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
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.
She's sure he would be happy if it was someone else. In this precise moment, where he is in pain, she is certain that he would not sing a different tune if she was swanning off to a happily ever after with Verso.
She's also sure she despises being defensive, or angry, but on the floor of their barren apartment, without much to dampen the sound, it's at least easy to keep her voice low.
"Well, exactly that. I thought you would be upset about the things I kept from you," she says. "So yes, I knew he was Renoir's son. I also knew he wasn't going to tell you without being made to."
Oh, she hates this. It never feels good. It's not supposed to.
If she wants him to be honest about his feelings, he's giving her a taste of her own medicine in return; it takes an unpleasant bite of her tongue to not just tell him that thinks the way he says "okay" is condescending. Like he thinks she's said something stupid but is too polite to say that.
"Because you had enough to grapple with for one day," Sciel replies. "How much was I supposed to tell you?"
And he'll hate this one, but it's bloodletting, too.
"And I wanted him to tell you. He didn't tell Lune and I."
That's the second time today someone's excused not giving him information because they didn't think he could handle it. He sits up a little straighter, pushes the flare of frustration further back. If even Sciel is hiding things from him because he's too much of a wreck to hear them, he needs to pull it together. "I'm not a child, Sciel."
Maybe she was just trying to protect him. He's more inclined to believe it of her than of Verso. Or maybe there are other reasons, too.
But she goes on, and his eyebrows flicker up again, his mouth pressing for a moment into a line. "I can't say I'm all that surprised to hear it. So how did you find out? Back him into a corner again?"
“Maelle is,” she says, firmly. “And when you break, she does too.”
She shifts on her seat, up onto her knees, like sitting even an inch taller gives her some sort of advantage. The distance between them feels immense.
“We found the 58’s journal,” she says. She can’t bring up being separated from Maelle, not like this. She can’t create the spectre of danger. She continues, earnestly: “I wish he’d told you what he did tell us —— that he and Renoir had not spoken in decades. He doesn’t consider Renoir family. I thought he would, Gustave.”
Maelle is. Yes, she is. Which means the fragility he showed Sciel earlier, at the park, is something he can't allow again. He can't break, for Maelle's sake.
He breathes in, quick and deep through his nose, lets it out again slowly. "I'm not sure that's true anymore."
Gustave thinks back to his own conversation with Verso, what they'd talked about. What they hadn't. "I told him he didn't need to explain his relationship with Renoir to me. Maybe he'll be willing to talk to you about it, I don't know. But I can't imagine being in a place with this with my father and not speaking to him, no matter how estranged we might be."
She’s quiet for a beat, watching the way he breathes, with a tension in her own shoulders that will linger much more than she’d like. Is it ammo if she defends Verso? Ammo if she doesn’t?
“Your father wasn’t like his,” she says. “And nor was mine. We’re both lucky that way. But I’m also not going to judge him if he needs closure he can only get now that it’s over.”
He watches her steadily. Could she really have been so surprised he feels out of step, left behind, when right now the inches between them might as well be the entire shattered length of the Continent? It feels almost as impassable.
He hates it. Of everyone, it might hurt most to feel torn asunder from Sciel. "Do you think I will?"
Whatever claws they're digging into each other, she's sure hers are deeper, but she still feels herself wince.
"No," she says, steadily. She's done fighting, she decides. "You won't, because you're kind even when people take that for granted. That wasn't fair of me to imply."
But she had implied it, reacting to a perceived threat to Verso the same way Maelle had. He does his best to keep his expression neutral, open, even warm and sympathetic, but it flickers across anyway in tiny shifts of his brows, a wince that's just the faintest narrowing of his eyes for a half a second, his lips pressing. All of it there and gone again in a second: hurt. "You're pretty protective of him."
His voice, he thinks, is reasonably even, normal sounding, though it feels more than a little like he's being punched in the stomach. "So was Maelle."
Defending Verso to him, until he started to feel like he was the one in the wrong. Overreacting. Fragile and not seeing things clearly.
Maybe he's not, anymore. Everything is confusion, even these two people he loves so much and trusts so implicitly. They've changed, too. "I'm trying, Sciel. I really am. I'm not.... I'm not some kind of a threat to Verso. I told him he's a part of this team."
She'd done her best to not envision anything from this conversation. There's never any point in doing that; no way to know where things are going, no way to know how people will react, no guarantee she will have the right answers in any given moment. None of this was strategized. None of it could be; it's not her way.
It's gone wrong.
"I know you are," she says, softer. She'd have gone fetal ten minutes ago, if she ever found herself with that kind of emotional wound again and in a conversation like this, and she's done it to a friend. Near carelessly, she thinks.
She raises a hand like she might reach for him, but doesn't. She doesn't withdraw, either.
"I'm so sorry, Gustave," she says. "So much has happened... I wish I knew how to share it all without putting salt in your wounds."
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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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She's also sure she despises being defensive, or angry, but on the floor of their barren apartment, without much to dampen the sound, it's at least easy to keep her voice low.
"Well, exactly that. I thought you would be upset about the things I kept from you," she says. "So yes, I knew he was Renoir's son. I also knew he wasn't going to tell you without being made to."
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She had been the one to back Verso into a corner. But.
"So why didn't you just tell me?"
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If she wants him to be honest about his feelings, he's giving her a taste of her own medicine in return; it takes an unpleasant bite of her tongue to not just tell him that thinks the way he says "okay" is condescending. Like he thinks she's said something stupid but is too polite to say that.
"Because you had enough to grapple with for one day," Sciel replies. "How much was I supposed to tell you?"
And he'll hate this one, but it's bloodletting, too.
"And I wanted him to tell you. He didn't tell Lune and I."
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Maybe she was just trying to protect him. He's more inclined to believe it of her than of Verso. Or maybe there are other reasons, too.
But she goes on, and his eyebrows flicker up again, his mouth pressing for a moment into a line. "I can't say I'm all that surprised to hear it. So how did you find out? Back him into a corner again?"
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She shifts on her seat, up onto her knees, like sitting even an inch taller gives her some sort of advantage. The distance between them feels immense.
“We found the 58’s journal,” she says. She can’t bring up being separated from Maelle, not like this. She can’t create the spectre of danger. She continues, earnestly: “I wish he’d told you what he did tell us —— that he and Renoir had not spoken in decades. He doesn’t consider Renoir family. I thought he would, Gustave.”
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He breathes in, quick and deep through his nose, lets it out again slowly. "I'm not sure that's true anymore."
Gustave thinks back to his own conversation with Verso, what they'd talked about. What they hadn't. "I told him he didn't need to explain his relationship with Renoir to me. Maybe he'll be willing to talk to you about it, I don't know. But I can't imagine being in a place with this with my father and not speaking to him, no matter how estranged we might be."
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“Your father wasn’t like his,” she says. “And nor was mine. We’re both lucky that way. But I’m also not going to judge him if he needs closure he can only get now that it’s over.”
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He hates it. Of everyone, it might hurt most to feel torn asunder from Sciel. "Do you think I will?"
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"No," she says, steadily. She's done fighting, she decides. "You won't, because you're kind even when people take that for granted. That wasn't fair of me to imply."
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His voice, he thinks, is reasonably even, normal sounding, though it feels more than a little like he's being punched in the stomach. "So was Maelle."
Defending Verso to him, until he started to feel like he was the one in the wrong. Overreacting. Fragile and not seeing things clearly.
Maybe he's not, anymore. Everything is confusion, even these two people he loves so much and trusts so implicitly. They've changed, too. "I'm trying, Sciel. I really am. I'm not.... I'm not some kind of a threat to Verso. I told him he's a part of this team."
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It's gone wrong.
"I know you are," she says, softer. She'd have gone fetal ten minutes ago, if she ever found herself with that kind of emotional wound again and in a conversation like this, and she's done it to a friend. Near carelessly, she thinks.
She raises a hand like she might reach for him, but doesn't. She doesn't withdraw, either.
"I'm so sorry, Gustave," she says. "So much has happened... I wish I knew how to share it all without putting salt in your wounds."
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