Work Text:
In the beginning, an artist made all the chroma that ever was and ever will be. It spilled onto the canvas from a tiny child’s hands, until it spanned the universe from edge to edge.
More liquid than paint, more magic than blood. It flowed like water and gleamed like color.
The child pressed his hands into the chroma and laughed as it ran over his fingers. "Génial! Regarde maman, j’ai réussi!" A room of voices congratulated the child: heavy palms patted his shoulders, and lips kissed his hair.
*
From the other side of existence, a child opened his eyes. He watched and felt those hands on his shoulders, felt those kisses on his hair. When the child smiled, he smiled. Bon anniversaire, Verso.
The space surrounding Verso stretched to a black and gold starscape that swirled with light. Before him stood a giant frame, three times as tall as himself. Within that shimmering frame the child’s face lit up in delight, and Verso’s did the same.
The child put a hand up to the chroma surface, tiny fingers splayed. Verso answered, with his own little hand.
“J’arrive, j’arrive!" the child shouted. At the age of six it was more of a shriek. "Je suis prêt!"
\Verso\\
//osreV/
"Verso!"
The child Verso stepped into the universe. When his feet landed, it was on black stone with golden streaks, and Verso giggled as he leaned down to feel it. The stone felt cool, while the air was warm as summer. Above, a black sphere ruled the sky. It seemed close enough to touch too—he wished to touch it all—but something else caught Verso’s attention. He ran forward on little legs to see a second frame, this one on the ground. Blue and silver chroma coated it, as if all the possibility of existence were held in its depths.
“Verso, wait for us! We’ll be right there!”
He heard Maman and Papa’s voices, back in his bedroom. They’d be coming too, to show him how to paint. Verso glanced back towards the frame and out to the real world. On the other side stood his parents, Clea, and his own frozen form.
Why wait for them, when there was a whole world to discover?
Verso smiled down at the blue flowing canvas instead and squatted on his little ankles. He reached out to graze its surface with a single fingertip. When nothing scary happened, he dipped his whole hand into it. Chroma rippled up his arm, and it tickled where it touched him. How warm, how wonderful! It was all his to make into anything he could ever want. With peel of laughter the child Verso fell headfirst into the chroma and vanished into a magical world.
But did he vanish, truly?
For the place where he’d knelt was far from empty. Part of Verso stayed in that moment, crouched above the canvas. He closed his eyes and felt the paintbrush in his hand. In the world below, he saw himself running across a cloud of cotton candy.
They were his gangly little legs, moving through wispy clouds. The wind rushed through his hair, and through Verso’s hair. When Verso waved his brush to create a vast forest of trees, it was his paintbrush and they were his trees. When Maman appeared and wrapped her son in her arms, whispering how proud of him she was, Verso felt her arms encircle him too.
In the canvas, Verso danced and laughed and painted. Above it, Verso knelt and watched and loved.
*
Year after year, Verso returned to the universe. He painted the world; he painted his friends. He brought his sister and they had glorious adventures. They painted new wonders together: mountains and caves and lakes. An ocean to sail across and sea monsters to battle. A tower to challenge each other, and celestial guardians to fly with.
For a time, their parents joined them in play. His maman showed him how to paint a real train to span the continent, and his papa helped him pour a river so powerful it could bring a Gestral back to life. Being a precocious child, Verso scattered secrets and treasures across his play world. He carved out a private island where no sisters and no parents could go and filled that too with everything that had ever made him happy.
With each return the Verso at the heart of the canvas felt himself renewed, and with each departure he promised he would protect this world with all his bravery. In those times between—sometimes months, sometimes years—he liked to watch the doings of the creatures Verso (he, I) painted. The Gestrals built villages and filled them with markets and tournaments. They fought endlessly, tumbling against each other like piles of sticks. The Grandis, once introduced to the concept of art, became prolific creators. Poems, paintings, anything requiring craft and skill; they applied themselves endlessly in the pursuit of beauty. Everything the child Verso touched was imbued with the gift of creativity and the currency of joy.
Verso watched all of this from above the canvas, where with each brush stroke he painted the picture of the world.
*
The first time Verso returned with Alicia, the canvas celebrated. She was a fumbling, bumbling creature, but Verso carried her on his shoulders, and her laughter rang like bells across the land.
Alicia was a beautiful child, beloved by all, but her arrival marked a change for the canvas and the family. They visited less often, for shorter adventures. Verso came alone, and sometimes he would not adventure with Esquie or Monoco at all. He preferred to sit in his treehouse or the manor and play for hours on the piano.
When the Verso in the canvas played music, the Verso above played with him. The hands that touched the keys were his hands, the ache of holding his back rigid became his ache. Verso Dessendre wrote music, and every piece of his soul wrote it with him.
*
The centuries between adventures became a millennia, and the young boy wandered his canvas of life. He painted every leaf and every stone, and he loved all of them.
When the end came, Verso’s final visit to the canvas was not much different than the times before. Verso—a boy, kneeling—watched as Verso the man stepped confidently into their world. He hadn’t needed to pass through the heart of the canvas in thousands of years. He went to his friends first, as he’d always done, and Verso watched it all from beyond.
When that Verso cursed and cried and fought Monoco until he was bloody, this Verso was with him. When that Verso rested in Esquie’s arms and told him the tale of his days, this Verso spoke the words alongside him.
"Je le fais pour de bon cette fois, Esquie. J’ai accepté une place au Conservatoire."
“I’m proud of you, mon ami,” rumbled the giant. “You worked so hard.”
Verso sighed, and played with his cufflinks as he spoke. "Papa m’a crié dessus quand je leur ai dit que je ne veux plus signer mes lettres en tant que Peintre, mais Maman l’a interrompu et elle m’a pris dans ses bras. Elle tremblait."
“I’m sure she’s proud of you, too.”
"Je l’espère. Je crois qu’ils ont peur, mais ils ne devraient pas. Je suis si heureux à l’idée de partir que je peux à peine respirer."
Esquie wrapped his huge, pillowy arms aroud Verso and hugged him tight as tight can be. “I will miss you, mon ami.”
Verso hugged him back just as fiercely. "Tu vas me manquer toi aussi, mon cher ami."
*
A millennia passed, and Verso—man, boy, soul—painted.
A millennia passed, and Verso—the man—died.
*
A millennia begins, and Verso—the boy, kneeling—paints.
He paints when Maman throws herself into the canvas like a keening ghost. He’s with her when she sits in the red grasses and stares dully out to the landscape of her son. He stands behind her as she weeps tears that melt into dream animals. When the days of her comings and goings are too many to count, Verso is with her as she paints the first boulevard of Lumière.
It’s her brush that makes the people, but her brush is his brush. Her humans are Verso’s humans; her family are Verso’s family. For that he loves them—
(all the chroma that ever was and ever will be)
—he loves them.
*
Verso paints for years more and one day, Papa returns. He drags his chains behind him in long streaks of burnt umber and tries to wrap them around his errant wife. It happens so fast—between one brush stroke and the next all the grief Verso’s parents have poured into the canvas turns to granite rage.
The sky rains lightning and red spills across the canvas. Verso, kneeling, trembles as he moves his brush across the world. His mother screams, and his father shouts. Verso’s cracked stone fingers crumble with dust as he paints every terrible strike with them.
When his father splits the ground and blasts the earth apart, Verso squeezes the brush with his tiny hand and wills the land to freeze in the sky. When massive swords of light slam down upon the city, his mother wrenches the half holding her family into her heart and flings it across the sea. Verso’s paintbrush moves in tandem: stopping on the edge of the world and holding it there. His father’s show of crimson force is so staggering Verso can barely keep up. He follows the destruction across the map, running on shadowed feet and blinking from corner to corner.
His beautiful train tracks crumble and split. Villages erupt in painted fire.
The Gestrals on the beaches and the hills—dead. The Grandis of the valley—dead.
Falling Leaves, Yellow Harvest, the coral reefs, the basalt stone cliffs and the spring oasis and the red forests—dead, dead, dead.
Valiant loyal Monoco lying in the snow, dead.
Seizing with panic, Verso jumps every place he can to counter Aline and Renoir’s painting with his own (their chroma is his chroma, all the chroma that ever was). It’s like grabbing scraps of paper in a hurricane. He tries to memorize the essence of the dying: the humans, the animals, the monsters Clea made and his own beloved creations. Verso sketches their shape and weeps their loss and grasps onto as many as he can. He cries across the world for Esquie to take Noco, then buries them both in a cavern where they’ll have a chance to survive.
When his mother raises the ocean itself, Verso seizes control of his own brush at last and does what he knows from storybooks: he paints a castle so tall it reaches the heavens. He paints his mother to the top and his father below, and binds them to each other.
Blinded by the tyranny of their conflict, they don’t see when the barrier encircles them both.
At the heart of the universe, Verso breathes out.
The scope of their duel is, for a time, contained. Tears fall from Verso’s cheeks onto the canvas, and soft rain covers the world when the shaking ends.
All that happens after—the gommage and Clea and sixty-seven years of bloodshed—matters not in the shadow of this defacement.
Verso Dessendre is dead. Aline has come. Renoir has come. Clea has come.
His world (his soul) is fractured but still Verso—the boy, kneeling—paints.
*
Decades pass, and Verso paints. He inhabits the painting more but recalls it less. His form is as much shadow as stone now. The decay was sudden and frightening, as his body and his essence flake away.
He watches Clea fill their artwork with cruelty, and weeps for her as well.
Beneath his fingertips the chroma tells the story of the other family, in all their loss and betrayal. The sisters become prisoners: one to a Paintress and one to hopelessness. The father follows in Renoir’s path of overwhelming death. Verso—the painted—has his love and innocence scraped away with a palette knife until he becomes the warrior he (they, we) used to dream of as a child. Yet the reality of war is nothing like the adventures Verso’s canvas was painted for; it leaves the man carved out and hollow inside.
Esquie and Noco survive. When Verso’s fingers move the brush across the world to paint their reunion with Monoco at the Gestral river, he writes a song in the wind for them.
Expeditions go out, and expeditions die. Nevrons warp the chroma and devour the continent. The Gestrals flock to the sanctuary, and begin to recover their society. The Grandis flee to the snowcaps, and fail to save theirs.
Alicia comes, and nothing changes.
*
The boy, kneeling, wanders his canvas of death.
In the ancient sanctuary, he speaks to a man with one arm. “Another expedition. Thirty-three…”
“Who are you?” the man asks, but the boy has forgotten how to answer.
“Me? A dream, an illusion.”
Was he still kneeling above the canvas, or was he here amongst the red trees? If the painter is dead, does the soul die too? Maybe the real one could have done better. Maybe the real one could have saved them all.
Explaining that to another poor, doomed human feels pointless, so he says, “I don’t really remember what I did all of this for. I miss laughing with everyone…”
“Who are you talking about?”
The boy tries to say their names, but he is a shorn canvas and his edges have frayed. “Why do I forget?” he asks the expeditioner. Everything is washed away. He goes silent.
*
The boy, lost, stands in a forest of gold and watches his world end one piece at a time. Expeditioners pester him with questions, but he cannot hear their words.
“Why would she paint these things?” he asks without hope of an answer. “Eating the world, eating our world. We used to have fun here together.”
He wishes they could still have fun, someday. Cle… Clea. His sister’s name is Clea. She lives in a manor in the sky…wait, no. That’s a stranger.
His sister has left, and will never return.
*
The boy above paints, kneeling, and the faded shadow below waits. When the expeditioners come again, recognition flutters in the stardust where his heart used to beat.
“It’s you. I know you.”
The one-armed man pauses to talk to him again, and the boy sees the history of his life in the chroma he carries.
Gustave, sword of Lumiere. Brother, father, inventor. This one won’t know—can’t know—that all her brothers die in the end.
“I’ve seen you countless times. Yet I’ve never grasped your essence.” The boy looks past Gustave to her, but they can’t see it in the hollows of his form. “You are not from here.”
“Our essence?” Gustave asks.
“I can feel it…familiar yet so different.” It reminds him of his older sister again, and the boy paints words without knowing why. “Like everything she created. Like the creature of darkness at the end of this path. It is but one of her many creations.”
Beautiful, in its own way, but deadly. Clea’s favorite combination.
“You mean the Paintress?” another expeditioner asks. She is Lune, a shining beacon in the darkness. “Why is she doing this?”
The boy, fraying at the edges, answers the best he can. “I wish I knew. It’s not like her. She was my best friend, but she outgrew us so fast.”
More important things, more important friends.
He looks out on the water. Below them, the hulls of ships lie broken on the rocks like whale corpses. “She left me behind.”
*
The boy, kneeling, barely notices when Verso, the painted, joins the thirty-threes. They speak to him in Falling Leaves, but all he can think about is the suffering that plagues his painting. She’d always been there, from the moment he was born. How could she do this?
How could all of them do it? To his canvas. To his world. In every brushstroke he feels it dying.
“She’s doing this for you,” the expeditioner says, and the boy grieves.
*
The shade of Verso inside the monolith is his mother’s son, and he answers the expedition’s questions joyfully. He remembers candy clouds and kisses in his hair. He is proud of the trains she painted for him.
He barely notices when the barrier falls. When they come for Maman he paints the battle around them. Their hits are his brush strokes. Her gradient attacks are his music.
Their chroma is his chroma, and he loves all of them.
*
When the Paintress is defeated, Verso—the boy, kneeling—paints their joy without cynicism. They cannot see the world for what it is, but their victory is true, and their valor inspiring. Their adventure is no less meaningful for how it must end. Always the witness, he paints the triumph of their return and the tenderness of their hope.
He inscribes their legend into the chroma, honoring the last of Maman’s art. He cannot hold them all, however, and fate bears down on them from across the ocean.
Renoir is coming. Verso arcs his brush across the canvas and paints the wave alongside him.
*
Everything has ended a second time, and Maman cast out of the canvas (free! oh, to be free). Alicia and Papa are all that remain, and the boy, painting, feels the cavernous hollow inside him grow. The planet above has become a black hole (was it always that? he doesn’t remember) and the universe extends into infinity while he remains here, kneeling above a broken world.
*
Verso paints the final adventures of his family with trepidation that turns to pride. His little sister is as brave a warrior as he imagined she’d be, and he only wishes that she’d come to play with him before all of this. He paints in bold, fortuitous colors when she begins The Greatest Expedition in History. He watches as she flies around the world with her friends, the way he and Clea used to do.
When they find his secret hideout and defeat his most dreaded archnemesis (Osquio, the petty and terrible), he basks in a short and shining period of joy again. Verso, the painted, leaps on Esquie and gives a war cry. Verso, a fading boy, strikes the final blow alongside him.
“Thank you,” Verso says. The boy does not answer.
*
The expedition ends the way all adventures do: by going home. The young boy meets them on the streets of Lumière and admires the last outlines of his mother’s art.
“Isn’t it beautiful here? Her paintings are always astonishing. Yet, I wish she would understand…”
His little sister looks around at the world she is afraid to lose. Does she recognize him? He wonders if he would recognize himself.
“Understand what?”
“What it means for me, to paint…” The confusion on her face stymies him; he wants to explain. He wants to explain everything. But he is a shorn canvas and his edges have frayed.
*
The story is almost over. He sits at his piano in the opera house and plays and plays and plays.
He watches from above the city. Papa has stained the sky in crimson, but Verso, the boy, cannot find it in him to fight this battle a second time. He tried so hard before, and it made no difference. This piece of theater is for Alicia, not for him. But doubt is a hungry creature and it stalks him always.
“Maybe I should continue?”
“Continue what?” Alicia asks.
Painting. Dreaming.
“Forever,” he whispers. “Forever…”
He wonders if he’s always been just a dream, an illusion. A figment of a man who died a thousand and sixty-seven years ago.
Where is he, when she speaks to him like this? The strike of his father’s cane rings across the shattered sky.
Strike.
He’s kneeling at the center of creation. He paints and paints and paints.
Strike.
He’s performing in the opera house. He plays and plays and plays.
Strike.
Has he, the faded soul of a faded boy, ever performed at all, or are these borrowed memories? Memories from Verso, the painter. Memories from Verso, the painted. That’s one joy, at least, they shared in truth. That was real for them. How much is real for him?
Give and take memories, and twist and bend oneself. Mix the tints until all the colors smear together and nothing beautiful is left.
Strike.
Renoir is waiting. The adventure is almost over.
*
The boy looks to his painted counterpart. The one who got to grow up. The one who was never a boy at all.
“He is here. Doing… what needs to be done. What I can’t do anymore.”
Verso’s eyes (our eyes) are soft with understanding, but he asks anyway. “What needs to be done?”
The boy trembles. He cannot answer. Why can’t he answer? Parts of him erased already, or parts that were never there at all. Yet he tries. “For my sake,” he murmurs. “And theirs…”
*
Renoir is vanquished and the boy, kneeling, paints on. He doesn’t raise his eyes to look out at the universe anymore. He doesn’t hear when a portal opens and a being of his own chroma enters. He doesn’t even see the painted son of Aline approach until the man kneels too.
Verso greets him with infinite gentleness: “Hi.”
The boy looks up, and his face is a cavern filled with stars.
The man looks back, and his heart is a cavern filled with time.
“You’re tired of painting, aren’t you?” he asks.
The child’s answer is easy, because the man already knows. Ten thousand years or seven decades, their will and spirit are aligned. Verso looks at him from the canvas and nods.
(all the chroma that ever was)
Verso smiles. “I’m tired too…”
Their sister comes, and draws the man away. The canvas calls out beneath his fingers, always calling, until the child (the boy, the soul, the dream) looks down and begins to paint again. Their arguing makes no difference in the end.
Verso returns, and holds out his hand. “It’s time to stop painting.”
Verso looks up to him, and reaches out.
The universe bends and bends and bends until—
Strike.
The child, kneeling, flinches. The man, tired, rises.
Though he does not look their way, the child watches the fateful duel nonetheless. He watches from the black sphere above, from the painted man’s eyes, then from the stars themselves.
(and ever will be)
One more battle to fight, one last loved one to exile.
*
When it’s done, Verso, the painted, returns a third time. (three children, three battles, three heroes in the play. but all plays end, do they not?) “It’s ok,” he promises. “It’s over… Verso.”
Verso—the boy, the infinite—stands up for the first time.
Verso—the man, the beloved—takes his hand.
Together, they walk away from the canvas and out, out, out into the universe.