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
“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."
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?”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
“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?”
no subject
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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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 subject
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."
no subject
no subject
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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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?"
no subject
"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.
no subject
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."
no subject
She had been the one to back Verso into a corner. But.
"So why didn't you just tell me?"
no subject
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."
no subject
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?"
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.”
no subject
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."
no subject
“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.”
no subject
He hates it. Of everyone, it might hurt most to feel torn asunder from Sciel. "Do you think I will?"
no subject
"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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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?”