There is little in his awareness aside from the man before him, to tell it true. He was always a tall man, broad and strong, but now he’s so tall that even kneeling he is nearly as tall as Verso is, standing before him. The scar across his face, the missing arm that even after all these decades still bleeds golden chroma —— they all tell the tale of a man who has survived more than any human ever truly could. Is the chroma the only thing holding him together? Will he crumble to ash and petals as soon as it’s stabilized? Perhaps that is the only thing that keeps him going at all.
The emergence of the dagger sparks a flare of alarm in a mind repainted to erase all nuance in protection, in holding ground: those broken thoughts want to immediately read it as threat, eyes flashing and chroma surging. But it, too, tangles with the sharp copper tang of blood, the events unfolding before his eyes like a slideshow of horrors: daggerpoint to skin, digging, a line of red, red, red: red streaks like petals, soft and dangerous and he forgets why they’re dangerous but knows they are.
The world looks different to him, now: he can almost see the lines and framework and ink-stains of the world, has been given the power to destroy it and mold it to hurt but not to heal it. And this Verso, oh, he doesn’t gleam like any of them, too sharp and real in this painted canvas to be true. This Verso is the same as he: painted, but different. Given gifts ( oh, what a vicious word that is, here —— ) to do things he shouldn’t, and so that spark of resistance is tamed for the moment enough it takes for the bloody hand to rest upon him.
He knows what it’s like to be repainted; knows it intimately, purely, terribly. But he only knows what it’s like to be painted by the gods of this world with their fickle choices, and this is different. He’s too changed to be cured completely; he will never be what he was, barring being erased utterly and remade. But the raging, battling chroma in his mind and thoughts is pushed back and captured, not sealed away so much as allowed to knit into his own, true self ——
The gleam in his eyes fades, slowly, the burning silver of chroma and light dimming until it fades completely and extinguishes. In their place, the deep dark brown of his own emerges with a slow blink, shadowed heavily under heavy brows, and the steady golden drip from the missing arm slows, darkens, stops. And for the first time in decades, his thoughts are for the moment his own, and everything floods in with a overwhelming surge. He doesn’t know how long he’s been down here: it could be a year, it could be a hundred. He just knows it’s been too, too long, and his chest aches with the weight of it all.
Blood drips; he becomes aware of it; a breath surges into his lungs and he seizes Verso’s arm and pulls it away, gentle but firm. " Enough, " he utters, but it’s not angry: it’s a kindness, a worry, but there’s a clarity that wasn’t there before. " Too much. You give too much. "
