and duty, all the things that weigh on the people of Lumiere as the years pass and the number on the Monolith dwindles. Aside from Maelle, Emma... Sophie... he thinks she might know him better than almost anyone. He hadn't needed to tell her about the waterfall, the cave. She already knew how lost he'd be without any of the others. "It's just... you know, I'm..."
Too many things. Too many thoughts, too much snarled up inside him. He's never known how she manages to run as smoothly as a stream, no matter what rocks or twigs or barriers try to clog the way. "I'm trying to... we still need to be a team, so I, I'm..."
He grimaces, right hand falling to his lap, glance sliding away from her. "You're right. I know. But I don't like feeling like I'm some kind of... tipping point."
Another scrunched face, a shake of his head, embarrassed. "That sounds really egotistical. But you know what I mean, right?"
Yes, really. She turns her head back upright slowly, then to the other way, watching him with concern in her eyes and her mouth set in a line. She listens quietly, and sits upright again.
"I know," she says. "I know."
It had felt ghoulish, from the moment they landed, to act like anything other than a stiff upper lip and a head held high would be a disservice to everyone that had died thus far. It was a necessary evil; she knows she'd be embarrassed if she died and then other people fell out of being able to play their part. But...
"To say we continue keeps the mission going, but it doesn't leave us any direction on what to do if someone comes back from the dead," she says. "Given the circumstance, I think you can be as egotistical as you feel. You can be angry, if it's what you feel. Or uncomfortable, or frustrated."
She leans forward a bit, her weight on her hands, eyes boring into his.
"With me, with Verso, or even with Maelle."
To have him here at all, regardless of emotion, is a privilege.
She's not wrong that it would help, that he needs to be honest with himself, to be open with her. He wonders how she squares that same desire for real connection and understanding with Verso, a man who tailors his words to whatever he thinks the other person wants or needs to hear.
That is the kind of uncharitable thought she wants him to speak aloud, and he grimaces again, carefully leans forward to try and stretch some of this tension out of his back. He feels like he's only winding tighter and tighter with every word, every thought he can't control, all of them piling up together in his mind. "All of the above?"
The huff of his breath is wry as he meets her steady gaze without flinching away. "Angry. Uncomfortable. Frustrated. Like the unwilling center of some... delicate balance I can't see and don't understand. Disconnected, which I hate more than almost anything else. We used to be a single unit, and now I feel constantly... out of step, out of joint. Unable to catch up. You've all moved past me, you had to, of course you did, it's just..."
He shakes his head, arms settling loose on his crossed legs, and abandons that train of thought for the moment to focus on the other thing that's gnawing on him, quiet but insistent. "And I feel guilty. In the end... I failed."
“Oh, Gustave,” she says, expression soft. “We could never move on from you, but I’m sorry we’ve made you feel that way.”
Some of this, she’s sure, could be quelled with information. Timelines. Full and proper explanations of events. A honest assessment of Verso’s place with them — how fragile their ties really are. But cold facts wouldn’t create a place for his emotions; all of this comes from the past few days. The maelstrom of the past few hours could sweep anyone out to sea.
He shakes his head at her, the guilt chewing and chewing on him, tiny needling fangs sinking in over and over again. "It's not a bad thing. You all needed to. You had to learn new things, had to walk new paths. There was no point in all of you lingering. You'd only have died, too."
Even if he knows how it must have haunted them, Maelle especially. He still thinks about Lucien, even now, about how he saved Gustave's life so many times in so few moments, only to be wiped out of existence in an instant.
But the rest...
He tries to ignore the sound of crying seabirds as they call in his ears, the scent of salt and wet rock. It's not real. "I couldn't..."
It sticks in his throat, thick and sore. "I couldn't... protect Maelle. I wasn't, I wasn't strong enough. And I know now, I know, I know, it was never even possible, it was never a fair fight, but she's... I had to try to keep her safe, but..."
The breath he blows out is shaky. He can feel his heart pounding. "But I couldn't. I left her there, alone. With him."
She often thinks she's figured out a lot about death and what it means to carry on after it, but she listens to him talk and thinks about the thousands of corpses they've seen over their journey across the Continent and concludes, quite curtly, that everything on the Expedition makes it different.
"You did protect her," she says. "From the moment you took her in to the last possible second on that cliff, you did everything in your power. No one else could have done any better than that."
She rolls her shoulders, once forward and once back, and then puts her hands on the floor between them, just in reach.
"We were all up against something we couldn't have understood. There's still so much we don't know. Despite that, you still saved her."
Everything she's saying makes sense. He knows it's true. He'd done everything he could, tried everything possible, even when there was no chance whatsoever of his own survival. "She was still trapped, the last time I saw her."
Stuck in that painted cage, locked behind a swirl of ink, her face tear-streaked and frantic. He shakes his head again, slow. He's utterly failing at stretching or relaxing at all. "That must have been Verso. It's the only thing that makes sense."
Lune and Sciel trapped down below. Him, a fallen, empty shell. So how had Maelle escaped? The only other person he knows was there is the man Sciel had sent away so Gustave doesn't have to be in the same space as him. Renoir's son.
"Verso put her in the cage?" she repeats back to him. She's not sure if it's a question. She hadn't given it any thought, the conflict above unknowable to her, Maelle's grief her biggest priority over the coming near-cosmic mystery of Verso's family. "The way I heard it, Verso––"
She cuts herself short. It doesn't matter. She shifts forward, close enough to put her hands on Gustave's knees, bracing.
"Are you sure you want to talk about details now? The last thing you need is to work yourself into a panic."
"No." Her hands on his knees are warm, but he barely feels them. "No, the white-haired — Renoir. He put her in the cage. Verso must have been the one to get her out."
Right? What else could make sense? Renoir wouldn't have released her except to hurt her. "Verso saved her. Not me."
It's slow, thick, heavy in his chest, and the look he gives her is wry. "You asked what I've been thinking. This is part of it."
"Okay," she says, nodding, meeting that wryness with a little squeeze of her hands. That's her Gustave, and for him, she'll listen to any detail he needs to pore over. "But you still held him off. You bought her time. If you didn't fight as hard as you did, or Verso came even a moment later... she would not have survived. All of 33 could have died there."
She doesn't tell him he's dwelling on details that don't matter, which is kind of her, but it's all connected in his head and heart anyway. The things Verso can do. The things he couldn't. "Yeah."
Probably true. He hopes it's true, that his last stand wasn't for nothing. But wasn't it all for nothing, in the end? Expedition 33 won through but the Gommage came anyway. For everyone, this time.
So what's left to save?
"It's all..." He lifts a hand, gestures at his head, the cacophony there. "I don't really know where to start, Sciel. With what you want to know. I feel like every thread I pick at only unravels a hundred more."
She purses her lips briefly, but there's no tension there. She just sits with him, the impossibility of this situation, and whatever they mere mortals can do about it, if anything.
"It's not about what I need to know, it's about what you need to untangle. We have all night," she says, simply. "And we'll have tomorrow, and another night, and as much time as we need."
He lifts his hand a little helplessly, drops it down once more to his knee. He feels like he's treading water in an open ocean, and has no idea which direction to strike out in, where land might be. She's right that he'll drown soon enough if he doesn't say something, anything, try to figure some of this out, but it feels impossible to even start without some kind of guiding light giving him a direction.
It's too much free rein; he needs at least the beginning of a path. "But if you did want to know what I think about you and Verso, don't worry."
His hand lifts again, this time waving briefly in front of him. "I'd just as soon not think about it. At all, thanks. It's none of my business."
It's not confused, not exactly -– Gustave is perceptive, Verso can never help himself, and she has never been a particularly taciturn person. She'd shrugged at his look. She can own that.
And it is annoying, in some mundane way, to have gone through everything they had, overcoming death itself, just for her friend to care who she rolls around with on the fringe of camp. But at least it's a direction, and she can swim.
"I have not moved on and found love again, Gustave," she says, curtly. "Why is this upsetting you, of all things?"
He holds up his hands, a little amused at that sharp tone. Maybe there were some things she wasn't ready to hear, after all. "It isn't, and I would be happy for you if you had," he tells her.
"But I don't know why else you think I might be upset with you. And I think I could be forgiven for thinking it's more serious than that, considering. Well."
It's his turn to fix a glance on her, studying. It's quiet and calm, but there's a glimmer in the depths there of something sore. "You knew he was Renoir's son."
She's the one who told Verso to tell him, after all.
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At her question, he glances away, toward the door of the room Maelle had picked for the two of them tonight. "Uh..."
He imagines Maelle waking up, startled, and coming out to find him and Sciel both gone, and winces. "Maybe better leave it for morning."
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"You'd think! We do the evening sober, then," she says, still grave, but she can't keep that up forever. She exhales, shoulders relaxing, and she turns to pour them water, instead. Convenient that there's already two washed cups in the sink.
But she looks at him over her shoulder and adds, with the slightest bit of humour:
"Tired of talking about Verso yet?"
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"Well, I'm tired of talking about him sober. But I don't think I have much choice in the matter right now, do I?" His tone is joking, but there's more than a little truth to it, even if he doubts Sciel would ever try to make him talk about it all if he didn't want to.
But there are reasons why he came to speak with her last, after the dust had settled. He curls his metal fingers around the back of one dining chair and looks over at her. His voice is gentle as he says: "You didn't need to send him away, you know. I could have handled it."
He has his suspicions as to why she had. Gratitude and guilt curl in him like twin cats, snuggled up together.
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She wanders to the dining table and sets a glass in front of him.
"And no... I didn't need to," she agrees. "But I don't think you should have to be a gracious host while grappling with all of this, and he's a grown man. And..."
She looks at him, long, calm.
"I should have told you. It might have spared some upset."
Verso dug himself a plenty deep hole all on his own, but she's not blameless, either.
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Which he tries to be, whenever possible. He doesn't like lying anymore than Maelle does.
Is that why he got so upset? He hardly even knows, anymore. The anger is gone, but it's left deep, sore scratches in its wake. He feels sore inside, raw and bloody. "I'm glad you prompted it, at least."
Maybe Verso would have told him, down the line. He can almost believe the man when he says he meant to, but it's easy to have the best of intentions.
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“I am, too. Come stretch with me while we talk,” she says, giving him a friendly little poke in the side as she walks around him to the living room, taking her glass with her.
She talks over her shoulder as she goes, in that quiet, children-are-sleeping sort of tone:
“It was difficult for Lune, too, you know. To adjust to how close he keeps his cards to his chest.”
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It's difficult to imagine Lune putting up with it at all, but apparently she had. Adjusted. He's never known Lune, practical and sure of herself, to adjust for anyone.
Finally, he forces his fingers to uncurl from the chair back and follows her into the living room, feeling more than a little like a kicked dog. "I'd expect Lune to give him the same tongue-lashing she'd give any of the rest of us."
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“Whenever I see Lune lay into someone, I’m at least a little glad it isn’t me,” Sciel agrees, as she drags the flimsy coffee table out of the way with one hand. She sets her glass on it. “But he was our only lead on how to get to the Paintress, so…”
So it was what it was. They picked their battles. Sciel shrugs, and she feels her memories of that time in her body, in the way it tenses up, too.
“Sit,” she tells him, as she sinks cross-legged to the floor. She fixes him with a very serious look, her bangs shading her eyes. “And tell me what’s on your mind. Whatever you need to say or ask, even if it’s really, really uncharitable, and I’m going to make sure you don’t wake up stiff as a board.”
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He does. But understanding it seems to have come almost wholly uncoupled with how he feels about it, and he doesn't know what to do with that. Nothing, probably. It's an almost entirely useless piece of information that changes nothing about what happened, about what might happen now.
Gustave gives her a long-suffering look, but obeys, settling down on the floor across from her. "Come on. I'm trying to be fair... the last thing any of us need right now is for me to be uncharitable."
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"The last thing I need, personally, is for my dear friend to become a complete basketcase because he is more concerned about managing what is fair and charitable than what's eating him up inside," she says, and as she says is, she slowly leans her head dramatically towards one shoulder, stretching out the long muscle of her neck. "You've heard some ugly things out of my mouth over the years, too, Gustave."
It's never comfortable.
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Rather than follow her lead and stretch, he shifts to put his metal left hand in his lap, reaching up to scrub the fingers of his right into the hair at the back of his head before letting them curl at the nape of his neck. His shoulders lift and fall with the deep breath he takes, slowly exhales. "Yeah, I know."
Sciel is a constant; she's bedrock. They've talked about a lot of things over the years: loss and hope and grief and duty, all the things that weigh on the people of Lumiere as the years pass and the number on the Monolith dwindles. Aside from Maelle, Emma... Sophie... he thinks she might know him better than almost anyone. He hadn't needed to tell her about the waterfall, the cave. She already knew how lost he'd be without any of the others. "It's just... you know, I'm..."
Too many things. Too many thoughts, too much snarled up inside him. He's never known how she manages to run as smoothly as a stream, no matter what rocks or twigs or barriers try to clog the way. "I'm trying to... we still need to be a team, so I, I'm..."
He grimaces, right hand falling to his lap, glance sliding away from her. "You're right. I know. But I don't like feeling like I'm some kind of... tipping point."
Another scrunched face, a shake of his head, embarrassed. "That sounds really egotistical. But you know what I mean, right?"
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"I know," she says. "I know."
It had felt ghoulish, from the moment they landed, to act like anything other than a stiff upper lip and a head held high would be a disservice to everyone that had died thus far. It was a necessary evil; she knows she'd be embarrassed if she died and then other people fell out of being able to play their part. But...
"To say we continue keeps the mission going, but it doesn't leave us any direction on what to do if someone comes back from the dead," she says. "Given the circumstance, I think you can be as egotistical as you feel. You can be angry, if it's what you feel. Or uncomfortable, or frustrated."
She leans forward a bit, her weight on her hands, eyes boring into his.
"With me, with Verso, or even with Maelle."
To have him here at all, regardless of emotion, is a privilege.
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That is the kind of uncharitable thought she wants him to speak aloud, and he grimaces again, carefully leans forward to try and stretch some of this tension out of his back. He feels like he's only winding tighter and tighter with every word, every thought he can't control, all of them piling up together in his mind. "All of the above?"
The huff of his breath is wry as he meets her steady gaze without flinching away. "Angry. Uncomfortable. Frustrated. Like the unwilling center of some... delicate balance I can't see and don't understand. Disconnected, which I hate more than almost anything else. We used to be a single unit, and now I feel constantly... out of step, out of joint. Unable to catch up. You've all moved past me, you had to, of course you did, it's just..."
He shakes his head, arms settling loose on his crossed legs, and abandons that train of thought for the moment to focus on the other thing that's gnawing on him, quiet but insistent. "And I feel guilty. In the end... I failed."
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“Oh, Gustave,” she says, expression soft. “We could never move on from you, but I’m sorry we’ve made you feel that way.”
Some of this, she’s sure, could be quelled with information. Timelines. Full and proper explanations of events. A honest assessment of Verso’s place with them — how fragile their ties really are. But cold facts wouldn’t create a place for his emotions; all of this comes from the past few days. The maelstrom of the past few hours could sweep anyone out to sea.
“In what way do you think you have failed?”
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Even if he knows how it must have haunted them, Maelle especially. He still thinks about Lucien, even now, about how he saved Gustave's life so many times in so few moments, only to be wiped out of existence in an instant.
But the rest...
He tries to ignore the sound of crying seabirds as they call in his ears, the scent of salt and wet rock. It's not real. "I couldn't..."
It sticks in his throat, thick and sore. "I couldn't... protect Maelle. I wasn't, I wasn't strong enough. And I know now, I know, I know, it was never even possible, it was never a fair fight, but she's... I had to try to keep her safe, but..."
The breath he blows out is shaky. He can feel his heart pounding. "But I couldn't. I left her there, alone. With him."
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"You did protect her," she says. "From the moment you took her in to the last possible second on that cliff, you did everything in your power. No one else could have done any better than that."
She rolls her shoulders, once forward and once back, and then puts her hands on the floor between them, just in reach.
"We were all up against something we couldn't have understood. There's still so much we don't know. Despite that, you still saved her."
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Stuck in that painted cage, locked behind a swirl of ink, her face tear-streaked and frantic. He shakes his head again, slow. He's utterly failing at stretching or relaxing at all. "That must have been Verso. It's the only thing that makes sense."
Lune and Sciel trapped down below. Him, a fallen, empty shell. So how had Maelle escaped? The only other person he knows was there is the man Sciel had sent away so Gustave doesn't have to be in the same space as him. Renoir's son.
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She cuts herself short. It doesn't matter. She shifts forward, close enough to put her hands on Gustave's knees, bracing.
"Are you sure you want to talk about details now? The last thing you need is to work yourself into a panic."
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Right? What else could make sense? Renoir wouldn't have released her except to hurt her. "Verso saved her. Not me."
It's slow, thick, heavy in his chest, and the look he gives her is wry. "You asked what I've been thinking. This is part of it."
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Probably true. He hopes it's true, that his last stand wasn't for nothing. But wasn't it all for nothing, in the end? Expedition 33 won through but the Gommage came anyway. For everyone, this time.
So what's left to save?
"It's all..." He lifts a hand, gestures at his head, the cacophony there. "I don't really know where to start, Sciel. With what you want to know. I feel like every thread I pick at only unravels a hundred more."
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"It's not about what I need to know, it's about what you need to untangle. We have all night," she says, simply. "And we'll have tomorrow, and another night, and as much time as we need."
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He lifts his hand a little helplessly, drops it down once more to his knee. He feels like he's treading water in an open ocean, and has no idea which direction to strike out in, where land might be. She's right that he'll drown soon enough if he doesn't say something, anything, try to figure some of this out, but it feels impossible to even start without some kind of guiding light giving him a direction.
It's too much free rein; he needs at least the beginning of a path. "But if you did want to know what I think about you and Verso, don't worry."
His hand lifts again, this time waving briefly in front of him. "I'd just as soon not think about it. At all, thanks. It's none of my business."
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It's not confused, not exactly -– Gustave is perceptive, Verso can never help himself, and she has never been a particularly taciturn person. She'd shrugged at his look. She can own that.
And it is annoying, in some mundane way, to have gone through everything they had, overcoming death itself, just for her friend to care who she rolls around with on the fringe of camp. But at least it's a direction, and she can swim.
"I have not moved on and found love again, Gustave," she says, curtly. "Why is this upsetting you, of all things?"
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"But I don't know why else you think I might be upset with you. And I think I could be forgiven for thinking it's more serious than that, considering. Well."
It's his turn to fix a glance on her, studying. It's quiet and calm, but there's a glimmer in the depths there of something sore. "You knew he was Renoir's son."
She's the one who told Verso to tell him, after all.
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