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Verso's Verso's cousin, and they look a lot alike, but Esquié's never struggled to tell them apart, and he's sure he wouldn't have struggled even if they had both lived at the same time.
Verso would have never worn the same tattered uniform for decades, for one thing, and he preferred to keep apple juice in Esquié's belly, rather than wine. And he could Paint, so Esquié never had to fish him out of the bottom of the sea or hit the snake really hard so it would spit Verso out.
This Verso is quieter and sadder, like the other Verso on realllllly bad days, except he's like that more often than not. Esquié doesn't mind; it's always been his responsibility to sit with Verso and tell him all the nice and true things about him. He can do that for this Verso just as well as he could for the other Verso, though the nice and true things aren't quite the same.
He doesn't even really mind when Verso seeks him out just for a drink and doesn't want to talk. Sometimes Verso will change his mind after a few cups and tell Esquié alllllll about the things that make him sad, and sometimes he'll lean into Esquié without a word and Esquié will pat his head until Verso falls asleep.
Either way, Esquié doesn't mind. He likes when Verso finds him, even when Verso doesn't want to go on an adventure. He likes it best when Verso is in a good mood and plays the piano and offers to go look for his rocks, of course, but if Verso's going to be sad, Esquié would rather they be sad together.
What he doesn't really like is when Verso has an empty flask with him, and he comes to Esquié just to fill it, and then he's gone again.
The other Verso didn't come into the Canvas for wine, but Esquié knows enough about humans to know that they aren't supposed to drink wine alone, because it makes them sad, and then it makes them sick, and Verso doesn't need to be any sadder, and being sick makes him grumpy.
He's tried telling Verso, "Non non non, you can't have wine tonight," but Verso didn't listen, and he knows just where to push and tickle Esquié to get the wine out.
So the next time Verso tries that again, Esquié has another plan. He lets Verso have the wine, and he lets him slip out of the cave even though it's so late at night and there are always Nevrons around, and he makes himself as small and quiet as he can (which is not very small, and maybe not quiet enough when Verso's always on his guard), and he follows Verso out.
They don't go very far at all, only a little way into the woods. Verso doesn't start drinking his wine immediately. He sits down on the rocky ledge above the river with the canteen in his lap and stares down at the water for a while without moving at all. That's better than drinking alone, no?
But Esquié knows Verso isn't very good at not falling down cliffs, so when he leans forward a little, Esquié plops down next to him.
He's very chagrined that that startles Verso; he didn't mean to scare him. Then Verso recognises him, and instead of chuckling like he normally does when Esquié isn't very graceful, he frowns and leans away.
"Did you want something?"
"Non non," says Esquié, bobbing his head a little.
Verso's frown only gets more pronounced. That's okay—Esquié knows Verso's never really angry with him.
"If you need me to find one of your rocks—"
"I have all my rocks!" Esquié announces cheerfully, and pats his belly. "Right here. I could even fly you to the moon! But I don't think that's a good idea, since there's no air up there."
Esquié was sort of hoping that would get a smile out of Verso, but he only frowns harder.
"You don't usually leave your nest for no reason that late in the day," Verso says, which isn't a question but sounds like a question.
Verso's been asking questions that way a lot lately, and it doesn't bother Esquié, except that Verso used to think questions were fun, and he always sounds so tired when he asks them this way.
"That's true," he says, since there wasn't really a question. "Everything's better when the sun's out, and my bath looks very cool at night with the lanterns. But watching the stars with you is also really nice."
That does draw a small smile out of Verso, and not even one of the fake ones. Better still, he sets the canteen down next to him and leans a little closer.
"Is that what we are doing? Can't see that many through the trees."
"Well, it's true we would see more of them if I flew us up to one of the floating islands," Esquié muses, "but frostbite didn't look very fun last time... I think the stars are pretty enough like this—like they're playing peek-a-boo."
He's looking at the sky through the swaying foliage, so he doesn't see it when Verso definitely smiles again, but he hears the soft huff of amusement, and then Verso's shoulder presses against his side.
"Prettier than your lantern bath?" Verso asks. His voice sounds a little strangled in that way he never likes Esquié pointing out. The flask of wine is all but forgotten now, toppled over on the ground next to his hip.
"Everything's prettier with a friend," Esquié declares, and puts his arm around Verso.
Before Aline came into the Canvas alone, Monoco never gave any thought to food.
Gestrals don't need to eat, and no one else in the Canvas really did either, back then. Esquié might have a taste for light, but he doesn't truly need it. And when Verso and Clea visited, they never wasted time on Painting themselves any food that wasn't candy or cake.
But when Aline Painted the humans, she made them resemble the humans she knew as much as she could, limitations and all, and she's indubitably a talented Paintress.
Monoco knows why she did that, though it's always seemed silly to him. Verso never wasted time eating inside the Canvas, and needing food just to survive is clearly one of the many design flaws humans suffer from, and that Monoco would have Painted away if it'd been up to him. Humans are so easy to kill.
Monoco's human is just as easy to kill as all the others. The difference is that he never stays dead. He's a little like gestrals in that way, though he doesn't forget like gestrals do. Monoco would never admit it to his face, but he's grateful for that.
He's not grateful when Verso neglects to eat for the fifth day in a row and staggers right into a Stalact's attack.
In any other situation, Monoco would hold his ground and pulverise the puny Nevron, of course. Unfortunately, he's deprived of the chance to show his prowess when the Stalact throws Verso down the slope.
Verso might be effectively immortal like gestrals, but he isn't immune to the cold like they are, and Monoco would hate to have to miss out on their daily spars because someone got the sniffles, so he's forced to abandon that glorious fight and go barrelling down the mountain after his irresponsible friend.
Thankfully, the Stalact gives up the chase after only a few seconds, and no other Nevron has shown up by the time Monoco finds Verso at the bottom of the slope.
He's definitely dead, which irritates Monoco further. Lately Aline's blessing has been noticeably slower to piece Verso back together, and sometimes does it clumsily enough that he's back too soon and knows nothing but pain. That's taken some of the fun out of bashing his head in.
But there's nothing for it. If they stay here, more Nevrons are bound to find them, and it will be a pain to slaughter them while also making sure they don't stomp all over Verso, so Monoco sticks his staff on top of the collection of feet on his back and picks Verso up. He doesn't even need to turn into a Chalier or a Bruler: humans tend to be pretty light when they skip too many meals.
It takes longer than it should to make it to the broken train coach they've been using as shelter, since Monoco can't both carry Verso and fight the Nevrons on the way. He has to sneak past them, though gestrals aren't really built for stealth. If Monoco hadn't been broken during the Fracture, he would be too big to manage it, now.
By the time they make it to the coach, Verso still hasn't stirred. He'll be insufferable if he's cold when he comes to, so Monoco tucks him under all their blankets before he starts going through the pile of their things.
It's mostly Verso's stuff, and there's not much of it, since he keeps his weapons and his piano in Pictos, but this is where he keeps food when he cares to keep it. They haven't found a recent expedition cache in a while, though, and they haven't been back to the village either, so Monoco's not surprised that there's not much there: only a half-empty packet of salted meat and two shrivelled potatoes.
He's no chef, and Verso doesn't usually bother to do much more than stick ingredients on a stick of green wood over the fire. But he's seen humans cook over the years. They love to throw seemingly inedible things into a pot of water and heat it up until it's bubbling. It doesn't seem very hard.
He finds a pot in Verso's pile of junk. Lighting a fire is easy enough with a Braseleur leg, even if the wood's damp. The nearest brook is half an hour away, so he just tosses in a few handfuls of snow and all the ingredients he found, and then he waits.
With the carriage door open, he can see that Verso's still out, but the wound on his forehead has vanished. That's a good sign: maybe the chroma hasn't messed up this time, and there will be none of that blind panic when Verso wakes.
Monoco was made unafraid of death. Verso—the first Verso—didn't just give gestrals the gift of the river: with it he granted them the certainty that death was not final. Even the forgetting seemed like a gift, then. A chance to become something new in a comfortably unchanging world.
After he was gone, Verso's family Painted in a foreign kind of death. Even the gestrals have learnt that lesson, now: death can be the end. Still, they have their river of new beginnings, and they're as they've always been, bold and confident.
This Verso doesn't shy away from death any more than gestrals do. But there is a difference between greeting it and wasting it.
The stew starts bubbling just as Verso begins to stir, quietly enough that Monoco can take his time filling a cup before going inside. When Verso's eyes blink open, Monoco hauls him upright (one-handed, because Monoco's strong and Verso's an idiot) and shoves the cup into his hands. He has to wrap Verso's shaky fingers around it for him lest the soup spill all over their blankets.
"What…," Verso trails off, squinting at the cup and then at Monoco.
"You got yourself killed. Very stupidly. By a Stalact."
Verso blinks hard, looks down at the cup again. His plastered-on smile when he looks back at Monoco is exceptionally lackluster.
"So, did you pound it into the dust? No Stalact could resist you, I'm sure."
"I would have, if it hadn't already pounded you into the dust hard enough that you needed rescuing. Because you're a fool. Eat your soup."
He must still be feeling the exhaustion of death: he raises the cup to his lips without even a token argument. Monoco watches him freeze with his mouth full of stew and swallow it slowly. Human faces are strange, even Verso's familiar one. But that looked like distaste.
"What did you put in this?" Verso asks, his voice carefully even.
Definitely distaste, and he'll either be obnoxious about it within the next minute, or he'll inhale the rest of the stew fast enough to choke on it in an attempt to spare Monoco's pride. Which would be ludicrous: Monoco's a warrior, not a cook. He has no reason to care what the stew tastes like.
"Your leftover meat and potatoes," Monoco says, crossing his arms. "If you don't like it, you should remember to resupply more often."
Monoco very generously chooses not to comment when Verso sighs and rolls his eyes before drinking the rest of the soup. He even takes the cup from Verso when it's empty, and goes back out to scrub it with snow.
The stew is still bubbling on the fire; it probably won't be improved by letting it burn, so Monoco puts out the flames. But he doesn't toss the stew, because Verso clearly can't be trusted to be smart about his human limitations, and bad stew has to be better than pointlessly losing fights he should be able to win in his sleep.
When he goes back inside the carriage, Verso is sitting cross-legged against the wall and polishing his sword, the blankets tossed in a corner. He doesn't even look up when Monoco comes in.
"We're going foraging tomorrow," Monoco announces. "Watching you starve yourself is very boring."
"I'm not starving myself."
"Hm hm."
Verso finally looks up. He has the audacity to be frowning.
"I'm not. I just... forget. It's not like it can kill me."
Monoco could let it go, or turn it into a joke, tell Verso he doesn't want him to have an excuse next time he pathetically loses a fight. But as much as he enjoys Verso's immortality, he's getting tired of watching him test it senselessly.
He picks up a blanket and plops it down on Verso's shoulders.
"Humans have to eat. Even you. I'm stronger than you; I'll pour stew down your throat if I have to."
That cracks a smile out of Verso, and he puts his sword away, holding his arm out to the side to make room for Monoco under the blanket.
"Let's not be dramatic. I'll eat. There's a flock of wood grouse down in the forest; we can see who's the superior shot tomorrow."
Monoco snorts but drops down on the floor next to Verso. Gestrals don't get cold any more than they get hungry. But shoulder to shoulder with Verso like this, he does feel warmer.
"A contest we already know I will win," he says, tugging his corner of the blanket down so the cold air can't sneak in.
"I'm sure you'll be very good at turning the birds into mush, but there's supposed to be something edible left when we're done."
From there, it's inevitable that the conversation devolves into an argument on the merits of their respective fighting techniques, really. Still, entertaining and familiar as it is, it doesn't stop the niggling voice in the back of Monoco's head, reminding him that Verso can't be trusted not to make him a witness to endless, pointless deaths.
But an hour later, right before night finishes settling over the mountain, Verso gets another cup of stew, and says tomorrow's game will improve it, and drags the blankets out of their corner and over both himself and Monoco.
It's not an apology Monoco wouldn't care for, and it's not a promise he couldn't trust. But it is something of a peace offering. Monoco will never have it in himself to reject it.
Lune used to share a room with her brother and sister, when she was younger.
Space in Lumière is limited, and the extra room in her family's apartment was put to better use as a laboratory. Lune's parents had their own office at the Academy, but being able to conduct additional experiments at home, between dinner and bedtime, was too efficient to pass up. Lune always understood the importance of optimisation, and that alone would have sufficed to make the cramped bedroom acceptable to her.
But more selfishly, she always liked sharing a room with her siblings.
Sol and Stella were older than her, and more determined to have their own lives beyond their parents' expectations. With her nose always in some book or some chroma experiment, she didn't see very much of them during the day. But at night, they would lie down in the dark and tell each other what the day had brought—Sol's apprenticeship with the archivists, Stella's latest stained glass project.
Lune lived in that apartment until her parents left with the 46 and failed to come back, but by then Sol and Stella had both had their own homes, their own lives for years. The bedroom where she had been granted such vivid glimpses of other lives had become a mausoleum of fantasies long before her parents failed to do the one thing they had turned all three of their lives towards. Her racing thoughts had filled the silence where her siblings' stories and jokes had once been, and she had never managed to kick the habit. Over the years, sleep had started to elude her more than she cared to admit.
She hadn't expected joining the expedition to help with that. She knew, before they even set off, that she would risk her life and watch others lose theirs, that she would have to constantly be planning and correcting plans, that there would be too much to learn for sleep to be particularly appealing. And she had largely been right.
But somehow, in the midst of that grueling nightmare, she's found companionship and understanding. Sciel's seemingly infinite patience and equanimity make the painful edges of their lives feel softer, and Maëlle's youthful tenaciousness is a welcome reminder that "those who come after" is not an empty phrase.
She might never be able to fall asleep easily and peacefully. But lately, she's occasionally found herself able to put off puzzling out the threatening mysteries of the world long enough to sleep. Long enough, even, to think of frivolous things like Sciel's warm hands, or Verso's quiet laugh, or her own fingers on the strings of her guitar, drawing a new melody out of her own heart. It's certainly more pleasant than frantically trying to plan for every eventuality.
Tonight she lies awake not because she fears what tomorrow will bring, but because she hasn't been able to quite figure out a transition in her new song. That's a lovely problem to have to unravel; something that can wait, that will be as pleasant to tease out as it will be to finally solve, with no one's survival riding on her ability to find an answer.
A pleasant enough puzzle that she refuses to let it become another nagging worry that keeps her up at night. So with only a little effort, she chooses to leave it for the morrow, and turns her thoughts to sleep.
She's only just starting to drift off when a quiet thump followed by a quieter curse drags her back to wakefulness.
It's unmistakably Verso's voice, but only silence follows, so it can't be anything serious. Most likely he dropped something.
She turns her head to look anyway. He isn't usually clumsy. He's holding an empty cup and trying to wipe something that must be wine off his trousers.
When they made camp, he insisted on taking the first watch again, claiming he wouldn't be able to sleep anyway. Lune doesn't doubt that it would have been a struggle: they've spent the last few days gathering chroma from the corpses of an expedition he travelled with, and she's seen him fail to rest often enough even without that.
He's seemed weary as long as she's known him, which makes it difficult to judge how much of a toll their long days are taking on him. But he hasn't made any egregious mistake in combat, hasn't missed a beat in the constant playful arguments he and Monoco have. She assumed something about his immortality made him less susceptible to sleep deprivation somehow, though she could find no sign of it in the chroma.
But as she watches him and the minutes tick past, his eyelids slip shut and his chin drops to his chest. He almost immediately draws himself back up, shaking his head to clear it, but she's seen enough.
She rolls to her feet soundlessly, though she should still be in his field of vision. That he doesn't notice her approach until she's standing right next to him only confirms that he has no business keeping watch. At least he doesn't jump when he realises she's there; only draws in a sharp breath as he turns to her. Now that he's cleaned up the gore and grime that they all spend most days covered in, in the flickering light of the flames, the dark circles under his eyes look significantly more pronounced than usual.
"I'll take the first watch," she announces.
"I've got it."
"You're falling asleep. There's not much point to keeping watch with your eyes closed."
He snorts and gestures to his face.
"Eyes very much open, see? I'm good."
"Verso—"
That one word must have sounded more concerned than she intended; a slight frown replaces his smirk.
"It wouldn't help if I slept, anyway. I'm used to it. I won't let us be caught off-guard by whatever Nevrons somehow manage to slip past Monoco's patrol."
"What happened to not burning out?" she asks, and sits down on the log.
That gets a more genuine smile out of him, though she didn't really intend for it to be teasing. When her shoulder brushes his and he leans some of his weight on her, she lets him.
"I mean it," she says. "The chroma behaves in unusual ways around you, but I haven't seen any sign of it affecting your sleep. Your immortality clearly doesn't override your body's need for rest."
"I thought we agreed that we wouldn't be watching each other sleep."
"We agreed that you wouldn't be watching me sleep. But that's hardly the point. Human bodies need rest to function, and all our studies suggest that even low-quality sleep is superior to no sleep at all."
"I'm familiar with the idea," he quips, and then sighs. "I really couldn't sleep tonight. I'm sure it'll come to me at some point before next week. And if not, well, you know what they say—I'll sleep when I'm dead."
Lune's not sure what's more annoying: that he would make the joke at all, or that he seems to expect her to find it amusing. Or perhaps it's that she's not sure exactly what she finds so annoying about it, beyond the fact that she will never think of death as he does. As Sciel does. And it unsettles something in her, that these people she has let herself care for would so blithely entertain the idea of being gone.
So she's perhaps a little harsher than she means to be, when she leans away just far enough that he loses his balance, and says: "You endanger us all every time you die. You're expedition 33 now. We can't leave you behind."
That shuts him up, at least—long enough that she considers trying to put words to the rest of it, to whatever offends her about his wasteful recklessness that's not the insult to her own sense of duty and self-preservation.
Before she has to decide how much of that she wants to unveil, to herself and to him, he clears his throat.
"Right. I'm sorry." He pauses, looking convincingly contrite. He usually is. He glances down at the ground, then back at her face. "Are you sure you're good to take the watch?"
"Yes."
He looks like he wants to say something else, but when she keeps her gaze fixed on the flames, he simply sighs and gets up. And she has gotten what she wanted, hasn't she? She can't hold something she hasn't fully admitted even to herself against him. She can be a gracious winner.
"You can take my bedroll," she blurts out.
He misses half a step. When he turns back to look at her, his cheeks have a little more colour than usual.
"There's no point in wasting time setting yours out," she explains, perhaps a touch hastily. Perhaps enjoying the now obvious blush spreading over his face, just a little.
"Right, yeah. Yeah. Thank you," he says, and Lune's treacherous heart gives a faint twist when he smiles at her hesitantly.
"Goodnight, Verso."
She doesn't quite watch him shuck off his boots and cape, his jacket, but she can't help that he's in her field of vision. When he first joined them, he slept further away from the fire, apart from the rest of their team, and he never undressed at all. Always geared up for a fight, always expecting the next blow. She didn't trust him then, and he didn't trust them, despite the charming act.
Sometimes it strikes her as strange that they should trust each other more now, when he's actually proven himself a traitor. That they should trust each other at all.
But she supposes that's it: he's already done all the betraying he was going to do, and as wrong as he was, she does understand why he did it.
He's already done all the betraying he was going to do, and they've still chosen to keep him.
He can be so frustrating. Lune's no stranger to frustrating things. She spent most of her life puzzling out the impossible conundrum of her world's curse. She learnt young how to grit her teeth through failure and vexation for the sake of her people's future. Lumière and its people come first, always. She's never regretted it. She would do it a thousand times over.
Still. When Maëlle refuses or fails to explain her Painting, when Verso hides and obfuscates and even Sciel's unfailing patience grates—when loving them is hard work… When it's hard work, it's still never a sacrifice. She never has to love them through gritted teeth. She would do it a thousand times over, and she almost doesn't mind if they know that. She almost wants them to count on it.
She watches Verso try to sleep, facing the fire and her. She thinks of the shred of peace he helped her claw out of her parents' death, and his quiet honesty when she didn't expect it.
She thinks of her song. He's not the only reason why she's started writing it, but he's certainly part of it. He helped her gather the courage to wring some more joy out of her life. She can admit, at least to herself, at least this late at night, that she wants to share that with him.
She plays out a few chords in her mind. She imagines asking Verso to play them with her. She imagines asking for more than that. She lets herself imagine a world in which she's as free to compose music as she is to uncover the inner workings of chroma, at her own leisure; a world she's not responsible for preserving. A world where children can grow old and friendships can last decades. A world where there is time, just enough time, for Verso to bear staying.