Work Text:
- All is lost
Save thought of love
And place to dream.
You love me?
- I love you.
- You are, then, cold coward.
Stephen Crane
…
Dunwall is dying.
He knows it in the broken Weeper cries that haunt the empty streets, in the pungent copper-taste of blood and sick on his tongue. Years ago, when the summer heat had clogged the gutters and wrapped thick arms around his throat, Daud would sometimes catch a faint wind of it, the stench. But summer has come and gone, and the plague has stayed—
And he can smell death all the time, now.
Lately there has been something else, too. A warning, erratic, humming at the corners of his mind and the edges of his skin. Like the dissonance of the Void, ripping into his world.
He lays down the audiograph in his hands, feeling a weariness that sinks beneath his skin, into his bones, beyond his years.
It’s about time Corvo came for him, he thinks.
…
The streets are unkind and the hunger is sharp; fear and loyalty are the same things. Daud is twelve years old and this is what the world looks like: Serkonos, vast and endless. The universe, contained. Life does not exist outside the city walls— if it does, it doesn’t matter, anyway, and those are the same things, too, or they might as well be.
They call his mother a White-witch. Chewing willow bark will cure a headache. An egg in warm milk will soothe sore throats. They are the kinds of remedies that common folk come to her for when their wolfhound falls ill, when their newborn has trouble breathing. She teaches him everything that she knows, and tells him not to mind the rumors that paint her something wicked. “White-witch,” his mother laughs, and
crumbles
chamomile and gingeroot over bubbling honey.
“Let them call me what they’d like,” she says. “There’s no harm or foul in words alone.”
…
One of the Whalers travserses, materializes at his side. Thomas. “What is it?” Daud asks, rubbing at his forehead. He wants to be alone.
“Forgive me,” Thomas says, his voice hoarse even behind the mask. “We can’t seem to stop him. He’s crossed all our secure perimeters—”
“It’s all right.”
Thomas stiffens at the consolation. “We’ve failed you, sir.”
Daud clasps his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter,” he tells him, and it’s true. He would have found him, no matter where he had hidden away. “He’ll come to me. He’ll have to.”
…
Fifteen, and he is a magnet, the kind of dirty-faced half-pint who has enough steel in his eye to encourage fear—
Loyalty—
They’re the same, remember?
Witch-boy, the other children call him. They don’t know the magic isn’t real. Sometimes they set up a ring in the back alleys, to watch him fight and frighten. The empty threat of a black curse, the practiced slash of a pocketknife.
He has never lost.
Fifteen years old and there is a dark-eyed schoolboy in the ring, just as dirty-faced, sporting a swollen eye and a broken nose. A few minutes in and Daud is spitting blood, too, and tiring of the other boy’s quick feet and deft swings. He flicks out his knife to finish off the round—
And a second later he’s flat on his back, with the boy frowning down at him.
Around them the other children are still shouting, shrill white-noise. Daud stares up at the boy from the ground, the back of his head smarting. “How’d you do that?” he asks, too surprised to be angry.
The boy shakes his head, and kicks the blade out of his hand. Daud scrambles to his feet.
“How’d you—“ He barely ducks the boy’s next swing. “Hey!” he says, more sharply.
“Again,” says the boy, breathlessly.
And so Daud goes again. And is floored again. He has never lost, and certainly never twice to the same pair of fists. But there is something in the other boy’s eyes that makes him want to bleed. When they’ve finished, nursing their bruises as they slump against the brick alley walls, the boy tips his head back, and looks at him. “Corvo,” he says, “I’m Corvo.”
HIs fingers are rough and warm and scrape raw against Daud’s own, when they shake.
…
He plays it out in his mind, as he paces. The way he will make his entrance, sharp and cold and metal. He’ll be angry. He’ll draw it out, make Daud suffer, and Daud will be glad of it. He’ll need that, his anger, if he’s going to be able to give him the satisfaction of a fight.
Corvo won’t find any satisfaction in killing a man who refuses to put up a defense against him. Not the Corvo that Daud knows.
The one he remembers.
…
Daud is nineteen, when Corvo enrolls in the Blade Verbena. The bright flags and colored ribbons flap and wave frantically in the strong, summer breeze. The arena rumbles, the crowd humming with frenzied energy. The gong sounds, the Verbena erupts—
In the first five minutes, Corvo has already bested three of the fifteen fighters.
He cuts through the arena like a molten rapier through silk; it is like something out of a fairy tale, like watching a projection out of a dream. A man twice Corvo’s size stumbles back howling, clutching at his arm, and it is not even his glory but Daud’s elation is like ambrosia, and it leaves him lightheaded.
When it is over he takes Corvo home and dresses his wounds, with Corvo sitting up on the counter by the sink. There is still sweat drying on his temple, and blood smudging the winner’s wreath nestled in his dark hair.
“They’ve asked me to join the Guard,” Corvo murmurs.
Daud keeps his eyes on what he’s doing, dabbing at a shallow gash on his arm. “Oh,” he says. “Are you going to?”
“Should I?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Daud,” says Corvo, and his voice so unusually helpless that Daud blinks, and looks up.
Corvo pulls him up against the counter and kisses him, hard, holding his face in his hands. It is quick, and over too suddenly, but he stays close, his breath coming fast and a strange, wild look in his eye.
“I don’t want to kill anybody,” he says. “Don’t you know that? Never. Never.”
Daud doesn’t understand. He is only nineteen, and still half-dizzy with the softness of Corvo’s mouth. “You wouldn’t have to,” he says. Kiss me again, he thinks.
There is blood on Corvo’s fingers. When he slides his hands into his hair, he leaves blood on Daud’s cheek, and neither of them notice for a long time.
…
The waiting, he finds, is the worst of it. Not the knowledge of what he is waiting for— but the long, ticking minutes of silence, before. He is tense. Rigid. Straining to catch the slightest sound of his boots scraping the floor, or the rustle of his coat. He hears nothing but his own unsteady breath.
Corvo had always been quiet.
Even when they fought, or fucked—
He remembers that well.
…
Somehow, they convince each other that it is just a way to pass the time.
They fight and they fuck and sometimes, it feels like the same thing, with Corvo on his stomach, or against the wall, still struggling to string together a counter-attack while Daud is braced over him, his chest to Corvo’s back, his fingers in Corvo’s mouth. It is always too rough. Too fast. And he is twenty-one and they are too young
to understand
temporary.
They fight, and then they fuck, and every time, it gets a little harder to stop Corvo’s name from sounding like a prayer.
When Daud is twenty-one—
He thinks he is strong and clever and he imagines, for a moment, that he will live forever.
And maybe Corvo does, too.
But then that moment ends.
He doesn’t mind the rumors about a plague, far away, or the Overseers, and their puritanical law-book. And when the word ‘witch’ becomes a threat he doesn’t mind that either because his mother said
there is no harm or foul in words alone
she said
He is twenty-one when the Abbey comes for his mother and she
crumbles
in the kitchen beneath the hilt of a sword
like paper and ash
over flame
and everything
unravels
at once.
He is still there on his hands and knees hours later shudder-shaking and trying to scrape her blood off the floor he hears the door slam open
again
Corvo’s voice is shot through and frightened and he calls Daud’s name
Here Daud says he feels numb I’m in here
Corvo grabs his hands and holds them tight they’re talking about it on the street he says I was afraid they’d hurt you he says
Hold me Daud thinks
Did they hurt you I’ll find them if they hurt you I’ll kill them I swear
Hold me he thinks I am twenty-one and I don’t feel strong
anymore
Did they hurt you Daud
No he says
I wish they had he says
Hold me he says
And Corvo wraps his arms around Daud’s back and rocks him
back and forth
back and forth
back and forth.
One of them says I love you.
Daud doesn’t remember which of them it was.
…
Neither of them meant for it to fall apart, not the way that it did.
But the Serkonan Abbey had started to gain influence and power—
And Daud couldn’t kiss him in the open anymore—
And one night Corvo had been lying next to him, pressing his mouth to the palm of his hand, and he had told him, quietly, that he’d been asked to serve an Emperor.
Across the sea, in Dunwall.
Daud remembers yanking his hand back. Rolling away, his back to him. He is forgetting the details, now— maybe it had just been a misunderstanding. Maybe Corvo had thought he would make him stay. Maybe Daud had been waiting for him to ask him to. But who had he been, to stop him?
He thinks, that was the very last time he was selfless.
…
“Please,” Daud says, breathing it into Corvo’s open mouth, his legs hitched up around Corvo’s waist, “I need— I need this.”
Corvo looks at him with distress in his eyes. His ship is coming in the morning. “Daud—”
“One more time, just once—”
“Okay,” soothes Corvo, softly. He starts to turn over, ass up.
Daud’s chest aches. “Not like that,” he says, his voice cracking.
He pulls himself into Corvo’s lap instead, and rocks up against him, his hands in his hair.
“This way,” he says. “Like this.”
It is the last time, but it feels like the first.
Corvo goes slow.
And he is warm, warm and gentle—
“Come on,” Daud says, panting into Corvo’s neck, “come on, fucking hell.”
His teeth are gritted, straining as he tries to keep his name in the back of his throat, “Fuck,” he says against his skin
cradled in the dip of Corvo’s hips riding him
Corvo’s hands holding him steady
And his voice comes out high higher than he—
“come on, fucking
move already.”
Corvo is warm, almost too gentle oh hell he’s
careful
“move” says Daud, pleading, “come on—”
But Corvo goes
slow
slower so sweet that his eyes get wet and he has to blink it back because
damn if Corvo sees that,
damn if Corvo
Holds him, afterwards.
Strokes his hair, lets him cry into his shoulder.
Daud is twenty-one, and this is what his world
This is what his world
This is his world.
This.
…
In the end, he never hears him.
He is standing at his desk one minute—
There is a heavy arm across his windpipe, the next.
Twisted backward and fighting for breath, he thinks, of course. It will be easier, this way. For Corvo to spill his blood without having to look upon his face. And it will be easier for Daud this way, too, without having to see the hate in his eyes. He struggles, because he knows that Corvo will want him to, he braces himself with sickened relief, steeling for the quick, blissful burst of cold metal, for the crimson-sharp pain as his throat is slit, thank you—
But the pain doesn’t come.
He feels a gloved hand, a soft cloth, instead, pressed up against his mouth, over his nose, and the thick, pungent stench of chloroform.
No! Realization and hysteria mix and strike through him and he tries to scream, tries to lash out, blackness smearing across his vision, tipping him into unconsciousness, Please, please, no, don’t—
…
The Overseers come for him, the same way they came for his mother. But now there is a Mark on his hand, and the magic is real, and this time, he leaves the blood on the floor.
He flees to Dunwall. No one tries to follow him. Twenty-eight years old and he is still a magnet, still has enough steel in his eye to encourage fear—
Loyalty—
Dunwall is like any other city.
He settles into the streets and finds those dirty-faced half-pints and puts up his fists and fights until they fall.
Again, he says, breathless, and pulls them to their feet.
And then Daud is thirty-five.
Forty-seven.
Fifty-two.
And this is what his world looks like.
The rooftop, underneath his feet.
His blade, whipping out of the Empress’s chest.
He’s had many names. He’s been called many things. But nothing is worse than the horror in Corvo’s eyes, and the word, trembling, “you—?”
“You—?”
…
He wakes sprawled upright on a broken chair in a tiny one-window room, a thickness in his head and nausea clinging to the roof of his mouth.
Corvo is leaning against the wall opposite, in the corner, hunched with his arms tight across his chest. He’s taken off his mask. There are just as many creases lining his face as there are lining Daud’s, and just as much pain. Me, Daud thinks. I did that.
He runs his tongue along his teeth and the taste comes back sour. “Where are we?” he asks, struggling to focus; every word scrapes up against his throat like sand over stone.
Corvo’s words are low, almost distant. “Still in the District. I didn’t carry you far.”
“And my— the Whalers—?”
Corvo turns his head. “Alive,” he answers, softly. “I wouldn’t—”
Wouldn’t do that to you.
Daud’s stomach heaves.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” he says, weakly.
Corvo watches as he turns away, retching, and vomits over the side of the chair, his body desperately trying to heave up the rest of the drug. When he sways upright again acid spit is drooling from the corner of his mouth. He wipes it away with his sleeve, and looks at Corvo with his eyes burning.
“Kill me."
Corvo laughs. There isn’t any humor in it. “No.”
“Please,” Daud says. His voice breaks. “If you don’t—”
“No, Daud,” replies Corvo, sounding tired. “If you were going to take your own life, you would have done it already.”
The first time he has said his name in over twenty years, and it is wholly unremarkable.
Daud swallows, and it hurts. “They said you wouldn’t be there,” he says, pathetically. “The Lord Regent, he said— you weren’t supposed to be there.”
“Would it have changed anything?”
“No,” he admits, quietly.
“You still would have killed her.”
“Yes.”
Corvo sighs, frayed at the edges.
“Please,” Daud repeats, “Corvo, do you really need me to tell you? How I wish I could take back what I’ve done, how it haunts me, every day—”
“Stop,” Corvo says, sharply. “I don’t want your apologies, your excuses—”
“Then what do you—”
“Your help.”
Daud’s breath catches, painfully. “What?”
Corvo watches him, eyes dark, and serious, and if Daud didn’t remember him the way he does he would mistake the edge in his voice for anger, and not for uncertainty. “Come with me. Take back the Tower.”
His mouth is dry, his head reeling— not from the chloroform, not this time. “I can’t—”
“If you regret it,” Corvo says. “If you loved me—”
“You think I didn’t—?” Laughter, hysterical and cracked, bubbles up into his throat. “Corvo—”
“If you loved me,” Corvo says again, but gentler, now. “Daud. Make this right.”
…
Daud is fifty-two.
Fifty-two, and if Corvo were to kiss him it would feel like regret.
It would feel like I’m sorry
And you killed her you killed her you killed her
It would feel like fear, and loyalty.
It would feel like, hold me.
The sun begins to come up over the high city rooftops, and the salt-wind clears the smell of death from the air, and Corvo pauses in the window, illuminated, scarred and half-healing and not quite forgiving, not quite yet.
“Well,” he says. “Are you coming, or not?”