Chapter Text
Look, murder for hire is a delicate art. Murder for hire using power granted by black magic spawned by a probably malevolent deity? Even moreso. So Daud means it when he says he's handled his fair share of tricky situations. None have left this sort of taste in his mouth before, though. He's taken with the idea of killing the Empress when he's first approached—him, the Knife of Dunwall, the Serkonan brat, the Outsider's no-longer-quite-Chosen, asked to shake the very foundations of a city that scorned everything he stood as a representative of? Cosmically perfect. He'd even wondered if Hiram Burrows' approach had been a sign of the Outsider's renewed interest—wondered, and not been sure how he would feel if it were. Months after the fact, he knows for a fact that he should have run when he’d had the chance.
He’s not a man naturally inclined to running, but he should have run when he’d had the chance.
There’s a difference between killing a woman and kidnapping a child, and his being the hand that strikes the blow that topples an Empire. When it’s late and he can’t sleep, he considers slipping into the royal stronghold again, considers the satisfying way the light would dull from the eyes of the man who had hired him to bring the entire part of the world that matters to its knees. When it’s late and he can’t sleep, he knows that it would bring him no closure. If he were just the faintest bit more self-aware, Daud would recognize that he’d never needed closure from a job before: the fat purses that landed in his hand had always been enough. Of course, in the assassination business, self-awareness is both highly lauded and highly avoided, and so his odd relationship with it means that he does not for a single second contemplate his own emotions beyond how they may impact a potential job, or his safety. And frankly, he’s been ignoring the screaming danger sense Lurk’s presence gives off for so long that it’s likely he’d not even note the danger if he cared to try.
A visit from the Outsider after years of silence, though? That gets his attention, and quick. He’s torn near insensate from a dream whose details are all too fleeting, and he finds himself standing over the corpse of the Empress. He knows better, he knows better, he knows he knows better, but he still bends to pick up the fallen letter that lies beside her head. Smoothing it open, he half wonders if it will simply be a reflection of a real letter, as these things frequently are. One glance at the bold letters torn across the paper puts that thought to rest quickly, though—YOU KILLED HER YOU KILLED HER YOU KILLED HER is not precisely the sort of letter that the Empress might receive. He crumples it up in a quiet sort of fury, stuffs it in the pocket of his coat rather than allow it to hit the ground where the Outsider could see the effect the simple bit of cruelty has on him. Turning to face the void, he has to resist the urge to roll his eyes, or scream, as the floating cobblestones snap into position to form an easy ascent. The message couldn’t be clearer: as ever, despite having been the one to demand Daud’s attention, the Outsider would not come to him. Pulling his sword makes him feel marginally better, hefting it in his palm gives him the clarity he requires to start up the path. The endless nothingness of the Void has long since lost its edge, and his path is nearly careless up the floating cobblestones.
Of course, it would kill the Outsider to make things simple, and so Daud stands at the lip of the cobblestones, staring at the overturned carriage with something akin to resignation seething in his skin. Experimentally, he takes a step over the edge of the cobblestones, and simply allows himself to plummet. He gets an estimated hundred feet before the Void warps around him, and he is simply back at the edge of the cobblestones. Still no Outsider. Sighing, he closes his eyes, and transverses to the top wheel of the thing. Then, it’s to the lip of a building, to the next window, to a courtyard he recognizes well. It’s not incidental that he is tracing backwards his path to the Empress’ murder, he doesn’t think. It’s just through the gate that he finally meets the Outsider—from the outset, Daud can feel his teeth grit. It’s not just the greeting, though the Abbey knows that Daud has little to no patience for the Outsider’s ways after such a prolonged and (in retrospect) blissful silence. It’s the way that the Outsider’s presence grates, that horrific anticipatory nails on chalkboard feeling that does it. The way it makes his skull feel about a dozen sizes too small for his brain, the way it almost feels good after so long without it.
After a careful breath, Daud deigns to transfer his attention to the Outsider. Because the Outsider is some level of omnipotent, it chooses that exact moment to launch more fully into what it has to say. Its talk of friendship and gifts are almost something he can believe in; almost something he wants to believe in. That’s mainly what tips him off to the insincerity of it all. The Outsider isn’t in the business of giving people what they want . And his hunch is confirmed when the Outsider offers him nothing but a name, like that’s any help at all, like the word Delilah might mean more to him than death, destruction, deceit. He wakes from the void, if you can call his unceremonious eviction from sleep a waking. Terse, he gives the orders for his Whalers to suss out this Delilah, and sets the matter entirely from his mind.
The information doesn’t come at once, but life as the head of the most formidable group of assassins in Dunwall doesn’t exactly leave him too much time to fret over it. What time he doesn’t spend training his share of the newest promoted master assassins is spent on paperwork, and what’s not spent on paperwork is spent meeting with twitchy nobles who want to be certain that their enemies meet untimely ends. He watches from his desk while his second in command trades quips with—that one’s Thomas, he thinks—Thomas, watches her thoroughly trounce him on the transversal combat grounds later that same afternoon, watches the newest recruits attempt their first transversals, sits at the head of the long table that serves as the dining outpost for his master assassins, and lays in his bed long past when he should sleep, listening to the cat-quiet footsteps of his Whalers patrolling the roof.
Some nights, he’s joined by Lurk for a game of cards, and they play for hours in the middle of the room where he’d taught her how to transverse, back when the Whalers were small enough that he could justify teaching the basics, and they garner a crowd that in other times might have made Daud hiss displeasure—with a crowd the size cards gathers, there’s no way in the Void every patrol route is manned, but after he’d sent a handful of Whalers out red eared with embarrassment from the castigation in his tone at their folly in leaving their routes, one of his Whalers—the former Overseer, the only one who’d made it past the obviously heretical nature of what the Whalers are —had brought back a handful of Abbey hounds, and kennelled them at points strategically sound enough that Daud had let the matter lie, providing the dogs were cared for on off time only. He’d been unsurprised, weeks later, to find that Willem had been the one to suggest the kennel spots.
He had, however, promoted the Whaler on the spot.
Literally.
The benefits of the arcane bond are hard to deny: Willem had appeared with a soapy plate in one hand, and a dishwashing rag in the other. And Daud had never been above using people’s tendency to hit the back foot when taken by surprise. Willem had latrine duty for a week, and training starting at fourth bell for three before Daud actually told him he’d been promoted.
Cards are good for morale, which is why Daud doesn’t mind indulging the security risk, but they aren’t the sum total of how he spends his evenings, not by a long shot.
Practicals mean he spends two or three nights a week out in the cold and misery of Gristol, attempting to trip up his own men in their missions, paperwork means he strains his eyes until a headache claims his abilities to concentrate for its own nearly as often. At most, that leaves him three nights in which to go out himself and execute one of the more complicated hits, or to rest, or to hunt for runes in a city he’s certain he’d long since sucked dry: without the Outsider’s oh-so-helpful interference, rune appearance had plummeted. He focuses on not focusing on the Outsider while he waits, tries not to condemn himself for how hard it is; certainly, the degree to which his younger self had shaped himself around the Outsider’s interest seems in retrospect a folly, but he owes everything that he has to the Outsider, even if the thought leaves a taste like ashes and his mother’s favourite poisons in his mouth.
Sometimes, when the paperwork threatens to blur into total incomprehensibility in front of his very eyes, he practices reading the lips of whichever of the three Whalers who’ve taken it upon themselves to guard his door turn away visitors. It's while he's doing just that that he chances upon a golden exchange—he's been poring over a map of the rooftops surrounding Bunting's home, in anticipation of a hit placed by the Pendleton twins, and if he has to see it again on paper before in person, he thinks he may kill the man from sheer spite, and forget the gold that could come of patience.
Thomas is the one outside his door, and it's one of the newer initiates who transverses to the hall outside Daud's door: the transversal is sloppy, and the Void lingers for seconds longer than it should. "Thomas," the initiate—Caden?—says, rushed. "I need to speak to Dad, he's put me on patr—" ce doesn't even note cir mistake until several words past, and then ce breaks off mid word, buries cir masked face in her gloved hands, and cries, plaintively, "Why does his name have to be so close?" Thomas undoubtedly replies, but Daud's got his own head in his hands, trying desperately not to laugh, and so he misses it. Not a half hour later, Lurk transverses in, smugness undeniable in her posture. "Daud," she says, "I've scheduled Caden and the Overseer for patrol together. If they both survive, I think we should promote him. Maybe even if ce doesn't."
Three jobs go off without any of Daud's people taking so much as a scratch, and then Aaron ends up in the infirmary with River Krust burns. Daud reads over the report, and then reassigns the boy. His partner is failing to temper him, which means he'll need someone with a touch more subtlety—Daud stares down the list of free Whalers for a solid bell before he gives up and simply swaps partners so to match Aaron with Renard. Daud isn’t dumb enough to think that it’ll be an entirely peaceful match, but he knows that Renard is both mean and sharp enough to be able to handle Aaron’s temper when it flares, and hopefully distrustful enough not to endear himself to the boy too much, to avoid a repeat of the River Krust incident.
Things continue along those lines for nearly three weeks, and each second of it grates, deeply unpleasant and completely impossible to ignore. He sleeps poorly, feels the gulf between himself and the rest of his Whalers even more keenly than usual, and doesn’t speak to Lurk at all. That last doesn’t bother him. It doesn’t bother him.
It doesn’t bother him.
It doesn’t bother him so much that he throws Thomas out of his office over it, reorganizes every single file that’s been lying around for as long as he’s had an office to pile it in, and reads three books in the time he’d usually spend tossing barbed compliments back and forth with her, or even just mutually appreciating the silence.
He and Lurk have had a mutually beneficial agreement for six of the eight years they’ve known each other, and while Daud would like to say that he is a person entirely untethered, that. Would probably be a lie. He’d found some measure of peace in his existence in Dunwall, a rhythm, if you would. Lurk had integrated near seamlessly into almost every aspect of it, and she’d done it slow; Daud nearly hadn’t noted it until it’d stopped. He’s not blind, not even when he it comes to introspection, and he knows that the Empress’ death had hurt him, knows that the impact had shaken and ripped through him to reverberate into anyone close enough to feel it, knows that Lurk had been the definition of close enough to feel it. He’s nothing if not confident in his ability to mend the tears, though. It’s simply difficult to accomplish when she won’t be in the same room alone with him.