"I can't imagine he'd say no," she says, and she feels grateful for both that and Lune's agreement; anything that lifts Maelle's spirits is a good note.
And perhaps, she thinks, when Gustave and Maelle are ready to stand on their own again, she'll get a place. Maybe something to offer to Lune, too, in case neither of them wants to go it fully alone, but if she's being honest with herself, it would be nice not to explain any visitors to a sixteen year old and two people who can't find anything romantic about ferris wheels.
"In some ways it's like this hotel, you know. The technology, the conveniences. But if you venture out beyond the apartments, there's a lot of open land and strange buildings. Nothing matches! It's like dozens of Sirène islands, all out of place."
Maelle's enthusiasm lifts Lune's spirits for a moment, a tiny smile curving at her mouth for a second. At least her arrival hasn't disrupted whatever existing group dynamic that's been shaped up in her absence too badly. Hopefully.
"Hm– I'm looking forward to seeing it all."
Her left arm drops to hang loosely by her side, right hand clasping the elbow– uncertainty. The curiosity and interest of discovery sparking up within her push against all this newness, and just... new trauma. She probably does need that break at some point in spite of arguing the opposite a while ago.
The group dynamic is a mess, and no small part of Maelle wonders if the tension would be so bad had Lune been with them from the start. She feels hopeful that Lune will help them make sense of things and encourage them to actually solve some of their problems. Somehow.
"We didn't get a chance to explore a lot before this mission. No will be able complain they're bored," she says. Though she has far more appreciation for quiet moments now, especially when she can look over and see Gustave whole and alive as if nothing terrible ever happened.
“I did some exploring,” Sciel replies, amused. “I watched a knight fight a large dragon, and I visited an island and drank rum out of a pineapple with that ‘old’ man.” She glances at Lune, smiling. “Forty-four!”
But since her attention is on Lune, her gaze drifts over that uncomfortable posture, the short response. Sciel glides to her feet, moving a little more towards Lune’s space slowly, obviously. (She’s not going to touch. She promises.) She gestures back towards the couch.
“Are you sure you don’t want that break? Or to just sit?”
That, at least, dredges a small huff of laughter from Lune, her smile brief but genuine. "That does sound like you, Sciel."
Said in all affection! In the face of Sciel's obvious concern, Lune realizes she's let her focus drift, to get distracted. She can obsess later, not now. Shaking her head, her hands migrate to her waist instead.
"Yeah. It's just... a lot on my mind." Understatement.
Maelle rolls her eyes with an amused smile. Sciel didn't waste time, but to be fair, Maelle's found it difficult to go anywhere Gustave isn't. She keeps telling herself it'll get easier, but maybe not so much when the scenery keeps changing.
When Sciel motions to the couch, Maelle scoots over to the far side. See? Plenty of room.
"Is that new?"
Look, their situation is far less bleak than it once was.
It could be time to round Lune up and gently crowd her towards the couch until she’s made to take a break, but maybe not; Lune is not quite so permissible, and if she insists she’s fine, it’s so, and if she wants to sit, she’ll go. Sciel drifts past her instead, off to the kitchenette.
“What’s the thought nagging at you most, then?” she asks, taking a glass from the cupboard and filling it from the tap.
The rain of ash and petals comes back at the question and Lune has to take a steadying breath, to glance down at herself to check she's still standing in one piece, not slowly fading away. Swallowing, Lune manages to unroot her feet from the floor and move to the sofa, finally submitting and taking a seat, leaning her elbows against her thighs.
"The Gommage," she says slowly, perhaps predictably. Maybe she should be more concerned by this inexplicable change of scenery, but she isn't. Maybe it's just her mind latching onto something that's familiar rather than processing everything else that's new and overwhelming just yet.
"But we don't need to get into that, now. I'll need to speak with Verso later. Ask a few questions."
Maelle's expression falls when Lune speaks. Predictable, yes, but she had hoped--
Well, what she hoped isn't necessarily the right thing. She turns in her spot to face Lune, attentive.
"We can," she offers. "I still don't understand what happened, but I guess we were all operating under the assumption killing the Paintress would save us. Instead..."
She lifts and drops her hands. It pushed them over the brink, into oblivion. After a false moment of hope. Maybe that's the worst part--the Gommage came after they returned to Lumiere.
Sciel comes back with the glass and offers it to Lune. If not, it goes on the coffee table.
"I haven't asked him about the Gommage," Sciel says. "A little about what happened on the Monolith, but..."
She shrugs. Verso, not bringing up anything of his own volition? Shock of the century. She can hardly blame him for how flippant he's been about it all, anyway. She's been plenty relaxed herself, unbothered by the sensation of her body drifting away on the breeze, even less so by seeing friendly faces on the other side.
Whatever happens next, who knows? But it's not over. Not even close.
Lune turns her head to look at Maelle when she speaks, a small, wan smile crossing her lips for a brief moment. "Yeah. It should have."
But it didn't. And since it didn't, a critical part of what they thought was the truth isn't so. Somewhere, there's a faulty supposition– and Lune needs to discover it. Verso is her only lead currently, one that may still amount to nothing. She accepts the glass from Sciel with a nod of thanks, but only cradles the coolness of it between her palms for now. She shrugs one shoulder at Sciel's question.
"Could be nothing. Could be something." Her lips press into an unhappy line for a beat. "Hard to be certain with Verso, isn't it? But after everything... I can't not ask, either."
That's all she can do. She'd been so close to pressing him, when they'd been on their way back home to Lumière upon Esquie. She never did get the chance before they arrived and, well...
"If he knows something and still won't tell, he can at least make the conscious decision to lie to my face and live with the choice."
It's petty, really. Maybe it won't even change anything. But that won't stop her.
She looks between Sciel and Lune, frowning, thinking back to when she first ran into Verso.
"I... don't think he knew what to expect, after we killed the Paintress. How could he? He seemed just as... defeated. I think," she adds, because so much of what they know about Verso, in retrospect, isn't what it seemed at the time.
"He probably thought it was over and he'd finally done what he'd wanted to do for all those years and then..."
“He thought it would be over, too,” she muses. “The first thing he said to me here is that now we’re immortal…”
He’s been robbed of the normal life he wanted, just as much as they did. She thinks of his face, how age might deepen the lines of it. How much he might look like his father.
She pivots before her thoughts get too into the weeds.
“I hope you get something out of him,” she says. And, a little dry: “Gustave might like proof we don’t just idly accept whatever Verso says, too.”
Lune frowns. What does that mean, though? He thought it would be over. There are several ways to interpret that, after everything, but she's not sure actually saying that out loud is helpful.
"Look... I like Verso, too. I want him to have the closure he needs and finally be at peace. But I can't say that I trust him. By now, he's kept too many things to himself and appointed himself the judge on what we do and do not need to know."
That's never sat right with Lune, but she doesn't want to come across as some villain, either, out to tear Verso down, because she isn't. It's just difficult to be so suspicious of someone you've come to like. Someone who's is supposed to also be a part of their team, on the same side.
"I know it's easy to speculate in hindsight, but I think we've earned the right to ask him some hard questions, too."
Fair, she supposes, but Maelle doesn't like it. Why is everyone so fixated on what's already passed? There's nothing that can be done.
"So what do we do if we find out Verso is still hiding things, or... I don't even know what else he could hide. Cut him out? Tell him thanks for helping us defeat Renoir and the Paintress, but don't ever talk to us again?"
Please. Maelle shrugs, moody. None of it matters when they're so far from Lumière. They're alive. They have Gustave. It should be enough.
Sciel finds her mouth settling into a tense line almost immediately, but she pushes that down; it's not really about her, and she knows that. It's just too easy to feel in the middle of everyone, even now, between Lune's desire for closure and Maelle's complete indifference to it. And Lune hasn't yet seen Verso and Gustave in the same room together, and Lune hasn't been accused of excusing him, of moving on too quickly or not enough, of––
She's going to get a water for herself. For Maelle, too. She replies as she moves:
"You're fine, friend. And I'm not at all opposed to asking him hard questions, either," she says, sunnily enough. There can't be a 'but' here. "We just have to be cautious about it. He'd probably disappear on us long before we decided to cut him out, and then we'd have nothing."
Lune beats back a small wave of frustration, knowing it's not anybody's fault. But she can't just move on from what happened with a shrug of her shoulders, not after literally her entire life has been tied up in preventing the very fate Lumière suffered. She can't yet face the possibility that all of her hard work – and her parents' – has been for nothing, that she'd wasted her life fighting the inevitable when she could have been living it. Verso may not be the answer and he may not have the answers, but at the moment, he's the only thing they do have.
"Yeah. You're right," she acknowledges Sciel's caution, finally taking a drink from the glass of water. To Maelle: "No one is saying cut him out. That wouldn't be fair, nor smart."
Lune imagines that would only drive him to Renoir, potentially. They don't want that, surely.
"He doesn't share anything he doesn't deem important. I just wonder what even is important anymore," Maelle says with a shrug, trying to look unbothered despite being very bothered. She doesn't approve of lying, but she can certainly understand.
There's no point in trying to dig for truths when it won't change how they are now. As much as she would like for Gustave to trust Verso, she has a hard time imagining it.
Sciel comes back with two more glasses. She holds one out to Maelle, scrutinizing her face for a moment; whatever Maelle's trying to hide, it's not going very well.
She feels much more sure about her own face, at least.
"He doesn't share things he deems important if it's personal," she says, like a gentle correction, because that's a lot of things, now.
Sciel pauses, and elects to sit on the coffee table, across from both of them. She sets her glass down with her and curls her fingers around the table's edge. There's a million things floating around in her head. She chews on it a moment, the words sitting on the tip of her tongue, then:
"I feel like I shouldn't say this," she admits, "It feels like prying, but I can't avoid that when it's all tied in together. Still... I'd like to understand how his mother became the Paintress."
And that that's meant for all of them, going back generations.
Lune feels like Maelle may have had it right the first time, but says nothing to counter. Arguably both Maelle and Sciel probably get Verso better than she does.
"Just because revealing something may not make a difference now doesn't mean it has no meaning or importance." She knows her and Maelle are (obviously) on different sides of that argument.
She gives Sciel a steady look, nodding after a moment.
"Agreed. That feels like a good place to begin. And how did the Gommage come to be tied up with her— why? If it's because of her, why did it come for us all regardless once she was gone? It makes no sense."
Some of this is Lune working it out aloud; and as if to counter the obvious argument, she adds, "Verso may not know, but we should still at least ask."
Maelle takes the glass of water but doesn't drink. It rests between her knees, hands clasp around it. She falls quiet as Sciel and Lune both speak. She wonders, too, about the Paintress. The nail of her thumb idly picks at the lip of the glass. The Paintress. Renoir. Alicia. Verso. There's so much there they don't understand.
"Is the Gommage tied to the Paintress?" She asks, voice steady, but small. She hasn't liked thinking too much about that day, because it ended with their deaths despite victory. She looks down at her hands, thumb still anxiously catching on the glass. "What I did to her, to Renoir... was that something else, or...?"
“He must know something,” she says. “I’ve asked about his mother. He changed the subject.”
As Verso is wont to do.
But there’s something more important at play now, and her attention swivels to Maelle. Every time Gustave has remarked on how far they’ve come with the Lumina converter, she’s politely swallowed the thought that he doesn’t know the half of it. The girl sitting on her hotel room couch now has the very same power that they’ve built their lives around for decades, and none of them have wanted to say anything about it for over a month.
Sciel finds herself shaking her head.
“It was Gommage, Maelle,” she says. No point in denying it. “But you didn’t Gommage us and then yourself. So does that mean there’s more of them out there?”
Lune glances from Sciel to Maelle, nodding her agreement. It was definitely Gommage, what Maelle did to Renoir and the Paintress, but that's all they can say about it for certain.
"I thought at first that it was the Curator, but then you did it again, independently." To the Paintress. Lune was so fascinated with the anomaly at the time that she didn't question it further. And there wasn't time, anyway. "Though clearly, it was something the Curator did to you that... unlocked it."
She frowns pensively. Unbeknownst to her, Lune echoes Sciel's thoughts; safe to imagine Gustave probably doesn't know about that particular detail. It will be extremely difficult to explain to him something that they don't really understand themselves. Lune's gaze tracks back to Sciel. Her question is an uncomfortable one, but the reasoning can be proven viable by simple process of elimination.
"If the Gommage is not tied to the Paintress, nor the Curator..." And certainly not Maelle. "Then perhaps it is because of someone else. We've been given evidence now that this... power? Ability? It's not so individualistic as we may have once perceived."
But that just opens up a whole new venue of questions.
Why me? The nightmares, the Curator's attention, the remarks and feelings here and there that still make no sense to her. Things only got more confusing once they entered the Monolith.
"... I don't feel like I could do it again now, if I tried," she says, eyes downcast. Not that there's anyone to try it on, and it seems the Gommage simply doesn't exist in the places they've been. "If there's some other person or being involved in this, I can't imagine we're going to find out the truth this far from Lumiere."
Sciel feels her shoulders dropping a little, her posture bending under the weight of these things they are powerless to untangle themselves from. Horrible conversations lie ahead of them, with both Gustave and Verso, and perhaps both at once. There’s no death march towards annihilation to focus them. Their ties to each other are not so strong that they could not break under too much pressure.
She finds herself looking at Lune even as Maelle speaks, her expression vaguely tense.
“Verso can’t know much about that,” Sciel says.
She regrets it even as it comes out of her mouth –– there’s no real need to be sure of anything, on that subject –– but it feels right to her. Why would he bother leading them to the top of the monolith if he knew there was something else beyond her? Why take them on a detour that could just get them killed? Why would he have them kill his mother, of all beings, if the real culprit was elsewhere?
A worse thought:
“Renoir might, but he wouldn’t give us a straight answer even to save his life.”
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And perhaps, she thinks, when Gustave and Maelle are ready to stand on their own again, she'll get a place. Maybe something to offer to Lune, too, in case neither of them wants to go it fully alone, but if she's being honest with herself, it would be nice not to explain any visitors to a sixteen year old and two people who can't find anything romantic about ferris wheels.
"In some ways it's like this hotel, you know. The technology, the conveniences. But if you venture out beyond the apartments, there's a lot of open land and strange buildings. Nothing matches! It's like dozens of Sirène islands, all out of place."
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"Hm– I'm looking forward to seeing it all."
Her left arm drops to hang loosely by her side, right hand clasping the elbow– uncertainty. The curiosity and interest of discovery sparking up within her push against all this newness, and just... new trauma. She probably does need that break at some point in spite of arguing the opposite a while ago.
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"We didn't get a chance to explore a lot before this mission. No will be able complain they're bored," she says. Though she has far more appreciation for quiet moments now, especially when she can look over and see Gustave whole and alive as if nothing terrible ever happened.
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But since her attention is on Lune, her gaze drifts over that uncomfortable posture, the short response. Sciel glides to her feet, moving a little more towards Lune’s space slowly, obviously. (She’s not going to touch. She promises.) She gestures back towards the couch.
“Are you sure you don’t want that break? Or to just sit?”
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Said in all affection! In the face of Sciel's obvious concern, Lune realizes she's let her focus drift, to get distracted. She can obsess later, not now. Shaking her head, her hands migrate to her waist instead.
"Yeah. It's just... a lot on my mind." Understatement.
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When Sciel motions to the couch, Maelle scoots over to the far side. See? Plenty of room.
"Is that new?"
Look, their situation is far less bleak than it once was.
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It could be time to round Lune up and gently crowd her towards the couch until she’s made to take a break, but maybe not; Lune is not quite so permissible, and if she insists she’s fine, it’s so, and if she wants to sit, she’ll go. Sciel drifts past her instead, off to the kitchenette.
“What’s the thought nagging at you most, then?” she asks, taking a glass from the cupboard and filling it from the tap.
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"The Gommage," she says slowly, perhaps predictably. Maybe she should be more concerned by this inexplicable change of scenery, but she isn't. Maybe it's just her mind latching onto something that's familiar rather than processing everything else that's new and overwhelming just yet.
"But we don't need to get into that, now. I'll need to speak with Verso later. Ask a few questions."
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Well, what she hoped isn't necessarily the right thing. She turns in her spot to face Lune, attentive.
"We can," she offers. "I still don't understand what happened, but I guess we were all operating under the assumption killing the Paintress would save us. Instead..."
She lifts and drops her hands. It pushed them over the brink, into oblivion. After a false moment of hope. Maybe that's the worst part--the Gommage came after they returned to Lumiere.
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"I haven't asked him about the Gommage," Sciel says. "A little about what happened on the Monolith, but..."
She shrugs. Verso, not bringing up anything of his own volition? Shock of the century. She can hardly blame him for how flippant he's been about it all, anyway. She's been plenty relaxed herself, unbothered by the sensation of her body drifting away on the breeze, even less so by seeing friendly faces on the other side.
Whatever happens next, who knows? But it's not over. Not even close.
"What do you think he knows?"
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But it didn't. And since it didn't, a critical part of what they thought was the truth isn't so. Somewhere, there's a faulty supposition– and Lune needs to discover it. Verso is her only lead currently, one that may still amount to nothing. She accepts the glass from Sciel with a nod of thanks, but only cradles the coolness of it between her palms for now. She shrugs one shoulder at Sciel's question.
"Could be nothing. Could be something." Her lips press into an unhappy line for a beat. "Hard to be certain with Verso, isn't it? But after everything... I can't not ask, either."
That's all she can do. She'd been so close to pressing him, when they'd been on their way back home to Lumière upon Esquie. She never did get the chance before they arrived and, well...
"If he knows something and still won't tell, he can at least make the conscious decision to lie to my face and live with the choice."
It's petty, really. Maybe it won't even change anything. But that won't stop her.
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"I... don't think he knew what to expect, after we killed the Paintress. How could he? He seemed just as... defeated. I think," she adds, because so much of what they know about Verso, in retrospect, isn't what it seemed at the time.
"He probably thought it was over and he'd finally done what he'd wanted to do for all those years and then..."
She wiggles her fingers. Petals and darkness.
"We lost."
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He’s been robbed of the normal life he wanted, just as much as they did. She thinks of his face, how age might deepen the lines of it. How much he might look like his father.
She pivots before her thoughts get too into the weeds.
“I hope you get something out of him,” she says. And, a little dry: “Gustave might like proof we don’t just idly accept whatever Verso says, too.”
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"Look... I like Verso, too. I want him to have the closure he needs and finally be at peace. But I can't say that I trust him. By now, he's kept too many things to himself and appointed himself the judge on what we do and do not need to know."
That's never sat right with Lune, but she doesn't want to come across as some villain, either, out to tear Verso down, because she isn't. It's just difficult to be so suspicious of someone you've come to like. Someone who's is supposed to also be a part of their team, on the same side.
"I know it's easy to speculate in hindsight, but I think we've earned the right to ask him some hard questions, too."
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"So what do we do if we find out Verso is still hiding things, or... I don't even know what else he could hide. Cut him out? Tell him thanks for helping us defeat Renoir and the Paintress, but don't ever talk to us again?"
Please. Maelle shrugs, moody. None of it matters when they're so far from Lumière. They're alive. They have Gustave. It should be enough.
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She's going to get a water for herself. For Maelle, too. She replies as she moves:
"You're fine, friend. And I'm not at all opposed to asking him hard questions, either," she says, sunnily enough. There can't be a 'but' here. "We just have to be cautious about it. He'd probably disappear on us long before we decided to cut him out, and then we'd have nothing."
No answers and no Verso.
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"Yeah. You're right," she acknowledges Sciel's caution, finally taking a drink from the glass of water. To Maelle: "No one is saying cut him out. That wouldn't be fair, nor smart."
Lune imagines that would only drive him to Renoir, potentially. They don't want that, surely.
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There's no point in trying to dig for truths when it won't change how they are now. As much as she would like for Gustave to trust Verso, she has a hard time imagining it.
"What are we looking for?"
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She feels much more sure about her own face, at least.
"He doesn't share things he deems important if it's personal," she says, like a gentle correction, because that's a lot of things, now.
Sciel pauses, and elects to sit on the coffee table, across from both of them. She sets her glass down with her and curls her fingers around the table's edge. There's a million things floating around in her head. She chews on it a moment, the words sitting on the tip of her tongue, then:
"I feel like I shouldn't say this," she admits, "It feels like prying, but I can't avoid that when it's all tied in together. Still... I'd like to understand how his mother became the Paintress."
And that that's meant for all of them, going back generations.
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"Just because revealing something may not make a difference now doesn't mean it has no meaning or importance." She knows her and Maelle are (obviously) on different sides of that argument.
She gives Sciel a steady look, nodding after a moment.
"Agreed. That feels like a good place to begin. And how did the Gommage come to be tied up with her— why? If it's because of her, why did it come for us all regardless once she was gone? It makes no sense."
Some of this is Lune working it out aloud; and as if to counter the obvious argument, she adds, "Verso may not know, but we should still at least ask."
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"Is the Gommage tied to the Paintress?" She asks, voice steady, but small. She hasn't liked thinking too much about that day, because it ended with their deaths despite victory. She looks down at her hands, thumb still anxiously catching on the glass. "What I did to her, to Renoir... was that something else, or...?"
And why her?
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As Verso is wont to do.
But there’s something more important at play now, and her attention swivels to Maelle. Every time Gustave has remarked on how far they’ve come with the Lumina converter, she’s politely swallowed the thought that he doesn’t know the half of it. The girl sitting on her hotel room couch now has the very same power that they’ve built their lives around for decades, and none of them have wanted to say anything about it for over a month.
Sciel finds herself shaking her head.
“It was Gommage, Maelle,” she says. No point in denying it. “But you didn’t Gommage us and then yourself. So does that mean there’s more of them out there?”
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"I thought at first that it was the Curator, but then you did it again, independently." To the Paintress. Lune was so fascinated with the anomaly at the time that she didn't question it further. And there wasn't time, anyway. "Though clearly, it was something the Curator did to you that... unlocked it."
She frowns pensively. Unbeknownst to her, Lune echoes Sciel's thoughts; safe to imagine Gustave probably doesn't know about that particular detail. It will be extremely difficult to explain to him something that they don't really understand themselves. Lune's gaze tracks back to Sciel. Her question is an uncomfortable one, but the reasoning can be proven viable by simple process of elimination.
"If the Gommage is not tied to the Paintress, nor the Curator..." And certainly not Maelle. "Then perhaps it is because of someone else. We've been given evidence now that this... power? Ability? It's not so individualistic as we may have once perceived."
But that just opens up a whole new venue of questions.
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"... I don't feel like I could do it again now, if I tried," she says, eyes downcast. Not that there's anyone to try it on, and it seems the Gommage simply doesn't exist in the places they've been. "If there's some other person or being involved in this, I can't imagine we're going to find out the truth this far from Lumiere."
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She finds herself looking at Lune even as Maelle speaks, her expression vaguely tense.
“Verso can’t know much about that,” Sciel says.
She regrets it even as it comes out of her mouth –– there’s no real need to be sure of anything, on that subject –– but it feels right to her. Why would he bother leading them to the top of the monolith if he knew there was something else beyond her? Why take them on a detour that could just get them killed? Why would he have them kill his mother, of all beings, if the real culprit was elsewhere?
A worse thought:
“Renoir might, but he wouldn’t give us a straight answer even to save his life.”
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