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“My Lord Protector,” she says, heart rattling like a carriage car, “will you dance with me?”
Lately, she has found herself cursing protocol, the duty that keeps Corvo half-cast in shadow on the fringes of the ballroom. Dark and imposing before the pale walls of Dunwall Tower, but in the dregs of lamplight, what sharpness he has is smoothed, edges feathered and soft; his eyes deep, warm, fathomless as he turns to her.
“It is late, Your Grace.” He’d been quiet all night. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed his voice, even after so short a silence. “We should get you to bed.”
Of course he would say that- no thought in his mind for indulging a silly girl in her fancies. Steadfast, as always, in his duties.
“I don’t want to go to bed,” she sighs. “Please, Corvo, dance with me.”
A pang of guilt pulls tight in her chest because Corvo is right; the moon is high and the world long since retired and she should be in bed. But for all the revelry she’d indulged in, a part of her had been restless, empty as the wake of her shadow where her protector usually stood. She doubted sleep would come to her anyway, burdened with such hollowness. Loneliness.
She can see the second he concedes; his eyes dart to the side, his fingers flex, and he inclines his head to her, hair spilling over his face. His hand engulfs her own, calloused and strung with scars across the surface, his other curled over her lower back, barely touching. She leans into it, can’t help it, and allows herself a breath when he does not pull away.
They are very close- she can see a tiny twitch in his jaw before he speaks. “Just one dance.”
Maybe she has been presumptuous. The waltz is a nobleman’s game, and of course he must think this a ploy to embarrass him. She knows he is mocked despite his position in the court- not before her, of course, she would not stand for it- and as strong as he is, it must wound him in some way, internal and festering.
But he leads her through the motions, a beat ahead of the music but surefooted in his steps, fluid and swift as she is carried in his momentum.
His deference to her- it must cloud her perceptions sometimes. She finds herself marveling at his height as if it were something new and fascinating that she’d never examined fully. The way the crown of her head just barely meets his shoulders, the strength she can feel even with his touch so light, so careful with her always. Sometimes she finds it hard to think of them as the same: the man who bows to her in the hall and murmurs good night, sleep well versus the man who stands over the bodies of her assailants, silent and stern with his hand clenched around a sharp, bloodied blade.
He smells like metal in the sun, firewood in the hearth, the cigar she’d lit a week before while hunched over a sheath of cumbersome paperwork. Heartache washes over her in an great, terrible wave and sweeps away her already loosely tethered thoughts; she is a figurehead, an idol, trapped under a facade of stone, fated to keep her tender feelings hidden from the world at large. Her actions and thoughts belong to the empire, not herself, and even as Corvo shifts and swings with her along to the music with a hand on her bare skin, he is so utterly far away, so out of reach as she stands alone, spotlit on her pedestal. Hers, but not hers.
In the end, he did not ask to be a looming spectre at her side, and often she worries their interactions are, for him, a trite and tiresome part of a job he is forced to endure. Surely, he must look with longing at someone with the worldly experience she lacks, free of the trappings of courtly decorum, someone with whom he could escape the spotlight, mingle with the populace as any normal citizen.
Just a job, of course, and when she dies young (as all the rulers before her have) he will be glad to be discharged and be free of her simpering, free to return to the guard or return to Karnaca, free to pursue his whims and wishes elsewhere in the isles. Surely he will choose a companion, and dance with them to bawdry tunes, weightless in his arms and so selfish of her to want more after all he’s given her but she wishes- she wishes-
“Your Grace? Are you alright? What – is there something the matter – did I –?-”
His brows are turned, so openly and nakedly concerned she feels wounded by the sincerity. While lost in her thoughts, she had slipped out of step and now he was staring at her with that expression and something was wrong- her chest had seized up with something heavy and cloying inside her and her vision had blurred into runny-wet colors and she means to say thank you, thank you for indulging me but it comes out as a harsh, ugly cry, loosed upon his chest.
“No, no- I’m fine. It’s silly.” Her voice crawls out of her in a quiet and miserable gasp. “Did you know that Lady Briene Orlee got engaged last month? That’s why – why she was flaunting around that garish, absolutely awful diamond tonight.”
Engaged, with a trinket to show for it, a gaudy beacon attracting attention like moths to a flame. She had felt choked, looking at it, jealousy damming up her thoughts, sludging her blood into a foul and envious poison. That simple pleasure of honesty, denied. Her love clawed at her insides, ran through her like an infection, afflicted her mind and senses, and she so wished she could excise it completely and hold it before a crowd and yell: Do you see now?
She’s made a fool of herself- again- and waves her hand to try and brush away her drivel, to regain a modicum of the composure she can just never hold onto around him. “And it’s so silly but – I was just thinking – it’s going to be beautiful. When you get married, someday. You’re going to make someone very lucky.”
False cheer didn’t soften the blow. The words filled her with a sobering melancholy; a cold, weightless nausea in contrast to the heat behind her eyes, down her cheeks. Someday, sometime, she would sit on the side and give a few gilded words, well-wishes for Corvo and the person he’d come to love, both of them left ignorant of the festering wound of her affections.
He is quiet. Ashamed at the crack in her facade, perhaps.
“Oh,” is all she manages, hands rising to cover her face. When had she come to feel everything so deeply? “Oh, Outsider’s blood – this is foolish, I’m –”
Her heart is racing, erratic and painful in her chest. It is something drawn deep from some hidden reservoir of sorrow, impossible to stop. Distantly, she knows her tears are soaking the chiffon sleeves of her jacket, that her hair has started to come loose from its twist, that a blister has formed from the tough leather of her new boots- she realizes, as well, that Corvo is still silent, unmoved from her proximity.
It is one of the few times she hears hesitance in his voice. “Your Grace,” he says, “Jessamine. I could never marry.”
She tries, she does, to not read into it, to tells herself that not everyone in her presence has such troubles with sentimentality. Her resolve becomes tenuous, tripwire-thin, when she dares to peek at him through her fingers; Corvo, who passed notes with her through insufferable meetings and walked with her on the riverside, who supped with her in the gardens and told her of his wayward youth, who killed for her.
His hand engulfs her shoulder, steadies her, and it is exactly as she feared; warm through the fabric, a gentle squeeze to draw her from her mauldin thoughts. Her reprimand rings in her head- so selfish, so selfish- but the brandy has her reckless, and he is standing so close, she can’t help it -
He yields to her trembling hand at his collar and leans down to meet her halfway in a kiss.
( oh, oh- by the void-)
She thinks her heart might burst, every muscle in her body held taut as she leans farther forward, dumbstruck by the shift of his lips against hers. For a terrible moment a fear overtakes her- she’s overstepped, been too forward , and any second now he will shove her away and chide her-
-but instead-
One hand clasps her waist as the other comes up to weave through her hair, to pull her close with the barest tremble of restraint in his grasp- always so careful- and he is impossibly, impossibly real against her, solid and so very warm, familiar, comforting. Each flex of his hand has her gasping, shaking as she tries in vain to bring him closer, too far away even right beside her. He makes her wants, he does ; he holds her so tightly he lifts her from the ground and it makes her ache down to her bones, sets loose something hot and shivery in her blood that stutters her breath and curls her toes and calls her voice to sing for him, low and raw in her throat.
(What would it take, to break the mirror surface of his calm and have him press her hard against the wall, hungry for the feel of her, mouth to her throat, hands pinned above her-)
Her teeth catch on the swell of his lip and he moans for her, a ragged, desperate sound that drags her thoughts downward and leaves her with little more than instinct to keep her going. It’s too much, far too much- she feels small and senseless when she draws back and sees the fondness in his expression; love, warm and soothing, held in his gaze alongside something darker, magnified by the tears gathered along the narrow edge of his eyes.
“Corvo, Corvo, Corvo,” she rasps. “My lord protector.”
She dares to rest her head on his chest, to listen to his unsteady heart, and in return he wraps an arm around her shoulders and lays a single, fluttering kiss to her hairline. So many things she could say in this timeless moment but the words are robbed from her throat when he whispers ‘my Empress,’ reverent and tender, and follows it with another quicksilver touch of his lips to her temple. “It’s late. Let me escort you to your room.”
Always such a soldier , she thinks, reaching for his hand.
“Alright,” she breathes, and says into his chest, “and you’ll be there, in the morning?”
“Of course,” is all he says, and at last, her world is right.