Expedition 33 AU. Gustave remembers. He remembers arriving to the paintress’ world, fighting the nevrons and befriending the gestrals and growing as close of a bond with his adopted daughter, Maelle, as possible. He remembers resting at the camp at night with Maelle and Sciel and Lune, and writing in a journal at night, and dreaming of a handsome man with black and grey hair. He even remembers meeting the stranger, who calls himself Verso, late in a few occasions and dancing with him to soft music playing, talking about being stranded in the foreign and hostile land. Gustave insists that the beautiful stranger joins them and stays in safety. He is denied, which is a little strange and sad, but the two always grow closer and closer at night. Verso is defensive and so beautiful and defeated, where Gustave is optimistic and chatty and bubbly and kind with the stranger. He tells the group about the mysterious man. No one believes him. Gustave is only 32. Was 32. He remembers the beach, the panic in seeing the man who killed the whole expedition, Renoir, approach them. He remembers fighting so hard to keep everyone alive, only for Renoir to stab him and kill him. The last thing he sees is Maelle screaming and crying in grief as the light leaves his eyes. He died. And he should have stayed dead. But no. He is resurrected. Alive and well. Sort of. Lumiere is fixed, and Maelle is safe and crying and so scared and traumatized and alive and happy to see him. Gustave is bewildered and disoriented, and he hugs Maelle with heavy tears. And then he sees Verso, the handsome man, and there is a strange tension between them now. It’s made worse when Maelle told Gustave the truth of Verso’s life, how he is a sort of the painter world just like they all are, and how he is the so. If the man who killed him, and he didn’t want to save him out of selfishness and fear, and he’s so sorry. Which is sad, because Gustave and Verso began to get so close and now Gustave wants nothing to do with him. And Verso is hurting and apologizing and trying to make up for the pain he’s inflicted.

Chapter 8: The Grief of Two Worlds

The golden light faded, leaving only the cold, whispering wind of the summit. Verso stood on the edge of the shattered obsidian altar, his hands no longer wisps of pigment and regret but solid, trembling flesh. He looked at them, turned them over, watched the play of real tendons beneath real skin. The Paintress was gone, her final gift a thundering silence inside his new, aching chest.

Gustave stood a few feet away, the brush he’d been ready to wield as a weapon hanging limp at his side. He was staring at Verso’s transformed body, at the soft pink linen of his tunic, at the way his black-and-grey hair now held the light instead of swallowing it. The conflict on Gustave’s face was a physical thing, a storm in his kind hazel eyes.

“You’re real,” Gustave said, the words raw.

“She made me… whole,” Verso whispered, his voice hoarse with a century of disuse. He took a step toward Gustave, then stopped, seeing the flinch. “Gustave.”

“Don’t.” Gustave’s voice cracked. “Just… don’t say my name like that. Not after what I know.”

Maelle watched from beside a spire of fractured light, her green eyes sharp, unblinking. She was a statue of guilt and grief.

Verso’s newly-real heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, living prisoner. He looked from Gustave’s tormented face to the infinite drop behind him, where the canvas-world bled into muted clouds. The love he felt was a geyser, hot and desperate and hopeless. It mingled with the shame, with the inherited rot of his father’s crimes, and it solidified into a single, crystalline decision.

He smiled, a small, broken thing. “You were the light,” he said, his voice gaining strength, carrying on the thin air. “In all that darkness my father made, in all the years of lonely, awful existence… you were the only thing that was ever warm. You loved me. You danced with me. And you never asked for anything.”

“Verso, what are you—” Gustave started, taking a step forward.

“No!” Verso’s command was sharp, final. He held up a hand, his new fingers trembling. “You have to let me go. You have to. You’ve carried this—me—for long enough. The weight of me… it’s breaking you. I see it.”

Tears streamed down Gustave’s face, cutting tracks through the summit’s dust. “You don’t get to decide that!”

“I do,” Verso said, soft and absolute. He backed toward the edge, the void singing a silent hymn behind him. “Thank you. For every secret, for every touch, for seeing the person under the pain. Thank you for loving me. Now let me love you enough to set you free.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He didn’t look at Maelle. He simply stepped backwards off the cliff, his eyes locked on Gustave’s until the last possible moment.

The scream that tore from Gustave was not a word. It was the sound of a world rending. He lunged, his fingers scraping only air where Verso’s pink sleeve had been a fraction before. He collapsed onto the jagged edge, his own cry echoing back at him, a mocking, empty chorus. He screamed and screamed, his body convulsing with sobs, his fists pounding the unfeeling stone until they bled.

Maelle stood frozen. Her breath hitched, her knuckles white where she gripped the obsidian. But no tears came. Her grief was a dry, silent cleaving, a fault line opening inside her chest. She watched her adopted father come undone, and she could not move.

There was no impact. Only a rush of wind, a blur of color, and then a sudden, soft stillness.

Verso opened his eyes.

Crimson and violet swayed around him, a gentle sea under a sky too brightly blue. The scent of lavender and crushed poppy stems filled his nose. He was lying in the field. Their field. The place where Gustave had once lain with him under a fabricated moon, where whispers had been traded like secrets.

And sitting cross-legged beside him, watching the same horizon with hollow eyes, was himself.

Not a reflection. A twin. The same black-and-grey hair, the same sorrowful icy-blue eyes, the same soft curve of jaw. But this other wore dark expedition gear, worn and practical, his expression etched with a different, deeper exhaustion.

Painted Verso pushed himself up on his elbows, the real poppy stems bending under his real palms. He stared. The other Verso—Real Verso—turned his head slowly. They stared at each other. Two halves of a soul, cleft by a mother’s grief and a painter’s obsession, existing in the same fragrant space.

“This is impossible,” Painted Verso breathed.

“Apparently not,” Real Verso replied, his voice a dry rasp. He looked back toward the horizon, where a distant, shimmering window showed a tiny campfire, and a man broken on a cliff. “I felt you die. It was… peaceful.”

“It wasn’t,” Painted Verso said, the memory of the fall a cold vacuum in his gut. Then the other feeling surged, hotter and more terrifying. “I want to live.”

Real Verso nodded slowly. “I know. You only realize you want the cup when it’s dashed from your lips.” He wrapped his arms around his knees. “My Gustave is out there, in the world that is only paint and memory to you. And I miss him. Every second.”

The confession undid him. Painted Verso crumpled, his face in the blossoms. He didn’t just cry; he wailed. It was a sound of shock, of relief at being somehow, impossibly, here, followed immediately by a gale of new, more profound grief. The essence of his life—the one spun from the Paintress’s sorrow and his own desperate escapism—was leaching away, leaving behind a raw, wanting core. He wanted to breathe. He wanted to feel the sun. He wanted to fix the mess he’d made.

He wanted Gustave.

The ache was physical, a constriction around his heart so violent he gasped. His chest heaved, his newly-solid breasts feeling heavy and aching, a biological echo of the emotional emptiness. “She won’t bring me back,” he choked out between sobs, thinking of Maelle’s stony, tearless face on the cliff. “I ruined it. I had him. I had his love, right there in the dark, and I was too much of a coward to hold onto it. And now he’s up there, and he’s broken because of me, and I’m down here wanting…”

Real Verso shifted closer. He didn’t touch his other self, but his presence was a quiet solidarity. “You had to die to want to live,” he said, echoing the thought forming in Painted Verso’s stormy mind. “No matter how or where. I understand. I chose a different cage, but it’s a cage all the same. We both look through the window at what we can’t have.”

Together, they sat in the field as the light softened. In the shimmering window hanging in the air before them, the painted world moved on. They saw Sciel and Lune leading a group to shore up a fractured bridge of crystal. They saw others tending to glowing groves, building shelters from luminescent wood. Life, resilient and fragile, was stitching itself back together over the scars Renoir and the Paintress had left.

Painted Verso watched Gustave, now being pulled gently to his feet by Maelle. His big shoulders were slumped, his face blank with devastation. The sight was a knife twisting in Verso’s gut.

“I want him so much it feels like dying all over again,” he whispered.

“I know,” Real Verso said again, his own tears falling silently for a husband in another reality. “I know.”