Chapter Text
The back door was unlocked.
For the record, Verso had felt ridiculous checking the back door at all, but from his weary, mangled brain, he recalled that after coming in from the garden, his sister often forgot to lock the door.
Maman hated when she did that. What if someone breaks in?
Of course, that might not have been his memories, his sister, or his home, which added to the rigmarole of the whole thing and really made him feel like he’d finally lost his goddamn mind when the door opened.
Upon smelling the air, his nose made the connection for him, and his shoulders slumped: home .
Then he shook his head. He felt invaded. He wasn’t Verso, not in any way that mattered, and this wasn’t his house. He was an intruder here, and he needed to move accordingly.
There was a noise from the cellar, too faint and quick for his ears to process. Verso tensed again and drew out his dagger — he knew from experience that the halls were too narrow to properly use a sword. Regardless of how he felt about them, the memories helpfully informed him on how to most silently enter the cellar. The real Verso had used that knowledge to steal sips of wine. The false, to kill.
In hindsight, he wasn’t sure what he was thinking he’d find. Alicia, perhaps. If it were anyone else, that would’ve spun out into a fight he couldn’t win.
Perhaps he wasn’t thinking at all. Thinking was a tool of survival, after all.
Regardless, any assumptions he could’ve made would’ve been wrong.
Verso was halfway down the stairs — a place at which someone below could only see his legs, and he couldn’t see them at all — when the noise was made again, clearer this time.
“No.”
A shifting, a jingling, a shudder.
“No no no — fuck, don’t! You were — you were just — it’s too soon…”
He’d heard that voice before, in the wrong context. Verso descended the stairs fully.
In the corner of the cellar, there was a man.
He was huddled and curled as much into a ball as he could manage, but one hand was fixed to the wall with a chain so short that he had no choice but to leave the limb outstretched and pitifully exposed. His hair was dark, copious, and bloody.
He was also supposed to be dead.