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The crow is perched on the fence again.
If Daud still carried a pistol on the regular, he might just have shot the accursed bird out of pure frustration. It has been hanging around the vineyard for almost a year now, arriving with a flock to stay for winter and then never migrating back north – and it’s been a constant observer ever since, never far from wherever Daud is working. Its ability to track Daud’s every move is uncanny, and Daud is half-convinced there is more to the Voiddamned bird than meets the eye.
It would be just the Outsider’s brand of perverse humour, to send a crow his way. A constant reminder of the crime he committed, and of the man who took the fall for it.
Not that he needs a reminder today, of all days.
It’s rather hard to forget this particular anniversary.
He’s celebrating, for lack of a better term, with a bottle of whiskey, the good, Dunwall-brewed stuff that costs an arm and a leg this far south. Daud doesn’t drink as a general rule, a rule he kept even now that there is no need to be able to make a snap decision at any given time, but tonight he will gladly break it. Anything to keep his mind from wandering. Anything to try and forget.
Daud sequesters himself on the roof of the building that serves as the vineyard’s warehouse, far away from the home where his men must be getting ready to retire right about now. It’s always an early morning during harvest season. He, too, will rise with the sun to pick grapes for hours on end, hangover and sleep deprivation be damned. He can’t leave the others with the work just because he feels like drinking alone tonight.
Well. Not entirely alone.
“Voiddamned bird,” Daud mutters at the crow, unable to muster the energy to feel truly annoyed. “What do you want? I don’t have any food.”
The crow cocks its head and lets out a quiet caw, and then –
And then the crow is gone.
In its place is a man.
Daud stares at the Empress’ disgraced Royal Protector for a solid ten seconds before he hums a soft, mirthless laugh, shaking his head. “I knew there was something off about you.”
He makes no move for the knife he never stopped carrying in his boot, doesn’t even think of it, really. If Attano wanted to kill him, he could have easily waited until Daud had a good bit of whiskey in him. He’d have been easy prey.
The thought doesn’t disconcert him as much as it perhaps should.
But Attano doesn’t reach for the sword at his belt; he just observes Daud for a spell, head still cocked in an undeniably birdlike manner. “I didn’t come looking for food,” he says eventually, his voice hoarse and his words slow, as though his tongue is having trouble curling around the syllables. He must not have spoken in months now. “But I wouldn’t refuse a glass of whiskey.”
It’s almost funny, that this is the first thing Attano has ever said directly to his face. Daud would have expected condemnation, at the very least a curse or two. Not this mundane, polite request for a drink.
Daud pops the cork with his teeth and takes a hearty swig straight from the bottle before he offers the liquor to Attano. “Didn’t bother to bring a glass.”
Attano lowers himself to sit an arm’s length away from Daud and accepts the bottle, though he doesn’t drink, not immediately. Daud wonders if he is still wary of poison, even two and a half years after he washed up in Rudshore. Part of him is tempted to tell Attano he didn’t put poison in his own bottle of whiskey; a larger part of him recognises the foolishness of the impulse. Antagonising Attano is not high up on the list of clever things to do.
“If you’re not going to drink, give me the damn bottle back,” Daud says instead, holding his hand out impatiently. “I didn’t come up here to stay sober.”
Attano raises the bottle to his lips and takes a small, measured sip. “I’ve never seen you drink before.”
In the year I’ve been watching you remains unsaid, and Daud snatches the bottle back when Attano offers it, two swallows of burning liquor helping to loosen his tongue. “I don’t drink,” he shrugs, and he takes another swig to prove his point, “except for today.”
“What makes today special?” Attano asks.
Daud fixes him with an incredulous stare. “How long have you been living as a crow?”
Attano wordlessly requests the bottle back; Daud hands it over. “A while. It’s… easier.”
“It’s the eighteenth of Earth.”
Daud speaks bluntly, and Attano’s hand tightens on the neck of the bottle. “I came here to kill you.”
Honesty. Good. “You’re doing a piss-poor job of it.”
Attano snorts, and takes a proper, long drink. “I didn’t mean that’s why I came up here. I meant Serkonos as a whole.”
“My point stands.”
“You’re almost never alone,” Attano says, sounding almost accusatory. “And you lock your door and window at night.”
The fact that he knows that speaks volumes. “I’m alone now,” Daud points out. “You can push me off the roof if you’d like. It’ll look like an accident.”
He means it, too. Had Attano confronted him back in Dunwall, Daud would have pleaded for his life, he thinks. But it’s been three years to the day since he took his last life, a bit over two years since he and his men came to this vineyard. Daud has basked in the warm Serkonan sun, given his Whalers a better life, even travelled down to Karnaca to finally pay his respects at his mother’s grave. He is content, at peace, and he knows his men will be fine without him, in the long run. He doesn’t think he’ll terribly mind dying, now.
Attano puts the bottle of whiskey down between them. “I don’t want to kill you.”
“Imagine that,” Daud drawls. He doesn’t reach for the bottle again. “What do you want, then?”
“To talk,” Attano says, though he sounds hesitant. “To ask…”
Daud knows what he wants to ask. “Coin,” he says bluntly. “I killed her for coin. Burrows was offering enough to pay for… everything. This vineyard, for one. Passage through the blockade. I wanted out of Dunwall. Set up shop somewhere else.”
Attano’s expression is unreadable. “Your reason was coin.”
“That is the idea of an assassin, usually.”
“Yet you haven’t killed since I got here.”
“I haven’t killed since I got here,” Daud corrects. “The Empress was the last.”
Attano stares hard at the bottle of Old Dunwall, but he doesn’t reach for it. “I heard you record an audiograph, back then. You said you’d have given back all the coin if you could.”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t have been able to buy this property without that coin.”
“No,” Daud has to agree. His legacy is built on blood, he’s well aware.
“But you would still have traded the coin for her life?”
“Yes,” Daud says again. It’s the truth. “We would have managed. I just took the easy way out.”
“It doesn’t seem to have been that easy.”
Daud almost laughs. “Understatement. But also hindsight.”
Attano hums, brow furrowed in thought. “You didn’t take the easy way out, after,” he states, like it’s an obvious fact. “I heard some of yours talk about Delilah.”
The mere name is enough to spur Daud to grab the bottle of whiskey again. “I wanted to atone,” he grunts, the very notion of it seeming so very arbitrary, now. Childish. “Didn’t matter much, in the end.”
Because Emily Kaldwin fell from the top of Kingsparrow Lighthouse only days after Daud sealed Delilah away in a prison of her own making.
Attano’s mouth is curved into a sardonic smile. “You cannot save her,” he murmurs. “The Void tells me every time. A note, next to her body. Their bodies.”
“You killed her,” Daud returns the courtesy. “That’s what the note says for me.”
Attano nods, takes the whiskey when Daud offers it. “You killed her,” he agrees. “And I wanted to kill you, in turn. An eye for an eye.”
“Why didn’t you?” Daud cannot stop himself from asking.
“I was too weak, back then. I could’ve snuck up on you, I suppose, but I would never have made it out of Rudshore alive if I had, not with all of your men in position. And Emily…” Here he stops, shakes his head, lifts the bottle to his lips. “You weren’t important compared to her.”
There was a time, not too long ago, when being called unimportant would have raised his hackles. Now, Daud is only relieved. If history is kind, it will let him be forgotten entirely.
“I asked the Outsider about you, after,” Attano continues. “A while after, I think. I’m not sure. I spent a long time as a crow in Dunwall, watching the process of succession. They weren’t getting anywhere, and the city… it will eat itself alive. I wanted to leave. Wanted to do something worthwhile again. Hunting down the Knife of Dunwall seemed as good a goal as any.”
Daud almost feels betrayed. “The black-eyed bastard just told you my whereabouts? That’s new.”
Attano’s face twists into a scowl Daud has seen in the mirror very, very often. “He said some cryptic nonsense about a murder. I only realised he meant a murder of crows after the one I joined to migrate south led me straight here.”
“That sounds more like him.”
Attano’s answering smile is almost sincere. “I think I’ve started to bore him. I doubt he foresaw that granting me the power to shapeshift into a bird would lead to me spending most of my time as one.”
Daud can imagine why it would be appealing to remain a crow for so long, just as he can imagine why the Outsider would find it terribly dull. “So he sent you to me,” he deduces, unable to keep the amusement from his voice, “and you hung around the vineyard as a crow for a year. He must have been riveted.”
Attano laughs, muted but genuine. “I’m glad to disappoint him.”
Daud reaches for the whiskey again; Attano has been picking at the label. “He was hoping we’d have a duel.”
“I’m not going to fight you,” Attano says, with finality. “I have no reason to.”
“I killed the Empress.”
“You also saved an Empress. An Empress I let die,” Attano argues. “Your death won’t bring them back. It won’t solve anything. When I came here, I thought – I expected – you’d still be killing. But I’ve been here for months now, and the worst thing I’ve seen you do was steal Rulfio’s last pack of cigarettes.”
“Confiscating,” Daud corrects, but absently. Attano even bothered to learn the Whalers’ names. “He has bad lungs, he shouldn’t be smoking.”
Attano snorts. He doesn’t take the bottle of whiskey when Daud offers it again. “Neither should you,” he admonishes, the sentiment oddly amiable. “It’ll kill you.”
“Something has to,” Daud shrugs, “since you won’t.”
There is something sharp in Attano’s gaze. “Disappointed?”
“No,” Daud denies easily. He could die content today, but he’ll live just as happily. “Someone should keep Rulfio from smoking too much. Might as well be me.”
Attano nods, seeming pleased. “Good luck, Knife of Dunwall.”
A soft hum of the Void, and a crow flaps its wings, its black silhouette swiftly vanishing in the dark of night.
Daud stares down at the bottle of whiskey in his hand, still half-full, and places it down deliberately. Drinking to forget is clearly not in the cards tonight, and Daud finds the need to forget to be much less pressing, in any case.
He leaves the alcohol behind on the roof, and returns to the house. It will be an early morning, after all.
On the morrow, the bottle is gone.
And the crow is nowhere to be found.
Two days later, the crow lands on his shoulder while he’s working the field.
The sensation of sharp talons digging into the meat of his shoulder is as unpleasant as it is unexpected, and Daud very nearly smacks the bird away with the handle of his rake. “Outsider’s eyes, warn a man, would you?”
The crow makes a little cooing noise, and something drops in the freshly overturned soil at Daud’s feet.
“Potterstead cigarettes,” Daud mutters as he scoops the little pack up. It is exactly the cheap, low-quality brand he used to smoke back in Dunwall. The same brand he pilfered from Rulfio, too. “Where in the Void did you even find these things?”
The crow clicks its beak, annoyed; obviously it cannot answer Daud, not in this shape, and Attano doesn’t seem inclined to shift in broad daylight, in front of so many people.
“Fine,” Daud shrugs, the motion jostling the crow and earning him another indignant click, “you can tell me tonight. But bring your own damn whiskey this time.”
He’s answered with a quiet caw he takes as acceptance, and Daud nods, taking up his rake again. There are worse ways to spend an evening, he supposes.
“Talking to the birds now, sir?” Feodor jokes from the other side of the row of vines.
“It’s not like I have any other choice if I want to have an intelligent conversation around here,” Daud snips back, “since Thomas and Rulfio don’t work the field.”
“Rude!” Rinaldo calls from two rows down.
“Yeah, sir, I thought you loved us.”
“Don’t have too many thoughts, Feo, you might hurt yourself.”
“Can it, Misha.”
“Make me.”
The former Whalers quickly descend into a chaotic squabble, and Daud hums softly to himself as he continues his work.
This, he knows, is what home feels like.
Attano is already waiting for him on the roof when he arrives shortly after sundown.
Daud sits, letting his legs dangle off the edge. “I didn’t think you’d be back.”
“Neither did I.”
“So why are you?”
Attano shakes his head. “I don’t know. I was flying over the market in Cullero, I saw a dockhand with a pack of Pottersteads, and I realised… I have no idea where to go.”
He sounds so very lost, and of course he does. His whole life was ripped away from him; he has no one left to care for, and no one left to hate now, either. Daud took that from him as he took everything else.
It’s funny, in a morbid sort of way. Had Daud stumbled upon Corvo Attano in this state some three years ago, he’d have tried to recruit him for the Whalers.
“You’re welcome to stay,” he offers now, not recruiting, but inviting. “There’s always something to be done in this damn place, we could use the extra pair of hands.”
Attano starts, then shakes his head. “I can’t… there’s too many people,” he admits, honest in a way Daud wouldn’t have expected. “You’re the first and only person I’ve spoken to in… months? Years, now? I don’t think I can…”
“I understand,” Daud says, and he does, all too well. He, too, spent years avoiding people once, after he escaped from his kidnappers. “Offer stands. You can stay in whatever form you want, as long as you leave the damn grapes alone.”
Attano cocks his head, assessing him in that eerily birdlike manner again. “And at night,” he begins, carefully, “would you join me here?”
Ah. Now that is… perhaps not as surprising as it should be, yet it takes Daud aback all the same. “If you’d like,” he says. “I’ll welcome any excuse to skip out on Nancy night.”
“Still getting fleeced by Hobson?” Attano grins.
“He cheats,” Daud defends, sullen.
“You taught him to cheat.”
Daud narrows his eyes. “How would you know that?”
“Educated guess,” Attano shrugs, still wearing that infernal grin. His posture has relaxed significantly since Daud acquiesced to more of these unorthodox late-night conversations.
“I liked you better as a bird.”
Attano laughs. It’s a nice sound, Daud decides. “Dishonesty doesn’t become you.”
“Smugness doesn’t become you,” he snips back, though that, too, rings false. Attano is much more becoming wearing this lopsided smile than he is with a frown creasing his brow.
Outsider’s eyes, what has he gotten himself into?
It becomes a curious sort of routine.
The crow remains at the vineyard most days, occasionally disappearing for a day or two only to return with a small gift of sorts. They’re thoughtful presents: small vials of whale oil for his lighter just when he realises he’s running low; a new buckle for Quinn’s belt the day after she was cursing up a storm when she broke her old one; a packet of the Tyvian mints Yuri favours that are difficult to find in the bustle of the Cullero market. It’s Attano’s way of repaying Daud for allowing him to stay, and so Daud doesn’t mention it. He does know a thing or two about pride.
Evenings are for conversations on the roof of the warehouse, when Attano isn’t off to the city and Daud hasn’t been roped into losing all of his cigarettes in a round of Nancy. Daud finds he enjoys those talks more than he expected, yet it isn’t all that strange – they are, after all, more similar than either would like to admit. The mere fact that they’ve ended up in this very place together is telling enough.
Some nights, they venture away from the safety of the roof, walk along the edge of the property to get Attano accustomed to using his legs instead of his wings again. Rarely, they find a set of sturdy-looking sticks and engage in something of a mock-spar – and Daud should not feel quite so gleeful about beating a man who has been living as a bird for most of the last three years, but damn if it doesn’t feel good.
It is, indeed, an odd routine. But Daud finds himself secure in it, and that is much more odd than the routine itself could ever be.
They carry on for a handful of months, long enough for autumn to set in properly, harvest season flashing by in a series of long days of hard work. Now comes the time to actually make and bottle the wine, a process which Daud has long since been banned from getting too involved with. He does not have the finesse needed to create an even halfway drinkable sample of wine.
It means more time spent running errands to the market, or working the field by himself, and Daud is rarely spotted without a large crow perched somewhere nearby, oftentimes making a comfortable seat of his shoulder.
The Whalers, of course, find it hilarious.
“Have you named him, sir?” Thomas asks one afternoon, his voice utterly serious despite the frankly ridiculous question.
“No,” Daud says – lies, really, because this bird definitely does have a name.
“He seems attached to you,” Thomas observes, a softness to his features as he regards the crow. He always did have a soft spot for animals. “It might be worthwhile teaching him to respond to a name.”
If this really was just a bird, he would be right. “Fine,” Daud relents, because it is pointless to argue with Thomas, he has long since learned. “I’ll call him Corvus.”
Close enough to the truth to be familiar, different enough to avoid raising suspicion, and simple to remember, considering the Academy still refers to species of flora and fauna by their old, pre-Empire monikers. A good name, if Daud says so himself.
Considering the wing that smacks in his face as soon as the word leaves his mouth, he can surmise Attano does not agree.
Thomas turns back to the papers he’d taken outside, smiling faintly. “You’ve found a good companion, sir. I hope you’ll keep him, if he wants to stay.”
Daud wonders just how much his second has figured out.
He doesn’t ask.
The Month of Rain never fails to live up to its name.
It comes pouring down without so much as a warning, and most of the Whalers stick it out inside the warehouse, unwilling to brave the storm even with their powers to carry them through. Daud hopes they won’t be sampling their own merchandise too much – they do need the income, now that he’s sunk most of his savings into the purchase and upkeep of the vineyard itself.
Daud, for his part, ducked inside the house as soon as the sky began to darken, and he is warm and dry in his room, going over some of the bookkeeping that Thomas hasn’t had the time for recently. It is how he spends most rainy days, few and far between as those are in Cullero, and he doesn’t fully realise something is off until he rolls his shoulders and the lack of the crow’s familiar weight becomes noticeable.
Attano is still outside.
Shit.
Daud curses under his breath as he gets up, accounting and comfort long forgotten. He doesn’t stop to think that Attano, in his current shape, must have braved many such storms back in Dunwall, doesn’t stop to think that crows can easily take shelter in a dry nook, doesn’t stop to think at all, really.
Leaving a crow out in the rain is one thing. Leaving a crow he knows to be a person out in the rain is something else. And leaving a crow he knows to be a person he’s grown fond of out in the rain is simply unacceptable.
Thunder rumbles resoundingly when Daud steps outside, and he curses again, more vehement this time. The rain is coming down in sheets, and he’s already soaked, stupid goddamn terrible weather, he left Dunwall to avoid this, why the fuck does it have to be raining in fucking Cullero –
“Corvus!” he bellows over the sound of the heavy rainfall. For once, he’s glad for the name Thomas insisted he give the bird – it’s useful, if nothing else.
He only has to call once. The crow caws loudly as it swoops down to meet him, working hard to battle the harsh winds trying to throw it off course. It does not quite manage to land on Daud’s shoulder, grasping his upper arm instead, and Daud reaches up to steady it. The feathers shiver under his touch.
Once again, Daud doesn’t stop to think. He plucks the crow from his arm and shoves it inside his coat, sharing his body’s warmth. Hurries back to the house with the bird securely in his arms, muttering curses at the rain and the Void and the Outsider who has got to be laughing at him all the way.
He kicks off his shoes as soon as he’s back inside, ignores Thomas’ knowing smile but accepts the two towels he offers, and stomps back upstairs.
“This is exactly why I left Dunwall,” he tells the crow when the door is securely shut behind them. The view from his window is treated with an especially dark glare.
He doesn’t think, still, when he plucks the crow from his coat and wraps it in one of the towels, carefully rubbing the feathers dry. It is easy, too easy, to forget that the bird who is his constant companion during the day and the man he spends his evenings with are one and the same.
Daud sets the bundle of towel and bird down on his desk and towels his own hair as dry as he can before peeling off his sodden jacket – and then also the shirt underneath, because it fared little better. He has to dig around for a clean one, because someone (Feodor, it’s always Feodor) has been slacking off on laundry duty. And when he finally turns back to his desk –
“You didn’t have to come get me,” Attano says hoarsely. There is an odd tint of red to his cheeks. “I could’ve managed.”
“You look like you have a damn fever, Attano,” Daud points out. “And I’m not in the habit of leaving my people out in the rain.”
“‘Your people’,” Attano repeats.
“This is my property, you’re staying here, that makes you one of my people,” Daud says, defensive. Something about this setup has him tense. “If you don’t like it, you’re free to leave any time.”
Something sobers in Attano’s gaze. “I wasn’t criticising. I just didn’t realise you considered me as such.”
“I have a habit of picking up strays,” Daud grumbles. “That’s what Rulfio says, at least.”
Attano laughs. It is still a nice sound. “He’s not wrong.”
He is not. Rulfio rarely is, though Daud will never say that to the man’s face. “I know what it’s like to not have a place in this world. I carved one out for myself a long time ago. I don’t see why others can’t share it.”
“This is not the same place you carved out all those years ago, though,” Attano remarks. He is smiling; it looks impossibly soft in the gentle light of the candle on Daud’s desk. “This place is kinder.”
“Fewer swords, more rakes,” Daud can’t help but grin back. “I’d say it’s an improvement.”
“To the rundown building with the caved-in roof in the middle of the most plague-ridden district in the most plague-ridden city? It’s not as though the bar was high, Daud.”
Daud snorts. “I still like you better as a bird, you know.”
That, he’s said countless times now. And countless times, Attano’s answer is the same.
“Dishonesty still doesn’t become you.”
“I’m not a becoming man, Attano,” Daud drawls.
“I’d beg to differ.”
Daud raises an eyebrow. “Would you?”
There’s a curious sort of determination in Attano’s face, a set to his jaw, steel in his eyes. “I don’t want to be one of your people.”
For a moment, the only sounds are the howling of the wind, the rain hitting the window, the rumble of thunder in the distance.
“No one is forcing you to be.”
Attano shakes his head, steps closer, searches for… something in Daud’s face. “I don’t want to be one of your people,” he says again. “I want…”
A hand on Daud’s shoulder, so reminiscent of the crow’s familiar weight and yet so very different.
He’s much too close.
“Stop me,” Attano murmurs.
Daud doesn’t.
The rain isn’t so bad when drunk from another’s lips.
Daud begins to leave his window open at night, after that.
It doesn’t change much for their usual routine, not truly. What little decorum they exercised is foregone, touches coming easily, frequently, and evenings spent together become longer, spanning the nights, both squashed together in Daud’s decidedly single-person bed. But the conversations, the walks, the occasional sparring, all remains as it was.
It’s a comfortable kind of contentedness, a novel feeling, and Daud basks in it as he basks in the warm Serkonan sun, far away from Dunwall, far away from plague and corruption and hierarchy. He has everything he wants, everything he needs, right here on this acre of land just out of Cullero.
“You should stay for breakfast,” he says, on impulse, one particularly sunny morning.
It is impossible not to notice the way Corvo stiffens at the words. “I don’t think…”
“It’s only Thomas at this hour, maybe Rulfio,” Daud says. “Not too many people, not at once. But I think you’ve been hiding long enough. And I think Thomas has suspected something for a while now.”
“He’s clever,” Corvo agrees. He is still tense. “I just… I don’t think… not today. Not yet.”
“Alright,” Daud agrees. He has no right to be disappointed. “Not today.”
Not the day after, either, or that week, or that month. But, eventually –
“Today.”
“Today,” Daud nods.
It’s only Thomas, that morning, and a short conversation held over a bowl of oatmeal.
The next day, it’s Rulfio. Then Yuri, then Feodor, then Misha and Quinn together. Rinaldo is the last to learn of their resident crow’s true identity, and he’s sure to complain incessantly about being left out of the loop for so long – but he, too, takes Corvo’s presence in stride, when he’s done pouting. The Whalers, for all that they’re not the Whalers anymore, are used to a certain degree of oddity in their lives, after all.
“Maybe I am one of your people,” Corvo says, when they’re out in the field on a particularly sunny day. In his hands is the broad-brimmed hat Hobson just pushed into his hands while telling him, in no uncertain terms, that he’s not hauling his ass inside if he collapses from heat stroke.
“Maybe you are,” Daud agrees, smiling. “Is that still a bad thing?”
There is something impossibly fond in Corvo’s smile. Daud doesn’t think he’s ever seen him more at peace. “No.”
He wears the sunhat, and they work shoulder-to-shoulder despite the cloying heat.
Retirement, Daud thinks, was the best idea he’s ever had.