Sciel smiles, trying once more before watching Lune abandon her own. She keeps hers trapped between her thumbs, the reed of grass stretched taut. The moment's passed; she feels a little sad for it, watching that rare glimpse of a carefree Lune slip away again, but she'll be back.
"Sure have," she says.
Before Auriel, it was regular trips out to Camp with a backpack full of supplies and an itch to spend time with him, worried that he'd come around less if he thought he was intruding on them. Here it's a little more casual: crossing paths on neutral territory, mid-revelry, whenever it suits them.
"He looks good with white hair. It's such a shame he's so self-conscious about it."
"Mm. It's not a bad look on him," Lune muses. She can admit that! "Perhaps it's more so a way to distance himself from Renoir, rather than simple vanity."
She pauses before she gets carried away with idle speculations, tilting her head and giving Sciel a sidelong glance. "How did he seem to you, otherwise?"
What a shame to have such a beautiful colour ruined by such a miserable man, but she supposes that’s a rare treasure of everyone dying young; white hair on a young body is so striking, even novel.
As for Verso’s mood:
“Here and there. Less panicked, certainly, but he’s good at rallying,” she says, setting the blade of grass on her thigh and leaning back on both hands. Less outward panic doesn’t mean much when he’s had time to compose himself, and settle into a new life here. “I’m not as worried as I was before.”
Sciel looks sidelong at Lune, pleased.
“I told him about Clea. It was really something, seeing him smile like that.”
Lune watches Sciel as she listens, her head tipping a little more, expression inquisitive, slightly expectant— as if waiting for a but... to follow that statement.
But it never does. Instead, Sciel's expression is bright and pleased, and she mentions Clea. Lune wonders if perhaps that prick of expectancy was just her own concern, projected. She can't say for certain where Verso's head is currently, even after her own conversations with the man.
"He is good at presenting a front," Lune agrees, a touch wryly, but she sobers soon enough. "I wonder if he's been to see her. How it went— what she thought about it. It must be a surprise for her, too. Hopefully a good one."
If Stella or Sol showed up here, Lune would be beside herself. But who knows how Clea would react.
When she thinks about the way he’d looked at them when he’d first walked into camp, tremendously calm and straightforward as he’d told them that Renoir was Expedition Zero’s commander, she thinks he could deliver the news of the world’s end without the slightest waver.
“I hope so too. I haven’t asked. I thought…” She pauses, pursing her lips together, turning her face up to the sky. “They haven’t seen each other since she died in the Fracture. If he has seen her, it must be painful. It’s been so emotional having Gustave back, I can’t imagine what I’d feel seeing Pierre again, or Dad… and it’s been the better part of a century for him.”
She sinks right back to lay down in the grass, hands folding across her ribs, grass all scrunched up under her.
"Yeah," Lune says quietly. There isn't much else to say to all that. A hint of concern returns. What little she's been around Clea, she has a hard time seeing her being moved— but suppose many people would say the same about Lune herself. Appearances deceive. She just hopes whenever the meeting happens, it will go well. Or at the very least, without heaping more trauma upon anyone. They've enough of that, already.
"Much as he's always been." A small hum, the wryness making a comeback to her tone. "Charming just so. Answering questions with questions, or evading them."
Lune frowns slightly, running her fingers idly through the soft grass around them. "Still. Something's different about him. I just... can't quite put a finger on what."
Sciel glances sidelong at Lune again when the quietness returns, eyes searching Lune's face, her posture. But Lune shifts back to being wry, and Sciel rolls with her.
"I know," she says, a little wistful.
She feels it too, that difference. Not at all like he'd been in their arrival to Etraya, really –– the same man, certainly, but motivated by something different. She thinks about the look on his face and the set of his shoulders and the way his arms had tensed holding the railing. The way his voice had flattened out ––no, not feeling lucky. What's going on with him? Is it fixable? Will they ever understand it? Can they help?
"Where do you even start?" she muses. "Jumping off the skyscraper, wanting Gustave to fight him, being jumpy about Maelle. Living out at Camp."
Lune exhales slowly through her nose, shoulders falling.
"I'm less surprised about the rest than I am about him being so rattled around Maelle. What could have caused it? He's seen her do something, but what? There's more there than he's willing to say. What could have been so bad it's making him act like that?"
The question is burning in her mind, niggling at her.
On a long enough timeline, any of his reactions could make sense, but Sciel isn’t so sure about the here and now. And it’s worse, maybe, that Maelle and Verso have been so isolated from each other since. Is something festering? Or is it time for Verso to shore up his defences, work up some terrible calm for the next encounter?
Her own questions have never felt truth-seeking. Answers, she thinks, will come when they understand each other a little better.
“She Gommaged Renoir, and his mother,” she says. It’s the only thing that makes sense. He knows how too, but that feels beyond them right now, a thing that would encourage Lune’s mind to reel around in circles like a carousel. “He puts on a brave face, but Gustave saw him vulnerable, and it took down his defences long enough for the Gommage to catch up with him.”
"You think that's all it is? Some sort of delayed stress reaction?"
All is maybe an unfair understatement. Losing one's family members is already plenty, even before the Gommage. She's not an expert on the mind, but all Lumièrans are intimately familiar with grief and what it can do to a person. Still.
"I guess it could be, but... I don't know." Lune frowns, still bothered by something elusive about this that she cannot grasp. "It feels like it's more than that, still."
"We all Gommaged, so that's the last it could be," she says. She's not convinced of that, but it's more non-committal than it is any desperation for an alternative. "Unless he's immune to that too, in which case... he's alone."
More than ever.
The sun is shining and the breeze is lovely and they're having a nice afternoon, but the mere concept of being in that situation feels like plunging into ice water. She has to swallow to let that pass, to take another breath, to smile again, bracingly.
"But if he did Gommage, that would be new to him. It could be frightening, too."
It is the last it could be, isn't it? It's the logical conclusion. What else would make sense? And yet...
Lune's expression grows pensive, a small frown knitting at her brows. Dissatisfaction, but underneath it, empathy as well. She understands Sciel's points; none of them can put themselves in Verso's position, not really. Perhaps... a bit later, they can try to broach the topic with him.
"Mm. Yes." She well remembers her own terror, the cloying panic crawling up her throat along with the ashes. "And he could associate that with Maelle. Even without meaning to."
"Right! I'm sure he has good reason to feel afraid, even if he's directing it at the wrong person," she says. "That kind of fear is never completely irrational."
She'd know; the Gommage had been calm, peaceful even, but sometimes stepping out of a loud and raucous party into the comparative quiet of the streets has made her throat close up, her body imagining itself thrashing in complete silence under the waves. People are nice about it, of course. It still feels shameful to explain, but she can.
She shakes her head, sad, disappointed.
"He said I was there. If it was the Gommage, you were right there with us, too. So... when he's ready, we can help him make sense of it."
Lune glances back at Sciel at that, catching that expression on her face. It's partly why she agrees so quickly. "Yeah. Of course."
Lune had lost sight of Verso in the harbor soon after they'd arrived, swept up in the hubbub of bring greeted as returning heroes, but the fact that she didn't see him get Gommaged didn't mean anything concrete.
"In the meanwhile, let's hope he can find other ways of coping that aren't punching Gustave in the face," she says, lips flattening into an unhappy line for a beat at the memory. "If he wants a fight, we're probably overdue some team sparring."
Sciel gives Lune a flash of a smile in turn, appreciative –– they’ll all be fine, she’s sure. Eventually.
“Augh, I am going to lose my mind if we don’t have a good spar sometime soon,” she says. It would be good for all of them, probably. Might be a little tough on Gustave’s pride, but if they’re all at risk of getting rusty, that should even the playing field a little. “Besides, they’re never going to get friendlier with each other if we keep them separated. Sparring’s a good place to start.”
No drinks, neutral ground, some semblance of protocol, an excuse to hit each other.
"Mm— I was hoping maybe one of these missions would help us with finding a new energy source to use with the Lumina Converter. I know there's a way to adjust it so it might use sources other than Chroma to create more Lumina."
Lune shakes her head, making a small sound of dissatisfaction. "It's not just pride, though. It's... bothering Gustave more than he's saying. He really believes he's a liability to us, with less Lumina and comparatively weaker Pictos."
And that in turn bothers Lune, on some raw, fundamental level, that Gustave thinks he's a weakness in the team— even if she cannot deny that when viewed through the lens of hard facts, Gustave is not on the same level as they are. She wants to fix it for him, with him, but so far even their combined efforts have yielded little results.
“Well, if the Converter could be made to work in the first place, there’s no reason you two couldn’t make it run on other things.”
What does she know, honestly, but if other worlds have magic, too, they must have their own way of using it. Channelling it. It’s up to smarter people than her to make that happen. She’ll be there to test it.
“And even if it never happened, we’re all liabilities in one way or another. That’s why we’re better as a team than we are alone,” Sciel says, lighthearted, and a little bit of humour slips into her voice as she adds: “And Verso took a short-cut, anyway, the cheater. He couldn’t do anything until us and the Converter.”
"Here's hoping," Lune says, blowing out a small breath between her lips. She does think Sciel is downplaying the liability issue some, but that's neither here nor there now; she's always one to look at things from a more positive outlook.
When Sciel goes on to rag on Verso, Lune huffs a laugh. "Such disrespect! I'm shocked."
No, no she isn't, since Sciel is absolutely correct.
Sciel nods, moving breezily past Gustave being a liability; all of this is going to be whatever it is, and maybe Gustave will hold them back in a fight someday, but not in any way that’d make her feel poorly about him. None of this would be possible without him, anyway. He could never grip a sword or a pistol again, never see the battlefield again, and he would still have a meaningful part to play.
She raises her arms above her head and stretches out from her toes to her fingertips.
“Oh, I’d like to see him deny it!” she says, grinning. It’s nice to be leant on, though, to be a support to him, even if he’d underestimated them more than once. “And until he gets his chroma back, he has his own catching up to do, anyway.”
Lune doesn't disagree. It's the fact that Gustave himself does that's not sitting right with her, sitting heavily like a stone in the pit of her stomach. They've overcome many hurdles by now, since winding up in Etraya, but there are still some that need to be resolved.
"It's true, though. He couldn't even handle one paltry Axon without us." She sucks air through her teeth in a small tsk, a smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth.
Sciel meets that smirk with a scrunched nose, smiling.
“I told Gustave that, you know,” Sciel says. “What Verso said about the Axons, and the Nevrons that have flattened him. But I guess it’s all the same because we need the Lumina converter, too. All of it comes back to the Sword of Lumière!”
"Oh? Hope he got a chuckle out of it." But probably not. Lune herself only recalls being angry and suspicious in the aftermath of Old Lumière, ready to go toe to toe with Verso over his insistence that they were surely going to die the moment they came face to face with the Axons.
"The Sword of Lumière," she echos wistfully, humming. "What was left of it, at least."
Two women and a teenager. They'd been so optimistic, boarding that ship in the morning of departure. Solemn but optimistic, with their Lumina tech and their protocols and their full team, trained and prepared to perfection— or as close to it as possible. Not one of them could have begun to think they would get violently smashed into pieces the moment they set foot on that darkened shore.
No comfort in anything involving Verso. Sciel just turns her eyes up to the sky, thinking of the Continent, how beautiful it had been anywhere the light touched, anywhere someone saw fit to set a lantern or a candle.
But she knows that wistfulness, that reminder that many died. They did. Hundreds of thousands died so they could get where they are. There is no comfort in that, either, not really, but Sciel has done her mourning for the senseless violence of life and who gets to have it and for how long. How cruel, she thinks, that Lune was made to feel responsible for that, the machinations of other, even crueller people.
“Only a few of us made it to the end, but every single Expedition helped get us there,” she says, voice a little softer, more sober. Every body a warning, every journal or handhold a waypoint. “We made it there together.”
For all the good any of it did. Lune holds back the words just in time, pressing them into the roof of her mouth with her tongue while that familiar blend of guilt and disappointment churns within, the different shades of failure. What inroads she'd begun to make into accepting what had happened in these passing months, the fog had undone, every single whisper still echoing in her ears.
Her fingers pluck at bits of grass, devoting the task too much attention. "Yeah."
As usual, letting her thoughts venture down these paths threatens to plunge her into melancholy, silent obsession and self-flagellation. She forces a hard stop to it, boxes it all up again and shoves it into the back of her mind. Nobody needs to be subjected to her dysfunctions on such a nice day, Sciel least of all.
"We should try to set something up once we're back in Etraya," she says, in a steadier voice. "For the sparring, I mean."
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"Sure have," she says.
Before Auriel, it was regular trips out to Camp with a backpack full of supplies and an itch to spend time with him, worried that he'd come around less if he thought he was intruding on them. Here it's a little more casual: crossing paths on neutral territory, mid-revelry, whenever it suits them.
"He looks good with white hair. It's such a shame he's so self-conscious about it."
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She pauses before she gets carried away with idle speculations, tilting her head and giving Sciel a sidelong glance. "How did he seem to you, otherwise?"
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What a shame to have such a beautiful colour ruined by such a miserable man, but she supposes that’s a rare treasure of everyone dying young; white hair on a young body is so striking, even novel.
As for Verso’s mood:
“Here and there. Less panicked, certainly, but he’s good at rallying,” she says, setting the blade of grass on her thigh and leaning back on both hands. Less outward panic doesn’t mean much when he’s had time to compose himself, and settle into a new life here. “I’m not as worried as I was before.”
Sciel looks sidelong at Lune, pleased.
“I told him about Clea. It was really something, seeing him smile like that.”
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But it never does. Instead, Sciel's expression is bright and pleased, and she mentions Clea. Lune wonders if perhaps that prick of expectancy was just her own concern, projected. She can't say for certain where Verso's head is currently, even after her own conversations with the man.
"He is good at presenting a front," Lune agrees, a touch wryly, but she sobers soon enough. "I wonder if he's been to see her. How it went— what she thought about it. It must be a surprise for her, too. Hopefully a good one."
If Stella or Sol showed up here, Lune would be beside herself. But who knows how Clea would react.
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When she thinks about the way he’d looked at them when he’d first walked into camp, tremendously calm and straightforward as he’d told them that Renoir was Expedition Zero’s commander, she thinks he could deliver the news of the world’s end without the slightest waver.
“I hope so too. I haven’t asked. I thought…” She pauses, pursing her lips together, turning her face up to the sky. “They haven’t seen each other since she died in the Fracture. If he has seen her, it must be painful. It’s been so emotional having Gustave back, I can’t imagine what I’d feel seeing Pierre again, or Dad… and it’s been the better part of a century for him.”
She sinks right back to lay down in the grass, hands folding across her ribs, grass all scrunched up under her.
“How has he been with you?”
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"Much as he's always been." A small hum, the wryness making a comeback to her tone. "Charming just so. Answering questions with questions, or evading them."
Lune frowns slightly, running her fingers idly through the soft grass around them. "Still. Something's different about him. I just... can't quite put a finger on what."
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"I know," she says, a little wistful.
She feels it too, that difference. Not at all like he'd been in their arrival to Etraya, really –– the same man, certainly, but motivated by something different. She thinks about the look on his face and the set of his shoulders and the way his arms had tensed holding the railing. The way his voice had flattened out ––no, not feeling lucky. What's going on with him? Is it fixable? Will they ever understand it? Can they help?
"Where do you even start?" she muses. "Jumping off the skyscraper, wanting Gustave to fight him, being jumpy about Maelle. Living out at Camp."
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"I'm less surprised about the rest than I am about him being so rattled around Maelle. What could have caused it? He's seen her do something, but what? There's more there than he's willing to say. What could have been so bad it's making him act like that?"
The question is burning in her mind, niggling at her.
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Her own questions have never felt truth-seeking. Answers, she thinks, will come when they understand each other a little better.
“She Gommaged Renoir, and his mother,” she says. It’s the only thing that makes sense. He knows how too, but that feels beyond them right now, a thing that would encourage Lune’s mind to reel around in circles like a carousel. “He puts on a brave face, but Gustave saw him vulnerable, and it took down his defences long enough for the Gommage to catch up with him.”
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All is maybe an unfair understatement. Losing one's family members is already plenty, even before the Gommage. She's not an expert on the mind, but all Lumièrans are intimately familiar with grief and what it can do to a person. Still.
"I guess it could be, but... I don't know." Lune frowns, still bothered by something elusive about this that she cannot grasp. "It feels like it's more than that, still."
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More than ever.
The sun is shining and the breeze is lovely and they're having a nice afternoon, but the mere concept of being in that situation feels like plunging into ice water. She has to swallow to let that pass, to take another breath, to smile again, bracingly.
"But if he did Gommage, that would be new to him. It could be frightening, too."
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Lune's expression grows pensive, a small frown knitting at her brows. Dissatisfaction, but underneath it, empathy as well. She understands Sciel's points; none of them can put themselves in Verso's position, not really. Perhaps... a bit later, they can try to broach the topic with him.
"Mm. Yes." She well remembers her own terror, the cloying panic crawling up her throat along with the ashes. "And he could associate that with Maelle. Even without meaning to."
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She'd know; the Gommage had been calm, peaceful even, but sometimes stepping out of a loud and raucous party into the comparative quiet of the streets has made her throat close up, her body imagining itself thrashing in complete silence under the waves. People are nice about it, of course. It still feels shameful to explain, but she can.
She shakes her head, sad, disappointed.
"He said I was there. If it was the Gommage, you were right there with us, too. So... when he's ready, we can help him make sense of it."
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Lune had lost sight of Verso in the harbor soon after they'd arrived, swept up in the hubbub of bring greeted as returning heroes, but the fact that she didn't see him get Gommaged didn't mean anything concrete.
"In the meanwhile, let's hope he can find other ways of coping that aren't punching Gustave in the face," she says, lips flattening into an unhappy line for a beat at the memory. "If he wants a fight, we're probably overdue some team sparring."
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“Augh, I am going to lose my mind if we don’t have a good spar sometime soon,” she says. It would be good for all of them, probably. Might be a little tough on Gustave’s pride, but if they’re all at risk of getting rusty, that should even the playing field a little. “Besides, they’re never going to get friendlier with each other if we keep them separated. Sparring’s a good place to start.”
No drinks, neutral ground, some semblance of protocol, an excuse to hit each other.
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Lune shakes her head, making a small sound of dissatisfaction. "It's not just pride, though. It's... bothering Gustave more than he's saying. He really believes he's a liability to us, with less Lumina and comparatively weaker Pictos."
And that in turn bothers Lune, on some raw, fundamental level, that Gustave thinks he's a weakness in the team— even if she cannot deny that when viewed through the lens of hard facts, Gustave is not on the same level as they are. She wants to fix it for him, with him, but so far even their combined efforts have yielded little results.
"Still. Some sparring couldn't hurt."
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What does she know, honestly, but if other worlds have magic, too, they must have their own way of using it. Channelling it. It’s up to smarter people than her to make that happen. She’ll be there to test it.
“And even if it never happened, we’re all liabilities in one way or another. That’s why we’re better as a team than we are alone,” Sciel says, lighthearted, and a little bit of humour slips into her voice as she adds: “And Verso took a short-cut, anyway, the cheater. He couldn’t do anything until us and the Converter.”
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When Sciel goes on to rag on Verso, Lune huffs a laugh. "Such disrespect! I'm shocked."
No, no she isn't, since Sciel is absolutely correct.
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She raises her arms above her head and stretches out from her toes to her fingertips.
“Oh, I’d like to see him deny it!” she says, grinning. It’s nice to be leant on, though, to be a support to him, even if he’d underestimated them more than once. “And until he gets his chroma back, he has his own catching up to do, anyway.”
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"It's true, though. He couldn't even handle one paltry Axon without us." She sucks air through her teeth in a small tsk, a smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth.
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“I told Gustave that, you know,” Sciel says. “What Verso said about the Axons, and the Nevrons that have flattened him. But I guess it’s all the same because we need the Lumina converter, too. All of it comes back to the Sword of Lumière!”
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"The Sword of Lumière," she echos wistfully, humming. "What was left of it, at least."
Two women and a teenager. They'd been so optimistic, boarding that ship in the morning of departure. Solemn but optimistic, with their Lumina tech and their protocols and their full team, trained and prepared to perfection— or as close to it as possible. Not one of them could have begun to think they would get violently smashed into pieces the moment they set foot on that darkened shore.
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But she knows that wistfulness, that reminder that many died. They did. Hundreds of thousands died so they could get where they are. There is no comfort in that, either, not really, but Sciel has done her mourning for the senseless violence of life and who gets to have it and for how long. How cruel, she thinks, that Lune was made to feel responsible for that, the machinations of other, even crueller people.
“Only a few of us made it to the end, but every single Expedition helped get us there,” she says, voice a little softer, more sober. Every body a warning, every journal or handhold a waypoint. “We made it there together.”
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Her fingers pluck at bits of grass, devoting the task too much attention. "Yeah."
As usual, letting her thoughts venture down these paths threatens to plunge her into melancholy, silent obsession and self-flagellation. She forces a hard stop to it, boxes it all up again and shoves it into the back of her mind. Nobody needs to be subjected to her dysfunctions on such a nice day, Sciel least of all.
"We should try to set something up once we're back in Etraya," she says, in a steadier voice. "For the sparring, I mean."
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“We should,” she says, warmly, and she pushes herself up to sit again, weight leant on one hand, towards Lune. “Can I ask you a question?”
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