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Emily’s coronation is swift, in deference to necessity as well as preference, on both of their parts. Emily might once have dreamed of an extravagant ceremony, complete with a party and all her favorite desserts--but the carefree girl she once was is gone now. She was stolen. Just like Jessamine, just like every person in Dunwall who would have lived, if it weren’t for Burrows’ cruelty.
So Emily is crowned, and then put swiftly to bed. She protests, once, that an Empress should be able to set her own bedtime, but Corvo can tell her heart isn’t in it. He leaves her with a careful kiss on the forehead, and decides that he might as well try to get some work done.
Corvo’s former office is in disarray. One of Burrows’ people had been using it, and Corvo has yet to fully set it to rights. A simple enough task to do now, when all of Dunwall is as quiet as it ever gets. There will be much to do in daylight.
Corvo, after he enters, checks the room for intruders. It’s empty. He lights the lamp at his desk, and locks the door behind him. When he turns back around, he is no longer alone.
That’s another thing that’s been stolen from him: the belief that he is ever, truly, alone.
“Hello, Corvo,” the Outsider says. He’s sitting cross-legged on Corvo’s desk, hands folded in his lap instead of behind his back.
“Huh,” Corvo says. “No shrine, and not the void this time, either.” He walks to the cabinet along the wall, never letting the Outsider fully out of his sight. It’s not that he thinks it will do him any good, but keeping a careful eye on dangerous things isn’t a habit that he’s intending to train himself out of anytime soon.
Whoever was using this room in Corvo’s absence drank, but not heavily: there’s still plenty of whiskey, and not too much dust in the glasses. Corvo pours himself a drink. He wishes that not offering one to the Outsider could be construed as a slight, instead of merely practicality. Although who knows. Maybe he can drink.
“Did you really think that I couldn’t appear anywhere that I willed?” the Outsider asks.
“Guess I didn’t give it much thought.” Corvo never acquired a taste for good alcohol. The whiskey burns all the way down his throat. “I have an empire that I need to help run, you know.”
“Yes,” the Outsider agrees. “How does it feel, Corvo? All of history within your grasp.”
Corvo closes his eyes. “Honestly, I think I’ll just start with tomorrow.”
When he opens his eyes, the Outsider is in front of him, standing on nothing, his eyes wide and black. He smells of the sea, the clean kind: the open ocean, not the stink of Dunwall’s fish markets. Corvo doesn’t startle easily, and he’s used to the Outsider appearing where he doesn’t belong. That doesn’t mean he has to like it.
The Outsider reaches out and takes Corvo’s glass from his hands. His fingers are shockingly cold.
He makes a face at the taste. Corvo bites back a smile. “What are you doing here?” he asks.
“I was curious,” the Outsider says. He peers down at the glass in consternation, and then he hands it back to Corvo. “About what you would do. All this power, now suddenly within your grasp. Will you squander it? Put it to use shaping Dunwall as you wish it to be? Punish those who have caused you harm?” The Outsider pauses. Tucks his hands behind his back. “But I think I know the answer.”
Corvo brings his glass back to his lips. It’s not whiskey anymore. It’s wine, the kind that’s made only in Serkonos. Corvo hasn’t tasted it since he was a child. He stares at the glass, and then at the Outsider, and then he shakes his head and laughs. What he feels isn’t quite amusement; but it’s farther than usual from despair. “And what’s that?” he asks.
“You’re going to give it to Emily,” the Outsider says. “As much of it as she can handle, and then more and more until all of it is hers. You have something men have died for, have killed for a hundred times over. And you will give it all away.”
“I killed for it,” Corvo points out mildly. “Almost died for it, too.”
“All the more reason to keep it for yourself.”
Corvo sets the glass down on the cabinet. Abruptly, he is exhausted. “If I’m doing what you expect me too, I’m not interesting, right? Going to take this back?” He raises his hand, fingers splayed.
“You are always interesting,” the Outsider tells him. “You were interesting long before I ever gave you my Mark.”
“Right,” Corvo says. “I was interesting when Daud tried to kill me the first time.” He shouldn’t think about Daud. It never leads anywhere good. But the peacefulness of this night was shattered the moment the Outsider set foot in this space that was supposed to belong to Corvo alone.
The Outsider tilts his head. “Are you angry, Corvo?”
Corvo thinks that the Outsider, if he was the kind of person that could get scabs, would probably be the sort to pick at them. “Let’s see. I don’t know. What do I have to be angry about? That someone with your Mark killed Jessamine? That you gave me these powers and let me run around this entire city like a rat in a maze, because you wanted to see what would happen? Because you couldn’t bring yourself to leave Jessamine alone, even in death?”
“You have never refused any of my gifts. The runes, or the Mark, or Jessamine’s heart.”
“I had Jessamine’s heart. And then you let Daud murder her.”
“Jessamine died the way that anyone in Dunwall does: through a combination of her own folly and the small cruelties of fate, eddies in still water. Daud has only ever been an instrument of that fate.”
“Right,” Corvo says. It feels like he’s back in the Flooded District with Daud. The same anger is heavy in his gut, so cold that it’s almost paralyzing. “And I wasn’t there to protect her.”
The Outsider opens his mouth. Whatever he’s about to say next, Corvo doesn’t want to hear it.
It’s a practiced motion by now, punching a man in the face. Corvo was practiced at it by the time he turned sixteen. He’s never tried it on a god before, but it turns out the principles aren’t very different.
It’s like hitting a block of ice. The Outsider doesn’t do anything so satisfying as let his head snap to the side, or bleed, or give off any sign of pain. It doesn’t shut him up, either. The bastard’s smiling. “Do you consider it often?” he asks Corvo. “Saving her?”
Corvo isn’t sure he’s done anything but consider it, since Jessamine died. For his six months in Coldridge and the long weeks afterwards, he’d thought of nothing but saving Emily, but underneath it, there was the aching and lonely knowledge that he couldn’t do anything for her mother but that: save Emily. Protecting Emily would have to be the guiding force of his life now, because he had so utterly failed in protecting Jessamine.
“It’s useless to ponder the past,” the Outsider says. “It is a tree already felled. Better to focus on those still to be planted.” He pauses. “You couldn’t have saved her, Corvo.”
“You could have,” Corvo says. “A thousand times, you could have stopped it. But you watched, like you always watch,” and it’s easier, to hit him this time, knowing how much it’s going to hurt.
His knuckles are bruised already; probably they’ll start bleeding if he keeps this up. The Outsider, of course, merely watches him, unblinking.
Corvo hooks a foot around his ankle and pulls in a way that would throw him off balance if his ankle wasn’t floating about a foot above where it should be. He yanks harder and pushes against the Outsider’s chest, and abruptly gravity begins to perform as expected, and they both tumble to the floor with a clatter. Corvo really hopes they don’t wake any servants up.
“It really is fascinating,” the Outsider says, while Corvo sits across his thighs with his hands pressed against his shoulders, thinking very seriously about whether it’s worth the blood to hit him again, and see whether it’s possible to break his nose. Maybe that would get him to look concerned. “He thought about it often, but Daud would never have dared to lay hands on me. He liked to think it was a healthy sense of self preservation. It would have gutted him to understand that it was reverence.”
Corvo grinds his teeth, and presses both his hands around the Outsider’s throat. “Shut the fuck up about Daud,” he says, bearing down.
The Outsider doesn’t move. He’s still under Corvo’s hands, and his laugh echoes in Corvo’s head. You think I need breath to talk, Corvo?
It’s useless. It’s always useless, trying to get the Outsider to be quiet. Corvo presses his thumbs down and digs in.
The Outsider, heedless, reaches up and brushes his cold fingers against Corvo’s cheek. But this is about Daud in the end, isn’t it, Corvo? You couldn’t fight him, not really. Not with all your strength. Because then you might kill him after all. Do you wish that you did? That you could?
Corvo grabs the Outsider’s hand and slams it down against the floor, his marked hand still wrapped around his neck.
“Shut up.”
You didn’t have to spare him. It would have changed nothing. He had already played his part.
“Daud could only do what he did because you let him.”
The Mark on Corvo’s hand flares bright. His fingers loosen without any input from him, and his hand pulls away from the Outsider’s throat. It forces Corvo to lean back.
The Outsider sits up, the skin of his neck none worse for the wear. “Daud didn’t need my Mark. He would have made just as many mistakes regardless. But I don’t mind taking whatever blame you like, Corvo. I could play dead for you, if you wanted.” All at once, the bruises that Corvo didn’t leave begin to bloom across his neck. The Outsider presses his finger against one curiously. It doesn’t seem to hurt him. He looks back up at Corvo. There’s a bruise ringing his eye now, too, splotchy and dark.
“Stop,” Corvo says. He’s starting to feel sick.
“You can’t really hurt me, Corvo.”
“I don’t want to hurt you. Real or not.”
“What do you want, then?” The Outsider leans in closer, peering at Corvo’s expression, his bruises beginning to melt away into the void that always surrounds him. “If it’s Daud, I can find him for you in an instant. I could kill him, and that would be the last you’d ever need to know about it. I could make you forget what he did to you.”
Corvo shakes his head. He pushes his hair back, out of his face. “Worried I’m not happy with what you’ve given me?”
His Mark flares again. The Outsider doesn’t deny it.
Corvo wants a lot of things. But he’s become practiced at not thinking about the things that he can’t have. “I don’t want a punching bag. And it doesn’t matter what happens to Daud. Like you said. It won’t change anything. All I want is to drink some whiskey, and not worry that the city is about to fall into the sea, and have some peace and quiet for once.”
The Outsider vanishes. In a moment, he appears again, perched on Corvo’s desk just like before, two glasses in his hands.
He lifts one in Corvo’s direction, raising an eyebrow.
Drinking with a god can’t really be much worse than punching one. Corvo sits at the chair and doesn’t bother to tell the Outsider to find a seat that isn’t the top of his desk.
He drinks. The whiskey tastes just like it should. The Outsider grimaces every time he takes a sip, but he says nothing. It’s everything that Corvo can bring himself to want.