You were losing your hair. In great wind-blown waves you left pieces of yourself all across the continent. You barely dared to detangle it in the mornings, although you did for fear of your hair condition worsening, and watched it fall away strand by delicate strand.

It was stress, you assumed, that was causing the change. Facing down death every day, watching your friends die, listening to Gustave… Having to witness the destruction of so many lives as you uncovered all those who came before were dead and gone. It was too much for anyone to handle, and if the cost was your hair, so be it.

Or so you thought to yourself. Under the moonlight with the monolith looming ever closer it was more difficult to wrap your head around your circumstances even with the feeling of loose hair tickling between your fingers.

Maybe you were losing your hair because you were just plain ripping it out. A nervous tick, perhaps, to card your fingers through your hair and feel the drag of your nails against your scalp. With how few mirrors there were around the continent you could only hope you didn’t look like a poorly maintained doll.

You were letting those strands fall and get caught in the wind when Monoco came over to sit beside you. His mask drifted from your face to your hair blowing away and glinting slightly as they caught the moonlight.

“You won’t be very good at fighting Nevrons if you’re fighting a cold too,” he said. His voice held little inflection, so you weren’t sure if he was chastising you or teasing.

You shifted so you could look at him better. “Are you offering to keep me warm?” you asked, venturing to guess Monoco was trying to lighten your mood. The Gestral was often well meaning, but he was made of wood too.

“I think he wants me to help you out with that,” Verso’s voice startled you slightly as you weren’t expecting him to be coming up behind you. Monoco’s mask tilted to look behind you, and you craned your neck to see Verso was settling down on your other side.

You didn’t even have the time to ask him how he planned to do that. As soon as he settled in the grass, he grabbed you and pulled you near. You shifted with him, letting him pull you against his chest. Verso was warm and soft and as comforting as he had always been. The barest shift in the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed reminded you that you were still alive.

“What’s bothering you, ma cherie?” Verso asked, rumbling against your ear.

Instead of waiting for your mind to flood with everything that had ever happened to you, you blurted out the first thing that was on your mind. “I’m going bald,” you admitted, a little more dramatically than maybe you intended.

Monoco had been observing the two of you, but his mask tilted in worry at your words. “Is that something that can happen?” he asked, appalled.

Verso nodded behind you, his hands trailing up to push his fingers through his hair. You tried not to wince at the feeling, even as his fingers flowed through without catching on any tangles. “Is it the stress?” he asked lowly.

“Of course,” you sighed, settling further into his embrace. You tilted your head up to look at him. His fingers massaged against your scalp. “How do you keep all that hair on your head?” you asked.

Verso stiffened under you, a feeling you barely registered but for how familiar you were with him. It was like he was trying so hard to hold himself back from telling you the truth. And you could live with his lies, you told yourself, as you watched Monoco share a curious glance, because he gave you everything else you could want.

“Luck, I guess,” he said after a while.

“We could do your hair,” Monoco offered almost at the same time.

“Huh?” you asked, confused.

“Over the years we’ve done each other’s hair,” Monoco explained, “cut it or styled it. We could do that for you, too.”

You looked from Monoco to Verso and back. You trusted them to keep you alive. You supposed they had deft enough fingers. Doing hair hadn’t been on the list of skills you attributed to them. What did you have to lose, really?

“Okay,” you agreed with a shrug, “if you think it’ll help.”

Monoco seemed to light up in his excitement. He shifted so he was sitting next to Verso and they both had full access to your hair. You watched him, as he moved, pull out a peculiar looking book from the pack he kept on his back.

“What’s that?” you asked.

Monoco handed the leather-bound book to you. “Be careful with it,” he warned as you opened the cover. “It’s where I press the flowers I’ve cultivated outside the Station,” he explained when you flipped the page and saw the delicate colors held within.

You gasped at the beauty of it and turned the page gingerly. It was all so fleeting and fragile. Each bloom was perfectly almost perfectly uniform in its growth, the colors delineated on a microscopic scale as to be almost indistinguishable from the next. The whole journal was thick with the same repeating pattern of petals and stems all lovingly placed and maintained by the protective Gestral’s hand.

“They’re beautiful,” you breathed. The book had distracted you enough that you’d barely noticed the two had started in on your hair. Verso’s fingers slipped easily along your scalp while Monoco picked this bud and that from the open book to wind along the pattern Verso was crafting.

The well-preserved flowers were the same exuberant purple that accented the expeditioner’s uniforms. Soon enough there were far fewer contained in the journal than were cascading over your shoulder. They were weaved expertly through the twists and braids Verso had managed to pleat and tie from your scalp all the way down to your split ends.

At the end your hands hovered over the work of art they’d created on your head. You hardly wanted to ruin it, but you couldn’t really see what they’d done.

Then Verso pulled something from his pocket. A small metallic compact. It flipped open with a pop, and he handed it to you. On one side was dusting of the remains of a long over-used powder. The other held a pristine mirror. It was small, but with some maneuvering and determination you soon had a clear picture of what the two men had given you.

The entire thing was breath taking. There was an extravagance to it that you had never experienced before and feared, momentarily, you would never experience again. “It’s wonderful,” you breathed, trying to do three things at once. You couldn’t stop looking at your hair in the mirror, but you wanted to make sure Verso and Monoco understood just how grateful you were.

“Does it still work?” you ask, gesturing toward where it sits in the corner of the room, gathering a thin film of dust.

“I believe so.” He rises from his chair, his exhausted limbs animated by a persistent grace. “Though I confess it has been some time since I’ve used it.”

You make your way over to it, studying the brass horn, the intricate crank mechanism. “Show me?”

“Very well,” he replies, crossing the room.

He stands behind you, one arm reaching around to demonstrate. You feel the warmth of him against your back, his chest solid and lean. His movements are precise as always, showing you how to place the needle, how to wind the crank with just enough tension.

“Not too much,” he murmurs, his voice close to your ear, his breath fluttering against your skin. “Patience is essential.”

When the first crackling notes of an old jazz standard fill the room, you turn in his arms to face him. “Dance with me?”

A flicker of hesitation crosses his face. “I’m afraid I am rather out of practice.”

“Perfect excuse to start practicing again,” you counter, taking his hand—the left one, which sometimes trembles slightly—and placing it at your waist.

His posture shifts, instantly formal, as though remembering steps from long ago. When he moves, it’s with the same deliberate precision that characterizes everything he does, though there's a charming stiffness to it, an uncertainty that's endearing coming from someone usually so composed.

“I believe this foot goes—” he starts, looking down.

“Doesn’t matter,” you assure him, moving closer, eliminating the proper dance form in favor of simple swaying. “Just feel it.”

Gradually, his movements soften. The hand at your waist becomes less tentative, more secure. You rest your head against his shoulder, breathing in his familiar scent of spiced vetiver and cigar smoke.

“This is nice,” you murmur, nuzzling into his neck.

“Indeed,” he agrees, before stepping on your toe and immediately pulling back. “My apologies—I meant what I said about being out of practice.”

“Well, then,” you tell him, drawing him back toward you and placing a soft kiss to his lips, 

“I guess we’ll just have to do this more often.”

-

Wandering around the expedition grounds had left little time for socialization. You weren’t exactly a combatant, but your team was. They spent all day fighting and killing Nevrons only to collapse at camp once night fell, talking into the small hours of the morning, before passing out and waking up only a few hours later in the predawn grey.

You did much the same, although you didn’t expend as much energy seeing as how you barely ever fought and really only helped to move the camp from one place to the next as you traveled ever closer to the Paintress.

Gustave had been the one to justify your continued existence after the horrors on the beach. Even though the words were barely kinder than “pack mule.”

After everything else that happened you thought the group was just happy to have someone else who was still alive.

Then came Verso, kind but impatient and exacting in a way that had you shying away from any more social interaction than necessary. He understood there was no place for someone who had to rely on others to stay alive. You understood his pointed remarks and syrupy words were meant to make you take more risks – to sink or swim against the never-ending tide of Nevrons.

And maybe he wasn’t as callous as you felt he was. On clear nights in the cold air, he’d ask you to spar with him, offer to teach you some technique or another, or tell you how to find a weakness in an enemy. Sometimes you appreciated that he took the time to recognize you were human. Other times he was so intense, pushing you past the point of reason, and you would hide away in camp until the bruises and aches and heartbreak subsided.

At the end of every encounter you knew, reaffirmed for yourself, you would never be more than you were.

Then something horrible happened.

You were licking your wounds, relaxing in the shadows and watching the flickering fire as the expedition sat around the fire and talked, when a pair of legs came from across the camp, carrying Verso’s voice and trying to get the attention of Maelle.

You blanched, your stomach rolled, and you pressed your hands over your mouth as you moved to run or intervene. You weren’t sure which to follow through on yet.

Maelle didn’t even react, just told him to go away, and you watched as a slightly defeated pair of legs tried for Lune’s attention instead.

You had tears in your eyes as Lune shouted, and a torso – the top half of Verso – came crawling over on his hands. You wanted to scream. Who in their right mind thought any of this was appropriate?

But once the shock wore off, you saw the little group begin to laugh and share quips. Then you heard your name echoing from the conversation. They were talking about you. You groaned, inwardly, and hoped they wouldn’t call you over.

Maelle caught your eye and waved you over with unrestrained glee.

“-Absolutely brilliant. I go to every show!” You catch the last part of Sciel’s excited information as you approach.

They’re all looking at you. Your expedition partners with an awe you hadn’t seen since before you left Lumiere, and Verso with a look that made it clear he was reconsidering his opinion of you.

“You were part of the theater on Lumiere?” he asked in that unwitting way that always drew you in.

Maelle had been talking about one of the plays you’d done a few years ago, the first she’d even been to, and how special it had been for her and Gustave. Her voice quieted but you weren’t sure if it was because she’d stopped talking or because of the way Verso made you feel like you were the only two people in camp.

That was what it was like when he trained you, too. The whole world fell away until there was only your body and his and the movements of a battle dance that rang out like a song.

He made a noise, and you came back to yourself, offering him a nod in answer to his question. “I was apprenticed under Matthieu Bossuet before he had his Gommage. I left behind quite a few promising apprentices myself.”

“I really couldn’t believe you’d choose to be part of an expedition,” Lune interjected as soon as there was space for her to do so. “We were all upset, at first, that you’d leave Lumiere without your entertainment for something so hopeless as this.”

“Yes,” Sciel agreed, “Before…” she trailed off for a heartbeat, “you’d sing to us, or act out a little scene from one of your plays, and it made everything feel better, like we hadn’t left Lumiere at all.”

You were forced into a sort of stunned silence at that. You had no idea… Of course you’d seen them at your shows sometimes, with so few people left on Lumiere it was easy to recognize the same faces, but you hadn’t… What you had done on Lumiere had felt frivolous, and selfish. The self-loathing you had become accustomed to had fallen away when you’d signed your life over to the expedition.

Verso was looking at you with a different sort of intention than you’d ever seen from him before. The pity was easy to put aside, it was something you were used to seeing from him, but there was also admiration there and, perhaps, respect.

“Do they still preform Le Gardien Des Singes?” he asked.

You’re shocked he knew the name, though you knew you shouldn’t have been. He was from Lumiere and the play was old. “I did, once. Some of the pages have been lost and the ink from the first half is faded from use. No one really wants to restore old manuscripts when they could be writing original pieces.”

Verso smiled, covering a clear sadness with a sort of self-satisfied mirth. “I composed it with a writer friend of mine before the fracture,” he admitted wistfully. “I guess I’m just glad to hear some of it survived the move from the continent to the sea.” There was a moment of silence as you took that information in. Verso didn’t let you sit with it for very long. “When this is all over, I’ll come back with you and restore it myself.”

You smiled, despite the knowledge at the forefront of your everyday life that you would not be going back to Lumiere alive. “I’d love to perform it with you, when that happens.” And when you said it, it sounded like a promise.

It was late and you were ready to leave it at that, but Verso seemed invigorated, and you knew the rest of the expedition didn’t really sleep all that much either. Instead, you were forced to watch his body slide back together, the top half stitching together with the bottom in a disgusting squelch. Verso, now whole, was grinning widely and moving around the camp to find an appropriately flat section of grass and dirt.

His picto snapped and flourished and there sat an elegant piano. Veros took a seat on the bench with his back to the keys as he looked over where he’d left you and the rest of your group

“Do you remember any of it?” he prompted as you all walked over to him.

You saw the group’s eyes light up hopefully at the question. You felt Esquie’s shadow and Monoco had come to see what was happening too.

You opened your mouth to reply and felt yourself rendered mute by the sudden humiliation of the truth. Le Gardien Des Singes had been one of the last performances you’d done before the preparations for the expedition became a full-time job. It had been a passion project of yours and in putting it on you’d learned almost every aspect of the thing.

In what felt like long minutes you finally answered. “I remember a scene from the second act, I think. The one when the two guardians learn about the escape,” you admit. Once the words are out of your mouth you realize you hadn’t taken that much time to answer at all, and the thoughtful looks on their faces told you they’d thought you’d just been wracking your memory.

That wicked grin still curled on Verso’s lips, but it lost its edge at your words. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear that was the part you remembered. In truth it was a scene that you’d felt was the most emotionally impactful of the whole script which might’ve had you shying away if it weren’t for the anticipatory charge the air now held.

“Do you want to start-?”

You interrupted Verso, already knowing what he was going to say, “From the start of the argument, yeah.” It would be interesting playing both characters against each other especially since that hadn’t been your part on Lumiere either. But the thought of performing again, with someone else to do the music was making your heart race and a pleasant sort of adrenaline hummed under your skin.

Verso didn’t need any more prompting. He turned on the bench and placed his fingers above the opening keys.

The music came in as a crash of discordant noise. The two characters had already been enemies from what had happened at the start of the act. There was no prelude to the harm that was coming.

You threw your body into it. Giving each of the two guardians a distinct body language and flow of words. When you couldn’t remember the exact verbiage, you improvised based on where you knew the conversation was going.

It was going very smoothly, with a captive audience and a musician willing to improvise with you when your lines went on longer or shorter than he probably wrote them. And he was an excellent musician. His fingers were lightning across the piano and seemed to anticipate every move you were going to make even when the notes weren’t what you were fully familiar with.

Then came the part where the two guardians launched themselves at each other.

You were bending backwards, your own hands reaching for your throat, when the musical sting interrupted your flow completely. You stuttered a bit in your actions and shot Verso a look like, “get your shit together.”

You played out the next round of dialogue without anything amiss, although you felt the upbeat notes were a little out of practice considering what was going to happen next.

Then you were leaning back as the other character, fist coming at your face. Lune and Esquie gasped appropriately.

And there was that out-of-place musical sting again.

Everything stopped.

You whipped around to face Verso. “What’re you doing?” you both accused each other at the same time.

It was harsh enough to make you pause and take in the situation. Verso heard his words echo with yours and started laughing.

“I think I’m missing something,” you admit, relaxing your body language from where you’d been strung against your own movements.

Verso’s laughter died down a bit, but there was still clear amusement in his voice. “It’s a comedy,” he informed you.

“What?” The words came out like a bark as you bit back your own amusement imagining what he must’ve been picturing in his mind. To you, and to the people of Lunmiere, that scene was the beginning of the descent for the characters that led up to the catastrophe at the end of the act which led into the resolution at the end of the performance.

“It probably doesn’t work since its just the two of us, but the whole point is that they’re arguing about the sanctuary that isn’t missing anything at all,” he explained.

“So, they’re all there?” you asked, picturing your cast all on stage, watching these two characters trying to kill each other over nothing.

“They’re all there,” Verso agreed, suddenly his usual calm and held together self.

Esquie quite expertly took the crowd away from the piano with a fluttering interpretive dance which seemed easy to join.

“And it still ends the same?” you asked, stepping nearer to the bench.