Chapter Text
—1—
There’s a hole in his chest.
There is a hole in his chest.
He can feel it, on every unsuccessful breath; on every heartbeat that fails to push blood through his body. He can feel it, the blood, spilling out of him, turning the sand under him into reddish dirt, failing to reach his limbs and his head — because there is a hole in his chest and somehow he is still alive to feel it.
He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.
There’s a wheezing, whimpering sound somewhere close, deafening him, drowning out all the noises around him. He distantly realizes that he is the one making it.
He wants to scream; the pain is blinding him — or maybe his vision is just going dark, because he can’t breathe; he can feel his lungs collapsed, fluttering uselessly in his chest, unable to draw air.
He is supposed to be dead. He is supposed to be dead, he is not supposed to feel this, no one is supposed to feel this; no one is supposed to have a hole in their chest and still be alive, it’s not— he can’t breathe.
The wheezing sound won’t stop. The battlefield around him has long gone silent, the furious Paintress with his sister’s face killing them all effortlessly, her monsters slashing and clawing and burning them, her cruel words ringing in the air and destroying Verso’s whole world.
Painted worlds. Doppelgängers. Verso being a facsimile — a mockery, she said, a poor copy, a fake — of a dead man; of her brother.
Of his mother’s “real” son.
“We’re real,” he yelled at her, his heart frozen with horror, his limbs leaden with unwelcome truths. “We’re as real as you!”
That’s when she turned to him — looked at him for the first time — and pierced him through with a dart of pure chroma. That’s when she scoffed, looking into his terrified eyes — “Of course. What did I even expect. She wouldn’t want anything to happen to her precious toy, would she?” — and turned away from him as he fell, easily putting up a chroma shield to block his father’s sword. He saw it, that sword, shattering into a thousand pieces.
There were screams, then. There were monsters, and shouts, and groans of pain; there was blood, oh-so-much-blood, and there was battle, and then there was silence, loudest of them all.
There was a moment when Verso realized what she meant by her last words to him. There was a moment when he realized that he was not going to die — that his body, broken and suffocating, was going to just lie on the silent battlefield — can you even call it a battle if it really was a slaughter? — and the blood would flow and flow and flow, his lungs failing, his heart fluttering, useless but never stopping — his body living despite the wounds, his mind refusing to shut down despite the pain, his chroma (his paint, he is not human apparently, is he?) boiling inside him like a hurricane in his veins, the unwelcome tears hot on his face.
He can’t breathe.
He should be dead.
He wants it to stop. He needs it to stop.
There is a moment when he is sure that this is how he’ll spend the next eternity. Hurting, and crying, and suffocating — on a dead battlefield, among the piles of dead bodies, never able to join them in death. There is a moment when it sinks in, the terrible realization — that all his friends are dead, and even his father — his father…
There is a touch to his shoulder. He can’t see who that is, his vision gone dark long ago, but he knows — he knows this touch that pulled him out of his nightmares when he was young (was it he or was it the other?), he knows this touch that grounded him when the world collapsed, he knows that touch that is burning now his shoulder — he sobs voicelessly, unable to push any noise out of his throat apart from this horrible wheezing sound, and tries to reach for the source of this touch, and fails, his body heavy and half-dead and hurting, and—
“I need you to calm down,” says his father’s voice, steady and deep and soothing. “Listen to me, son. I need you to calm down and let your chroma do the work. Do you hear me? Don’t fight it. Let it heal you.” A pause. “Let her heal you.”
The words reach him as if through a thick layer of water. Verso tries to follow the instructions — to calm down, how is he supposed to calm down when there is a hole in his chest?! — and fails at that, the only result another wheezing sound — a wordless plea for all of this to stop.
He’d begged his father if he could — if he had the voice. He’d begged him to make it stop.
His father’s hand rests on his forehead now, his words almost incomprehensible behind the pain and the panic. Verso tries to press into the touch, to grab at his hands, anything — anything to ground himself, anything to feel even a little bit safer, anything to hide from the pain; he would be thrashing around, he thinks, if his body obeyed him at all, but there’s a goddamn hole in his chest, and he doesn’t have the strength to do anything, the blind panic burning through the remains of his energy.
His father is telling him to breathe, he thinks, but he can’t — he tries, he really does, but—
There’s a sigh. A “sorry”. A flash of chroma.
A sharp, blinding pain, overriding briefly the sensation of the hole in his chest.
And then it finally stops.
(He wakes up near a campfire, clean and warm and healed and finally not hurting, with his father sitting beside him — as if he is a child again who came down with a fever. The reality feels unstable around him.
His father’s presence makes it a little more bearable.)
—2—
He sits on the bank of a river and cuts his forearm with a dagger.
Repetitive motions, repetitive sensations — the blade slicing easily through the skin, the sharp pain following it, the blood merging with water and carried away by the flow.
The chroma boiling, almost angrily, under his skin. The cut disappearing in a matter of seconds. The pain dissolving. He tries, without real commitment, to control it — to slow it down, to stop it, to quicken it, to do anything at all — but it won’t obey, and he doesn’t really put in the effort to make it.
When there is no trace of a cut left, he does it again.
And again.
And again.
The pain makes him feel tethered. Real. Alive.
He needs to feel alive. He feels like he will drown if he doesn’t.
He is drowning — the new knowledge about his world, about him feels too much. Everything is too much, and his mind cannot cope with it — every new thought feels like a crushing wave, pulling him down under.
The cuts seem to heal slower when he starts spiraling too much — especially when he thinks about Lumière they are going to return to in a matter of days. He grits his teeth when he notices it, and he carves into his skin some more, letting the pain bring him back to reality.
What even is “reality” anymore?
Papa explained it soon after the horrible end of their expedition — that the healing is a gift from Maman, that she loves them so much (loves him so much) she made sure to save them (him) no matter what. That they have some control over it — that there, on the battlefield, Verso in his panic kept fighting instinctively against it.
That he has to learn. That they all have so much to learn.
There was confidence in his words. There was knowledge. There was certainty.
It calmed him down then, a little. It helped him breathe when he was shaking, pressing his hand to his chest to make sure that it was healed and he was okay and his heart was still beating. His father’s presence was always able to calm him down.
Now, weeks later, the Crooked Tower on the horizon, he replays that conversation again and again in his head and gets progressively more and more sure: he knew.
His father knew. All of it. Or maybe not all — but most.
What that Paintress said, wasn’t a revelation to him.
He knew. He knew, going into this expedition, that he and his son would be okay no matter what. He knew, Verso thinks, that the other members of the expedition weren't going to make it. He knew, when they left Alicia behind in the half-destroyed city — he knew she would be fine until they returned.
He knew.
The next cut goes too deep — much deeper than he intended. Verso hisses, his heart beating too fast in his chest, and watches as the blood flows into the water a little too freely, briefly making him light-headed and dizzy. He watches the crimson dilute and disappear in the crystal-clear stream, he thinks about all the blood they left behind on that battlefield, and he wonders, detachedly — if he was to throw himself into that water, would he stay alive through the drowning too?
It would be easier, he thinks. It would be less painful than having to tell everyone about the end their expedition met — looking his friends’ families in the eye and lying to them that he and Papa got lucky when the others didn’t.
He brings the dagger to his arm again.
It is snatched out of his hand, making him startle. He looks up to find Renoir, visibly upset, looking at the wound on his arm with a frown.
Verso half-expects him to be angry — as if he is a teenager caught in the middle of sneaking out of the house — but all he gets instead is a sigh.
“What are you doing?”
Verso looks down. “Learning to use Maman’s gift,” mutters, too tired to come up with something convincing. The pain in his arm is sharp, sharp and hot and real, and his mind latches onto it. “You told me to.”
“You’re wasting it, not learning.” And, after a pause, “Move.”
Verso scoots over and watches as his father sits beside him, his bad knee clearly struggling on the uneven ground. Wonders detachedly why he has a bad knee at all. Wouldn’t it have been easy for Maman to fix it?
“Let it heal,” Renoir says, surprisingly softly. Verso follows his gaze, landing on the cut on his arm again — the blood trickling slowly down his fingers, dripping into the water, the wound slowly closing but not yet healed.
He is trembling, he realizes. A moment away from a panic attack — it feels like it’s never too far from him these days. Always waiting. Always ready to pounce.
“I can’t exactly control it,” he bites out.
“Take a breath. Focus on it. Bring your attention to the chroma flow.”
Renoir’s voice is calm, gentle, guiding — and Verso, despite himself, finds his frantic heartbeat slowing down. Just like in his-not-his childhood, coming down from a nightmare in his Papa’s arms.
He takes a breath.
He focuses.
The chroma bubbles gently under his skin, as if it is calmed by his father’s presence too; the cut closes, not leaving any trace on his forearm. Just like his chest and his back — no wound, no scar, no evidence that it happened.
He hates it.
“What’s on your mind?” Renoir asks. Verso notices, out of the corner of his eye, that his father’s shoulders relaxed a little — now, when the cut disappeared.
He looks away. Swallows.
“You knew, didn’t you?”
The question hangs in the air between them, an almost-physical barrier that Verso doesn’t know how to break. The night feels colder.
The pause lingers.
Then, softly: “I did.”
“Maman told you.”
“She did.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
His father sighs, but doesn’t deny it. Verso appreciates the honesty.
“I wanted to protect you. We both wanted to protect you,” Renoir says finally. “You and your sisters.”
“From the truth?”
“From the hurt. Would the truth have made you happier?”
Verso stays silent. They both know the answer.
“This was a revelation,” Renoir continues, “that almost broke me.” A pause. “I did not want it to break you.”
Verso swallows around the lump in his throat. Glances up at his father. Renoir has never shown vulnerability — and he doesn’t show it now either, not really; but there is a little slump to his shoulders, and a little glassiness to his eyes as he looks at the river in front of them.
They are both exhausted, aren’t they?
Verso feels like he won’t be not exhausted ever again.
“It did anyway,” he mutters. “In the end.”
His father nods. The silence lingers.
“We wanted you to have a life,” Renoir says finally. Gives Verso his dagger back without looking. Verso takes it; lets it disappear. “Me and your mother — we both wanted you to have a life.”
This makes Verso bristle — with a sudden flash of anger that he didn’t expect himself. The words come out too sharp, too bitter: “Because he didn’t get to have it?”
“No,” his father says, almost cutting him off, and his voice rings suddenly sharp. Verso glances at him, slightly startled. “Because no matter what happened before — no matter who came before — you are and always will be my son.”
Verso stares at him, frozen, almost scared to move, the turmoil inside his head quieting down slowly. He needed to hear it — he didn’t realize just how much he needed to hear it.
Papa looks at him, and his gaze is warm. When his hand comes to rest on Verso’s shoulder, Verso doesn’t flinch away — on the contrary, leans into it, seeking comfort; seeking security, seeking that straw he can grasp at to stop drowning in this nightmare.
“I love you and your sisters,” Renoir goes on, “because of who you are. Not because of who you were painted after. And I will always fight for you, no matter what.”
Verso swallows. Nods.
Lets himself be pulled into a hug.
He wants — he needs — to find his mother. To ask her so many questions — why, and how, and what does it cost her.
Why did she choose them over… them.
Why did she make Alicia keep her scars.
(Does she sees him as real — as her son, not as a copy of one.)
Allowing himself to relax into his father’s embrace, he believes, for the first time since the Monolith, that he will get to ask.
He has all the time in the world, after all.