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The gentle rocking of the ship is barely discernible in the calm waters of Karnaca Harbor.
Daud can see the sharp planes of Billie's skin illuminated in the moonlight that obnoxiously bathes them. He can't tell if she's sleeping. Years ago, it would have caused fear to curl snakelike in his stomach. If he couldn't tell when someone was sleeping, then he'd never be able to let his guard down.
He lets it down now. He's always known Billie wants to kill him; and he appreciates her fighting the urge.
Not so much these days. He's so tired of being alive.
Billie can't stand it, she wants to breathe life back into him through the desperate passion of her kisses, through the sea air of his childhood home. He lets her try, because he loves her. He's spent so long in fear of what she could take from him that he never noticed what she gave.
She shifts against him. Her body is stretched out across his, lithe and scarred. He runs a calloused palm carefully over the length of her spine, her breasts pressed against his chest. It's impossible to share a cot in this scorching heat, even at the dead of night when the air turns minutely cooler, but Billie insists they try. She's afraid he doesn't have much time left; worry etched into her haggard features, concern glinting in her dark eyes every time his ragged coughs wrack his thinning body.
Daud's mother said that spending time with the dead and dying siphoned away your soul, until there was nothing left, and you were as dead on the inside as they'd become on the outside. She told him to stay away from grave-yards, because the bones in the ground were hollow and empty, waiting to be filled with the life force of the unwary mortal.
"Billie," he croaks. His voice sounds dry and sandpapery. It sounds like the voices he'd imagined walking through the bloodied battlefields, calling out his name. It sounds like the rasping dead woman's voice he hears in his dreams, every single night- "Corvo? Is that you?"-
Billie makes a sleepy, questioning, "Mmhm?"
"It's not good for you to be with me now," he tells her. He moves his face to nuzzle against her cheek, apologetic, begging her to understand. He doesn't want her to remember him as a weak old man, barely able to lift a sword.
She laughs coolly, and he feels the sound of it reverberate through her body. "I know what's good for me," she replies. Her fingers draw lazy patterns over his bicep.
He says what hes been too afraid to say since the first night she found her way into his bed, barely audible. "I don't want you to wake up holding a corpse."
Billie lifts her head, a physical recoil. "Don't say that."
He looks her steadily in the eye, defying her to reassure him that it's never going to happen. But they both know it's likely. And the more time she spends in the coffin of his arms, the greater the chance they'll be cold when she wakes up.
It feels wrong.
It feels as though he's draining her vitality just to eke out his wretched existence for a few more miserable days.
"It's going to happen very soon," he whispers, trying to ease her into it. He can see the pain cross plainly over her face, the moment the jaws of the trap close around the rabbit's leg, and it knows it can't escape. Daud can't escape death. He's tried for so long. He tried to befriend Death, bring it gifts in the form of Dunwall's rising body count, but here it ends. You cannot bargain with it, you cannot bribe it.
"Then just for tonight," Billie says quietly. Anguish bleeds into the edges of her attempted impassivity.
He nods minutely. Satisfied, she rests her head back on his shoulder, pressing a kiss to the clammy skin of his neck.
For many days, he wondered if she'd put him out of his misery. A drop of deadly nightshade in his tea. A dagger slipped lovingly into his carotid artery. The bliss of a snapped neck. Yet every morning, the sun filtered through the wooden slats of the cabin, and his heart was still fluttering an unsteady beat. Billie's admiration morphed into disgust when he lost his edge. The moment remorse influenced his actions, she lost all respect for him. In its place, a deep love took root. She wouldn't kill him now if he begged. Some may call that compassion, but to Daud, her refusal to end his suffering is only a mark of her enduring ruthlessness.
He's proud of her, and as he feels himself slipping under, he hopes he mentioned that in the recording, because he can't quite recall.
His Mark burns as the Outsider lends him a small comfort with the reassurance of his respectful presence.
He doesn't think he'll last the night.