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Her little tower smells. This whole place smells. The river, Samuel told Emily, draws in the stench of death and rot and things she doesn’t want to think about. It seeps in through the walls until the room sweats with it. It’s in her nightmares and clinging to her skin when she wakes up.
She’s sat up in her bed, staring blankly at Callista in the dark. Still shaking, and she’s not sure why; it’s never cold, and she can’t really remember what she was dreaming about. Doesn’t want to. She wishes there was a candle, so the darkness wouldn’t trick her into seeing figures that aren’t there. One of them seems to claw for her, and Emily flinches away before she realizes that it’s only the shadow of a cloud crawling across the wall.
The tower stinks, and her bed is stiff, and she wants her doll. She wants- She wants to throw a fit until everyone is forced to listen to her. There’s a scream trapped inside her, like it has been for months since she realized that crying wouldn’t help her and it made her too tired to plan her escapes. She locked it inside tightly. She’s not sure she remembers where she put the key.
It’s not behavior befitting an Empress. Besides, it would wake Callista up.
She folds her arms around herself tightly, like she had all that time with nothing else to hold on to. Sometimes, she was scared even that would be taken away somehow, that she might wake up in The Golden Cat and find that she was no longer Emily, that everything good that she remembered had been a dream and the nightmare was all that was left.
She wonders if Corvo would have recognized her. If he still would have rescued her.
And like a gasp of air upon breaking the water’s surface, Emily knows what she wants more than anything else in the world right now.
She has to be as quiet as a whisper. Callista is a deep sleeper, but even she will wake up if the tower’s door creaks too loudly. Emily doesn’t put on her shoes. She steps like Corvo does, slow and deliberate at first until she’s sure she can balance her weight in such a way that her footsteps won’t make a sound; though he has never formally instructed her how, she has spent so much of her life on his heels and copying the way he moves that his silence comes naturally to her. She’s glad Callista doesn’t lock the tower doors. Emily’s not sure she’d ever get any sleep if she knew she couldn’t leave.
She pushes the door open slowly. The night air is more pleasant than the slog of wading through the daytime humidity. There’s even a hint of a breeze up high on the catwalk. Emily watches where her feet go extra careful in the dark.
The nightmare may be real and never-ending, but she’s not alone in it. That’s easy to forget. It’s only changed so recently, and before that- She didn’t believe them. She didn’t. They said Corvo was dead like Mother, but that was different. Emily saw her- So Corvo couldn’t be dead, and Emily hadn’t believed them.
She knew he would come save her because he always would. She’d just been scared that was how they would take him away from her, too. Make her watch. Force her to believe this time that he-
Emily grips the catwalk very tightly. Her throat hurts.
She doesn’t go through the window gracefully. Her legs are too short. She clatters and stumbles and manages, at least, to land on her feet on the other side. She’s proud of herself for that.
She pokes her head through the doorway to Corvo’s room.
The room is too dark for him to have been awake, but Corvo is up on his feet already. He turns on her quickly with his sword outstretched. His swordarm sways slightly. Emily watches the cold expression on his face melt away in an instant, his eyes widening and mouth falling open slightly in surprise.
“Emily,” Corvo breathes, as he lowers his blade, and Emily wonders why he looks so unsettled. It’s not like he ever would have used it; it’s only her. “Why are you here? Are you alright?” He puts his weapon aside and holds out his hand to her to invite her in.
Emily tries to find the words but they stick in her throat. She swears she can feel them, hooked in deep and refusing to be dragged out any further. Corvo watches her with concern as she swallows repeatedly in an attempt to dislodge any sound at all out of herself. Crying would be easier, if she could only do it, but that’s trapped inside her, too. She’s bound to explode at this rate, leaving little pieces of herself all over Corvo’s walls. She shudders, but she can’t stop picturing it once she’s started—her blood staining the floor, and all over Corvo, and when Mother died, did she bleed like that, why they tried to lie to Emily that Corvo had killed her, because he was covered in-
She thinks she remembers what her nightmare was about.
She’s too wrapped up in her horrors to notice Corvo come closer when she doesn’t. He gets down on one knee, watching her with worried eyes. She has to get herself under control. No one will let a scared little girl be Empress. She has to be like Mother is- was, strong and never scared and all grown up.
Corvo touches her cheek gently, and Emily lets out a shaky breath. She might shatter.
“Can I sleep in your bed?” she finally manages to whisper.
She never knew how bad her nightmares could get before. She’d gone begging Mother to let her sleep in her bed for childish dreams like her tutors surprising her with tests she didn’t know about. (And sometimes Corvo was also in Mother’s bed when she went. Emily liked those nights best of all, even if Mother and Corvo both acted very silly whenever Emily found them and made her promise never to speak of it. She didn’t mind, never told anyone except Mrs. Pilsen—who couldn’t very well gossip about it with anyone else—and snuggled in with Mother on one side petting her hair and Corvo on the other, listening to them both whisper once they thought she’d finally fallen asleep, until she really did.)
Now, Corvo’s bed is too small. Emily is being selfish. It isn’t that bad in her tower, and Corvo needs his rest even more than she does. His face is furrowed with deep lines these days and heavy shadows hang under his eyes. This is how an Empress is supposed to think, to remember what everyone but her needs. It’s why Mother ate after everyone else at dinner, ‘I always serve myself last.’
But Corvo says, softly, “Yes, you may,” as he tucks little stray locks of her hair behind her ear, and Emily is not Empress just yet.
She hugs him. Corvo smells like he’s had a bath, which is much nicer than when he comes back in off the boat with Samuel and stinks like the river, or of worse things. She takes a deep breath of him, and remembers, guiltily, that for her part, she had run away from Callista trying to put her in the tub for hours until she had given up. Emily pouts. She probably doesn’t smell that bad, right?
If Corvo cares, he doesn’t show it. He wraps her up in his arms, and Emily remembers that’s the safest place in the world to be.
She would stay there forever if she could. Corvo lets her go reluctantly, leading her to bed by the hand. It really isn’t big enough for two, but Emily is still small and Corvo can fit himself well into cramped spaces when he wants to.
When she is Empress, she’ll have the biggest bed in Dunwall. No, the world. And the most comfortable.
Emily gets into bed first on the side that’s closest to the wall, and Corvo makes sure that she’s comfortable. His pillow is worse than hers are, but she holds her tongue. The bed gives a low groan as he settles in between her and the rest of the room, blocking her view of the dirty windows or the drab walls. Corvo watches her quietly, and Emily’s eyes flick between his own and his bare torso. It’s strange to see him unarmored these days. If you had asked Emily, she would have said he always slept hidden under layers of leather and black robes. (She had caught him passed out in his bed fully-dressed at least once. At least he had remembered to remove his mask, though by the indents it left pressed into his skin, he’d only done so barely before exhaustion had claimed him.)
Silently, Emily puts her hand over a scar on his shoulder. Her fingers trace the slight smooth rise of it from his skin until it becomes imperceptible again; she finds another, and another, and another. Corvo lets her catalogue them in near silence, only broken by the sound of their own breathing. At first, she thinks maybe she’s imagining things or that she doesn’t remember correctly, but the longer she stares, the more certain she becomes; Corvo didn’t have these scars before Mother died. Many, yes, but not these.
There’s only one thing she can assume: wherever Corvo was, they were hurting him.
She trembles with a fury too big for her body. Corvo puts his arm over her, pulls her close, and murmurs, “You’re safe here.”
“So are you,” she says, wishing she could do what he does and make everyone who has ever harmed him pay.
Corvo rubs her back. “I am. And when I leave, I’ll stay safe for you, I promise.”
“You had better.” She curls her hands around nothing. If they were home, if it was then, it would be Corvo’s arms around her and one of her mother’s placed just so Emily could hold onto her, or her mother hugging her and Corvo’s hand tugged up against Emily like she’d hold one of her dolls. “Corvo,” she whispers as he shifts to press a kiss to her hair, “will I be a good Empress?” Corvo sighs heavily, but Emily’s fear that might be his answer is allayed quickly.
“Yes,” he promises. “Try not to worry about that, Emily.” She doesn’t see how. It’s in everything she does now, every lesson and every conversation and in all the eyes of the Loyalists as they stare at her. They call her a little Empress already, and when she thinks of her mother’s throne, she knows she will sit too small in it. “When your mother ascended to the throne, she was scared she would never understand how to rule.”
That, Emily thinks, is simply not true. Mother was born to be the Empress; To Emily, it was as if she had never doubted herself. That would be like saying Corvo is not the bravest, strongest man in Dunwall. Impossible. Emily knows this.
(Then why is Mother dead? says a voice inside her that makes her feel like she’s going to choke.)
“You won’t be alone. Your mother had advisors,” Corvo says, “as will you.”
“Advisors? Like Admiral Havelock?” she asks. She wrinkles her nose. “Or Lord Pendleton,” she adds, dragging out his name dramatically. “I don’t like Lord Pendleton, you know.” He resembles his brothers too much. “He never looks at me when he’s talking, and he’s always yelling at Wallace. And Lydia says he has a little too much-” She pauses so that she can make the same gesture Lydia does, tilting her cupped hand towards her mouth. When she had asked what that meant, Lydia had told her she wasn’t to eavesdrop on her and Cecelia anymore.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Corvo says, as though he’s trying not to laugh. Emily nods a little too fast. She hasn’t heard him sound like that in what feels like forever. (She had thought the months without him when Mother sent him for aid were the longest months of her life. She’d had no idea, none at all, how agonizingly time could pass.) “I don’t like him much either.”
Emily considers for a moment. “Can I make him stop being a Lord when I’m Empress?”
“Yes,” Corvo answers, “but that wouldn’t be very nice.”
“He’s not very nice.”
“He did help free me”—Corvo taps the tip of her nose.—“and helped me to find you.” Emily huffs.
“I suppose he can stay. I won’t invite him to any parties, though. I’ll invite Wallace instead. And Lydia.” She glances at Corvo, and she wishes there was something she could do to take the sadness from his smile. She snuggles back into him, in the hopes that might help.
She could cry again if Corvo did, too. Then again, she’s not sure how she would survive hearing him cry.
Maybe… Maybe Corvo is thinking the same thing. Maybe he’s waiting for her to cry first. Maybe he doesn’t know how he would handle it either.
Emily is tired, and they might both be left waiting a long time.
Corvo’s arm is heavy. Emily can feel the weight if it every time she breathes in. She tucks her knees up as if she could curl in closer to him, get so very, very small that she could burrow into his chest and sleep safe next to his heart and not come out until he’s made the world a kinder place. Corvo would probably let her, if he could.
“You’ll still be Lord Protector, won’t you?”
“Why would you ask that?” Corvo sounds genuinely surprised, and that settles Emily’s fears without even an answer.
“Admiral Havelock,” she mumbles into his chest. “He said you might want a new title and to retire. That I’d need someone new.”
“Did he,” Corvo says, flatly. Emily nods.
She can get people in trouble with Corvo now, and she likes it.
“I’ll have a talk with Admiral Havelock,” Corvo says, petting the back of her head. “We’ll have that cleared up. I won’t leave you.”
“I knew you wouldn’t,” she says. “As your Empress—“
“Not yet,” he whispers, soft with regret.
“—I order you not to ever, ever quit.” Despite himself, Corvo chuckles. She touches her cheek to his chest, and she can feel the sound. It could lull her to sleep paired with the rhythm of his heartbeat.
“Even when my hair goes grey and my bones start to creak?” he asks.
“Even then,” she says, stubbornly.
“I am yours to command, My Lady,” he says. Emily giggles in return, and Corvo sucks in a quick breath as though the sound startles him.
Emily yawns. “Your Majesty,” she corrects. When she is Empress, she will make Corvo sleep in her bed every night, and she will never have nightmares.
Corvo doesn’t say her future title back to her. He seems to hold on to her tighter.
Emily feels him combing his fingers through her hair and blinks heavily as her eyelids droop further and further. Corvo presses a kiss to the crown of her head. As her thoughts begin to unravel, she wonders foggily why it is so much cooler at her back than she’s used to, but she can’t carry that thought to the end of its hurt as her eyes slide shut a final time.
Emily nestles in. The warmth of his arms around her will keep her safe more than blades or bullets.