Chapter Text
I. The first time Corvo came to the shrines, he’d stumbled in and rammed a chair under the door’s handle. The Outsider had watched with amusement as the frame buckled under the fists of the weepers beyond, as Corvo shored up the splintering wood with the desk of a dead clerk. He could hear the blood frothing in the lungs of the dying. Corvo’s own were full of life and air, scraping in his windpipe.
The Outsider had said hello, and Corvo had not. He never said a lot. That was his way.
But they had sat together, listening to the rats. Corvo cleaned his crossbow, the Outsider watching with tar-black eyes.
II. The second time, Corvo Attano was on the way to collect dear prying Sokolov, and had been calling on the Void every step of the way, blinking up the side of buildings and stopping clocks mid-tock. Nobody had known he was there; guards found sleep in his wake. One of them was called Gregor and he would be fired for sloth on shift. Without the income, Gregor’s family would find the city hard and unforgiving as they fell flat upon it, ground down by the heel of inflation and spiraling costs. They would crumble like biscuit, each one breaking away – the daughter to find a man in an alleyway, offering coin at the Golden Cat. She had hoped to be a politician. The son would meet death by the bottle, the child would waste in its crib. The wife, ah, she would flee the isles as she had wished to every night, home to native Tyvia. And the father… where did that leave him?
“Drunk one night, he sleeps in an alleyway,” the Outsider says, “So deep is his stupor, that the guardsmen who were once like kin will think him corpse. In the Flooded District, when he awakes, his tears are clear as mountains streams, augmenting the dense evening air.” He exhales, “Soon they shall be river muck.”
Corvo paces after that, fingering the feathered bolts in the pouch. The Outsider’s words have made him unhappy; the man’s teeth grind like chattering rats.
“Send my love to Sokolov,” the Outsider calls out after him when he leaves.
Corvo calls him cruel.
The Outsider is more reluctant to agree than he expects, and by the time he does the man has left.
III. The next shrine Corvo comes across, he does not approach. He has already dug bone from Wrenhaven silt, from the grip of a rotting Overseer, from portraits on aristocrats’ walls. There is no need to approach the hearth of his cruel god.
There is no want.
IV. “On the way to a party?” the Outsider asks as the man leans up against the wall, taking the cap off a vial of elixir. He is neat, but his lips still ring in a blue stain.
“I hope you’ll have a nice time,” the Outsider says amicably. “It’s been quite a while since your last soiree. You must be careful to remember all your social cues. Do let me know how it goes.”
The inky lips smile then, and Corvo nods a little. He has blood on his gloves and mask, but the Outsider doesn’t point that out. The nobles will think it’s part of the costume. The nobles will think it’s fabulous. Of these things, he is certain.
He is not certain that Corvo will come back to him.
(He does.)
(The party has made him shake, worse than the rats and the plague and the prison.)
(The Outsider points out then that there is blood on his hands.)
(…)
(It was the wrong thing to say.)
V. He begins to seek the shrines, seeking the Outsider. The conversations grow companionable, Corvo sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning on a wall, breaking bread with his strange river god.
Sometimes they play Nancy (Corvo is good, the Outsider is good, the games are long). Once Corvo told a joke. It was ok. The Outsider makes lots of them. Corvo understands his humour, but he doesn’t always laugh. The Outsider has to wheedle smiles out of him, like coaxing a stubborn mouse out of a hole.
“A sword house of nobles,” Corvo lays the cards down, “I win.”
“Ah, ah!” the Outsider holds up a finger, “Don’t be so sure – for I have commoners with rats. Plague sweep,” he lays the black set down across the purple drape, then wonders if this will offend the man, current events being what they are.
Corvo surprises him when he laughs.
“Playing with a god,” he shakes his head, “What else do I expect?”
“What?”
“Rather unsubtle, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Even the nobility cannot escape the rat plague,” he tosses his cards away, still smiling, “Very droll. Did you really fix the cards just to make that joke?”
“I do not fix anything Corvo, as I do not cheat.”
“Of course.”
“I do not!”
“Remind me never to gamble with you,” Corvo says, and the Outsider laughs and means it.
VI. In the Flooded District, Corvo staggers over purple drapes awash with blood and grime. The weepers can be heard clawing at the walls, death knocking on the door. Pounding, hammering. Churlishly demanding that Corvo Attano come out here now.
Swearwords trickle from lips like raindrops; fuck fuck fuck, fuck, fuck. He has called on the Void so many times now, the Outsider feels as though he has made it his home too. But that is not true. Wishful thinking, maybe.
“A rotten place for rotten men,” the Outsider says softly, and Corvo jumps. His heart skitters like a rat.
“Is that why I find myself here?”
The Outsider frowns, but does not reply. No, of course not, he wants to say. No, you are far too special to be rotten, far too whole to fracture. But none of that would be true, physically or theoretically or mentally or any way it could be put; Corvo is a wreck. His mind bleeds guilt, his heart chasmed by traitors, skin mapped with a hundred agonies like bloody stars. Even now, pain flows readily, from cuts on his forehead, his lips, his fingers splayed like a macabre fan. Three of them have been broken by falls, and the other hand was trod upon by Daud. Stomped upon, the steel heel coming down on the hand and twisting, pulping the skin and bone into wretched fragments more spider than human. The Outsider knows why. If a hand cannot call, then the Void cannot answer. Daud thinks he has severed Corvo’s bond with his god.
(And thoughts like that are why Daud had always been wrong.)
Corvo makes no sound when the Outsider washes out his wounds with the blue of Piero, except to drag shallow breaths and allow his heart to thrum. The red runs clean and white cloth is wrapped over every cut found until Corvo is more whole than not. Lastly, the god inclines his head to press lips against Corvo’s broken hand, kissing the black spot he put upon the skin. The mark glows gold and burns bright, the light flooding along the highways of bone to the end of each fingertips, knitting skin and flesh and soul back up. The hand clenches, the Void answers.
That night Corvo sleeps in the shadow of the shrine. The Outsider listens to him dream of Emily and a garden of white flowers.
VII. Daud had kept a shrine on one of the roofs of the Flooded District. Corvo did not find this one, but it gave the Outsider ample view over the man’s matinee performance. Daud’s was a shrine rarely visited, a shrine kept neat but unloved. The drapes were stolen from a noblewoman in a fit of fancy after a wintry Friday’s assassination in the month of seeds, and they glisten with gold thread as the sun dies in the sky. It is not the only thing ailing here. Daud looks redder than his coat.
I’d not ask for you to forgive, Daud is saying, Only to understand.
Corvo buries his knife in the belly of the assassin, up to the point where the blood washes over his whitened knuckles, warm and wet. Like summer on sea.
“I forgive,” Corvo whispers, and the Outsider does not understand.
VIII. The next time they meet, it is almost the last. Corvo finds the shrine in the sewers; water is shaken down from the ceiling by the movement of a tall boy overhead. It slides in fat greasy droplets down the back of his neck.
They speak nothing of the bolts lodged in his chest, nor the infection that has begun to rage there.
The Outsider thinks on how quiet the world will become once Corvo is gone, but knows he will make it to the lighthouse in the end.