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Dunwall smells different.
It’s never been pleasant, of course. Not this part, at least. Sharp and pungent, all smoke and salt, something timeless and terrible. There had been brief flashes of something else, wandering these alleys; the thick and acrid stench of oil burning, the odd, earthy sweetness of ambergris, something lighter brought from the higher echelons of society, all the more precious for its ephemerality.
In prison, he couldn’t remember it right. He didn’t think he could remember anything but the sight of a sword through her chest. No, that’s not right, either, because he can remember the light leaving her eyes. He can remember being torn away from her. He can’t forget it. He won’t. He can’t.
The hollowness in his chest beats alongside the heart in his hands. He holds it when he doesn’t have a weapon in his hands. (He holds it less often, these days.) The charms and runes are secondary to the comfort of having it close. He wonders if it hurts her. He wonders if she hurts at all, anymore. He wonders a lot of things.
No one can see it. This is for the better, he tells himself, and sometimes he even believes it. When someone sees him skulking about, mask on, soaked to the bone by the grime of Dunwall’s sewers, it is for the best that he is merely mad like the rest and not holding a woman’s heart. When he is caught on the roof, masking indifference because he cannot bear to show anyone anything else, it is better that they think it is a more common misery bringing him there, staring at the ground so far below. They do not ask questions, so long as he doesn’t leap.
(He doesn’t, and doesn’t plan to. He blinks down, once, and it makes the heart thrum with a warm, mirthful concern that he knows even without words. It also scares Samuel half-to-death, muttering something about drunkenness when he turned away. The man hasn’t mentioned it since.)
There’s only one person he truly wants to see the Heart. She doesn’t, either.
But he holds it around her, anyway. When he was locked away, he wanted to know she was alright, more than anything. He doesn’t know if what it feels is at all similar, but if he can spare it that -- if he can spare it anything -- he’ll do it.
Around Emily, his chest feels less an empty cavern than it does when he’s apart from her. He feels himself again. A man instead of a blade. A person instead of a blunt instrument. (Is there a distinction? He feels it, but he doesn’t know it. Everything in his hands feels an extension of something Other, except the Heart, always the Heart.)
Emily’s quieter than she used to be, but she still chatters away. It reminds him of birdsong, light and lilting and utterly unsuited to what Dunwall is now. She uses his name often and freely. She isn’t the only one, but it only sounds like his when she says it.
He leaves her only when he must, and he always, always must. There is always more to be done. He sees someone with a brand he has held in his hands, though not the man who deserved it, and pretends the smell of burning human flesh isn’t familiar. He shocks a man who deserves it, he thinks, and sentences two people to a fate they’d have inflicted on dozens for a single coin. He slits a woman’s throat and knows it to be a kindness, even as the blood soaks his gloves, seeps through to stain his hands.
Blood stains everything in Dunwall, now. Why should he be any different?
People weep in the streets. Something other than people weep in the streets. The streets themselves weep, somewhere underneath it all, at some frequency he shouldn’t be able to hear. He hears weeping in the back of his mind, somewhere that should be left untouched, and doesn’t know if it’s the Heart or the Void or something else utterly inextricable from all he is now.
The Void doesn’t sob like the rest. It sings in his veins, low and loathsome, louder when he doesn’t let it out, slow and sated when he does. It reminds him of the humming of the gates. It reminds him of the odd synchronicity of a swarm of rats, devouring whatever fool is unlucky enough to fall in front of them. It reminds him of the pounding of blood in his ears as he does all he can not to scream.
He can’t say he cares for it.
The Heart quiets it. Never silence, but its whispers are easier to bear. He knows its voice. He misses it.
No one at the party seems to notice the blood, but he swears the tang of copper lingers in the air. Something about it feels different, more animal than weapon, always more weapon than man. He could swear he hears the whining of a wolfhound underneath the music, though he can’t imagine from where. He could swear that drool’s pooling in his own mouth like he’s nothing more than another slavering beast, ready to tear out a man’s throat. (He had already torn out a woman’s, tonight, but that hadn’t felt base or beastly. The cruelty would have been to do otherwise.)
He playacts. He pretends. He signs the book out of habit before thinking better of it--pointless, really, given he’s on his way out, not in. Let them whisper about it, tittering behind their masks at the sheer audacity of whoever mocks their city’s specter. Brave of whoever signed. Foolish. Distasteful.
He’s been all of these things; he is none of them now. He continues because he must. He returns to Emily to feel himself again.
Today she’s drawing again. She does that a lot, despite the efforts of the rest for her to focus on other things. Said efforts are often half-hearted. Emily often gets the ones most directly responsible for her care on her side. It had easily worked on him, the very first time he saw her face, screwed up into a wail, lungs already strong enough for the scream to hurt his ears.
He had loved her, then, and has loved her since. He loved them both.
The Heart beats in his hands, murmurs that Emily had called his name, once. He’s sure it’s right. It hasn’t failed him yet. That doesn’t make the truth of it any less a dagger.
When Emily draws him, he’s smiling. She smiles when she shows him, too. He doesn’t know what his face does back. It might return the look, sharp around the edges, bestial and unwelcoming, but she doesn’t flinch back, so maybe not. Maybe his face doesn’t shift at all, and he’s simply too lost from what he once was to read her unease. Maybe she’s gotten better at hiding from him.
It breaks what remains of his heart in two, to think of her needing to learn that skill, suffering any hardship at all. No matter that he’s saved her from it now; no matter that there are children, just as sweet and so much smaller, feeling all the same as she has. He would spare them all that suffering, if he could; he would gut the world, if he thought it would spare her anything. If she asked.
She would not. He would love her still, if she did, but she would not. The men here ask him to kill, seem quietly confused when he doesn’t.
(He is a weapon, after all, and they think themselves his wielder. He thinks they’re foolish for it. Not for thinking him a weapon--he is, and any who look at him could see that--but that they think themselves the ones holding him. He is uncertain who’s wielding him. The cold hand of the Void itself; the Heart and what he thinks it wants of him; Emily, and a world in which she can be safe. All of these seem true. None of them seem real.)
She speaks of nothing. He listens and he lingers. This was something they did often, before. She is used to him leaving and returning to her life as the Empress willed it. (He cannot think her name. The guilt would pass over him like a swarm of rats, only not so kind as to kill him.)
In many ways, Emily is just the same. Curious about so many things she shouldn’t be, monsters and war and what lies beneath this city’s bones. He would not dissuade her, though it makes him worry. He thinks it would worry him more, if she’d stopped asking questions like this, if she’d bent to whatever will the Loyalists imposed on her.
(In the Cat, he’d slipped through shadows, unseen, unheard, unhunted until long after he was gone. His hands had shook with the force of restraint. He could have killed them for that. He could have enjoyed it.)
Emily gets bored of her drawing eventually. He takes it and places it on her desk for later; if she doesn’t want it, he’ll take it, bring it to the room he so often lies awake in. She shows him the things she’s found, digging through the muck. A broken bolt, a glass bauble, beads and stones and bones and bullet casings. She knows what they are, but speculates as to how they got there, descriptions fantastical like a fairy tale, rather than lurid, visceral like a soldier’s.
He hears the hiss of the last thing she hands him before she even pulls it out from under her pillow. The bone is cold to the touch, even as it feels like it hums in his hands, the Mark thrumming in response.
Emily says she has nightmares of a man with black eyes. He feels an anger so startlingly sharp that the rune in his hand nearly cracks. He feels himself, for once. She frowns, and talks about Callista’s attempts at teaching her statecraft. In matters of subtlety, she’s much to learn before she’s as skilled as her mother. (The Heart beats, and beats, and beats.)
That night, the Outsider talks to Corvo. (In the Void, his name feels easier to grasp, though he’s not sure why.) He doesn’t talk back--so rarely does, these days--but the hollow thing inside a man’s skin seems to sense his anger.
He doesn’t soothe Corvo, exactly. Talks to him in much the same way Emily talks about a bird she watched break the water to catch a fish, emerging bloodied by some unseen, vicious predator’s teeth. Curious and detached while still caring, likely more than they should. The Mark itches in an all-too-familiar way as Corvo wonders idly whether the emptiness inside him is the Outsider’s or the Void’s or terribly his own.
He’d like to think it’s the result of what he is now, but he remembers it from the moment the blade sunk into his Empress’ chest. From the moment he failed her. The moment he would forever be defined by, no matter what vengeance or chaos or peace he manages to tear from it.
When he wakes, his name feels once more alien, and he still tastes blood in the back of his throat.