It’s not an admonishment, you know. You don’t have to do anything about it if you don’t want to –– especially if it’s what you need to do to feel comfort. How do you want to be about all this?
[Sciel pauses, looking at Maelle, and then she puts the cards back together in a deck and slides them away from them. Forget the cards.]
Maelle, a normal person takes years to grieve a lost loved one, and spends years looking for them in other people. You’ll be asking for yourself what to do for a long time. There is no magic answer.
It is a lot. [She can agree with that.] Perhaps we can think about it differently, though.
We didn't think we'd ever see Gustave again. Now we have him, hale and whole. We also have another opportunity to save our world. I think any other problem after that is pretty manageable.
It doesn't. It's strange –– I keep thinking there must be a reason it's us. Everyone in Lumière, all the Expeditions, everyone in the 33, and it's just us?
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Either, if you want to talk about it.
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[There was still a wall between her and Emma, after all.]
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[Either could find themselves jockeying for their own version of normalcy.]
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... could it be both? Somehow?
[She would love to be able to cut herself in two like Verso, so she could be with both Gustave and Verso and never have to choose.]
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Of course it can be. Especially if that’s the answer that speaks to you.
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[Maelle's still not sure how much she believes it, but it's... something. Maybe it'll get her thinking, at least.]
The tension, the walls? The clinging?
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[Sciel is the most normal person she knows.]
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Maelle, a normal person takes years to grieve a lost loved one, and spends years looking for them in other people. You’ll be asking for yourself what to do for a long time. There is no magic answer.
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Ooh. You're making me sound normal.
[Maelle is sure she would grieve Gustave for the rest of her life, had she actually gotten to live it upon returning to Lumiere.]
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You are. You’re very normal.
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[She says with a small smile. The touch is nice.]
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Oh please, I’m lived with you for months and months now, if you were strange I’d have noticed.
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[You're in it, Sciel.]
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He is strange, but it’s an endearing sort of strange.
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[Not the get returned to the orphanage kind of strange!]
It just feels like... endless problems. No matter what we do.
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We didn't think we'd ever see Gustave again. Now we have him, hale and whole. We also have another opportunity to save our world. I think any other problem after that is pretty manageable.
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It still surprises me sometimes. That he's... really here. And okay. Relatively speaking.
[The same could be said for them, but his death was far worse than the Gommage.]
Does it catch you off guard sometimes, too?
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... yeah. Losing him was the worst thing to ever happen and getting him back has been the best. It's--a lot. It doesn't feel real.
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[Their Disaster Expedition.]
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[None of them were, but there's a difference, in her mind, between a slaughter and the way Gustave had been taken down. Too methodical, maybe.]
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[At the expense of Lumière, maybe. Maelle doesn't fibd herself terribly upset about that. Not with what she has here.]
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[It isn’t the whole of it. She doesn’t even think of Lumière; she’s thinking of who else she’d want back.]
But whatever it is, or whatever’s going on… we can work through it, yeah?
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