Work Text:
The night air feels like a benediction.
Not much does, recently. There used to be nights when Corvo could tuck himself away from the bustling sprawl of the city, either into Jessamine’s arms or the cloister of the Abbey. There was always some sort of restful silence for him, some harbor. But the docks had been torn down, and now he was left to his devices in the night.
Not that it is necessarily a bad sight. Even the more run down parts of the city where most of his work takes him aren’t truly hideous, their squalid conditions easily masked by the relieving darkness and glittering signs and apartment lights. They use crass neon instead of the biolumescent material, ironically called whale oil, so popular with the upper echelons, but in a way, that suits him, too.
Subtleties belong buried with the rest of his old life, in the courtyard of a church he no longer has any right to access, let alone legal capability. No, he doesn’t visit his lover, not even at night; he knows her grave will creak with the weight of the roses heaped upon it until her name fades to oblivion. There is no need for him to sully the soil there with his own tread.
Corvo puts his mind to better uses, more practical things. He has money to earn for his daughter, and his work as an assassin and all around spook requires very specialized materials in the days of highly sensitive security systems and clanking heaps of humanoid machinery patrolling every street corner that can afford one.
He lets the night air stroke his hair as he moves quietly, rolling and jumping from roof to roof, stairwell to stairwell, sliding along cables and laundry lines he’s sure are secure enough. In his defense, his mind doesn’t trail to when he did these things for the state rather than as a free agent – as a criminal.
Instead, he uses his senses to pick out his mark.
It isn’t an easy task, not ever. If the Outsider doesn’t want to be found, nobody will ever find him. Even when he does, it’s all too easy to glance over his little hiding holes, the only signs of his inhabitation the faint glow of blacklight and the tell-tale scrapes and scratches of grinding and carving.
About twenty minutes in, he spots it – what should be a bird coop on top of one of the older buildings, a fish packing plant at the ground level that houses employees on the higher floors. A legitimate business, a bitch to get into, and Corvo has to take out three different laser traps and one drone before he can manage a clean leap from the tenement building just beside it.
He’s reminded of part of the problem with finding the Outsider every time he sees him. In his mind’s eye, he’s so distinctive, but before him, he’s almost instantly forgettable – brown hair and pale skin common to most of the population in the lower half of the city, with features neither too beautiful nor too plain.
It would be impossible to pick him out of a crowd, if he covered his eyes. Maybe even if he didn’t. They’re dark, and the ruined sclera around them could be caused by any number of diseases or chemical contaminants common to factory life.
“You made it,” he says, a statement and not a question.
His dark eyes fall on Corvo before they flick back to his work, the bubbling liquid in front of him. The automatic mortar and pestle grind softly beside him. Corvo knows he’s making more of the stuff he calls Dark Vision, little purple pills that will come out glossy and perfectly spherical. They break the veins in the sclera, but the tradeoff for sight is worth it to those who buy; to those like him, who have a need for seeing things in the dark without equipment that can be easily lost or damaged, that can’t always be relied on to work.
The Outsider doesn’t peddle these chemicals. He offers, and people take. Everything else seems to fall into place for him.
Corvo has some serious doubts he’s actually human.
He stays silent as ever, though, waiting. His hands don’t even move like they might, like they do when he talks to Emily. The Outsider understands sign language well enough, and that’s part of the reason he stays completely still.
“I was wondering when you would run out. But I imagine that the Boyle party really did give you a rather hard time of it,” he pauses. Looks at Corvo again, and slowly rolls his head to one shoulder. Observing, more a bird of prey than Corvo has ever been, despite his namesake or profession. “My. It did, didn’t it? I suppose killing a pretty young thing will do. Especially given your circumstances.”
There’s nothing mocking in his tone, which he hates. At least mockery would give him something to rage against. Instead, the dispassionate observation only makes Corvo feel how tired he is; in every fiber of him, he is tired. He feels his back rest against one of the columns of the coop. The breath that comes out of him might as well be his last.
“I have something for that,” the Outsider tells him. “For escaping. But it’s a more intimate experience than you might be up for.”
Corvo squints at him. Half the Outsider’s mouth ticks up, amused.
“Sexually. Yes, that was the meaning. Not that the thing itself is actually sex. Is that ever really enough?” He asks like he wants to know, and Corvo hates him a little more for it.
But he knows the Outsider doesn’t peddle. He doesn’t push, or haggle, or threaten. He offers, and one takes or doesn’t.
The air inside of the coop is close, though it doesn’t smell like birds, or even fish, or the stink of sewage. It smells like every one of the Outsider’s little shrines, each one looking exactly the same inside, no matter where he’s erected his station. They all flood with violet light, curios and chemicals arranged in a dizzying array around him. There’s only ever one chair, and a thin mattress on the ground with no pillows and no blanket. No books. No favours. No clothes or phones or handheld video game platforms. Everything is impersonal.
The scent of medicine and rose cigarettes clings to him as much as the tang of salt air, and it’s only with a little reservation that Corvo leans forward a little and lets his forehead rest against the Outsider’s shoulder.
The Outsider offers.
Corvo always accepts.
He feels the clasps of his mask worked free, as easily as if the one undoing them were looking at him. He isn’t, though, his ruined eyes are focused on the chemicals in front of him, bubbling away. He watches a few more moments before he reaches out and turns the flames down. It’s only then that he gets up from his little chair, walking a few steps to an assortment of containers Corvo knows hold a treasure trove of chemicals men would kill to have even a few of. The Outsider’s work is coveted by many, and had by few, and so when he offers, Corvo knows he would be a fool to turn away.
This is what he tells himself, anyway.
The Outsider doesn’t rummage so much as select. Two small white pills, their shapes unattractive and roughhewn. But he opens his mouth to accept them, doesn’t even flinch when the Outsider hooks his fingers into his mouth, depresses his tongue to keep him from swallowing.
“That way lies disappointment. They need a mixture of saliva to activate fully,” he’s told, and Corvo finds himself a little more disheartened to realize he isn’t even shocked that the chemist would make such a thing. Instead, he closes his eyes, and keeps himself still, and when the Outsider leans forward to take the initiative, he more than willingly abdicates his right to rebuttal.
He feels the tip of the Outsider’s tongue slide against his own, slick and solid, leaving him hot in the cheeks. There’s nothing clumsy or unsure in the way he does it; they aren’t rutting each other like teenagers, and the Outsider isn’t trying to choke him. It’s all slick temptation, knowing what he’s doing, and Corvo powerless to stop him from doing it.
It feels good.
He wants so desperately to feel good.
The pills dissolve between the friction of their tongues, and he can feel his whole mouth tingle with it, a slight ache in his jaw as though he’s swallowed something too sour. But he can feel something else, too, a building buoyancy in his chest, swelling in his lungs until there’s no more room for it, and it moves up his throat and into his head.
His world fractures and spins when his dealer pulls back, the Outsider’s face and voice multiplied in a thousand bright and shining ways like fragments of glass and all of its silvery tinkling noises as it falls to the ground. Lashes close, and open and the picture is whole again, the timeless features and steady stare restored.
“Do you really want this, Corvo?” he asks, and when he touches the hard line of Corvo’s jaw, the assassin shivers like a pilgrim before god.
A nod, and then another. He swallows, throat dry with the air from his lungs, superheated by the coiling furnace inside of him. Aflame, he feels aflame with holy fire, and when the Outsider presses his body closer, kisses him again, Corvo can’t help but shiver again in despair and pleasure both.
The tips of the Outsider’s fingers are scarred and pitted. Corvo can feel that he bites into the nailbeds often, that there is tattered skin both from his work and from habit, nervous energy and boredom turned to self-mutilation. His tongue is compelled towards them, eagerly laving each imperfection, lapping at each wound, a faithful hound. When the Outsider takes one of Corvo’s hands and guides it down between his legs, he complies only too readily.
He jerks back only when he feels his own fingertips touch something slick and wet, the surprise of the sensation multiplied a dozen times over because of his sensitivity. The drug makes him feel as though his heated hands have been doused, and he stares for a moment, wide eyed and almost innocent.
“Come now, not getting trigger shy on me, are you?” the Outsider asks, and Corvo finds himself sliding his hand right back down the front of his pants again, eager. The sensation is still a shock, but at least it’s one he’s ready for this time.
The Outsider sighs as he swipes a thumb over the swollen skin of his clit.
Admittedly, not what he’d been expecting. But then, Corvo isn’t quite sure anything has been what he’d been expecting in a long damn time, least of all when it comes to the boy picking him apart with his eyes and tongue and touch.
The Outsider grips the lapels of his coat and pulls him forward, and it’s all Corvo can do to follow him. Every movement now makes him feel like he is floating farther away, as though if the Outsider let go of him, he could float up into the night sky until the heat of some distant star consumes him. It’s only with some shock that he feels his knees hit the thin mattress on the floor, his body arched up over the boy beneath him.
“Doesn’t feel quite real, does it?” he asks, and for the first time, it dawns on Corvo that he had probably gotten just as much of a hit, too. If so, it only bolsters the feeling that the other can’t possibly be human – how the hell can he be so composed, how can he not feel so fragile and barely tethered to reality? “Open your eyes again. I like it when you look at me, daddy.”
It’s the admission that makes him do it, he tells himself. He can’t admit that maybe it terrifies him a little to be like this, to see what he’s doing. He can’t admit that images of the boy have haunted the fractured reality of his dreams for some time now.
He wants to be angry with him for using that word, for taking what he knows Emily calls Corvo and twisting it, infecting every last inch of his life. Instead, he’s only hungry.
The hallucination is different this time, the violet glow of the blacklight too bright over pale skin, a gaudy shine over the Outsider’s shoulders, the curve of his cheek. It glows in his dark eyes, nearly bright enough to make Corvo flinch. Nearly.
He looks so young when he’s undressed.
He isn’t aware he’s holding the boy’s sweater in his hands until the Outsider takes it from him, throws it off to one side of the mattress. Scarred, pitted fingers pick apart his own sweater, his own coat, divest him of his shirt before he’s sure which way is up. All ways, it feels like, all ways when he feels the intensity of being touched, sure hands running over an unsure body.
Corvo’s skin is scarred and pitted too, the marks of missions in the distant and present past, both. The marks of his torture, the marks of his own bottomless ocean of ennui. But they all feel glittering when the Outsider touches them, seams of white gold sewn into his skin, making him precious. He doesn’t know how he fucking makes him feel that way, and he hates it. He hates the not knowing.
But the emotion is gone as soon as it surfaces. He’s floating in all of his body now, feeling weightless and wonderful, and when he kisses the Outsider, his whole body trembles with it. His nose presses against the pale cheek beneath, and he sucks in a hard breath as he guides his cock into the cunt waiting for him.
He’s too big, he knows that before he gets even halfway through, but he can’t make himself care to stop. And the Outsider doesn’t seem keen on making him, either, his hips pressing upwards even as he hisses. The air escaping through his teeth smooths into a sigh, and then Corvo is being kissed again, and he wishes he could cry out at the shaking wonder of feeling the Outsider fuck himself against his prick.
He doesn’t cry out, he can’t; but the Outsider doesn’t cry out, either. Their passion is the sounds of quick breaths and mouths interlocking until Corvo is too dizzy with the overwhelming heat of it all and gives up on anything but the basest pleasure. He fucks the boy beneath him hard, gripping his boney hips too roughly, breathless and gasping with the pleasure of it all.
The orgasm itself feels far away. He’s barely aware of the fact it happens in rare conjunction with his partner, the cunt around him spasming as he fucks the Outsider to his own perfection, too. All he can feel is the explosion of it, the birth of a star inside of the solar system of his body.
He feels godhood incarnate inside him.
It’s the Outsider who draws him back down to earth, who lays him out on the mattress. Corvo isn’t aware of much at all, staring at the beaker that the Outsider left to bubble. Time is stretched out and strange, and he doesn't comprehend that the other has gotten up and lit a cigarette on the burner until he’s sitting back down on the mattress.
He takes a drag from it, holds it in his lungs for a moment before he drapes himself over Corvo’s chest. Their mouths meet, and the Outsider presses an exhalation of rose flavoured poison into the spangled void of his body.
This, too, is a benediction.
He will take them where he can.