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
“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."
I'm so sorry. Apology after apology, from him to his friends and back again. Batted back and forth between him and Verso. All of them raw and bleeding and sore, no matter how they might look on the outside.
And the worst thing is that he still doesn't understand. For him, it's only been days since he last saw Sciel, Maelle. That's not enough time for them to have developed new, strong relationships with Verso — but it is, because time stopped moving for him, he was taken out of that world, the one they shared, and it didn't for them. And yet he still has the audacity to feel hurt when they rally behind Verso and not him.
Why should they? His opinions, his thoughts and feelings, none of them have had to be a consideration for them for weeks. Months, probably. Verso has their sympathy, he has their trust, even though Sciel and Maelle both willingly admit that he'd lied to them, too, that he's likely to continue withholding truths from them. Which brings him right back to not being able to understand.
(Even Lune was swayed, apparently, which he finds hard to believe. He's never known Lune to give the time of day to anyone who wasn't scrupulously reliable.)
Sciel reaches, but her hand stops mid-air, and he thinks if he takes her hand, feels her touch, he might just crack open from top to bottom, clean as porcelain. Gustave scrubs at his face with his right hand, the left staying where it is, resting on his thigh. His chest feels like it's burning, that now-healed wound ripped back open again. If he looks down, will his uniform be soaked in blood?
"Yeah, I know. I know a lot's happened. And I wasn't there for it, and that's probably most of the problem, but that wasn't my choice."
“None of this is your fault,” she replies. It isn’t. There is nothing he could have done to change what happened to him. There is nothing he has done in the last few days to deserve even one second of this.
But what else is there to say?
She looks at his face, feeling frozen in place. She can map her own actions back to their origin points with ease, and the way they connect, web-like, up with everyone else’s. Verso’s chronic wounds and his ambivalence towards consequence and perpetual flight risk. Maelle’s clinginess, her refusal to lose anyone else, her unwillingness to admit that Verso had, yes, been a replacement of a sort. Even Lune has her part, even in absence, the void where there should be a strong word and a demand they do better by him.
And Sciel –– how selfish is she, to think that she could blithely shrug and everything would be fine? How could she pass this off to time to heal?
Some greater power undid a tragedy and spit out its central victim right into the arms of his friends, and they’ve done wrong by him so quickly his head is spinning.
She creeps forward on her knees, hands still out. She still doesn’t touch him, but she’s close enough that she could hold him, if it was welcome. Her gut twists when she can’t tell if it would be, and she’s imposed enough carelessness on him. She just hovers there.
“What do you need right now, Gustave? Even if it seems impossible. What do you need?”
It's such a simple question, and he has no idea how to answer it, how to even begin sorting through all his swirling thoughts, how to know which sore spot to press. It all piles up at once: Maelle, Verso and his omissions, everything his friends went through without him, Maelle, Lumière gone and Gommaged, this strange rift between him and Sciel, his death, his guilt, Maelle. "I... I don't..."
But that's the problem, isn't it? One of them, anyway. He grimaces at himself, at the kneejerk reflex that tugs at him, tells him to tell her all he needs is her, and Maelle, and maybe for Verso to be a little more forthcoming, but that's not what she's asking. She's here, on her knees in front of him, hurts of her own written across her face, and before he can think himself out of it, he reaches for her hands, cups them gently in his: one warm flesh, one cool metal, both holding hers like she's something precious. "I barely know, myself."
That's the truth, and he catches onto it like one of the 69's climbing handholds, drags himself up a rung at a time. "I need Maelle to be okay."
She's not. None of them are, no matter how breezy Sciel might be about it all. "I need... to find some way to stop feeling so out of step with her. With you. All of you."
He shakes his head, tips it. His eyes are steady on her, the expression open and sore. He's hurting her, too, he knows. And this will hurt her, when he says it, but. "I need to know you still have my back, too."
It does hurt, like a little hook into her gut, but that’s alright. She’s had plenty of hurts, and she’ll likely have a great deal more in her very unexpectedly extended life. This particular one will feel pale within a week’s time, if even that. It is, after all, eclipsed by the enormity of the pain right in front of her. How awful, for him to feel something so violent within him that it would prompt him to need that kind of reassurance from her at all. After all they’ve been through.
She edges a little closer, until her knees are brushing his, her hands held between his. She should have just hugged him. Should have crawled into his lap again, kissed his cheeks, promised him it’s all some misunderstanding. Emotions running high.
“Oh, Gustave,” she whispers, “of course I do. I… none of this is easy, but I’m going to be here, every day. No matter how long it takes for you to figure out what you feel, or how long it takes for me to get back into step with you.”
He hasn’t changed at all. He stopped here, was crystallized as the rest of them marched forward. They can’t expect him to catch up if they aren’t willing to slow down for him.
She pulls one hand out from his, gently, so she can clasp his hands, too. Her dozens of colourful braided bracelets are bright against his skin, her thumb running a firm stroke against the side of his. She holds his gaze with glassy eyes, unblinking.
“You are so dear to me,” she says, nodding. “I’m going to make sure you feel that. And I’m far from perfect, but we’ve been through too many terrible things together for me to leave you behind on this one, my friend. I want to be here with you, at your back, at your side, your front––“
She gives a silent laugh, just off her breath, her expression still grave but a light behind her eyes. She warns:
His shoulders lift and fall in a huffed breath of his own, one corner of his mouth tugging up. Even now, Sciel can make him laugh, even when it feels like their hands clasped together might as well be holding on for dear life as a bridge between them threatens to separate. He tips his head the other way, and for a moment a smile warms his eyes. It wasn't so long ago that she'd perched in his lap and grounded him before, after all. "Promise?"
But they still have a lot of ground to cover. She's right, not all of it will be now; it'll probably take them both a long while to figure out how they fit together again. Still. He takes a breath, glance lowering to their clasped hands, and exhales it in a steady stream. "I'm sorry to be so suspicious of your friend."
He is, truly. He's not a suspicious person, usually, but he feels now a little like he had after he and Lune had found Maelle in that strange manor: on edge, seeing threats everywhere. His shoulder lifts again. "If it helps, I thought maybe he was starting to become my friend... well."
It's even money, he thinks, on whether Verso will want much of anything to do with him. He can't blame the man if that's the case, considering Gustave is the reason he's not able to stay with the people who became his team, his friends, his... whatever it is that's going on between him and Sciel. "But it's not just him, you know, it's... it's everything, it's Renoir seemingly everywhere I look, and Maelle... I haven't seen her this anxious since she first came to me and Emma... and I don't want to hold any of you back."
His gaze lifts back to her face, this face he's missed so much and has been so happy to see. If he had to flay himself open like this for anyone, he's glad it's Sciel. Who else could coax it from him, really? "You're dear to me, too."
Softer now, as if that could make all this somehow less raw, less sore. "Before I saw you at the park, I was... I've been so alone, here, and I didn't know... I wasn't sure if I could..."
There was no cave, here, no pile of Expeditioner bodies, and he'd met people. Good people, kind people, people who offered him help, people who he might be able to help in return. But that sense of crushing loneliness never really went away. Not until he saw her.
He shakes his head, swallowing. "Anyway, I... you have me, too." A smile twitches, falters, warms again. "For good, this time. I hope."
“Promise,” she says, firmly, “Until we’ve eighty, at least, and then we’ll meet up again on the other side and carry on there.”
There can be no stepping out on each other earlier, not with the pain it leaves behind. Comfortable as she is with the ending of her own life, there’s no reason not to wring out as many minutes as she can until then.
“You’re not holding us back, and don’t be sorry, Gustave. Verso made his own bed and he can lay in it,” she says. “And the rest of it… we take one day at a time.”
She won’t be Verso’s keeper, nor can she offer soft apologies for his behaviour while looking for the next opportunity to slip off with him. Which is worse, having to justify the things about him she’s willing to overlook, or having to feel quiet shame about her choice in lovers? She doesn’t know. She chooses not to think about it right now. If they don’t become friends, she can figure out how to balance her friendships with both of them. It’s tomorrow’s problem.
She gives Gustave’s hands a tight squeeze. Funny, how easy it feels to overdo the flesh one, as if any pressure could squish the metal one.
“And Maelle would never feel held back by you.” Her heart pangs at the idea alone; she can’t speak for the girl any more than she can speak for Verso, but Sciel feels confident in that. She’d followed Gustave to the Continent, hadn’t she? “I’ll be shocked if she lets you get further than a hundred metres from you for weeks. Both of us, really. I’m going to be here taking care of you both so there’s time for her to heal with you.”
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no subject
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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And the worst thing is that he still doesn't understand. For him, it's only been days since he last saw Sciel, Maelle. That's not enough time for them to have developed new, strong relationships with Verso — but it is, because time stopped moving for him, he was taken out of that world, the one they shared, and it didn't for them. And yet he still has the audacity to feel hurt when they rally behind Verso and not him.
Why should they? His opinions, his thoughts and feelings, none of them have had to be a consideration for them for weeks. Months, probably. Verso has their sympathy, he has their trust, even though Sciel and Maelle both willingly admit that he'd lied to them, too, that he's likely to continue withholding truths from them. Which brings him right back to not being able to understand.
(Even Lune was swayed, apparently, which he finds hard to believe. He's never known Lune to give the time of day to anyone who wasn't scrupulously reliable.)
Sciel reaches, but her hand stops mid-air, and he thinks if he takes her hand, feels her touch, he might just crack open from top to bottom, clean as porcelain. Gustave scrubs at his face with his right hand, the left staying where it is, resting on his thigh. His chest feels like it's burning, that now-healed wound ripped back open again. If he looks down, will his uniform be soaked in blood?
"Yeah, I know. I know a lot's happened. And I wasn't there for it, and that's probably most of the problem, but that wasn't my choice."
no subject
But what else is there to say?
She looks at his face, feeling frozen in place. She can map her own actions back to their origin points with ease, and the way they connect, web-like, up with everyone else’s. Verso’s chronic wounds and his ambivalence towards consequence and perpetual flight risk. Maelle’s clinginess, her refusal to lose anyone else, her unwillingness to admit that Verso had, yes, been a replacement of a sort. Even Lune has her part, even in absence, the void where there should be a strong word and a demand they do better by him.
And Sciel –– how selfish is she, to think that she could blithely shrug and everything would be fine? How could she pass this off to time to heal?
Some greater power undid a tragedy and spit out its central victim right into the arms of his friends, and they’ve done wrong by him so quickly his head is spinning.
She creeps forward on her knees, hands still out. She still doesn’t touch him, but she’s close enough that she could hold him, if it was welcome. Her gut twists when she can’t tell if it would be, and she’s imposed enough carelessness on him. She just hovers there.
“What do you need right now, Gustave? Even if it seems impossible. What do you need?”
no subject
It's such a simple question, and he has no idea how to answer it, how to even begin sorting through all his swirling thoughts, how to know which sore spot to press. It all piles up at once: Maelle, Verso and his omissions, everything his friends went through without him, Maelle, Lumière gone and Gommaged, this strange rift between him and Sciel, his death, his guilt, Maelle. "I... I don't..."
But that's the problem, isn't it? One of them, anyway. He grimaces at himself, at the kneejerk reflex that tugs at him, tells him to tell her all he needs is her, and Maelle, and maybe for Verso to be a little more forthcoming, but that's not what she's asking. She's here, on her knees in front of him, hurts of her own written across her face, and before he can think himself out of it, he reaches for her hands, cups them gently in his: one warm flesh, one cool metal, both holding hers like she's something precious. "I barely know, myself."
That's the truth, and he catches onto it like one of the 69's climbing handholds, drags himself up a rung at a time. "I need Maelle to be okay."
She's not. None of them are, no matter how breezy Sciel might be about it all. "I need... to find some way to stop feeling so out of step with her. With you. All of you."
He shakes his head, tips it. His eyes are steady on her, the expression open and sore. He's hurting her, too, he knows. And this will hurt her, when he says it, but. "I need to know you still have my back, too."
Too.
no subject
She edges a little closer, until her knees are brushing his, her hands held between his. She should have just hugged him. Should have crawled into his lap again, kissed his cheeks, promised him it’s all some misunderstanding. Emotions running high.
“Oh, Gustave,” she whispers, “of course I do. I… none of this is easy, but I’m going to be here, every day. No matter how long it takes for you to figure out what you feel, or how long it takes for me to get back into step with you.”
He hasn’t changed at all. He stopped here, was crystallized as the rest of them marched forward. They can’t expect him to catch up if they aren’t willing to slow down for him.
She pulls one hand out from his, gently, so she can clasp his hands, too. Her dozens of colourful braided bracelets are bright against his skin, her thumb running a firm stroke against the side of his. She holds his gaze with glassy eyes, unblinking.
“You are so dear to me,” she says, nodding. “I’m going to make sure you feel that. And I’m far from perfect, but we’ve been through too many terrible things together for me to leave you behind on this one, my friend. I want to be here with you, at your back, at your side, your front––“
She gives a silent laugh, just off her breath, her expression still grave but a light behind her eyes. She warns:
“I’ll sit on you again. I will!”
no subject
But they still have a lot of ground to cover. She's right, not all of it will be now; it'll probably take them both a long while to figure out how they fit together again. Still. He takes a breath, glance lowering to their clasped hands, and exhales it in a steady stream. "I'm sorry to be so suspicious of your friend."
He is, truly. He's not a suspicious person, usually, but he feels now a little like he had after he and Lune had found Maelle in that strange manor: on edge, seeing threats everywhere. His shoulder lifts again. "If it helps, I thought maybe he was starting to become my friend... well."
It's even money, he thinks, on whether Verso will want much of anything to do with him. He can't blame the man if that's the case, considering Gustave is the reason he's not able to stay with the people who became his team, his friends, his... whatever it is that's going on between him and Sciel. "But it's not just him, you know, it's... it's everything, it's Renoir seemingly everywhere I look, and Maelle... I haven't seen her this anxious since she first came to me and Emma... and I don't want to hold any of you back."
His gaze lifts back to her face, this face he's missed so much and has been so happy to see. If he had to flay himself open like this for anyone, he's glad it's Sciel. Who else could coax it from him, really? "You're dear to me, too."
Softer now, as if that could make all this somehow less raw, less sore. "Before I saw you at the park, I was... I've been so alone, here, and I didn't know... I wasn't sure if I could..."
There was no cave, here, no pile of Expeditioner bodies, and he'd met people. Good people, kind people, people who offered him help, people who he might be able to help in return. But that sense of crushing loneliness never really went away. Not until he saw her.
He shakes his head, swallowing. "Anyway, I... you have me, too." A smile twitches, falters, warms again. "For good, this time. I hope."
no subject
There can be no stepping out on each other earlier, not with the pain it leaves behind. Comfortable as she is with the ending of her own life, there’s no reason not to wring out as many minutes as she can until then.
“You’re not holding us back, and don’t be sorry, Gustave. Verso made his own bed and he can lay in it,” she says. “And the rest of it… we take one day at a time.”
She won’t be Verso’s keeper, nor can she offer soft apologies for his behaviour while looking for the next opportunity to slip off with him. Which is worse, having to justify the things about him she’s willing to overlook, or having to feel quiet shame about her choice in lovers? She doesn’t know. She chooses not to think about it right now. If they don’t become friends, she can figure out how to balance her friendships with both of them. It’s tomorrow’s problem.
She gives Gustave’s hands a tight squeeze. Funny, how easy it feels to overdo the flesh one, as if any pressure could squish the metal one.
“And Maelle would never feel held back by you.” Her heart pangs at the idea alone; she can’t speak for the girl any more than she can speak for Verso, but Sciel feels confident in that. She’d followed Gustave to the Continent, hadn’t she? “I’ll be shocked if she lets you get further than a hundred metres from you for weeks. Both of us, really. I’m going to be here taking care of you both so there’s time for her to heal with you.”