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“Scaring the children? You already do that without a mask…”
The Outsider’s voice drawls just over Corvo’s head. He looks up, startled, to meet flat black eyes and a thin smile. The formerly-hidden door behind him is wide open, revealing the shadows of the nursery beyond. There are three children there, all sound asleep: a baby in a bassinet, a small child in a crib, and a taller child in a bed. The light of the lamp is low, and the woman who is presumably the nurse dozed off in the corner.
And the window, of course, is wide open. That’s how Corvo got in. Left open to catch the evening breeze coming down from the peak, blowing fresh air through the dust-coated city. Karnaca is far too hot during the day not to take advantage during the night. Of course, the danger of people like Corvo getting into the house…well, if it’s that or baking in his bed, Corvo would open the window too.
Corvo glares silently, pushing the mask up so the Outsider can see his face, and holds a finger to his lips. The Outsider smirks at him, watching tolerantly as Corvo turns to close the door of the secret room. Only then does he feel safe enough to carry on a quiet conversation.
“I am not here about the children,” Corvo says. He knows he’s taking the bait, but—“You’re the one who left runes singing all over this shrine.”
The Outsider sinks to rest on the floor, leaning against the wall. “Not my doing,” he says. “The owners of this house are closet worshippers of mine.” There’s no glint in his eyes, but there should be.
With perhaps undue reverence, Corvo takes up the runes, pocketing them one by one. “They’re idiots,” he says, shaking his head. “Hiding a shrine behind their children…”
“Anastasia out there is more of a mother to those children than the woman who bore them,” the Outsider says. He folds his arms. “And her hiring was…perfunctory at best. Her employers do not pay her well for her labor. But she is a woman with more heart than money…”
Corvo makes a mental note to leave money with this Anastasia before he goes. “I only came for the runes,” he says, taking a step back toward the door.
“Really?” The Outsider’s voice is a purr. In the blink of an eye he’s standing mere inches from Corvo, close enough to kiss. “Only for the runes.”
Corvo sighs. “You live to annoy me,” he mutters, but lowers his mask to his side rather than putting it on. He gazes at the Outsider—not that much smaller than Corvo in terms of height, but thin and slim-shouldered as a boy.
“I do not live,” the Outsider corrects.
He looks like he’s going to say more, so Corvo sighs and kisses him instead. Much better use of both their time. It’s a very good kiss, all things considered. Tastes of salt and night air. Makes Corvo’s nerves sing like the runes do. And when he pulls back, the Outsider looks satisfied and less like he’s going to needle Corvo with more pointless anecdotes.
“They are not pointless,” the Outsider says with a tiny shake of his head. “I tell them to you to give you…maps, clues of things to come.”
“They’re incomprehensible,” Corvo says, running his hands over the Outsider’s shoulders. His jacket is cold, giving it the impression of being damp. It’s far too strange, but it’s a strangeness with which Corvo is intimately familiar.
Black eyes gaze at Corvo. “Not to me.”
“Nothing is incomprehensible to you,” Corvo says tolerantly. For all his near-omniscience, the impossible prescience…dealing with the Outsider very often reminds Corvo of dealing with any other twenty-something youth.
Narrowing his eyes slightly, the Outsider crowds Corvo against the door. “You’re incomprehensible to me,” he says, with even more of that youthful petulance. “Ridiculous man…slipping in at nursery windows to retrieve runes and have conversations with me…”
“Conversations we could very well have on the Dreadful Wale,” Corvo points out, holding the Outsider by his lapels, “if you would bother to show up anywhere but at a shrine.”
The Outsider soundly ignores him. “…a man with pocket change to his name, contemplating giving it all to a woman acting as a mother to children of unhinged fanatics…”
“My daughter is a child of one of your unhinged fanatics,” Corvo says.
Of course the Outsider still ignores him, breaking into a full running monologue. “…and your rationale for being in the city this time of night is the quiet character assassination—character, mind you, I know you’ve no plans to use that sword tonight—of one of the captains of the Grand Guard, offering ‘protection’ to shopkeepers in the Dust District. This is a captain who you met precisely once as you knocked him out in his office, and proceeded to hate on sight because of the shipping manifests you happened to spot on his desk that showed his poor character—mmf!”
This is a much longer kiss, and deeper too. Corvo holds the Outsider to him by his jacket, infinitely impatient and also unable to feel anything but affection for this strange lonely god. The kiss is a respite, a quiet and altogether human moment.
“If I start talking again,” the Outsider says, when Corvo finally comes up for air, aiming a sly smile at him, “will you kiss me again?”
Corvo chuckles. He presses his forehead to the Outsider’s and the Outsider patiently permits the intimacy. “I will kiss you regardless, if you want.”
“Good,” the Outsider says.
There’s very little in this world that the Outsider actually enjoys. He’s too obscure to make it clear whether he likes Corvo romantically or merely as a particularly fascinating toy, to explain whether he has physical enjoyment of kisses or merely appreciates the novelty. But something about this makes him…happy, and it makes Corvo happy too.
So he kisses the Outsider again, as deep as before, holding his sharp-cut cheek in the palm of one hand. The Outsider rests against him, arms sliding around Corvo’s waist. He is very, very good at this, and Corvo entirely loses track of time for a while.
“Did you really start talking just to annoy me into kissing you?” Corvo asks when the Outsider finally draws back from him.
The Outsider doesn’t wink, doesn’t give him anything but a small tilt of a smile. His eyes are flat, expressionless, and his hands are folded behind his back. But Corvo’s known him long enough that he can read the smugness in his mere posture.
“My dear Corvo,” he says, “what would ever give you that impression?”