Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He wakes to a world he never wanted to see again.

A world of running paint…of scarlet and ivory petals. Of currents of cloud, and a monolith far in the distance where a number once glowed.

“Verso?”

A high voice, hesitant.

Alicia.

Maelle.

His heart begins to pound right away; his hand splays out across his chest, finding himself painfully whole. He looks up and finds his sister—not his sister, the other Verso’s sister, the real Verso’s sister—looking down at him.

“It’s you,” she whispers. “You’re back…you’re alive.”

She throws her arms around him, and he knows…he wasn’t successful.

All he did with this long and arduous quest was give himself over to a new and cruel god.

***

Verso was a gifted pianist.

His copy is too.

And this, Maelle believes, is a reason for him to live: to carry out Verso’s dream of abandoning life as a painter, to be a musician instead. So he plays at the opera house each week in Lumiere for an adoring audience of Maelle’s painted puppets, and they clap and cheer…and her eyes, her eyes vacant and coated with splatters of paint—

His friends, her playthings, try to talk to him. They try to remind him that he is of their world…but he isn’t, is he? He never really was.

He’s a copy of the man who used to be the boy who made this place. Out of control as much as the rest of them, cursed with the terrible knowledge of what it was to live out there.

The music is clean, perfect, hollow. Every note shines like glass. Every crescendo feels like a scream.

The audience cheers him on.

Painted smiles stretched too wide. Cheers in eerie harmony. Choreographed, and even Maelle beams at him with too much hope. As if this is healing. As if this is life.

And beside her…a beautiful doll. Lune, smiling.

When he’d first met them, he thought of Expedition 33 as little more than accessories. It was what he’d had to do over the years, watching them be erased, generation by generation. Then…he’d learned their stories. He’d gotten to know them. And even though he knew the canvas needed to be destroyed, he came to see their stories as having value, their lives as beautiful ephemera.

Falling for Lune had been an accident. It had made his attempt at destroying the canvas far more painful. He hasn’t been able to so much as look at her since he was painted back to life.

But she comes to his performance every night, and she watches, and she smiles…

…then one night he meets her eyes, and he sees everything.

She wants out, too.

***

That is how he finds himself at her apartment, long after sunset, after most everyone else has gone to bed…standing on the stoop, raking a hand through his hair.

Nervous like he’s never kissed a girl. Like he’s never kissed this girl.

Or maybe he’s nervous because of what he’s about to ask her.

He knocks tentatively, considers walking away. A light is on upstairs in the loft, but the apartment is otherwise dark. Perhaps she’s already gone to bed—

The door clicks, opens.

His words get caught in his throat.

“Verso?” she breathes.

She’s wearing a white blouse and loose tan slacks, barefoot as always. Her hair is in a lazy braid over one shoulder, the golden lumina tech on her left arm catching the streetlight nearby.

“I uh…I hope I’m not intruding,” he says. Awkward, clumsy…embarrassing.

She shakes her head. “Not at all.” She steps aside. “Come in, please.”

So he steps inside.

The door closes behind him with a soft thud, Lune coming around him and walking toward the cozy kitchen at the back of the apartment. The room—a small sitting area and office—is littered with books and papers, notebooks full of ramblings. A kettle is on the stove, and it starts to whistle as Verso shuffles awkwardly into Lune’s living space.

He doesn’t sit down.

He’s not sure if he’s allowed.

“Would you like some tea?” she asks. “I’m making chamomile.”

It almost makes him laugh…how real each and every detail is. People here simply living their lives, all thanks to the fractured soul of a dead man, painting into eternity or until someone finally lets him rest.

“That would be lovely,” Verso says.

Lune moves around the kitchen, gathering mugs, putting honey in both. She remembers how he takes his tea. He isn’t sure how that makes him feel. Nor is he sure how he feels when he spots the guitar in the corner, and remembers the sight of a guitar in Lune’s hands on a magical night on the continent, the only thing hiding miles of starlit skin. How he’d taken the guitar from her and laid her in the violet flowers, mouth finding the heat of her lips, her breasts, her hips…

“You still take honey?” she asks, coming back into the room.

He nods.

“Then sit,” she says, gesturing at a couch with only two very crowded spots, surrounded by papers.

He does as she says, lowering himself carefully onto the edge of the couch, like he might break something if he gets too comfortable. Maybe himself. Lune sets the mugs down on the low table, pushing a small stack of maps and sketches aside with one forearm. One of them flutters to the floor—he catches a glimpse of notes on how to harness the power of chroma.

She sits next to him, not close, not far—just enough space to feel. Her warmth. Her presence.

Her choice not to close the gap.

“Why are you here, Verso?” she murmurs.

He grips his mug in both hands, enjoying the heat on his palms.

Well…no point beating around the bush, is there?

“I want you to kill me.”

Lune’s brow furrows, fingers curling slightly tighter around the cup.

“You…you want me to kill you,” she repeats. “But you’re immortal. We all—”

“No, not kill me,” he says. “I want you to unpaint me, Lune. For good.”

She blinks several times in quick succession. “You—I don’t—I’m not a paintress, Verso.”

“But you are the most brilliant woman in Lumiére.”

A faint blush paints her cheeks, biting her lip as she looks down at her tea. When he met her, she was so unflappable; he’d found it to be a particularly proud moment when he finally got a smile out of her, a blush, a laugh. He finds himself proud once again, watching the effect he has on her.

Monoco would tell him he relies to much on his good looks and charm.

He hasn’t spoken to Monoco since he returned, either.

“I’m not sure what you expect me to do,” Lune finally says. “If we understood how to gommage…well, we would never have been in this predicament to begin with. The whole point is that we are products of the canvas; we don’t have any tangible effect on this world.”

He reaches out, his hand covering hers on the cup. Lune’s blush deepens. He feels like a bastard—it’s been a matter of minutes and he’s already manipulating her again.

“Will you do it? Or…will you try?”

She swallows hard. “Maelle…what if she just brings you back again?”

“I hope to find a way not to let that happen,” he says.

And that is how they begin.

With two cups of tea, and a man begging for death.

Chapter Text

Lune does her research.

It’s what she does best, of course. It’s what she’s always done best. She was born to go on Expedition, raised to be intelligent, discerning. She did not have time for friends or hobbies or lovers. 

But…Sciel and Maelle and Gustave were her friends.

Music was her hobby.

And Verso was…

Verso is sitting in a chair at her tiny dining table, wearing a white dress shirt rolled up to the elbows, a pair of slacks that fit impossibly well. She wonders if he was painted prettier than the original or if his model was just as lovely. He has always seemed surreal to her. 

“So…you're doing what, exactly?” he asks as she ties a tourniquet around his elbow and prepares a syringe. “This is all very mad scientist.”

Lune snorts. “I'm taking samples so I can experiment with the application of different kinds of chroma. Or would you prefer I experiment on your living tissue?”

“Well, I did once cut myself in half for your entertainment.”

Lune cocks an eyebrow. “You're funny for a man who wants to die.”

“Is there anything funnier than being immortal and yearning for death?”

Lune meets his eyes. “I can think of a few things.”

Verso watches her as she presses her fingers to the crook of his arm, finding the vein with precise, unhurried intent. He doesn’t flinch when the needle goes in. She didn’t expect him to.

“You know,” he says, tilting his head, “there’s something disarmingly intimate about this.”

She doesn’t look up. “Is that a flirtation or an existential observation?”

He hums. “Yes.”

The vial fills slowly. She watches the ribbon of color bloom through the glass, crimson red like anyone else's. 

“You could have talked to me,” she says. “After.”

Verso stills, barely moving as Lune works—like he doesn't even feel the needle. 

“I thought you might be angry.”

“I was.”

“Then it seems my intuition was correct—”

“It wasn't,” she interrupts. “Verso…when you hurt someone you care for, you take responsibility.”

He meets her eyes. “I do care for you,” he says. “I hope you know that.”

She takes that, brings it in, internalizes it. “Would you mind removing your shirt for me?”

A smirk curls his lips. “Take me to dinner first.”

She slides her eyes up toward him.

“Fine,” he says. 

He unbuttons his shirt and slides it off his shoulders with that awful grace of his, skin luminous in the lamplight. It isn’t the first time she’s wondered about his scars, the ones that mark his skin like graphite. She isn’t sure if it makes him look like a weathered, real person , or more of a sketch, a facsimile of the man he calls “the real Verso.”

As far as Lune concerned, this is the real Verso—under her hands, heart beating just like anyone else’s.

“I’m going to test resonance frequencies,” she says, placing her hand on his arm. “Just…hold still.”

“Would it help if I moaned?” he chides.

She doesn’t dignify that with a response.

The lumina resonator in her left hand hums…Verso shifts.

“Does it hurt?” she asks.

“No, I’m just not used to being touched.”

She adjusts the frequency, focuses…

…a single petal floats from ashen skin.

Verso gasps. Lune yanks her hand back.

“It was working,” he says. “Why did you stop?”

She meets his eyes.

Because I don’t want to lose you, she thinks. Not again.

“Because I’m still trying to figure out how to make it permanent,” she says.

***

She isn’t sure if she’s doing her due diligence with her research…or if she’s biding her time. 

Stretching the days and nights.

It begins to feel like it did on Expedition, with Sciel and Maelle and Monoco and Esquie. Sitting around the fire, swapping stories, getting to know each other…

…falling. 

Falling hard, playing stoic, obsessed with those eyes that were so blue and so sad behind the veneer of casual charm. She had never allowed herself something just for her. But Verso…Verso was something she selfishly took.

She knew that made it risky to ask her for help.

That maybe, like Maelle, she would decide that she wanted him here, not gone.

***

She tests him every other night now.

Always after tea. 

Experimentation requires consistency…controlled conditions. Thus, the tea. It’s necessary to have tea, not just nice. Yes, maybe it would be nice to have tea with Verso after sunset without having to try and kill him afterwards.

But Lune is a pragmatic woman.

She takes what she can get.

Tonight’s method involves skin-to-skin contact and biolumina threading—an advanced method of mapping pigment disruption in real time. She’s never used it on a person before.

Verso lies on her bed—because the table is too small, not because she wants him in her bed—bare from the waist up, an array of glowing filaments threaded down his arm and across his chest like veins of starlight. He watches the ceiling while she calibrates the panel near his hip.

“You’re very calm,” she mutters.

“I’ve died before,” he says. “Everything after that feels like a dress rehearsal.”

She tries not to smile. She fails.

He turns his head to look at her. “There it is.”

“What?”

“That smile,” he says softly. “I missed it.”

She swallows and adjusts the dial too quickly. The filaments surge, flaring with a low pulse. Verso hisses through his teeth.

“Sorry,” she breathes, hands hovering near the activation node. “That shouldn’t have—”

“It’s fine,” he says. “Pain reminds me I’m still here.”

She exhales, sits back on her heels. Watches the glow fade beneath his skin.

“I’m getting closer,” she says. “It’s…flickering. I can see it. Your pigment loosens, your form resists—but not as much as before.”

He nods. “Then we’re making progress.”

There’s no triumph in his voice. Only peace. The kind that feels too quiet.

“Verso…” she says, before she can stop herself. “Are you afraid?”

His lashes flicker. “Of dying?”

She nods.

“No,” he says. “I’m afraid you’ll succeed and regret it.”

She looks down at his chest, the gentle rise and fall. The little shimmer of light still curling through his collarbone.

“I already do,” she whispers.

He closes his eyes.

“Lune…I promise I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t…you know.”

She doesn’t know. She can’t understand. She doesn’t live this double life, she sees herself as fully realized. Even if the canvas is her whole world…it’s a world of beauty. 

If anything, she would like to find a way to paint purely for her own pleasure—to explore worlds within worlds, into eternity.

It would be nice to have company.

“I don’t know,” she says suddenly.

“You don’t know what?”

“Not that…I don’t—” she pauses. “I don’t understand. Verso…obviously I haven’t lived as long as you, but this world…it’s real to me. It’s the only one I’ve ever had. And you…I don’t know why you want so badly to cease to exist.”

He lets out a wry laugh, easy smile at odds with the pain clenching a fist around her heart. “Because I know what’s on the other side of this.”

She bites her lip. “You never told me.”

He sighs and leans his head back against the headboard. “A fractured soul, Lune. A child forced to keep painting until…until the painters outside are done playing their games. The last piece of the real Verso .”

Lune’s eyes flicker, brow furrowing. “You are my real Verso.”

He looks at her with an expression she’s only seen on him a few times: insecure, maybe frightened. 

“You don’t mean that,” he says.

“I do.”

Verso turns away, a lock of silver-threaded hair falling across his forehead. His breath leaves him slowly, chest falling…rising again.

“I’ve never been out there and I never will,” she says. “But here…you are real . You’ve made choices and broken things and you have habits. I’ve held your blood in a vial. I’ve felt you…”

She trails off. Doesn’t finish her sentence.

She doesn’t have to.

She wants him to touch her. To take her hand and pull her into his arm like he did that one beautiful night on the continent. But…he doesn’t. 

So she acts.

She's often the one reminding others that they have no choice but to continue.

She reaches out. Takes his hand, threads her fingers through his. Not with a touch to destroy…a touch begging to be heard, to be acknowledged as enough to stay. His eyes dart from her hand to her eyes, breath coming fast—

It happens all at once.

His other hand rising, the one twined with hers pulling her closer. And Lune doesn’t care in that moment if he’s accepting her offer or if he’s using his charm to lull her into a sense of complacency yet again, into going along with whatever lies he’s concocted.

Because his lips are on hers, tongue gliding across the seam, begging for her…to do something that needs doing .

And how could it not be real when he takes her in his arms to pull her into his lap? How could it not be real when she feels him pressing hard into the apex of her thighs, through their clothes, desire coursing through them both? Is it blood pumping in their veins, or paint…and does it really matter?

She feels this now .

She wants him now.

And she wants to ask him to stay, but instead she says, “Make love to me, Verso.”

His breath catches. Just for a moment.

Not because he’s surprised—but because she asked.

He doesn’t speak. Just kisses her again, slower this time, like he’s tasting the syllables of what she said. Make love to me. Not a demand. Not a plea. An offering.

And he takes it like someone who’s never been given anything.

His hands map the shape of her waist beneath her shirt, fingertips trailing like memory, like melody. She lets him undress her slowly, piece by piece—clothes shed like petals, his touch steady and soft and devastating. Her shirt slides from her shoulders. Her bra unclasps. His mouth finds the swell of her breast, the warm skin between, the curve of her ribs. He treats her body like something he might never see again.

And maybe he won’t.

“Lune,” he breathes her name like it’s a benediction. His voice is rough around the edges, cracking open like it can’t contain what he feels.

She holds his face between her palms. “Don’t look at me like that,” she says. “Like you’re already saying goodbye.”

His forehead presses to hers. “I’ve never looked at you any other way.”

That’s when she undoes the button of his slacks and slides her hand inside—just to touch. To feel the heat of him, the way he throbs against her palm, the way his mouth falls open in a soundless curse as his hips flex forward, helpless. He’s hard and heavy in her hand, and she wants him with a clarity that hurts.

“I want you inside me,” she says, and she doesn’t mean just physically.

He lifts her. Lays her back on the bed with reverent hands and fevered restraint, like she’s too precious and too dangerous all at once. When he pushes her thighs apart, when he sinks into her slowly, deeply, until she gasps—he doesn’t look away.

He watches her.

Watches the way her lips part. Watches her eyes flutter shut. Watches the tremble in her limbs as her body tries to take all of him.

“Too much?” he whispers.

“No,” she says, breathless. “You’re perfect.”

He laughs—a real one this time, not bitter or hollow. He buries his face against her throat. “God, I forgot how good that feels.”

She wraps her legs around him. Her arms around his back. Pulls him in like she’s anchoring him to her body, to the moment, to this .

They move together—not fast, not frantic. Just…true. His body learns hers again with every stroke. Her hands roam his back, his shoulders, the grooves of old graphite scars, grounding herself in the realness of him.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she breathes, arching against him.

“You already did,” he murmurs back, kissing the corner of her mouth. “But I came back anyway.”

And when she comes—tight and trembling around him, her nails in his skin, his name in her mouth—it breaks something open in him.

He follows her over the edge with a shudder, spilling inside her with a groan that sounds like grief and glory all at once.

Afterward, they lie tangled. Quiet. Her head on his chest, his fingers playing with a lock of her hair.

“I think he must have been cruel,” she says. 

“Who?”

“The first Verso.” She sucks in a breath. “He gave us the ability to love…and to lose and to mourn. He gave us the ability to have children. Only a cruel maker would allow his playthings to do that.”

“He wasn’t cruel,” Verso finally says. “He was a child with the power of a god.”

She’s quiet for a moment. 

“And you want me to have that power?” she says.

He props himself on his elbow to look into her eyes. “You’re the only person I would ever trust to wield it with compassion.”

Chapter Text

The morning after, she wakes to the sound of him playing.

A sad song—the only kind Verso has ever known. And she knows, then, that even with the heat they shared, he still wants more than anything not to exist . Because he is severed…a man who lives as a plaything in the world of his younger sister and the boy he once was. 

He has asked her to take on the power of a paintress.

So she will.

***

This research is done primarily on nights when he performs at the opera house.

She enlists Esquie’s help in flying her to the tower, where it all ended…where the world fractured and Verso went through into some other place . She didn’t see him for years after that…until Maelle decided it was time to force him back into existence.

Something happened here, in the gap between their worlds. Between there and here, in the paint swirling on the canvas.

That night, Verso went into that between place and came to blows with Maelle. Lune knows this because Maelle came out bloody…and they all grieved. And Lune dreamed of repeated words.

Unpaint me. Please, please unpaint me.

She investigates the battlefield where Renoir fought them, where the Paintress returned, and she takes samples of chroma. Lune considers how she herself has ways of making and unmaking their world—evoking elements. She considers how Verso wields light, how Sciel adds necessary shading, how Maelle erases. 

And just like learning any other skill, it seems almost simple when it finally clicks.

It starts with the breath.

Not hers—his. The first breath Verso ever took here , in this world. Not as a child painter, but as the man they dragged back from the canvas like a revenant. That breath is trapped in the pigment. It echoes in the fracture lines. And Lune listens.

She doesn’t try to break it open.

She lets it unfold.

The paint yields to her—not because she commands it, but because she understands it now. This isn't pigment. It’s memory. It’s trauma. It’s longing petrified into color and light.

She stands in the field where the last great unmaking began—where the original Paintress fell to her knees, hands bloodied with the work of trying to preserve someone who begged to be forgotten.

Lune doesn’t kneel.

She claims .

She lifts her hand and reaches through the fracture. Feels the pull of Maelle’s talent—the same force that dragged Verso screaming back into this world. She doesn't fight it. She folds it into herself. The light, the darkness, the pain. Every part of their ecosystem: creation and deletion, harmony and distortion.

The paint doesn't resist her.

It recognizes her.

And a barrier appears like a ripple in time and space.

And Lune steps through.

***

The whole of Lumiere feels it: a breach. 

From his place on the stage, Verso sees Maelle’s recognition that something is wrong—that something is threatening her paradise. He sees not fury, but pain, fear…fear that all she loves will be unmade.

And he wonders what Lune is doing, because this is not what he asked for.

He finds Sciel and Pierre, sitting with their child…finds Gustave and Sophie, all the others. 

Monoco at the back of the theatre, watching him behind that mask.

Lune’s words come back to him: He gave us the ability to love…and to lose and to mourn. He gave us the ability to have children. Only a cruel maker would allow his playthings to do that.

Maybe it was cruel after all.

Because he wants to be unmade…but the others don’t deserve this. It’s the only world they’ve ever known.

“Is this what you wanted?” Maelle is asking, tears in her eyes. “Why, Verso?”

He can’t answer. Because he doesn’t know what he wants anymore…and he has no idea what Lune has planned.

***

Inside the breach, the rules shift. Color isn’t color. Form isn’t form. Lune’s body pulls apart and reassembles, her memories flickering across the fractured planes like brushstrokes on wet canvas.

She sees the boy Verso once was—barefoot, laughing, hands stained with paint. 

She sees the original Paintress, weeping as she paints a world where no one leaves her. 

She sees herself, watching from the edge.

And Verso is there: a boy with dark, wavy hair.

Then the hollowed out shell of a boy.

Sitting in the center of it all. Surrounded by half-finished skies and abandoned figures, their faces blurred by indecision. He’s smaller than she expected. More fragile.

Still painting.

Still working .

She watches him for a long time before she speaks.

His brush is too large for his hand—his fingers clumsy with exhaustion, stained to the wrist in shades that don’t belong to joy or creation anymore. They’re the colors of compulsion. Of grief. Every stroke he lays down vanishes and reappears somewhere else, half-formed, like even the canvas is tired of obeying.

He doesn’t look up.

“Verso,” she says, gently.

The boy flinches.

It’s his name—but it isn’t. Not here. Not anymore.

She takes a step closer. Then another. The light fractures around her, spinning like a prism, each shard a moment she could ruin if she touches too soon. So she doesn’t. She kneels beside him instead.

“I’ve seen what you’re making,” she says softly. “And I’ve seen what it costs.”

He keeps painting. His voice is barely a whisper. “If I stop…it all stops. They die. I die.”

“You already did,” Lune says. “You’re just caught in the echo.”

The brush falters.

“Alicia needs it,” he says. “She’s scared. Alone.”

“She’s not alone,” Lune murmurs. “You brought us all here. You made a whole world, Verso. She’s not alone anymore. You can rest.”

He turns his face to her, and his eyes are, for a moment, blue. Bright. Heavy.

The brush in his hand calls to her, resonates with the lumina threaded through her limbs.

“Will he be happy?” the painted boy asks.

Lune says, “I hope so.”

He lifts the brush.

And offers it to her.

It trembles between them. So small. So simple.

So ruinously powerful.

Lune hesitates. Because she knows: the moment she takes it, there’s no undoing what comes next. She won’t just inherit the work—she’ll inherit the burden. The grief. The memory of every unmade thing.

But she also knows what Verso doesn’t.

That love is not the same as staying.

That caretaking a world someone else built isn’t a trap—it’s an honor, if you choose it freely.

So she takes the brush.

Her hand closes around it, warm where his is cold.

Verso—the boy—lets go.

He exhales.

The entire realm exhales with him.

And Lune rises.

Her form stabilizes, lumina braiding through her bones, chroma blooming beneath her skin like blooming ink. Her hair lifts on some unseen current. The canvas around her vibrates—not breaking, not bending, but readying .

For her.

She turns to the unfinished horizon, to the fragments of what could be.

And she paints.

She does not paint to erase or to control.

She paints to heal .

Each stroke is an act of reclamation. 

She shores up the places Renoir frayed in his desperation. 

She paints windows into locked rooms, doors into closed hearts. 

Not a paradise. Not perfection.

Just…a place worth living in.

A place that doesn’t hurt to remember.

A place where Verso could be more than a function. Where Maelle could be more than fear. Where Sciel and Gustave and Monoco could live without the weight of someone else’s grief pressing the pigment into permanence.

A place chosen .

And then, at last, she paints herself home.

***

The piece changes when its inhabitants have their own agency.

The work becomes messy. Everyone is crafted of their own chosen medium. Graphite and watercolor and ink bleed into swirls of strange creation.

But for the first time, the canvas feels truly alive .

And they step into that next canvas together—not because they have to, but because they want to. Because there are more nights and more days…and whatever comes between.

Verso’s hand finds hers the moment the threshold opens, a shimmer across a painting, a tear in expectation. She squeezes his fingers, and he squeezes back.

“Will there be lots of fighting on the other side?” Monoco asks from behind them.

“I hope there are many new rocks to find,” Esquie hums.

“I think there will be all kinds of things to fight and things to find…and things to learn,” Lune says, smiling up at Verso. “Shall we?”

He nods. “For those who come after,” he says.

And together, they step into the breach.