Work Text:
There was a storm that winter which left waves crashing on the beach and wrecked half the boats of Dunwall. It was the greatest storm that many had ever seen. Corvo, in his house away from the city, watched the lighthouse turn and warn away the ships, and waited for the rain to end. When it did he went out onto the beach, to see what the storm had brought up from the depths.
And there, at the edge of the water, he found a boy.
Naked and unashamed of it, skin as pale as the inside of a shell, with eyes as black as the abyss and sharp, sharp teeth. He wept bitter and angry tears and when Corvo approached him would not explain where he came from, or who he was, or if he had a name. But after a while he let Corvo help him up and wrap him in his coat. He followed Corvo back to his house, walking on uncertain legs like those of a sailor too long on the sea, and let Corvo give him clothes and feed him and keep him warm by the fire. He asked no questions of Corvo, only looked at him with those black, black eyes and hummed a song that sounded like the inside of a shell.
And that was good, because Corvo did not speak. It was why he lived so far from his fellow fishermen. He could say nothing, could not be one of them, and so he stayed away. He was respected, he knew that; he had sailed on whaling ships in his younger days, and had helped haul aboard more than his share, until a line caught him around the throat and choked him until his voice was gone. Now he lived alone, calling for no one and desiring no company.
But he made the boy welcome, giving up his bed and finding him clothes that were ill-fitting but warm enough for a Dunwall winter, and by signs they bit by bit came to understand each other a little better. The boy could speak, in a pleasant, detached voice; and the sound of his lips wrapping around Corvo’s name was like listening to the sea call him. He watched Corvo’s hands and face intently. Still, Corvo felt as though the boy might well be reading his mind.
“I am from the sea, Corvo,” the boy murmured, looking out the window at the gray sky and black ocean. “I came up from the deep parts of the water, where men do not go with nets and harpoons, where the sunken cities drift in the deep and the abyss sinks into the Void. I made a mistake and came too close to the land. The storm beached me on your shore and I could not reach the water before the tide turned. And the tide took with it my skin, the skin of a leviathan, and now I am trapped here.”
By the end of this speech he was crying again, tears dripping down his impassive face. For no matter how hurt or happy, it seemed that the boy did not know how to change his expression. He simply looked, and sometimes wept. Corvo dried his face, for the boy did not seem inclined to do so, and with a little trouble over signs managed to ask again for the boy’s name.
“You could never say it,” the boy said. “It’s not a human name.”
Corvo insisted.
At last the boy closed his eyes and began to sing, a slow and beautiful song in the rhythm of the tides and the moon, a song that spoke of deep dark places of the sea, of peace and serenity, and made Corvo shiver at the thought of the silence through which this song would ring.
“That is my name,” the boy said, after what must have been hours. “But you cannot speak, so there’s no need for you to try it.”
On a slate, Corvo scrawled, you will need a name to deal with men.
“I see no need for that, my dear Corvo.” The boy stretched out on the bed and rested his head upon his arms. “I will not deal with men. I have you.”
you’ll stay with me?
The boy blinked at him slowly. “I have nowhere else to go,” he said. “For what good in the world is a whale without his skin?”
***
Very soon it was as if the boy had always been there. He spoke more than Corvo usually liked, but his voice was pleasant and the things he said unusual and inoffensive, so Corvo did not mind. And he learned, very quickly, the signs Corvo used in place of speech, and was able to sign back, though he usually chose to talk.
At night by the fire he would watch Corvo as he worked at making clothes for the boy, refitting old things until the boy had a coat that fit him and gloves for his thin hands. Corvo asked about boots; the boy scoffed. “Nothing else in the world wears shoes, why should I?” But after he cut his heel on a sharp stone while walking on the beach, he admitted that shoes would be nice.
He would never answer questions of his wants except by saying, “I want to go home.” This Corvo could not give him. He stopped asking, and they stopped discussing the matter.
Winter passed slowly, and the thin siren-boy never spoke again of where he had come from. He sang at night: Corvo would hear him go out when the winds screamed in the city, and there would be a song on the wind, calling lonely for ears that did not hear.
Corvo built a second bed, which he put in the loft. It was a rarely-used place, and when he relocated the boxes and barrels and oddments that naturally congregated in the space, the boy fit well into it. The small window, looking out over the gray sea, was his; Corvo was willing to let the boy stay there always, watching it move. But he was surprised when the boy continued to keep company with him.
Corvo had to work on his small fishing boat. He had chased the greatest catch, when he was a whaler sailing on the open ocean; now he contented himself with inshore fishing. His vessel, a twenty-foot gilnetter, could be managed wholly alone. She was a lovely craft which he kept up well. After all, for years she had been his only company. In early winter he took her out for smelt; in the spring he caught shad; in the summer it was pole-and-line for tuna. The boy had come at just the right season: Corvo was not on the water at all.
So the boy sat while Corvo worked on his craft. “Is she named?” he asked one day, as Corvo sealed a hole eaten through by rust in the salt air. Corvo merely shrugged in reply.
The boy drummed his fingers upon the railing. He was always restless; as with many of his other oddities, this did not bother Corvo. “It keeps you safer, if you go out in a boat with a name.”.
Corvo paused in his work and looked up at the boy, who looked back with those black eyes. He set down his tools and signed to the boy, do you worry for me?
“I will, when you go out again,” he said. “I know well how dangerous the sea can be, even close to shore. Will you name her?”
no need. Corvo smiled wryly. you know i cannot speak to her.
The boy cocked his head. “Then may I name her?” he asked.
what would you name her?
“I would call her the Delphi,” the boy said.
Corvo painted the name on the next day.
***
When he began to sail again as spring approached, he noticed that dolphins often followed him.
***
The boy, of course, couldn't be unnoticed forever. Daud, an old whaler, stopped Corvo at the market one day. “Who's the boy?”
a runaway. i took him in until he finds his feet.
“Apprenticeship?”
if he's competent.
Daud looked at Corvo keenly. “Be careful of runaways from the sea,” he says. “They aren't what they seem. But they make good fishermen.”
***
Spring turned to summer and summer to fall and it wasn't long before the boy had been with Corvo for a year and some change. He was a little taller and a little stronger in body, and better at signing. He still chose to talk to Corvo, but was competent enough to be a translator when they went among people who didn't understand signs.
He wasn't an apprentice, exactly; he knew the sea better than Corvo himself, and had more luck with fish than anyone in Dunwall. But the boy made a good companion, and refused most other company with an air of distrust.
And in some strange way this made Corvo happy.
***
The boy sat on the bow of the ship when they fished together. While Corvo worked, the boy would talk, telling stories and sometimes singing in his strange beautiful voice. When the boy was aboard, the waters were always calm and the fish plentiful.
Corvo felt that he had, perhaps, been blessed.
***
And soon another year had passed, and another, and another, and now the boy could no longer be called a boy but a man. He was tall and lean, and he remained far too pale and never tanned in the sun. Though he was beautiful, impossibly fair of face, his abyssal eyes and shark teeth unnerved people.
They did not bother Corvo.
They rose together before the sun and, often enough, said not two words to one another before they were out on the water in the boat. The Delphi was getting on in years but Corvo would have no other craft and the man was good at repairing her, so they kept her. And their work for the day would be good, fish nearly leaping into the boat on some days. On those days the man would smile and hum shanties he heard at the harbor.
And on other days the man would be melancholy, and sit on the shore and watch the waves.
what are you waiting for? Corvo asked once.
“I’m waiting for what I lost,” the man said.
are you not happy here?
The man looked at Corvo. “Yes,” he said, “but I still miss my home.”
***
They lived life together.
In the mornings they rose together and dressed in silence. Corvo made breakfast for them both, something hearty to keep them working for the day, and they would eat while the man talked of everything and nothing.
As the sun barely edged over the horizon they went down to the docks together and put the Delphi out to sea. They spent the whole day that way, bringing in nets and lines. Often the man sang in that beautiful eerie way, and Corvo thought even the fish stopped to listen.
They went to the market together to sell the fish they brought in, and it seemed that always their fish were sleeker, plumper, more beautiful than those other fishermen brought. They fetched a good price, though Corvo was a pragmatic man and used the money to repair the Delphi or to buy new boots for them.
When evening came and the lighthouse on Kingsparrow Island began to shine out its signal, they sat by the fire side by side, drinking some hot brew or another. Corvo told stories, tall tales he’d heard in his years on the waves and the bedtime stories he’d told his daughter, now long since grown and gone away. The man watched with his beautiful black eyes, laughing at the jokes Corvo told with his hands and sighing over the tragedies.
And they went to their separate beds at night, so that the next morning they could repeat it all again. Sometimes, as Corvo listened to his companion in the loft, murmuring in his dreams, he yearned for things he dared not name. To take the man from the sea in his arms and...
But they were happy.
***
“Are we married?” the man asked one evening while they sat by the fire.
Corvo nearly spat out his drink. He swallowed it, nearly, and set the mug down hard to demand, have you not yet realized what a marriage is yet?
“I know what you call a marriage,” the man said, looking at Corvo with a faint flush of color high in his cheeks. “A man and a woman, sharing property and a house in some kind of...business contract. Where I’m from...it’s something else. A meeting of hearts, of minds...the one that swims side by side with you, the one that dances with you, that dives with you. That is a marriage, Corvo…”
if that is marriage, then yes.
The man blinked slowly at Corvo and for a moment Corvo thought he looked into the eyes of a wholly different creature, something not human. “One thing is the same,” he said, in a soft voice. “But I do not know how to go about it with you.”
The thought should have filled Corvo with some sort of nervousness, but instead a calm like the eye of a hurricane descended on him. what is it…?
“This body...some things are the same, but others...and I didn’t know if you...”
i could show you.
“...yes.”
***
That was the beginning of things.
And the end.
***
It was ten years to the day when Corvo woke the morning after.
The light spilled in the windows; they had missed the dawn. He lay for a while, gazing at his lover’s pale face. With his black eyes closed, curled in Corvo’s arms, he might be any man. He might simply be someone that Corvo could keep, could love, simple and uncomplicated.
But Corvo thought of the voices of gulls in his lover’s cries and the motion of the waves in his hips and knew in his bones that this was not to last.
He rose and dressed, silently, tucking his lover in warmly, and walked down to the shore to gather his thoughts. And it was here that he saw it, lying on the sand: a great gray mass, large as a whale. When he approached it Corvo saw that it was indeed a whale, or the skin of one, and in that instant he knew that all was over.
When his lover rose he found Corvo on the shore, staring into the waves beside the great skin. Corvo looked at him and saw him as if for the first time, his sharp teeth and abyssal eyes and voice like a whale’s song.
you have to go back. you do not belong here.
His lover took Corvo’s face in his hands. “I belong with you,” he said, and pulled Corvo down to kiss his forehead. “My dear Corvo...”
Corvo helped him put his skin on again, and helped him into the sea. He stood on the silent shore and watched as, far out, the graceful tail of a whale curved through the air and disappeared into the waves.
And then he was alone.
***
He stood by the shore every day and watched for the signs of whales that never came.
***
The days were the same, but emptier.
***
Even if the whales came, Corvo had no voice to sing their songs.
***
“I warned you,” Daud said, when Corvo admitted to him six months later that his lover was gone back to the sea. It wasn’t angry. It was only weary, and Corvo wondered if Daud had been in his shoes once before.
***
The fish did not come like they once did.
***
In a storm the Delphi sank. Corvo barely survived, but it seemed as if the sea did not want him to die. He washed up on the shore and lay on the sand, wishing that he had remained below the waves.
***
No voice, no boat: no fisherman.
***
Out of pity, or possibly a secret shared history, Corvo began to work with Daud. To fish with him. Though they did not speak at all to one another, there was a companionship there. It seemed better than nothing, for both of them.
***
He missed the songs his lover sang.
***
A year and a day after his lover vanished into the sea, there was a storm. It sent waves crashing on the beach and wrecked half the boats of Dunwall. It was as great as that storm all those years ago, and in his house Corvo watched the lighthouse turn away the ships as he once had. He was older and grayer now, more weathered by the sea. But with the curiosity of a young man he went down to the beach when the rain had stopped, to see what the storm had brought up from the depths.
And there, at the edge of the water, he found a man.
Naked and unashamed of it, skin as pale as the inside of a shell, with eyes as black as the abyss and sharp, sharp teeth.
Corvo’s heart leaped.
“Hello, Corvo.”