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“It takes a while, at least you’re here. I see you. Yes, I see you.” - MISSIO, ‘I See You’
~*~
The first time Emmrich created an ocular prosthetic, he’d not been in the Mourn Watch long. But it was a very desperate man who came to find him in the Necropolis - one who had been trying to find someone who would help for a long while - and so when even a new Watcher accepted his request for a meeting he didn’t delay. When they did meet soon after Emmrich sent word he sat very still in the lab, back straight, stumbling through his story as his young son tried to squirm out of his lap. Manfred, still a wisp then, came away from the man’s ruined eye socket to float just out of his boy’s reach, dancing out of the way of his little fingers and brightening when he squealed in delight.
A construction accident, the young man explained. Repair work in one of the most desperate places in Nevarra City; not far from where Emmrich himself was born, but of course the poor man didn’t need to know that. Scaffolding had given way, he’d been standing in the wrong place when iron and wood exploded outward as the structure buckled, and suddenly he was near-blind and out of work. The healers who attended him had saved his other eye and a small amount of his vision, but the other was beyond saving. He didn’t need something that was perfect, he didn’t mind at all if it didn’t look like a normal eye, he didn’t want to waste mi’lord’s time (Multiple gentle reminders of “Please, my good man, just Emmrich,” went unheeded) but if he could help in any way at all then he could get back to work because the boy had no one else, his mother, Maker bless her, gone a while back now, and if could just see again and he’d been trying for so long to find someone at the Necropolis, and he’d heard that there was a new Watcher who maybe could do this kind of thing, would Emmrich please try -
- and then when Emmrich leaned across, took the man’s hand in his own and said he most certainly would, he was reassured to see that the tear ducts in the remaining eye still worked.
In comparison to his runecraft now, of course, it was a crude prosthetic. Had he the skills then as he does today, he would have been able to mask the glow of the runes with a small, hardy glamour that didn’t make it quite so obvious. And dear Manfred didn’t have the fingers he does now to make a true mould of the eye socket with impressions of veins and paint flecks in the iris, so true to life one might think it could blink. But the basic principles of necromancy have remained true, even though his skillset in this area is much improved.
To lose an eye, a finger or a whole limb is a death - not as large or as final as the death of the entire body itself, but there is still an absence where there was something there before. It was once alive in the most basic sense, with a presence and a capacity to feel. Necromancy is the transposition between life and death, and so it is there the necromancer works the magic backward. In a way it is like his corpse whispering: Emmrich finds an impression of what was there before, and speaks to the energy within that empty space. Like a flame held in the hands and lifted to his mouth to breathe gently into it and make it glow.
The young man he helped all those years ago was the first to benefit from a small niche of necromancy Emmrich had a hand in developing. He has made dozens since - each a little better than the last, he is pleased to think - but this time the stakes are a little higher. That’s not to say that all the people he has helped before now in this way weren’t important, of course. It is just that the very essence of himself and his soul wasn’t as dependent on those successes as this one is.
Like the emptiness that needs to be coaxed into life with a breath of power, Emmrich holds the hand of his spouse to his mouth and talks them through their breathing.
“...and hold for three, now,” he says softly against the crook of Lenore’s finger as they fill their lungs and pause. He counts them down. “And release. That’s it, darling. You’re doing wonderfully.”
He sees their lashes flutter as they blink, head bowed toward the floor with their gaze directed between their knees and where Emmrich stands between them. Their fingers twitch restlessly against his wrist, and he soon registers a pattern to the movements. One, two, three. They ground themselves this way when their anxiety threatens to give way to panic, and despite how much he would like to tell them he’s proud for the way they’re doing it on their own, he stays quiet. Medical examinations and procedures are decidedly not Lenore’s favourite activity, and though they’ve come quite far in the last few years it’s still quite a fraught experience for them.
Emmrich, however, has all the time in the world. If Lenore wants to take two days to do it, then they’ll take two days. If they want a week, then his labs are shut and his books are cleared until it's done. While he is a senior necromancer, a member of the Mourn Watch and subject to all the responsibilities and demands that come both, he is first and foremost Lenore’s husband. And that is that.
“Okay,” Lenore says suddenly, lifting their head in a sharp jerk and pushing their face toward Emmrich.
“Hmm.” Emmrich draws back, enjoying the frown between Lenore’s eyebrows despite himself. “I’m afraid not. Try again.”
He gets a frown. “What? Why?”
“Darling, you’ve got both eyes closed.”
Lenore pauses. Their eyes are still screwed tightly shut.
“Oh,” they say. Even then, it takes a moment before they open them again. When they do, they blink up at him. As they scan his face anxiously, Emmrich observes the stark difference between their better eye and the prosthetic as he has countless times over the last few weeks with increasing worry. Their good eye is healthy, still as lovely as it always was with the dark brown that enchanted him so when they first met, but it is truly time that the prosthetic is seen to.
As his darling has aged, their body has changed. The process has, at times, been a difficult and upsetting one for them, dredging up reminders from Lenore’s past that they would have much rather forgotten. In particularly dark moments Lenore hasn’t allowed Emmrich to touch them at all, shying away from touches and caresses, flinching from kisses laid on their shoulders and down their arms, sucking themself in and away from his arms when he reached for them in their bed. It felt as though a part of himself was gone adrift, and from a terribly lonely island he watched it pull away, aching as he called and called for it desperately to come back. But Wilhelmina’s arrival was the tipping point where Lenore began to make their way back to him and, crucially, themself. It was their body that carried their daughter and brought her into the world - it had strength, it had power, and it performed a miracle in every sense of the word.
And now, when they come adrift from Emmrich, it is a little easier for Lenore to find their way back. Especially when Emmrich talks about how Wilhelmina’s first cradle is beginning to look a little lonely. Then Lenore smiles in their quiet way and asks him what they might do about it.
Emmrich reluctantly pulls away from those pleasant thoughts when Lenore sighs heavily, touching their prosthetic anxiously with the tips of their fingers. It’s a habit they’ve developed when they’re growing uncomfortable, and, just like the other times, Emmrich gently bats their hand away. Years of use have changed the edges of the prosthetic, smoothed down where it once curved and blunted what was once a snug fit. And the magic that lets them see through it - that precious spark of light from Kal-Sharok - is worn, as all things loved and cherished are. Lenore often frets about it, shedding tears at the thought of losing dear Harding all over again should the magic ever go out completely.
The pain that they’re feeling - both emotional and physical - is something Emmrich can’t stand. And, thus, this intervention in the quiet of his workspace at home. The slab is clean, the curtains are drawn back to let in the light, and, from nearby in the garden, they can hear the sound of their daughter laughing as she and Manfred run laps around the Shroud’s Kiss Emmrich grows in his spare time. Here, he and Lenore will find a way through this pain together. As they always do.
“Could you tell me what’s going to happen again?” They mumble, their face turned away and to the tiled floor.
“Of course.” Emmrich gently frames their face in his hands, rubbing his thumb with a feather-light touch back and forth under their eye. “First, my darling, beautiful spouse is going to look at me so that I might show them precisely what I’m going to touch and where.”
That gets Emmrich a laugh - a snort that Lenore would be mortified to let loose in public. But here, with him, they look up and smile. Emmrich smiles back and kisses the tip of their nose.
“Fantastic. We’re off to a flying start.” Emmrich slowly moves his hands so that he can tilt Lenore’s head back ever so slightly, turning it to the side. His fingertip moves over their vallaslin before coming to rest in the corner of their eye. Even though it is the lightest pressure he can manage, their eyelid flutters at the contact. “We will count down from three together, and when you breathe in I will very gently push this corner further into the socket, lifting the other side out. It will probably be a little uncomfortable, but I’ll be as quick as I can.”
Lenore nods. “And then I just keep breathing.”
“That’s exactly right. Your job will be to keep breathing, nice and steady for me as I see to reactivating the magic and adjusting the shape.” He traces its outline under their eyelid, familiar to him as the beat of their heart. “And then, when it comes to putting it back into place, we’ll count down to it together once more. When it's in, I’ll cast a small enchantment, and you should be able to see through it again.”
He watches Lenore as they quietly process this, nodding as he speaks. When he finishes, their fingers begin to move on his wrist again. One, two, three. They measure their breathing in time, and he matches it with his own as he tips their foreheads together.
“And all of it is on your terms, my dear. Whenever you’re ready, and not a moment before.”
If Lenore wanted to sit in silence for hours more as they brace themself and summon the courage he knows they have, Emmrich would give them every hour they wanted and then however many minutes more. His life is intertwined with theirs, and not a moment of it could possibly be wasted.
One, two, three, say their fingers on his wrist. They breathe in and out together.
They nudge the bridge of their nose against his own, and Emmrich’s stomach flips. Their years together have paved the way for little silent signals such as these, and when Lenore asks to be kissed like this it's hard not to overflow with pride and love. For so long they seemed baffled when he touched them, whispered words of adoration, awe and desire, and now? Now they can ask. Touch me here. There. Hold me. And now, kiss me.
And so he does. Their mouths come together and he gathers Lenore up against him, as close as he can. They hold on to him tightly, and, like the precious thing he’ll soon hold in his hands, they breathe the courage to do this into him.
When Lenore breaks away from Emmrich they nod quickly.
“One,” murmurs Emmrich. “Two, and - ”
Lenore inhales deeply and, in perfect sync, Emmrich pushes with this thumb. As the prosthetic comes free they gasp, stiffening against him, but it's done. He presses it into his palm and closes his fingers into it with the same breathless care he took when his daughter was first put into his arms.
The praise falls out of him. “Oh, well done. Perfect. My perfect darling.”
As Lenore drops their hands to hold onto the edge of the slab tightly, they start their breathing. In and out. As steady as he hoped it would be. He presses a kiss to the corner of their empty eye socket and turns away.
Emmrich laid out all the tools he needed ahead of time, covering them with a spare shroud so that Lenore wouldn’t have to see them as they came in. In the here and now he pulls it away, throwing it up over his shoulder in a movement that’s become habitual since he became a parent, and drops the eye into the base he built to hold it. He wills the magnifying lenses he built for this purpose twenty odd years ago to fall into place, and he leans in to study the prosthetic as his consciousness leans into the fade.
Yes. He can see the absence that it fills. What it stands for and what it represents. The death of Lenore’s old eye in an act of senseless cruelty and the birth of the new. The way through the dark, Harding had said. He remembers when she presented it to Lenore and how he had thought, not just for you, Scout Harding. Not just for you.
He calls up the memory of dear, dear Harding as magic lights up his fingertips and he gets to work. Her laughter, the sardonic lift of her eyebrow, the confidence she’d had with her bow, and the way she’d looked at Lenore in the days of the Veilguard with complete sincerity when they were Rook. Your call, she said, and Lenore blinked in surprise. Every time.
Emmrich finds that blink and lays it into the Kal-Sharok rune, the edges of the prosthetic glowing like metal in a forge. The moment when something in Lenore, however small, began to think: it could be my call. I could be more than this. I could be more than they told me I am. How it was when they saw themself anew, and let themself be seen.
His magic and his love pour forth. The rune glows anew, the ancient magic of it spinning in miniscule discs within its faux-pupil.
Emmrich’s hands shake, and so he motions at the prosthetic instead to free it. It floats up and into his palm. He turns around with it again, and Lenore is as he left them. Eyelids closed, breathing in and out. The trust they have in him to return this gift back to them - he can’t think about it, or he’ll weep and then this will have to be begun all over again.
He swallows hard. “My love,” he says. “Are we ready?”
Lenore nods on an exhale, and he steps up between their knees again. “Just my hand, on your face,” Emmrich says, spreading his fingertips across their cheek. He pulls back their eyelid with his thumb and they shift their weight restlessly from one side to the other. “I know, darling. We’re so nearly done. Ready now?”
Lenore doesn’t answer in words, but with a deep, steady inhale. Oh, perfect. His perfect love. “Three, two, and - ”
They breathe out, and he slips the prosthetic home. Lenore gasps just as before, a hand flying up to catch his wrist. They tremble as he pushes down with both thumbs to make sure the prosthetic is firmly in place, but they fall still when he leans forward to press his mouth to their eyelid as he guides it back down. He breathes the magic out, and the rune glows like an ember.
Emmrich pulls away a fraction, watching intently as Lenore blinks profusely. Moisture gathers as their eye socket begins to overcompensate, their body instinctively reacting to what is unnaturally dry. Emmrich wipes away the tear that forms before it can fall. With his hands on their face both of Lenore’s eyes find his, and he realises he has simply stopped breathing altogether.
“What do you see?” He asks them quietly. He’s suddenly desperate to know.
In response, Lenore gives him a shaky smile, and reaches up to cup his face as he does theirs.
“You.”