Chapter Text
Life in Lumière was not all that different from life on the continent—at least where Lune was concerned. There was always an order to things, especially in the morning, and a change of scenery didn’t disrupt that.
Every morning started with a pink sky, always just ahead of the waking dawn. In those quiet moments she allowed herself some time over her journal full of yesterday's notes. Just to read! She’d make amendments later if she found them, but it helped her get back to where she left off before she’d slept. Then when pink turned gold, she’d dress in her uniform. On the continent it was practical, in Lumière it was comfortable, but it was still a uniform for her. Or maybe armor was the better word.
In Lumière she could spend extra time on herself. She could style her hair in a way that did more than just keep it out of her face while she worked and fought. She could pick out a color lipstick from the plethora that Maelle had gifted to her and wear it without fear of it coming off in a battle. She could slip on a pair of comfortable but impractical heels and revel in the way they sounded against the stones as she walked.
Lune could do all of these things. But it felt like pulling teeth to do them.
She breathed through the strange nerves rattling in her chest, slipping on her shoes. The lines of Lumina laced on her feet made them fit more snugly than she would like, but she pushed past the discomfort, standing tall and smoothing her pants.
In her vanity mirror she looked . . . like a civilian.
She found herself rolling up the sleeves of her black blouse to keep them from catching fire, then stopped. She wasn’t going into battle. She wouldn’t be using chroma at all today or for the next few weeks. She rolled her sleeves back down and buttoned them at the wrists.
Her mirrored self twisted her painted lips into a frown, then smoothed it back out again. Behind her, discarded on the chair overlooking the harbor and the Monolith, her uniform sat folded neatly. The only piece of it she still had on her was her necklace.
“It’s good to be home,” she whispered to the mirror.
—
Lune licked the buttery flakes of the viennoiserie—her second—from her painted lips, wincing a little. Apparently lipstick couldn’t survive breakfast anymore than it could survive Nevrons.
She nudged her plate to the side, bringing out her journal and pen and flipping to the once mighty list of mysteries to solve. She poured over it again, ticking off the ones she’d forgotten about. Or, well, attempted to. It appeared she’d been thorough last night.
Lune pursed her lips, then reached for her latte. It was lukewarm by now, forgotten and chilling in the cool, salty breeze coming from the harbor. Maybe it would’ve been better to sit inside, but she preferred the fresh air now.
She forced herself to drink it anyway.
“There you are!”
Lune startled from her drink and journal as a familiar face with a warm smile and unruly brown curls slid into the empty seat across from her. Her heart still lurched at seeing Gustave alive—each time a shock, like she’d forgotten Maelle had brought him back with so many others.
He looked like he’d never left Lumière, his blue suit crisp and clean and mostly covering his prosthetic arm. His smile was easy, not nearly as burdened as it had been on the continent where they fought for their lives each and every day. Although, from what she could tell, he still had those memories. He just didn’t seem haunted by them.
Not for the first time, Lune wondered if Maelle had painted him with all his memories back. Surely remembering his own death would be traumatic, but taking that away from him felt wrong as well.
“Gustave,” Lune smiled, setting down her cup.
“Lune,” he matched her tone, laying his hands on the table. She hadn’t realized she sounded so grave. “You’re working.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Very observant of you.”
“It's your day off.”
“And?”
He blinked at her. “Do you ever take a break? Merde . . . you just got back from the continent after months and you’re still here pouring over your notes?”
Lune shrugged. “Just tying up some loose ends. I can’t relax unless I do.”
He sat back, folding his arms across his chest. “Mhm.”
“What?” She narrowed her eyes.
“You need a break.”
She laughed a little, gesturing to the cafe. “What do you think this is?”
“Not a break.” He nodded to the notebook. “Unless that’s full of bad poetry or new music. Which we both know it isn’t.”
Lune cleared her throat, closing the notebook and pulling it into her lap. “It could be.”
“It isn’t.”
They stared each other down for a while, nothing but the sounds of the city sweeping between them. The gulls cried over the harbor, the doors to shops jingled as everything started to fully open for the day, and a group of children ran by giggling and brandishing their books like shields.
Gustave sniffed, his mustache twitching as if his nose itched, but he didn’t break eye contact.
Lune narrowed her eyes. “Why does it bother you what I do on my days off? You’re not bothered when I leave the city.”
His warm expression faltered, a familiar frown settling on his lips. “Is that what you think?”
“I . . .” she started, sudden embarrassment burning in her chest. “No, but, it’s not like . . .” She sighed. “It’s my work, Gustave, not yours.”
“We used to share work, you know.”
She gripped her journal, fingernails digging into the leather. “I know.”
In truth, she missed those days. Not the crippling weight of expectation, or the fear of failure, but it had been a simpler time. Planning Expedition 33 had been her whole life and she’d let it consume her. Even when he’d died, she hadn’t let herself stop being consumed by it. Well, not completely . . .
Gustave leaned forward again, resting his arms on the table. “Tell me what you found.”
Embarrassment nagged at her, though. She tucked her hair behind her ear, looking over his shoulder at the harbor. At the Monolith. “It was mostly the same. We spent most of our time recording the names of those on the Forgotten Battlefield.”
“Hm, but I know that look.” Gustave’s pointing finger brought her back to him. “Something you found is troubling you.”
She rolled her eyes. “I was digging through the piles of hundreds of thousands of corpses. Everything bothered me.”
He didn’t buy it. Hell, Lune wouldn’t have if she was him. But he let her sit in silence until the waiter came by and cleared the table. Gustave ordered two fresh lattes, and he still let her stew when they were set down. His metal fingers clinked on the porcelain as he took a sip. Lune just sat, gripping her notebook and the damning line she’d scribbled in there that wasn’t a mystery but an accusation. One she should’ve seen coming. One she hated she hadn’t seen.
Gustave set his cup down, licking his lips. When he spoke again, his words were feather soft, like he was afraid she’d break if they had any edge to them.
“What did he do?”
Lune shook her head. “Nothing.”
“You only come back like this when you’ve uncovered another lie.”
The latte art was swirled to look like a gestral, as best as the barista could get. The plume of bristles swirled at the ends, and she let her eyes take the vortex deep into the cream foam. As if that was an escape from the embarrassment and the shame.
“Maybe there’s another explanation . . .” Gustave started.
“There isn’t,” she said, sharper than she intended to. But she latched onto that edge, pulled herself out of the pity hole she was sinking into and looked Gustave in the eye. Anger was better than whatever else she was feeling. It was easier to be angry, and he knew that. Knew that her anger wasn’t directed towards him.
“The 46th,” she said. “They were on the battlefield.”
He blinked. “But . . . you found your parents in—”
“Siréne, yes.” She nodded, purposefully ignoring the memories that came from that time, that fight, and what resulted afterwards. “That was the end of the trail. Their journal was there, and so was my mother. But the 46th was a large expedition and there weren’t nearly enough bodies to account for all of them.”
Lune took a breath. “I remembered one of their flags on the battlefield, so when we looked, I kept an eye out for all of them.”
Gustave nodded. “The Remembrance.”
It was her biggest project so far, and by far the most tedious. What kept her going out to the continent—officially, anyway—was to find each member of each expedition and their names. Record them all, how they died, find if any went missing, and plug in the holes of missing information. The journals the 33rd had collected during their expedition helped, and there was an official list of every expedition member in Lumière’s archives, but this was about laying them to rest more than information. Lune always knew the Forgotten Battlefield would be the hardest to get through, but it was more than just sorting through piles of corpses and armbands.
It was also the secluded graveyard just past the battlefield.
“We didn’t get through all of them,” Lune continued, her throat tight. “We’ll need another three expeditions to do so, I think. If we have the gestrals help again.”
“But you found the 46th on the battlefield?” Gustave pressed.
“No.”
He blinked. “No?”
Lune let go of her journal and reached for her latte. It had cooled enough for her to drink comfortably now and she sipped, her mind a hundred miles away under the shade of that red tree. It was strange, seeing Gustave’s grave. That’s why she’d been there at first, to visit it. Knowing he was alive, knowing she’d said goodbye to him there, made her feel like she was being ripped in two different directions. So she’d looked away, went back to work. There were others buried in that graveyard that belonged in the Remembrance, and she could get started by looking at the armbands fluttering in the wind. Then she’d grasped the closest one to her, one of three on a single stake of wood, its golden numbers faded with time but still legible enough to read.
46
“He lied, Gustave.” she said to her latte. The foam gestral was destroyed, a ring of red lipstick on the rim of her cup. “That graveyard . . . nearly half of it was full of 46th armbands. He told me . . .” Her hands shook and she set down the cup. “He told me that he’d never traveled with them. So why? Why take the time to bury so many there? And why didn’t he tell me?”
“Lune . . . I-I don’t—”
“Why didn’t he tell me?” She snapped. “After everything we went through, after everything he did , his olive branch to me was to help me with the 46th and he still. Fucking. Lied. I asked him if he’d ever traveled with them and he looked me right in my eyes and said he’d ‘only come across their trail’. I should have known when he brought me straight to where my parents died that he hadn’t been honest. I should have fucking fed him to the Nevron that killed them. I should never have . . .”
Lune trailed off, and the silence that rushed in after the vacuum her voice left was suffocating. The sea and the gulls and the cafe and the streets weren’t enough to drown out that silence, or the memories that came unbidden to her. Of warmth and comfort shared, of a night full of music and contentment.
“I should never have trusted him,” she said finally, softer now. The anger simmered still, but she tapped it down. Causing a scene wouldn’t do anything other than upset her and everyone else trying to have a pleasant morning.
Across the table, Gustave watched her carefully. The pity in his eyes made her want to vomit, but she didn’t pull away when he reached over and took her hand in his good one. She wanted to. She felt herself reflexively twitch away, but didn’t let herself pull away completely. The anchor of her friend’s hand was . . . a comfort, even on the heels of the memory of a mistake.
“I’m sorry he’s still hurting you,” Gustave murmured. “All of you.”
Lune sighed deeply. “He still won’t see Maelle.”
It wasn’t a question, but Gustave shook his head. “She won’t admit it, but it's killing her. Sciel stopped trying too. I know he was a friend to all of you—”
“Some friend,” Lune muttered. He’d been more than that, for a time. That also made her want to vomit.
Gustave snorted. “Alright, fair. He was a bad friend, but he got you here, and I’m grateful for that.”
Lune didn’t say another truth Verso had hidden, one that Maelle had only told her after they’d saved the Canvas. She doubted Gustave would be so grateful towards the man who’d let him die, but what was the point in saying it outloud?
“Everywhere I turn I see more of his lies,” she said, staring at the consequences of one of those lies.
“There’s more to this world than him. You used to see so much more.”
“There used to be more to see.”
Lune wasn’t sure if she’d pulled away from Gustave or if he’d taken his hand away. Regardless, she sat unmoored while he finished his latte, deep in thought. By the time he was finished he seemed to have landed on an idea, brightening up with another smile.
“Sophie and I are hosting dinner tonight. You should come.”
“Oh.” Lune scrambled for words. “That’s—”
“Sciel and Pierre will be there! It’ll be great.”
Her heart sank. “A fifth wheel to a double date? That’s not my idea of fun.”
“It’s not a date, it's a dinner amongst friends.” He stood up. “And you’ll be there, yes?”
“I don’t know,” she started. “I’m meeting Alan about the Remembrance—”
“You can do that in the morning.”
“The ship! I have paperwork—”
“And endless amounts of time to get it done. Dinner’s at seven. We’ll see you there.”
Without letting Lune get another word in edgewise, Gustave turned on his heel and left. Lune started to call out for him, then stopped. She sighed heavily and sank her chin until it rested on her hand. Her latte had gone cold again and her journal practically begged to be opened now that Gustave was gone.
She turned her gaze to the harbor, to the continent. That place that held so much wonder and so much heartache, yet still called to her. Maybe it always had, or maybe she didn’t know a life that wasn’t steered towards it, but one thing was becoming abundantly clear; she was running out of mysteries to solve. The Canvas was only so large, after all.
And all the remaining mysteries circled back to Verso.
Lune tore her eyes from the Monolith and back to her table of cold lattes. “I guess I’ll get the bill.”