Chapter Text
Despite the acrid stench of urine soaked bedding and the claustrophobic wagon, within the first hour of the journey he found himself slipping into a shallow pool of boredom.
The view above him was an unchanging slate of grey, with nary a suggestion of a cloud sailing through the sky. He could almost fool himself that he was back in the Void. Almost, but not quite. There was no buffeting wind streaking ice-cold daggers in the rips of his jacket. The occasional vocalisations of his travel companions could not quite match the depths of sadness leviathans possessed.
The warm leather of Billie’s shoulder against his own felt like an anchor, keeping him tethered from slipping into his own thoughts. The thud of the mechanical heart of the locomotive reverberating through his body was grounding, like an infant being soothed at the beating breast of the mother.
Billie was taking advantage of the down-time of travel. Legs spread akimbo in the corner she has claimed as her own, the space was covered in the minutiae of repair kits. Oils for the arsenal she kept strapped on her person during all hours of the day, brushes to keep the dust at bay, the various implements to keep the tools of her trade in immaculate condition.
She was running a rag - infused with an acerbic mixture of oils which tickled his nostrils - across the various components of her cursed arm. It was almost meditative, the methodical movement from her still-flesh elbow, down to the bones, to the ink-black hand. He’d questioned the practice before - a thing borne of the Void had not needed the care. But Billie did not wish to see it like that.
It was a weapon. And Daud taught her that weapons required care.
He did not see the need to argue against the principle.
“Why did you give me this gift ?” The question rang like a gun-shoot at the height of midnight. There was no accusation in her voice. Her face was placid and still. The movement of the rag against the obsidian lines on her hand was smooth and practised. As if she was filling in the space between them with commentary about the weather.
There were no easy ways to answer. He could tell her about the fragility of time, how it bent, stretched, and ultimately broke in places where too many variables were in play. He could tell her that the fevered dreams which plagued as she scoured Serkonos for Daud were no dreams at all, but the strings of reality fraying. He could tell her about the Time-Piece tucked in the Empress’ inner chambers, how it tore through the fabric of time and left Billie trapped in the rips.
Or he could tell her about the seeds of selfishness which were planted in his heart by Delilah. How they grew roots in soil he had always thought to have been barren. How strong the madness gripped his mind, that the screams of million living souls had gone from static noise to pain.
He opted for something else entirely.
“Centuries before the Empire was founded, there was a Gristolian thinker that argued that the passage of time was not felt by everyone in lock-step. Clashing with his contemporaries, he considered each person a type of nexus - the eye of a needle, if you will - through which the threads of time were passed through. Unlike real threads and needles, only one fibre of the whole bundle was capable of passing through, dictating the time-line a person could experience. He could not comprehensively explain how this phenomenon would work, but he postulated that the Void had a potential involvement.”
Billie’s repetitive movements slowly ground to a half, as she turned her full attention onto him. There was a tenseness in her frame now, like she was expecting the lunge of a sword. Or a grand revelation.
“The Gristolian natural philosopher was partially right,” he continued. “Except he did not consider the possibility of cases where a nexus could be threaded with multiple fibres of time. He argued that the psyche would not be able to handle this overload of information, and perish from bouts of madness. He was wrong, in that regard. Most are not granted the ability to perceive more threads than one, or even care for more than one chain of events. In my four thousand years of vigil, I have met four, which could. Two had turned their own swords upon themselves. One became a seer in the Oracular Order.”
“Am I the fourth person then?”
“Yes.”
Billie stretched her cursed arm, letting the oil-slicked arm shine in the limited afternoon light. She was tracing her sight along the sun-yellowed surface of the interlocked whalebone shards, into the flesh-and-metal junction of her wrist. She curled her fist, as if preparing to unleash a spell upon her.
She relaxed her stance, and turned back to him instead.
“You’ve still not answered my question.”
“In order to cast Delilah out of the Dunwall Tower, Her Majesty resorted to esoteric approaches which would have seen her burnt by the zealots of the Abbey. Even in the absence of my Mark. Unfortunately, it had the unintended effect of fraying the threads of people like you, Billie. I intervened, collapsing the disparate worlds into a singular one, merging them together. The arm, eye, and the Hollows are the result of the difference between the two. I will not deny that it had not been a selfless act on my behalf, but there was no better way to do it.”
“Whatever Lady Emily did - did she know this would happen?”
“Not entirely.” Her Majesty thought she was erasing the traces of a past that should have never happened in the first place. Where Stilton was not plagued by the visions of a ritual gone wrong, and Billie had always been whole. “She thought her actions to the best, considering the larger circumstances at play.”
Best intentions never paved a road to anything approaching good, let alone great.
“How very Empress of her,” Billie remarked without humour, chewing her bottom lip between her teeth. “What would have happened to me if you hadn’t collapsed realities? Would I have died?”
“I am not certain. You could have gritted your teeth and tried to make sense of the world. You could have locked yourself in Addermire, beseeching Hypatia for a tonic to make the jagged pieces of reality fit. Despite the pain, you could have still taken Daud’s crusade against The Outsider, and failed. There were too many variables to make a definite guess.”
“Right,” she said, letting the conversation trail into silence. Falling to her own musings, perhaps. Reshaping her understanding of reality to fit this new puzzle piece he dropped in her lap.
The rhythmic beat of the engine must have lulled him into a light doze, just on the edge of true sleep. He couldn’t tell how long he had been out - the sun was well beyond the visible patch of sky, without a hint of change in the endless grey. Only after rubbing the remnants of dust from his eyes, he realised what had woken him.
“...it was something I was wondering about, while you were busy sweating blood all over the mattress. Why then, of all times? Why offer me your Mark after I’ve outgrown the stories about The Outsider, and let Daud’s opinion about him colour my own perspective? And then you just enter my life, and begin trailing me like a bad odour, years after I’ve given up on trying to gain your attention.”
She was fiddling with an unlit cigarette, gracefully rolling it between each knuckle. A new nervous habit, now that she couldn’t enjoy the sweet taste of tar and herbs around him.
“Though I know I’ll never be able to get the full picture, I think I get it now.”
He straightened up, rolling his shoulders against the kinks building from inactivity. “Has my evasiveness been bothering you?”
Billie pursed her lips. “Yes. No. Maybe?” She huffed a laugh, and stashed the cigarette in the inner pockets of her jacket. Finally, she settled on an answer. “I don’t know, but it’s probably not something you can help with.”
“Can you articulate?”
“Sometimes, I see Thomas in you. Other days, Ricardo. Even Galia, on bad days. I keep thinking I can figure you out, like I could with anybody else. But then you tell me about the nature of reality, and I am starkly reminded that you are not just any man, and some of your behaviour is going to drive me up the wall. But I don’t think I could ask you to strip yourself of the mantle of The Outsider, just like I can’t strip the black out of my skin. It wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”
“I am glad to know my time in the Void had not made me entirely inhuman.” He was sincere - and most certainly flattered - even if he tried to inject the whisper of irony into his voice.
“I’ve stitched your leg-wound. Trust me, there was a lot of meat and blood in the way. No black sand, or Void-rock in there.”
“Glad to know.”
He settled his head against the back of the wagon, and let the rumbling rhythm of the train lullaby him into fitful, dreamless rest.