Moments we Paint, but Stories they Write (Clair Obscur:E33/From)

[FireWalkWithMe99]

GUSTAVE



The morning came in soft over Lumière, the way it always did that gold-edged hue in the sky, indifferent to the fact that any given gonmage they'd lose yet another year's worth of people. Gustave had he always resented that indifference others had on it. Still even to him at times it just felt like the weather. The years when no one he knew well was gommahed were the easiest but still every year was a reminder of those he lost and the losses yet to come. You dressed for it, or you didn't, and either way, the flowers didn't care.



He dressed carefully today but thankfully not for a gommage.



The blue suit had hung in the back of his wardrobe for longer than he wanted to admit, worn exactly once before today. He remembered lacing the collar with the same unsteady fingers he had now, remembered thinking, absurdly, that a piece of fabric could matter as much as anything he might say.



It had mattered, in the end.



Sophie had noticed it before she'd noticed anything else about that first night, had reached out and smoothed the lapel flat with two fingers, and told him very seriously that blue suited people who didn't know it suited them. He hadn't understood what she meant then. He wasn't sure he fully understood it now. But he'd kept the suit, and today, without any real plan, his hands reached for it again.



Some things you didn't decide. You just recognized them, waiting for you to catch up.



He was going to ask her today. Not ask that wasn't the right word, there was no ring in his pocket, no ceremony he was building toward. He was going to say something, plainly, the thing he'd spent the better part of a year swallowing back down every time it rose in his throat.



That he wanted a life with her. That he wanted, insane as it was, given everything a child. Not despite The Paintress. Maybe, in some twisted and stubborn way, in spite of her. Because if the world insisted on spending every year in death and forgetting, then he wanted before it ended, to have made something real inside it. Something that was theirs.



He knew what Sophie would say. He'd built the argument against himself a hundred times, lying awake beside her, rehearsing her voice better than his own. You want to bring a child into this? Into a countdown of days? He held no clean answer.



Only the stubborn, unreasonable want sitting within like coal that refused to go cold, no matter how much sense tried to smother it.

---

Emma was at the dock already, sleeves pushed up, doing something practical and slightly violent to a coil of rope.



"You're not taking my boat looking like that," she said, without looking up.



"I'm taking your boat, looking exactly like this."



She glanced over then took him in; the suit, the hair he'd actually bothered with, the poorly hidden nerves, and her face softened before she let it go sharp again like she usually did during their little verbal spars.



"You're going to fall in with Father's suit on, and I am not fishing you out in front of the whole town."



"I'll make note of the concern."



"Gustave!" She straightened, rope forgotten. "This is a date-date. Not a rowing-around-being-broody date."



"Is there a difference?"



"With you? Historically, no." His sister said that with the knowing smile she's had since they were small before the orphanage, before mama was gommaged.



She tossed him the rope anyway, and helped him check the hull the way she always did, in that oh so competent way he wished he could muster, before she said softer not quite looking his way, "Take care of her out there."



"I intend to."



"I meant the boat." A beat. "But also her."



He didn't answer that directly. Emma had a way of saying the thing that mattered inside a joke.



He thought, not for the first time, that it was a blessing the gommage would come for him before they came for her; she would be fine. Not unhurt but alright at the end of things, she already had a steel that this world required that even Gustave failed to truly obtain.

---

Lune was harder to get past, mostly because she wanted an explanation for the suit and gave him a stare that suggested she already had one and merely wanted to watch him squirm, confirming it.



"You look like a man about to do something monumentally sincere," she said.



"I am but a man borrowing a boat."



"You also look like a man who ironed a jacket for the first time in a year." She crossed her arms. "Good. She deserves sincerity."



"I know that."



"I know you know. I'm saying it anyway." Lune's expression shifted, something more careful underneath the teasing.



"Just whatever you're about to do out there. However it goes. Don't let it eat you before you've even said it." Lune paused for a moment that felt like forever. "I hope it goes well"



He didn't ask what she meant by however it goes. He suspected she already knew this wasn't only good news he was carrying, that some part of what he meant to say today had the potential to skewer his soul where he stood.

Lune had a way of seeing the writing on the wall before it came to pass.



He thanked her, and said little more, going onward to find Maelle before, hoping she could provide the motivation he needed to go into this date.

---

He found her exactly where he expected, sitting on the low wall above the eastern dock with her knees pulled up and a book she wasn't reading open on her lap, watching the water instead.



"You look ridiculous," she said, by way of greeting, without turning her head.



"Thank you."



"No, I mean it. That collar's doing something to your neck." She finally looked at him properly, and her whole face changed, delighted despite herself. "You look like Emma dressed you."



"Emma tried to stop me from leaving the house."



"Smart woman." Maelle patted the wall beside her, an invitation, and he sat, careful of the suit but wary of nothing else because fourteen-year-olds did not require carefulness the way the rest of Lumière seemed to.



"Big day," she said after a moment, in the tone of someone who already knew and was waiting to see if he'd admit it.



"Might be."



"You're going to tell her you want to have a baby with her."



He nearly fell off the wall. "How—"



"You get a face." She shrugged, entirely unbothered by having demolished his composure in four words. "The same face you get when you watch the little kids at the shelter. Like it hurts to look at them because you want something you're not sure you're allowed to have." A pause, more serious now. "You get that face a lot, actually. I just don't think you know you do."



He didn't answer immediately. There wasn't a version of 'how observant of you' that didn't sound like he was trying to avoid the topic. Afraid talking about it anymore in depth would take his nerve.



"Do you think I'm a fool," he asked instead, quietly, "for wanting it anyway. Knowing what the world is."



Maelle considered this with the terrible seriousness only children seemed to still have access to, the kind the older members here seemed to have trained out of themselves as a survival mechanism. "I think," she said slowly, "that if everybody stopped wanting things because the world might end, there'd be nothing left before it actually did. Might as well want something." She picked at the corner of her book. "Besides. Isn't that sort of the point of you and Sophie? You're both walking around already knowing how this ends. And you still… " she gestured at him, as she lightly ruffled his straightened tie, "do this."



He looked at her, fourteen years old, a number stitched invisibly somewhere on her that he refused to let himself think about directly, and yet already so much wiser about the actual math of hope than most of the older guard. He felt something in his chest fold over on itself, proud and afraid in the same breath.



He had seen the look in her eyes lately, the one that had arrived sometime after she'd truly understood what the number meant. It wasn't fear or at-least not strictly so, It was resolve.



The dangerous kind that made him suspect, though he would never say it for fear of bringing it to being, that she would not wait for her final year to try to do something about all of this. That she'd go looking for a way to fight it long before then, whether anyone gave her permission or not.



He hoped selfishly, that the expeditions would be finished by then. That thirty-five would be the one to reach the monolith, or that some other door out of this nightmare would be found first, anything, so that Maelle would never have to be the one standing on a departing ship with that same resolve in her eyes.



"You know," he said instead, because he couldn't say any of that, "you're the reason Sophie and I are even.. This thing. Us."



That got her attention properly. "What?"



"All those afternoons at the shelter. Watching you terrorize the younger ones into behaving." He nudged her shoulder with his. "That's where it started. Sophie and I. Somewhere between you refusing to eat your vegetables and you organizing the six-year-olds into a very aggressive card game."



Maelle looked, for a moment genuinely undone by this a tiny bout of pride she tried immediately to smother under a scoff. "That tracks, honestly. I'm very influential, and here I thought it all was cause that spot of trouble you got into with Emma, for the two of you lovebirds madly kissing during her Aquafarm 3 construction speech."



"You are unbearable."



"Tis that not but an intersection of Influence." Despite the little devil's jab she was smiling, and bumped his shoulder back.



"Go tell her. Whatever happens. Better to have said it than to keep carrying it around like you have been."



He stood, straightened the suit jacket he apparently hadn't been wearing correctly, and found, for the first time all morning, that his hands had stopped shaking.

---

Sophie was waiting at the dock in her red beret, and something in his chest simply stopped when he saw her the exact beret, the very same soft grey coat over the white polka dot blouse with the beautiful terracotta red draping below.



The very same she'd worn the first time they'd done this. Neither of them had discussed it. He was certain of that, certain there'd been no conversation, no agreement to dress like the first night all over again.



Yet there she was, waiting in it, just as he'd arrived in the same blue suit without meaning to, without planning as though some part of both of them had reached for the beginning by instinct alone.



"You wore the suit," she said, when he was close enough, a private smile pulling at her mouth.



"You wore the beret."



"I didn't plan that."



"Neither did I."



They looked at each other for a moment, and it was and he knew he would think about this moment for a long time afterward, turn it over and over regardless of how tonight went.



It was one of those instances where he understood, that whatever else was true about this world, the damned Paintress, about the number ticking down over both their heads. This thing between them was real.



Not a story they'd told themselves to survive the darkness and the cycle of loss. Real, and messy, and imperfect, and irrevocably theirs Two people who had somehow against every reasonable expectation, found the same wavelength without ever agreeing to look.



He helped her into the boat. It was small, and a little worn at the oarlocks from years of Emma's use nothing grand that'd fit the backdrop for anything of note. Which suited him. He didn't want grand. He wanted this: her hand in his as she stepped down, the boat rocking gently under their shared weight, and the quiet slap of water against the hull as he pushed them off from the dock.

---

They didn't row far. There wasn't much need to. Lumière held itself at a careful distance from whatever the mainland actually was, and the water around it did the same thing the light holding that iridescent gold when reflected in the right way.



Gustave let the oars rest more than he used them, content to let the current do the slow work of carrying them in a wide, unhurried loop around the edges of the only home either of them had ever known.



"It's strange," Sophie said, watching the towers catch the light, "how it can still be this beautiful. After everything."



"I've thought that too."



"I don't know if that's a comfort or an insult. That the world kept being beautiful while it does this to us."



"Maybe it's both."



She looked at him then, and there was something searching in it like she already sensed the shape of what he'd brought her out here to say and was trying to get ahead of it, the way she braced for most things now.



He didn't want to make her wait any longer than he had to.



"Sophie." He set the oars down entirely, let the boat drift. "I need to say something, and I need you to actually hear it, not just let it pass the way we always do."



"Gustave, "



"Please." His voice cracked slightly on the word, and he hated that, hated that his nerve was already fraying before he'd even said the thing.



"I want a life with you. All of it. Not just… just whatever pieces of it we can steal before the next expedition, before the next year turns over. I want, "



He made himself say it. "I want a child with you. I know what that sounds like. I know everything you're about to say. I've said it to myself already, every version of it, lying awake next to you more nights than you know. And I still want it. Maybe because of everything, not despite it. I don't want to just survive this world with you, Sophie. I want to have 'made' something in it. Before either of us runs out of time."



The silence that followed was long enough that he could hear the water lapping against the hull, could hear a bird somewhere on Lumière, impossibly, one of the rare ones as he didn't recognize its strange caw at all.



"You're serious," Sophie said finally, very quietly.



"Completely."



Her eyes were already glassy when she looked up at him, and her voice, when it came, wasn't cruel he wanted, desperately, for her to understand later that he never once thought it was cruel but it was final in a way that made his stomach drop before she'd even said anything.



"I can't, Gustave."



"Sophie—"



"No, please, let me." She pressed her palms briefly against her eyes, steadying herself, and when she took them away her face was wet, but her voice held.



"I have thought about this. More than you know. More than I've ever told you, I never wanted to be the one to say it first and ruin whatever time we had left pretending we hadn't both been thinking it."



She shook her head. "I cannot bring a child into this slow death sentence. I can't do it. Every single year, this world takes something from us and calls it inevitable, asks us all to just endure, generation after generation, and I am not — " her voice broke off, strained "—I am not going to hand a child a life that's already been measured out before they've even had the chance to understand what a year even means. A life where they'll lose me and then you when they are very young. I won't do that to them. I won't let them, watch it happen."



"I know the risk," he said quieter now, all his rehearsed conviction gone thin. "I know what I'm asking. I just thought if there's ever a moment worth trying, worth wanting something in spite of the ending, isn't it now? Isn't it us?"



"That's exactly it, Gustave." She was openly crying now. His own face started to wet before he'd even noticed the first tear fall.



"It's because it's us. Because I love you enough that I can't do that to a child of ours. I can't bring someone into this world just to hand them a clock the second they're born." Her hand found his, gripped it hard even as she said the words that were unmaking them. "I love you. I need you to hear that too. This i— this isn't me not loving you enough. It's the opposite. It's too much love to let this happen the way you want it to."



He didn't argue. There wasn't an argument left in him only the coal in his chest, still stubbornly glowing, now with nothing left to hold onto except the ash gathering around it.



"So that's it," he said, and it wasn't quite a question.



"I don't know." Sophie's hand hadn't let go of his. "I don't know what it even is anymore. I'm not — I'm not saying I don't want you. I'm saying I can't want this specific thing with you. Maybe that's the same as ending it. Maybe it isn't. I don't have the answer, Gustave. I just have the truth, and the truth is I can't."



He turned away from her then, toward the window of pale golden etched water and paler gold sky, because he could feel his composure slipping and some useless pride within didn't want her to watch it go. He let the boat drift without direction, because his hands weren't steady enough to be trusted with navigation and his mind was too loud with the wreckage of every version of the future he'd built without her permission.



He thought, absurdly, of Maelle's voice not an hour ago: isn't that sort of the point of you and Sophie. He thought: not yet. Maybe not yet.



Maybe expedition thirty-five would end this countdown, the yearly slaughter all of it and there would be room again for the kind of hope he'd just laid bare out on the water between them and watched sink. Maybe thirty-four, even, before that. Before.. It has to be before the day he only thought of in bad dreams.



He didn't finish the thought. He never did, lately. It only brought him nightmares.



Sophie didn't try to fill the silence and he loved her for that too, even now with everything unresolved and raw between them. She simply stayed close, her shoulder nearly against his a gesture that refused the neatness of a true ending even as the words between them had already painted a version of one.



It wasn't over-over. He didn't know what it was. Only that she hadn't moved away, and some small, foolish part of him took that as its own kind of answer.



It was Sophie who broke the silence first, her voice small and startled in a way that had nothing to do with grief.



"Gustave." She was looking past him, out over the water. "How did a tree get this far out? From both the mainland and Lumière?"



He turned, grateful, humiliatingly grateful, for anything that could pull him even slightly out of the wreck of his own chest.



There was impossibly, a tree.



It sat low in the water some distance off, a dead thing, stripped grey and stark, the kind of dry, brittle grey that came from years exposed to weather rather than water.

Only the base of it, where it met the surface, looked wet at all.



It was a bit unsettling that the upper reaches were bone dry, untouched, which made no sense at all for something floating this far out.



If a storm had carried it, or even if one of the flying Nevrons he read reports on which he knew never ventured this far out to begin with, somehow had dragged it loose from wherever it had grown.

It should have been soaked through top to bottom by the jostling of the currents alone, given it clearly wasn't just dropped here at this moment. Yet it sat there dry as if it had simply always been exactly where it was.



And it was covered in birds.



Crows, he recognized the shape of them only distantly, the idea of a crow more familiar to him than the actual sight of one, since nothing like them lived on Lumière and no expedition record he'd ever read mentioned the birds, or many animals really, surviving out here.



The concept of them existed the way old accounts of expeditions did: known, and referenced, but never actually witnessed. And yet there they sat, a dozen of them at least, black and near still along the withered branches, watching the water without any of the wariness he'd have expected from the wild held within their beadlike eyes.



"I don't understand it either," he admitted, quietly some of the raw grief in his chest momentarily eclipsed by something else entirely, a small sense of fear seeming to come from nowhere. A curiosity sharpened by wrongness.



Sophie's hand tightened slightly around his, and for a moment neither of them said anything else. They only looked.





They turned the boat right to head back towards lumiere. There was nothing else to do he said what he needed to and the goodness of their date expired sometime mid conversation. No reason to stay out here he would deliver Sophie safely home and hope all would work out one day, but it was in the turning that Gustave first noticed the water didn't look quite right.



It wasn't Lumière's water anymore. The color had shifted subtly the horizon drawing inward in a way that made no geographic sense, Even the dreaded sight of the number upon the monolith and the paintress below was missing, normally a sight he'd find most unwelcome but at this moment the paintress and her dread would've served as a true north of sorts.



He still looked for sight of it, and of Lumiere, But the wide unbroken ocean seemed narrower, closing until what surrounded them felt less like a sea and more like a lake. Something with edges where before there had been none.



"Gustave." Sophie's voice had gone tight.



"I see it."



Gustave did see it. He didn't really understand what he was seeing at all only that the shoreline ahead faint through a low haze matched nothing on any map he'd ever studied. He'd trained for this in a sense, some sliver of him had always assumed he might one day see land that wasn't Lumière, might one day be the one to volunteer for an Expedition and go looking past the edges of what anyone actually knew.

He'd also knew he'd wait that if the prior expeditions could do what needed doing if thirty-five or whatever came after could close the distance between them and an ending that didn't require any more names carved into any more walls, then he'd never have to leave Sophie at all. He'd been telling himself that story for over a year now. He believed it and he would continue to up until the exact moment he no longer had such luxury.



Because if this wasn't the mainland, then he didn't know what it was at all. And Sophie was here. Sophie, who he'd just lost not twenty minutes ago and who he could not, would not, lose again in some other more final way out here on unmapped water.



His mind, uselessly went to Sciel. One of Sophie's closest friends, a widow, the woman who had lost her husband on a nearby island and then discovered, cruelly, after her grief brought her to the darkest place any of them can go, that she'd been carrying his child the entire time she grieved him. He thought of her often when he let himself think about what all of this actually cost, beyond the yearly toll the particular griefs that didn't show up in any accounting of the Gommage.



If I don't get her home, I will have made another Sciel of myself or of her. Except there would be no child left behind, only an ending with nothing on the other side of it.



He rowed harder, uselessly, against a current that didn't seem to care which direction he wanted.



The shoreline kept coming closer regardless. Whatever this was, it wanted them to land.





They saw the shelter first; a low, overgrown structure that might once have been a proper lodge, its shape softened under years of vine growth and erosion, nothing like anything either of them had seen in Lumière. And then they saw the boy.



He came out from somewhere near the treeline a fair bit older than Maelle but younger still than either of them holding a somewhat darker skin tone, and he stopped dead at the sight of the boat or was it the sight of them, his whole posture caught somewhere as he looked deeply in direction with fear all over his face. But why?



Gustave's first thought absurd as it was, arrived before he could stop it: could this be a child one of the older expeditions left behind? It made little sense. But it was also the least impossible explanation.



An older man emerged next from the same direction, moving with the particular caution of someone deciding, in real time, whether what he was looking at was a threat. He didn't look too far beyond Gustave's own age at first glance though still he seemed older as the boat neared closer, something about the way lines softly carved parts of his face, and the way he walked in a more settled way.



It made Gustave wonder if he was well and truly old, old enough, perhaps that Lumière's cruel arithmetic would already have claimed him, had he been born under it.



Gustave held the oars still, water dripping slowly off the blades, and looked at the strangers looking back at him feeling Sophie's hand find his again as the small boat rocked differently in this shallower water, steadying his resolve yet again.



Whatever this place was. Whoever these people were.



They were not in Lumière anymore.

---

A.N.
Hope any readers enjoy this crossover I don't really know what hit me persay but I was just sitting down and started thinking about the game again after the paintress theme came across my YouTube feed and my love from last year was reignited been updating another my other from fics (which im also actively writing a new chapter on) and this idea just came to me.

Hope the characterization thus far seems alright, definitely curious who you think they are about to meet next chapter is mostly drafted out now just need some edits hope to post it soon.

 

[FireWalkWithMe99]

KENNY



The settlement didn't feel any less messed up on day two than it had on day one.



Kenny figured it would, at least a little. Daylight, a full night behind them, the simple fact of having walked through the place once already without anything eating or attacking them, which usually took some edge off not this time though. If anything it felt worse just what was that thing running around the shelter during the night it didn't seem like one of those creatures sounded like it could move a lot faster as well, Made him feel like this place was watching them pack up and load out. Unfortunately though they had to stay atleast long enough to grab some of the food.



"You gonna help, or you just gonna stand there having a moment," Jim said, hauling a bag.



"I'm surveying."



"You're standing."



"Surveying requires standing." Kenny grabbed a bag anyway before Jim could give him a look again. "We got everything worth grabbing?"



"Got the food, got the tools. I'd like to be gone before whatever's was walking around last night decides we overstayed."



Couldn't argue with that game plan. Nobody who'd spent more than a week in this town argued with the instinct to get away from anything weird especially after the past few days with the dreams and what happened to Julie, Marielle and that other guy.



They were finishing the last load; Jim shoving the last few cabages into his bag, Kenny taking one last scan of the treeline across the lake mostly out of habit when he clocked it.



For a second his brain refused to file the thing as a boat. Looked more like a photograph propped up at the edge of the water, flat, staged, wrong. Then it rocked with the current and his brain caught up for once: an honest-to-God wooden boat, mostly a pale white straight out of some old painting, drifting toward shore like it had every right to be there.



"Jim."



"What."



"Tell me you see that."



Jim followed his eyes and he froze. Stuck looking for what felt like an eternity.



"I see it," Jim said, swallowing loudly. "That boat looks older than it should to you?"



"That's the thing. It doesn't look old. Not at all " Kenny hunted for it, and what came up was some field trip from ninth grade, standing next to his dad in front of a diorama of a whaling ship with small wooden dinghies not disimilar in size to the boat he and Jim stared at now. In the museum it was all painted backdrop and careful fakery; nothing about it was actually old, just built to look old. "Looks like something out of a museum exhibit. Like somebody repurposed something new to look old instead of it actually being beat up."



"That better or worse than the alternative?"



"Ask me in five minutes."



He didn't get five minutes, because well, the coastline was much closer and his brain skipped straight past his reverie and went right to theorizing on what this could mean in conjunction with the town.



Boyd accidentally bringing back that thing the worms. That whole dream-that-wasn't-a-dream mess, Julie spasming on the floor violently screaming in the middle of his house… something crawling into people's heads and screwing with the already lacking amount of peace and stability this place still held. And the storm before any of that shit, the storm forming as if right on cue the second they'd gotten close to actually getting that radio tower up. Every single time we had a shot at something better, this fucked place found some new way to slam the door on your fingers.



So when a boat that looked like a museum prop rolled up carrying two people dressed like extras from a period drama, Kenny's gut didn't say rescue. It said here we go again.



"You thinking what I'm thinking," he said, low.



Jim didn't look away from the water. "That this is another one of this places' way of messing with us?"



"Yeah."



"Wouldn't put it past it."



Neither would Kenny. Still he had to do what he could to protect Jim and the town from whatever this was. Paranoia only got you so far here, but he hoped it'd be enough to stay on the defensive against whatever this turned out to be.

---

Up close, in real daylight, the two people in that boat looked a lot less like a trap and a lot more like two people who had absolutely no clue where the hell they'd landed.



The clothes didn't help his first impression, though the guy had on some tailored blue suit, way too formal for a boat, let alone whatever this was; the woman wore a red beret and a soft grey coat with the end of a darker red dress flowing beneath it ending somewhere loosely past the kneecaps, both looking like they'd stepped straight out of an old photo album. For half a second, Kenny's brain wanted to file them under the same category as the monsters too out of this era, like something wearing a person costume.



Then the woman's face just crumpled, plain scared, and the guy's hand found hers in the boat without him even seeming to think about it. It caught him off guard a little, how much that one small thing reminded him of his parents, back before everything with his dad went the way it went. There'd been a version of them, years back, where his mom would get overwhelmed by something, often times their bills, though sometimes just a bad day. His dad wouldn't say a word; he would just find her hand or rub her shoulder before either of them had time to think about it, some truly human reflex that ran underneath any spoken language.



Kenny used to take it for granted, the way you take anything for granted when you've never once considered it might stop happening. Watching this stranger do the exact same thing for someone he clearly couldn't fix anything for. That killed his initial assumptions. The monsters can't fake that at least not truly and never with each other.



"Not monsters," Kenny muttered.



"You sure?"



"No. But I'm sure enough."



Which left him with the actual problem: if they weren't monsters, and probably weren't the town cooking up something new then what the hell were two people doing showing up by a boat more fitting in a history museum, at a settlement nobody in town even knew existed until yesterday.



Were these the ones growing the crops this whole time, he thought, and immediately shelved that one, because the boat had already scraped bottom on the bank and there wasn't time to chase his theories farther and stay alert if his gut instincts about the two were wrong. He went on this trip largely to keep the Matthew's kids from becoming orphans and he wasn't about to slack now.

---

"Hey," Kenny called, hands loose in the universal don't-shoot posture he'd gotten way too good at lately. "Hey you two good?"



Nothing. Just two sets of wide, freaked-out eyes.



"You understand me?"



Still nothing though the guy in the suit turned and said something low to the woman quickly, clearly not aimed at Kenny at all.



"Je m'en occupe," he murmured, one hand still wrapped around hers. "Ne t'inquiète pas. Nous trouverons une solution pour retourner à Lumiere."



Kenny didn't get a word of it besides solution, which just provided the shape of it a real language, structured, they were going somewhere towards a goal, an answer?



"That French?" Jim asked, coming up beside him.



Kenny listened again while the guy said something else, Semingly more to himself than to her this time. "Ça pourrait faire partie du continent," he said, eyes on the tree line past the two strangers on the bank, "qu'on n'a pas encore cartographié..." He didn't sound very confident in whatever he said. The sentence just sort of ran out on its own, trailing off into nothing, and the woman's hand tightened around his like she'd heard the doubt in it too. But about what he had no idea.



Again, though a few phrases led to some understanding, continent and cartography, so were they making a map? Was there another group of people stuck here, and they were none the wiser cause very few dared to go out far into the woods?

It seemed like a very out there idea, but given he doubted anyone besides him and Jim had stumbled across this place, it wasn't impossible. Could there be a whole new town of people deeper into the forest?



Looking back at Jim, he got back into focus. Recalling Jade's frequent bursts of French, most notably when he stubbed his toe on the corner of the oven at Mom's house, which happened far too many times to count.



"Yeah. Pretty sure that's French."



"Great." Jim didn't even try to hide the flatness.



"Unfortunately. I took Spanish in high school."



"I actually took a semester of French my first year in high school, but remember very little of it. Man, where's Jade when you need him."



Came out as a joke, but it was a genuinely shitty turn of events because Jade actually spoke French, ran his mouth in it half the time when he was deep in one of his manic spirals, and Kenny had tuned most of it out. Never once thought to ask him to slow down and teach him a word. Why would he there'd never been a reason it might matter?



Guess there was a reason now. Story of his life, showing up right after the test.



He tried the basics anyway, feeling like an idiot doing it. "Bonjour," he said. "Je jem apple " digging through the wreckage of a high school class he'd been half focused through, " — je m'appelle Kenny."



Something shifted in the guy's face recognition maybe a bit of relief. He said his own name back, slowly "Gustave" then pointed at the woman. "Sophie."



"Sophie," Kenny repeated, nodding. "Gustave." Pointed at himself again, then Jim. "Kenny. Jim."



Small win he'd have to settle for the easy stuff for now hopefully they could keep them calm.



He tried the one other word he half-trusted himself on, the word for safe palms up. "Sûre," he said, slowly. "You're Sûr. Sûre."



Gustave's face scrunched up, then said something back that had the shape of a question. Kenny had zero shot at that one. He just repeated himself, pointed at the shore, himself, Jim, the two of them. "Safe. You're safe here."



It wasn't landing. It was like trying to explain a zone defense to somebody who'd never seen a basketball. The woman in the Beret Sophie he supposed said something to Gustave, sounding anxious and he answered, and all Kenny caught out of the whole exchange was the tone of two people trying to hold it together.



That's the part that actually got him, more than any of the rest of it.



Because he knew that look. Same exact picture of two people stuck on opposite sides of a gap neither one could close, reading each other's faces because the sentences weren't gonna get there in time.



His mom had lived a version of that for years, Cantonese the only language that ever really felt like home in her mouth, English always a step behind wherever she actually needed it to be. His dad used to run interference for her, patiently smoothing things over before they turned into a messy misunderstanding. Then the dementia started seeping through that too, and some days the old man would just sit by the chessboard groping for a word that used to live in his mouth easily, looking exactly as lost as Gustave looked right now. No way to make himself understood by the two guys actually trying to help him.



Something in Kenny just felt bad for the guy. Hoped to God Jade would actually be worth something today, that whatever scraps of French had bounced off Kenny over the past few weeks without sticking would turn out to matter more than he'd ever given them credit.



"We'll figure it out," he said, mostly to himself. "Get you somebody who can actually talk to you."




They luckily got them to agree to come with little prodding Jim agreed to lead and Kenny trailed behind.



The two unexpected members of the trek back were holding pace relatively well all things considered though both of them seemed anxiously looking up into the horizon, sometimes staring at a particular spot squinting like they were looking for some sign from the heavens itself. After a few minutes of that. it just kind of fizzled out of them. Seeming to understand that whatever they were looking for was simply not present.




Then suddenly, Gustave spoke again for the first time since they started heading back.



"Le Monolithe a disparu. Où nous trouvons-nous par rapport à Lumière ? Il était un arbre au sein des flots, puis soudain... nous fûmes ici. Un arbre mort, couronné de noirs corbeaux."

Jim ended up looking back in his direction, and Sophie seemed to grip Gustave's hand more tightly than a second before and whispered briefly in the man's ear. Not that it would've mattered if Sophie screamed to the top of her lungs, since neither he nor Kenny knew what she or Gustave was saying.

Now Gustave looked briefly at Jim, then back at Kenny. His eyes seemed to hold an apology for the earlier confusion. Then Gustave spoke again, a much shorter group of words.



"Un arbre... L'arbre, et puis ici."



Jim caught it first, one word, said twice, Gustave pointing back the way they'd come, hand cutting some shape in the air. Not a word Kenny understood, but the gesture landed close enough to ring a bell.



"Did he just say tree?"



Kenny listened as Sophie repeated it, nodding at whatever Gustave said, adding something of her own, hand doing the same rough shape then directly touching one of the trees they were walking near in the part of forest surrounding the edges of the settlement repeating the word again.



"Yeah. He definitely said tree." Kenny frowned. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"



Jim didn't answer right off, which Kenny figured meant he was chewing on the same ugly thought.



That word mattered more in this town than it had any right to matter anywhere on Earth. Every single person who'd ever ended up here, every name that ever got added to the list of folks who drove in and never found the way back out, there was always a tree at the start of the story somewhere, his own entry included. The dead one with crows all over it blocking the road. The one that took you and spat you out here instead of wherever you were actually headed.



Except every single one of them came in on the road. Car, van, truck, bus… that one was still hard to think about the sheer volume of people on it that day compared to the vehicles that came before. But even still, it was always something with tires, something that belonged on a road. Not once not in any story Kenny had ever heard, traded around a meal or muttered half-drunk in Colony houses kitchen, had anybody shown up by water, much less on a boat.



"That doesn't add up," he said. "Nobody else came in like this and everyones been whos came has came from a road in the States."



"Nobody else we know about," Jim said.



That was fair, because up until yesterday, none of them knew this whole settlement was even a thing, let alone if it or somewhere past it had its own version of whatever rulebook this place was running on. If the last day had taught Kenny anything, it was yet another reminder of how thick the ice really was under everything they thought they figured out. Tree blocking an empty road that was the way everyone currently in town experienced arriving. Didn't mean it was the only play on this fucked up board.



"So maybe there's more than one way into this place," he said, mostly just to hear how crazy it sounded out loud. If so that meant they'd have to check here daily or even have a group posted here for new arrivals?




Gustave was watching them now, clearly clocking that something in his words had landed, that the two guys in front of him were having their own little sideline conversation about whatever he and Sophie had just tried to say.



Kenny met both their eyes and found nothing there but the same wrung-out look, you'd expect off anybody dropped somewhere they didn't understand with people they couldn't talk to.



"Okay," Kenny said, mostly to Jim, though he kept it soft for the other two's sake, didn't want them to lose their willingness to travel with them and run off and end up dead.



"We're not solving this barely walking and thinking about it either, though. We bring 'em into town. Find Jade first thing, before anybody else gets eyes on them. Who knows what this will turn into if too many people get wind of this before they can even tell us anything….honestly even just Jade having to know first is a bit troubling."



"What if Jade's no help? He speaks french but he isn't always very forthcoming. Maybe we can look around the area sureounding the settlement a bit more first it could give us ideas, and Tabitha has to be near here somewhere."



"Listen, Jim… even if Jade isn't helpful initially, we're no worse off than we are right now. And he's better than you think. I've lived with him a bit longer than you guys have." Still didn't love those odds either, but standing in the dense forest, pointing at the sky wasn't winning any prizes.



"As for Tabitha. Jim, will keep looking later, but we have to go back right now. Beyond our two unexpected additions we can barely communicate with, the people need to know about the soil and food here, and we agreed we wouldn't spend too long out here before we even began this trek, Come on."



He waved Gustave and Sophie forward, palms open again. After a second, Gustave nodded some silent deal struck without either side saying a real word. With that, Jim reluctantly strode forward beyond the three of them again.

---

They walked along the trees in an awkward cluster of sorts, Jim half a step ahead scanning the woods out of habit, Kenny falling in back yet again but a bit closer to Gustave and Sophie, watching as they clocked every strange thing about the landscape, the kind of look that farther said none of this matched wherever they'd come from . Every so often Sophie would say something low to Gustave, and he'd answer in some vaugue french sounding mumble, and Kenny caught himself straining after the sound of it even though he didn't understand a word.




Town showed up first as smoke a gray thread above the last bits of tree canopy. Kenny slowed up a step, watching Gustave and Sophie get their first real look at the place: rooftops, shapes of buildings distant silhouettes of movement, places people actually lived, whatever else it turned out to be besides the point.



"Almost there," Kenny said trying to sound assured, knowing full well neither of them had a clue what he'd just said. He hoped maybe it could help them understand a bit more. His mom got a better handle on a lot of words after being exposed to them on a daily basis even if she wasn't saying anything back often.



He just hoped whatever came next with help from Jade, they could eventually piece together some explanation even if half-assed between three languages and a lot of pointing.



Kenny quickened his steps just a bit with that on his mind determined to find Jade as quickly as possible the distance outline of people becoming all the more well formed as the trees became less dense.




Finally they came to the last fewtrees coming into the town proper. The first set of eyes on them however unfortunately was not Jade but it made him freeze all but not due to the mans recent history in town.



The face on this man was not a face that seemed to fit the situation. Given who it was Kenny only ever expected to get looks of anger and disinterest from Randall, the guy who'd convinced himself the whole town was some kind of government head game with Donna running point on. He figured the boat people alone would've been more than enough to set him off. He was ready to get on the defense on their behalf as soon as he saw the bus.



But Randall wasn't looking at Gustave and Sophie at all. He was looking straight at Kenny, with a sad kind of smile and eyes that were doing something Kenny didn't like the look of at all.



Kenny felt his stomach drop and an uncomfortable dread he recognized all too well began to spread within.



Then Randall's eyes slid past him, landed on Gustave and Sophie, and the softness dropped off his face like it had never been there at all. The expected face of the exiled man returning



Maybe, He really was just imagining that earlier look…

---

Translations:



——

"Je m'en occupe. Ne t'inquiète pas. Nous trouverons une solution pour retourner à Lumiere."

"I've got this. Don't worry. We'll find a solution to get back to Lumiere."

——-

"Ça pourrait faire partie du continent qu'on n'a pas encore cartographié..."



"This might be part of the mainland we haven't mapped yet..."



——-



"Le Monolithe a disparu. Où nous trouvons-nous par rapport à Lumière ? Il était un arbre au sein des flots, puis soudain... nous fûmes ici. Un arbre mort, couronné de noirs corbeaux."



"The Monolith has vanished. Where are we in relation to Lumiere? There was a tree amidst the waves, then suddenly... we were here. A dead tree, crowned with crows."



——



"Un arbre... L'arbre, et puis ici."

"A tree… the tree then here"

---

A.N. Well, hope everyone enjoys the chapter. The next chapter will be in Sophies pov. As the story continues regarding portraying the Clair Obscur characters lack of a secondary language, I will plan to use italized text in quotes to indicate when our characters are speaking French, down the line. so theres understanding of why other characters don't fully understand them. But readers still get full understanding without having to look at translations.
I do hope the language barrier aspect served things well. I initially debated on it but I thought it would both make sense from a lore sense and also be interesting to tackle.

I based Kenny's inner voice partly on what we got from him in the show backstory wise and some of my own inferences.

Him saying "that other guy" opposed to saying Randall was mostly meant to showcase how Kenny atleast kenny at this moment doesnt respect randall as much as some others and also meant to be a bit comedic.

The use of some sports metaphors and stuff is linked to the fact that season 4 has a throwaway line about Kenny being a Youth Sports League Administrator. The backstories and info about his parents are mostly just me kind of making fanon based on what we know about Kenny and his family.

If anyone is curious, I picked Gustave and Sophie, opposed to just Gustave or say the whole expedition, because I thought it'd be interesting to explore Gustave and sophies dynamic, and also I thought it'd be more manageable and interesting to add two characters. I also wasn't really interesting in picking any non canvas characters to end up in From though out of the "real" people we meet i'd probably pick Clea though that would be a very different story.

I will say, though I think a story about an expedition boat ending up in some setting like this (doesn't have to be this series could definitely work for many settings) could definitely be interesting.